Archive of Our Own

“Forking muddlefudger—!”

Boothill’s curse was cut off by both the pouring rain and the ensuing splash as he ended his rapid descent off that damned muddy cliff straight into the icy water below. Fuck. It had to be a bunch of dust-devil-forsaken water to meet his ass instead of the ground. Nevermind that it was a long-ass fall—his body was made of tough stuff. (And fixable stuff.) But no, he hit the water and sank immediately, no footing and nothing to propel him upward. ‘Tough stuff’ was not buoyant, not like flesh, so Boothill might as well be a stone in a duck pond right now. Or maybe a cement shoe.

What a lackluster way to die—blown over a cliff by a wildly aimed rocket to the chest and then bested by a natural body of water. Now, with no good way to get out, and with water being the natural enemy to exposed electronics and machinery, he was about to either shut down altogether or become litter at the bottom of a bucket for an indeterminate amount of time. While Boothill never believed in giving up, that little voice in the back of his head (that sounded suspiciously like Nick) said that this was it: the death he accepted a long time ago as inevitable.

He wished he could have at least put a bullet in the head of that no-good smuggler (in lieu of being able to do so to Oswaldo) but regrets were for the living… and he has been a ‘Boothill’ for a long time anyway.

The Nameless were still up there though, and while he knows that they won’t split that guy’s skull in two out of ‘morals and principle’, or whatever, he hoped they would give that bastard hell. They surely will.

His thermal regulator informed him in screeching and halting intervals that the water was fucking freezing, which was frankly the least of his concerns when said water was rushing through his vents and joints and torn open wounds and whatever was left of his organic structures in his throat, and doing its upmost to ruin everything along the way. He certainly ain’t some toaster that will fry at a single drop of water, but rainproof ain’t submersion proof, and the freezing quality of the saltwater was already trying to put his system into some sort of shock. Boothill doesn’t need to breathe, not really, but the water in his fake-lungs and voicebox still felt like drowning, and he reflexively sputtered against it.

Boothill won’t die easy, so he still tried to thrash against the water and mimic swimming; it did not get him far. This was some sort of ocean or lake—he wasn’t paying that much attention before—so the water by the cliff was ridiculously deep, and he fell far from the cliff itself. Already, the light above him was being swallowed by dark waters—or maybe that was his optics fucking breaking already. Will his systems last long? If he made it to the bottom of the water, maybe he could walk out, but Boothill wasn’t that dumb. He knew this second body of his won’t do anything but short-circuit and freeze. He would be damned lucky if he could preserve his memory modules, at the very least… Provided something fished his body out of the depths.

Then there was a burst of movement above him, stirring the murky water into a cloud of salt and bubbles. Two glowing spots of bright greenish blue emerge from it and rush towards him, and for a delirious moment, Boothill wondered if there was a fucking shark stupid enough to try to eat him. Then the shape turned into none other than Dan Heng, and Boothill sputtered for a completely different reason. 

“You fudging idiot!” he yelled around the water, his vocal cords not entirely reliant on air anyway. “What’re you doing?!”

Boothill may not be submersion proof, but organics aren’t freezing water proof either. Or drowning proof, and he was hella deep down now. Not to mention that Boothill was a solid, heavy motherfucker and not at all someone who could be hauled via swimming power alone. Dan Heng should have been fighting the smuggler off along with March 7th, not drowning alongside his tin ass.

“Be quiet,” Dan Heng retorted uncharacteristically harshly, expelling air underwater like it wasn’t the stuff meant to keep him alive. He grabbed Boothill by the wrist, and even in the stirred up water, he could see the tense concentration on the Nameless’ face. (Probably because his eyes were fucking glowing.) Still, Boothill respected chaps with some wild grit on ‘em, but this was insanity, even for his standards. You avenge the dead—not die with them.

Then the water lurched. Boothill and his not-buoyant body impossibly rose, pushed and yanked upward as the water churned around them. He couldn’t see shit beside the bubbles, frankly, but he could see the shape of Dan Heng by his glowing eyes, something stick-shaped the same color coming out of his head, and something even fainter and translucent trailing behind him, like some tail. Well, he’ll be damned—either Boothill’s optics were failing spectacularly, or Boothill misunderstood something fundamental about how those Xianzhou people worked. Or Trailblazers. Fuck, maybe both. 

Whatever happened, Dan Heng dragged the both of them out of the depths until they broke the surface of the water. It was still pouring something fierce out there, so it didn’t get any less wet, but at least the lung-having person present could breathe again—however long he had to hold his breath (if he did at all). Still, Dan Heng made some sort of wheezing sound as he adjusted, and Boothill felt a pressure around his ribs that may or may not be a bunch of waterlogged components protesting. 

Boothill couldn’t get a word in—could barely think—around the influx of errors his fake nervous system kept hounding him with, and the function he often utilized to mute them wasn’t fucking working right at the moment. So for two seconds he just bobbed there uselessly at the water’s surface, somehow, with absolutely no idea what bright idea Danny Boy had to haul them to shore—in whatever direction that was. The rain obscured everything something fierce, and not even his enhanced eyes were having much luck. 

Apparently Dan Heng really did have a trick up his sleeve, because Boothill was abruptly thrown out of the water entirely.

Or should he say carried. In the jaws of some greenish, scaled thing that might be a dragon, at that. It flew over the surface of the water and then dipped downward, exploding into droplets before it crashed, so only Boothill got to be flung onto the sandy shore. Well, Boothill and Dan Heng, because he apparently planned a smooth landing for neither of them, so Dan Heng tumbled beside him in an ungraceful tangle of limbs.

Well, he’ll be damned. They’re alive after all.

Boothill pushed himself to his knees as best he could when all his joints were fucked up. His coolant worked double time to combat the ice that already froze into the crevices—not that Boothill would let some piddly ice stop him. Not for long, at least. Now that Boothill was no longer a victim of gravity and electronics’ ongoing war with water, he considered himself ‘fixable’ again in all the ways that mattered.

Dan Heng, however, was not mostly made of metal.

Boothill tried to speak and then choked out the water in his throat, growling as some of it came out the port in the back of his neck instead. “What,” he half-sputtered, “the forking wubbaboo was that?! You got feathers for brains if you thought that diving into a muddle-fudging iceberg after my tin-can aft was a good idea!”

Dan Heng—who was supposed to be the smart one, Boothill thought, or at least the careful one after the Xianzhou Nameless proved more than willing to yank Boothill back by the collar—had nothing to say in his defense. He didn’t even try. He just dragged himself to his feet, stared up the cliff with the helpless face of a man told to blow up a mountain with a toothpick, and said, “I… can’t get us back up there. Not… now.”

And as pissed as Boothill was, as soon as he finally shut up all the error messages and could focus right, he had enough sense to know that Dan Heng wasn’t out of the woods yet now that he willingly iced himself, so Boothill very charitably decided to continue yelling at him after he dragged that Nameless to somewhere warmer and not soaked to the bone with ice water.

“Forget that,” Boothill dismissed. It was his turn to drag Dan Heng around by the collar now—literally—so Boothill grabbed him by the coat and immediately started searching. His knee screeched with some problem, louder than the rain, and something electric jolted against his artificial ribs in a bad way, but Boothill could still walk, so who cared? Blinking the water off his eyes was more annoying—he lost his fucking hat, just to add insult to injury—mostly because it impaired his ability to see through the rain, but that would not stop him either. 

“What—? Boothill!” Dan Heng tried to protest, but Boothill wasn’t going to stop to listen to him unless Dan Heng could prove he was alive enough to break out of Boothill’s grip on his own.

Dan Heng didn’t—didn’t even put up much struggle at all—so Boothill rested his case.

Finally, he found a cave of sorts after following the bottom of the cliff away from all that blasted, shitty water, so he dragged his own ass and Dan Heng inside. No wild critters or people jumped out, so Boothill deemed it ‘good enough’ because it was, most importantly, out of the rain.

In the scant light that the stormy outside filtered into the space, Dan Heng looked almost normal, but he was way too still and quiet as he stumbled to the cave wall and just… leaned there. It struck him like a sling-shot to the noggin a moment later, as Boothill squirmed under the feeling of ice in his ports: Dan Heng was not even shivering.

“Shirtballs, you better not be going hypothermic on me, Dan Heng,” Boothill growled, because when people with flesh and blood stopped shivering in conditions like these, it usually meant death was knocking. (Like a red-faced baby in the snow, found just in the nick of time.) Boothill may not fear death, but the idea of this idiot Nameless dying because of him didn’t sit right at all.

(Nobody was supposed to sacrifice themselves for Boothill. Not ever. Not again.) 

 “I’m not,” Dan Heng half-mumbled, which did not spark any confidence at all.

“Shut yer’ frosty behind up and sit down,” Boothill snapped back. “I’m not done with you.”

Boothill probably looked as shitty as he felt, but all that was negligible. After he ensured Dan Heng did not freeze to death underneath his nose, he would make sure nothing was damaged too badly, because he still had things to do. In the meantime, Boothill muttered jarbled, mistranslated curses to himself as he discovered all the shit he lost to the iceberg lake and struggled to scrounge up something good enough for a fire. Akivili must be watching over Dan Heng’s sorry ass from the great Aeon Beyond, though, because there was some broken wooden debris inside the mouth of the cave, crusty as fuck from whatever was in that water, but dry. Boothill’s matches were all soaked, but he still had his pistol, and some partial dismantling let him use the hammer to light a spark, with a wrung-out, torn strip of his sorry poncho as kindling.

“Get closer to that before I push you in,” Boothill ordered. At some point Dan Heng had slid down the wall into a sitting position, but the glazed quality to his eyes, now reflecting firelight, did not give Boothill confidence that he would move any time soon. So Boothill did not give him a choice. He grabbed Dan Heng by the arm, eliciting a reaction but only in the form of tense muscles and something close to an honest-to-Aeons hiss, and dragged him closer himself.

Boothill more or less collapsed next to him, his power supply demanding a low-stakes activity after spending too much fuel defrosting himself, to mixed success. He needed the stupid fire as much as the Nameless did.

It nagged him that there was not anything else to do. Boothill certainly could not go out and chase down the smuggler in this condition, as much as he wanted to (and he wouldn’t leave Dan Heng looking like an icicle, either), but he could not think of anything else to do here, either. He recalled age-old first aid knowledge about what to do with freezing people, and the number one trick was body heat. (An infant, pressed against a soft chest like Graey said to do until she started shaking and crying, loud enough to prove she was alive.) Boothill had none of that. In fact, his metallic body would surely make it worse, because even with an alloy made to be weather resistant, the slowly melting ice up his limbs said enough. 

Dan Heng released a small sigh, a shred of life finally back in him. As if activated, the Nameless moved, but only just enough to pull that soaked coat of his off and move it to the side in a reverent wad. “Thank you,” he said simply.

Boothill wasn’t having any of it. “Don’t go thanking me yet. I ain’t done yelling at you, you ashvole!” Now that he was pretty sure Dan Heng wasn’t ringing Death’s doorbell, he unleashed the tirade he had been oh-so-patiently holding back. (Besides, freezing folk needed stimulus to stay awake and alive, right? He could provide that.) “What the fork were you thinking, diving after me like that? Just ‘cause you pulled some wonky shirt back there didn’t mean it wasn’t stupid as fudge to go diving after a hunk of metal in water colder than the forking ice asteroids!”

“No,” Dan Heng started, horribly vague and calm and undeservedly so. “I dived after you because I would have been fine. Unlike you.”

Boothill bristled at the answer. “You think I don’t know that?” he hissed, and he hated the way that all the water left in his system (it had to be the water, and nothing else) made his words awfully shaky. “And just because you got lucky didn’t mean you couldn’t have drowned. I at least might have been salvageable.”

But Dan Heng proved he was more obstinate than Boothill gave him credit for (and he knew that man was stubborn), and shook his head again. “I’m a Vidyadhara,” he sighed, sounding awful tired. Maybe the fire wasn’t working, because now Dan Heng was just talking nonsense.

“Huh? What does that have to do with anything?! I know you’re from the Xianzhou. Being a few centuries old doesn’t make you actually immortal, shirthead.” Boothill admittedly did not know the full difference between all those Xianzhou folk, but Vidyadhara were one of them, right? Or was that the name of people from a specific ship…? Gah, Boothill might know a thing or two, but he wasn’t some damn anthropologist. 

Dan Heng leaned his head against the cave wall with some tired, half-baked noise between a chuff and a sigh. “Vidyadhara can be amphibious,” he elaborated, like that garbled sounding word meant anything and counted as an elaboration. Well, it might, if Boothill freakin’ knew what was going on—or if his damned synesthesia beacon worked right. Usually he could hear just fine but Boothill was more than willing to blame the IPC for messing with it in the first place. (Or, just as likely, it was just a term his uneducated ass did not know.) 

“Huh?” he pressed. “You gonna’ have to speak in plain terms ‘cause my piece of—” junk “—fine equipment—” FUCK, fuck those fucking censoring assholes— “of a beacon didn’t catch a lick of that.”

“Right.” Dan Heng closed his eyes in a dangerously long blink for someone who just took an ice bath. “Semi-aquatic,” he amended. “I could breathe.”

“Well, I’ll be plucked and feathered. Alright then.” Boothill tactlessly retracted his drowning accusation, but that did not mean that he didn’t have plenty more. “You gonna try to tell me you’re icicle proof next? Because freaking wubbaboo, you look halfway to a popsicle right now.”

Dan Heng still did not open his eyes again, but he did sigh harshly. “I will admit,” he began slowly, “that the water was colder than… I anticipated.” Another slow breath. “But I do not regret it.”

“You should, if you freeze to death,” Boothill hissed, stoking the fire with prejudice and then hissing again when his damn elbow sparked. Fucking water… He needed to find some upgrades to avoid this horseshit. “Now you’re stuck down here with me while that smuggler is probably running scott-free! No offense to your tiny friend, but March 7th doesn’t strike me as the solo type.”

“He…” A heavy exhale. “Already ran. After you fell.” Dan Heng shifted, slightly closer to the fire, but clearly it wasn’t enough. “March knows what to do in these situations. She would have…” A heavier inhale. “Met up with… Mr. Yang. While I sit tight with you.”

Maybe the cold got to him too, just a bit, because it took a little too long for the explanation to sink in, and when it did, it came with teeth. “You picked me over him,” he realized, and Boothill… did not know how feel. Angry? Confused? Touched? A Galaxy Ranger would have chased after that no-good smuggler without hesitation. While Galaxy Rangers sometimes ran in packs when the hunt called for it, they avenged, they did not save. Certainly not if it jeopardized what they came to do. 

“Yes,” Dan Heng replied, like it was the obvious answer, and not something that Boothill struggled to accept. Especially because, out of all the Nameless with their bleeding hearts, it was Dan Heng that made that call.

“What the fudge, man? I’m not worth more than that shirtbag. You’re from the Xianzhou—I thought you of all people would understand.”

Dan Heng slipped his eyes open again, just to glare, before he lost the energy for even that. “I don’t follow the Hunt,” he said. “I… can’t. So forgive me for doing things differently.”

What? A Xianzhou citizen who didn’t follow the Hunt? Huh. Well, in hindsight, Boothill supposed that it meant something that he was a Nameless following the Trailblaze, but he never interpreted that as some kind of one-over-the-other situation before. 

And, hey, Boothill did not actually give a shit on what people did with their time or beliefs, but he was rubbed raw that he potentially lost his quarry—a close accomplice to Oswaldo—because he trusted the Nameless to have a close enough ideal to him to get the job done.

“Can’t? Or won’t?” he found himself asking.

To his surprise, Dan Heng was brutally honest, even in his languid state. “Won’t. It’s… I can respect the Hunt, but it… comes with collateral.” Dan Heng grimaced as if the cold brought a fresh wave of pain. “It’s not for me,” he finished quietly.

If Boothill knew how the hell to respond to that (he didn’t) then he would not quite get the chance, because something electronic chirped from Dan Heng’s direction. His corded earpiece? Boothill’s sensitive auditory enhancements could pick it up, even past the hum of static that persisted post-bath.

“Dang, that little phone is still working?” Boothill marveled.

“It’s more waterproof than you,” Dan Heng muttered without looking up. Well, he was alive enough to have some dry sass left in him, at least. 

“Listen here you smart-aleck…” 

But Dan Heng ignored him, instead focusing on fumbling with his phone with slower than average movements. The cold was clearly slowing him down like a piece of outdated software with a virus, but the bastard kept going nonetheless.

“Are you okay?!” the tinny voice of March 7th blasted through Dan Heng’s earpiece. Boothill would have heard it at a normal range, too. “I couldn’t see you after…”

“We’re fine,” Dan Heng replied, underselling it but not technically lying. “I’m with Boothill now, but… I don’t think either of us can make it back… anytime soon.”

“That doesn’t sound fine! What happened? Are either of you hurt?!”

Dan Heng had the audacity to flick his eyes over to Boothill, looking him over. “Not much,” he said, and unfortunately the sparks coming out of Boothill’s hand as he flipped Dan Heng the bird did not disprove his assessment. “Mostly… cold.”

“Oh.” Judging by the change in tone, March seemed to understand what it meant. “Are you sure you’re okay? Mr. Yang and I were hurrying to the downed aircraft, but if we need to split up…”

“No,” Dan Heng denied. “I’m fine. Focus on them, first.”

“Are you sure? Like super sure? If I find out you’re actually…”

“March,” he cut in, firm despite the exhaustion clear in his voice. “I’m not alone. You go.” 

(And Boothill will be damned if he thought too hard about how effective he made that argument sound. As if Boothill’s company really made things safer, despite his reputation and present uselessness.)

“Okay… Be safe, Dan Heng.”

“You too.”

With that, the call ended, and Boothill stopped with the pretense of being polite. “So you are going after that ash-vole. I thought you said he got away.”

“He did,” Dan Heng refuted, and maybe it was the firelight illuminating the bags under his eyes, but the man looked extra tired. “But he left behind his prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” Boothill echoed, a little startled. He knew that the guy was a no-good motherfucker who moved all kinds of illicit goods, even including trafficking slaves… Oh. Oh fuck, okay. “That muddle-fudging weasel.” 

Dan Heng did not say anything, but the growl-like hum seemed to be some sort of agreement. 

Boothill still wanted to be pissed, but it was harder to blame the Nameless for prioritizing those poor folks over the smuggler than it was when it was just about them saving his sorry ass. Boothill might be self-aware enough to know that he would have hunted the bastard first, but his heart wasn’t dead enough to want to see innocents hurt. Lucky for them, the Trailblaze was a far better savior than the Hunt was. So Boothill would just be salty over lost prey in silence, this time.

“You still look like you’re freezing your rear off,” Boothill said instead. “And you just admitted it’s bothering you.”

“It’s…fine,” he insisted, like a damn broken record. Boothill was learning that this was Dan Heng’s default reply, which was frankly pretty useless. 

“Says the guy that looks like a corpse,” Boothill refuted, and Dan Heng looked down with a wince. It was true, though. The dude had not moved much at all, and his skin was awfully pale. Coupled with the way his speech continued to slow and even slur… The fire clearly was not enough.

Boothill, meanwhile, was pretty sure his hands did not count as freezing hazards, anymore, so in lieu of Dan Heng giving him a satisfying reply (or a reply at all), Boothill once again took matters into his own hands. 

He reached over and grabbed Dan Heng’s wrist. The sudden action earned him a shudder—not quite a normal shiver—but still hardly a reaction beyond some wordless noise in his throat that Boothill’s synesthesia beacon tried to helpfully ping as ‘startled,’ despite normally never bothering with sounds. Unfortunately for Danny Boy, Boothill’s sensors were still shot to hell and back, so he had to get up close to get a read on this guy’s statistics. It took an aggravating three tries before he could get his infrared vision working for more than two seconds, which was around the same time he picked up a pulse.

And holy hell and high water.

“Why are you forking blue?!” Boothill sputtered. Dan Heng barely appeared in infrared, as if he were trying to blend into the fucking stone. Worse yet, his pulse was abysmal. How the fuck had he even talked before? Boothill had been half-joking about the corpse comment, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“...what?” Dan Heng croaked, proof that he was still alive, somehow. 

“You have no muddle-fudging body heat, you dang-nabbing son of a nice lady. And you have the gall to convince me you ain’t forking hypothermic?!”

“No, I’m… a meso-poikilotherm.” 

And now he was spouting nonsense. (Or more likely, more terms his synesthesia beacon gave up on translating for Boothill’s idiot ass.) “Is that supposed to be a word or have you lost your senses?!”

“...sorry.” 

Boothill was close to losing his mind over this strange, self-sacrificing Nameless, and the quiet apology equally made it worse and stopped him in his tracks. What kind of automatic, half-unconscious response was it to apologize? And yet it came so readily and so quietly that it nearly gave Boothill an error message to process it. For the best, probably, because in the time he spent fighting back against the renewed wave of diagnostic messages trying to convince him to power down to fix his damaged terminal, Dan Heng found some real words.

“It means I don’t… produce much of my own… body heat,” he managed. “I apologize. I don’t have much… energy, at the moment.”

Now, Boothill may not be the most ‘traditionally educated’ bastard out there, but he wasn’t actually dumb. Really. He just focused on the things that were useful to him, and usually, random biology facts did not make the cut. However, after mulling the brief explanation over, Boothill realized that he did actually know what Dan Heng was talking about. On his planet, they called it being ‘cold-blooded,’ which was something for the reptiles and such, who sat out in the sun all day and then went into shock whenever the plains hit the cold season a bit too quickly.

“You telling me you’re one of them iguanas that fall out of the trees?!” he sputtered. 

“...sure,” Dan Heng agreed, a bit too airily. His eyes had slipped closed at one point and had yet to open, even as he technically responded. Was falling asleep in the cold as dangerous for cold-blooded folk as it was for the warm-blooded? Boothill wasn’t sure. What was the difference between hibernation and being frozen, anyway? All he knew was that even cold-blooded bodies had a line between shutting down temporarily or permanently, and usually sudden shifts risked the latter.

Dan Heng must have expended the energy he had on using that water technique thing to fish Boothill out of that sea and then to walk here afterward. He might not have much left at all, if his heart-rate was still this low, and for some reason, the fire just didn’t seem to be enough to do much beyond keeping him alive—if it was even good enough for that. 

But then Boothill took a closer look through his infrared, and he noticed that Dan Heng’s shirt was technically the coldest thing on his body, still. It looked to be one of those fancy moisture-wicking materials, sure, but it was not drying fast enough.

“Oi. Take your shirt off,” Boothill said, which predictably earned him a half-hearted and half-confused glare.

“It ain’t raining in here so it’s warmer than being soaked in forking ice water, relatively speaking,” Boothill continued, because suddenly he had to be the voice of reason here. 

Dan Heng stared for a bit, and then shook his head. “S’fine,” he muttered, unwilling to take Boothill’s perfectly reasonable advice.

Now, usually, Boothill did not care when people got themselves hurt or killed or whatever thanks to their own stupid volition. But. Boothill was not… incapable of helping either. Dan Heng risked himself and expended all of his energy and braincells just to keep Boothill from becoming so waterlogged he risked ceasing to be himself. It was aggravating and unasked for, and yet, Boothill would be damned if he did not try to reciprocate it. Maybe he gave up on being the hero in exchange for being a ranger, a hunter, but Boothill still abided by these kinds of debts.

“Fine, you’re tired,” Boothill realized. “I’ll help ya’ out then.”

Boothill had many skills, and one of them happened to be wrangling clothing off of incapable bodies. (A skill that was solely thanks to an infant without motor control and then an energetic toddler, always rolling in the mud and doing her damnedest to catch a cold… But he very carefully did not remember this part, lest his artificial heart start hurting again.) Now, this was a very different setting, but somehow, a Vidyadharan iguana going into shock from the wet-fueled cold managed to recreate a similar enough scenario. Dan Heng’s black long-sleeved shirt did not make it easy, however. Boothill pried off the bracer in the way first, with only minimal and listless resistance, and at the rest of the shirt he considered saying to hell with it and just cutting the damn thing off. Unfortunately, if Dan Heng was weak to the cold, he may very well need it back when it was properly dry, so Boothill resigned himself to the hard way first. Dan Heng was now too out of it to be embarrassed, anyway. 

“Sorry, bucko,” Boothill said unapologetically. “Arms up or I’ll do it for you. Last warning.”

Dan Heng, worryingly, did not respond, not even to glare or huff. Boothill resolved to take that as implicit permission then, lest this idiot truly freeze. Except Boothill only managed to lift the hem of the shirt before suddenly Dan Heng jolted to life, as if somebody jammed a cattleprod into his ribs. He jerked away from Boothill with a wounded kind of snarling noise befitting a cornered animal that made Boothill wonder if this was actually some sort of cold induced stroke or heart attack. But, maybe it wasn’t so ‘wordless’ after all, because the combination of their synesthesia beacons still endeavored a translation attempt, rattled into Boothill’s skull. 

‘(No stop don’t touch stay away stop please I’m sorry—)’

Boothill yanked his hand back with a frown. Dan Heng did not make it far—just a few inches—before he froze again in a way that had little to do with being cold. His readings showed that Dan Heng’s heart rate increased a bit, making him just a bit warmer, but Boothill found no victory in it, when the thing that spurred Dan Heng had been nothing but raw panic. 

“Easy there, wubbaboo. I’m not— I’m not gonna hurt ya,” Boothill assured awkwardly in the wake of jade eyes stretched wide and unseeing. Boothill did not have a comforting component in his body (not anymore) so the attempt was foreign and clumsy, but maybe not half bad, because a few blinks later, Dan Heng looked a bit more… present. 

“Sorry,” he muttered. “You startled… Sorry.”

“Oi, apologize one more time and you’ll be talking to the bullets,” Boothill returned, increasingly weirded out by all of the useless, random apologizing. His very valid point, however, also solidified his lack of comforting ability, because Dan Heng’s face twisted into something eerily flat and then stayed like that. Suddenly, that seemed worse than the tint of panic. 

“Just… get outta’ that shirt before you lose your dang mind to this forking chill,” Boothill grumbled. “Right now you’re less waterproof than that fancy phone of yours.”

For a second, Boothill thought Dan Heng was still going to argue—or worse, fucking apologize—but then he sighed. “...right. Okay.”

The panic fueled burst of adrenaline at least gave Dan Heng enough of a boost to wrestle himself out of the wet shirt. His pants might be an issue too, but they weren’t as snug, and Boothill was pretty sure the chest was more important for that kind of stuff. Was that the same for cold-blooded folk? Who knew? Either way, this was enough of a hair-raising struggle and Boothill figured this time, for real, it would have to be good enough. 

Dan Heng half-leaned and half-collapsed, elbows propped against his folded knees, as he expended that short burst of energy. Boothill stoked the fire and tried not to stare. It did not help that having the eyes of a sharp-shooter meant that he was too good at noticing and memorizing details at a glance.

Those… those were a hell of a lot of scars. Boothill expected any respectable warrior type to have a few—Aeons-knew that Boothill still got dinged to hell and back, to the point of pissing off the doc something fierce—but this… It wasn’t all tears and slices and gunshots. (And fuck, there were a lot of blade wounds, too, across his arms and down his torso.) Boothill knew the fucking differences. The rest, though? Well. The IPC chewed Boothill up like a bone in the jaws of bloodthirsty hounds, for defying them and having the audacity to survive it, and when they ran out of patience ‘questioning’ him and he bailed… He knew what kind of shape his flesh and blood body ended up in. Sure, Boothill took some extra damage by ensuring he killed as many of those bastards as he could while escaping, but most of the credit still belonged to those psychos. Boothill had long since ditched that chewed up body, but he remembered. 

Boothill was sure as hell not squeamish, but something about seeing those signs of deliberate abuse on somebody else, somebody he knew… It unsettled him. It was none of his damn business, but it was the same kind of rage that simmered next to his own whenever he thought about what those psychopaths did to Rappa. Boothill had his own Hunt, but fuck, he had more room than he thought to add on new grievances. If the reason why Dan Heng had whip-mark shaped scars down his back and shoulders, an almost burn-like mass of scar tissue at his wrist, and more little systematic scale-sized marks next to real scales down his back than he could see or count still fucking breathed… Then Boothill could spare a bullet or seven to change that. Free of charge.

Boothill thought he stopped feeling phantom pains, but he could swear that the memory of saltwater-dipped leather belts and cigarettes snubbed out on his ribs invaded his nervous system, at that moment. 

He glared into the fire and stewed, fury for his sake and for Dan Heng’s doing a mighty okay job at stimulating his power supply, however artificially. If Dan Heng had enough energy to recognize the coiled rattlesnake of memory sitting there in plain sight, then he stoutly ignored it, like Boothill was trying to do. At the very least, Boothill was trying not to be too obvious about it, lest he make the kinder Trailblazer uncomfortable over it. (Or uncomfortable in general. Fucking hell… no wonder he jumped so bad when Boothill touched him by surprise…) 

Finally, the fire did its damn job in bringing the amb-phobius (or whatever) iguana boy back to life. Dan Heng inhaled deeply, almost shuddering with it, and eventually started moving around until he sat up and reached for his jacket.

“You better not be thinking about dousing yourself in ice water again,” Boothill warned. “I don’t keep idiot shirt-stains alive for doing stupid-ash crap.”

“I was just checking,” Dan Heng argued, still sounding awful tired, but hey, the side-glare was back. Ah, Boothill missed it. He much preferred the perpetually annoyed and too-reasonable Nameless over the one looking like a kicked dog. (Although the tension remained in his hiked shoulders, so really, it wasn’t over yet.)

“Yeah whatever. Just save your energy, iguana-boy.”

Dan Heng half snorted, in what might have been amusement. Or more annoyance, not that Boothill cared for the details. 

“Thanks, Boothill,” Dan Heng said after another beat of silence, sounding way too damn sincere about it. “I apologize for becoming so unresponsive and…” He brought his arms and knees up to his chest, curled against the cave wall in a deceptively casual manner. “...jumpy.”

“If you have anything to forking apologize for, it’s jumping into that ice bath in the first place if you knew that your cold-blooded behind couldn’t handle the muddle-fudging cold.” Because Boothill still hasn’t forgiven him for that one, so that would be the only apology he could fucking stomach after all of those all of those small-voiced delirious ones…

And the only one Dan Heng had a spine about at the moment, it seemed, because he just hummed. “You know that contact with the cold won’t actually kill me that easily, right?” Dan Heng asked instead, staring straight into the fire. 

“You could have fooled me, bucko.”

“I’ll admit it was… worse than I anticipated,” Dan Heng allowed, which might as well be an admission. “But likely I just would have been unresponsive for a while. Any side effects will pass within a few days at most after returning to the Express.”

“Only unresponsive, he says,” Boothill grumbled. “That’s a death sentence too. Not to mention your heart rate plummeted.”

Dan Heng did not comment on the last part. “You were here,” he said, just like he told March, and once again Boothill hated the implication of trust in that. “Mr. Yang and March would have found me through my phone afterward. I’m sure they saved my location when we all separated.”

“I think you’re being deliberately lead-headed about this, shirt-for-brains,” Boothill complained, just so he would not have to address whatever the hell he did to earn Dan Heng’s trust after the Nameless spent so much of their battles together dragging him by the collar for being ‘too impolite’ or ‘too extreme.’ (Not stated out right, but Boothill could translate that well enough.) 

“And you seem stuck on the matter of my health, despite the fact that I am presently fine,” Dan Heng returned, much too observant again now that he wasn’t actively freezing to death.

Boothill clucked his tongue angrily. This time, he chose not to dignify that with a response. Mostly because, annoyingly, Dan Heng was right. 

“The Blessing of Akivili provides resistance against extreme conditions,” Dan Heng explained out of nowhere, apparently sensing that Boothill knew nothing about it. “And Vidyadhara are poikilotherms, which means we are more adaptable than your… iguana analogy. What energy we cannot absorb from the environment is actually supplied internally, from cloudhymn or adapted metabolic processes. Hence being mesothermic too.”

Boothill would bristle more about being lectured, but the plainly given facts were actually kinda’ useful and interesting, he supposed. It helped that Dan Heng sounded more like a booky archivist than someone patronizing—he got enough of that from the doc. Still, his pride was a bitch, and since the only reasons he had left to be pissed about Dan Heng’s stunt were annoyingly personal, Boothill used his nerd spiel to side-step the subject with all the grace that Boothill normally had, which was to say, absolutely fucking none at all.

“What, you think I didn’t know all that?” he lied brazenly. “Cold-blooded, like I said. Don’t lecture me because this fudgin’ Qlipothian isn’t my native tongue.”

(It wasn’t even anything he was smart enough to learn. The doc couldn’t pry out the synesthesia beacon without destroying his brain beyond saving, but she could tamper with his ‘language center’ in other ways. So she took pity on him and crammed that devil-forsaken galactic Qlipothian language into his digitized brain manually, just so he would not hear that damn beacon speaking translations over everyone all of the damn time.)

Dan Heng looked unimpressed, but also… weirdly thoughtful. Boothill inwardly bristled again. The Astral Express probably already knew he was uneducated in general and super illiterate in a language he never actually had the hope to learn the conventional way, and he did not care, he didn’t, but if Dan Heng pitied him over it when he still looked like a drowned (beaten) cat, then Boothill might lose it.

“I know,” Dan Heng said simply. “It’s not mine either. The terms used to be interchangeable, I think, but there’s more nuance to it. Regardless, I… understand what it is like not to want to have to ask. Apologies if I offended you.” Before Boothill could follow through on his promise about the apology thing, Dan Heng huffed dryly, voice even quieter. “It… confused me too, once. It doesn’t help that I think I am more… variable, I think, in tolerance, yet without a particularly helpful metabolism…”

“Because of the Trailblaze?” Boothill guessed, but something in Dan Heng’s tone scratched him the wrong way. 

Sure enough, Dan Heng’s mouth flattened even more. He stared at the fire like it was about to swallow him whole and he would let it. “Not exactly.”

That itch, that bad feeling, worsened. Because it would be one thing if Dan Heng had just seen through Boothill’s bravado, but he had offered his own admission as well, because the Nameless was made out of way kinder stuff than Boothill was, and he clearly did not want to single Boothill out. Except, except, in catering to Boothill’s pride, he once again proved that he had way less of it than Boothill did. (If he did, he would not be apologizing all the damn time over nothing.) So the alternative… Well, the alternative did not seem so impossible seeing the way Dan Heng flinched when he was caught off guard and the way he looked and talked all small when something bothered him. Boothill hated it in ways he could not properly express. 

(Because it was bad enough to look at Dan Heng’s scars and see the similarities to his own, when those IPC bastards plucked him out of the wreckage of his home and wanted nothing else than to make a mockery of him. But the thing was, Boothill survived with his sanity (mostly) intact because he had both pride and anger in surplus; Dan Heng, strong and dependable as he was, did not seem to have much of either.) 

Boothill bit his pride back. Dan Heng clearly needed a distraction (and so did he, frankly) and while this was normally when Boothill would advocate for getting drunk, that was not really an option at the moment. So as it happened, Boothill did have a few more questions. Some of which should not drive Dan Heng closer to the brink. Let the lizard boy be a nerd instead. 

“Is that why you weren’t shivering?”

“Hm?” 

Damn, so much for being better. He had spaced out again. “Earlier,” Boothill elaborated, “when I dragged your butt here, you were frozen over but not shivering. That’s why I thought you’d gone hypothermic on me. Along with the whole being unresponsive bull.” 

“Oh.” He looked more thoughtful than faraway now, but not by as much of a margin than Boothill had hoped. “I… I can shiver, but it does not normally happen as a cold response. It’s an involuntary contraction of muscles, ultimately, but the mechanism that triggers it for thermoregulation is endothermic in nature, I believe.” As if sensing he used fancy terms again, Dan Heng looked up at Boothill quickly, some expression that he did not catch flying across his eyes. “Ah, I mean, warm-blooded creatures have a narrower range of internal temperature, usually much higher than the environment. There are more fail-safes to keep that temperature range, and… more consequences if that temperature is not met. For ectotherms and poikilotherms—l-like reptiles, for instance—there are no… or less, I suppose, for mesotherms… ways of internal regulation. So instead our organs can withstand less optimal conditions for longer, and bounce back a bit better. Within reason, of course. The Vidyadhara I come from are more adept at cooler climates, being primarily aquatic, but…” He trailed off meaningfully, not needing to explicitly say that they weren’t ‘arctic freeze proof.’

Boothill mostly understood that. Probably. But one thing did jump out at him the longer he thought about it, and the more he remembered from that bygone past of his. “So, what’cha saying is, you were hypothermic, just that you had less of a chance of dying from it.”

Because that was the thing, right? The slowed down body processes, the spaciness, the lethargy—he had all that and more. Surviving what would have been the body temperature of a corpse doesn’t mean it wasn’t ridiculously low and affecting him. Especially since the verdict of all that yapping was that he used too much of that fancy water magic to haul Boothill out, which meant there wasn’t enough to keep his insides warm enough to function once they froze. See? Boothill could pay attention.

And really, all that fancy biology stuff just proved that that lake would have killed someone, warm or cold-blooded—or that in between stuff, which apparently existed—if they did not have a bunch of Xianzhou and Aeon nonsense helping them out. (Or was a cyborg.) And yet, however calculated, a risk was still a risk.

Boothill was either way off mark or shooting way straighter than Dan Heng at the moment, because his (very reasonable) observation seemed to surprise him, making him consider the accusation long enough that Boothill worried he was spacing out again. “That’s— Huh. I… I suppose so…”

At the admission, Boothill finally gave up on the chin-wagging. Besides, he was getting dangerously close to acting like some sort of mother-hen, and that was territory that not even he wanted to wander (back) into. At the end of this shitty endeavor, Dan Heng’s calculated risk did work out. Boothill would just have to get over it, and forget how the raw feeling of being saved and then watching the person who saved him start to look far, far too vulnerable. 

(He still did, in a different way, but Boothill did not want to think too hard about that either.) 

So he dialed back that encroaching stress and took the more casual route. “Tch, typical. You were so out of it you were in denial,” Boothill laughed. Because that was the Nameless archivist’s stubbornness talking, alright. That part was no problem to stomach.

But Dan Heng furrowed down, continually deflated. “Ah, sorry… It didn’t register as that extreme yet, because…” He tapered off. Boothill waited for him to finish, but the silence stretched on too long. The bad feeling remained. 

“Because? Spit it out, already.”

“Because I’ve… had a lot worse,” he finished in a near inaudible mumble, very purposely not looking at Boothill or anywhere near him. If Boothill could feel the cold normally, his veins might have gone icier with the implication than what the water could ever do him. Because this had been a fucking nightmare scenario, and he said he had worse?! It would be different if it was laughed off with reference to some sort of ridiculous Trailblaze expedition, but the body language was all wrong. 

Almost as if he was aware of the horrible speculations Boothill started making against his will, Dan Heng inadvertently corroborated them in his sudden sense of squirming. Dan Heng retrieved his jacket once again, and this time, awkwardly yanked himself to his feet. Boothill moved to follow him, halfway on instinct that he could not name even if he wanted to (he didn’t), but stopped himself when Dan Heng caught himself before stumbling like some newborn deer. 

With a decisive movement, he flicked his coat out toward the doorway. The remaining water flew out in a single wave in some freaky magic bullshit. Dan Heng noticeably sagged in relief when the water left, and then swiftly put on the jacket. 

The campfire illuminated his back better, which was not really a sight Boothill needed or wanted to see again. The light bouncing off of his scales—a shiny black near his spine and tapered to sea blue then sea green elsewhere—would have been a nifty sight by itself had Boothill not noticed that the overlapping scars were different ages. Some skipped and stretched with the growth of new skin, laid underneath some of the scales, and the newer, thicker ones tore right through them. Boothill wasn’t one to speculate, but the uncomfortable question still tore through his brain like a bullet. How long ago did this happen? How many times did it happen? (Or worse: how long did it last?) 

Once he had his jacket on, pulled tight across his body with white knuckles, Dan Heng stiffly sat back down, near the fire. 

Neither of them had been prepared to come so close to a surprising load of shitty trauma that Dan Heng had, clearly, and likewise neither of them knew what to do about it. If it wasn’t fucking raining, Boothill was sure they would have left already, even if just to drag Dan Heng back to the Express. But nope, the freezing rain would have made Dan Heng worse, and Boothill… Well, that idiot softy trusted him to watch his back. What else was Boothill to do? 

But man, it would be a good time for them other Nameless to show up. Unfortunately, it made too much sense that situating that bastard’s likely abused captives would take time. 

“Fancy trick,” Boothill said with more trainwreck social grace. “Guess you’re warming back up.” In all of his clumsy kindness, he did not bring up that he could have done that to his shirt first, but eh, semantics. 

“Yeah. I’m just glad that worked…” Dan Heng sighed. 

“Eh? Never done that before?” Now, Boothill was no expert in all that magic stuff, but creating a solid dragon out of water (he was pretty sure) to fish out a cyborg from the icy depths seemed more impressive than flinging water out of some clothing. Odd learning curve. 

Dan Heng shook his head. “I’m still… learning.” 

Definitely an odd learning curve. “I guess even you old-as-fudge folk struggle to have free time, huh?” Boothill said lightly. 

But Boothill was fucking terrible at this whole ‘distraction’ thing because Dan Heng got that weird look again. To his credit, Dan Heng himself tried to shake it off, but the exhaustion that clung to him made the attempt more obvious than it should have been. “Time is…relative.”

“Hey, I’ve been curious. How old are ya’, anyway? Or is that an insensitive question to your culture, or some bull?” The one time Boothill had visited the Xianzhou, it was about a 30-70 chance for that question to be ignored or answered with a laugh, respectively, so it couldn’t be that offensive, right? Boothill could be somewhat sensitive if he wanted to be. And surely a regular-ass age, however old (his guess was no more than two centuries, because Dan Heng didn’t seem that old, relatively), would not be some dark subject. Right?

Dan Heng huffed a bit though, some sardonic sound halfway between amused and resigned. “...twenty-eight.”

Wait. “Forking wubbaboo, twenty-eight hundred years?!” And here Boothill thought he was prepared for the answer. 

“Ah, no… Just twenty-eight…years,” he corrected awkwardly. 

The real answer registered after a beat. That… that was worse, actually. Because not only did it mean that Dan Heng was two decades younger than he was, it also made him super young in Xianzhou terms, didn’t it? And all of those scars… Boothill had wondered, admittedly, how scars faded for long-life people, because they had looked way too fresh for a hundred years—but not that fresh either, including the fact that those kinds of scars healed like shit. Not to mention those older ones… Now, the timeline was downright chilling. If Boothill had the ability, he might have gotten a little nauseous at the thought. 

(Now Boothill wished the shithead(s) still lived, because he would gladly empty a magazine into them. For personal reasons.) 

“Dang,” he whistled instead, for once fighting tooth and nail to keep the violence to himself. It… would not help right now. “And already some fancy Nameless archivist guard. Pretty accomplished, huh?” 

Dan Heng relaxed a bit, and Boothill could have breathed a sigh of relief at finally not making things worse. “I’ve had help along the way,” he agreed, the soft fondness washing away the earlier admission that there had been a time when he clearly didn’t have that kind of support. 

But that past was just that: the past. Dan Heng had the Astral Express, and clearly, it did him some good. (There were methods other than pride and anger after all, it seemed.) 

The small bit of activity seemed to take it out of Dan Heng again, but overall, he looked more alive. And more relaxed, too. If Boothill moved a bit, or spoke, he was responsive, though sometimes with an odd delay. Just as long as Dan Heng did not look like he was about to freeze and croak (or panic…) then Boothill could consider this a successful defrosting. 

Something moved through the rain. Boothill heard the patter of rain hitting something different and footsteps through the mud. He had maintenanced his pistol since the defrosting started, and now he trained it for the entrance. “Someone is coming,” he warned quietly. Normally he wouldn’t bother, because a raised gun was a loud enough warning, but better careful than startling Dan Heng’s still slower than usual reactions. 

Dan Heng looked up, eyes and presumably ears set on the outside, shoulders tense. Despite Boothill’s sensors being awfully advanced (though definitely water damaged, based on the occasional crackle), Dan Heng seemed to locate the newcomer fairly quickly. And then he reached over to push Boothill’s gun down. “It’s Mr. Yang,” he said, tension fading. 

How the hell Dan Heng could tell, when the rain and environment would have obscured most tells, he had no fucking clue. But sure enough, the figure that emerged from the downpour was Welt Yang of the Express, wearing a raincoat. 

“There you are. Are you two alright?”

“Tch. I’m peachy,” Boothill deflected immediately. “Go check on your frosty lizard. He still ain’t completely thawed.” 

Sure enough, Welt focused solely on Dan Heng with a sharp expression, no doubt taking in everything from his half-wet clothes to his soaked hair. He knelt down next to him. “March told me what happened. This planet’s rain is one thing, but the temperature of the Aegis Sea is far too frigid, even for you. Especially for you, perhaps. How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” Dan Heng tried. Which might be true now, but it was one hell of an understatement, in Boothill’s opinion. 

Welt was surely a smart man, because he looked like he didn’t believe it either. But he was also a nicer man than Boothill, so he did not immediately call the guy out. Or maybe he didn’t have to, because Dan Heng wilted underneath the patient stare himself. “I’m fine now,” he amended. “Boothill helped.” 

Boothill pretended like he didn’t catch the grateful look that Welt sent him from over Dan Heng’s head. Things were awkward enough as it was. 

“That’s good.” He took out too small thermoses from inside of his coat. “I have hot broth and that springwater that Himeko sent down the Space Anchor when she heard what happened. Which do you want first?”

Dan Heng hummed. “...the springwater. I think my cloudhymn is almost back, though low. It’ll be better if I can somewhat thermoregulate first.”

Welt’s only reaction was to send a quick glance to Boothill, as if gauging his reaction. Dan Heng read between the lines quicker. “He knows,” he huffed simply. “It was necessary to pull him out of the sea. And convince him I was not… dying.”

It was at that point that Boothill realized that Dan Heng having been secretive with his Vidyadhara heritage was a purposeful thing, and not some shy introvert thing. Come to think of it… Dan Heng had always acted squirrelly whenever Boothill brought up him being from the Xianzhou. It hadn’t been overly obvious, since he never denied it, but he had been awkward, alright. At first Boothill assumed he just disliked the attention of being a long-life species away from the Alliance, but now… He thought of the plucked scales at his back. The folk of the universe got along more often than not, but Boothill knew first hand that wolves like the IPC or freaks like Dr. Primitive and whoever else were always far too interested in ‘rare’ species. Especially the powerful ones. The ‘useful’ ones. (The isolated and vulnerable ones.) 

“I ain’t no blabbermouth,” Boothill promised. About more than just the Vidyadhara thing, and he suspected that was the part Welt cared about in the first place. 

Welt nodded appreciatively, satisfied. 

After Dan Heng finished the springwater—which must be special or something, otherwise it seemed kinda pointless—he reached for his shirt finally, and did the same water trick. 

“Here.” Welt handed him the soup next, which should actually get that fucker warm. Although apparently the water helped him get his magic back, which was also his heat source? Eh, whatever. Boothill could stress less about the damn calculus problem that was Vidyadhara biology now that Welt was here. 

Once he wasn’t going to keel over in a few damn steps, Dan Heng walked a bit deeper into the cave to put his clothes back together in relative privacy. Ready to go himself, Boothill yanked himself to his feet. He didn’t fucking leak water anymore, even though his joints still felt off. Oh well. The rain wouldn’t make it worse. 

“Thank you for the help, Mr. Boothill,” Welt said, all cordial-like. “I’m aware you were tracking that… smuggler.” He scowled around the word. Anybody fucking would. “We can provide you with the direction his spacecraft left in, but I am afraid we only have so much. Still, we would be happy to provide you with the map data.”

It was mighty tempting. Boothill’s ship was a hell of a lot faster than merchant vessels, although it was highly possible that the smuggler bailed in a personal craft too. Ugh. Either way, he would be careful, high-tailing it from a Galaxy Ranger and the Express. The trail was definitely cold. 

Besides… what was that thing that Dan Heng had said? About collateral? It scratched at him worse now that he had a suspicion he just saw evidence of that ‘collateral’—even if it was only the fact that Dan Heng found refuge with the Nameless, and not his own people. Boothill still upheld the Hunt, but… well, even good Hunts needed breaks. Might as well use that break to clean up the mess along the way. 

“What about the ship he ditched?” Boothill asked instead, already knowing full well what that entailed. “How are them folks doing?”

“Some of them… are in poor shape, I am afraid,” Welt sighed. “Caelus and March are with them now. Fortunately, there’s a planet not far from here that Himeko contacted, that will host them until they can get home, or get on their feet. It’ll be some time until everyone is settled enough to leave. There’s a few, ah, language barriers, still.”

“We should have some spare synesthesia beacons left. I can go check,” Dan Heng said, silently returning like some damn spectre. Too much exposure to Rappa has made him immune to ‘ninja’ antics, but he could still gripe about it. 

“That would be helpful, Dan Heng, but please, don’t push yourself. Nobody would begrudge you if you simply wanted to go back to the Express to rest and warm up.”

Dan Heng frowned, and Boothill could have cackled at the familiar exasperation that finally returned. “I am perfectly capable of such a menial task.”

“Coulda’ fooled me!” Boothill heckled. “Well, there’s some crap on that ship’s servers I want anyway, so I might as well stick around and lend an extra set of hands. And make sure this one doesn’t freeze his brain cells again.”

“Boothill,” Dan Heng complained, but jokes on him, because his glare only encouraged Boothill.

Welt looked at him far too knowingly, unfortunately. Like Boothill had just admitted to being all soft out loud or something. Geez. “Then we thank you for your help, Mr. Boothill.”

Dan Heng sighed, sensing he was outnumbered. 

The trek back to the top of the plateau was not as bad as it could have been, when there was a less steep passage some distance from the water and some stone stairs installed by the locals. The stuff that Welt gave Dan Heng did a pretty damn good job at keeping him upright, and the raincoats he brought kept the worst of the soaked-induced chill back—and the rain out of Boothill’s own eyes, in lieu of his hat. (Fuck, he missed that hat already.) However, it was still a metric fuck-ton of stairs, and even though it was apparently a safer option than using those Space Anchor thingies, Dan Heng’s cold-sapped energy clearly started making itself known. He slowed down in irregular intervals, drifting closer to Welt until he started to practically lean on him. Fortunately, despite being seen with a cane sometimes, that guy clearly didn’t need it, and he shouldered Dan Heng’s weight without any difficulty. That said, ain’t nobody could go particularly fast at a drowsy lizard-fish-man’s pace, so Boothill made the executive decision to hurry things along. 

“Up you go,” Boothill decided. 

Dan Heng got the warning of telegraphed movements before Boothill plucked him off the ground and hoisted him on his back. In reward for his efforts, Dan Heng half-squawked and half-sputtered, but he did wrap a stabilizing arm around his shoulder instead of making a real effort to get off. That was probably why Welt only gave him a warning look instead of eviscerating him. (Although that warning look faded to a fond one real quick; Boothill was never going to salvage his reputation as a tough bastard in front of these Nameless, sheesh.)  

“He’s tiny. Ain’t nothing for me to carry him, even with these joints being all wonky,” Boothill defended. Human weight was nothing to this body anyway. 

“I am a normal size,” Dan Heng grumbled. 

“Whatever you say, short stack.”

Dan Heng grumbled again, muffled into his shoulder. It might not have been a Qlipothian or Xianzhou word anyway, because his stupidly persistent synesthesia beacon activated to helpfully translate it simply as ‘offended noise.’

Boothill grinned victoriously. 

Soon enough, the commandeered ship came into view before long. 

“Thank you,” Dan Heng said softly, hardly heard over the rain. It meant more than just dragging his exhausted ass up the plateau, Boothill surmised. It was too vulnerable for that. If Boothill thought about it too hard, he might break out into hives, though—never mind that he didn’t have skin anymore. So instead, he just released Dan Heng with a grin and steadied him until he wasn’t wobbly.

These damn bleeding-heart Nameless. They were rubbing off on him, until even the two halves of the creed of the Galaxy Rangers redistributed their weight in his mind. 

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing, though. Boothill had more room in his heart than he realized, to the point where it could fit more than just revenge. 

“Don’t mention it. That’s what friends are for, right?”