Still nursing embarrassment over her dress and the endless chattering she couldn't seem to quell, Alex swallowed hard as she stared into Zasz’s unhidden eyes. Reassurance wasn’t exactly the expected set of words she had come to expect from a hold like this. “If you do not shut up…” was more typical. “One more word…” was also a usual threat-opener. Either barely worked, if at all, but when his words were so different, her gaze flitted across his face, trying to discern if he was toying with her. He, of course, gave nothing away. Which would have been troubling, were the thrill of having been told she could be herself without fear not beginning to power through her brain like a drive at warp.
Toying with her or not, she'd take him at face value. Alex preferred people who spoke plainly, honestly, and Zasz didn't seem like the kind of man to pull punches. Verbally or physically. Incredible, that she and her unfortunate tendencies to talk, overthink, and think aloud would wind up in a place where the Captain wouldn't threaten to put a laser through her eye socket. And what could she say in return but, "I'm not afraid."
The elevator stopped and she scampered after him into temporary darkness, straightening her bare shoulders as the room self-lit. She wasn't afraid, no, and she wasn't useless. He'd even put his ship in her hands! Her footsteps faltered only slightly at the sight of the straps. Not for me. Never for me. Not ever again.
"Honesty is good," Alex agreed. "And I do appreciate your candor." Retrofitted prison ship? Various jobs on the regular? So many he couldn't fit them in a nice, concise list? Well, she guessed one had to take breaks where they could get them. "How much did it run up your budget? Did you find it in a scrapheap too? Don't answer that. You paid too much, at any rate." She probably didn't want to know. It was probably best for her if she didn't. For all she knew, maybe he'd been desperate, stolen it and it'd been in this shape when he'd grabbed it. Beggars couldn't be choosers, after all.
And why she'd painted Captain Zasz Fenris in a desperate portrayal of money need pre-current-profession, she didn't know. But it made sense, she figured, because who would want to take on odd jobs one couldn't expand on in polite conversation much less keep a ship in such horrible disarray, than someone with empty pockets? She rolled that around in her mind for a moment before coming up with a half-dozen examples that knocked her theory off its axis. Independently wealthy sorts and bored wanderers topped the list. Perhaps she would never know what made Captain Zasz Fenris tick.
Unless she asked him.
Her mouth gaped open a bit when he made the suggestion, and the question she'd had would have to wait. The Captain seemed straightforward and unflinching. Alex liked that. But it didn't mean she was going to run around in the nude just because he suggested it like one might suggest a nice picnic or an evening stroll on a station proper. She had her dignity to consider. Granted. Not much of that was left given how many times he'd already seen her fall flat on her face in the short time she'd been aboard his ship. And yeah, he'd already seen her scars, hauled her through a mortifying shower experience and gotten the grand display of every bazillion one of her freckles. Still.
She straightened, tugging on the sheet once more. "Maybe I'm the one who doesn't want to see them," she suggested, and those weren't the words she'd planned on coming out of her mouth either. She flushed paler, her freckles probably smattering like hot pokers over the bridge of her nose. "It's better to forget they're there at all," came a faint explanation that didn't make it better. Even so, when he made a crack about his suit not being clothes, an uneasy laugh came out, ringing clearer the longer it lasted. "Thanks," she murmured as she came closer to eyeball the drawer. "I needed that."
She grinned, too, as he deposited the heavy tool into his half-melted helm. "Will do, Captain, sir!" She shuffled forward and dove into the drawers he'd revealed on the far side of the wall. She quickly rummaged through screwdrivers and sonic boards and levels and clippers and wrenches and laser cutters. A ton of scrap gear was in evidence and she pondered what might be useful for fixing the long, long list of things aboard the ship that he had given her.
Not truly knowing what condition they were in yet, perhaps the best thing she could do for now was find tools that would let her assess the damage and those that would patch up the common situations she might find in other ships in similar shape.
She continued her shopping excursion and followed Zasz's example of loading up the heavy equipment, carefully setting things inside and sorting so nothing would inadvertently fall out nor further damage the interior. She had more investigating to do, after all. Ducking her head, Alex pointedly avoided the fact that there were straps of all horrible varieties around her. They might have been meant for anything, really, not just tying people to tables and performing terrible terrible acts of torture to get her to talk about things they knew she had no knowledge of.
For a moment she teetered, wobbled with uncertainty and a bit of adrenaline coursing backwards through her system. Alex sat down hard on the floor, surrounded by tools and trinkets and wires. No tears escaped but she was tired. So tired. She flopped backward and the toga-esque sheet billowed around her as she stared at the straps suspended from the ceiling of the stuffy room.
How had she come to this? She'd survived her "you're a disappointment" childhood, she'd survived odd jobs herself--engineering through dozens of ships, a bright star of skill and talent that the Agency had finally caught wind of and dragged her in for a job on a whole different keel. She'd survived being their puppet, taking on more and more undercover jobs to spy on ever-increasingly dangerous ships and humans and inhumans and corporations, she'd survived getting out without getting deleted and she'd even survived her return back to freelance, the previous job contracts blacklisted until she was working only on remote outposts. And then she'd survived the Diem Vuong. She'd survive this too, this ship in the middle of the vastness of space where nothing made sense and people she didn't know, hadn't had a chance to annoy with her uncontrollable mouth, fired at her with shotguns and the ship she stood on could fall out of the sky at any moment.
How she had come to this didn't matter.
She was here. She was in this.
Alex's brain shifted from self-pity to productiveness, escaping reality and her usual mish-mash of thoughts to hide in the list of things she might yet need to be able to assess the situations aboard the ship, to be able to fix it for good. Even if a ship like this she might fix forever and still not have it to perfection, no one was stopping her from trying.
And that, she realized, forcing herself to sitting and letting the cloth cinch around her waist, that was the thing about this ship. No one was stopping her from trusting herself, from doing useful things, from talking, from simply...being.
A bright smile spread across her lips. "Moons, this might actually be the best place I've ever been."
Clunking and limping and laden with fire-breathing, shotgun-toting princesses though it was.
She moved to stand and the muscles in her back clenched, straining against the feel of what she assumed an incoming fireball might have been like. No. I will not. Not feel. She shoved it back, down, away, behind her tolerance until it was gone and the threatening flickers at the edge of her vision receded. Plucking at an edge of sheeting, she secured it over her shoulders much better than it'd been when she entered the room in the first place, her jaw grimly clenched. No way was she going to sit here and be taken down by another fainting incident while the Captain was waiting for her to appear below decks. Or wherever the Greenhouse was. With a nudged the elevator opened and she rested against its back, comm, pad, and tools in one convenient helmet as she barely managed to fumble her free fingers across the button.
"I am good enough. I am worth something. Valuable, even. I can fix this thing, I can make myself worth keeping around. At least not worth the trouble of spacing." She continued to mutter to herself until the elevator slid to a stop and the doors slid open. At which point her hard won balance became a joke as the ship jerked to one side and sent her almost rolling out of the open doorway and into the strange room beyond.
The sheet caught on the door and ripped away as she tumbled forward and landed on the floor. Again.
And right at Zasz's clever boots. Which was convenient, at best, and really damn tiring, at worst. She flicked long strands of hair back over her shoulder and got to her feet as fast as she dared, shoving down the pain and instinct to wince, smiling slightly instead--as if she could pretend it hadn't happened. "Do you have a couple of burned out boosters on this thing too? Or are little pieces of ship just exploding for the hell of it, now?"
Dreams come in a size too big so we can grow into them.
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