Chapter Text
Life aboard the Wurst is different, in a lot of ways.
For starters, everyone looks different. It’s never hard to tell who’s who, even between him and Barry Syx. Moreover, there’s no real leader of the whole pack. Sure, Skip is the captain, badge and all, but he doesn’t act like any captain Nyne’s ever seen before. Even Margaret, who usually makes most of the decisions around the ship, doesn’t mind if people argue with her or try to change her mind. Everyone’s got different jobs and names and histories, and somehow they all just sort of mesh together and manage to make a team that’s almost as good as a batch of clones genetically engineered to do the exact same thing.
Almost as good.
“I’m hit!” Gunnie groans through the comms. “They got my legs with an EMP.”
“Got it, I’m coming for you,” Barry barks back. “Sid, cover me!”
“I’ve only got one more grenade—”
“I’ll reimburse you,” Margaret assures her, and a ribec later the whole compound shakes on its hinges.
Skip stumbles against Nyne, grabbing his arm to keep from falling. “Yeesh,” he mutters, looking back over their shoulders. They’re too far down the long, thin hallway to see much more than a tiny square of the atrium behind them, but the burst of smoke is not exactly encouraging. “This is… not looking great.”
“Nope,” Nyne agrees, not sure what else to say.
It’s a little weird being alone with someone else. Not like he and Syx are joined at the hip or anything, but Syx is probably the only person on the Wurst who wants anything to do with Nyne. Of course they all did the we don’t blame you speech and everything, but Nyne’s not an idiot. He sees how they look at him sometimes— or, more accurately, how they don't. Especially Zortch.
Nyne gets it. He doesn’t exactly like looking at himself either.
Out of everyone, though, Nyne’s sort of glad he’s found himself paired off with Skip today. Not that he doesn’t like everyone else, but there’s something about the guy that just gives off an easy vibe. He doesn’t really expect anything from anyone, which is a nice change from the others. Sidney and Gunnie are talkers, which is fine, but it means that Nyne can’t stand next to them for five martrons without having to think of something to say. And it’s hard to talk to Margaret without constantly thinking about whether or not she’s gonna bring it up in her one-on-one— hell, Nyne’s still not totally sure if he’s still in some kind of probationary period or not, and like fuck is he gonna ask her about it.
It’s kind of funny, really— Syx and Margaret are so different in pretty much every other aspect of their personalities, but when Margaret says something like so where do you see yourself in 20 cycles and Syx asks do you wanna talk about it, it’s transparently obvious that there is a right answer, and Nyne seems to choose the wrong one every time.
“Come on,” Skip says, nodding towards the wall at the end of the hallway. There’s a large, square metal panel welded into the middle, identical to the one on the other side of the ship. “We gotta move, Margaret’s probably already at her mark.” They start running, Skip’s footfalls uneven as he tries not to put too much weight on his right side.
On paper, the mission had looked pretty simple: sneak into an old, run-down UFTP satellite, hack into the ancient archive files, steal some confidential information, and sneak back out. But, as Nyne is quickly learning, simple isn’t really how the Wurst tends to do things. One very badly botched attempt at subterfuge against a Vercadian protector droid later, and they’d wound up on the wrong side of approximately three dozen guns. And now they’re out of ammo and very nearly out of time.
“I got Gunnie!” Barry’s voice calls, “we’re heading back to the ship!”
“Great job, get us ready for takeoff, this is gonna be down to the wire— Skip, I’m ready whenever you are,” Margaret says, right as Nyne and Skip reach the panel.
“Almost,” Skip calls back, sounding a bit breathless. He curls his fingers around the thin edge of the panel, but it doesn't budge. “Damn it,” he mutters, “Nyne, can you bust this thing open?”
Nyne doesn’t dignify that with a response— both because the answer’s obvious and because he’s not sure how to get that idea across without sounding like an asshole. Instead, he just rears back and jams his fist into the panel, denting a crater in the middle and wrenching the edges right off the wall. It falls to the hallway floor with a loud, clanging clatter that echoes off the tight, cramped walls, revealing a mess of wires, switches, levers, and buttons.
“Ready!” Skip shouts, tapping his comm piece, apparently not put off in the slightest by Nyne’s silent treatment.
“Gunnie, start running FTL,” Margaret commands. “Skip, do you see a big, yellow lever on the left-hand side? The one that says DO NOT PULL?”
“Yep—”
“Pull it, that’ll wipe the power from their security systems.”
Skip has to grab the lever with both hands to get it to move, but eventually he manages to pull the thing down by jumping off the ground and letting his weight do most of the work. With a groan of metal against metal, the lever falls at last, and in an instant the whole facility goes dark, save for a row of red, flashing lights lining the hallway. A shrill, high-pitched alarm sears through the air, and they both wince, clapping their hands to their ears.
“C’mon,” Margaret mutters, and Nyne can practically see her chewing her bottom lip as she types away, sifting through layers of encryption and legal jargon with practiced ease. “C’mon… c’mon— got it!”
“Hell yeah,” Skip cheers, clapping Nyne on the shoulder in an uncharacteristic display of camaraderie. Nyne stiffens, taking a step back, and Skip wrenches his hand back as if the gold armor burned his skin. “Oh, uh— sorry,” he says, awkwardly.
Nyne opens his mouth to say something like it’s fine or don’t worry about it or some other platitude that means nothing at all, but before he can so much as exhale, he smells it: gunpowder.
Wordlessly, he plants his open palm on Skip’s shoulder and plunges him down to the ground just in time— bullets slice through the air, missing Skip’s head by mere inches. One of them grazes Nyne’s armor, and the rest hit the walls, ricocheting off, filling the hallway with a cacophony of noise. It mingles with the bitter smell of gunpowder and the dizzying flashing lights to make a thick din of sound, smell, and sight.
“Shit,” Skip hisses, clapping a hand over the back of his neck. “Oh, we’re so fucked.”
Nyne grunts in agreement as the three— fucking hell, three— Vercadian droids blocking the end of the hallway begin to inch towards them, not even bothering to waste the fuel on rushing forward as they fire more shots down the hallway.
Nyne’s not a scientist, but he was cloned from one, and the near-atrophied part of his brain that was once designed to think critically kicks into life in a sudden burst of insight. These droids, like the rest of this rusty station, are old, battered, and running on reserves. They’re just as deadly as any other Vercadians, but these ones have been programmed to prioritize doing their jobs cost-effectively rather than quickly, and that means they won’t waste their bullets unless they’ve got a clear shot.
He hefts his gun up. “Get behind me.”
Skip obeys, still clasping his neck like he’s expecting to stop a bullet with the back of his hand. In an instant, the storm of bullets peters out, leaving nothing but the low, ominous hum of machinery as the droids slowly hover forward.
“We can’t take down three Vercadians on our own,” Skip points out, though he still pulls out his vibrodagger all the same.
“We don’t have to,” Nyne grunts. He takes a cautious step forward, keeping Skip as covered as he can, and watches the Vercadians follow his movement, their cybernetic eyes glowing deadly, steadily white against the red strobe light of the alarms. But they don’t shoot.
“Dash on three,” Nyne mutters, not taking his eyes off the droids. “Stay behind me.”
He can’t see, but Skip must nod, because he doesn’t make a sound.
“One,” Nyne breathes. “Two. Three.”
At the last ribec, he feels Skip’s hand clamp onto his back, clinging to his armor, and with a surge of adrenaline, Nyne kicks off, rushing towards the Vercadian droids.
It must happen in the span of ribecs, but it feels like it takes much, much longer to cross down the long, empty hallway and breach the line of droids, to hit his feet against the metal floor, to thrust his legs forward and back, carrying his weight and Skip’s together. The droids don’t so much as move as Nyne and Skip approach, but it’s not entering their space that Nyne’s worried about, moreso leaving it.
“Turn, turn, turn,” he yelps, trying to twist himself around as they crash past the line of Vercadians. He wasn’t exactly built with dexterity in mind, and Skip’s extra weight clinging onto his armor doesn’t help, but somehow they manage to spin around together, and then he’s running backwards, Skip stumbling behind him, out the hallway and back into the central building.
The air’s thick with smoke, further darkening the now completely unlit satellite station, but Nyne can hear the Wurst’s engines revving from the far side of the room, can almost smell the fuel burning. He’s only called the Wurst his home for a scant half-nargon, but it feels like he’s running his way back to safety, to familiar shelter.
“I can’t— believe— that worked,” Skip pants, letting go and sprinting to keep up with Nyne. “You know, we should work together more oft—”
For a fraction of a ribec, the air sizzles with a strange, fizzling electricity, and then, like the atoms themselves are being torn in two, it splits in a burst of deafening, thundering cold. This time it’s not the foundation of the satellite but the air within it that shudders, shaking Nyne to his core.
And Skip collapses to the ground, vanishing from sight beneath the smoke.
Nyne skids to a halt, dropping to his knees. Over the roar of the Wurst’s engines it’s impossible to hear anything but the thudding of his own heartbeat in his ears; the room blurs as his eyes start to water. “Skip!” he roars, thrusting his arms into the air, trying to clear the smoke away enough to see. “Skip!”
“Skip, what’s going on down there?” Margaret demands in his ear. “We’re set for takeoff, get back to the ship!”
Nyne fumbles with his own comm device; he’s never turned it on to broadcast before, but there’s a button near the back that he hopes is the on switch. He mashes it with his thumb, heart thudding. “Skip went down.”
There’s a pregnant pause, then, “Nyne?”
“Yeah—”
“What happened?”
“I— I don’t know,” Nyne stammers, trying again, fruitlessly, to wave away the smoke. “He must have gotten hit, but I didn’t see—”
Something extremely cold clamps itself around his ankle. Nyne bites back a shriek, yanking his leg backwards, and pulls Skip’s body from the cloud of dark, acrid smoke. He’s clutching Nyne’s ankle with one hand and looking down at the other where it’s cupped to his chest. Nyne’s first thought is that he’s pressing it to a wound, but as Skip gets closer, it becomes apparent that he’s holding his hand a few inches away from his chest, shielding something within it. He coughs roughly, hunching over.
Nyne drops to his knees, offering out a hand. “Come on,” he urges. “The ship’s about to leave, we have to go—”
Skip shakes his head weakly, and from this close Nyne can see the ends of his hair are sparkling white with frost. His legs, splayed behind him at odd angles, are unnaturally stiff, and at once Nyne realizes they’ve been frozen completely solid. The ice itself spreads even as Nyne watches, creeping up to his waistline.
“T— t—” Skip stutters, pulling on Nyne’s leg to try to pull his torso up. The hand cupped to his chest, too, is solid and unmoving, but the object within it is not.
With frigid, mounting horror, Nyne sees the telltale glint of dark, viscous slime oozing from between Skip’s fingers. And as a burst of gunfire lights the air, the slug itself is illuminated, the vile, bright green, eyeless, faceless, monstrous creature writhing pathetically in the smoke-filled air.
“Take,” Skip croaks— the real Skip, the real captain, the one who’s been trapped behind his own eyes all this time. Nyne’s throat fills with a thick, wet anger. For all the pity he’s let himself wallow in, at least he’d had a second chance in the end. Skip, his body freezing over, his lungs filling with smoke, might not be afforded even that luxury.
Nostrils flaring, Nyne raises his boot.
“NO!” Skip roars, and instantly winces, hunching over, his jaw tight. Behind the slug, his uniform is stained a dark red, but even as it spreads Nyne can see it icing over, deadly white fanning out in intricate patterns until his shoulders are coated in tiny, glittering crystals. Skip hikes in a sharp breath, shuddering. “Barry—”
Nyne goes utterly still.
“Please,” Skip croaks. “Barry, please—”
The station shudders as another explosion rents the air, this time from the Wurst itself. They’re using ship cannons to fire on the oncoming Vercadians— a proven tactic, but not at all sustainable. Skip barely flinches at the noise, instead focusing what looks like the last of his strength to hold out the cerebro-slug in his hand.
“Take him.”
Nyne swallows, hefting his gun into position.
“No,” Skip rasps. “Take him.”
Nyne searches between his eyes, both a dull gray compared to the bright, vibrant green they’d shone just a martron ago. There has to be something he’s missing, some message he’s just failing to read. Skip can’t mean what Nyne thinks he means, he can’t, because— because that would mean he doesn’t want the slug to die, and that’s not possible. But there’s nothing in Skip’s eyes that suggests that he means anything other than what he’s saying, nothing but a silent, hopeless plea. His face is ghostly white now, his ears tinged a faint, sickly blue, but still he holds out his hand, staring up at Nyne in desperation.
“Please,” Skip breathes, his lips barely moving. “He’s dying.”
It’s like being torn in two. The biggest, loudest part of Nyne’s brain screams at him to slam his foot down, to pull the trigger, to rid the galaxy of one more mind-sucking, life-destroying parasite and leave it better off for the loss. It’s strong enough to make him put his finger to the trigger, to tug it back with the slightest, hungriest bit of pressure, to see the image in his mind’s eye, the spray of green splattered across the floor, the smell of charred flesh mingling with the smoke.
But there’s another softer, quieter, part of him that has been sleeping for a very long time. It’s a part of him that’s more used to taking orders than giving them, that wants ever so slightly more to offer protection than exact revenge, and it’s the part of him that, he realizes only now, he has not let rear its head since his return to full control of his body.
And so, though every instinct in his body screams at him not to, Nyne reaches out and cups the slug into his hands.
It writhes against his grip immediately, squirming to get away, but Nyne keeps his grip as tight as he can without squishing the thing to death— sorely tempting though it is. The slug wriggles fruitlessly for another couple ribecs, apparently realizes it’s not going anywhere, and then Nyne’s stomach flips over as the slug starts trying to throw itself forward instead, clearly aiming for his face.
Nyne takes a very, very deep breath. Please don’t let this be a huge mistake, he thinks to the void, looking upwards though he knows he’ll find no pitying ear. And if it is, please don’t let me hurt Barry.
And he lets go.
There are so many deadly forces at play within the universe, whether they be sectarian, corporate, paramilitary, or religious at their origin. And from them are forged weapons of every fashion that deal death from metal, gunpowder, plasma, even crystalline energy itself.
How humiliating, then, that mere temperature has come for his life twice now, and very nearly succeeded both times.
It seems unfair that the cold had pierced through his true body so quickly, and yet the warmth, even as it comes now, is slow to penetrate through to his core. It takes all the strength he has to drag himself through the familiar cavity of the human skull, to nestle beneath the weight of the heavy, warm brain that pulses in its center, alive and electric, and to wrap his mandibles around the brainstem, tethering himself to this new anchor. The connection solidifies, and— Oh. Oh, that’s not ideal at all, is it?
For a singular moment, through the haze of cold and pain and darkness, he wants to laugh. And then the rest overtakes it, and he can feel almost nothing at all.
He is too weak to overtake control, to weak to do anything but hold himself in place, and with his last ribecs of consciousness, he sends to Nyne a feeble, psychic wisp of an apology.
There’s nothing quite as unsettling as the feeling of a full-grown, foot-long slug shoving itself up his nose and squeezing into the back of his brain. It settles with a horrible feeling of pressure right at the nape of his neck, giving his head an uncomfortable extra weight on his shoulders.
Worst of all, though, is the way his body settles into the sensations with a sense of deep, ingrained familiarity. Any moment now, he’ll feel it pulling his consciousness down into a deep, dark hole, and then it won’t be him in here anymore.
Nyne’s chest spasms of its own accord, shooting out a coarse, foreign-sounding bark of laughter. And then it recedes, just as quickly as it had come, and then—
And then nothing happens at all.
Nyne waits, for four long ribecs, but his eyelids still blink when he tells them to. His hands still open and close at his sides, one of them now uncomfortably sticky. His chest even rises and falls as he concentrates on the motions, and, great, now he’s gonna have to think about that for the rest of the day, isn’t he—
“Nyne,” Margaret barks into his comm. “What’s going on down there?”
The chaos of the room returns, the stinging in his eyes, the grit in his lungs, and the roar of the Wurst’s engines from the far hangar. There’s no time to stand here and wonder what the fuck is going on— he grabs Skip’s body, tucks it under his arm, and bolts towards the sound of the engines, heart thudding in his chest.
The Wurst emerges from the dark plumes of smoke as he nears, its door open wide, two figures waiting on the ramp. With a whistle, Sidney points out at him, and a moment later Aurora Nebbins races down the ramp. As always, Nyne has to fight the urge to bolt from the sight of her leg muscles bulging and her mouth agape, dripping with bright blue acid, as she careens across the satellite floor directly towards him.
He grabs onto her spines with one hand, keeping Skip’s body safely tucked under his shoulder with the other, and then Aurora’s racing back, galloping through the smoke, up the ramp, and into the open maw of the ship.
“Good girl!” Sidney coos, scratching her under the chin. Aurora’s tongue hangs between her teeth, oozing acid all over the hangar floor. Still scratching her, though taking care not to get her cannon wet, Sidney touches her fingers to her ear. “They’re in, Gunnie, take us out!”
“Roger that,” Gunnie calls back, and the ramp lifts up as the Wurst rises off the dock. “As soon as we clear the gates, I’m gonna jump us, so hold on to something!”
He’s a good enough pilot that Nyne’s not worried about the ship, but he is worried about the very frozen, very breakable Skip tucked under his arm. “Um,” he says, pulling Sidney’s attention away from Aurora.
“Hm?” She mutters, looking up. And then her jaw drops as she sees him. “Oh— oh, he’s all— he’s—” She blinks up at Nyne. “What happened?”
“Don’t know,” Nyne admits. “I didn’t see him get hit.”
Sidney rushes over and eases Skip out from under Nyne’s arm, trying to prop him up. But while his legs have been fixed in a wide position, his feet were frozen into place as he was lying down, so they’re not set at the right angle, and he promptly topples forward.
“Careful,” Nyne snaps, catching Skip’s body before it can fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Ooh, that’s bad,” Sidney winces, looking Skip up and down. She lingers her gaze at his nose, like she’s looking for something, but the moment she sees Nyne watching her she looks away, clearing her throat. “Here, I should take him up to Gunnie, he’s the closest thing we’ve got to a doctor.”
“He’s driving the ship,” Nyne protests. “Doesn’t he need to—”
Sidney waves him off. “He can multitask.”
Nyne opens his mouth, to say what, he has no idea— it’s not like he has any position of authority on this ship, after all— but before he can form a single word, there’s a pulse of something foreign in the back of his mind, something fragile, threadbare, and— remorseful?
It fades away in a matter of ribecs, leaving him with nothing but silence.
When the hangar bay swims back into focus around him, he realizes that Sidney is staring at him.
“What?” he mutters, folding his arms on instinct.
Sidney shrugs. “You just went real quiet for a moment there. You all right?”
And this, Nyne realizes with a jolt, would be the perfect moment to say, no, actually, there’s a fucking cerebro-slug inside of my head. In fact, it might be the only chance he has to talk to Sidney with his own voice before the creature gains back the capacity to overtake his body and pilot it for itself.
But as it stands, the facts are these:
Firstly: the captain, the real captain, had, with what very well may have been his dying breath, begged for Nyne to save the slug’s life. And— though Nyne’s muscle memory is still shouting at him to shove his finger up his nose to yank the damn thing out himself and squash it under his boot— something in his gut is desperate to understand why.
Secondly: if anyone on this ship knows he’s harboring a slug in the back of his head, they’ll rip it out of him and kill it themselves.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m.” Oh. Looking at her is suddenly extremely uncomfortable. He snaps his head to the side, staring out the window instead. “I’m fine.”
“O…kay,” Sidney says slowly. “Not super convinced, but I kinda got bigger stuff to worry about right now, so.”
She gives an awkward thumbs up, and then, hefting Skip under her arm, skates up the ramp and takes a hard left for the nav station, heading for Gunnie.
The ribec she’s out of sight, Nyne lets out a breath, slumping against the side of the hangar, feeling, not for the first time, unbelievably relieved that the crew’s resident psychic jumped ship half a nargon ago. After having something literally rooting around in his head for so long, the absolute last thing he’d needed was a psychic doing just that whenever they wanted, and from what he’s heard, Riva hadn’t exactly understood the concept of boundaries all that well. Of course, they still have Zortch on board, but Zorch’s psychic powers manifest themselves more in the ways of telekinesis rather than telepathy. At the very least, they seem less inclined to go skimming around their colleagues’ minds.
Not to mention the fact that they barely look at Nyne in the first place.
Point being, no one’s going to know what he doesn’t tell them, unless they think they need to go looking for secrets.
The ship pitches to the side— Gunnie’s either made a spectacular dodge or bumped his hip on the steering wheel— and Nyne catches himself on the railing, breathing hard. From the next floor he can hear the muffled sound of the gunner station firing off— probably a dodge, then— and Barry’s voice cheering something indecipherable. Nyne should join him; Sidney’s the other gunner and she’s busy dealing with Skip’s body, so they’ll need the extra hands.
He sets a foot on the first step. And then he stops.
It’s eerily quiet in the hangar. The insulation that keeps the open space at bay also keeps the sound from carrying over inside, and but for the faint churning of gunfire from the upper decks, it’s utterly silent.
Nyne swallows.
Hey, he thinks.
Immediately, he clamps his teeth down on the inside of his cheek, feeling stupid.
He doesn’t remember much from being under the other slug’s control, just that it had felt like drowning in vat water, thick and heavy and choking. But the few times he’d talked to it— or rather, it had talked to him— he hadn’t had to think at it to say anything. It had just dived into the depths of his deepest, most personal thoughts, and pulled out whatever it was looking for.
So, maybe this isn’t doing anything at all. Maybe he’s standing on the hangar steps, thinking to himself like an idiot.
But then again, who’s gonna judge him?
I don’t know what— or, I guess who— you are, he thinks, tripping over the words even in his own mind. And I’m not gonna lie, I really, really hate the fact that you’re in here. But.
He hesitates, unable to stop the picture from surfacing. It makes him shudder, the memory of Skip’s face, so white and pale and panicked. As the cold had overtaken him, he hadn’t begged for his own life, hadn’t pleaded for Nyne to try reversing the effects of the cryo ray. He’d asked for one thing, and one thing only.
Nyne swallows thickly. I’m gonna keep you safe, he thinks firmly. I promise.
And he might be imagining it, but from a tiny recess, in the furthest, faintest corner of his mind, he thinks he might feel a bare, nearly imperceptible bloom of gratitude.