Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jet had been arrested more times than he cared to remember. They never managed to hold him for long, of course, but he knew the routines: the cuffs, the stammered reading of his rights, the too-cramped seating, the way that cops and officers and agents alike faltered when he flexed his bound shoulder muscles, the unneeded violence. Rough treatment was inevitable, he had learned, no matter in what state they found him. Whether his reputation, or simply his bulk, invited it, he couldn’t be sure. But he was absolutely certain of the fact that such things were infinitely more tedious sober.

He had been apprehended doing reconnaissance for Buddy on a remote arm of the Outer Rim, the planet Dizang. Both were wildly aware that Jet did not make for the galaxy’s most inconspicuous scout, but out of the two of them, even still coming down from his vices as he was, he was the only one capable of long physical endurance when necessary, and so he had been the only choice.

It really was just the two of them. Anyone else Jet had ever worked with was either long gone or not safe for him to be near. The famed Ilkay and Aurinko , queens among thieves, were no more: Vespa Ilkay had fallen to her death, and Buddy Aurinko was a shell of her former self, incapacitated by grief as much as she was by radiation poisoning and organ failure. They worked alone, now, as unnatural as that felt to both of them, her with her infamous ‘Buddy system’ and him accustomed to being one particularly volatile link in a long supply chain. Or - they had worked alone, until Buddy had found him. They would face this new way of being, they had promised each other, just as they had faced their afflictions. Alone, together.

Working with Buddy meant that Jet could be sure never to be unmonitored while out on a job. He had listened to her cursing expertly down the comms as the cops closed in, before he removed and stamped on his earpiece, and he knew that even at this moment she would be tracking the various chips they had hidden about his person, ready to extract him the moment he gave their pre-agreed signal.

For now, though, he would sit tight, observe, and report back. It was government computers and documents they were attempting to steal; a position within a jail facility might prove very useful to them indeed, provided he didn’t remain confined to a cell. He did not think that getting free of any bars would be a problem in a facility run by people too busy gloating about having captured the Unnatural Disaster to search him properly when they first caught up to him, and too intimidated by him to get close afterwards. All it would take was patience and timing.

Jet had not always been a stoic man. He had spent most of his life at the whims of ravening impulses, swinging with wild abandon from one moment to the next, uncaring of both the past and the future. But he had seen the destruction that his uninhibited impulses had wrought, and he had fought to contain that man, to lock him away deep below a lake of glassy calm. His self-control was hard-bought, and it was important beyond words. So he knew that when necessary he could be very, very patient indeed.

“Good luck, darling,” Buddy had said to him, right before he destroyed his comms. He appreciated the sentiment, but he wished that he had had the time to reply and reject it.

Jet didn’t need luck. He was in control of himself; he was not under the thumb under something so nebulous and indistinct as destiny , any more than he was going to remain trapped in this cell.

*

The jail in question was a space station circling one of Dizang’s moons. It was a common design, and a clever one: the void was the ultimate physical barrier, so no way in, no way out, except on official police vehicles. For someone who wasn’t a galaxy-famous stunt driver and car thief, Jet supposed, escape from such a place might have been a real problem.

They threw him right into the depths of it, of course. He had expected solitary confinement; it had seemed, in fact, that that was where he was being led. But then the cops hauling him around apparently changed their mind, jeering something about killing two birds with one stone; he was shoved through a heavy metal door in the centre of the station, the magnetic cuffs holding his hands behind his back not coming open until after it was slammed shut, so that he had to twist onto his shoulder not to fall heavily on his face.

As he crashed onto the floor, he heard a sharp gasp, the rustle of someone scrambling backwards.

Jet gave himself a moment, just half a second, to be unimpressed at this attempt at brutality. Sure, there was a satisfying enough thud when he fell, a grunt, but he barely even expected a bruise from it. He quickly rolled his eyes in a momentary lapse in stoicism before he pushed himself upright and took stock of the room.

Not a particularly large cell, if not the smallest either; ceilings just about tall enough to accommodate someone born and raised on Earth, which was a rare mercy. Bare walls, two thin mattresses on the concrete floor against either side. A kid, staring in alarm at Jet from the far corner. The beady black eye of a camera on the ceiling. One grim-looking combined sink-toilet in the other corner. No windows except a slat across the door - inconvenient, but Jet was sure he would find another way out. 

He showed no shock when his eyes landed on the kid, but it was a genuine surprise. Usually law enforcement took the Unnatural Disaster to be a crazed killer, with either a terrible temper or an unhealthy interest in blood, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Jet knew where they got the idea: from streams, certainly not from fact. There were reasons for his violence - not good reasons, often reasons fuelled by the kinds of leaps in logic a brain only produced with chemical aid, but always reasons. He had killed unnecessarily, many times. Just never entirely without cause. The perception that he had, though, meant that he rarely had company in these situations. 

Two birds, one stone, huh. The cops must have really wanted this kid scared into compliance - either that, or they didn’t care much about badly he got hurt.

They would be disappointed, of course. Jet intended to wait out the hours staring silent at the wall and thinking. Probably he and his cellmate wouldn’t exchange even one word.

For a few hours it seemed as though that would be how it worked. The kid shrank down to perch at the head of one bunk, knees drawn up to his chest, back defensively against two walls, still watching warily for an outburst that was not going to come. Jet ignored the uncomfortable feeling of being scrutinised, stretched out muscles that had been cramped by restraints, and settled down on the other mattress with his arms folded over his broad chest, eyes half-closed in as close to rest as he would allow himself to get in that situation.

He stayed like that for several hours - and then he shifted slightly, and his foot brushed against something thin and metal.

*

Careful and precise as he was in all things, Jet only looked down with his eyes. Partly that was because unnecessary physical exertion would be unwise at a time like this, partly because he was still under the probably-rarely-actually-monitored surveillance of the camera on the ceiling - but mostly because of the kid. If Jet was a more paranoid man, he would say his cellmate was there to spy on him. There was no reason he could conjure for such a thing to be true, and he found as much point in obsessing over the future as agonising over the past; which was to say, basically none. Nonetheless, the sensation of being watched intensely had gotten under his skin. The kid was absentmindedly cleaning his nails, ostensibly paying no attention to Jet. Until he moved, that was. Every slightest gesture made the kid twitch.

He had been expecting a shiv - maybe a pen, maybe a toothbrush, but most likely a shiv. Instead he saw the long arm of a pair of glasses, lying haphazardly half-folded on the ground. They were wire-framed, clearly heavily-worn, twisted and repaired at the hinges, scuffed and scratched. Jet frowned slightly to himself, glanced up, and watched the kid’s gaze flick toward him at the movement, then nervously away again.

Almost as if, Jet realised, he could only make out motion, and not small indistinct details like the shifting of eyes. Because he was shortsighted.

Jet was not one for swearing, if he could avoid it. There was an economy to his speech; each word was considered, and found necessary. He talked freely only to his car, to cats on the street, or, on planets that had one that was safe to approach, to the ocean: occasions of one-sided communication. Psychology told him that foul words were an emotional release, a cheap way to express anger and mitigate pain, which sounded to Jet like taking the easy way out. He would prefer to simply be in control of himself to begin with.

In this situation, however, he permitted himself a long thirty seconds to sit and curse internally, and to consider smacking his head back against the concrete wall. He wasn’t going to, of course. But he indulged the distant possibility of the idea.

And then he looked up at his cellmate and said bluntly,

“Do you wear glasses?”

He spoke in a flat tone, his deep voice level, but at the sudden noise in the too-still space-station air the kid still jumped badly. Jet waited stoically as the kid blinked, now clearly noticing the way he squinted as he tried to force his eyes to focus across the distance.

There was no other choice but for him to ask, of course, much as he didn’t want to. They were almost certainly too far away for the kid to see, too thin to make out against the blank grey concrete of the ground. Much as Jet would have loved to ignore this unasked-for company, he was not prepared to deprive someone of any kind of assistive device. Especially someone who had ended up here so young.

“…What?”

At the sound of his voice, Jet’s estimate of age crept up a few years. The kid was maybe eighteen, nineteen years old, not really a kid, not by most standards. Still scrawny enough that Jet was going to continue to think of him as one. His appearance didn’t tell much of a story about how old he was, how he might have ended up in the cell. He had a black hair to his shoulders, which had probably been very precisely styled in the recent past, and now hung flat and tangled around his thin face, hiding half his expression. Everything about him was sharp in a way that made Jet think of long, protracted hunger, but his clothes screamed wealth . The silk shirt and the gossamer-light sweater were both moth-bitten and hanging loose off him, sure - but real wool and silk on the Outer Rim meant a lot, no matter how threadbare they might have been. Old money, perhaps, fallen on hard times - either that or a con artist. Maybe both.

“Do you,” Jet repeated evenly, “wear eye glasses.”

Something smooth and cold slid over the kid’s narrow features, precisely the kind of composure they apparently drilled into the rich at young ages, leaving nothing but a haughty glare. Beneath the mask, Jet was sure, remained all-consuming anxiety; above it was only superiority and irritation. The pretence grated on Jet’s nerves like the screech of brakes slammed too hard against his ear.

“So what if I do? The police took them.”

A pair of deadly-sharp canines showed at the edges of his mouth when he spoke, fox’s teeth. Jet couldn’t tell if the kid was baring them as an overt threat, but it didn’t matter much either way. That was as close to a yes as he thought he was going to get.

He bent down calmly and picked up the glasses, delicate with thin metal and glass between his big fingers, ignoring the way the kid went tense as a coiled spring at the movement. Best not to get any closer, then. Instead he held them out, turned them in a way that hopefully would mean they caught the light. In his peripheral vision, he saw his cellmate go stiff as he recognised them.

“Yours?”

The kid’s proud expression didn’t budge in the slightest, but Jet saw his throat shift as he swallowed.

Neither of them moved for a long, inscrutable moment. Jet was a very patient man. The kid, he thought, was simply frozen with indecision. He began to suspect that he wasn’t going to get an answer - then, still enunciating with carefully performed dignity, the kid admitted,

“…Yes.”

There was an unspoken question, expressed as much in the kid’s continued stillness, his gaze intent on Jet’s outstretched hand, as in the silence around what he had said. What are you going to do with them ?

Jet answered with actions rather than words, leaning down and laying the glasses halfway between them on the cold concrete. The kid hesitated for a heartbeat, seemingly anticipating a trap - then darted out and grabbed them, snake-strike quick, trying to be faster than Jet. When Jet didn’t move, he slid them onto his face and blinked uncertainly, readjusting to clear vision, with relief just visible beneath his otherwise still carefully controlled expression.

In all honesty, Jet didn’t expect his cellmate to say anything more, to show any kind of gratitude. Rich kids seemed to consider such things a display of weakness, and this particularly cold example of the type.

“Thank you,” the kid said, abruptly, barely more than a whisper. It came awkwardly, but he managed to spit it out.

Huh. Alright.

Jet nodded, wordless and neutral. For another moment, the kid fidgeted, apparently wrestling with whether or not to speak again: to offer a name, perhaps, or ask a question, attempt to strike up a rapport. Jet hoped not. He had a friend already, and no desire to attach himself to anyone else. Not to mention, the kid should get higher standards; the absence of cruelty was not tantamount, in Jet’s opinion, to kindness.

Though Jet moved neither his face or body, the kid seemed to sense not to attempt to talk to him, and leaned back against the wall, briefly running his eyes across Jet now that they were fully visible to each other, then looking down. If he was smart, he would doze, keep up his energy. That was what Jet was going to do, so long as nothing else -

His train of thought was interrupted by the echo of steel-toed boots marching down the corridor to stop outside their door.

Chapter Text

Jet was pulled off for interrogation in what he had begun to think of as the normal manner : literally pulled, iron grip just below his elbow on arms once again cuffed behind his back, all implicit menace. Only implicit, though. They were still in the early phase, the facade of civility. Right now his ‘cooperation’ - or more accurately, his lack of active resistance - would be enough to keep it that way, so that later they could say see, we gave him a chance .

Jet contained his distaste to flat glowering, for the moment. When he spoke, it was to give noncommittal, unhelpful answers; true answers, mostly, but unhelpful.

What were you doing on Dizang? Looking. Looking?

Looking at what, Mr Sikuliaq?

Who do you work for? No one.

We have comms relays from your location, Mr Sikuliaq. Looks like you were making an encrypted call in the minutes before you were apprehended. Who’d you call? A friend.

Mostly he did not speak, and met their questions with stony silence, let the repetitions and threats and cajoling slide off him like water from a bird’s back.

Where’s the Ruby Seven, huh? What, forgot where you parked it?

Tell me, Mr Sikuliaq, what is it that a weapons smuggler does after the war is done? Nothing good, right?

What happened on Jupiter can’t happen here. So I don’t care what you say you were doing in this sector, we’re not done here until you talk.

It was all immaterial. He did not intend to stay long, and much as he did not enjoy pain, it more bored than scared him. They would be done long before he ever gave away anything he didn’t want to reveal, even if the answers they wanted were not particularly important. He had sold the Ruby Seven to pay for Buddy’s surgeries; semi-legally, even, although not under his real name. He had never solely smuggled weapons, and just because the galaxy had officially come to an armistice, didn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of needy black markets on both sides. What had happened on Jupiter  - what Jet had done , to fifteen innocent people, would never happen again. Jet was the only person who could guarantee that, not some cop.

His interrogators - he paid no real attention to their faces, names, or titles - seemed unimpressed with this obstinancy. The sneers on their faces said the next round of questioning would be far less pleasant, which was not a surprise. More frustrating than anything else was the wasted, pointless time: more than four hours, at least, though he hadn’t been quite bored enough to count the seconds. But that was certainly the point, an attempt to wear him down, and so he showed nothing of his impatience.

The corridors were dimmed as he was marched back through them to his cell, fewer cops milling about; those that were on duty were bleary-eyed, glum-faced, clutching coffees, in a way that told him that this was the night shift. Good to know. As best he could, he met the gazes of those that gawked as he passed; hopefully they would believe he was attempting to stare them down as an intimidation tactic, and not mentally logging the pace and grouping of the patrols.

Jet was back in his cell before he had time to figure them out, but he had a start, and for now that was enough.

He had missed lights-out, apparently. The only illumination in the small room came from the slat in the door: just enough to see by, once his eyes had adjusted, all in shades of dull grey. It was the same as he had left it, only the kid had curled up on his side, head pillowed on his arm, body crammed defensively against the wall.

There was no way he was really asleep, Jet was sure of that. The heavy door opening, slamming, and locking again would have been enough to wake the dead, and the cell was cool - not cold enough for sleep to be impossible, but certainly chill in a way that would keep someone on edge. Especially someone so wary, so aware of any presence, with Jet’s shadow over him. But the kid had committed to pretending, breathing measuredly slow, eyes shuttered, expression not-quite-entirely relaxed.

Fine. Jet wouldn’t disrupt a pretence so carefully created. Without a word, he crossed the small room to sit on his own mat - and, for the second time that day, glanced down as something unexpected caught his eye on the concrete floor. 

A tray, this time, the kind of segmented plastic plate common to prisons and schools the galaxy over. One portion of nutrient paste porridge, a section of potatoes and cubed protein, a few balls of ambiguous canned fruit, in each case with half of the plate scraped clean.

Precisely half, in fact. The kid had carefully, deliberately divided the food in two, eaten half, and then slid the tray over to the head of Jet’s bunk when he was done.

Jet blinked silently as he considered it.

Not a trap, no more than the glasses had been a trap on his part - almost certainly not a trap, anyway. The kid showed no signs of waking when Jet glanced over at him. Cynically, Jet assumed that this was to avoid having to explain himself.

Jet could pick up on an offer made so obviously without the need for any words. He ate quickly; it tasted exactly as he had expected, which was to say, of almost nothing. No evidence of having been tampered with at all, and, no, of course not; it was much simpler than that. From what little he had seen of the way his cellmate’s mind worked, Jet felt he knew what this was. Not a grand gesture, just a silent kindness, a balancing-out of the debt.

It made sense to him. Still, when he put the tray aside and settled back, he found that the words thank you stuck in his throat. 

He had not had many opportunities to say them in recent years, not sincerely, meaningfully. He could thank Buddy easily enough, sure - but Buddy was unlike other people, and Jet’s relationship with her was unlike any other in his life. Ridiculous, he told himself. He was being ridiculous. This was simple, human: not being deprived of food was no special act of mercy, just like not depriving someone of their vision. It only seemed kind because the world around them was not. There was no danger in acknowledging the favour.

“Thanks,” Jet made himself say, bluntly and clearly, into the stale air between them.

There was, of course, no reply.

He might as well get some rest, he supposed; as a general rule, he found it best to sleep as much as physically possible in jail. Easier said than done, though. Jet didn’t like the artificial night they used in orbit, had never managed to get accustomed to it, no matter how long he spent in space. It was different for people who grew up on spaceships or satellites or asteroids, or even simply planets with too-long or too-short days, of course, with bodies long-accustomed to false light. But Jet was born beneath a yellow sun, an unfiltered blue sky, and his circadian rhythms demanded natural darkness in natural cycles, just like his terrestrial ancestors. Buddy teased him for it, sometimes; she called his extraplanetary insomnia quaint, ‘old-fashioned in an evolutionary sense’. Jet knew her well enough to take it as a compliment.

He allowed himself a few seconds to miss her, to grieve not being able to speak to a person he had seen every single day for two years, to crave her grounding touch, the feeling of her cool hand casually resting in his, her head on his shoulder, always with her hair somehow getting in his mouth. Her fast mind and faster wit would be a shining beacon here, something to lift him out of bleak practicality; they balanced each other well, that way.

But she was not here. Jet could not be something he was not. He was alone, with this boy and his untrusting eyes, and both of their grim calculations.

Jet settled on his back, and pretended not to notice the kid watching through his eyelashes.

Chapter Text

The lights slammed on too-early and too-suddenly the next morning, the fluorescents painfully bright. Jet grunted, squinted hard against them. In his peripheral vision, he saw the kid jolt awake, breath caught, instantly alert.

A panic response to abrupt bright light was not unusual, especially for someone his cellmate’s age; someone who must have grown up in the brutal last decade of the war. Far more unusual was the iron-clad self-control it must have taken the kid to go perfectly still at once, rigid in a way that said what he had learned to fear had used motion-sensors. The moment was revealing, but over quickly, only a few heartbeats. As soon as he got his bearings, realised that there was no immediate danger, the kid exhaled shakily, let his shoulders slump, shifted to rub awkwardly under the manacles they both still wore.

Jet didn’t move except to turn his face away from the glare. No way to tell what time it was - not that it would have matched his internal clock, still running on Martian eastern hemisphere time. It was not yet morning in the Cerberus province, his body informed him. Given that he had nothing to reference it against, the information was useless. 

He hated waking up and not knowing what to do. Almost all of Jet’s mornings looked the same, so rote and precise that Buddy swore she calibrated her watch by him. Routine and stability was how he regulated himself. Get up, make the bed, stretch, meditate, get dressed, check the perimeters and the radiation shielding, pretend not to notice Buddy shuffling around without her hair or makeup yet entirely perfect, brew tea, prepare breakfast. Try not to miss the easy rush and dulled, uncomplicated world that he had used to seek out upon waking, and try not to feel guilty for missing it, and know that Buddy was tracking every single drop of alcohol consumed on her premises, so that even if he wanted to - and he didn’t - he couldn’t relapse. At least that wasn’t a possibility here.

There were two trays of grey nutrient porridge shoved through the door for breakfast, confirming that there only being one last night had been an attempt to starve him. Jet didn’t drink the coffee that came with it, and he allowed himself some petty amusement at the way the kid eyed his own coffee suspiciously, like Jet might know something he didn’t. The kid still drank it, though. Not one to pass up calories wherever he could get them, it seemed, if the way he wolfed down the blandest food in the galaxy was any indicator.

This time, Jet was ready when he heard boots outside, had rolled his shoulders and gotten to his feet at his own pace. If it was the Unnatural Disaster they were expecting, the least he could do would be to loom over them.

The door swung open heavily, just as it had the previous day, and a guard looked in - but faltered, scowled, at the sight of Jet.

“Not today, Sikuliaq.” They glanced past him and called sharply, “Glass.”

The kid - Glass? Jet doubted it was his real name - had gone pale, trepidation more than visible in his usually-controlled expression. His glasses had disappeared, squirrelled away in some sleight of hand. Still, he stood and went quietly, if reluctantly. He was lanky, taller than he had looked sitting down.

The guard reached out to take hold of his elbow - and without warning, the kid ducked out of the way and bolted, shouldering another cop into the wall.

For a few stunned seconds as he darted down the corridor it seemed as though he meant to make a break for it. He couldn’t be, of course: he couldn’t see properly, he was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and stuck on a space station, with nowhere to go. The only thing his little stunt could successfully do was anger his jailors - which it did. They caught up to him almost immediately, one grabbing hold of a handful of his shirt to jerk him back so that another could slam a baton into his stomach; the boy gave a winded yell, doubled over, and a kick from a steel-plated boot sent him to the floor with a thud.

That was the point at which whoever was left standing by the door hastily slammed and locked it, cutting off Jet’s line of sight. The sound was enough to snap him out of the frozen shock he had been in, fists hanging tensely at his sides, to make him stagger forward a few steps to the tiny window. He couldn’t see what was happening, but he could hear it: the meaty thump of more blows, more choked-down cries of pain, and then the indistinct groaning and footsteps of the kid being dragged upright and away.

Jet released a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding, tried to uncurl his hands from the tight fists they had become. He was still under the watchful eye of the camera on the ceiling, after all.

The kid had invited violence deliberately. He didn’t want to provide answers, so he made sure his interrogators would be more focused on beating him than asking questions. That was the only thing he could possibly have intended. Jet couldn’t think of another explanation that made sense.

He also couldn’t stop thinking of Buddy, of the way she talked and talked and talked when she was in danger, until the threat was furious and disorientated, easier for her to control. She would go to great lengths to give herself an advantage in a conversation, to claw herself up out of any terrible situation. He didn’t know whether the kid had made the same calculations that she would: whether he knew he was too valuable a prisoner to kill, or had decided that the risk was worth the possible reward, or whether he had simply panicked. But Jet did know that he had just watched a calculation, and not a sustainable one. 

Sure enough, when he peered into the corner of the cell, he could see the boy’s glasses folded neatly, stashed safely away. Whatever else they might break, his only means of seeing clearly would survive intact.

He realised with sudden clarity, as though the decision had already been made, that when he broke out he was taking the kid with him.

*

They hauled the kid back in by the back of his collar, limp like a scruffed kitten, blood trickling down from his hairline and crusted at his nose, and tossed him across the floor of the cell. He curled in on himself immediately, keeping his narrow body out of the way.

Jet crossed the cell to grab some of the thin toilet paper; the kid recoiled at the movement, drew away, and only stilled when Jet stopped at arm’s length and held out the tissue to him. He was putting his bulk carefully between the kid and the camera on the ceiling, offering him a tiny piece of privacy. It was all he could give.

The boy hesitated, and then wordlessly, shakily, accepted.

“Kid -” Jet began, uncertain of what he was actually going to say.

“Don’t call me that.” the boy blurted, unsteadily.

He wetted his split lip, expression distant, a series of decisions that Jet couldn’t comprehend running rapid-fire behind his eyes.

“Rex,” he said slowly, voice thick with blood. “My name is Rex Glass.”

No, it wasn’t. The name all but screamed early space colonist; it sounded Martian, maybe Venusian, and if this Rex kid was from Mars then Jet was a sewer rabbit. Still, he wasn’t in the habit of refusing to call a person by the name they chose.

“Rex,” Jet repeated flatly. “You deliberately angered them.”

He was asking, for all that it had come out as a statement.

The kid closed his eyes and stayed quiet, not denying it. Jet narrowed his eyes, wracked his brain. This was a cunning person, someone like Buddy, someone to whom Jet could perhaps not relate, but could understand. And Buddy did nothing without an ulterior motive or three.

“You stole something they desperately want back.” he guessed, and received a tender-looking shake of the head in answer.

For a long moment they waited there silently: Rex pressing a scrap of tissue to the wound on his head, Jet obscuring him from view, and waiting. He was, after all, a very patient man.

“They think I’m somebody,” admitted Rex eventually in a whisper. There was a hunted-animal look in his eyes.

Jet raised his eyebrows.

“Who are you?”

The faintest hint of an unhappy smile appeared at the edges of the kid’s mouth, fox fangs just showing.

“Nobody. Nobody at all.”

*

Hours passed without any further words between them - Rex unwilling to let anything else slip, Jet preferring silence to needless noise. He left the kid alone to nurse his wounds, and paid attention instead to the continuous beat of the patrols around them, mapping the pattern against what he remembered from the previous night, against approximately when he supposed the shifts had to change. He didn’t have enough information to really make use of it yet, but he would soon. Besides, the rhythm of the footsteps made a useful reference against his own boredom, the way that understimulation made time trickle past in a dull, formless syrup.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Rex move, twist himself into a position slumped up against the wall. Probably he was attempting to take the weight off some bruise, Jet presumed - but a moment later, he began to tap with his nail against the concrete. It was a faint sound; if the cell had not been so overwhelmingly quiet, save only the buzz of the life support systems and the movement outside, it probably wouldn’t have been audible at all.

Meaningless, patternless, at first; test runs, he thought. And then, when Jet looked over to the kid’s hand, confirming he could hear it, more regular beats began to emerge. Binary dots and dashes, a simple, ancient system. One Jet recognised.

C-O-D-E tapped Rex against the wall. His expression was carefully blank, but behind his glasses his eyes were intense.

Jet folded his arms as though he was annoyed, fingers resting against his bicep, silent but visible, and replied. Dash, dot, dash, dot: an affirmative. The kid didn’t waste time being happy that his plan, whatever it was, was working.

B-L-I-N-D—S-P-O-T.

Of course: Rex had been here longer, had been marched through those corridors more often, maybe even enough times to spot something. Jet let himself feel excited, just a little bit, deep inside, though he didn’t outwardly respond.

B-S-?, he tapped back, intent.

He didn’t question why Rex was telling him, why now. Asking would not accomplish anything useful.

Carefully, laboriously, the kid explained: by a storage cupboard that seemed to contain janitorial supplies, next to a bend in the corridor. There was a camera pointed at the door, and in both directions down the hall, but the space for a few steps past the cupboard itself was concealed from all view. 

Y-O-U-R-E—S-U-R-E?

Affirmative, tapped the kid quickly. He had tested it, he claimed, by dropping an earring there, presuming that any cleaning robots operated by following the security cameras. The earring had not moved.

I-T-S—S-T-I-L-L—T-H-E-R-E.

Jet would check for himself, of course, but Rex would not be telling him this if he didn’t expect for there to be proof. He raised his finger to tap a reply - but as he did, the constant march of footsteps outside slowed and then stopped. Both he and the kid hesitated, still in their carefully-innocuous poses, waiting to see if they had somehow been caught… and then a guard sneezed, and moved on, and the danger passed.

Rather than continuing the conversation, Jet thought for a moment, and then nodded solemnly. He could use this. Alone, Rex probably wouldn’t have been able to make anything of his discovery either - but together they could. Jet was pragmatic enough to admit that.

And soft enough to feel glad that any escape plan that involved the both of them would make it easy to get the kid somewhere safe.

Chapter Text

You should not die, Jet Sikuliaq. Other good can still be done. The past is dead behind us. The future is potential.

He had been slumped in the darkest corner booth at the back of the Lighthouse, the first time he heard that message. His vision had been blurry, his thoughts sluggish, head pounding. Another few days of living the way he had been living, he would be dead.

He had kept his eyes on the floor, no higher than Buddy’s shoes, and pretended not to listen - but her words had taken root in his heart nevertheless. There was good still to be done, and a version of him - not yet in existence, then - who could do it. Jet had wanted to meet that man.

It had not been his first attempt to get clean, but it was, so far, the only one with any success. Buddy had given him what he needed: a purpose.

He should not die. Strangely, perhaps, it was that first sentence that he kept closest in times like this, held against despair. He would have liked to say he would not die, but of course, Jet knew that that was not entirely his choice to make. At the very least, he would try his best to live. There was too much possibility in the galaxy not to do so.

*

Jet’s hair had been in the same ponytail for almost a week, and it was a greasy mess; the texture made him twitch whenever he thought about it. Still, he took it out, wore his hair loose around his shoulders. Rex had Jet’s hair-tie on his wrist, ready to use the thin wire inside it as a lockpick. Jet had Rex’s glasses in his pocket, where hopefully they would be safe.

He had scanned the floors as he was hauled off for interrogation the previous day, and he had seen the glint of a tiny gold stud against the tiles, right where Rex had said it would be. The earring was still there, which meant the cameras still weren’t looking there. Just enough assurance that their hasty plan would work.

The kid was limping pretty badly when the cops ordered him on his feet. Real, Jet thought, but exaggerated; enough to guarantee he would be underestimated. Jet was doing the same. He really was displeased at being stuck here this long, really was yearning to lash out against those who were more than happy to take their tempers out on him - but he usually wouldn’t let such things show on his face, and now he did.

Their jailers had made sure to handle Rex firmly this time, two big cops jostling him around as they cuffed him. He wasn’t resisting - yet - but the police had evidently learned better than to underestimate the kid. They were brash with him, overconfident that he was in their power with no way to resist.

Those sneers fell away when they laid eyes on Jet’s expression, the way he had drawn himself up to his full height and refused to back out of the doorway.

“Step back, Sikuliaq,” barked some officer, who blanched when Jet turned his steely gaze down at her.

He planted his feet, let his lips twist infinitesimally in displeasure, and didn’t move. Out in the corridor, he saw Rex crane his head over his shoulder, trying to turn to get a better look at whyever it was the cops had all stopped to stare, all wide-eyed and over-surprised, utterly unlike his shuttered and calculated real expressions. They noticed, seized hold of his thin shoulders and gave him a shove to keep going.

Good.

“Final warning,” snapped the officer who had spoken before, and her hand went to her belt, hovering between the baton and the blaster. Jet put his hand out and braced his arm against the concrete wall, all immovable stone, and gave her the lazy, dangerous once-over of an apex predator, a polar bear daring a dog to take a snap at it.

The kid kept on stumbling forward, closer and closer to the twist in the corridor where he had promised Jet the blind spot still remained, uncorrected. 

The cops around the door began to rally, realising perhaps that no matter how big and how intimidating Jet might be, there were far more of them, and they were armed. Deliberately, far more slowly and obviously than he usually ever would, he shifted his centre of gravity low, braced himself to fight back.

A few more steps, and - there. In the corner of his eye, he watched Rex and his guards near the end of the long corridor, beside the battered door of a storage cupboard. 

Jet allowed a tiny, choked-down, sealed-away part of the Unnatural Disaster to flare to life.

It would have been gratifying, to be able to say later, that this had been an act of powerlessness. That he had not been in control of his body; that for however long it took, he had seen nothing but red. In reality, however, he simply quieted his better self, his restraint, his calm, the endlessly wise voice in his head that sounded like Buddy, and allowed his body to do what felt natural. He was present; he was calculating, he was acting of his own will. It was just that what felt natural to the body no longer felt right to the mind.

Jet swung one huge fist into the face of the cop beside him, sending him flying into the far wall, the blow no less devastatingly effective for how uncharacteristically attention-catching he had made it. It took a moment for the others to react, and he was ready for them when they did, turning his shoulder to absorb one baton strike and twisting the arm of another so that her blaster clattered out of her hand and across the floor. 

They were yelling, meaningless demands and warnings that he ignored completely, all enough of a commotion that everything else in the corridor stopped dead in shock - that the cops leading Rex turned their attention from him entirely.

He would not have been left unobserved for very long, but it was long enough. One step back, and he was in the blind spot, arms shifting surreptitiously behind him to slip the wire into his bound hands.

Something collided so hard with the back of Jet’s head that his knees buckled. He lashed out backwards, effectively if the distinct sound of a cop falling on their ass meant anything - but doing so put him in a more vulnerable position. Most of the officers around him rushed forward, attempting to contain him by sheer brute force; one, smarter or perhaps merely more cowardly than the others, scrambled backwards, found a fob at their belt, and managed to aim it at Jet and press a button. The magnetic cuffs on Jet’s wrist slammed together hard.

That was not enough to stop him, nowhere near; he felt manic laughter bubble up in his throat, a sound he thought he had forgotten how to make. He didn’t let it out - it would be a step too far, to have to hear that noise again - but he pasted a broad grin onto his face below his beard, and he kept on fighting, unbound hair whipping around him, felt bones break and flesh split beneath his hands.

While the situation escalated and escalated by the cell door, in a blind spot at the other end of the corridor, unnoticed, the kid’s cuffs snapped open with a wire jammed into their internal mechanism and slid off his wrists. A half-step to the side, shoes whisper-soft against the squeaky floor, long limbs pressed unobtrusive against the wall, making sure he was still out of view of any camera. Eyes narrowed hard in an attempt to focus them, body all still and steady and waiting bowstring-taut for his opportunity - first rule of thieving, Pete: pick your moment.

And then a guard made a gesture with his arm that left his holster unprotected, and in one smooth movement the kid had a blaster in his hands.

They noticed him, then. Rex was not a good shot, probably would not have been even if he hadn’t been shooting blind, but he didn’t have to be. Two blasts rang out, point-blank range, the two officers closest to the kid hitting the ground hard. Jet caught, in the too-sharp adrenaline-tinted distance, a glimpse of a meaningful glance, the kid demanding that he survive to make good on the next part of their escape plan. Then Rex was gone.

Jet didn’t need to be told twice. A handful of cops were still on their feet, still struggling for their guns or attempting to hurry up the backup that was inevitably already on its way; dealt with easily enough, he decided. The more pressing problem was the manacles.

He grit his teeth, stuck his fingers stiffly up, turned, and rammed the base of his right thumb into the cold concrete wall with all his considerable might. His vision went white, entire body seizing against blinding, shocking agony; he heard an audible crack, and a wild roar of pain that could only be coming from his own throat.

With his thumb broken, folded unnaturally against his hand, the cuff fell easily off his right arm, and he was free. His left hand had always been more dominant anyway.

Breaking his thumb had wasted enough time. It was shocking enough to stop the officers in their tracks for a minute, but more would appear in a moment, and speed mattered, now. Through a dizzy, painful haze, he braced himself for more brutality, and threw himself toward them.

Chapter Text

More of their plan than Jet would have liked had relied on the hope that no one would pay much attention to where Rex had bolted toward. Not for the airlock, nor for weapons storage, nor command control, not even at random through the maze of the space station’s twisting corridors. The kid could sneak around, at least: he had a chance of going unnoticed. Jet himself was not so subtle.

Cellbreak, jailbreak, getaway, insurance. So far, they only had achieved the first of those four components, and it had not been without its price. Jail-break, getaway, insurance - these were all more complicated.

The Aurinko method for prison breaks was devastatingly effective, if carried out precisely as planned. Not otherwise. Buddy had always been clear that a person had to be able to rely on every link of the chain to ensure a smooth exit. Jet’s only co-conspirator here was a near-stranger, a purposefully inscrutable kid with desperate eyes, a fake name, and an overactive flight instinct.

He didn’t have another choice, and besides, he didn’t want Rex left here to rot, to the mercy of their jailers. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

He dragged a desk from the now-empty bullpen into the corridor, turned it on its side, and blocked the door as he entered, jaw set hard against the pain radiating from his thumb out through his entire body. It wasn’t easy to be himself right now, the self he had gone to great lengths to build. Only more reason to try.

Rex was waiting beside the door with a blaster still clutched in his hands, face beaded with sweat, live-wire tense. He had presumably been watching the security cameras, and knew Jet was alone. There were two cops slumped lifeless on the ground at the back of the small room. Stunned, Jet hoped, not dead, and didn’t care enough to check. It wasn’t as though he had left those he had fought in the corridor in any better condition.

“How long will that last?” Rex hissed, nodding jerkily toward the makeshift blockade. Jet stepped past him, pulled a chair across the squeaky floor with a squeal that made the kid wince, and jammed it hard under the handle.

“Not very long.”

Direct communication was not among Jet’s top priorities here. He scanned over the room, noticed with relief a green box marked with the universal symbol for First Aid, and ignored the now-familiar discomfort of the kid’s eyes on him to cross over to it and - ah. The kid’s eyes.

Wordlessly, he paused, reached carefully into his pocket with his good hand, and lifted Rex’s glasses out to him. Rex didn’t hesitate, this time, not as he had those few days ago in the cell. He took them immediately, delicately, not snatching them frantically away. 

His eyes focused quickly on Jet’s hand, once they could see, on the nature of the injury now clear, the purple bruise and the jarred angle of the bone beneath scarred skin.

“Do you,” he began awkwardly. Need help?

“No,” Jet grunted, which was the truth, not a matter of pride. Not solely a matter of pride, anyway. He nodded bluntly to the communications array - Rex was a terrible shot, really, and there were sparks coming off computers and wiring where his blasts had gone wide, but at least some looked to still be working - and added, in the tone of an order, “Comms.”

Somewhat hesitantly, Rex keyed in the number Jet recited for him. His eyes flickered all the while between Jet’s one-handed rifling through the first aid kit, and the doorway, attention snagging on the distant sounds of officers readying to try and recapture them.

Jet got a splint and a roll of bandages laid out before him, and pushed the rest of the kit away, too hard, sending it clattering off the desk. Better that than look inside for what else it might offer.

It had been necessary, to break his thumb. He had needed his hands free to fight - even just to be able to access his full range of motion. He didn’t regret it. But he hated the way it made that wild version of himself so much harder to rein back: the constant throb of unalloyed pain, the adrenaline, the pressure, all of this would be so much easier to deal with if he didn’t have to be in control, if he could even allow himself just to take the edge off, to numb just the most demanding injury.

No. No. He closed his eyes and searched for the memory, the familiar words in a voice he trusted above all others. You should not die, Jet Sikuliaq. Other good can still be done. He would need to be present in himself, to survive; he would need to have the Unnatural Disaster leashed tightly down, to do any good by any measure.

Rex dialled, and the call hung in the stale air for a long few seconds, struggling to find its signal. Jet found a thick knot of longing in his throat, suddenly barely able to breathe with helpless anxiety that the burner comms whose number he had memorised had already had to be disposed of. And then -

“Hello, Lighthouse bar and tearoom here,” came that crisp, antique accent he knew so well, distorted a little in the static. “What can I do for you today?”

Jet’s eyes closed in relief, broad shoulders sagging down. The Unnatural Disaster faded back into memory.

“Buddy.”

It wasn’t just that it was her: it was that she sounded well, safe, as amused with herself as ever. He hadn’t realised how much he had worried for her, alone beneath the blazing radiation of the Cerberus Province. She could handle herself, of course; she was more than capable. But he had made it his duty to care for her, as she had for him.

He gathered himself and spoke again, blunt as ever.

“We need an exit.”

“I thought as much.” The fondness in her tone was subtle, but obvious enough to him, and he allowed himself the smallest curl of a smile beneath his beard. Rex was frozen, seemingly unable to believe that this was working. “How urgent is this exit, darling?”

“Extremely.” Jet deadpanned, his voice still utterly expressionless. “Can’t you hear how stressed I sound?”

A hint of something - disbelief, irritation, utter confusion - flashed briefly across the kid’s face, listening to this.

“And how many is ‘we’?”

He hummed, unsurprised to be caught out so quickly. Buddy knew better than most that Jet simply did not speak carelessly, and he knew that she paid careful attention to even the smallest details.

“Two. Me, and one other.”

“I didn’t ask for a ride,” cut Rex, the insistence in his voice just as cryptic as it was sharp. “Once we get to the escape pods, I won’t go with you.”

Jet was in no mood to explain it to the kid, but he absolutely would not be going without him. That would be tantamount to leaving him to die.

“Two,” he repeated to Buddy, flat voice broaching no objection. She typed for a few seconds, and said nothing, though he knew the face she would be making at overhearing that, all sly interest and calculation.

“Very well, dear. There’s a series of escape pods down by the airlock, loaded and ready to go. I have the one furthest from the door disconnected from the police network, with strict instructions for AI in this system to ignore it on all radars. Analogue cameras won’t be fooled, darling, nor real human eyes, so you’ll have to avoid them, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you. Besides, chances are that our dear friends in law enforcement are too high-minded to consider simply looking for you.”

Cellbreak, getaway: sorted. That just left the jailbreak.

“Mn. See you soon,” said Jet bluntly, if warmly, and nodded to Rex to kill the comms.

Soothed by Buddy’s voice, the implicit assurance that the life they had made for themselves in the Cerberus Province was still waiting for him, Jet braced his forearm against the closest desk and felt along his thumb for the break, jaw tight and shoulders tense with the tender pain of the sensitive flesh around the injury itself. The kid was still perched awkwardly above the nearest comms, staring at him with an unreadable expression, in which Jet nevertheless still read alarm. He wouldn’t condescend to Rex by telling him not to watch. In this line of work, squeamishness was not of much use. If the kid wasn’t already accustomed to the sight of improvised medicine, he should get used to it.

As best he could under the circumstances, Jet set his finger and bound it firmly to the splint. It wasn’t the worst injury he had ever dealt with by himself, or the hardest to treat, not by a long measure. Still not pleasant. In the corner of his eye, Jet could see Rex’s facade of utter control twitch slightly at any particularly painful movement. He ought to get that under control. A near-indifference to physical danger like Jet’s was hard to cultivate, but such a thing could be faked.

Eventually Jet straightened up and rolled his shoulders, listened to his back crack sorely.

Outside, the noise of their jailers rallying was getting louder.

He turned to the kid to try and explain their plans - but then paused, narrowed his eyes at the way Rex was sitting, the way he wasn’t putting any weight at all on his right leg. He had already been limping. The dash to the comms room couldn’t have helped.

“Can you run?”

Rex bristled like a haughty cat and stood in a fluid, practised motion like that of a dancer, posture too-perfect, both feet forward in a precise way that simply looked performed, fake. He nodded, lying without speaking.

Not a rich kid after all, Jet thought to himself, not for the first time, regretting that he ever fe for that pretence. Not with bones like that. He tried his best not to visibly scowl as he begrudgingly nodded back. They didn’t have any insurance, not really, but they also didn’t have any more time to waste. He moved toward the door, angling his head to try and hear what was going on outside.

“We need to go back out there.”

“Are you kidding?” blurted Rex, incredulous.

“Never,” Jet lied.

“Straight through every cop in the Outer Rim?!”

No matter how difficult it seemed, they would have to broach the corridor again. But it seemed the kid needed a few seconds to process that - he glanced around at the bank of unguarded computers, knowing that the only reason he had come to this godforsaken star system in the first place was to steal state bank details.

“How are you with hacking?” he hazarded, for the sake of it.

Rex hesitated, then shook his head.

“Basics, only. Nothing complex. I can do specific things on these systems, you know, disabling the alarms, messing up the security feeds - but not much else.”

Jet blinked at him, reordering several priorities in his mind. Something about the way the kid said it made him think…

“You’ve disabled the alarms already?”

The faintest hint of an awkward smile, smug but a little shy about it, came across the kid’s face, and he nodded.

“Hm.” Maybe they would have some insurance, after all. “Could you open the other cells?”

An apologetic shrug. “Not from here. Not that fast, anyway.”

Doing so would only put their fellow inmates at more risk, anyway - but a distraction did not have to be real, to be distracting.

“…Could you make it sound as though you had?”

Rex caught on at once; his keen expression became one of calculation, and he nodded sharply. There was another fight waiting for them out there; Jet was tired, now, more than he was anything, but the thought of regaining the upper hand drew some dark amusement back.

“What else could you do?”

*

Out in the corridor, the warden of the Dizang Orbital Holding Facility got off the comms with the planet-side police commissioner, and turned to curse under her breath at the wall. They wouldn’t be getting any backup; the only response she could expect was a minor scandal, for allowing the Unnatural Disaster himself to bust out of what had been meant to be a high-security cell. Not to mention, if the Brahman authorities got wind of the boy whose face had pinged some kind of high alert in their wanted database getting loose, that would be its own diplomatic disaster - easier to contain, since they were very much keeping his arrest quiet until they were certain it was their guy, but still an issue. Things could have been worse, of course. Stars only knew why, but both prisoners had managed to corner themselves in the comms room, which only had the one narrow doorway. That had given her plenty of time to assemble what few troops the Unnatural Disaster hadn’t already put in the sickbay - the man was an animal, clearly.

Most of the officers were fidgeting with their riot gear, unfamiliar with being expected to use body armour in the middle of a space station, of all places; a few had their hands resting on their blaster butts, a few others trying to talk tactics, the majority doing nothing. She turned to head up to the front of their rough formation, to get their attention and start barking orders for them to stand to attention.

And then, with the police still all in disarray, several things happened all at once.

The overhead lights slammed off with a heavy thunk, leaving the station in total darkness for the second or so it took for the backup generator to kick in. Multiple sirens began to blare all at once: the shrill beeping of the fire alarm, the low drone for a solar storm, the piercing squeal of a critical oxygen failure, even the klaxon leftover from the Galactic Civil War, blaring its warning for an imminent Solar attack. Above it all, mild automated voices battled for attention: this space station has been placed in quarantine for Ashur Fever, please remain - a serious security breach has resulted in complete data leak, please re - this space station has been propelled more than seventy miles from its planet of origin and will shortly drift into the void, please remain ca- universal override: every cell in blocks A, B, and C have been opened - please remain calm – please remain calm.

Perhaps a consequence of the fire alarm receiving no response, perhaps just another phase of the system malfunction, both sprinklers and flame-retardant foam nozzles on the ceiling burst to life. In the darkness, in the deafening noise, in the water and foam, bodies flailed and stumbled about, coughing and shouting and scrambling for order.

And through the sinister red glow of emergency strip lights in the floor, two figures appeared in the comms room doorway and began to barrel toward the airlock.

It was chaos. It was perfect.

Twig-thin as he was, still visibly beaten, the kid was never going to be a great fighter. Still, he had enough cornered-wild-animal desperation to take advantage of the mayhem, to be dangerous. Jet didn’t doubt that Rex would use those fangs of his, if he had to. Perhaps he kept them sharpened specifically for such a purpose.

Jet was battering ram, unstoppable, angling his body to keep his left hand out of the way. Some of the cops managed to get some shots off, apparently, but entirely at random, and soon enough he and the kid were around the corner.

Rex was deceptively quick, even struggling to keep his balance. It was a learned quickness, one that utterly ignored the pain and the danger they were in; it said that someone, somewhere, had trained him that if freezing still and trying to go unnoticed failed, he should cut his losses and run. He reached the escape pods first, throwing a glance over his shoulder for just long enough to see Jet nod to the end of the row, repeating Buddy’s instructions wordlessly in the din: the one furthest from the door.

The kid disappeared, just in time for Jet to remember that this was a career criminal who now owed him nothing, who had already said that he wanted to escape alone. Too late to regret it. Jet didn’t make a habit of questioning his own decisions once he had made them, and he had made this one in good will, in trust.

They had both grabbed discarded blasters from the floor of the comms room. Jet waited until someone managed to stumble close through the chaos, grabbed them by the collar, and swung them into the wall hard enough that they stopped moving, shooting behind them to keep any of their colleagues well back. There was a keycard at their belt; he shoved the unconscious body away, went through the airlock door, and locked it behind him. And then he kicked the lock until it was mangled and spitting out sparks, just for good measure.

Behind him, one of the escape pods’ engines sputtered to life, and the chamber echoed with the heavy metal ka-clunk of its moorings beginning to disengage. Jet whirled around, aware that if the kid left now, he wouldn’t only be stranded on a jail in orbit, but almost definitely ejected into the vacuum of space - just in time to hear the pod beep insistently, a muffled robotic voice demand that all doors must be fully sealed before release.

Rex was in the front seat, leaning back to wedge the side hatch open, blinking behind his smeared glasses.

“Are you coming or not?!”

The gears within the exterior walls of the space station were moving, already keen to eject whatever in the airlock was trying to leave. Jet didn’t waste another second. He stepped sideways into the pod, pulling the door closed firmly behind him, and the kid slammed down the acceleration. All at once they were rushing away, shot forward like a stone from a sling, probably leaving charred streaks across the airlock floor.

For a moment Jet smiled through the g-force, delighted by the sensation of freedom, the stomach-swooping rush of speeding through space. He took a step toward the tiny cockpit - and then lurched violently into the opposite wall, as the pod took a sharp swerve to the left for absolutely no reason.

His elation faded quickly into adrenaline as he swallowed a noise of pain, on edge again at once - were they under attack, were these evasive manoeuvres? A half-second, and they jolted again, bucking upward in a way that made everything not nailed down hit the ceiling, and throwing Jet on his ass. It also gave him enough of a glance out of the windows and at the controls to know that nothing was following them. The gears ground together with an awful screech, the vehicle somehow juddering unsteadily through the void, and Jet felt himself scowl with absolute outrage at the way this poor, tiny ship was being treated.

He hauled himself to his feet, glaring a hole into the back of the kid’s head, any good mood, any solidarity forgotten. 

“Who the fuck taught you to drive?”

Chapter Text

“Move. Move.”

Jet wasn’t one to swear, or to repeat himself, if he could ever help it. This, however, was an exceptional situation.

The kid blinked, caught off-guard enough that he didn’t get up immediately. That wasn’t good enough. Jet could practically smell the damage he was doing to the engine.

Ignoring the hiss of shock and minor panic that unexpected touch earned him, he grabbed Rex up by the armpit and physically hauled him out of the driver’s seat.

“Move.”

Despite the frustration, it felt good to be behind a wheel again. The moment he sat down, he felt more himself. He loved the thrum of the ship beneath his hands, the familiar set of his body, the endless expanse of space rushing past out of the front window. Even the steady whir of the life-support in his ears felt right. He had learned to fly in ships like this. All the emergency vehicles in the galaxy were built the same.

Jet had been an ambulance driver, once, in a past so distant it felt like a foreign galaxy. Two years fighting in the Galactic Civil War, right on the frontlines, and then his sergeant had taken a long hard look at the wild-eyed fury that was quickly becoming young Private Sikuliaq’s resting expression and said maybe let’s see if we can get you reassigned, son . Jet had wanted to throw the man across the room, at that - had been big enough to do so, even back then, aged barely twenty - had wanted to snarl I’m not your son , because there had still been family waiting for him in a fishing village at the northern tip of Turtle Island, ties that had been close, then, though all long-severed in the decades since. But he had let command transfer him from ground troops to emergency service, and he had quickly discovered that there was no greater joy in the galaxy than soaring through the emptiness of space, no greater rush than weaving in and out of the chaos of a battle. There was even peace and balance to be found in repairing the ship, understanding the simple mechanical logic of its inner workings - though peace and balance were not words he would readily associate with that period of his life, especially since it was also through that job that he had begun to work as a smuggler, and after it came desertion, destruction, addiction. He didn’t waste time and energy despising what was past and could not be changed, but he allowed himself some nostalgia, just a little longing for the sensation of flight beneath his fingertips, before flying had become complicated.

“What was I doing wrong?” snapped the kid from where he was leaning over at the entry to the cockpit, breaking Jet out of his memories. He shot a half-hearted glare out of the corner of his eye: really, it would have been easier to list what the kid wasn’t doing wrong. “We were moving away from them, fast, and -”

“If we had continued on that path, we would have crashed into a moon,” Jet pointed out.

Rex’s eyes followed his to the radar, and some of the defensiveness went out of his tense form as he realised that was true.

“Oh. Well, I -”

“Have you ever flown anything before?”

“Yes!” Jet fixed him with a flat stare, and the kid shrunk back even further. “…Once or twice. Not a lot. But I’ve read plenty.”

Bemused, Jet huffed, and patted the steering wheel in mock-comfort. The escape pod drove awkwardly, all left-in-the-package new and not yet broken in, over-responsive to his every nudge. It wasn’t the Ruby-7 by any means, far from it, but it was sweet in its own way, almost eager to please. They were zipping along neatly now, deliberately avoiding legal flight-paths.

“I know,” he muttered to the ship. “It’s okay. I won’t let him drive again. I’ll put him in the trunk next time.”

He saw Rex glare, indignant for the half-second it took for him to process that this was a joke, and then blink, disorientated. After a second, Rex seemed to settle at being only mildly offended.

“You have a strange sense of humour.” He took a step toward Jet to try and make his point, letting go of the wall now that they were flying more steadily. “ And I’ll have you know that I -”

Rex cut off with a strangled yelp as he collapsed, his right leg simply giving out below him. There was blood soaking through the fine material of his trousers, just above the knee.

The expression on his face was more frustration, regret, than shock or pain.

“You got shot.” Jet said, not a question, kicking himself mentally for not realising sooner. And you hid getting shot. In that last frantic run to the airlock, that was the only time it could have happened, and he had noticed that the kid hadn’t looked as though he would have stopped for any reason at all, never mind a blast.

Rex had scrambled back at once, folded into an awkward sitting position that allowed him to straighten his injured leg, hands pressed tight into the flesh above the wound.

“Just grazed,” he ground out, too-composed, trying to recover that dignity he was always so careful to maintain.

Jet didn’t bother responding to that, just flicked a switch on the dashboard for a rudimentary autopilot - the keep going forward button, the woman who had taught him had called it  - and got up, heading for the box where he knew the spacesuits and medical supplies would be kept, because all the emergency vehicles in the galaxy were built the same. Gauze pad, bandages, tourniquet, medical alcohol, anything else that he could think of, all quickly laid out on the floor beside Rex.

“Let me see.”

The kid drew back, that look on his face again like a fox in a trap, more prepared to gnaw his own leg off than allow a human to come to his aid. Jet hesitated - then leaned back in return, out of Rex’s space.

“If it has nicked your femoral artery, you will bleed out.” he explained steadily.

Rex took a deep, unstable breath, and then shook his head, turned his leg cautiously from one side to another, showing the way the bloodstain didn’t spread any further than it already had.

“It hasn’t.”

Jet observed for another long moment, then made an assenting hum, and stood up again. They were still in a busy enough area of space that he couldn’t really leave the ship to speed along by itself - but he also didn’t wish to leave the kid to care for himself.

“You need to remove your pants and clean it, or it will become infected.”

Rex nodded jerkily.

“Of course.” When Jet didn’t move immediately, he added, “I can do it.”

“Mn.”

Reluctantly, Jet put himself back in the driver’s seat, watching in the small mirror as the kid took stock of his situation, as cogs moved silently behind his eyes and a calculation, again, was made. He didn’t try to shuffle awkwardly out of the fabric; he took a small pair of scissors from the medkit and sliced a huge, uneven hole around the wound, then changed his mind, and with a miserable sniff that Jet suspected he wasn’t supposed to hear, cut off that leg of his pants entirely. He had not been entirely inaccurate, apparently, to refer to it as a graze, but that meant that the shot had left a slash along his leg, not the small crater that a direct blast would have made as it hit. Not particularly deep - not shallow, either. He flinched sharply when he pressed disinfectant to it, but didn’t move his hand away.

Maybe not so unfamiliar with improvised medicine, then. Just afraid of it. And rightly so.

“That will need stitches.” Jet intoned, and saw the boy wince uncomfortably at the reminder that he was still there.

“I can do it,” he repeated.

“There are staples and sutures in the box. If necessary, I -”

“I can do it.” His voice was becoming increasingly desperate. “Please. I can do it.”

What he was really saying, of course, was don’t touch me . Jet didn’t bother mentioning that he had been a paramedic, long ago, in a war zone, and that he was more than capable of closing a wound like this. That wasn’t the point. The point was that the kid had already been pushed to the limit of what he was prepared to endure, and being handled now would be a step too far.

Alright. Jet made the very smallest of placating gestures, hating every moment of it, and turned his eyes out to the void beyond the glass.

The stifled whimper that came at what must have been the first press of a needle made a muscle beside his eye twitch, made his hands tighten so hard on the steering wheel that the plastic creaked.

“There are painkillers there too.” he offered flatly. He hadn’t seen them in the box, but he knew where they would be. He was acutely aware of where they would be.

The kid shook his head, mumbling something that Jet couldn’t make out a word of, except for something about a clear head . Another careful, painful, movement, pulling the thread taut with a shaking hand, and then he glanced up meaningfully at Jet’s broken thumb.

“You should take some.”

“I can’t.” said Jet bluntly, and gave no further elaboration.

There was a fleet of planetary law enforcement drones doing a wide orbit nearby; probably nothing that had a chance of catching them, but still enough of a concern that Jet turned the pod away and tried to map out a route that would keep them far from prying eyes. Around the edge of one system would take them too close to an asteroid shower for his comfort, and there would still be that centuries-long red alert active around a supernova that had been steadily irradiating one particular quadrant of the Outer Rim for years, but if he didn’t mind adding a few extra hours to their flight then he could steer clear of both.

For a long few minutes as Jet made those decisions, there was near silence, broken only by shaky breathing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the kid tie off the end of his thread, and reach to measure out a roll of bandages. He would collapse soon enough, once his body ran out of whatever nervous energy was fuelling it, but for now he was mechanically pushing forward, one procedure after the other. He tried to speak, failed, cleared his throat and tried again.

“Where are we going, anyway?” came out in a strained voice. Whether he was trying to divert his own attention, or Jet’s, didn’t seem to matter much. “Toward Sol?”

Jet’s eyebrows lifted a millimetre or two. Telling, that Rex referred to it as Sol and not simply the Sun . He was definitely Outer.

“Mars.” Jet glanced over his shoulder, making eye contact enough that Rex could know he was serious. He had wanted to get the kid out of jail, and he had done so; he wasn’t prepared to kidnap him now that they were free. “Unless you have somewhere else to be.”

Rex hesitated, hands hovering over his leg, and then shook his head, all false lightness.

“Nowhere in particular.”

That was what he had said when Jet asked him who he was, too. Nobody at all . Nobody, nothing, nowhere. His parents would have called that a tuurngaq , a spirit without a body to call home. Tuurngait still had their own personalities, motivations, good or evil; accepting one into your life meant making the judgement call of whether or not they could be trusted. Jet supposed he was already long past that point.

“What’s on Mars?” said the kid, still focused on his bandaging. “Your buddy?”

Jet huffed, amused. A common misunderstanding, but one that never failed to make him smile.

“The Cerberus Province. And Buddy, yes.”

The kid hesitantly moved his leg up and down, holding his breath at the feeling, but satisfied with the way his dressings held up. Hesitantly, he drew it up, as though ready to stand, and then met Jet’s steady gaze in the rearview mirror with his own cunning eyes.

“There are plenty of smugglers in the Cerberus Province,” he said, sharp. “Aren’t there?”

Jet’s eyes narrowed infinitesimally. Smugglers like the infamous Unnatural Disaster, did Rex mean? 

“Ships that’ll be taking off without official permissions,” the kid went on meaningfully. “Which could take an extra passenger or two.”

Ah. Jet relaxed, nodded, neutral; often people, especially Martians from the dome cities, were shocked to discover that the Cerberus Province was anything more than a sprawling black market and an illegal spaceport, that people lived there, for a certain definition of living.

“Hundreds. Every day.”

Easy enough to make an escape, if that’s what you want , he didn’t say, but that was what the kid seemed to hear.

“Good.”

Painstakingly, Rex took hold of the seats along the side of the pod and pulled himself to his feet. His hair was plastered to his neck with cold sweat, born probably more of stress than heat, but nevertheless unpleasant beneath his layers; Rex braced himself tiredly against a wall and pulled the sweater he had been wearing for days over his head, accidentally lifting his shirt as he did so. For a half-second, his ribs were uncovered - far too many of them visible, and bearing a telltale rosary up the side. It was a pattern Jet recognised. That, and the way his posture had fallen naturally into a bowlegged stance when he was too weak to correct it - these were signs of deprivation that Jet associated with war orphans and the kind of stowaways you found on bootlegger’s ships, the extreme of poverty. Someone who had been not only hungry, but starving. Rex’s ankles turned inward in a way that had probably taken a great deal of training and braces to hide, but which Jet hadn’t noticed even a trace of before the injury. He must have been in pain, walking straight upright every day; it must have been a tremendous effort. His earliest years could not have been kind ones.

The kid turned away, and limped toward the other end of the pod. There were the controls in the front, a handful of seats, emergency supplies, then just a small bunk and bathroom. Perhaps not much, but luxurious compared to where they had been before. Rex paused, and Jet thought he might have been staring only at the bed - but his eyes turned quickly toward the window that stretched across the back wall. The sun Dizang had orbited was no larger than a dinner plate now, blazing away further and further into the distance. There was nobody following them, but the view of it, the stars streaking away behind them, seemed to captivate him.

Looking back was a bad sign, in Jet’s opinion. That was something he could use a reminder of, too. No more reminiscing; it was the now that mattered, the immediate future that had to be prepared for.

“We may look back only to make sure we have not walked this way before.” he intoned.

“Or,” snapped Rex pedantically, a brat. “To make sure we’re not being tailed.”

Jet didn’t concede the point. They were not, for one thing. For another, this was a person who seemed far too used to looking nervously over his shoulder, fearing that something was chasing him out of the past.

“Try to get some rest.”

Chapter Text

The kid slept the way he always did: with his back braced against the wall, positioned to fight or to flee if necessary, eyes on Jet’s back until they slipped shut. It could not have been particularly comfortable. But at least he slept at all. Small victories. 

Six or seven hours passed peacefully. Then the kid began to stir - waking, for the first time in Jet’s acquaintance with him, naturally, gradually, until he finally rolled over and peered blearily around the ship, gathering his wits before attempting to stand up.

They had a lot to speak about, that day, no matter how much they both wished to avoid it.

“There’s breakfast in with the emergency supplies.” Jet intoned, voice creaking slightly with missed sleep. When he turned his head to look at Rex directly, his neck twinged in protest; his broken thumb throbbed as his fingers flexed on the wheel, whole body stirring out of the meditative doze of a long, uninterrupted stretch of space flight. He would need to change his bandages soon. So would Rex.

Rex nodded, scrubbed the sleep away from his eyes with one hand, and groped around on top of the emergency supplies for the thin wire frames of his glasses. By the time he slid them onto his nose, some of the usual circumspection had come back into his face; he scanned over the label on the crate - printed in five different Outer Rim languages along with Galactic Standard; Jet wondered privately which one the kid’s eyes had drifted to first - and frowned to himself.

“How long is the journey?”

Jet hadn’t inputted their destination into any of the pod’s navigation software - partially because he didn’t need to, and partially because he knew better than to leave a trail. He checked their current position and did the sum quickly in his head.

“Approximately an additional twenty one hours.”

“Shouldn’t we be… cautious, with rations? It says here that there’s enough for three days, and if we become stranded, or we’re forced to take a diversion, then- ”

“Enough for three days, for six people.” Jet rumbled, flat, then added, “We will not become stranded. There are a number of settlements between here and Mars.”

Do not worry, he didn’t say, knowing that Rex’s hackles would only rise at the implication that he had been worrying. He also didn’t bother to say that even if there hadn’t been such an excess, and such reassurance that they could acquire more if necessary, Jet would have insisted that the kid eat.

He had shared his food with Jet. It had been very clearly a kindness, a tiny protest against the inhumanity of their situation. But the full significance of the gesture hadn’t become clear until Jet had realised just how badly starved Rex had been in the past. He had shared his food, after a lifetime deprived of it, when he otherwise spent his time fixated on where his next meal would come from, when he had known that the jail used hunger as punishment. On this ship, in Jet’s company, the kid wouldn’t be hungry at all; Jet was determined to see that through. 

“What about you?” asked Rex, midway through sorting out the rations - moving the notoriously foul tubes of nutrient paste designed for failing gravity right to the back, where they belonged, and the dehydrated curries and soups to the front.

Jet considered the question, open and vague as it was. What about him indeed? He was going to have a shower once he had a chance; the grime and the stress of incarceration had settled into a film on his skin that he wanted gone. He should apply an ice pack to his thumb before the swelling got any worse. Logically, he knew he should nap soon as well, though the thought of sleeping in this scenario felt a little like leaving a house fire unsupervised. None of that was worth saying aloud to the kid, though, so instead he asked,

“Is there tea?”

“There’s… just instant coffee, I’m afraid.”

Jet hummed very slightly in distaste.

“I’ll heat up two of these, shall I?” continued the kid when no further answer was forthcoming, grabbing two freeze dried meals at random. He was fussing with his hair, with the hem of his shirt, a few of the mannerisms that he had presumably used to disguise himself among the pristine Outer Rim upper classes returning to him. “Then - you’ve let me rest for quite long enough, it really ought to be your turn.”

“Hm.” Jet checked their course one more time, flicked on the autopilot, and ignored the way his joints protested as he stood up.

What he was about to say was important, and he thought it probable that the kid already had his suspicions anyway. Still, he kept his gaze steadily on Rex’s face as he spoke.

“We are likely to receive communications from my contact in the next few hours or days. However, we are also likely to receive false, attempted tracking, communications from law enforcement as well.”

That would be the variegated policing and letter agencies of the Outer Rim, all the Solar authorities, and of course Dark Matters, whose powers extended across the width and breadth of the Milky Way. Not to mention any bounty hunters that caught their scent. Jet’s reputation always had that effect: all over the galaxy, hard-bitten cops were presumably quaking in their jackboots at the thought of the Unnatural Disaster on the loose again, and such fear tended to engender overzealous space surveillance.

“You could write down her number?” suggested Rex.

“It will have changed,” Jet returned neutrally. There were certain numeral combinations he checked for in unknown comms designations, clues that it might be Buddy calling: Vespa Ilkay’s birthdate, for one, or the anniversary of the last mass breakout from Aurinko Corrections. But it was just as likely to be randomly generated.

“You will need to look for the name Buddy,” he continued. “‘Buddy Aurinko’. ‘Captain A.’ will also work, or -”

“Buddy Aurinko?”

The kid’s face had gone red, eyes wide with shock behind his lenses. Jet paused, reconsidered.

“I wasn’t aware that Buddy was that much more famous than me.” he said, tone entirely even, the way it usually was when he was joking. “I’m sure she’ll be interested to discover that there are criminals out there who have heard her name, but not mine.”

Nonplussed, Rex blinked, and visibly struggled to get ahold of himself.

“I - it isn’t that -”

“No?”

By now, the boy knew Jet knew he was a liar. The performance did not drop - but neither did he bother to disguise that he was selecting his words and his habits carefully. For a second that stretched long between them, Rex just observed him. And then, quietly, he said,

“You weren’t how I imagined you would be. You aren’t how the net made it seem you would be.”

Jet raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Considering, catlike, Rex stretched out and kept on staring.

“I suppose I thought a serial killer with your reputation would be more… volatile.”

It was undoubtedly a test. Jet wondered absently what criteria, precisely, the boy was testing.

“I am not a serial killer.” he replied, completely calm. Rex narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

“But you are Jet Sikuliaq. The Unnatural Disaster.”

Jet sat down on the floor across from Rex, almost just how they had sat for those first few hours in that cell. His broad, rough hands were careful as they activated the chemical heating strip along the side of each packet of food and set them back down to cook.

“I am a mass murderer,” he explained gently. “Not a serial killer. There is a difference.”

He wasn’t the Unnatural Disaster, not anymore. And yet, he was the Unnatural Disaster’s keeper. No one else could take responsibility for him, for what he had done; that was Jet’s burden to bear, to drag around like a weight.

For a long few seconds, as Rex met his eyes, Jet thought he saw something of the same weight on the kid’s shoulders. Then he looked down, and reached for cutlery for his meal, and the moment passed.

They ate quietly, neither having anything more to say. The food tasted far better than it should have done - logically, Jet knew that it was just the contrast between unimaginably bland prison food and something heavily seasoned, but he couldn’t help his shoulders sagging in momentary bliss.

As he stood, he said plainly, “Change the dressings on your leg. You’ll need to clean it again.”

Rex nodded mutely.

The shower cubicle in the escape pod’s tiny bathroom was too small for Jet to stand in comfortably - but most were, outside his home planet, and he was used to it. If he had to hold his head at a ninety-degree angle to enjoy the rare luxury of lukewarm water, so be it.

He slept deeply, wrapped in a shock blanket, legs hanging off the edge of the narrow bunk. He didn’t dream.

The first time he woke, his internal clock informed him that he had had less than half of what he needed. Nothing in particular seemed to have woken him: it was dark, Rex apparently having had the merciful good idea to dim the interior lights, and for once the kid wasn’t even watching him. Instead he was perched cross-legged in the pilot’s chair, staring out of the glass of the cockpit at the emptiness of space. Forward, Jet was glad to note, not back.

In the far distance, Jet could see his native Sun, a pale-yellow dot glowing steadily against the black. Soon they would be entering the Solar System, a task that had gotten infinitely easier in recent years: none of the endless checkpoints, papers, and bribes that had been necessary to pass from one sector of the Milky Way to another in the war. Attempting to actually land on any planet would still require identification and permissions, of course, which anywhere but the Cerberus Province would probably be denied to two raggedy Outer criminals, but space itself was free again.

He had better set the ship’s day-night cycles to Martian eastern hemisphere timezones soon, or they’d both be jet-lagged as all hell when they arrived. With that thought, and the crinkle of a foil-lined blanket, he turned over and slipped back to sleep.

*

The second time, he woke from uneasy dreams of trying to repair Hanataba machinery with a throbbing broken thumb, to find the kid stretched out in a dignified sprawl on the floor - at a guess, a position designed to ease whatever joint pain he must be used to suffering - drawing absently on a torn sheet of paper, which he folded one-handed and swept discreetly into his pocket the moment he saw that Jet was looking. He had changed the dressing on his leg again, Jet noticed approvingly as he unfolded himself from the bunk, and with practice he’d improved at it: he was a quick study.

“Anything remarkable happen?”

“Nothing at all. No calls, yet.”

That was likely a good thing, all things considered: the less Buddy had to tell them, the more it meant she had under control.

“Time to kill,” said Rex, smiling. There was something sly about his expression, a thread of amusement which had appeared from nowhere, and which set Jet’s hackles on edge.

“Hm.”

The kid didn’t get up; he leaned back, stretched his shoulders a little in a way that drew his body into a long, elegant line.

“You know,” he went on, looking above the rim of his glasses playfully. It wasn’t a natural expression, Jet thought. He felt as though he was being read to from a script. “I don’t think I actually thanked you properly, for helping me out back there.”

Jet didn’t respond, just waited, blankly, tensely, for the next line.

“If there’s no one to see us and nothing else to do…”

Alarm bells rang sharply in Jet’s head just as Rex reached up and suggestively tugged down the collar of his shirt.

“No,” he said abruptly, sharply enough that Rex froze in his tracks - not entirely dissuaded, though, he rallied, playing up how definitely, entirely relaxed and enthusiastic and fine he was. 

“Don’t you w-”

“I do not.” Jet frowned hard, searched for the words he needed to shut this down entirely. Rex owed him nothing and he was uncomfortable with the implication, with the thought that someone had taught him to use sexual favours to dodge a debt. He was more than double Rex’s age. He had just woken up. They were both hurt. And, most importantly, most firmly -

“I - simply do not see the appeal, of,”

The boy glanced down at himself, far too aware of what he looked like, apparently puzzled at the thought of not being found attractive when he was checking off all the right boxes.

“Of… younger men?”

“Of anyone,” Jet clarified, flustered in a way that showed not at all in his voice and all in his eyebrows.

Rex’s expression finally cleared, then fell in humiliation.

“Oh.”

Like a paper doll folding away, the performance of seduction crumpled and disappeared; he shifted, shoulders lightly hunched, face twisted in discomfort as he bit the inside of his cheek.

“I’m sorry.”

Jet hummed, trying not to sound as disconcerted as he felt, and moved past the kid to check the console. Being perhaps a little more thorough than he technically needed to, taking more time than was strictly necessary, he made a few minor adjustments to their course, took the opportunity to simply be slightly separate from his cellmate for a few moments before he had to go back over to the emergency supplies for a cold pack and a new dressing.

Rex didn’t get up. He stretched out his injured leg in front of him, winced, then scowled at his bandages as he readjusted his position. At a questioning look – was there some kind of complication or infection Jet needed to worry about? – he paused a half-second, made his calculation, and then shrugged, falsely and unconvincingly casual, still embarrassed.

“It’ll scar.”

The stitches had been as neat as could reasonably be expected, given the circumstances, but they weren’t exactly surgically precise.

“Probably, yes.”

“It’s expensive,” he carried on pointedly, petulantly. “To erase scars.”

Jet inclined his head, neither in agreement nor disagreement, and set about unbinding his finger from its splint so he could clean it. Buddy wouldn’t be pleased with him, for the state of it: not dangerous, by any means, but more swollen and painful than he should have let it become. One scar, for Jet, among many, didn’t mean much. Not so for the kid, apparently. A scar halfway up his thigh, where it was very easily covered by clothing or explained away, still could be used as an identifying mark, and that was far too much of a risk to accept.

Rex’s thoughts seemed to have been straying down the same path, eyes following Jet’s to his hand. He seemed almost shy as he asked,

“...It really doesn’t bother you?”

Jet raised his eyebrows in silent question.

“That people recognise you, I mean. After all this time.”

In truth, very few people recognised Jet on the street. It had been twelve years since Jupiter, maybe six years since his mugshot had been in the news with any regularity.  Every time they released one of those godawful streams about him, he expected the stares to return, but they never did: he was an older man, hair and beard longer and greyer, very different in personality and bearing; he supposed he didn’t really resemble a caricature of the Unnatural Disaster anymore. And it bothered him, of course, in the sense that it was often a risk factor to consider.

But that wasn’t what the kid was asking.

“Maybe I am just too big to hide from it.” He deadpanned. “Someone your size can disappear in a crowd. I am almost seven feet tall. I do not have that option.”

Determined to press for a proper answer now, Rex shook his head.

“You haven’t even changed your name.” The statement sounded like an accusation.  “On the comms, Aurinko called you Jet - you’re still using your real name.”

As a matter of fact, Jet had not been his given name, originally. He saw the point, though. Grimacing at the feeling of new pressure on his injured thumb, he considered, then said,

“It was not the name that hurt people. Running away from it wasn’t useful. I could not change myself if I could not face myself.”

For a moment it had seemed as though the kid was about to stand up; hearing that, he paused again, eyes fixed somewhere between Jet and the ground, staring hard at nothing. The words had hit him harder than Jet had intended: because of course, he was still a tuurngaq, the shadow left behind after a person had unmade themselves, someone who would look into a mirror and see nothing - or at least, who wanted to see nothing. That was not a state that allowed for meditation or transformation, for altering his path.

As for what it was he was hiding from - well. It would be almost impossible for the kid to have done something so unforgivable as what Jet had done. If he believed that he had, then most likely he was being blinded by something - fear, or guilt, or shame. He had been a starving kid somewhere on the Outer Rim, growing up in the direst parts of the war, Jet reminded himself: whatever he had lived through, that he was running from, it was sure to be a twisted mess. 

Jet had needed Buddy’s support to work his way through his own past. He believed Rex needed the same. If Rex were to run away the moment they made land on Mars, Jet wouldn’t stop him - but if he followed him to the Lighthouse, then Jet would gladly take the opportunity to throw him to Buddy like a cat depositing a particularly duplicitous mouse at its owner’s feet.

Not that Rex was very much like a mouse. More of a fox, or perhaps a ferret.

In a sudden, twitchy movement like he was attempting to shake off the uncomfortable conversation, Rex pulled himself up, glanced past Jet to the console as he wavered unsteadily.

“Still ten hours left?” he asked, strained.

Nothing on the controls said as much; Rex must have been counting down the minutes. 

“Approximately.”

There was nothing much to do. Neither of them were particularly inclined to directionless, casual talk; the kid, Jet thought, was going to panic entirely if he had to have one more difficult conversation. He glanced around, found the empty pilot’s chair, and fixed on that.

“Try flying again,” he offered bluntly. Rex blinked.

“What?”

Wordless, Jet gestured to the front. It took Rex a moment to get it, but he did; a little nervous, cautiously interested, he slid into the seat. Jet leaned over to indicate proper posture, careful not to touch.

“Hands here. Eyes between here and here.”

Rex did so, somewhat awkwardly. But there was nothing wrong with needing guidance at something so obviously unpracticed. Nodding measured approval, Jet added,

“We only get better by trying.”

Chapter Text

They entered the Martian atmosphere late in the evening, local time. At either edge of the horizon glinted the old globes of Olympus Mons and Hyperion City, blue-tinted glass stretched wide over the spires and high-rises to form false skies; in between, the jagged teeth of mountain ranges and canyons marred the Tharsis deserts, threatening to tear out the bowels of their tiny escape pod and swallow it whole. But amidst it all shone the patchwork beacon Jet had come to know as home, a thousand shards of scrap metal all lit into abstract elegance from within, guiding any and all not welcome in the domed cities to the battered, ragtag haven of the Cerberus Province. The Lighthouse.

Jet knew this path well, and the descent came easily to him, all its tricky twists and turns practised and instinctual. He still kept himself in the pilot’s seat, eyes firmly on the glass, unwilling to allow familiarity to become clumsiness. The kid all but hung over his shoulder as he did, watching intently as the mess of tents and haphazard buildings of the Cerberus Province grew before them.

“We won’t have any radiation shielding once we have left this pod,” he informed Rex, pulling him out of his rapt focus. In all honesty, Jet wasn’t sure how much effective radiation shielding they had inside the pod: enough to safely travel through space in an immediate sense, certainly, but Jet was doubtful of its long-term security. “We will have to move quickly between the dock and the Lighthouse.”

Rex nodded, then glanced again between Jet and the tower, all its many pieces and panels, its elaborate scaffolding, the way it loomed impossibly high, far above even the nearby volcanoes.

“That lighthouse,” he repeated, not doubtful, incredulity only straining at the edge of his tone - trying to convince himself, apparently, that it could be true. “That’s your lighthouse.”

“Correct.”

“…Alright.”

Before they made land, the kid began to make a fuss of his clothes, trying to restore them to a passable enough state that he might still be mistaken for Outer Rim old money. Not much chance of that, now, but he tried, and he tugged his sleeves self-consciously into place. Jet huffed to himself, amused, and got a bitter glare.

“Just because you’re not impressed by her anymore -” he hissed.

“A person does not become less impressed with Buddy Aurinko the longer they know her,” Jet objected, because of course, there was no other her the kid could mean. “If anything, the opposite.”

It was clear that Rex was expecting suspicious eyes on them from the moment they ducked out of the pod - but the only stares they got were those needed for the inhabitants of the Cerberus Province to be sure they weren’t actually Outer Rim police, no matter what it said on the side of their vehicle. Then they cut their eyes away to the sides, ignored the visible injuries on these two new strangers, and carried on hurrying about with their own business, shielding themselves as best they could from the unforgiving sun.

He hadn’t told the kid to stick close behind him, or not to look at other people’s property. He hadn’t needed to: Rex knew this kind of place already. How to behave, at least, if not the sand and the dry desert heat. All around them were voices, people pressed in close by a mess of rough-built shops and tents, vendors and beggars attempting to call to them, poor souls with weeping radiation burns and debtors’ tags grabbing at their sleeves as they came past. Rex dodged them easily enough, moving in Jet’s wake, and managing apparently on instinct to duck through the crowd without colliding with anyone or being grabbed and pulled over to anyone’s stall.

If the grim look on his face was anything to go by, he knew exactly what the blood filtration bracelets were, too. 

A great many of the voices on the street spoke Outer languages, to the kid’s clear shock. Jet pretended not to notice as his head snapped toward a woman loudly advertising her wares in Vishnan. Just because migration from the Outer Rim to the Solar System had been all but illegal until a few years ago, didn’t mean it hadn’t still been very common: plenty of people desperate or Homesick enough to risk illicit rides to Mars or Mercury or Venus, and plenty of those unfortunate enough to end up in the Cerberus Province for it.

Silently, Jet held out a key toward the Rex, which the kid palmed and slid up his sleeve in one clean, practised movement, frowning up at Jet in question once it was safely away.

“Left down the next alley,” he explained flatly. “Last door along. I will follow once I am sure that no one is watching.”

He had had to cut open his shoe to get to where he had sewn a set of keys to the Lighthouse’s well-concealed back entrance into the sole - mildly annoying, but evidently worth it, since no one had removed them from him during his time in custody. 

Rex showed no outward reaction but a nod, kept walking at exactly the same pace - but his eyes were darting around sharply now.

“Do you think we’re being tailed?”

“No. But I try not to trust in first impressions.”

If someone was spying on them, most likely it wouldn’t be law enforcement. Almost no agency would follow them into the Cerberus Province, too justifiably wary of black market weapons dealing to send anything other than special operations drones past the mountains. The only possible exception would be Dark Matters, which Jet wasn’t too worried about; frankly, Dark Matters had bigger problems to deal with. But Jet himself had plenty of enemies, and if the kid was as prolific a thief as it seemed he might be, someone here might have recognised him already.

After a few minutes of nothing remarkable - a few appraising glances that said, simply, standing about on the street isn’t wise around here, but you’re really big, huh - he made his own way side-on through the narrow alleyway, used his duplicate key on the last door, and then came down the long dark corridor and up the clanking metal ladder that had once been someone’s bolt-hole, directly up into the wine cellar of the Lighthouse. The kid was waiting for him by the open hatch, only the tapping of one foot giving away his nerves. Just as well he hadn’t wandered up into the tower proper alone: Buddy kept herself armed ready to fight off the entire rest of the planet, if she had to, and she wouldn’t have taken kindly to a stranger in her home.

“None of this is cheap.” Rex remarked, absent-mindedly scanning bottle and case labels. Jet, who had seen Buddy balancing the bar’s books, inclined his head in agreement. Neither of them bothered to mention that it was all stolen.

“The bar room is up here. I am going to go upstairs and speak to Buddy. You are going to wait in the bar and not cause problems.”

“What problems?” The kid’s tone was mildly offended, but his shifting feet gave away that he knew precisely what Jet was talking about.

“Hm.”

It occurred to Jet as he was leading Rex up through to the bar that if he left the kid alone, he would absolutely take the opportunity to case the joint, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. His best friend was waiting somewhere upstairs.

Buddy showed no sign of herself while Jet deposited Rex at a table, ducked through to the staff quarters, then up another few flights of spiralling stairs. That didn’t mean she wasn’t there, though: he knew very well that she loved to make an entrance. All the while as he climbed, he chronicled the small things that had been neglected or changed in his absence, things he would need to put right: the houseplants that had been over- or under-watered, the silk dressing gown left draped over his desk chair, where Buddy had evidently been sitting. Like so much of the Cerberus Province, the Lighthouse had never been intended as anyone’s home, but that was what it had become. Still, they had done their best, filling it with mismatched furniture and the ill-gotten trophies of dozens of jobs together, and he missed it whenever he was gone.

She was standing in the doorway of her office, red curls glowing in the soft light of a reading lamp, smiling at him.

“Oh, darling,” she said, and Jet felt his heart lift at the sound of her voice unfiltered through the static of comms, the evidence that she was okay, that her radiation poisoning or her heart hadn’t taken a turn for the worse while he was gone. “Don’t you look wretched?”

At her usual teasing, the last of the tension that his worries had made shattered. He crossed the tiny landing from the staircase in two steps and enveloped her in a bear hug. She felt fragile in his arms, as ever, too light. Human touch, not something he consciously gave much thought to other than to disregard threats or unwanted advances, was suddenly pure reassurance, warmth. From the way she melted momentarily against him, he thought she felt the same. Since Vespa’s disappearance, she had spent most of her life alone.

“This is a considerable improvement on my previous state,” he informed her neutrally, a warm crease around his eyes as he smiled in return, almost imperceptible to the outside observer.

Buddy wrinkled her nose and stepped back again to look at him, readjusting her hair with one hand so it lay perfect over her damaged eye. She was as elegant as ever, dressed down - by her standards - in a green velvet blouse so avant-garde it could only have come from the sewing machine in her bedroom, and sleek wide-leg pants, which concealed her knives and blaster in their thigh holster without a crease.

“How awful. Well,” She scanned over him, gently taking his right wrist in her cool hands to angle his broken thumb toward her. “At least you’ve managed to escape, if not entirely unscathed. What happened here?”

“Handcuffs.” he explained succinctly. “It was necessary.”

Her eyes darted up and met his - was it? she asked without words - then down again, apparently satisfied in whatever she had seen there.

“I’m so sorry, Jet.” she said, crisp with frustration at herself. “There was no indication that it was you the Dizang police were trailing until the last moment, and I saw no feasible way to effect your release earlier, though I certainly searched for one. I-”

“There is nothing to apologise for,” he replied firmly, immediately. “You are responsible neither for my capture nor my injuries.”

Buddy pursed her lips, acknowledging his point without agreeing.

“I am just sorry that it happened, then. And glad to see you back safe.”

She glanced over her shoulder, through the open door of her office, to a small row of screens displaying the Lighthouse’s grainy security footage.

“Your young companion is rifling through coat pockets downstairs, by the way. A… unique creature.”

Exasperated, Jet took a deep breath and huffed it out like a horse blowing. Buddy laughed, then turned around to head down toward the bar, linking arms with Jet fondly as she went.

“Anything you care to warn me about him before we meet?”

“It is not like you not to research him independently.” he commented; in the corner of his eye, he saw her smile slyly.

“No, that wouldn’t be like me, would it? But he certainly didn’t make it easy for me. He’s a slippery thing, difficult to track. There really wasn’t much that even I could dig up - not for mere lack of anything to record, though. This kind of disappearance represents a profound and concerted effort. Every single loose end has been cauterised.”

“He believes he is being hunted,” Jet explained gruffly.

“And he certainly acts like it,” Buddy agreed. Her scepticism of Rex wasn’t unfounded - in fact, it was correct, and ordinarily Jet would simply have agreed, but at that moment he felt an aberrant urge to protest. Jet blinked, centred himself, and refrained from adding that Rex was just a kid, a good kid from a bad situation, that he had helped Jet escape and quite possibly saved his life in the process, that he might be a chronic liar but his gestures of goodwill extended past mere convenience, that he was clever and talented and probably extremely useful on a job. He didn’t have to plead his case to Buddy. He trusted her judgement to be fair.

It also didn’t occur to him to mention that the kid had been shot in the leg. This would be self-evident, and Jet didn’t like to waste words.

Rex may well have been going through the pockets of coats left over in the bar a few seconds prior, but he had the good sense to be back in the chair where Jet had left him as soon as he heard footsteps on the stairs, nothing visibly out of place around him, an expression of scrupulous innocence fixed on his pointed face. In an odd way, he fit in well: the polished dark wood and plump cushions, the elegant carved details, unavoidably marred and worn down by age and environment, matched all his scuffed and blood-stained finery, the sense that a calculated and precise show of wealth had once been displayed here, and was now dismantled.

The moment he saw Buddy, he froze. Forewarning was not sufficient, Jet knew: Buddy’s reputation preceded her, but she exceeded it, and the actual effect of being in her presence often left the uninitiated entirely dazed. Both of his feet were planted, his clever hands positioned as though to push himself into a standing position, but Jet didn’t think he had the wherewithal to flee there and then, the way he always seemed on the edge of trying.

“So,” said Buddy, with that glossiness Jet knew as meaning she had scripted whatever she was about to say. She strode into the room with the confidence of a queen surveying her domain - which, for all intents and purposes, she was - heels tapping sharply against the floor and eyes  bright and intent on Rex. “You’re half the reason Jet is home, then. I suppose I owe you my thanks. But one doesn’t reach a position like mine by over-generosity, darling, and I’ll be the first to admit I have a natural inclination to jealousy. Stingy, some might say - though they wouldn’t be so impolite twice.”

She smiled: not a genuine expression of affection, as she had given Jet, the lopsided and imprecise smile she reserved for private matters. This was very visibly a baring of her teeth. Too starstruck to speak, much less try to meet her charm with equal smoothness, the kid merely inclined his head, watching her like a dog trying to puzzle out a strange sound.

“So I’ve a favour to ask, dear. I don’t suppose you could clarify for me, to whom, exactly, I should be addressing those thanks? Jet’s told me so much about you -” Not a lie, Jet supposed; Buddy had deduced a good deal about the kid from Jet’s reaction without the need for words. “-But there was one particular piece of key information missing, and I expect you know precisely what I’m referring to, don’t you?”

The kid was silent for a few seconds too long.

“I’m afraid that isn’t something I like to share.”

“No, you didn’t share it with the Dizang orbital police, either, I notice.” Buddy commented, sliding neatly into the seat across from Rex. “You gave them several options to choose from, though.”

The wide-eyed look of restrained panic on the kid’s face flared, so acute that Jet took a half-step away from the stairs down to the trapdoor, thinking he might be about to try to scramble away and bolt, and not wanting to give him any further opportunity to fall on his already-injured leg. But before Rex could make any move on that panic, Buddy was laying a handful of photographs out on the table between them, evidently printed from confidential investigation records, and his attention snapped to them instead.

Each one was a scan of an ID card, from either the government of a Solar planet or asteroid local to the system. Each bore a recent photo of the kid, wearing different hairstyles and different clothes, under a different name.

“Andronikos Prince,” Buddy read aloud, pointing a finger at the first one along, then moving to the next. “Iskander Jade, Valens Pharoah, Oba Magnolia, Rex Glass. A regal selection! Some very high quality forgeries, too, I might add - if not for the fact that there are five of them, they would be indistinguishable from reality. And if not for the fact that I know the same clever little man from Umbriel as you do.”

From an inner pocket, Buddy drew another ID card: her own face, edited to conceal the radiation damage, claiming to be a lawyer from the legitimate side of Mars named Amity Ra. Jet looked between the two of them, two liars trying to figure each other out, and swallowed a heavy sigh. Probably he should have let them sniff each other through a locked door before allowing them in a room together.

“I’m all for forging one’s own destiny, of course,” Buddy concluded pleasantly. “But I think we both know that there’s a difference between choosing an identity and faking one. So if I am to trust your presence in my establishment, darling, much less my criminal family alongside dear Jet, I need a name. A real one. Nothing legal or official, necessarily. But something true.”

Her demand made, Buddy leaned back to allow Rex to digest it.

His gaze was flickering between the IDs and her expression; not even remotely considering telling the truth, but frantically seeking another way out, trying to figure out his approach and how he might escape the trap in which he had been thoroughly enmeshed. Buddy didn’t intend to harm him, she would never use the information against him - not without cause, anyway - but attempting to explain as much wouldn’t help, Jet thought, so he stayed silent.

Rex shook his head, opened his mouth; Buddy cut him off.

“Something else true, perhaps; can you give me a reference, a history, -”

“I believe there’s been a misunderstanding, Ms Aurinko.” cut in Rex eventually, in a tone that was probably meant to be measured and even, but nowhere near matched the famed Aurinko patter. “I never asked to be allowed to stay - I said as much to Mr Sikuliaq, that I wished to make my own way. Frankly I’m not sure where the idea of staying came from, and if not for factors rather out of my control-” He gingerly stretched out his injured leg, drawing attention to its bloodied bandages and cut-away trouser. “- then I would have attempted to disappear already. I will, promptly, I’m sure.”

His affected lack of interest in Buddy would have been more convincing if not for his huge, worshipful eyes.

“You don’t need a name. Not for such a brief arrangement. I’ll,” He swallowed hard, evidently choking down some longing or disappointment that didn’t fit this persona. “Be out of your hair soon enough.”

“You are still hurt.” Jet rumbled, jolting the two of them out of their locked staring. For a heartbeat, the expression on the boy’s face was one of betrayal, and Jet felt a muscle in his face twitch sympathetically; barely perceptible, to most, but he thought Rex noticed it.

“Once I can move easily on my leg, then.”

Jet inclined his head slightly, weighed up their relationship, and then said slowly,

“That is reasonable. I have no desire to trap you.”

A sharp edge came into the kid’s eyes as he nodded. Jet thought he was saying you wouldn’t hold me for long.

*

Rex slept quietly on a sofa in the locked bar room of the Lighthouse for a few nights, and Jet and Buddy barely saw him. He was certainly there: evidence from the cameras said as much, as did the way that the meals Jet left around for him regularly disappeared. But he avoided Buddy especially, dread and embarrassment and disappointment from his one brief encounter with someone he had so clearly worshipped. During the days he spent his time near-silently plotting in the tunnels below, or out exploring the labyrinth of tents and shacks that made up this place. When Jet offered, Rex had shrugged off the suggestion of a few creds to help him escape.

“Andronikos Prince has plenty still in his bank account from a previous job,” he had explained, a slight wrinkle of irritation in an otherwise arch tone. “It’s time to do away with that name, anyway.”

Without meaning to, Jet had caught a glimpse of him securing passage away. He found himself unsurprised to see that the kid was wearing a completely new persona, that of a bubbly and loquacious boy with a Saturnian accent, laughing uproariously at the black market dealers’ bad jokes, chattering happily away, fiddling with a shiny new skirt. It was none of his business, he had decided, and left well enough alone.

Jet didn’t expect a drawn-out emotional goodbye, or even a brusque one. That kind of warning would allow him to be followed. In a few days, a week at most, he expected the kid to simply slip away one morning and not come back.

*

Nureyev had explored every inch of the Lighthouse’s base, by the time he had spent a week convalescing in the space there allotted to him. Once the initial open-wound ache of that first awful conversation had passed, he had been able to admit to himself that it was a generous offer, really; more so than Mag would ever have made, be that to an ally or to some other urchin he’d taken pity on. And Sikuliaq had been true to his word not to bother Nureyev too, to allow him to come and go as he pleased – not that he had really doubted Jet at all. First rule of thieving, Pete, tutted Mag’s voice in his head, lightly disapproving, trust no one. But Nureyev had always been more sentimental than wise – a failing he was all too keenly aware of – and even knowing, intellectually, that he was probably being used, he couldn’t help but hope, which made an easy mark for honeyed words and promises of kindness. He was weak at heart, really. Something about the older man’s straightforwardness had appealed to that part of him, had stopped feeling like bait far more quickly than it should have done. Perhaps merely that Sikuliaq was so predictable. Every time he did something to surprise Nureyev, later he had been able to do his usual mental calculus, to sit quietly and balance equations of cause and effect in his head, and discover the simple, consistent, driving logic behind everything the man did.

At first, that had led him to the conclusion that the Unnatural Disaster was nothing more than a persona, something false to be lightly shrugged on and off, just as Nureyev himself burned through and disposed of names. Despite the ruthlessness with which he had dispatched each and every guard in their way on that jail – not that Peter had any objections; he still had bruises from his unproductive interrogations there – he hadn’t matched the stories that had reached the war-torn Brahma of his childhood, the reputation that came with being called a Disaster. Realising that Sikuliaq was not the kind of person who would ever pretend to be something other than what he was, though…well, that had gotten under his skin.

Years before Mag had ever plucked Nureyev from the filthy alleyway where he’d found him, he and the other pests used to bicker over who got to play an old, mostly-broken arcade game they had found, in which the player was among a team of cops going after the Unnatural Disaster, battling a bulging-muscled figure with a dark braid and furious glowing red eyes. (There hadn’t been an option to play as the smuggler. If there had been, they would have taken his side in an instant.)

Either everything Nureyev had ever heard about Jet had been a lie, or Jet had transformed himself more radically than even seemed possible. He had no idea what to think. First rule of thieving, scolded Mag in his head, and Peter ducked his head like a child in shame at a dead man’s words. If someone’s got a reason to be lying to you, they’re lying to you.

But Mag himself had been lying, from the moment Nureyev had met him, and his reasons for doing so had been cruel beyond imagining, and Nureyev had proved himself to be both weak and monstrous in how he stopped him. And it didn’t matter what he thought of Sikuliaq, no matter how curious he was, no matter how he had even, maybe, just a little bit, begun to enjoy the man’s strange company. It didn’t matter how the Buddy Aurinko he had fantasised about working with one day had tried to offer him a position, or how many (thousands of) questions he had for her. When trouble arises, I disappear. That was the promise he had made himself, the promise that had kept him alive in the few years since he had killed his own foster-father in cold blood, and – soon, now, very soon – that was what he intended to do.

In the mean time, he had resolved to investigate as much of the tower as he could access. He wasn’t stupid, he was entirely aware of Aurinko’s little cameras winking at him from shadowy corners. If he didn’t do anything objectionable, though, he didn’t see how she could object. Nosing around was a reasonably safe activity, so long as he made sure to leave everything where he had found it and clear out quick enough to avoid uncomfortable questions.

It was evening, a time he had noted a lull in Aurinko and Sikuliaq’s usual daily routine. Jet would be busy cooking, and Buddy seemed to sequester herself in her room for a time; she never ate with Jet, and he only ever seemed to prepare enough food for himself and Nureyev. It should  be quiet.

Up, up, up, up: he climbed more stairs than he ever thought anyone could fit into one building and still kept going. This high, if he had understood Sikuliaq’s extremely blunt warnings correctly, there was little or no effective radiation shielding. He wasn’t stupid enough to stay long; his knees and ankles ached horribly, always frustratingly weak anyway, and his healing wound burned at the exertion, but as the scorching Martian air cooled off with the day passing and the high altitude, it felt strangely easier and easier to climb, and he felt the strength to keep going until eventually – not quite all the way to the top, but higher than even many mountains – he reached a small metal platform, haphazardly welded into a gap in the Lighthouse’s frame like a balcony. Tentatively, breathlessly, he stepped across the metal, ducked below a girder… and then he was outside.

There was no dome, no concrete, no spacecraft glass between him and the sky. The sun was just beginning to dip beneath the towering peaks of the mountains, and the Cerberus Province was painted in wild streaks of gold and crimson.

His breath left him all at once; he grabbed onto the beams above him to steady himself, open-mouthed with wonder at the spectacle, and just stared helplessly.

*

He heard footsteps coming steadily up the stairs behind him long before they reached him, but they took a long while to register in his mind, and the thought to do as he usually would – hurry to his feet, try to regain a little dignity – didn’t even occur to him. Instead he stayed just as he had for… probably only fifteen or twenty minutes, in truth, but what felt like hours, sitting with his arms loosely around his knees and staring out at the glory of a sunset over a red planet.

The tap of footfall on corrugated iron faltered with surprise at the sight of him, then slowly restarted, until their owner was standing right next to him, leaning against the exterior of the tower.

“It’s an astounding sight,” came Buddy’s voice quietly, reverent. “Unfiltered, undimmed. It’s not really something that’s possible to describe, I think. Deadly, of course, but beautiful. Undeniably beautiful.”

He could only shake his head – not in disagreement, merely unable to comment or to tear his eyes away. Indescribable was the right word. He wanted to commit this moment entirely to memory, sure that he would never manage to witness anything so wondrous again in his life.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he whispered, the words thoughtless and unguarded for once. “Growing up, it wasn’t safe to look at the sky. If we had to go outside at all, we’d scurry from building to building like rats, we would never linger to look at…”

On the back of his head, he felt her eyes on him, questioning, assessing. What he had said could mean many different things: he could be from an asteroid belt, perhaps, or a planet where the atmosphere was too dense, like Neptune or Hephaestus, or maybe, just maybe, a planet held in authoritarian iron fist, like Aten or Brahma.

To his surprise, she didn’t ask.

“For what little it’s worth, I’m sorry to have pushed you so far, darling,” said Buddy softly, and glass clinked against the platform as she put the vodka she’d been holding down on the floor. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you keeping your distance from me. Evidently it was the wrong tact to take. Over my years of… semi-retirement, let’s call it, I’ve had to be rather spiky to survive. I just couldn’t stand the idea of anybody taking advantage of dear Jet and his trust.”

Something buckled and then gave way in Nureyev’s mind. He kept on watching the sunset, savouring the last few rays as the distant glowing dot sank below the horizon. Both Buddy and Jet had remade themselves; neither of them were what they had seemed to be. They had really transformed, not merely shrugged on a new self. I could not change myself if I could not face myself, Jet had said. Nureyev wanted to know how - and Buddy had said that if she was going to permit him to stay, then he needed to give her something true.

“Peter,” he said abruptly, in a whisper so low it was almost a breath. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aurinko look toward him, careful to keep her curls still falling over her face.

“What?”

“My name is Peter.”

He glanced up to her, then quickly out at the sky again, unable to stand the vulnerability of it. If she asked, he didn’t know if he would give any more than that, reveal himself to be what millions of Brahman rebels called the angel, and what New Kinshasa called public enemy number one. But she only smiled in surprise, and he thought he could see cogs beginning to whirr behind her eyes.

“I want to stay,” he blurted. “If you’ll have me.”

Buddy picked up her bottle, and lifted it toward him in a toast, still smiling.

“I’d be delighted to, Peter.”

Chapter Text

It had taken several days for Peter to calm, to stop twitching at the sound of his name, to be able to relax without constantly looking over his shoulder. After a week or two he was even able to speak to Buddy in something resembling a normal tone of voice. Jet promptly cleared out one of the rooms upstairs for him so that he didn’t have to sleep on a couch; they found a doctor to help monitor his leg as it healed; and Buddy, though she didn’t tell him until the project was almost finished, took Peter’s measurements by eye and began to plan him a thousand perfect outfits for a thousand future jobs.

They did their first heist together after only a month.

But weeks before that, when he had just begun to settle into a routine in the Lighthouse, Peter had slid into the chair across from Buddy and her liquid lunch with a resolute expression on his pointed face, and asked her, point blank, a question which had clearly been on his mind from the beginning.

“Where is Vespa Ilkay?”

It was not a demand, but a desperately curious outburst, as though the words had forced their way from his lips. Jet raised one serene eyebrow over his mug of tea.

Buddy, to her credit, merely blinked once and put down her gin with a steady hand.

“My, you are chipper today, aren’t you.”

Peter had not surrendered to the diversion. He had folded his hands before him on the table and waited watchfully for her response; Buddy had sighed.

“If I knew the answer to that question, darling, I would sleep easier at night.”

At this, Peter softened slightly. He was still observing her carefully - she might have meant that Vespa was out there somewhere, bearing some grudge, after all - but he was prepared to give her space if she needed it; just as she herself had been skirting around the secrets he wore all too openly.

“May I ask… what happened?”

“Now you ask permission.” she shot back, lightly amused. But she had seen him force himself not to squirm away beneath her questioning, had seen him try his hardest to crack open the shell he hid beneath, and she was prepared to offer him more than a little grace for it. She paused, sorting through the myriad scripts she had for the rare occasions on which she could be persuaded to explain herself. After a moment of consideration, she drew herself up straight and regal, and Jet saw Peter’s eyes sharpen attentively as she began to speak - voice half proud, half mournful. 

“I’m sure you’re more than aware of our reputation. Ten years ago you could clear a room anywhere from Earth to the furthest edges of the Outer Rim just by saying the names Buddy and Vespa together. I once saw an old Saturnian banker turn white and run out of the restaurant where he was dining to check on his vaults, at nothing more than the rumour that we might be nearby - only to discover that we had already robbed him blind a week earlier, and were paying for our meals with the spoils at that very moment. We had style, we had panache, and we had the skill to back it up. Dazzle them with flash, and draw the trap closed around them while they’re still blinking away their shock.” She was smiling despite herself, reliving fond memories. “Vespa was always the more practical of the pair of us. Ruthless, you might say. But she loved the theatrics just as much as I did.

“Either her tastes have rather changed in the years since, or she hasn’t had the chance to show them off.”

Buddy sighed tightly, the expression on her face visibly icing over.

“You asked what happened. I wish I could tell you a more exciting story: a tale of epic betrayal, of bitter rivalry, of grand hubris. But the truth is that it takes remarkably little to utterly destroy a person in our line of business.”

“Your reputations are intact,” interjected Peter quietly. It was obvious that he was thinking of his own situation, whatever it was, his fear of reveal and discovery. Buddy, however, was not in the mood to be interrupted partway through a monologue, and tapped one elegant nail against her wine glass for silence.

“I said destroy, darling, not ruin. As pleasing as it is to still be considered one of the galaxy’s premier thieves, I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much without the tangible, real means to carry out such thefts, be they one’s freedom or one’s partner. And those things are all too easy to lose. Some things simply cannot be accounted for, no matter how carefully your plan may be devised. A guard changing his rotation at the last minute so he can visit the bathroom, a security camera knocked into a new angle by a passing bird, a misfiring police laser… any of these factors could have been the end of Vespa and myself, at any moment, and as it turned out, that was all it took. 

“It was a bank job of the kind we’d done a thousand times before, five years of crime together beneath our belts. Somehow we had missed a guard. As we were running across the bridge that linked the two bank-towers, back toward our ship…”

Buddy grimaced, swallowed hard, and Jet saw her hold her voice steady only by the muscle memory trained into her by her mother’s strict elocution lessons.

“…Vespa was hit. The blast clearly struck something fairly vital; broken bones, internal bleeding. She couldn’t keep her balance. She fell.”

There was a sharp hiss of breath from Peter, a widening of his eyes behind his glasses. His expression otherwise didn’t move, in a way that seemed to mean he was too transfixed to do his usual act.

“The bank was in the centre of New Mbabane, capital of Baldr,” Buddy continued. “Do you know it?”

A heartbeat, and then Peter breathed, voice tinged with horror,

“The highscrapers.”

Buddy closed her eyes.

“Precisely. Almost three hundred storeys to the ground.”

“What did you do?”

“The only thing I could do, darling. I collapsed to the bridge with a laser to the knee and another to the throat.” 

Peter blinked, disconcerted, and Buddy allowed him a glimpse of her usual smirk.

“Just because Vespa was down, didn’t mean they stopped shooting. There were several million creds on the line, after all. Believe you me, I would have loved to finish matters in a rather more poetic manner: to throw myself after her, and end out our joint career as two falling stars, blazing together to the ground. But their guns were set to stun, and I could do nothing but lie there and slowly lose consciousness and wish things had been different.”

Her glass was almost empty. The ethanol synthesiser where Buddy’s stomach had once been could not process alcohol into any kind of intoxication, and so nothing in the Lighthouse would do much to dull her pain, but, since he was unable to bring her a cup of tea as comfort, Jet rose and went in search of another bottle of the gin that she had been drinking.

“That’s where the story ends, as far as the public eye is concerned,” Buddy went on. “Vespa and I both vanished without a word. After a while, our contacts assumed we had collected our ill-gotten gains and retired to a blissful honeymoon, as had always been the plan, or else that we had had our throats slit unceremoniously in some back alley somewhere. Baldr’s state police rather frown on the publicising of criminal activity of any kind, and as I am my own attorney and have comprehensively cut ties to my birth family,  no one was permitted to know where I was. I spent eight years in a maximum security prison there, disallowed to inform anyone of my incarceration. By the time I got out, all the leads had gone cold. I tried, dear, I really did. But if anyone did know what had happened to her, they had disappeared while I was locked up.”

Silently, Jet refilled her glass and then sat down heavily beside her. She took a sip - more to watch the micro-expressions on Peter’s face as he processed than out of thirst, Jet thought. Just as he seemed like he might be about to speak, she levelled him with a flat look, cutting him off.

“I know what you’re thinking. They were shooting stun blasts; she was alive when she fell. The distance to the ground is a… daunting concept, but Vespa had survived worse before. I thought the same. So I returned here to wait - just as we always did, after every job; just as we had sworn we would do if we were ever separated.”

Desperation crept into her voice for the first time.

“And I waited. And waited. And waited. For two years I did nothing but wait, and hope, trying desperately to reach out to her. You’ve seen what happens to those who live here without radiation shielding. A month would have been a fatal dose. Two years of nothing but hope was quite literally rotting me from the inside out. Eventually I had to make a choice between hoping and living.”

Jet reached across the table with his hand palm up; gratefully, Buddy intertwined their fingers. As usual, she was alarmingly cool to the touch.

“Fortunately, by then Jet was here to encourage me to live.”

Peter’s expression said that he didn’t entirely understand yet.

“I have to accept that Vespa is dead,” Buddy emphasised, steel in her tone. “Because if she was not, then she would have returned to me. For vengeance, for curiosity, for love, I can’t say. But she was a woman of her word. If she could come home, she would have come home. And she did not.”

With a slight hesitation, Peter nodded.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said hesitantly, reaching for and failing to find the correct social protocol for this situation. Buddy sniffed.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you know.”

Awkwardly for a few days, and then easily as time passed, life moved on.

Their first job together went off smoothly; their second was a notable success. Their third, however, required considerable technological finesse to prepare for, which presented an issue for all three of them. Jet immediately removed himself from the equation, explaining bluntly that his only equivalent expertise was as a mechanic, and that he could not possibly be of any use with computer software. Peter had not lied that his ability with hacking was limited to basics only: through brute force of trial and error, he could squirrel his way into the simplest functions of a great many networks, and the deeper levels of a few very specific systems that he already knew well. Buddy was excellent at manipulating anything she found herself inside, but didn’t have the skill to bypass anything more than the flimsiest securities. In this instance it didn’t make their plan impossible - or else Buddy would not have masterminded it - but it was fiddly, uncertain work, and had led to a great many hours of Buddy and Peter sat hunched over a monitor together, eyes scanning over her flawless notes and his scribbled annotations, debating the best course of action.

“We need a hacker,” Buddy would announce, periodically, as though no one else was aware - and then pin up her hair from the undamaged side of her face and return to her scheming.

They needed more than just a hacker: they were also missing muscle, the ultra-precise type of force that Vespa Ilkay had once been able to provide with her knives, or that they would have with a skilled sharpshooter. Jet knew several such guns for hire - but none that he would trust within the sanctuary of the Lighthouse, which was, of course, the reason they didn’t have one. Trusting someone new had been almost as hard for Buddy as it had been for Peter, and they were still figuring each other out. It was not a trust that would be extended again lightly.

Both Buddy and Peter had been spending sleepless nights examining the cybersecurity of the casino they were going to hit. But Peter began to hurry back to the computer at all hours: secretive, with the pinched line of a worried frown on his forehead, jotting down fragments of nonsense on scrap paper, even falling asleep - more than once - at the keys. Jet was fairly certain that, whatever the circumstances of Peter’s upbringing, he had never become accustomed to sleeping in a real bed, and had previously accepted the kid’s habit of napping wherever he could as just that: a slightly concerning habit, a quirk of his history. This, however, was clearly different. It had a hint of obsession to it.

“He overprepares,” Buddy had remarked lightly to Jet, shrugging, when Peter once again darted back to his work as soon as they had completed their initial recon. “You know that.”

“I do not think he is preparing for our heist together,” Jet had rumbled in reply. “Not solely for that, anyway.”

“No, me neither,” she agreed. “You see, the only reason he’s so open about the way he records things is that he keeps his notes in code. And he’s using two different codes. Two entirely separate projects, I expect, darling.”

Jet had only raised his eyebrows, asking silently, should I be worried?

“Furtive but not nefarious,” Buddy had concluded, more amused than anything. “He is entitled to his own business, after all, and I can think of more than one harmless thing a young man might be embarrassed about spending all his time doing online. Certainly worth… keeping an eye on. But not a priority right at this minute.”

Jet had nodded reluctantly – and then watched unhappily as the kid only got more and more shifty and erratic, around the computer, at the meals they shared, at all times of the night. He knew that Buddy was correct, that Peter had a right to his privacy, and that trying to demand answers from him would only drive him further into himself. But he couldn’t help but get his hackles up, waiting for something. The kid would freeze, and think, and think, and overthink, and then all at once erupt into some meticulously planned act of recklessness; Jet knew the pattern by now. He did not allow himself to speculate about why, to suspect someone he had chosen to trust of working against him, and he especially did not allow thoughts not worth having to influence his behaviours.

He still kept his guard up, and kept watching.

To Jet’s - guilty - surprise, the heist went off almost perfectly. The half-second of doubt when an automatic door glitched at the worst moment, the last-minute discovery that corners had been cut when constructing the building’s air vents, the natural brief jolts of adrenaline, even the difficulty in forcing their way through the online security: it all faded away into the smoothness of Buddy’s plan, and, as Jet sped them away from the scene of the crime in an unobtrusive little food delivery ship, the elation of success.

“Just like old times,” Buddy commented, only lightly bittersweet. Jet grunted, non-committal, not prepared to refute her - it may well have resembled her past - but also not prepared to agree. This was far more controlled, far better than his own old times, and he did not believe in reminiscing.

He noted, in the rearview mirror, that same harried expression returning to Peter’s face when he heard Buddy’s words, those darting, shaded eyes.

The kid was silent as they soared back to the dark side of Mars, as they landed back in the Cerberus Province and made their way into the Lighthouse.

The moment the door to the bar closed behind them, he took off like a shot to his room, muttering something about checking it over again as he did.

“Well,” said Buddy primly, pausing to listen as Peter’s footsteps faded up the long staircase. “How worried do you think we should be?”

In response, Jet could only fold his huge arms over his chest and sigh.

They didn’t see Peter for the rest of the night, though the light coming from beneath his door said that he was awake. Jet did not permit himself to speculate about the future - but he did permit himself to make reasonable plans. If they woke up to find the kid gone, he decided, he would meticulously scour the entire tower to discover what else was missing and whether they had been left any clues, and then he would go and loom over the smugglers in the spaceport until one of them gave him something he could use to follow: not to give chase, only to understand. If the kid was still here, and in the same state of mind, Jet would make him tea and make him listen to a recorded lecture on calming breaths. That would be reasonable, he decided, and made himself stop worrying by sheer force of will.

Neither situation came to pass.

Instead, Jet rose in the morning as he always did, and proceeded into his morning routine. He made his bed with military precision, stretched out his old, tense muscles, sat in meditation for an hour, dressed, checked first on the cameras, then manually, that the Lighthouse was still as safe from radiation and invasion as it could ever be, heard Buddy running her shower, went downstairs and brewed his tea -

And then, just as Buddy was emerging from her room and Jet was making moves toward breakfast, they turned to see that the kid had appeared behind them in that uncannily-silent way of his, comms tablet in his arms, wide-eyed expression of determination on his face.

“I have to tell you,” he blurted.

Through the surprise, Jet breathed relief in one long, slow exhale. The eruption would take the form of a confession, and not the self-destruction he had feared. This was a good thing.

“We’re listening.”

*

The first thing that Peter did was wordlessly hand Buddy his comms, then sink into the sofa to let her scan through the document loaded onto it, knee bouncing in clear anxiety. It didn’t make for a particularly compelling read, from what Jet could tell, glancing over her shoulder: a series of incident report forms, a handful of pages of dense legal language. But after a long moment, Buddy laughed.

“This is my prison record,” she explained, bemused. “Three weeks in the hole for manufacturing my own nail polish out of crushed beetles while on kitchen duty,” she read, pointing out the entry to Jet, who hummed, impressed as ever both at her and at Peter.

The kid nodded jerkily.

“I wanted to prove that I could get into them,” he said quickly. “Before I tell you the rest.”

Archly, Buddy clucked her tongue at him.

“Darling, if all this sturm-und-drang has been about you improving your hacking abilities, I really -”

“It’s not that.” He scanned her face quickly, trying to anticipate her reaction, and then dropped his bombshell.

“I think Vespa Ilkay is alive.”

Jet felt his body tense as Buddy went as still as a doll, and consciously forced himself to calm. Buddy’s love for Vespa was a gaping wound in her chest; left untreated, it would have killed her as surely as the Martian sky, even if she had gone to live somewhere safer. He knew that speaking to Peter about Vespa had been possible for Buddy only because she had managed to seal away that part of her heart entirely. This felt as though the kid had taken a knife to a fresh scar.

But he was patient, and he trusted Peter not to be doing this without cause, and, cautiously, he waited.

“You think that Vespa is alive.” Buddy repeated, expression unreadable, sounding each word out carefully, confirming that she had not misheard him. The kid nodded again. “If this is some kind of astoundingly ill-advised joke, dear, then things are imminently about to become very difficult between us. But if you mean it, then I suggest that you make your point at once.”

“I wouldn’t joke,” he insisted, and then sprung to his feet, unable to contain his nervous energy sitting down. “And I swear, I didn’t set out to question what you said, it was just - what you said about the secrecy of your arrest, and the timing of it, it made me think of…”

He ran a hand through his hair, backtracked mentally, attempted to revert back to whatever he had planned out when he envisaged this conversation.

“Most people in our position don’t know much about them. There’s no reason to anymore: they’ve been folded under the umbrella of Dark Matters, and they were never meant to function as regular law enforcement anyway. Unless you grew up training everyday to handle wartime Outer Rim surveillance forces, you wouldn’t need to know how to trace them - but that was, was how I - ”

“Who?” Jet intoned, before Peter could veer too far off-course. The kid blinked, but then remembered himself, took an uneven attempt at a grounding breath, and said, simply,

“Gamma. One of the old secret police agencies that used to terrorise the Aesir system. Including Baldr.”

He took back his comms and scrolled to a grainy, hastily typed note that had been appended to Buddy’s file, written in a cipher.

“They’re not the ones who took you in, but their fingerprints are all over the case afterwards. Apparently they considered you and Vespa to be potential security risks.”

The corner of Buddy’s lip twitched into something that might have been a smile, amused.

“Probably, yes. But what has federal nosiness into my case got to do with Vespa?”

Peter had a white-knuckle grip on the tablet now, frantic to be believed.

“It wasn’t obvious. I mean, it wasn’t easy to find. They don’t even refer to her directly - they use the local word for wasp, pollinator. But I’ve checked and rechecked, and there’s no one else it could be.

“About four years after you began your sentence, Gamma picked her up. I don’t know what she was doing in the meantime - I have a guess, and Gamma seem to have thought she was working as an assassin, but I don’t know for sure. She wouldn’t talk. They set a trap, and she fell for it - and then,”

Jet had been figuring the timeline in his head, and all of a sudden, it clicked into place.

“The armistice,” he interjected, voice heavy with understanding.

Around halfway into Buddy’s prison sentence, two centuries of Galactic Civil War had come to a ceasefire and then finally an end with a Solar victory, disrupting every single facet of life on the Outer Rim as it did so. He watched Buddy come to the same realisation and turn white as a sheet.

“Part of the conditions of which were that such agencies were dissolved,” she said grimly.

“Dark Matters isn’t interested in most of what Gamma handled,” the kid cut in. “They have different priorities. So its prisoners were scattered across organisations - some were released, some were transferred to state institutions, some disappeared into Dark Matters’ hands, and some…” He trailed off in dread, then regathered himself. “There are corporations that buy that kind of debt, years left to be served.”

“What corporations?” Buddy demanded, voice cold. She knew of them, Jet thought, but she needed to hear it said aloud.

“It’s how I think I can guess where she was, after you’d been captured,” Peter said, almost wincing. He turned the screen out toward them, showing the stamp of a ghoulish corporate logo, a series of initials bundled within a stethoscope. “She… must have been sick.”

“A pharmacorp,” Buddy said sharply. “Which pharmacorp?”

“The Board of Fresh Starts.”

Jet knew them: they operated in the Cerberus Province as well as the Outer Rim; a good portion of the unfortunate souls on the streets outside were wearing that logo on their blood filtration bracelets. If Jet had not known how to get her to a Hatanaba Clinic, Buddy might have had to turn to them too.

Vespa had been here, then. He could not find it in himself to be shocked that there had been no trace of her: a career criminal with Vespa’s deadly reputation would know how to cover her tracks, and it wasn’t as though the Lighthouse had been otherwise untouched by the time Buddy returned to it; she had reminisced to Jet about chasing out the squatters and scavengers when she got back.

“That’s as far as I could get,” Peter went on, nervous, apologetic. “I know the old security forces inside and out, and they were lazy by the end anyway, running out of money - they’re not hard to crack, once you know how. But the pharmacorps have all the money in the galaxy to put toward hiding their data, and the motivation too.”

“Not to mention the motivation to keep someone with Vespa’s particular skillsets within their grasp,” Buddy agreed darkly. “She was a doctor before she was ever an assassin or a thief: I can only imagine what uses they could think of for her.”

“We need a hacker,” cut Jet bluntly. That was the only conclusion this conversation could come to, the only thing that mattered next. “If Peter cannot access any further information, we need someone who can.”

He already had someone in mind: they were Martian, nearby, eccentric, and evidently more than willing and able to breeze past the law to reach their goals.

He would just have to figure out how to contact them.

Chapter Text

Buddy had been experimenting with nicknames. Having nothing but Peter to call her new associate was beginning to gall, and she used dear and darling really more as punctuation than as words with meaning - but attempts to use diminutives had, to put it mildly, uneven results. Petya had earned her a full-body flinch, clearly touching a nerve, and so she had not repeated it. Similarly Pete or Petey made his eye twitch in discomfort, though he tried to bury the reaction. Petrushka, however, startled him into an unguarded, undignified snort of laughter. It was far too familiar for everyday, but it was a useful tool to have.

Now, for example, when Peter had his head bent over his comms, fixed like a fox on a rabbit, listening to Jet trail their favourite hacker.

Discovering her identity hadn’t been easy. It had, in fact, been very nearly impossible. Even now, Buddy wasn’t entirely certain that they had found the right person: they had narrowed down the list to only a handful of candidates, and Jet had shadowed each and ruled them out one by one, until eventually they were left with only one person.

Staring at the information Buddy had managed to gather on their mystery hacker, Jet had blinked, narrowed his eyes, blinked again, leaned forward to carefully reread the words on the screen, and then finally produced a sentence Buddy had never heard him say before.

“That cannot be right.”

Yes, of all possibilities, Buddy had been rather shocked herself to hear that their prospective new family member was, of all things, a secretary for the Hyperion City Police Department. She had never deliberately worked with law enforcement officers before - growing up as she had, developing a full understanding of what her father did and why, had rather soured her on the concept. Still, things made a little more sense when one considered the details: an underpaid secretary for the police, whose identification card somehow contained no surname and no date of birth, who had repeatedly faced disciplinary action for stealing evidence and sticking her nose where it wasn’t allowed. This person, this Rita, must have been working toward her own goals within the HCPD, Buddy had decided quickly. It was the only logical explanation for her continued presence there.

So Jet had tailed her quietly for two days, observed her as she sat in her tiny apartment and watched streams and tapped away at her computer all night, then scuttled cheerfully into work with no apparent need for sleep, watched her purchase and consume a truly impressive amount of snack food from the tiny corner store nearby, watched her get coffee and crack jokes with the two detectives she worked alongside. For a cop, even Peter had had to admit, she seemed… refreshingly strange.

That hadn’t made him any more comfortable with what Jet was doing, nor that he was doing it alone.

“Peter,” Buddy repeated, for the third time. He didn’t snap out of his hawkish focus on the comms tracking Jet as he waited for Rita to be alone, to separate from her boss and head home by herself so that he could speak to her. Buddy sighed, dusted an imaginary bit of lint from her sleeve, and tried, more softly, “Petrushka.”

As usual, he reacted first with shock, and then shy amusement, blinking up at her from behind his glasses.

“Buddy?”

“Darling, Jet will be just fine. Pressing in so close to the screen will only leave a smear on it, which I can hardly imagine making anything clearer.”

He huffed, but obediently leaned back. This plan was his idea, his responsibility - or at least, Buddy knew he thought so. But she had every confidence in Jet’s abilities. Especially when they were set against a woman perhaps a third of his size, to whom he only wanted to offer a job.

On the other end of the comms, they heard the movement of Jet’s steady steps come to a halt. The tracker Buddy had on him placed him at the mouth to an alleyway outside Rita’s apartment: dark, secluded, as private as they were likely to get. Only distantly staticky, his deep voice echoed through to them, calling out,

“Rita.”

There was an audible squeak as the hacker jumped.

“What? I mean - no! Maybe? Who’s asking? I ain’t worth mugging, mister, I’ve got three creds and a toffee here, a-and maybe some fluff on the toffee, but I ain’t sure if that’s mold or dust, and -”

“I am not attempting to steal from you,” Jet rumbled. His voice was ostensibly as flat as ever, but Buddy thought she detected a small thread of amusement.

“W-Well, then, you should know I got a baseball bat in my bag, and my girlfriend up there’s real tough!”

“Your bag is not large enough to contain any such bat,” Jet pointed out calmly. “And you do not have a girlfriend.”

There was a reedy noise of frustration. 

“Maybe not, but you don’t gotta just say it like that.”

“I have no intention of harming you at this time,” Jet continued. “I am a great fan of yours.”

A beat of silence, and then the hacker blurted, alarmed,

“I’m guessing you don’t mean a fan of my dipping sauce blends or my stream commentaries, Mister, huh.”

“No. You would be correct.” Jet stepped forward, a rustle of his sturdy tan jacket. “My associates and I require the use of your skills for a job very dear to our hearts, Miss Rita. But I would prefer not to speak of that here. It would be better for us to move to a more secure location.”

Peter was hanging over the receiver again, heart clearly in his mouth, waiting to hear what the hacker’s answer would be. Buddy expected further reluctance; she was sure Jet did too.

But the hacker didn’t get a chance to reply, instead, there were muffled footsteps, and then a voice snarled,

“Hell no, no giant freak is kidnapping my secretary.”

Buddy and Peter went still in unison. Jet turned to face the new figure, over a distant peeping of the hacker mumbling oh my gosh oh my gosh oh fuck!, and they heard a sharp intake of breath as whoever was standing there took in Jet’s bulk and strength. Somehow, facing up to him still wasn’t enough to deter them, and they kept on goading,

“Come on Earthling, pick on someone your own size.”

“You are also significantly smaller than me,” Jet rejoined, neutral as ever.

“Yeah, so, pick on someone else!”

There was a scuffle, the sound of someone throwing themselves at Jet and Jet making sure they regretted it, the clatter of a blaster wrenched out of the stranger’s hands and tossed away down the alley, Rita’s pitchy voice shouting a continuous stream of panic. All the while, Peter listened raptly, tensely, ready to pounce: the moment there seemed to be calm, the kind of futile struggling sounds that suggested Jet had the stranger thoroughly restrained, he activated the comms and leaned in close to ask brusquely,

“Falco or Steel, Jet?” 

This was the right question to ask. If the lady on the other end had said my secretary, that meant he was either one of Rita’s two detectives or someone higher up, and given the particularly grotty neighbourhood of downtown Hyperion City they were in, Buddy very much suspected the former. 

An interesting development, to have one of Rita’s bosses present. The pair of them had been high up on her priorities for research, and she had discovered some fascinating information on both.

Evidently their detective’s head was pinned close enough to Jet’s comms that he heard the question too.

“Why don’t you come face me properly and I’ll show you,” he yelled, half-choked, still fighting.

“Steel, then,” Peter commented below his breath, and released the microphone.

“That’s a good plan,” said Jet abruptly. “You should both come with me.”

From the detective’s grunt as he was efficiently knocked unconscious, and the hacker’s screech, Jet didn’t intend to give either Steel or Rita much of a choice in the matter. That was no concern: Buddy was confident in her ability to explain herself, and if the hacker didn’t care to be involved then they wouldn’t force her, though her talents would be invaluable. And she could hardly blame Jet for his lack of sympathy toward cops, at present.

From what she knew of Steel already, she certainly believed a brief acquaintance with him would be, if nothing else, amusing.

*