#neither snow nor sleet nor space pirates nor hail

[antilocaprine]

I got an anon ask that wondered if I had any plans to continue this prompt fill, which is an AU of my already-an-AU Among Us/HLVRAI crossover Some Stars Are Not Enough. This is the result. (You don’t have to read Some Stars to get this, but you should read the prompt fill linked above, since this picks up right where that leaves off.)

45% Chance

The ship groans around Benrey as he sprints through the corridors. This time, he’s literally going through them - with no humans left on the ship, he’s free to clip through the structure. It slows him down a touch, since he needs to make sure nothing is exposed to the vacuum of space before he steps into it, but he’s got all his senses flared out like a net, his form warping into a dish-like shape with limbs in order to catch all the information he can get before he reaches the lab and the spacewalking suits.

Something cracks on the other side of the bulkhead he was just about to cross into and he jukes to the right, pounding through several hissing pipes and another bulkhead. He stumbles out into the lab and steps sideways to get himself free of the bed he’d walked into. Casting a frantic glance around, he lunges for the spacesuits and wrenches them out of their cabinet, breaking the door lock so he can pull them free. 

The lock floats by his face and he pauses to stare at it, then at the rest of the room. The lab is a mess of floating jars and colorful liquids that are coalescing into wobbly balls, drifting aimlessly through the air. The gravity is failing, and that means the second reactor is close to failing, too. Benrey moves faster.

There isn’t enough time to try to rig the suits together. Benrey jams himself into the biggest one, which will allow him to keep his own suit on with its auxiliary oxygen pack. However, that means he’s down to two arms and two legs - the spacewalking suits weren’t designed to change with him.

The screaming alarms rise in pitch and distort, then fall silent with a strangled chime. Benrey whips his head around and listens. There is a faint whine coming from the rear of the ship, which is now below him - he had to brace himself against the wall to get into the suit in the failing gravity. The reactor is going, and he’s running out of time.

He’s not really sure what his plan was beyond this. He’s in a suit that will give him four hours of oxygen on top of the two hours of oxygen his own everyday suit contains. (The people who sent them on this mission - the humans, not the Supervisors - figured if something in the ship broke and they lost oxygen for over two hours, it wasn’t going to be fixed. Why waste resources?) Benrey’s own, ahem, unique physiology means that he can use the same amount of oxygen for about twice as long as a human. It’s still probably not going to be enough.

The ship groans in protest of what’s happening to it. Benrey feels a bit bad - it’s not the ship’s fault it was chosen for a mission that was doomed to fail. They’re all just playing pieces in a bigger game that none of them know the rules to. It’s not fair - but what is?

Gordon’s shocked face flashes through Benrey’s mind, and he takes a sharp breath. He shouldn’t leave it like that. If there’s any way to get back to them - 

Probably not quite a 45% chance, now. Maybe 20%, at least? Benrey’s not great at calculations, but he can probably swing 20%.

The ship screams and something wrenches. Suddenly, half of it falls quiet.

“Hull breach,” Benrey hisses. “Fuck.”

He shoves the huge spacewalking helmet between his legs, locking his ankles around it. Upside down in the far corner of the lab, he pulls his torso out of the spacewalking suit and shoves more arms out, catching the walls and ripping them free. Rivets ping loose and tumble through the air as Benrey curls the walls around himself. He doesn’t need a lot of room - just enough space to keep all the suits folded inside with their fresh caches of oxygen. The tricky part will be getting a solid enough seal to maintain the atmosphere with no gaskets and no external bulkheads.

Unless…Benrey glances up through the narrowing space above his head. If he can reach the right wall panel, then maybe he could get a secondary layer. He’ll have to move quickly, though. Already he can hear cracks forming in the nearby bulkheads.

The vacuum is closing in.

 *   *   *

“Dad? Shouldn’t you put your helmet back on?”

Joshua’s voice is shaky, and Gordon snaps back to himself. He’d been floating away, his eyes on the porthole window of the escape pod that is rocketing away from the stricken spaceship.

“Yeah - yes, right.” He shoves the helmet back on and engages the locks with a hiss. Then his eyes flick to the control panel and he curses. 45% oxygen? That must be what Benrey saw, what made him back out. Just Gordon and Joshua will be okay, but adding another adult would have shortened their conscious time by a potentially lethal amount.

“Is Benrey gonna be okay?”

The pod is traveling on a surprisingly straight path, and Gordon can still see the ship. The pod must be rotating - or the ship is, because it’s tilting nose-down in the porthole view. He finds himself thinking about terrestrial ships sinking at sea.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Gordon reassures his son, though his voice is strangled.

He feels like he’s going insane. Benrey kissed him. What the fuck?

“Oh. Okay.” Josh looks around, but the jumpseat harness keeps him from moving too much. “Where’re we going?”

Gordon glances back at the control screen. “The pods are all - uh, they’re programmed to rendezvous with each other to form a raft. Then they’ll send out a distress signal, and someone will pick us up.”

“Okay.” Josh kicks his feet. “Um. How long?”

“It depends, buddy. Might be in ten minutes or two hours, or tomorrow.” Or a week, but Gordon isn’t going to mention that. Hopefully someone had gotten off a long-range distress signal from the ship’s transmitter while he and Joshie were locked in the stargazing room. Otherwise they’ll be at the mercy of interplanetary shipping schedules. All the planet-to-planet people transfers are limited to once a month, and they certainly don’t have enough air to hold out that long.

“Okay,” Joshua says, sounding preoccupied.

Gordon knows that tone. He tilts his helmet against the shoulder harness to look over at his kid. “You have to go to the bathroom, don’t you?”

Joshua nods. 

Gordon sighs and checks the control panel. “Can you hold it for ten more minutes? We’re supposed to dock with the rest of the raft then, and after that you can get up and use the cubicle.”

“Can I go now?”

“No. If we get knocked around by something you could get hurt.”

“Okay,” Joshie sighs, and Gordon stretches himself up to peer back at the ship, now inverted in the pod’s window.

It looks…weird. Some sort of vapor is coming off the snout, and it’s tilting away from the wispy trail.

Gordon breathes in sharply through his nose. That’s atmosphere. The ship is venting atmosphere, which means there’s a hull breach, which means -

“Shit,” he swears under his breath.

“Huh?”

“Nothing!”

Joshua seems like he’s ready to protest, but Gordon holds a hand up. “I’m - watching the numbers, okay?”

Apparently that sounds boring enough to satisfy Joshua, and he ducks his chin and pats his legs in an off-kilter drumbeat.

Through the window, the ship cracks in half. 

Gordon’s muscles are so tense his vision is starting to darken around the edges. His heartbeat is pounding in his ears, and he forces himself to breathe steadily as he watches the front half of the ship droop, then disconnect from the back half. A burst of debris is expelled from what must be the cargo hold - Gordon clinically picks out chairs, gas cans, crates, and tables.

He doesn’t see another pod. He’s not sure there were any left. Benrey was bunking with Tommy, and Tommy’s pod is blinking in the image of the raft on the control panel, so that means that, unless someone else hopped into that pod and left their own, Benrey’s trapped on the dying ship.

He must have a plan, Gordon’s sure of it. He must. There’s no way he would have sent Gordon and Joshua away without having a plan - right?

But he’d kissed Gordon. And it felt like a goodbye. It feels more and more like a goodbye with every passing second, as Gordon watches the field of debris expand into the vacuum of space. 

“Dad, can I -”

Gordon can’t pay attention to what Joshua says, because at that moment, the ship explodes.

It should make noise, he finds himself thinking wildly. It should be making a sound, or there should be a shockwave that hits the pod and sends it spinning. But this is the void of space, and all there is is a bloom of terrible light that obscures the intact rear half of the ship. When it clears - fire can’t live without oxygen - the entire stern of the ship is so much blackened debris, scattered chunks of bulkhead tumbling away in all directions. Without air resistance, their momentum will keep them going practically forever. Maybe someday, one of them will end up crashing through the atmosphere of the planet the ship came from. Maybe someday, some tiny remnant of their vessel will find its way home.

The pod’s transmitter crackles with static. “...Freeman! Mr. Freeman? Can you hear me? Mr. Freeman, come in!”

Gordon reaches out and hits the transponder button with numb fingers. “I can hear you, Tommy,” he says, voice hollow. “Can you see -”

He can’t finish, but luckily Tommy doesn’t need him to. “We saw it. You’ll connect, um, you’ll be docking with us in just a second.”

Sure enough, a heavy clunk sounds through the bulkhead behind Gordon’s jumpseat, and the whole pod shudders. Some sense of motion that he hadn’t even noticed ceases. He twists his head around, but he can’t see past the helmet, and there’s no window back there, anyway. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what to think.

“Fucking finally,” Forzen’s voice snaps through the static. “What took you so long?”

“We were trapped,” Gordon rasps. “On the observation deck. The doors locked on us.”

Several voices clamor at that, but Gordon can’t pick any of them out.

“Dad!” Joshua whispers. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Yeah - yeah, go ahead.” Gordon unclips his own harness at the same time as Joshie does, but he kicks away from the jumpseat and plasters himself against the window.

In the distance, the ship continues to drift apart.

Tommy’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Mr. Freeman, is Benrey with you? He’s not showing up on the scans.”

Gordon swallows. “No,” he chokes out, then stops. What else can he say? They already know he’s not with any of the others.

“Oh,” Tommy replies, and then he, too, falls silent.

“So…maybe he’s the one who sabotaged the ship,” Forzen says after a moment, and Gordon’s vision whites out. Luckily, several other voices are jumping to Benrey’s defense, Dr. Coomer and Bubby flinging curses over the channel and Darnold’s voice trying to call for calm.

“It wasn’t him.” When Tommy speaks, the others go quiet. “One person couldn’t do that. Watch - look at it! It was broken from the start.”

The others go quiet, and Gordon’s throat is hot and thick with grief and fury as he looks at the desolation. Benrey was supposed to get out of that. How could he just kiss Gordon, push him away, and then - and then die?

How dare he?

“I got a signal out before the, um, the ship’s communications went down,” Tommy continues. “My - um, I mean, we should be getting picked up soon.”

“How soon is soon, my dear Tommy?” Dr. Coomer’s normally jovial voice is tight.

“Um, really soon.”

Light blooms across the pod window again, and Gordon flinches back, squinting into the glare. This isn’t the dirty yellow-orange glow of an explosion - this is the clean white light of a spaceship.

“Is that a courier?” Forzen’s tone is disbelieving. “Is that a fucking courier? Who the fuck heard you and has the clearance to re-route a fucking courier -”

His voice cuts out with a screech of static. 

Please stand by, the courier says in a gentle voice. You will be relocated shortly.

“Dad?” Joshie has finally emerged from the tiny restroom cubicle, and pulls himself along the wall to reach Gordon. “Who’s that?”

“It’s a courier,” Gordon says blankly. “They’re - living ships, with a mind and everything. They’re the fastest commercial vessel in the quadrant.”

Joshua peers through the window at Gordon’s shoulder and gasps. “Is that our ship?”

“Um-”

“But where’s Benrey?” Joshie twists around to look up at Gordon in distress and ends up knocking himself loose from the wall. Gordon catches him as he floats by upside down. Zero-G is weird. “He was supposed to follow us - you’re supposed to get married!”

“What?” Gordon sputters, completely derailed.

“He kissed you, so he has to marry you!”

“He did WHAT?!” Several voices shout in unison from the control panel.

“Fuck,” Gordon swears vehemently. He’d thought the courier had cut them off, but apparently it had just overriden their speakers for a moment. “Uh - nothing! It’s not - it doesn’t…matter.”

He clenches his teeth and listens to the others yelling at him. 

“Is Benrey okay?” Joshua whispers.

Gordon bites the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know,” he says quietly, even though he does know. No one could have survived that explosion. Hell, he’d probably been killed when the ship broke in half and started venting atmosphere. 

He’s probably been killed.

The pod shudders, and Gordon’s boots hit the floor with a clank. He curses and stumbles, juggling a suddenly-heavy Joshua, and they both nearly fall before the gravity slips and they tumble weightlessly up into the air again.

My apologies, the courier says calmly. Please be seated for relocation.

“Shit - sorry! Let’s strap in, Joshie.” Gordon kicks off the wall and fumbles them both into their jumpseats, fastening Joshie’s harness, then his own. He looks over at the control screen to see that the raft of pods has detached and is rising in a steady line into the bright spot of the courier above them. 

Are you fully secured? The courier sounds slightly tetchy. 

“Yes - sorry, yes, we’re strapped in,” Gordon replies, and the weightless feeling disappears as the courier pulls them into line. On the control screen, Gordon can see the first two pods already vanishing into the courier’s cargo hold.

Thank you, the courier replies blandly. Gordon catches a glimpse of the vessel’s hull as the pod passes by, and it is just as sleek and white as the advertisements make it seem. Then the hold encases them and his view of space is cut off by the darkness of the ship’s interior.

The pod slows, then settles with a clank as some sort of mag-locks catch it with a hum. The view outside the window spins, then flips, and then Gordon can see two other pods facing him across the open hold.

Please remain seated and secured while retrieval continues, the courier says.

“Continues? Who’s missing?” Tommy asks. “Mr. Freeman?”

“We’re here,” Gordon replies. One by one, the rest of the crew responds.

There is one more signal to retrieve, the courier says.

Gordon freezes. “Who is it? Can you hear -”

One moment, please, while the signal is boosted. The courier sounds tired already.

Static buzzes, then resolves into the monotone beeping of a spacewalking suit’s emergency beacon. 

“No fucking way,” Forzen growls, but even his bad attitude isn’t enough to keep Gordon’s heart from lifting in his chest. 

The beeping stops. And now that Gordon thinks about it, it hadn’t sounded like an actual machine beeping so much as someone saying “beep beep” in the same tone as the emergency beacon.

He takes a breath, and hopes. “Benrey? Is that you? Can - can you hear me?”

“Uh…beep…beep…nope…beep…”

Gordon laughs in disbelief. “I heard that! Where are you? What happened? Are you okay?”

Fifty-three meters and closing, the courier says. Then it says, What is THAT?

“Uh…I’m fine, I'm in a burrito. Beep.”

“You don’t have to keep saying ‘beep,’ you idiot, we can hear you,” Bubby bursts in.

“Oh hey, cool, everyone’s here.”

“What happened to you?” Bubby snaps. “The ship blew up!”

“Yeah,” Benrey hums. “That was…kinda sucks.”

Stand by for relocation, the courier says.

“Can’t really stand, bro,” Benrey replies over the comms. “There’s, uh…no gravity out here.”

Please be secured for relocation, the courier tries.

“Yeah, this, uh, burritos’s not very secure.”

“Why the fuck do you keep saying you’re in a burrito?” Gordon laughs. Just hearing Benrey’s voice is filling his chest with bubbles.

“It’s a metal burrito,” Benrey replies, as if that’s supposed to make any sense.

The courier apparently gives up. Just don’t move, it tells him.

“Sure,” Benrey says easily. “No controls on this thing.”

The object that rises into the hold a few moments later defies explanation. It’s a long cylinder of metal that’s rolled up and twisted around itself at least twice like some sort of giant soot-smeared pirouette cookie. One end is blown open like a cartoon cigar, and it’s from that end that a battered spacewalking helmet pops out.

“You look like a weasel in a cardboard tube,” Bubby says.

“Thanks,” Benrey mumbles over the comms, and attempts to pull himself free.

What are you doing? the courier says sharply. Remain seated - remain still - stop MOVING.

“Kinda busy,” Benrey says as his makeshift pod spins. The spacewalking suits have darkened helms, but Gordon can see his head turning as he peers at each pod. “Where’s Freeman?”

“Over here!” Joshie bounces up in front of Gordon to wave through the porthole, and Gordon yelps and swipes his kid out of the air.

Can none of you follow orders? the courier asks in apparent exasperation as it closes its hull doors.

“Not - not really,” Tommy replies. The courier sends a burst of static over the comms in a machine version of a sigh. 

Pressurizing atmosphere, the courier says, then it says, Seal lock. Atmosphere present. Gravity is not available at this time. For your safety, please remain seated.

“Fuck that,” Benrey mutters, half-out of his handmade pod and spinning around upside down. He seems to be hung up on the bulky spacewalking oxygen tanks.

Yeah, Gordon agrees. Fuck that. He plonks Joshua down into his own seat and straps him in. “Stay here, okay? I’ll be back when it’s safe to grab you.”

Joshua tries to protest, but Gordon is already keying in the sequence to check the outside conditions and open the pod door. The pod seems to open almost sulkily, and Gordon tumbles out and kicks off the hull in a trajectory he hopes will send him colliding with Benrey.

He almost misses, but Benrey flings out an arm and Gordon snags the oversized spacewalking suit’s glove. They spin together and smack into each other, and Gordon kicks his feet down and engages the mag-locks on his heels, slamming his boot soles onto the floor of the hull.

Someone is applauding on the comms, but Gordon isn’t listening. He needs to see Benrey’s face. He frees one hand to wrestle at the clasps of the spacewalk suit’s neck, popping them loose with a series of clicks. Once it’s free, he bats it away and it tumbles lazily through the air, fetching up against one of the pod windows.

“Hey, I can’t see!” Forzen barks.

Benrey’s eyes are golden, with a red ring around the outside of the pupil, and they glow. Gordon always figured it was just a bodymod, but now he wonders. The explosion certainly couldn’t have rolled this sheet of metal up so neatly. And Benrey had talked about “humans” like he wasn’t one.

“Hey,” Benrey smiles lazily, sticking sideways out of his horizontal tube. He reaches out with the massive, clunky spacewalk glove and taps at Gordon’s helmet. “Off, please?”

Gordon pulls Benrey’s other hand down and fastens it to his waist so he can reach up with both hands and pull his helmet off. He feels his hair float up behind him, and Benrey’s grin widens, his glowing eyes crinkling at the corners. He wiggles and pulls his free hand out of the heavy exo-suit’s shoulders to flick his own visor up so he can lean forward, but Gordon is already pushing in to meet his lips.

This time, he closes his eyes and kisses back. This time, he savors the touch of Benrey’s chapped lips, feels the rush of air against his cheek as Benrey inhales sharply through his nose and presses harder into the kiss.

The comms are a cacophony of whistling and clapping, cut through with Forzen complaining that his view is still blocked and asking for someone to describe what’s happening. Gordon leans back and opens his eyes. Benrey looks concussed, slowly rotating in his “burrito” until he is nearly vertical, with his head facing down. Gordon snorts and pulls his helmet back on.

Please do not engage in dramatic emotional moments in my hold, the courier says. Save that for the private rooms.

Benrey blinks several times. “You, uh, have private rooms?”

Of course. 

“Can I, uh, request - oh, hey, where are you going?”

Gordon had started to pull away, but Benrey tugs him back with the grip on his waist. Gordon is suddenly very angry again.

“I’m going to get my kid, Benrey, so he can see that you’re alive. The ship blew up, dude! We thought - I thought you’d died.” His voice cracks awkwardly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bubby squeeze out of his own pod, muttering something about claustrophobia. Dr. Coomer soon follows, and Darnold joins them with a sigh, tapping something into his wrist panel.

“Oh…well, I’m okay, see?” Benrey spreads his arms, then has to grab Gordon’s waist again to keep from rotating away.

Gordon reaches out and smacks his shoulder, hard enough to knock him loose. “You’re an asshole,” he snaps. “What the fuck was your plan?”

Benrey’s makeshift pod bounces off the ceiling and starts to descend again. “Oh…you know.” He pulls both arms out of the exo-suit and wiggles himself free, kicking off from the metal tube, which flies like a javelin straight at Dr. Coomer. Dr. Coomer catches it and flings it away, where it slams into Forzen’s pod just as the door opens, knocking him back inside with an inarticulate curse.

“No, I don’t know, dude,” Gordon growls. “Enlighten me.”

Very suddenly, Benrey is in front of Gordon, both hands on his helmet. Gordon’s own hands snap up to keep him from pulling it off - but he’s not doing that. He’s holding down the comm button, which means they’re on a private, proximity-based channel.

Benrey leans in close, golden eyes flashing intensely. The red ring around the outside seems to be growing. “The plan was to keep you alive,” he says quietly. “Mission fucking accomplished, huh?”

Then he presses a smacking kiss against the curve of Gordon’s helmet and flicks his visor back down, pushing away from Gordon and corkscrewing through the air with a shout of “TOMMY! Did you see that explosion? Fucking sick, right?”

Please be warned that this hold is equipped with liquid water hoses, if their use becomes necessary, the courier says pleasantly. 

“Uh - sorry,” Gordon waves a hand. “Won’t happen again.”

Please refrain from lying, the courier says.

Gordon ducks his head and clomps across the hold, heading back to his pod so he can release his child, who will probably immediately attach himself to Benrey and ignore Gordon for the rest of the cycle. He can’t win.

But then again…

He pauses and glances up at Benrey and Sunkist spiraling around each other, the giant dog apparently perfectly accustomed to moving in zero-G. The other crew members stand or float below, commiserating and complaining, but miraculously alive.

Then again, maybe he’s already won.