Chapter Text
The cockpit of the Great Fox hummed with its usual chorus of blinking consoles and idle static from the comm channel, and in the middle of that hum sat Falco Lombardi, boots kicked up on the dashboard, spinning a squeaking baby squirrel around in the empty pilot's chair like it was the most riveting form of entertainment the galaxy had ever produced.
"Round and round we go," Falco crooned, giving the chair another lazy spin. "Where he stops, nobody—"
"Mah-yo!" squeaked the tiny bundle of grey-brown fur, flailing one paw and one small prosthetic peg where a leg used to be. It was the only word he seemed capable of producing, over and over, in every conceivable tone of protest, delight, or exhaustion. "Ma-lyo! Malleyo!"
"Yeah, yeah, Malleyo, I hear you, kid," Falco snorted, amused despite himself. He leaned in close, sniffing once, twice, and then recoiled with his beak wrinkling in open suspicion. "Hold on... Why does the peanut whippersnapper smell like a mushroom soup?"
The baby squirrel — barely bigger than Falco's forearm, with a rare frost-pale streak running through his otherwise ordinary fur, the kind of coloring that got infants like him snatched up as trophies by half the raider clans in the system — simply blinked up at his self-appointed "uncle" with dark, unreadable eyes. If squirrels could smirk, this one was doing an admirable impression of it.
You have no idea, birdbrain, Mario thought, safely locked behind a vocabulary that had shrunk to exactly one word. I have had-a this scent long before your kind figured-a out how to bolt two wings on a tin can.
Across the cockpit, curled into the co-pilot's seat with her knees drawn up and a datapad long forgotten in her lap, Krystal stared at absolutely nothing. Not the viewport, not the stars, not even the general vicinity of anything interesting — just a blank, magnetic corner of the room that had apparently become the most fascinating architecture in the ship. Her eyes were rimmed red, the telepathic hum she usually kept so effortlessly composed fraying at the edges from sheer exhaustion.
"Krystal! Help! I'm dying!"
The wail came rattling down the corridor from the general direction of the Great Fox's bathroom, followed by a series of noises that no amount of Cornerian military training could have prepared anyone to hear without wincing.
Krystal didn't so much as turn her head. "You are not dying, honey," she called back, voice flat with the particular patience of someone who had said this exact sentence roughly six times already that day. "You are a father."
A beat of retching silence answered her.
"That's — that's not better, Krystal!" Fox's voice cracked pitifully through the bulkhead. "That's genuinely worse!"
Falco nearly dropped the squirrel out of the chair from laughing. Across the room, sprawled sideways over a supply crate with a can of something suspiciously alcoholic dangling from one paw, Katt Monroe was in no better condition, wheezing so hard she'd started to hiccup.
"Oh, this is — this is the best day of my life," Katt gasped, wiping at one eye. "Fox McCloud, ace pilot, decorated mercenary, terror of the Lylat System, brought to his knees by a two-foot-tall rodent."
"He's not two feet, and he's not a—" Falco started, then reconsidered the squirrel currently gnawing thoughtfully on his glove. "Okay, he's kind of a rodent. Fine. Point stands."
Fox emerged from the bathroom a moment later looking like he'd personally lost a war. His fur was matted, his eyes bloodshot to a degree that made him look faintly demonic under the cockpit's blue lighting, and when he opened his mouth to speak, the smell that rolled out preceded him by a full three feet.
"I'm taking the helm," he announced, with the weary dignity of a man who had clearly decided that piloting a starship while concussed by his own stomach acid was a perfectly reasonable life choice.
Peppy Hare, who had been quietly nursing a cup of something warm at the navigation console and minding his own business up until this exact moment, took one long look at his adoptive nephew's face and set the cup down with the gravity of a doctor delivering bad news.
"Fox," he said, gently but firmly, "you look like you went nine rounds with a Venomian mudslide and lost every single one. Sit down before you fall down."
"I'm fine, Peppy—"
"Your breath could strip paint off the hull, son."
That landed. Fox's ears drooped, just slightly, the fight visibly draining out of him as fast as it had come. He glanced toward Krystal — silently pleading for backup — but she only raised one unimpressed eyebrow at him, arms still crossed, still staring off into that same fascinating patch of empty wall.
"She started it," Fox muttered, jerking a thumb vaguely at the squirrel in Falco's arms. "He started it. I said one thing—"
"You told him," Krystal said, at last turning her head with the slow, deliberate menace of someone reciting evidence in court, "that he cried like a broken siren."
"It was an observation—"
"He vomited on you within the hour, Fox. I'd call that a review."
Over by the ship's systems terminal, Slippy Toad — who had spent the entire exchange contentedly absorbed in recalibrating one of the Arwing's thruster diagnostics and staying scrupulously out of the family drama — allowed himself the smallest, most private smile before ducking his head back over his instruments like he hadn't heard a thing.
Fox opened his mouth to argue further, thought better of it, and instead trudged toward the pilot's chair anyway, if only to prove some vague point about resilience. He didn't get far. Peppy's paw landed on his shoulder with the immovable weight of forty years of surrogate-fatherhood.
"Rest," the old hare said simply. "The Lylat System will still be here in six hours. I promise you that much."
Fox groaned, but he went. Falco, still holding the squirrel, watched his captain shuffle off toward the crew quarters with the theatrical devastation of a man being marched to his execution, and couldn't resist one last jab.
"Night, Dad!" he called after him, in the same singsong tone he might've used on an actual toddler.
Fox didn't even turn around. He just raised one hand and extended a single, weary finger in Falco's general direction before disappearing around the corner.
In Falco's arms, Malleyo — or Mario, though nobody aboard the Great Fox had the faintest idea that was the name that belonged to him, in another life, on another world entirely, one with green pipes and red mushrooms and a lifetime of memories currently folded down into fragments too small for infant vocal cords to explain — watched his adoptive father retreat with something that, on a face capable of more expression than a squirrel's currently allowed, would have been an unmistakable smirk.
Tolerable, Mario decided, filing the day's events away with the same grim, methodical patience he'd once applied to flagpoles and fire flowers and falling very great distances onto the heads of unsuspecting turtles. Barely. But tolerable.
He remembered dying. That part came back to him in sharp, disconnected flashes — a blinding light, a terrible weightlessness, and then nothing, and then this: a body too small to walk properly even before some raider clan had decided his rare pelt made a fine collectible and left him with one working leg and a debt he intended to collect in full someday. He remembered waking up in the arms of a blue-furred vixen with sad eyes and a voice that spoke directly into his skull, and a red fox who apparently believed, with the total, unshakable sincerity of someone who'd never met a plumber in his life, that he'd simply found an orphan.
An orphan. Mario almost laughed, if laughing had been within his current physical capabilities. They had no idea. None of them — not Fox, not the smug avian currently spinning him around like a top, not the sharp-tongued cat drinking herself silly on the crate, not even the telepath who could apparently read every unspoken thought in the ship except, mercifully, his own peculiar and untranslatable ones — understood what, or who, they had actually pulled out of that wreckage.
That, Mario decided, was precisely where his patience would draw its line. He would let them believe what they wanted to believe. For now.
"Mah-yo," he informed Falco solemnly, patting the bird's glove with his one good paw, as if sealing some manner of unspoken pact.
"Yeah, yeah, buddy," Falco chuckled, entirely unaware he'd just been addressed by a war criminal, a hero, a fallen hero, and possibly a small vengeful god, all wearing the same suspiciously stained diaper. "Malleyo. Got it."
By the time Krystal finally scooped him up that night — murmuring something warm and wordless directly into the exhausted folds of his mind, carrying him off toward the makeshift nursery Slippy had rigged out of a spare storage pod — Fox's voice could still be heard drifting faintly from the crew quarters, muffled and aggrieved.
"That thing," he was informing nobody in particular, "is a menace."
"He's a baby, Fox," Peppy's voice answered, patient as ever.
"He's a menace baby."
Krystal only sighed, pressing a soft kiss to the crown of her new son's head as his eyelids finally, finally began to droop.
Sleep well, little one, her thoughts brushed gently against his, warm and entirely unsuspecting. Tomorrow's another day.
Mario — Malleyo, for now, for as long as this fragile disguise of infancy and ignorance held — let his eyes close at last, the low thrum of the Great Fox's engines carrying him down into whatever passed for dreams in a mind still busy cataloguing exactly how, and exactly when, he intended to reclaim every inch of the strength this galaxy had so rudely stripped from him.
Tomorrow, he agreed silently, already smirking in his sleep. Another day, indeed.
***
In the makeshift nursery — really just a converted storage pod that Slippy had lined with soft foam paneling and one suspiciously repurposed Arwing seat cushion — Malleyo's eyes opened well before anyone came to check on him.
He lay still for a long moment, staring up at the pod's low ceiling, doing the mental arithmetic he did every "morning" since arriving in this body: leg still missing below the knee, four working limbs otherwise, vocabulary still capped at one syllable, dignity still nonexistent. Some things, apparently, took longer to fix than others.
Then, with the grim determination of a man who had once climbed an entire castle by punching blocks with his bare fist, he rolled himself onto his belly and began, quite deliberately, to escape.
It was not elegant. His prosthetic peg-leg — a stubby little thing Slippy had rigged out of spare Arwing polymer, more decorative than functional at this stage — dragged uselessly behind him as he hauled himself along by his forepaws, army-crawling across the cushioned floor of the pod with the single-minded focus of a much larger creature on a much more important mission. He reached the pod's low entry flap, headbutted it experimentally twice, and then simply forced his way underneath it with a determined wriggle and a muffled grunt of effort.
Mah, he thought, satisfied, as he tumbled out into the corridor proper. Freedom.
The Great Fox's halls, from the considerably lower vantage point of an infant squirrel dragging one leg behind him like a soldier crawling under barbed wire, looked enormous. Every bulkhead seam became a canyon. Every support strut became a mountain range. Mario — because in his own head, whatever the ship called him, he remained stubbornly and entirely Mario — took it all in with the calculating eye of a man who had once mapped entire kingdoms by wandering through them on foot, and decided the ship's ventilation grates were, at the very least, an improvement over quicksand.
He made it perhaps twenty feet down the corridor, past a maintenance closet and a coil of cabling thick as his own body, before Katt Monroe rounded the corner ahead of him, mug of something dark and bitter in one paw, and nearly tripped directly over him.
"Whoa — hey, hold up, hold up." She crouched immediately, more out of reflex than concern, peering down at the tiny fugitive with an expression somewhere between amusement and genuine bewilderment. "How in the world did you get all the way out here?"
"Mah-yo," Mario replied, with the flat, unbothered tone of someone who felt the answer was self-evident.
"Uh-huh. Sure. Great explanation, kid." Katt glanced back the way he'd come, then down the corridor toward the crew quarters, visibly debating whether this was her problem to solve. She took a long sip of her drink instead, buying herself time. "You know what, not my department. I don't do daycare duty before my second coffee."
She stepped neatly over him and continued on her way, whistling, entirely unbothered by the fact that she'd just abandoned an infant to the vast, cavernous interior of a starship.
Mah, Mario thought, unoffended, and kept crawling.
He passed the ship's small armory next — the door sealed, thankfully, since even in his diminished state Mario retained a healthy respect for things that went boom — and rounded into the main corridor junction just as Falco emerged from the opposite direction, half-dressed, one boot on and one boot dangling from his beak as he hopped along on one foot trying to get the other on.
Falco spotted him mid-hop, froze, nearly toppled sideways into the wall, and hastily spat the boot out of his mouth.
"Okay, first of all," Falco said, hopping the rest of the way upright and jabbing a talon down at him, "how are you even out here. Second of all—" he squinted, doing a slow, suspicious once-over of the corridor as though expecting Krystal to materialize out of the ceiling vents at any moment "—if your mom asks, I found you immediately. Like, the second you got out. Got it? Immediately."
"Mah," Mario said, which Falco apparently chose to interpret as agreement.
"Great. Good talk." Falco crouched, scooped him up under one arm with the casual disregard of someone handling a particularly awkward grocery bag, and held him out at arm's length to study him properly. "You are a menace. You know that? An actual little menace. Your old man's right about that much, at least."
Mario blinked up at him, unimpressed.
"Don't give me that look," Falco continued, entirely undeterred, tucking him against his hip like a football as he resumed his interrupted quest to finish getting dressed. "I've seen that look before. Fox gives me that exact look right before he does something monumentally stupid. You're gonna be trouble, kid, I can already tell."
You have no idea, Mario thought, and allowed himself to be carried, for the moment, since crawling with one leg down an endless metal corridor was, admittedly, exhausting work even for a man who'd once swum through lava in his prior life.
They found Peppy in the galley, exactly where the old hare could be found most mornings: parked at the small table with a cup of tea, a data-slate propped up in front of him displaying what looked like several decades' worth of star charts, reading glasses perched at the very tip of his nose. He glanced up as Falco entered, took in the sight of the avian holding a squirming baby squirrel under one arm like a misshapen loaf of bread, and set his tea down with the weary patience of a man who had raised one McCloud already and evidently wasn't finished.
"Falco," Peppy said, tone even, "why does it look like you found him in a vent."
"Because I found him in a vent."
"You just said you found him immediately."
"I found him immediately in a vent," Falco countered smoothly, without missing a beat, depositing Mario unceremoniously onto the table beside Peppy's tea. "Semantics."
Peppy sighed the long, put-upon sigh of a rabbit who had heard every possible excuse the galaxy had to offer and found none of them particularly convincing anymore. He reached over and gently plucked Mario up instead, settling the small squirrel into the crook of one arm with the easy, practiced competence of someone who had done this — or something very much like this — many, many times before.
"Well," Peppy said, looking down at him over the rim of his glasses, voice softening considerably, "you're an early riser, aren't you, little one."
"Mah-yo," Mario informed him.
"Is that so?" Peppy huffed a quiet, fond laugh, adjusting his hold to better support the small prosthetic leg dangling at an awkward angle. "You'll want to be more careful with that leg of yours, crawling around loose bulkheads and coolant lines. This old ship has more sharp corners than sense some days."
Mario studied him for a long moment — the weathered fur, the tired but genuinely kind eyes, the steady, unhurried way he held him, so entirely unlike the frantic scrambling energy of Fox or the careless toss of Falco's grip — and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn't mind this one nearly as much as he minded the rest of them.
Tolerable, he decided again, filing Peppy into the same cautious mental ledger where he'd tucked Krystal the night before. Very tolerable, actually.
"There now," Peppy murmured, settling back into his chair with the small squirrel balanced against his shoulder, apparently content to simply hold him while he finished his tea and his star charts both. He glanced sidelong at Falco, who had flopped into the seat across from them and was now attempting, badly, to finish tying his second boot one-handed. "Go tell Krystal her son mounted an escape before breakfast. She'll want to reinforce that nursery door."
"Do I have to?"
"Falco, if you please."
"Fine, fine." Falco rose, grumbling, boot only half-tied, and shuffled off toward the crew quarters, muttering something under his breath about menaces and mushroom smells that made Peppy's mouth twitch with poorly suppressed amusement.
Left alone at the table, Peppy glanced back down at the small bundle nestled against him, who had gone very still and very quiet, watching the old hare's star charts scroll past with an attentiveness that seemed, for just a moment, almost too sharp for an infant.
"You're a curious little thing, aren't you," Peppy mused, half to himself, tapping one finger absently against the data-slate. "Wonder what's going on in that head of yours."
More than-a you'd ever believe, old-a man, Mario thought, watching the unfamiliar star charts with quiet, calculating interest — cataloguing exits, routes, and layouts the same way he'd once mapped Bowser's castles, one hallway at a time. Far more than you'd ever believe.
He settled a little deeper into the crook of Peppy's arm regardless, some small, tired, thoroughly infant part of him deciding that plotting could wait until after breakfast, and let his eyes drift half-shut as the ship's amber morning light crept steadily brighter across the galley walls.