Chapter Text
‘Your dad’s more sealant and juice than meat right now, but he’s going to be OK, honey.’ That was the day orderly. The night orderly wasn’t much for talking.
‘He’s not my father,’ said Cee. She didn’t like the day orderly.
‘I killed her father,’ said voice from the bed, cracked and dried up as a river bed.
This had the benefit of being both true and shocking the orderly into silence.
‘Or possibly the more accurate way of it would be to say, I took him a little further down the path of dyin’ than he had already moseyed –’ Ezra broke off to cough, curling up over the stump of his arm to cover his mouth with the crook of his elbow. It was strangely particular, Cee thought, to wake up from days out cold, freshly de-armed and newly skewered, and still be worried about where your spit might wander.
The orderly backed out hastily, muttering something about finding a doctor. Cee doubted it. She’d bet money that there wasn’t a doctor on the whole of the freighter. On the whole of the line, probably. Just as well. Doctors were expensive.
She offered Ezra the sucker of the water-pack by the bedside. He took it from her, fingers curling dry and a little too hot over hers while he swallowed painfully.
‘Obliged,’ he said, slumping back against the pillow. ‘You look like shit,’ he added, eyes warm.
‘Well you look a million,’ she said, washed through with relief. ‘Maybe two, if you like them holey.’
His fingers tracked down the centre of his chest without looking away from her, coming to rest on the wad of surgical-grade sealant that plugged the flesh just below his sternum.
‘Got me a souvenir of my time in the Green after all,’ he said.
‘Lost yourself an arm and a core of guts,’ countered Cee.
‘Well you look like you lost some sleep yourself,’ he said. ‘You been here long, waiting for me to come back to the land of the livin’?’
She’d been scrunched up on the stool by his bed for four days and five nights, napping in an uneasy slump over the mattress, ready to wake at any movement. Now she stood up stiffly, feeling all the muscles in her left side complain. That was from where she’d dragged him half delirious from the rock-hopper to the freighter’s clinic on the gantry core.
‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You’re not my father.’
‘I don't pretend to be much informed on the particulars of fatherhood,’ said Ezra. ‘But it ain’t an estate inheritable by rail gun shot, as far as I'm aware.’
‘Then we’re clear,’ she said, and turned on her heel. She was almost at the door before he spoke again.
‘You comin’ back, birdie?’ he asked.
She paused for a moment in the doorway, weighing up. ‘Got to eat,’ she said eventually, half over her shoulder. ‘I’ll bring you something back.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, and she couldn’t see his face but she knew exactly how he looked saying it.