Chapter Text
The thing that kept Breckett fixed in place next to you, the nagging guilt at the back of his mind that stopped him from leaving the med bay and focusing on the more important task of hiding his ship from the Sentinels and protecting the strange new planet he had crashed into- was how small your body was. Laid in the center of the simple, padded table more suitable for his height and build, you were dwarfed by its sheer size, encased in a ring of shifting machinery scanning and prodding and administering medicine to put together the pieces of your legs that still remained.
A twist in his stomach made Breckett’s gaze shift away from your lower half, fist clenching as his eyes focused on your peaceful face. The soft curve of your jaw, the roundness of your ears, the strands of eyelashes stood at attention over your closed eyes. You were unlike anything he had seen before. He didn’t even know there was life on Terra-519, let alone life like you, a small delicate... he didn’t even know what to call you. Something, someone so easy to break. This time his fist balled in the front of his shirt to quell the tides of horror in his chest. He almost killed you- he very well could have killed you already and the shifting machinery over you could be the only thing keeping you alive for the moment.
Breckett was heavy with the weight of responsibility for your wellbeing, maybe that was what kept him trapped in place looking over you. For all his years of scraping by to survive and putting himself first, the long-gone call of honor rang through his body. It baffled him, but he leaned into it all the same, a sense of the person he used to be rising to the surface. Before the Sentinels- before everything made him so jaded and alone.
His wavering voice pierced through the dense air of the room, the quiet hum of the hull around him drowned out as he asked, “NAV Ship, scan the area surrounding us. Have we been followed?”
When the ship answered back after a moment of calculating, claiming the ship was isolated in a light-year radius, some of the tightness in Breckett’s chest unwound. “Avoid all intercepting paths of ships on the way to our destination.”
A brief confirmation chirped through the speakers overhead. Breckett felt the gravity of the situation at hand come over him again. One foot shifted back, his boot hitting the edge of a seat behind him with a metallic clang. He pulled it closer, sighing as he accepted his place watching over you for a little while longer. He sat with his elbows pressed to his thighs, hung his head, and waited for the shifting machinery patching you up to finish its job.
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When the machines had long since stopped whirring and prodding your body, Breckett waited for you to wake up. A few days went by before Breckett allowed himself to walk away, to sleep and check the helm for any signs of Sentinel forces nipping at both of your heels or waiting on Dellaxeu to capture him. The ship felt peaceful, humming around him as he cleaned up the mess his old... friend had made before the crash. He searched into the darker, less used corners of the hull. Through one of the last boxes of discarded metal parts, Breckett found a few dusty translators he hadn’t touched in years.
Fiddling with the small devices kept his mind off the small creature comatose in his med bay. It didn’t take long to clean and tune the earpieces for use, and suddenly Breckett was faced with a new dilemma. Standing over your body, he couldn’t help but feel that tinge of guilt again looking at your peaceful expression. It felt scandalous to touch after all these days of watching over you, like his dirty hands would taint the innocent bubble formed around you in his mind. As delicately as he could, he hooked the device over your earlobe and pressed the end into your ear, finger hovering over the circle of light on the outside until it turned on.
He hoped the translator would help for that moment when you’d wake and realize that the universe was far larger than you ever knew, that there was life outside of your planet and there were people who would threaten those you left behind if they ever found out Terra-519 had life. Oh stars, what was he going to say when you asked how you ended up on his ship, and why he couldn’t return you home for the foreseeable future. You would surely be terrified of his physique, of being hostage.
Did this make him any better than those Sentinels, the ones who’d interrupted his life on Zentier in the same manner he’d crashed into your planet and almost killed you. The intensity of it all made him pause, hand still hovering over your face. A soft puff of your breath hit his skin, bringing him back into himself.
You were alive. Despite everything, without the machine’s aid you were breathing all on your own. Maybe, he allowed himself to think, he wasn’t like the Sentinels after all.