[fic] untitled

[Salzella]

“Hey”

“…“

“Hey”

“…”

“Fine. Just lie there. Ignore me, I don’t care”

“…”

“I didn’t mean that last bit. We’re actually about to fly into an asteroid field and get fried. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“…”

“OK, I was lying there. I just came in to watch you sleep.”

Kera’s eyes snapped open. She rolled over and glared.

“Atton, I was trying to sleep.”

“Yeah, I know.”

A pause.

“So, what exactly do you want?”

He shifted.

“I wasn’t kidding before. We actually are about to fly into an asteroid field.”

* * *

 

Sometimes people just didn’t understand. They had their own problems, varying in scale, varying equally in the success in dealing with them, or lack of success in dealing with them then much success in rationalizing/explaining/trying-to-explain-but-reverting-to-rationalizing-them(ing) and they thought of nothing else. Atton was lonely and resented sleeping in the cockpit. Mira was cold. Bao-Dur was a mild-mannered tortured soul with an aggression shortfall. HK-47 was… himself.

They just didn’t understand. They all – HK-47 aside obviously – wallowed in pity or complained to others, whilst the other person complained back, neither realizing that were basically only talking to themselves, creating an external dialogue, pretending that they had not thought the same thoughts themselves about the same things, neither looking for an answer, neither finding one. It was, she thought, all rather depressing. The whole asteroid incident was almost an amusing diversion, causing as it did, another amusing diversion, this time to a nearby starport located in a waterfall. In. Not near, or even at the top of, but in. The light – on this world slightly greener than on a standard human world – came in through the bubbled structures that clung onto the cliff face after being refracted through the tumbling water, and threw strange, sometimes tortured shapes on all solid surfaces. The place was, perhaps not surprisingly, a haven for narcotics, legal or otherwise, and indeed several bars were given over to this very purpose.

Regardless, it was, being honest, good to get off the ship. Tempers had started flaring over tiny, insignificant incidents like the cleaning of the food synthesizer, the calibrating of the sub-prime analogue postulator (a pointless, thankless task). Even T3, normally mild-mannered, had started to snap, saying some horrible things to Bao-Dur during his check-ups. In truth it was a slightly surreal experience hearing a T3 put-down – it always sounded like he was blowing a raspberry.

She leaned back further in her chair, lengths of hair coming out of the knot at the back of her head and lazily falling across her face. She picked up her glass – fluted and crystal-clear – and inspected the liquid inside. She couldn’t understand the accent of the barman, and so had simply pointed at random. What she got was a rather appealing golden colour which swirled, slightly viscous, around in the glass, glinting and shimmering in the erratic light of the promenade. It smelled of pine resin and chocolate. She sipped, slowly, carefully.

It tasted, she thought, of how a forest breeze in the morning felt.

All in all, she felt, it could have been a great deal worse.

 

* * *

 

She stared at him, closed her eyes, opened them again, and he was still there, still standing there.

“What?”

“An asteroid field.”

She considered this.

“And why are you here talking to me?”

He shrugged.

She gave him a long, blank look.

“I’ll go and correct our course, then.”

He left.

She sat staring into nothing for a moment longer, then shook her head, brushed her hair away from here face and followed him.

 

* * *

 

Occasionally a piece of odd debris or a small animal would join the tumbling fall, thumping on the exterior of the building with a sorry-sounding thump. This happened, and she glanced up just as T3 rolled sedately across the shiny floor towards here. He beeped a short, perhaps slightly terse (she could never really tell. Understanding droid-speak was one thing, understanding how their artificial brains worked was quite another.) message and trundled off again. She finished her drink (surprisingly refreshing) and walked back to the space the ship had been dumped in, steaming slightly, earlier that day. She could hear raised voices.

Inside, Atton and Bao-Dur were arguing over the best way to fix the overheated power coupling in the engine room -

“What? Why the hydrospanner?

“Why not the hydrospanner?”

“Because it’s the wrong shape? It’d fry the wiring!”

“No it wouldn’t. The thermal torch definitely would anyway.”

“No it wouldn’t.”

- Whilst the item in question sat there, looking – falsely – benign and unmolested.

She sighed. They could never agree on anything, despite Bao-Dur knowing considerably more of such matters than an unshaven, bad-smelling space bum.

In the end, however, Atton somehow got his way. The thermal torch was chosen over the hydrospanner. Bao-Dur ignited it one, twice, to test it. He applied it to the broken coupling and –

* * *

 

The ship jumped to the left, banking sharply. A sharp, metallic sound came from somewhere near the engine room but at that point no-one really paid attention. Instead they watched, silent and poker-faced, as asteroids of all shapes and sizes flashed passes the cockpit.

Several minutes later, they were out, having taken one or two minor knocks. Atton went to check the engines, worried they had been overheated. It had. He had lost his hydrospanner several days earlier, but would not be seen dead being humbled by that pointy-headed technophile by having to ask for his. Instead, he twisted a button slightly, changing the connection so that a blinking light changed from red to orange, and gave the wire a careful yank. It came free slightly. It would require a thermal torch to mend, and when they went in to land, he would tell Bao-Dur this, and he would not realize that the careful yank had turned what was a slight fault into tearing in the wires that would require massive heat to fix, and that Atton would therefore both fix the engine, and put one over on the pointy-headed one.

He was, in all honesty, rather proud of this plan.

 

* * *

 

- it fused, spewing sparks that were a distressing mix of purple, yellow and blue. Bao-Dur raised a pencil-thin eyebrow at Atton. He shrugged.

Kera shook her head.

[machievelli]

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[Hallucination]

Gets my vote for saying 'space bum'.