Chapter Text
Curly watches the window frost over, the gunshot ringing in his ears, his tears freezing over even as they form. The bulletproof glass turns white at the edges. Not like there’s anything left to look at. The foam, the dark smudges of what could be soot, rust, or blood. Anything of use has long been dug out from the panelling. The Tulpar is just like him now—torn open and adrift in the universe. Useless.
A ship with no hull. A captain with no crew. He thinks about them, what he might have done. He wishes he could say sorry. His gums taste like old meat and ethanol. He wishes he could say anything. The window shrinks into a distant square of light, the idea of a window, then the gap of a tooth, then a pixel. He can’t look anywhere else as it closes up.
In the dark, he hates Jimmy more than anything. His chest twists like planar collapse, and he hopes, selfishly, to die before anyone finds them.
“What would you have done?”
Anything.
Anything.
[SYSTEM FAILURE]
[SYSTEM FAILURE]
[SYSTEM FAILURE]
The entire ship shakes, black and red like the ring of the concussion, the strobing lights. Suddenly he’s standing again. He’s had nightmares about this. It makes him heave, god, all his limbs attached and his fucking fingers where there’s been negative space for five months. The dry scrape of skin, the callouses he’s never remembered long enough to find balm for, his fingernails and the hairs on the back of his arms standing straight up. A captain’s responsibility is to his crew. He tries to blink the icepick pain out from behind his eyes.
The airlock is familiar and each step on the weathered alloy echoes in his mind, a pulse, a crash.
Curly breaks into a run.
More shape than form, a collection of parts, like a discarded toy. A junkyard dog. His brain doesn’t recognize Jimmy when he reaches him. Refuses to.
“Jim,” he chokes. He doesn’t recognize himself when he opens his mouth. Out-of-body. Out of body; he has nothing left, and this is all an impossibility, and it must be something worse than déjà vu that speaks. The visceral, grainy drag of open nerve endings. “T-tell me you didn’t.”
Jimmy—his friend, his killer, his saviour —doesn’t move, hands braced over his scalp, the unwashed gleam of it, like fermenting meat. It’s a warped imitation of all the drills they did as trainees. Extreme weather. Intruder alert. Fire—
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
He remembers the burn of it, how the entire world became brighter than white, hotter than flame. The burn of exothermics. The flammability of meat [during chemistry class, Jimmy would sit to his left and copy off his notes] in a highly, highly, highly favourable reaction. Like moving through water; waking up lucid in a dream. Having all the pieces but not knowing where. If his closest, oldest friend shot himself, and Curly was still sitting in that cryostasis pod, then—
“I should have… I didn’t—”
Curly’s ears ring with the familiarity of it, the ghost words in his ghost mouth. Muscle memory. It happens when you die, he’s read articles about it, the seven-minute stretch of brain activity between being there and—being not. His skin burns vividly. He didn’t think it would feel so real.
“What the fuck did you do?”
The first time he said it, so many agonised, rewound nights ago, it had been with disbelief. This time it’s a lament. He laughs, a bitter, strangled sound, doesn’t try to hide it. Guess he’s learned nothing feels the way you planned once it actually happens.
Jimmy is silent. The ship roars around them. When he was alive, Curly hadn’t noticed any of it, too focused on fixing it, diverting disaster, doing anything he could to
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
Red fills his vision like he’s drowning, like he’s in Hell, his skin abuzz with adrenaline. He closes his impossibly whole hand around the door handle but something about living through all of it again, the memory wrapped around him like another layer of skin, gives him pause.
Our worst moments don’t define us, he remembers someone saying. How a moment can be minutes. Seconds. A thought ending in a decision faster than light travelling through space.
The metal handle is still warm from Jimmy’s touch.
He stands stock-still in the hallway, feet in cement, WARNING WARNING WARNING blaring like a second pulse. Remembers his face peeling away, how Anya had to cut away one eye and remove the other eyelid. Even in this nightmarish rehash of reality, it’s still too little, too late.
Jimmy’s done the unimaginable, sits trembling and waiting for annihilation. Curly’s done nothing.
“Why did you do it,” he says.
[TAKING RESPONSIBILITY]
There’s too much noise for Jimmy to possibly understand him, but the man suddenly turns his face up with a look like he didn’t expect Curly to still be here. Under the frantic emergency lights, it could be anything from rage to relief.
It’s the last face he saw before the cryostasis pod had shut. It’s a face he has known for years. It’s a face he has thought about for eons, the way your worst moments turn into loops on repeat, night after agonising night, a scratched record-d-d-d-d-d
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
Jimmy’s expression is darker than the space between flashes of warning lights. He sees every millisecond of Curly’s hesitation, not that Curly has the mind to measure out his movements. Jim’s always been good at reading him, liked to put him in difficult situations to see what he would do. Curly feels sick. A captain always goes down with his ship.
Instead, he reaches for Jimmy.
[KILLS NINETY NINE PERCENT]
It’s worse the second time. Knowing what’s going to happen and not doing anything to stop it. The first time he hadn’t known—didn’t have time to think—he hadn’t fucking known. It’s so much worse the second time. Like a veil has been pulled back, there’s nothing here except the stripped airlock and its LEDs, him and Jimmy. There was never any hope.
Jimmy refuses to meet his gaze. Curly searches desperately anyway. His eyes are wet. For one terrible second, Jimmy’s glints like his might be too.
[CRASH IMMINENT]
[CRASH IMMINENT]
[CRASH IMMINENT]
The force of it jolts through the airlock, the burnt smell of polyethylenes. After something terrible happens, there are always a few milliseconds of weightlessness—a moment suspended in impossibility. His stomach turns, a held breath waiting to drop. Then his skin prickles with the uncomfortable sensation of a space suddenly one or two degrees warmer than it had been, the entirety of the crash restrained behind the airtight seal. Like that, the rest of the world breaks through. The blaring alarms, the raised texture of the metal panelling, the hiss of foam as it burns in the incinerating heat.
His hands his face his legs his skin his mouth teeth bone to the bone he’s to the bone
The first one, or the one after, knocks him down. The aftershocks go until the alarm blows a fuse somewhere, leaving them in darkness even as tremors continue ravaging the hull. Distantly, his palms sting. His fingers are wet when he feels for his copilot, hoping he’s still there, then praying he won’t be.
The crew finds them huddled in the corner, bruised and bleeding. Curly has trouble focusing his eyes. He smells rust and copper and sweat, Jimmy’s and his own, the thought burning a hole through his mind that when they crashed the first time the only thing in between them had been the cockpit door. Thirty centimetres of metal the only thing between
[TAKING RESPONSIBILITY]
the heat of the sun and
[TAKE CARE OF IT]
the warmth of Jimmy’s body now, in the dark, the two of them alive.
“Autopilot error,” Jimmy croaks, shifting his weight from one armrest of his seat to the other. There’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead that gleams under the flickering lounge screen. He doesn’t look at Curly.
Curly feels so nauseous it doesn’t even belong to him, like it’s someone else’s stomach threatening to empty Pony Express trademarked dinner all over the ground. He can’t stand the feeling of his lips closed over his teeth. Can’t stand the sunset glow when he’s spent five months beneath the screen in the medbay, tossing and turning, feeling like something left to slow-roast. It used to comfort him, like the campfires from nights back on Earth. Now he can’t see anything but blood. None of this is right. None of it is real.
Swansea makes a face even less pleasant than usual. He’s built up a grudge against Jimmy since they started working together, five, six hauls ago. Curly’s been trying to mend relations between them. He can see by the set of his shoulders that Swansea doesn’t believe Jim.
“Yeah,” Curly manages. In the postcrash stillness, his voice sounds less like himself than ever. He presses on before the crew can figure out something’s really, truly wrong with their captain. Before he can fully think about what he’s saying. “Yeah, autopilot. It… it wasn’t responding. We couldn’t turn back on course.”
Swansea squints at them, Jimmy coiled in his chair and Curly standing to his right, too tense to sit. (To let anything touch his skin.) Their engineer looks the same as he always does. For as long as Curly has known him, Swansea’s had the same variation of a scowl glued to his face; couldn’t stand pleasantries. But he’s always been a good man. Curly thought everyone could be good.
[But what about HIM?]
(Anya sits at the corner of the couch, dissecting him with her sad, sad eyes, the way she did every evening in the medbay. Curly started hating it, at some point.)
The ship hums, the energy diverted to emergency protocols slowly filtering back into the standard maintenance systems. If Curly counts himself as familiar with the Tulpar’s ambient noise, Swansea can recite it in his sleep. Curly tries to swallow through a dry throat.
“... Piece of garbage,” Swansea finally scoffs. “Wouldn’t put it past Pony Express to send us out on a suicide mission like this.”
“Oh shit,” Daisuke says, hushed. “You think that’s why they fired us? Like—boom, get rid of the ship and crew in one go! That’s cold, man.”
Beneath the sunset his freckles look like bullet holes. Their intern isn’t old enough to drink, barely old enough to work. Curly almost didn’t let him on the ship. Almost. Almost. His skin crawls.
[TAKING RESPONSIBILITY]
Swansea doubles down on a frown. “Knew the inspection standards weren’t worth shit. I can’t work miracles, god damn it!”
Another lull. Nobody says the truth. That only people with no future end up with Pony Express in the first place. That going a thousand lightyears away from Earth for months at a time means there’s always the lingering possibility at the back of your mind—that you might not ever get back. That they’re all people with nothing to get back to.
Then Anya. She always speaks last, letting everyone else have their turn before her. Curly can’t bear to look at her. She had devoted herself to the [GODLESS] work of separating Curly from the foam. Gave him a handful of painkillers meant for migraines, a scrap of fabric to bite down on, and tried her best to preserve what skin he had left.
He didn’t have much left.
And then when she had locked one of the only two lockable doors on the Tulpar he had been unable to move or look away or stop her or look away
[KILLS NINETY NINE PERCENT]
“I can do an inspection, if you’re feeling well enough. B-both of you.”
They ran out of eyedrops before they did bandages. Curly scans the edge of the foam, newly hardened, blocking off a good portion of the kitchen cabinets and what must be the living quarters. He wonders if the packet dispenser was still accessible. It must be; he remembers the half-mixed plastic texture of what passed for food in the eyes of management before the crew switched to mouthwash. How long had that lasted?
He has to remind himself to blink when his eyes start stinging. It’s like his body has forgotten how.
An ignored truth is like the window in a sinking ship. Even as you look away the cracks grow, imperceptibly, then all at once. One unstoppable moment, like a flood. It’s absurd. It’s sacrilege. Curly is losing what’s left of his mind; he’s certain. But the truth is that there has never existed a reality like this—one where he survives the crash as himself.
Standing beneath the perpetual sunset, captain of a crew with no past and no future, he’s living a memory that hasn’t happened yet.
Four faces look at him, waiting for their captain. None of them know what he knows. The idea of it, the impossibility, aches in his mind like a muscle pulled too hard.
“Thanks, Anya. I’ll go first then.” Curly forces his mouth into a reassuring smile. Not even Daisuke looks convinced. “Just—going to check if the bathrooms are intact first.”
He has to get out of here. He just needs a minute to think—
He makes his way through the halls more by memory than sight. Pony Express never spared much breathing space for their living arrangements. The last time he had been down the hallway in its post-crash condition, foam lining the seams like burst intestines, Jimmy had been carrying him in his arms. Curly remembers his blood soaking through scarred-over skin to stain Jim’s white shirtsleeves. His stomach turns.
The bathroom to the captain’s quarters has been completely blocked off. The fading label of the communal one seems to mock him, untouched and unfamiliar.
Inside, the only light source is the green exit sign partially obscured by foam. It flickers every time the ship creaks, adding to his nausea and the certainty that he does not belong. He steadies himself on the cheap plastic tile of the bathroom, traces the caulk all the way around the corners. Collects himself. Captains are good under pressure. He’s trained for it. He’s going to be okay, he repeats to himself, and he believes it until he walks past the only mirror that survived the crash intact. It takes a second and a half for him to recognize himself as himself and another half to empty his stomach into the trash.
His mouth burns with the aftertaste of meat and stomach acid. No mouthwash. Curly stares at his reflection as it pants, a line of sweat going down a face he’s worn his whole life.
Without warning, the door slams open.
“There’s no cameras in here,” Jimmy says. “Thank god for privacy laws, right?”