Work Text:
Thursday 10th July 2042 (Gregorian), 19:11
216 Kleopatra's Stable Orbit Operative Station "Mark Anthony",
Commercial District C-2, University Hospital, Inpatient Care Room 306.
Jack's memories of the recent past are hazy at best, the events between the blast leading to her forced departure from the Poseidon, up to her awakening somewhere foreign yet familiar enough that it might be an alternate reality to her all playing at once through the fog of her mind, the people around her plain hospital bed arguing into what she's quite sure being Chinese while she pretends to sleep still.
She remembers that it started with a loud, roaring boom which shook her and the station whole, sending her off her feet and nearly on the train tracks as she was waiting for her ride home after a school day as drab as many others, the ceiling's LCD skies turning black save for green arrows and red crosses tracing the way for the nearest gathering points and everything else running to a halt while the sirens started blaring. An echoing voice — nearly unintelligible between the haunting repurposed tornado horns and the speakers' own reverb — calling for people to stay calm and follow instructions.
Safe to say, nobody stayed calm.
Not even her, at first, freezing on the spot and nearly getting ran over by the crowd while still sitting on the floor where she fell…Until a second, closer explosion vibrating through the aluminum platform and into her bones shook her awake from her torpor, her natural anxiety working in tandem with her for once, guiding her through the steps her paranoia had her repeat day in and day out for a situation like this one after her parents dragged her to live with them on a space colony millions of miles away from home, instead of leaving her with her gram in Oakwood.
Step One: get away from the crowd.
That was fairly easy. Maybe she took unnecessary risks by choosing side alleys, but she still made it to a quiet spot to collect her thoughts and browse through the maps she'd need for the next part, all already downloaded on her phone and ready for use.
Use in Step Two, that is: go not towards the predisposed gathering points, situated in parks and plazas, but rather towards the nearest maintenance shaft's safety pod, where the emergency comms device doesn't rely on the same, currently overwhelmed, radio lines as their regular-use devices.
That was a little harder, and evidently she wasn't the only one with that idea, a small gathering of engies already there and connecting to the radio to coordinate with their colleagues and trade info.
That, though, ended up being for the better, and after she explained them her own situation they saved her the book-knowledge based trial and error she'd have needed to effectively get in contact with her parents. Or try to, only static coming from trying to connect to the admin sector.
She's not sure what happened after. There were more explosions, and the static must have gotten to her head 'cause that's most of what she remembers between moments of vivid memory — the arrows going dark, the sprinklers setting off and raining sooty water on them, staining in drab, muddy gray her favourite shirt.
She remembers one of the engies giving her an oxygen tank to breathe from at some point while dragging her along with the group. Then how they made her trade her mask for a different one as she laid in the escape pod and the prick of a needle in her arm where the IV for the nutri-bags connected with her, the cold of the electrodes attached to her neck, wrists and ankles while they hurriedly explained her not how to do things, but where to find instructions for them, while his coworkers fought on the coordinates, arguing on the star charts and the chances she had to be found and retrieved by what colony.
She remembers the interminable, near-perfect silence that followed the hatch's closing on her, its airtight seal isolating her from the chaos of her surrounding. A bump into nothingness, the cameras feed opening to show the harrowing spectacle of the collapsing Poseidon inches from her face as she gained distance, the acceleration squishing her against the pod's cushions.
Media loves giving space battles sound. The buzzing of energy weapons, the clash of metal against metal and the blast of explosions…But the truth is that once she got out of the station all she could hear was her own breathing and the rhythmic beeps and whirring of the machinery meant to keep her alive.
She remembers feeling disappointed by how fake and small the Poseidon looked like from afar as other pods like hers left it like shooting stars, maybe a few hundred of the million people who had started calling it their home finding safety — or a slower death in the endless expanse of space — while the blasts from two of its rings sent the colony crashing against 15 Eunomia's nugget-like surface.
She remembers getting angry at her parents for dragging her there. For dying. Getting angry at the engies who didn't hesitate strapping her into her claustrophobic casket, buried not in dirt but cosmic radiation and dust.
She remembers reading the pod's manual on its little blue screen over and over, pissed that whoever designed the capsule didn't think to give a choice between light and dark mode for the interface — stupid and mundane, while she was just wasting time until her death, and all the more enraging for that.
She remembers wondering how long would take for the systems to fail and the initial panic it begot as she tried grappling with the possibility. If it'd be quick or she'd just catch an infection and die while trying to figure out how to relieve herself in that box barely big enough for a full grown man to lie in, wondering if she could just not do anything until someone caught her or she crashed against an asteroid or whatever.
She remembers feeling cold enough her teeth were chattering and her skin hurting until eventually, she drifted to sleep.
And now here she is, pretending she can't hear the statuesque amazon of a woman with a clean, chin-length black bob cut grilling a shortie dressed to the nines who bleached white even his eyebrows — and likely grew up thinking he's got plot armor, his tone infuriating even without understanding any of his words — while a beefy dude, taller than the amazon even, is trying so hard to blend with the machinery by her bedside that she wouldn't be surprised if he were to trip on a wire and scare the nurses half to death with a fake emergency.
In all honesty, she'd be more than content to just let them bicker and ignore them, to punctually 'wake up' once they leave for a doctor to come in, but while she's being kept hydrated through the IV she doesn't know how long it's been since she actually got anything to drink, and there's only so much her saliva can do to keep her comfortable. Thus, with heavy heart and a few warning coughs to save these strangers the embarrassment she already feels, she officially returns to the world of the living.
"闭嘴，她要醒了!" – She doesn't need to understand a word to see how the bespectacled blondie is finding her awakening a most convenient excuse to disentangle himself from his current predicament, almost literally pushing the woman away as he darts closer to her bedside—
"你别想逃。" – Nor she needs to know Chinese to understand the mood of that woman's huff as she, too, walks closer, her drawing attention a temporary interruption to their conversation and not its final note, the blondie ignoring it and seamlessly switching to perfect English — if sporting the accent classical of someone who's not used to speaking it aloud — to talk to her.
"How are you feeling? Do you remember your name? The name of your station?" – And bombarding her with high-speed questions while standing way too close, staring at her with reddish-blue eyes which barely register over the still continuing slew of questions.
"Your Bloc's current CEO? How did you end in the pod—"
Overwhelming. Bothersome…
"Can…Can all this wait a minute?" – She croaks through cracked lips, shrinking against the pillow. Who the hell is this guy without even a white coat or name tag? She wants him away…
"I'm like, hella thirsty…"
"Bet, must be uncomfortable as fuck. But I'm only a third year student and you might have brain damage we can't yet see…And I don't want to be held responsible if you choke and die."
Wow. Jack can't tell if she appreciates the honesty or she would have preferred some kindness at this point in time. If else, the blondie's not just making her uncomfortable — the amazon glaring at him and the beefy guy…
"I'll…Go call the nurse…" – Well, the beefy guy volunteers to do something actually useful, squirming in his corner and pulling his hoodie's collar further up his neck. He might as well just wear the hood at this point, but he doesn't. Like he doesn't use the button that certainly has to be somewhere around the bed to call said nurse but slithers out the room, hunched forward like a cooked shrimp.
"Thanks, Haoran." – The amazon murmurs in thank to the tallest of the trio, giving the beefy guy a name for Jack to latch on, while she whips out her smartphone and starts looking for something on it.
"I'm Xinyi." – She introduces herself then, handing her over her phone where she's typed way more than she says, while pulling away the blondie by the back of his collar.
"The guy who just left, Haoran, is my twin brother and this pest is Si-woong, our older brother. He's not evil, just annoying—We can put him on top of a cabinet, if he becomes too much." – Xinyi, Haoran and Si-woong. It's nice to have names for the faces. And…On top of a cabinet?
I'm not as confident as my brothers with spoken English, so I wrote this while you were asleep.
Hope you don't mind reading, even if you must be tired still.
"That doesn't sound bad—" – She replies with a little smile, going along with Xinyi's deadpan joke as she starts focusing on her notes, Xinyi and her brother starting to bicker once again.
Haoran, my twin brother, works with this station's Information Control Centre.
He's volunteered to take on your case.
"Ai! At home is the fridge, and here the cabinets???" – Starting in English…
He's looking for people whom you might know, be they on Earth or on other colonies.
Through him, we also found out a little about you:
"只要你敢乱来，我什么事都做的出来。" – …To go back to Chinese. She leaves them talk. It's not really her business right now, or at all.
Your name (which he shared with us) and date of birth from your smartpager (which he kept confidential. Also, he promised that nobody looked through anything except your digital ID). He also managed to retrieve what logs from your station were archived on your escape pod.
Her eyes feel uncomfortably dry, worse than her mouth…But at least it's not light mode, and the font Xinyi has chosen for her device is easy on the eye, the cream characters on a rich, deep brown background making her crave a sleeve of cream-filled, chocolate cookies.
Still, more people will ask you for these and other details to check your memory and ability to orient, so we won't call you by your name yet. What would you like us to call you meanwhile?
More importantly — and worryingly — though, her failed attempt to push herself up to sit has confirmed her something she really would have preferred being an illusion. A trick of the mind caused by the numbness of sleeping for however many days or weeks she's slept. Almost four months, isn't it? She really could have died out there…
An illusion, unfortunately confirmed true by looking towards her feet and trying to lift a leg, the white blanket curving down to follow gravity's pull far sooner than she anticipated.
A lot of things have changed for you over a relatively short time, and many more still are changing and are going to change, so if you feel overwhelmed and like it's to too much: It's normal. It is a lot to go through—
No shit, Sherlock. Where the fuck has the rest of her legs gone???
—but while your family might not be here at the moment you're not alone.
Many of us on the Mark Anthony wish to be your friends.
Nice thought, but not too helpful right now…And she's unsure she's got it in herself to read the last couple paragraphs. She has to try real hard not to burst out laughing as is. Not to show that she's losing it.
Kinda hard to control her breaths as well, though.
To keep herself from shivering like her gram's dog on the 4th of July, even as she reins in the tears—It's.
It's not like she thinks they'd dare to mock a traumatized girl for panicking a little…Would they?
"Hey, Eyes on me." – A black blur moves in her field of vision. A gloved finger with silver joints tapping on the topmost part of her bed's safety bars, Si-woong's dry voice reaching her through her tremors and the blood thumping, buzzing and suddenly, beeping loudly in her ears.
"Missy, freaking out is not going to make them regrow." – He continues calmly, as if he were talking of the weather, slowly moving his hand to encourage her eyes to lock on it—
"Besides, we got fairly decent alternatives…" – A smile in his voice, though it doesn't reach his hawk-like eyes while he effortlessly bends his fingers at impossible angles before they snap back to their natural shape around their ball joints, their whipping sound barely audible under Jack's startled gasp.
"Lee Si-woong!" – Gasp barely audible, as well, under an older woman's worried call, and yet more words she can't quite follow.
"Tsk. Not even when I'm being nice…" – Si-woong huffs under his breath, rolling his eyes and passing his tongue between tooth and lip in annoyance, before he turns towards the woman and her following—
A mechanical hand.
"Me? She noticed her legs went for a walk without her and grew anxious, is all! I was just trying to help her ground herself—That said, Mrs. Mei Lian, let's keep it to a language the missy can understand, too? I think she could do without the extra stress." – The tone coming from beyond his back showing a friendly smile that shouldn't have taken so little time to appear on his face and mixing with what Jack is sure must be his ever present notes of arrogance, like he alone knows best.
Moving so naturally she mistook it for a glove.
"It's Doctor Zhang, you rascal." – Were Jack paying proper attention to what's happening around her, to the doctor's irked tone and brisk steps forward, she'd concur that—Yes. She can absolutely see why this man seems to start an argument whenever he opens his mouth.
"Yeah. Sorry, Doctor. I'll be more careful." – Because even while only half paying attention, she can still tell how he doesn't really seem to care about whose toes he steps on and why...
Right now, though, she's transfixed on the hands leaning against her bed's off-white safety bars and helping him support his weight. On the near-glossy black surface of his palms and forearms peeking from clothes just as dark and framing the shiny metal joint of his wrist and fingers…Captivating in an unsettling way.
Are her legs going to look like this, too? With skin like a beetle's shell and joints like a puppet?
What—do they feel like to the touch? What can he feel if she touches them? What—
"—happened to your hands?" – Si-woong suddenly turns around, staring at her with his mouth in a line for a brief yet intense moment…Shit, she's said it aloud.
"I sold them for this blazer—Maison Margiela, autumn-winter of 2022. I was still a baby when it came out, and I doubt you even were in your parents' dreams—Worth every finger, wouldn't you say?" – He's pulling her leg. It's clear that he is, and it's not like she expected him to tell her shit. She didn't even want to ask to begin with…But it's unnerving, that he can say such a blatant lie with such a straight face and at a moment's notice.
That he can return a smug smirk to what she's sure being a morose expression that she's wearing.
He…She's not sure of how much she can trust someone like this. Or if she even should.
"Enough chatting." – Chimes in Dr. Zhang then, before Jack can come up with a comeback or even just something to say and change the topic herself.
"Mrs. Lee, accompany your brother out before it affects his grades…And go rescue your third head. The nurses swarmed him again..." – She huffs, shooing them away while two gentle-faced nurses — a man in his forties and a girl that can't be much older than Si-woong — approach her to invite her to properly lay back down, one updating the data on her tablet while the other asks her silly questions she's not sure she has to answer for the information as much as an excuse to help her think of else while the odd pair of siblings leaves the stage like the characters on a play, Si-woong's mechanical hand leisurely waving on the way out the corner of her eyes.
Huh?
W-wait. Xinyi's phone!
Fuck.