Chapter Text
Elusca Pontop: Regard yellowblooded adult troll out cold in your food prep block.
After you hauled your new guest aboard and made him comfortable, you spent the rest of the afternoon picking his ship clean. If it didn't blow up like something out of a shitty action adventure vid during the time it took for you to drag its kicking, screaming helmsman onto the Carla, you figured it wasn’t gonna send you to the deeps any time soon.
An hour’s rummaging later, you determined the useful parts of the ship must have broken up and landed elsewhere. No food, no water, but the fire extinguisher and the pair of first aid kits were in good enough condition that your efforts weren’t a total loss.
You had no idea what to make of the electronics—a lot of it was already waterlogged to shit, but you grabbed what you could, stuffing random memory grubs and hiveports and detachable consoles into your modus. You were able to gut a couple of the consoles you couldn’t move, pulling out pieces of things you couldn’t name, but you figured at the very least you could pluck out the precious metal bits and sell them for scrap.
Many of the slimy bioware tentacle garland things were torn to pieces, (and twitching, ew) but you untangled the few that still looked in working condition and added them to your stash. You figured if you didn’t make use of them, your new friend might know what to do with them.
The last thing you took was the Captain’s chair. By then your modus was full and you almost strained your back carrying that fucker aboard, but that thing was so plush it was like sitting in a god’s palm and you always did have a weakness for chairs with wheels on them.
Now it’s dusk and your insomnia shows no signs of abating. You’re miles and miles from the crash, you’ve tidied up what you could of the mess you and your new guest made earlier, and you’ve got fuck all to do except stare at this emancipated scarecrow sprawled out all limp on your table.
It’s hard to believe this is the same creature who bit the shit out of your neck and shoulder not too long ago. Trying to hold onto him was next to impossible—he thrashed hard enough that you almost dropped him in the ocean twice. His struggles were full of false stops where he’d go limp and pant angrily, only to start kicking and bucking the second your grip relaxed. The moment he realized there was shit on your ship that wasn’t bolted down, he proceeded to make every effort to use his psi to throw everything he could directly at your head.
Squirrelly-ass little fuck.
You put a stop to that nonsense by grabbing your 101 Uses For Grubcakes cookbook and whacking him a good one upside his deranged little nugbone. His weird crackly eyes went all dark behind his weird goggles and he collapsed like somebody's shitty voodoo doll made out of twigs, and after making sure that his thinkmeat isn't coming out of his ears or anything, you left him to go scavenge.
Now, looking at him close up, you’re not so sure he's okay.
He’s got weird holes all over him that you didn’t notice before. The bigger ones on his arms have metal plugs on them, but the smaller ones on the backs of his hands are just ugly craters without any kind of cover. They look like they hurt.
His suit is ripped up. You can see another metal plug peeking out just under his collarbone. You peel back the fabric and hiss; he is covered in gooey cuts and scrapes.
“Damn.”
His face is the worst. His lips are bitten all bloody and he’s lost one of the teeth from the row that sticks out between them. There’s a gash going down his face that starts under his right eye and ends almost at his chin—that’s gonna need some stitching for sure.
You bite your lower lip. God, the poor asshole. His cheeks and ears are flushed an angry yellow that means burns. It’s nothing that’ll scar, you think, but you’ve been burned enough times fucking around with welding equipment that you have a pretty good idea of how much that shit must sting.
His goggles are cracked across both lenses. Gently, so gently, you pull them off—and oh holy fucking hell one of his eyeballs is popped out, oh gods, oh shitting squittering fuck. Your fingers jerk and you drop the goggles on his chest and cover your mouth with both hands.
It takes a second or two for it to click that it isn’t a real eyeball. It’s some kind of metal thing, a fake one they must have put in him. It occurs to you that you don’t know shit about helmsmen or why this one would have a fake eyeball. All you know is this is hideous as fuck; you were never good at dealing with eye squick.
It’s gonna have to come out, though. It’s too far out to put back in right, and the eye itself is missing some of its outer plating. You think replacing it shouldn’t be too hard—you’re pretty sure you saw someone with a bowl of these bionic eye things the last time you were at market.
You’re glad he’s still out cold so he doesn’t have to see you turn your back to him and do a shuddery grossed out dance right there in the food prep block. Euuuuggghh.
Okay. Deep breaths. The sooner this shit gets done, the sooner you can patch the rest of him up and then go fix yourself a motherfucking drink.
You stare at your hands until they stop shaking, and then you pull open a drawer and take out a pair of pliers. Maybe if you were lucky it would all come out in one piece and you wouldn’t have to worry about random wires or metal bits causing an infection somewhere you couldn’t reach.
You fit the pliers at the base of the eyeball and pull carefully. Nothing.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck—”
You grimace and make yourself pull a bit more. There is a smooth, slick giving sensation and you’re aware that your hand doesn’t feel like it’s your hand anymore. You’re floating, dizzy, and your fingertips are tingling.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”
Then rest of it slides out with a faint wet sound and all at once you’re holding a mechanical eyeball and its stem. You stare at it stupidly. You won the prize, it’s you!
You’re gonna be sick.
You drop the eyeball and the pliers into the trash bin and spend the next few minutes hunched over the sink until you’re sure your legs can hold you up. Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if he woke up now, with you dry heaving and shuddering all over.
You’re relieved to find he’s still unconscious when you approach the table again, that bruised, empty socket looking all sad and droopy.
That won’t do. But it’s not like you have an eye patch or anything to cover it up with.
Inspiration strikes. Dialing up your modus, you remove an impulse purchase from the last time you were at market: a small plastic bag of small rubber balls you meant to give to your lusus as ablution toys.
You pick one out and wash it first with rubbing alcohol, then with water, before easing it into the empty socket. You are surprised and delighted to find it’s a perfect fit.
You picked this one specifically because it’s orange, which you think complements his natural eye color. There’s also a tiny smiley face where his pupil should be.
That ought to cheer him up some.
You take in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Being a docterrorist was fuckin’ hard, and you still have so much more to do.
You notice one of his smaller horns is chipped and wince, awww, that’s gonna hurt like fuck when he wakes up. Your brows furrow. Did that happen during the crash or when you clocked him with the cookbook? You can’t remember.
Either way, it’s a damn shame. The longer you look at it, the sadder you become. Poor skinny fuck, he’s all lopsided now. There’s something downright tragic about seeing that little nubbin with the tip all jagged and the crack down the middle; it would never match its tiny rightways brother again.
He’s just a bundle of bones, really. It’s easy to see that now, with him being all still and quiet. Frail as anything. You watch his narrow chest rise and fall and remember how you could feel him hyperventilating when you carried him over. The way he carried on, you would’ve thought he thought you planned to serve him with salad and eat him raw.
Poor thing must have been scared shitless.
The thought makes your chest tight. Even though he’s taller than you, the urge to fold up his long, bony limbs and cradle him against you is so strong it aches. You want to tuck him away somewhere dark and secret so the universe can’t shit on him no more. You want him to tell you everything, purge his little bloodpump clean, and when he’s done you’ll wrap his soul up in so many bandages he’ll forget what it’s like to hurt.
In short, you’re so pale for this troll it’s stupid.
Snickering at yourself, you remove the first aid kit from your modus and rummage around. Inside you find disinfectant, wet wipes, burn cream, bandages, gauze, needles, painkillers, and a precious six ounce bottle of horn cream. You’re going to have to make that shit last until you can find more, or you might have to get creative with engine putty and epoxy tape.
You crack your knuckles and smile down at your new diamond bro.
You have work to do.
Some hours later, you’re putting a kettle on the thermal hull when your buddy finally stirs. By now he resembles a scrawny mummy where you got a bit thorough with the gauze, but at least you’re pretty certain your stitching is decent. He emits a thin, hoarse groan and squints at you.
“Hey brother,” you say. “Grubcake?”
Helmsman Galgal: Fondly regard semi-conscious landscape.
Conscious thought comes back to you in gauzy fragments. This realization in itself is a surprise--you weren’t expecting consciousness, not after you sent the Sunslammer and its inhabitants hurtling planetward for a surprise seaside jaunt. The last thing you remember is blinding lights, the sting of smoke in your throat, the glorious crescendo of dozens of sirens and alarms, the frantic, futile machinations of your crew, and then your Captain--oh fuck yes, this is the best part--huddled beneath his desk with his hair and eyebrows on fire and his soiled pants split along the asscrack.
Even here, now, floating in this befuddling colorless cloud, you feel a tingly wave of vindictive satisfaction warm you all over.That image, you think, is something that’s yours, an exclamation point on the end of your lifespan, a last fuck-you to an uncaring universe, something to take with you into the dark and whatever else awaits beyond it.
Your only problem is that you have no idea what or where this even is.
Slowly, you put yourself together. Your name is Enkidi Galgal. You are eleven sweeps old. You used to be a troll, before the upgrades. You’ve spent most of your life since then hooked up to biowires, receiving hard knocks from your subroutine nanny and getting your nutritional goop from a feeding bag. Now you are a banged up, displaced bit of machinery, unhooked, useless. Back to being just meat.
You should, by all intents and purposes, be cold meat.
You are not cold meat. You are cocooned from legitimate wakefulness, capable of thinking only in dozey snatches, but you are here, and you are you. You know this because the meat can feel pain. It comes from very far away, but it’s getting closer by the minute.
There’s some part of your brain blaring ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR, but against all odds, you are very much alive.
For a pumpbeat or two, you are incredibly frustrated. That was supposed to be it, your big ending, and now existence marches on with all of its loose ends and abrupt, anticlimactic conclusions. If your murder-suicide was a book, you’d throw it across the room in disgust.
Then the panic sets in. You’re alive. You’re in pain. That means you can feel. That means you can be punished. They can punish you for a long time before they kill you. If they kill you. They can turn you into a screaming torso, blind and deaf to the world save for when they sent orders directly to your brain. They can put your thinksponge in a box and keep you alive and awake for sweeps, and there you would be until some clot or burnout finally, finally ends you.
“...rrroooootheeerrrrr, grrrruuuubcaaaake?"
Oh god. Bits of you are coming back online. You try to curl yourself away from the pain, the increasingly intelligible sounds, the distant but unmistakable sensation of someone touching you, but it’s no use. The cloud dissipates, leaving you lying on your back and staring uncomprehendingly at a ceiling you’ve never seen before.
You’re seeing it out of one eye, because the good one is broken. Not offline. Broken. You’re certain of it. There is absolutely no input coming from it, no infrared, no electromagnetics, no stream of info from its interface telling you minutiae about your environment. Your entire head is silent, in fact. No information, no orders, no subroutines. Nothing but your own pulse all thick and sluggish in your ears. For a second or two, disgust overpowers the rising panic. You can hear your blood . Gross.
So your camera eye is a dead bit of metal in your gross meat eyesocket now. You roll the other eye wildly, trying to identify something, anything that might tell you where you are. Nothing looks familiar. Nothing even looks sensical, and the longer you try the more frightened you become.
Then you can’t ponder the mystery of the ceiling any more than that, because now there’s nothing shielding you from the pain, and your pain comes in many flavors: burns, scrapes, bruising, sprains, damaged tendons, and you’re pretty sure at least a few of your fingers are broken. Your ports are inflamed. It hurts when you breathe. It hurts when you swallow. It hurts when you curl the gross meaty toes you suddenly have instead of starship parts.
But the worst of it overshadows the rest--a constant throbbing, nauseating ache radiating down from your horns and into your braincase. It’s a deep, intimate kind of pain, and dread churns in your guts as the extent of your injuries begins to dawn on you. Words flit through your mind: Cracked. Pulverized. All the way down to your nubs. Damaged keratin, rotten cores. Infected nerves. Amputation.
It’s a pain that means trouble. It’s a pain that means maintenance, the bloody surgical kind.
Oh, what did you do to yourself?
The sound of someone puttering around turns your blood to ice, and you go utterly still. Light, cool fingers touch you. Some new technician? You flinch and try to writhe away, but all you can manage is a weak twitch. Every muscle in your body shrills in protest and for a moment all you can do is close your eyes against the pain.
You breathe. There is talking, but you’re too out of it to discern what they’re saying, only that it doesn’t sound immediately threatening. Do you know them? They don’t sound like any of your mechanics. It couldn’t be one of your mechanics because your mechanics are at the bottom of the ocean now, where you should be.
Then they’re gently dabbing at the tears that squeezed past your lids with a soft cloth, and this unnecessary little act, this gentleness, lights a bright, insane rage in you. You just crashed an entire fucking spaceship and this person is babying you like you’re a lost little foundling mewbeast and who gave this no rank having tendril jockey the right to EVER touch Imperial hardware?
You emit a strangled snarl and bite at the nearest thing. This is hard; lunging upward hurts like a motherfuck and they’re on your blind side. At first your teeth only catch briefly on skin, but then you move again, your neck arching so that you strike like a viper, and this time your teeth sink home.
“FFFUCK.” says the weirdly familiar voice.
You growl deep in your throat and clench your jaws harder, grinding in your teeth. You taste thick salt blood. You’re sure you have their wrist, you can kind of feel their fingers twitching near your face, the arm jerking as they try to recoil away, but no answering strike comes.
Slowly, you roll your eye up to look at their face. You take in the long, branched horns, the finned ears, the tiny transparent seadweller teeth, the unmistakable white and gray facepaint. She looks back at you, trying gamely to turn her agonized grimace into something resembling a reassuring smile.
You are up to your gums in Highblood. Without really thinking about it, you move to grip her arm tightly with both hands, like a woofbeast with a bone.
“H-h-heeeyy, hey now!” she says shakily, all bright, false cheer. Underneath it, you sense an unmistakable attraction toward you, compelling and tender and deeply worried, (not for herself, but for you) and somehow you know--you just know--that she would let you bite her fucking arm off before she’d hit you for it.
She pats your cheek, and it’s only because you already have your jaws clamped down that you don’t try to snap off a finger. “Shhhshshshsh, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, you ain’t got nothin’ to fear, you’re safe with me, I ain’t gonna do you any kind of harm, okay? Just--ngghhk--just you leggo and relax yourself, baby, this hurts like hell!”
You decide that you hate her.
This merry painted hellgod worshiping fuck doesn’t know what it’s like to hurt like hell, but you’ll make sure she does before she inevitably kills you. You are going to bite crescents into every inch of her skin until you hit bone. You’re going to throw her, bounce her off the walls and ceiling, and then you’re going to claw and punch and hit and bite and bite and bite and bite, and it won’t be even a fraction of what you’ve been through from the likes of her, but you’ll do your best to give as much of it back as you can to this baffling, infuriating, STUPID idiot fuck who would drag you back to unwilling life and smile at you like that, you hate it so much, you hate it, you HATE --
Searing pain behind your eyeballs. For a split second you even feel it in the dead camera eye. It’s enough that your jaw wrenches open again, and you scream as your resurrected subroutine gives you the spanking of your life. Shocks crackle through you, you inexplicably smell peppers and blood, and when it’s all over, you’re on the floor, your head in her lap as she pets your hair and murmurs nonsense things over and over. Her arm is bleeding freely, but she doesn’t seem to care about that right now.
Your gross flesh bulb of a nose is bleeding. You’ve bitten your tongue. Your bloodpump is doing a fluttery, jittery dance in your ribs. You’re pretty sure that if you hadn’t already voided all the sustenance in your body, this latest punishment would have had you puking and shitting simultaneously. Your fingers keep spasming, locking up, then spasming. From far away, you can see your legs and feet twitching gently, like someone doing a soft shuffle dance.
It’s then that you notice that, at some point, this sadistic woman wrapped you almost entirely in gauze from head to foot.
“Hey baby, you with me? Just you breathe. It’s all gonna be okay.” Chilly fingertips brush your bangs off your forehead, mindful of your horns. “I see you, brother. Whatever had you out there, it ain’t gonna get you in here.”
I’m in hell, you think, and pass out.