Chapter Text
Ezra knelt on the ground, knees firmly planted in the soft dirt from where he hunched over a bit of aurelac, still cloaked and covered in the meaty flesh that so effectively protected the treasure within. He carefully shifted the scalpel in his hand, expertly curving its blade under the blister he was excising from the inner membrane. It was a maneuver he was plenty practiced on, yet his heart hammered in his chest the same way it did every time: in a frenzied mix of jittery nerves and bounding excitement. Ezra was sure as the stars he would never grow old of that feeling. For all the times he’d been to the Green and all he’d suffered under its grasp, the rush that came with uncovering a solid pull of aurelac stayed with a stubborn firmness.
“You mind passing me that fazer?” he asked, gently pushing aside the last of the excised blisters with the scalpel. Kresh, the only member of the crew he could tolerate, handed it over without comment, still silently watching. It was supervision he found unnecessary, but he was willing to wager she knew that as well, that the watching was more out of a gripping anticipation, the inability to look away as he finished the riskiest part of the process and moved onto the final steps.
Ezra carefully poured the solution over the aurelac, trying to use enough fazer to get a good, clear gem without being wasteful. The liquid sizzled slightly as it hit the cloudy surface, not unlike the way a compromised gem would cackle maliciously as it deflated. But instead of being left with a worthless red lump the surface of the gem cleared with the application of the stabilizer, and Ezra’s efforts were rewarded with a clear, shining piece of aurelac.
He let out a small whoop in victory as he held the gem up so Kresh could see it. “Now would you look at that?” he mused, holding the gem up to the light and tilting it slightly, letting the aurelac catch and flash off the sunrays, the orange light of the setting sun turning it into a scintillating display of light and color. The orange ball in its center became just as bright as the sun itself, and the surrounding crystal shimmered with the yellow hue of its surrounding sky. “That is an impressive piece of aurelac right there. You could enter her in a show,” he commented with a chuckle, bringing the gem back to eye-level. Aurelac was incredibly sturdy, but the thought of dropping the piece still rubbed him the wrong way.
“Hmm,” Kresh hummed thoughtfully, watching the light flash off the gem. “Can I see?”
She held out her hand, and Ezra happily complied to hand over the gem. “Be my guest.”
Kresh took the aurelac from him, her slightly lighter brown gloves overlapping his darker ones. The rest of her suit was that same lighter color, but it was striped with thin, branching lines of darkness. Camouflage, she’d told him once. She used to work as a mercenary apparently, and the striped brown had helped keep her hidden and alive more than once. Her helmet had a similarly utilitarian approach, a metal box around her head that had a small window in the front, wrapping around the sides of her head just enough to offer the bare minimum of peripheral vision while still keeping her head protected. Her black hair was shaved short underneath, hardly a shadow on her dark brown skin, and Ezra figured it to keep in code with the strict styling guidelines many militaries gave out, even to their soldiers hired from outside whatever conflicts they’d found themselves wrapped in.
Ezra admired mercenary work, but it was a grudging admiration he indulged in strictly from afar. Never anything he’d felt the yearning to try out himself, that was for sure.
Kresh gave the gem a much more thorough examination than Ezra had, holding up close to her helm and tilting it almost imperceptibly this way and that. After a moment she offered it back up to him, and he took it gratefully.
“Well?” he asked, still grinning at their good fortune in such a pull. “What’s the verdict?”
“Well, you could certainly enter it in a show, but I don’t think we’d be winning first place.”
Ezra scoffed slightly at that, pulling out one of the cases marred by the ostentatious show of the “RineCor” logo and flicking open the clasps that kept it shut. “We at least make it to the podium, you reckon?”
That got a smile out of Kresh, albeit an exasperated one. “Just barely,” she conceded.
It gave Ezra the distinct impression that she was humoring him, but he decided to ignore such a fact. “Good enough for me,” he said. He carefully placed the aurelac in the case to join the rest of its shining brethren, making sure it was nice and secure before clicking the clasps back into place. Then he stood up, offering a hand down to Kresh, who reached up and took it, pulling herself to her feet.
“Well, it seems our work here has come to its natural conclusion, so what d’ya say about heading back and rejoining our crew?”
Kresh nodded, dusting off the legs of her suit. “We should probably get back before they find a way to blow up the ship.”
Ezra let out a good-humored chuckle, setting off back the way they came. “Unfortunately that would not surprise me. Hell if we leave them alone long enough they might get bored and do it on purpose.”
“I don’t think they could figure out how to blow up that ship if we handed them a bomb to do it.”
That got a heartier laugh out of Ezra. For all her appearance and grit of a stoic mercenary, Kresh had quite the sharp sense of humor when she wanted to, and the relentless teasing of their kip coworkers was remarkably cathartic. There was nothing quite like an allyship born from a mutual frustration in one's peers, Ezra had found, and in the myriad of bad, boring or simply inquiry-filled company available to him, he found Kresh’s experience in the Green and no lack of filter regarding her feelings towards the rest of their crew mightily refreshing. When you had a crew of four kips and only two returners, Ezra found it hardly surprising that they’d gravitated towards each other for the duration of their journey. There was something in the Green that stuck with you, past its riches that filled your pockets and dust that filled your lungs. Ezra had been on many a planet or moon or asteroid in his travels, and each of them had left him with something. Some new experience, a lesson, an image seared into his brain that would never leave him (whether he wanted it to or not) and yet none had quite the same impact on him as the damn Green Moon did.
None of them grabbed onto him in the same way and refused to let go, pulling him back to its surface time and time again no matter how much he had tried to flail to get away.
He knew Kresh understood that feeling, knew she’d originally just came to the Green as a mercenary, with no aurelac ever touching her fingertips, and yet she’d been pulled back too.
The Green did that to you, he’d noticed.
“Speak of the devil,” Kresh suddenly muttered next to him, and Ezra was distracted from his musings to look up and see Silas and Leiyana cutting through the bracken towards them.
He couldn’t help but smirk at Kresh’s comment, hoping to distract from the mocking smile with a small wave to their newcomers. “Speak of the devil indeed,” he said as Silas and Leiyana came to stop in front of them. “We were just wondering if we’d be the last ones to return to our vessel and encampment, but it seems we’ll have to settle for a tie. You two just heading back?”
Silas nodded. “Yep, we got a bit turned around there earlier, but we figured it out in the end,” he said cheerily, wrapping an arm around Leiyana, who merely nodded in agreement. “Glad we ran into you two though, just to ensure we’re heading the right way now.”
“‘Course, there’s certainly strength to be found in numbers out here,” Ezra said, ignoring Kresh’s small disbelieving snort from next to him. He gestured an arm out to the forest in front of them. “Shall we?”
+++
It was night when the four of them finally returned.
Blackness cloaked most of the scene in front of him, only broken through by the bright white lights that stood outside of their ship. They harshly exposed the exterior of the Testin Screamer , revealing every nook and cranny of the ship in all of its glory, and Ezra couldn’t help but grin a bit at the sight. Sure, he still detested the corporate ventures of the Green, and RineCor was no different, but he couldn’t deny they knew how to pick a damn fine ship.
Nel and Len were the only two outside to greet them upon their arrival. The twins had set up some expired food packs in an impromptu shooting range, and were taking turns blasting them off their appointed stumps. Len noticed them first, elbowing Nel to get their attention before nodding over to the approaching group. Ezra waved, and Nel returned the gesture.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” they said with a smirk, leaning on their brother. Len gave them a glare but made no move to shove them off. Ezra admired his resolve.
Ezra tried for a good-natured smile. “Indeed. I apologize for our tardiness, but we were struck with some mighty good luck in the aurelac department and it seemed a fool’s errand to pack up early on the account of a little shrinking sunlight.”
Len just shrugged, pushing Nel off of him with the movement. “That’s fine, we didn’t mind the wait.”
Silas chuckled from where he stood just behind Ezra. “Oh well we appreciate the concern, but you didn’t need to wait for us, we made it back just fine.”
“Oh sure, sure,” Nel said, waving off his concerns with a flippant hand. “I’m sure we didn’t need to stick around, but we wanted to have a bit of a chat.”
“A chat?” Ezra shared a concerned look with Kresh, one hand cavalierly moving to rest on the thrower hanging from his hip. “Well we’re all ears, what about?”
Nel grinned, matching Ezra’s half-grab for his thrower with their hands on their hips, one on each of their guns. Len already had his long thrower in his hands. “Well, you see, we’ve come across some interesting information lately. Word on the street is you and Kresh are taking home more than your fair share from this venture.” Nel wore a smug smile as they shared this news, and Ezra’s gaze hardened. Kresh pulled out her boscelot frontiersman next to him and Silas muttered something that didn’t quite translate into his radio.
Damnit.
“And where did you hear that?”
Their grin only sharpened, and Ezra realized that they were enjoying this, the little shit.
“Len found you out,” they said, and it was Len’s turn to smile, nodding his head at them. “Heard you two talking. Chatting up a storm about how cruddy this job was but at least it was worth it, at least you were getting paid a full ten points.” They paused, grin freezing as their gaze sharpened into a glare. “To our eight, if you weren’t aware.”
“Well it’s not like that distinction is arbitrary, Nel. If you care to recall, Kresh and I are the only two of this crew who have been on the Green before. Our experience has bought us a larger cut of the pay, that’s all.”
Kresh stepped forward next to him, thrower still at the ready. “And besides, we’re in no position to change any of that now. If you have a problem with the pay, you can take that to RineCor and they can turn you down themselves,” she said.
“We’re not saying you can magically raise our pay at the drop of a hat, but what you can do is give us some actual fucking bargaining power,” Nel said, stepping forward to mirror Kresh.
And cut our own pay in the process. Ezra thought grimly. Unless RineCor wants to take it out of their paycheck, but the odds of that weren’t even realistic enough to be amusing to consider. “So your request is that we appeal for the loss of some of our own points in some naive attempt for equality?” Ezra asked. He stepped forward as well, bringing himself right up next to Kresh. “We are the only two here with any prior experience, any prerequisite knowledge as to what we were getting ourselves into when we signed the waiver for this job, and we are getting more of the points as a result of that. Quite frankly you should consider yourselves lucky that we don’t fancy ourselves worthy of a raise in pay instead,” he said evenly. Nel’s gaze narrowed as he said that last bit, and he wondered if he’d pushed too far.
They raised their thrower.
Well that answered that.
Ezra opened his mouth for another attempt to bargain, but then Silas stepped forward. More progress made in closing the gap between the two groups.
“Nel wait ,” he said, and from that alone Ezra found it worth letting him speak. “I know this feels unfair but think about it: is all this trouble really worth those two points?”
“So you’re taking their side in all of this? Don’t you think we deserve the same pay? I’m not going to deny their experience but it means nothing when we’re all out here doing the same work anyway,” Nel argued.
“Two points is a lot with all the aurelac we have,” Len added, voice calm but cocky in a weasley way that grated against Ezra’s nerves. “Adds up quick.”
That, Ezra couldn’t disagree with. Two points could make a big difference in a haul like what they had, and that’s why he needed to keep it.
“You won’t get your points anyway,” he said, cutting off whatever rebuke (or agreement) Silas planned on bringing to the table. “Even if we do join you in your grab for equal pay, it makes much more sense for RineCor to just take our extra for themselves and knock all of us down to eight.”
“So?” Nel asked. “Either our pay stays the same or we get more, sounds like we have nothing to lose. Or -” They raised their thrower, pointing it straight at Ezra’s chest. His own was up to match it before they even had time to continue. “-we could shoot you down here and now and make it look like an accident.” They cocked their head thoughtfully, like this was all still some little game to them. “We get paid either way.”
With the raising of Nel’s thrower, the trees rustled around them, and Ezra carefully turned his head, not removing the tip of his thrower from its steady aim right between Nel’s eyes.
Shadowy figures emerged from the trees, slowly coming to shape in the darkness until Ezra could make out, in the absence of facial features, the silhouette of suites and helmets soon sharpened enough to be discernible, although the familiarity definitely helped. Surrounding the ship was the rest of their crew, half a dozen more prospectors with half a dozen more throwers pointed right at them.
Ezra’s grip tightened on his own thrower and then-
Kresh fired.
Chapter 2: Whoops!
Summary:
Things very suddenly go very, very wrong.
Notes:
After this I'm going to start posting on Sundays, so have an extra chapter as a treat.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Before the crew had fully emerged from the trees, and almost before Ezra got the chance to figure out who they were. The shot careened towards Nel, but they were able to duck down just in time, and instead it slammed into the Testin Screamer behind them, leaving an angry black mark behind.
Pandemonium ensued after that.
Thrower bolts shot across the circle the crew had ensnared them in from inside and out. Ezra’s own pistol was raised and firing in a second, focused on trying to at least take out enough of the crew to clear a path out of the deadly trap they were cornered in. Their inner team had the element of surprise, to some extent, and it bought them precious moments that they turned into felled bodies.
But it was only for those few moments. It didn’t take long for the traitorous crew to recollect themselves, regroup, and manage a counterattack. All around Ezra throwers were raised into the air, but instead of straight forwards, tracking a deadly path to his chest or his skull, they pointed into the night sky at an angle. The sight made Ezra’s stomach twist for reasons he couldn’t explain, and before he even could’ve tried, they fired. And the lights above him disappeared with a loud POP.
He didn’t get a moment to reorient himself to the darkness before the Screamer’s crew launched their offense. Thrower shots rained down on them in earnest, and voices crackled over Ezra’s radio, too clogged with static to properly make out- he could only catch snippets.
“They’re still w-”
“I can’t-”
“-just stay-”
“-Sil-”
It was impossible to gain any information from the fragmented sentences, much less the information that would be needed to gauge the condition of any of his compatriots and certainly not what they would need to devise any sort of plan. Ezra dropped to one knee, making himself as small of a target as possible before returning fire as best as he could manage. All he had to go off of were the flashing pinpricks of light that marked someone firing off what could very easily be a deadly shot. The lights provided little for him to go off of, and even then they were constantly shifting and moving around him while they fired for his head. Some pinged off the metal of the ship just inches away from Ezra’s helmet, sending off more bits of light in disorienting showers of sparks. It did little to light his way, but the close calls did illuminate one fact for him plain as daylight: he needed cover.
He had no sooner thought that thought than the first flash went off.
Just as quick as it had been stolen from him, light flooded Ezra’s world. It was a confusing phenomenon for a moment, to experience light in such a brutally dark environment, but then he remembered: the flash gun. Nel’s flash gun, specifically. The one he’d scoffed at, brushed aside, silently categorized as silly, impractical, nothing more than a flashy weapon that was good for grabbing attentions and not much else. It was that flash gun, coming to teach him a brutal lesson in irony.
The charge exploded his vision, thrusting him into a world so suddenly bright and overexposed his first instinct was to, regrettably, flinch and squint away from it. A valuable opportunity was missed, one to take advantage of the precious new chance he’d been given to take a proper stock of his surroundings and figure out a plan. But instead he only caught a moment of what the light exposed before his eyes instinctively shut, a brief picture of the world around him that gave him only the locations of a single enemy or two, the briefest of glances at his own allies (certainly not one long enough to take a head count), and the looming shadow of the pod behind him.
And he knew the crew had at least gotten that same, quick glance, which meant Ezra had to move.
He stepped along the edge of the ship, still staying low to the ground and firing a couple shots off at the points he’d last seen some of the crew, but he got no feedback as to whether they hit home or not.
Ezra was much more prepared for the second flash charge.
Once again, it zapped itself into existence and faded with all the sudden brilliance of a flash of light, but Ezra didn’t flinch away, he watched it all. In reward for this, Ezra got 3 pieces of information: 1. He got sights on opposing crew members, mostly in front of him and all with weapons raised. 2. There were only two figures still standing on his side of the battlefield. There wasn’t enough time to see who was accounted for and who wasn’t. And 3. One of the four bracers of the ship was just a couple steps away, and that was the cover he needed.
Ezra placed one hand on the side of the ship, carefully running it alongside the surface as he stepped in the direction of the bracer. It was a sturdy leg of sorts that held up the ship from the ground, keeping it elevated enough to protect its soft, fuel-filled underbelly from any damages while landing. The tip of the bracer dug into the dirt, leaving Ezra a perfect panel to duck behind. His hand found the bracer soon enough, and he quickly grabbed onto it, deftly swinging behind the bracer and underneath the ship.
It was far from the perfect cover. He was cramped, stuck with limited movement that could prove fatal if he needed to quickly escape his hiding place, and he was still decently exposed on each of his sides. But even then, Ezra was still leagues more hidden than he was before, and he was still free to peek out from the sides of the bracer to fight back against the ship’s crew. With newfound security, he took the time to properly aim his thrower, line up his shots more carefully, and take more lives.
By the third flash charge Nel shot off, the battle seemed to be tipping in their favor. The opposing forces were starting to noticeably thin, and Ezra’s own crew hadn’t sustained any more damage from the last time he’d checked. Instead, it seemed they were finally pushing back, or at least standing their ground.
But in his optimism, Ezra’s guard slipped, and an invader found their way into his hiding spot.
His thrower was trained on them in an instance, but his opposition grabbed onto his wrist just as fast. His aim was jerked away from the target in front of him, so, so close and yet, without a thrower in his hand, so, so far away. The traitor twisted his wrist in their hand, and the thrower fell from it, fingers spasming away from its handle at the command of the pain that twisted up his arm. Ezra struggled, bringing up his other arm to try and retaliate, but a voice interrupted him.
“Ezra! Ezra it’s Kresh,” the voice hissed, grip still firm on his wrist even as he quickly stopped struggling.
“Shit,” he muttered in recognition, and her hand loosened its grip enough for him to pull away. “Sorry ‘bout that. Can’t be too careful at the moment,” he said with a forced lightness.
“It’s alright,” Kresh acknowledged simply. Her voice was muted and untainted by the static that plagued his ears, and he realized it was coming to him without the aid of a radio. He followed suit and shut off his own device. “Here,” she added after a moment, and his thrower was pressed back into his hand. His fingers curled around it, and with no more time for conversation, he leaned back over the side of the bracer and went back to shooting.
The fourth flash charge was even more promising than the last. It filled the area with light and gave Ezra more targets to focus on, but it was easy to tell that numbers were dwindling. Still, the quick shot of the scene around him held one worrying detail: the rest of the crew was moving in closer. Whether it was out of desperation, a misplaced confidence or something completely different Ezra wasn’t sure, but he knew it couldn’t bode well for them. He leaned back behind the bracer.
“I’m going out.”
“What? Why?”
“They’re getting bold, moving in. We might have the upper hand, but if we just sit here all pretty for them, they will take advantage of our complacency in a moment. I can go out there and get behind enemy lines, so to speak, spit up their attention.”
“I can come with you then, two of us can draw more of a crowd.”
Ezra shook his head. “A kind offer, but I must decline. One of us is needed back here to provide cover.”
“And why is that my job?”
He smirked. “My idea.” He got no vocal reply, so he took the lack of disagreement as a sign of agreement. “On three.” Ezra turned back to his edge of the bracer, shifting from where he kneeled to better prepare himself to spring out from their shared hiding space.
“One.” Kresh shuffled similarly next to him.
“Two.” Ezra scanned the trees as best as he could in the low light, looking for any signs of movement.
“Three!”
They both burst out of their hiding spot at the same time, sprinting out from opposite sides of the bracer. Shots zipped around Ezra, and he could only half-return fire as he dashed for the treeline, trusting Kresh to cover the rest. He didn’t get much of a chance for retaliation anyway, as another flash charge exploded in the corner of his vision.
Ezra stumbled, muttering a stream of curses under his breath as he tried to blink away the brightness that smothered the entirety of his right eye. He staggered half-blind the last couple of steps towards the treeline, before making it to the first arboreal tower, ducking behind it.
Ezra breathed a sigh of relief in the safety of his newfound cover. He took a moment to try to blink the after-image of the blinding light away from his field of vision, but all he could manage was to reduce the damage to a series of dancing spots, which was almost worse. He let out another soft curse, focusing his attention instead to the pistol in his hand, checking the cartridges were secured tight and ready to shoot before-
Something slammed into his right side, taking advantage of Ezra’s blind side to knock him to the ground. His pistol went flying out of his hand, landing somewhere in the surrounding brush, and Ezra crashed down next to it.
A pair of hands slammed down after him, landing squarely on his shoulders and pinning him to the ground. He couldn’t make out who it was in the dark, but it didn’t matter by then anyway. He couldn’t afford to worry about the identities of his opponents.
Either way, a fist pulled back above Ezra’s head, a knife firmly held in its grasp, and he had to scramble to catch it before it could slam into his chest or- if his assailant was feeling bold enough- right into his visor in an attempt to shatter it.
Instead he kneed the man in the stomach, and he was rewarded with a pained groan, the attacker pausing in his assault long enough for Ezra to pull one of his arms loose. He quickly moved his hand to his belt, frantically pulling at the clasps that held his knife in place with his single free hand.
With a final, desperate pull, Ezra freed the knife from its sheath, raising it up above his head just in time to block the arcing path of the man’s knife. The man grabbed onto Ezra’s wrist faster than he could pull away, tightening and twisting his grip. Ezra’s fingers faltered on the hilt of his knife, but he managed to keep his hold regardless. He raised his own arm to grab onto the hilt of the man’s knife, grabbing half onto the handle and half onto the man’s hand as he tried to stop another stabbing.
They stayed like that for a moment, locked in a test of strength. Ezra tried to shift his weight enough to reverse their roles, but the man remained on top of him, determindley pinning him against the dirt.
The sounds of the firefight to his side raged on, thrower bolts flying in all directions, scuffing up the Testin Screamer more with every shot and scuffing up the human beings they came in contact with even harsher consequences. The lights remained out, darkness only occasionally broken by Nel’s flash charges and the small flashes of light from the tips of throwers or the sparking that was starting to spurt from the side of the ship.
But Ezra could only give so much of his attention to any of that. Instead, he stayed focused on the man above him, pushing back with all his might against his attacker’s efforts to finish him off.
He’d never get the chance to.
Ezra shifted under the man, kicking one of his knees out from under him enough to offer it some limited movement. His efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the man, who moved to correct Ezra’s positioning and keep the upper hand. Ezra flipped the knife in his hand, getting in the right position to raise above the man’s head to-
The Testin Screamer exploded in a rush of color and sound.
The ship let out a terrible roar with its last breath, and a ball of fire emerged from its belly, lashing out like a horrible metallic beast making a conscious effort to destroy them all, instead of a sparking ship that had merely taken too much damage in all the wrong places. The shockwave pushed both Ezra and the man away from their locked position with a wall of heat and sound, and a pain rocketed through Ezra’s skull as it came in contact with some unyielding piece of nature or debri.
There was a flash of pain, and then there was absolutely nothing.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 3: Saters Be Haters
Summary:
Ezra is forced to interact with the Saters, and since they saved his life, he might even have to be polite about it.
Notes:
hi welcome to Ezra and Oruf bullying each other. Also I'm nearly done writing this fic, so I updated the chapter count to how many I think there will be? It's subject to change within one or two though
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Ezra woke up on the floor.
The pain was gone, that aching that filled his joints and the horrible pounding in his head nowhere to be found as he slowly stood up from where he was lying on the floor to take in his surroundings.
The room was small. All it held was a couple mats stacks on top of one another on the floor (which Ezra had been laying on), a closet with shut doors, and a light sitting on the ground next to him, and yet it was still cramped. More cramped than Ezra remembered. And he did remember it, he realized with a bit of a start. It took him a second, took a moment to place the crowded space with its single window and wooden walls, maybe more than it should’ve, but he placed them all the same, because they were his . He was in, for reasons unknown to him, his childhood bedroom.
And he was not supposed to be.
That should’ve been clear, he would later muse, free from whatever twisted reality he was caught in, but in that moment it felt like a revelation of monumental importance. In the moment, he was quite proud of the realization that he wasn’t supposed to be in that room, a place he hadn’t crossed the threshold of in over a decade, and hadn’t bothered to think about in almost just as long. Because it would’ve been so, so easy to ignore it, to shove aside the feeling of wrongness and just… let things be right.
That suggestion nagged at the back of his mind as well, some whispering voice tempting him back. Asking him to just lay down again, take another moment's rest, give himself a break. Didn’t he deserve that, afterall? He could feel the aching of his bones returning, his headache drumming itself back up in his skull the longer he stood there. Wouldn’t it be nice to lay down for a moment? Indulge in a second of rest before having to face more of the Green? Hadn’t he once regretted leaving this place at all? Didn’t he once want-?
Ezra shook his head, gently clearing away the indulgent train of thought with a chuckle, amused at his own ranting train of thought. It only worsened his headache, but the pain was grounding enough to pull him away from the fantasy he’d tried to grab onto. He was not supposed to be there, plain and simple. There was other business to attend to.
Ezra reached forward, and pulled open the door.
Outside there was a forest where the living room was supposed to be.
Ezra stepped out into it, recognition hitting him immediately. The mossy trees and curled ferns painted him a perfect picture of where he was, and if they hadn’t, the light purplish spores that floated lazy paths through the air around him would have. He watched them as they flitted through the trees and between their leaves, still unable to shake the feeling that something was off. He couldn’t pin down exactly what, but as Ezra stared out onto the scene he could’ve sworn the dust looked… brighter, in a way. It caught his attention more than usual, making a bold statement instead of just fading into the background, and as Ezra watched its brightness only grew. Soon they were past the point of a mere lightening in hue and the dust was glowing. It went from a light purple to neon pink to bright, pure, stunning white, the light from each of the spores growing brighter and brighter and fueling the pounding in his head to push harder and harder until their light washed away all color, filling Ezra’s vision with nothing but that blinding white brightness he couldn’t seem to look away from and-
Ezra woke up on the floor again.
Except it hurt , the second time around. He sat up slowly, trying to ignore the stab of pain the action welcomed to get a chance to examine his surroundings.
He was no longer in his childhood bedroom, for starters. No the space he was in was smaller, somehow- he wouldn’t have even been able to stand up straight had he tried. It shared the same brown tones, but darker, with no windows to let in light. He was no longer alone either.
A child sat at the foot of his makeshift “bed” and they started as he sat up, shaking the loose strands of fabric tightly wrapped around their head as they jerked a long, sharp knife in Ezra’s direction. A mask covered their face, patches of white around their eyes and mouth making a strange sort of face in a style Ezra had only seen in the… in the attire of Saters.
Shit.
He sat up fully, regretting slightly how it brought him closer to the tip of the blade, especially as the Sater child pushed it slightly towards him until he was eye-to-eye with it. Still, he didn’t let himself worry- one Sater child was hardly a threat, afterall. He slowly put his hands in the air, not even quite raising them above his own head, to show he meant no threat as. The child just continued to stare at him for a moment, slowly shuffling away and with the elongated knife so close to his eyes, Ezra could clearly see how it wavered and shook in unsteady hands. A scared child, then.
“Now I-”
And the child was gone.
No sooner than Ezra had opened his mouth had they scrambled to their feet, knife still pointed at him best as they could manage, and then darted for an exit. The tent flap was pushed closed behind them with a light thwap as the thick leathers collided, leaving Ezra with only the company of the filter thrumming in the corner of the room. Well then.
He let out an annoyed huff at the kid’s sudden departure, whisking away any opportunities he had for answers before Ezra even had time to pry. He took a breath, silently going over the details of what he knew in his mind to try and figure out what was going on himself.
He knew Nel and Len had staged a ridiculous mutiny in some vain attempt to get more of a cut they didn’t earn. He knew they probably wouldn’t get the money anyway, because RineCor couldn’t care about the likes of them had they paid them the credits to do so. But Nel had ignored all that, had rallied the crew, had gotten Len on board to help do so, all riding blindfolded with the guide of nothing but their delusions. Delusions that they rode to the point of violence. Planned violence too, for as much as Kresh had been the one to fire the first thrower, it was the rest of their mutinous crew that had threatened her to that point, that had been hidden away by the Green, waiting for their moment to strike.
And for what? Ezra thought bitterly.
All they had gotten was a blown up ship, hit by a stray shot to an engine or a deliberate attack Ezra couldn’t know, but it made little difference. All the same, that fine, fine, Testin Screamer was blown to bits because a damn group of kips grew heads too big for their shoulders. Hell, he was almost killed by those damn fools. If he’d been any closer, not protected by the body of a man trying to kill him, he very well might not be sitting in a Sater camp, as undesirable as that such scenario was to him as well.
In fact… if he’d been hiding behind the very belly of the beast, had been the one to stay behind and provide cover in an attempt to divide and conquer… he probably wouldn’t have made it. He’d probably be blown to bits same as that ship was.
But no, Kresh would be fine. She wasn’t directly under the ship; they’d split off several whole minutes before things went to hell. He didn’t have any proof Silas and Leiyana were anywhere near the ship; for all he knew they had managed to slip between the rest of the crew and escape into the Green. Wouldn’t do him any good to dwell on it then, anyway. His mental rant was supposed to have a point, he remembered vaguely, trying to scrape up what that point might have been from under his own reflections.
Right.
He was going over what he knew, with the goal of trying to figure out what he didn’t, not painstakingly going over every detail of how and why Nel and Len were bitches.
Another time.
What he knew was that most of his crewmates- headed by Nel and Len- had turned against him and Kresh, Silas and Leiyana had stood by their sides, and words and metal had flown until their ship took the worst of their ire and made them all pay for it. He’d been injured and rendered unconscious by a hit to the head, and then had woken up in a Sater tent with some kid who had quickly made themselves scarce.
Ah yes, the Sater.
What did he know about them?
Not much, if Ezra was being completely candid with himself (an ideal he was most certainly dedicated to). Despite his several previous trips to the Green, the absolute most contact he’d been forced to experience with the Sater had been once, and it had been a brief, bloody interaction.
He’d been part of a larger party at the time, but they’d splintered off often, and one sunny Bakhroma Green afternoon he’d found himself part of a relatively tiny group that was assigned to the protection of their ship. Back then the Sater were just as new to the moon as anyone else, and they needed supplies if they were to fund their efforts to make the horribly toxic place into something resembling a permanent living fixture. (Why, Ezra wasn’t sure. There were plenty of rumors about, of course. Folks thought of everything from making the best out of a stranding situation to an disgraced group of exiles meant to die with dust on their tongues to a cult of spiritual lunatics serving some inane, divine purpose, but not one of them had much more evidence than the last, just judging off what his own ears picked up. Cult seemed like the most popular answer, though.)
Regardless, their need for supplies had rapidly turned them to a life of scavenging, and that day they had found themselves desperate enough to turn to the very vessel that was partially under Ezra’s protection.
It hadn’t been a long skirmish, by any measures. The Saters were, by means of poor planning or just plan overconfidence, sorely outnumbered by the prospecting group, and they brought only weapons of short-ranged bludgeoning and slashing to face off against their own throwers. But the quickness of the battle made it no less bloody.
The Saters had fought to the very last man, even when it was clear they couldn’t take on the prospectors. They hadn’t been a large group, but Ezra had still found himself wondering why , as he stared down at those corpses. It baffled him at best and, if he dug a little deeper… unnerved him at worst.
The memory certainly didn’t make him want to stick around. He was still in his suit, with the absence of his helmet, presumably taken off for medical treatment but still helpfully sitting next to him on the floor. His thrower was gone from his holster as well, only it was not helpfully sitting next to him on the floor. Similarly, he realized after a quick pat down, his pockets were mostly emptied. The possibility of using any knives of scalpels on his person suddenly evaporated, as did any prospects for trade. All he had left were some crumpled up wrappers, a horribly wrinkled map, and that damn keychain he still found himself carrying around for whatever reason.
Prospectors used to say the little blue alien could bring good luck. He frowned down at its unwillingness to live up to such expectations but shoved it back in his pocket nonetheless.
Little extra luck didn’t hurt anyone, now did it?
He double-checked the rest of his pockets and pouches, but they revealed nothing but disappointment, much to his chagrin. All that remained was his wits and fists, which had served him well enough thus far. He could only hope they continued to do so.
Ezra reached over for his helmet, finally coming to the conclusion that the Sater child would not be returning any time soon and there was no more insight to be gained from sitting on the floor in a tent.
So of course that was when the tent flap was pushed open again, and the child pushed their way through.
“Well, look who decided to rejoin us,” Ezra said, pulling his hands away from his helmet and turning back to face the child. They staunchly refused to acknowledge him, instead they held the entrance to the tent open, and two more figures entered the space.
They wore suits of similar styles to that of the child’s, clearly denoting them as part of the Sater tribe as well, although their suits were much cleaner and neater than the scruffy clothes of the youth. They both had to stoop slightly as they entered the tent, brushing against its top, and remained completely silent as they sat down in front of him.
Ezra just nodded in greeting, offering up what he hoped came off as a polite smile. To be quite frank, he was out of his social depths in such a foreign situation; it seemed best to play things safe.
One of the newcomers settled right in front of Ezra, the other sitting slightly to their partner’s left. The Sater in front of Ezra reached over and removed their masked helmet, and the other followed suit. The child stayed in the background by the closed tent flap, fully masked.
A man and a woman were suddenly sitting in front of Ezra, instead of the mysterious, masked strangers he’d been faced with. The man had a thin, slender face with dark skin and even darker hair that was cropped close to his head, hairline subtly receding. He looked at Ezra with a calm, observant gaze, glancing up and down the man before him.
The woman, on the other hand, hardly looked at him at all. She had paler skin, and her face was framed by strands of long, dark hair, some of which were pulled back from her face in two thick braids that wrapped around the sides of her head. Both of their masks had been carefully set on the ground in front of them, facing away from them and towards Ezra. With no surprise to Ezra, the man spoke first.
“I am Oruf,” he said. “I lead the Sater here, as a guiding light through the perils of the Green.” He paused, gesturing to the woman next to him. “And this is Rahn. She is our mother, tasked with the vital job of continuing the Sater life on such an inhospitable world.”
The woman finally looked up at Ezra, nodding in confirmation. He just returned the gesture.
“Well I’m Ezra,” he introduced. “Prospector.”
“We are aware of your occupation, Ezra.” Oruf said, leaving a strange space before he said Ezra’s name, like it was an ugly thing he had to prepare himself to utter. “Although, is it truthful to call yourself a prospector any longer? With your ship and crew gone?”
Ezra's jaw tightened, but he managed to keep any other signs of emotion off of his face. Was the man just trying to get a rise out of him, or was there a different game at play? Either way, he was determined not to fall for it. “Well I came here to prospect, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Personally, I reckon that as long as I’m on this moon, I’m a prospector.”
Oruf was silent for a moment, just staring at Ezra as though he though if he just looked hard enough, the man in front of him would turn to glass and his insides would be laid bare for examination. Ezra just raised an eyebrow under the scrutiny.
“You know, I thought the same of myself, once,” he finally spoke. “I was filled with the greed of the Green, poisoned by the lust for the aurelac in its veins. But I shed those old ideals, that old man.” He straightened up, looking into Ezra’s eyes with a steely determination. “I feel that the Currents brought you alone to us for a reason, Ezra. You could do the same as I once did, find yourself once more amidst new friends and new experiences.”
So, cult of spiritual lunatics it is. Ezra thought, flexing his fingers as he found the best way to respond to such a ridiculous proposal. He quickly decided the best way was to not really respond to it at all.
“Me alone?” he asked, cocking his head with a feigned casual interest. “None of the rest of my crew?”
“Just bodies,” Oruf responded with a shocking coldness. “And wreckage.”
Ezra swallowed thickly, rolling the words over in his brain. If he was the lone survivor of the explosion without a ship or any way to contact one… well to put things very simply that would not be good. But Oruf’s harsh tone suggested it was not a very wise idea to express grief, and Ezra was already well-versed in the art of hiding away desperation. More often than not, it did little to aid in negotiations.
He hummed in clear disinterest. “Well, you won’t see me weeping for them. Bunch of greedy bastards, so far as I’m concerned.” Which was true enough, for the most part. The deaths of his allies would be unfortunate, if he found they were amongst the shot corpses and burnt bodies, but Ezra had lived out in the Fringe too long to dwell on such misfortunes.
Oruf nodded slowly. “Well, we Sater have removed ourselves as far from grief as we have found possible to achieve. It would be a fresh start for you, far removed from your old companions.”
Ezra paused for a thoughtful moment, as if he was considering the offer. Really, he was rooting through his own vernacular for the best words to turn them down. After several seconds of silence passed, he found an acceptable answer.
“I cannot properly express my gratitude for your assistance enough, and, indeed, your offer is mightily generous-” he started, carefully examining the two of them for any sort of reaction. He was offered none. “-but I am afraid I must decline. I don’t imagine a man of my such disposition would find himself fitting in well amongst your Sater lifestyle. I would only be burdensome amidst your people. It would be best for all participating parties, I believe, if I returned to my occupation beyond this here moon.”
Oruf just stared at him in return. His mouth twitched downwards in a frown for just a moment, the only indication of any emotion, before he covered it up with an exaggerated straightening of posture and continued dialogue.
“And how do you plan on doing that? The Currents have been pulling the Green from the hands of prospectors for a good while now, and I’m sure you’ve heard of the Kretine raids?”
Ezra merely nodded. The Kretine were a vigilante group, or at least that’s what they fancied themselves as. Different folks had different names for their exploits that brought them through not only various parts of the fringe, but plenty of risky jaunts through Central as well. Ezra never busied himself too much with their politics, as whenever he tried he found them bound to no logic or reason. Seemed to him their ideals changed from one leader to the next, and with all the feathers they ruffled and boot tips they tread upon, leadership was passed from one dead man walking to the next. They stood for everything and nothing, and Ezra could only find their unpredictably frustrating and, out in a place like the Green, dangerous. Which was exactly how they’d proven themselves to be when they hit up all the corporate expeditions on the moon just a couple weeks before Ezra’s own group had been sent out. Many said the attacks were the last nail in the coffin for the dying aurelac mining of the Green, and quite frankly Ezra had believed them. He stood by his prediction that the RineCor expedition would be his last goodbye to Bakhroma Green.
He had not predicted it would be his last goodbye to the galaxy at large, however, and he was determined for it not to be.
“I have indeed heard of the wreckage of the Kretine raids, but even as they might have cemented this moon’s fate, there will continue to be those who will hear the false cry of aurelac and follow it far. My own crew arrived after the Kretine, and I am sure more fools will follow in our wake.”
“You may have your hope then, prospector.” Oruf spat the word out like a terrible insult, which Ezra almost found amusing. “But it will be a thing you hold in vain. I should not have assumed you could be saved as I once was. It was foolish of me to assume you are as I once was.”
Ezra just nodded at the words as respectfully as he could for all the verbal barbs the man slung at him. “And that’s why I could never be a Sater like yourself,” he agreed. “Now that we have established I will be taking my departure, would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of the weaponry and supplies you have taken from my person? We could arrange the keeping of some of it as payment for your kindness, but I will still be in need of a thrower at the bare minimum if I am to survive the hardships of the forests ahead of me.”
“No,” Oruf said firmly. “The Sater are scavengers, we lay our full claim over that which the Currents pull our way. You as an outsider have no right to them any longer.” He paused, tilting his head with an amused smirk at Ezra. “You as a Sater would.”
Petty. Ezra thought bitterly, fully aware his affable facade was fading. He made no further attempts to push it back into place. He didn’t even think the Sater used throwers, unless something had changed since his last altercation with them. More likely they would just strip it for parts, just because they claimed the right to the objects they stole from his half-dead body.
“Hold on now,” he said, spreading out his arms in some gesture of placation. “Scavenging is the art of taking from those who have already moved on from this world, have passed the need for any material items.” He turned his arms to gesture to himself, to his own very alive body. “As you can see, I am still very much alive. That is not mere scavenging my friend, that’s just robbery, plain and simple. If you are a man of any honor, I implore-”
“Do not speak to me about robbery,” Oruf interrupted, face hardened into a glare. “And by no means do you find yourself in any position for discussions of honor, prospector. ”
Shit. Ezra could quite easily discern Oruf was only getting started, clearly getting ready to employ a lecture that could only end badly for Ezra: Definitely without his thrower and possibly without his life. He needed to interject before it was too late.
Luckily, he didn’t have to.
Ezra opened his mouth to speak, when he realized he could hear shouting from outside. He paused, tilting his head towards the noise, and before he could ask what the hell was going on now, the tent flap flew open again and a new Sater burst into the space.
“He’s back.”
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 4: Ghostly Bastards
Summary:
Ezra makes a... friend?
Notes:
We've finally made it. By which I mean Number Two has finally made it.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The stranger had come much too far for much too long to fail again.
He never wanted to deal with the Sater in the first place, but he wasn’t left much room for apathy when they’d raided the still smoking remains of the pod he’d travelled in on and left him without even his rail gun.
He needed to get it back, had been trying to get it back. It would be his third attempt to raid the Sater camp and reclaim what was his, and he was getting pissed. The stranger had no weapons except for a sharpened stick, and he couldn’t make up for it in numbers either. He’d been forced to retreat time and time again, and at some point it was just embarrassing, no matter how unarmed or disadvantaged he was.
No.
The stranger was done .
He would not fail again.
He already knew where the tent with his belongings was. He was pretty sure it was where they kept all their stolen treasures, but he’d never made it that far to know for sure. It didn’t really matter to him anyway. All that mattered was that his rail gun was in there. His means to defend himself was in there.
His approach was hardly stealthy. He tried, was discreet enough to make it close to the camp, the targeted tent in sight, but then Saters kept getting in the way of his planned out path for success and well… his attempts at stealth were ruined after he stabbed the first person.
The stranger was noticed immediately. A Sater shouted for help, another charged him, and a third ran off to who knows where. The one that charged him was probably least concerning out out all of them. The stranger grabbed their wrist as they raised a spiked weapon above their head and with a simple but harsh twist that weapon fell to the ground. He picked it up and used it to kill them. Someone other than him might have found that poetic in some way. The stranger found it little more than morbidly satisfying.
With a slightly more advanced weapon, the stranger made quick work of the next two Sater that tried to take him down, and with no backup arriving to their aid, he turned back to the tent- and someone crashed directly into him.
+++
Ezra thought the man was going to kill him.
He hadn’t meant to slam himself headfirst into the human equivalent of a brick shithouse, but he’d gotten a little caught up in his own worries. He’d fled the tent he’d woken up in as soon as he had a chance, Oruf and Rahn quickly taking their own leave against the mysterious “he” that had returned to their camp, likely not with good intentions, if Oruf’s harsh glare and Rahn’s panicked leave were anything to go by. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since he’d been instructed to stay put , but his own paranoia haunted him nonetheless, the relentless question of had he been followed itching at the back of his mind, forcing him to turn and try to get a glance over his shoulder only to- well. It wasn’t his best moment, per say.
The man wasn’t a Sater, that much was clear, though he had a dead one slumped over at his feet and a bloodied Sater weapon in his hands. It was enough for Ezra to hope they might be on the same side in what was quickly becoming a full-fledged battle. As soon as he had recovered his balance from the crash, Ezra raised his hands in the air, showing the regrettable emptiness of his palms clear as day.
The man only gave him a brief glance, the darkened visor of his helmet turning to Ezra for only a moment, and then the weapon in his hand lowered and he was moving away again, disappearing into another tent.
For a moment, Ezra’s eyes flicked to the arboreal wall just past the cluster of tents. He could make it without much of a struggle, disappear into the Green without so much as a trace but… but then what? He couldn’t be stranded alone on the poisonous moon, especially not when there could still be people out there who were determined to let his head roll. He tore his eyes away from the trees that could be his freedom but never his salvation, and ducked into the tent.
It was absolutely packed.
The Sater must have found better fortune in the Kretine raids then most folks, because the tent was filled to the brim with scraps, weaponry, field-kits, and a myriad of other supplies Ezra had no time to search through. The man was already rooting around in one of the piles, breathing heavily and Ezra kept him in his periphery as he edged towards the closest of the piles, upon which his pistol rested. The man paid no attention to him, so Ezra snatched up his pistol from its pile of mostly scrap metal. There was a field kit there too, though, as well as a couple battered but not broken food packs and filters of similar conditions he made sure to stuff in his pockets. The field kit was clipped onto his belt.
Then he turned his attention to his thrower, turning it over in his hands and prepping a charge to make sure the weapon was battle ready. To his surprise, it was indeed.
The man grunted from behind him, and Ezra spun around to face him and the horrible sounds of grinding and clattering metal as the stranger freed a rail gun from all the scrap.
An honest to Kevva rail gun , scratched up but seemingly perfectly operational and also pointing itself at Ezra’s chest.
Fuck.
He could hear more shouting from outside, but the stranger in front of him stayed perfectly still, aim not wavering for a moment. Ezra, on the other hand, was much more worried. He’d ducked into the tent with the goal to be as quick as possible, but clearly even then he’d taken too long, and a stand-off wasn’t going to help anyone.
“Now,” he started, keeping his voice as level and calm as he could. “The way I see it, we’re in the same predicament here, and shooting each other in this tent won’t prove to be of much benefit to either of us. So, I propose a temporary alliance of sorts. We work together to get out of this mess, and maybe we’ll get to fall asleep tonight with our minds still dreamin’. Sound good?”
The stranger didn’t say anything, even after Ezra had finished his proposal, even after he was clearly waiting for a response. He just silently lowered his gun and left, turning his back to Ezra and disappearing from the cramped tent.
Ezra tilted his head, somewhat surprised at the lack of an answer where he’d clearly requested one, but he had no time to dwell on that then.
He followed.
The stranger was already shooting.
Ezra watched as a bolt slammed into the side of one of the Saters. It sent a spray of blood shooting into the air and with it the Sater was knocked back to the ground, an assault they did not recover from. Ezra was already lifting his own thrower to clear their path as well, but the sheer power of his companion’s own weaponry went far from unnoticed. He was certainly impressed, to say the least.
But there was no time to dwell on that then, and Ezra quickly took out another approaching Sater before spinning on his heels to face the treeline behind him. It stood as a refuge, accessible for him to conquer and take advantage of with the thrower in his hand and newly restocked supplies hung at his waist.
“Come on!” Ezra shouted, hoping the stranger could hear him over the zipping bangs of thrower fire and frantic shouts of the Sater as they tried to organize themselves into something that better utilized their numbers to overwhelm the newly formed duo. But Ezra was hoping not to give them the chance to do so, and so, with a final shot over his shoulder, he took off running.
The camp wasn’t large, and he hit the treeline less than a minute after his initial take off.
The ground, uncleared by any human hand, became thick with foliage almost immediately, and Ezra was forced to take the forest at a much slower pace than he might’ve liked. But he didn’t stop, was determined to keep pushing forwards through the low-hanging branches of trees and over fallen stumps and deceiving dips in the ground covered by more leaves. The occasional glance over his shoulder revealed nothing but more trees, and as the shouting of Saters faded from his helmeted ears, Ezra slowly came to a stop as well.
He stood for a moment, straining his hearing for any signs of hostility from within the trees, but he was met with nothing but the floating dust. After a moment, he hesitantly sat down on a fallen tree trunk, draped with moss that made for a surprisingly comfortable seat.
Ezra sighed, tilting his helmet up to look at the bits of sky he could see filtered through the trees, the strange pollen he could never quite escape while on the moon lazily flowing in and out of the view of the sunrays. His body still ached from the impact of the explosion suffered just… well he couldn’t say quite how long he’d been out for, but judging from his injuries (and maybe sprinkling in a tad bit of optimism) it couldn’t have been much later than the next day, and his time recovering with the Sater had been, clearly, cut short.
He shook his head, pulling his gaze away from the slanting sunbeams and back to his own condition. He checked his filter first, tilting it upwards to find its meter doing a dangerous dance on the border between “Hey, make sure to refresh your filter soon!” and “OH GOD OH FUCK YOU’RE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DON’T GET THIS FIXED PLEASE.” and unfortunately flicking the side of the device did nothing in his favor. So he unclipped one of his newly acquired backups and took a deep breath before pressing a button on the side of his dirtied filter. The air rushed out of his helmet with a hiss that no longer triggered that panicky part of his brain that didn’t appreciate the idea of no more oxygen. Instead Ezra calmly unclipped the old filter, tossing it on the ground for a moment while he connected the new one. Another button was pressed, and air rushed back into his helmet, clean and fresh and with a bit of that chemical tang that Ezra had long since come to associate with the changing of a filter.
He took a deep breath, relishing in the feeling and sinking further into the safety that the quiet of the forest guaranteed him.
Then the crack of a twig whipped through the air, and suddenly Ezra was on his feet again. The leaves rustled around his hidden sanctuary, and more twigs crackled in the undergrowth as footsteps, heavy and loud, approached. Someone was coming, and whoever it was certainly wasn’t bothering with being stealthy about it.
Ezra pointed his thrower at the movement he could just barely pick up in the trees, still silent in case his brown suit and slight movements had kept him hidden to whoever was nearing him. Then a helmet broke through the foliage, and Ezra was face to face with the stranger that had fought at his back just moments before.
And they stood stock-still, throwers pointed at each other once more.
Ezra couldn’t help but grin, relief hitting him in a tsunami as the figure was revealed as not a Sater or mutinous member of his crew, but a hesitant ally. It almost made his thrower dip back down, but he caught himself just in time, only barely faltering. With their common enemy no longer at play, there was only so much trust he could afford to the man. His extra supplies made him a potential target, and it would be a ridiculously mindless move to let his guard down while the man had a rail gun pointed right at him.
Still, he grinned all the same, cocking his head at the stranger. “Well, wasn’t sure I’d be seeing you again.” He chuckled dryly, gesturing slightly with his thrower, a bad habit he could never quite make himself break. “Wasn’t sure you’d make it out alive, to be quite candid with you.”
He was met with more silence, more of that grating breathing he could just barely make out without the aid of radios.
“Listen, I have no plans on harming you, and I’m sure you’d like a rest after such an altercation as well. Would you take kindly to another truce?” Ezra asked, slowly lowering his thrower as he did so. The vulnerability pained him, but it was the best way to show he meant his words. A little trust went a long way, out in the Fringe.
It took a moment, but slowly the statue of a man in front of him unfroze, lowering his gun until it rested loosely in his hands. Confident in the display, Ezra holstered his own thrower and gestured to the array of logs in front of him.
“Care to take a seat?”
The man didn’t move so apparently, no, he did not, but Ezra decided to not let that stop him. He sat down where he had been before. “You even understand what I’m saying, or is all of this gibberish to you?”
The man nodded slowly, which the most response Ezra had been able to get out of him yet. He smiled.
“Glad to hear it. You talk?”
He shook his head.
“Any sort of sign?”
Another head shaken.
“Any command over the written word?”
No, not that either.
Ezra sighed, feeling a slight frustration at the lack of communication methods available to him. It seemed he would have to learn to adapt to a binary system of nods and head shakes.
“Well, no matter. You seem like a man of business so I’ll cut to the chase here.” He straightened in his makeshift seat, looking at where he hoped the man’s eyes were about behind that dark visor. “Seems to me like we worked pretty well back there, and I don’t know what you were doing snatching from Saters back there, but they made it sound like you’ve been hanging around for a while. Thought we might be in the same situation here: stranded.” He paused for a reaction, and the man gave a slow nod.
“Exactly. Now I’m sure you’ve discovered same as I have that the Green is no forgiving place. It’s a wild man’s game out here, and we’re all just pieces dancing ‘round on a board without the rulebook. It’s not the kind of undertaking a wise man would undertake alone, which is the position we have both found ourselves in, at least momentarily. But together, we might be able to scrape by a bit better. I’d appreciate the protection that impressive piece of machinery there could offer, and in return, well I have my own skills with a thrower to put on the table. And I know my way around the Green, know what I’m doing at a dig site, and, if it hasn’t been blown straight to Kevva herself, I might even have the beginnings of a ship.” He smiled at the man, offering out a hand to shake. “So, whaddya say?”
And he left.
Really, the stranger just hefted his rail gun in his hands, chose a direction, and started watching, leaving Ezra to watch the space he’d left behind with nothing but pure bafflement.
He quickly got on his feet again, snatching up the abandoned filter (he wasn’t too picky on littering, but leaving so obvious a trail wasn’t something that appealed to him) and set off after the man.
“Now hold on!” he said once he caught up with the stranger. “You never gave me a straight answer, my friend.”
The man stopped and looked at him for a moment, and then, with no further response, started walking again. Which, still, provided Ezra with no information but… well it wasn’t a no , necessarily.
“Ship’s over that way,” he pointed out, jabbing a thumb in the direction they needed to be heading in.
The man paused for a moment, half turning to stare at Ezra. Ezra titled his head at the gesture, felt the appraising stare burning through his visor and hoped it wouldn't run hot enough to burn a hole right through it.
Without so much as a nod, the man turned, and Ezra grinned.
“You know, it’s awfully rare these days, to find good company out on this moon. Not many left stuck on the damn rock.” His voice hardened into something bitter for a moment, and he found himself glaring down at the planet’s soil. Ezra forced his features to smooth into something a bit more amicable and looked back up at the stranger, at Number Two, with a lopsided grin.
“Save, of course, for we few ghostly bastards.”
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 5: Number 2
Summary:
Numbers, names, the best communication Ezra has to offer, and new homes.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Night fell before they could make it to Ezra’s ship. He’d been hoping they could best the darkness. Sleeping outside could take a mighty toll on one’s filters, and Ezra wasn’t too keen on the idea of potentially burning through another one so soon after he’d had to change. But they didn’t really have much of a choice. The dense forests of the Green were hard enough to navigate even in the daylight, and Ezra wasn’t risking unintentionally taking them further away from their goal.
So instead they found a space with enough clear ground to lay down on, and set up a makeshift camp there. Ezra got to work bundling up enough moss and leaves for a somewhat acceptable bed, and the stranger disappeared off into the woods. Ezra tried calling after him, but he was ignored. He just shook his head, figuring either the man would come back, or he wouldn’t.
He did come back, as a matter of fact, just as Ezra was sorting through his stolen ( repossessed , really) field kit, taking stock of what was still in there by the weak glow of the light affixed to the side of his helmet. It was a pretty good haul, actually: a foam gun, some painkillers, antibacterial solution, a syrette, medical tape. The box was banged up, sure, but the supplies inside seemed good as new and mostly intact. Ezra knew good as anyone they could prove vital in the days to come.
Right, the stranger. He’d emerged from the trees with a bundle of sticks in his arms, all brown and cracked with dryness, and dumped them out onto the ground.
Ah. Well that explained it.
“You sure a fire is a good idea?” Ezra asked, starting to repack the field kit. The stranger ignored him, just crouched down next to the pile and started arranging the sticks. Ezra continued.
“I know we’ve made it a good distance away from the Sater, but there still might be folks in these forests that aren’t really in my corner at the moment. Just not sure I want to be sending out smoke signals.”
The man still refused to so much as look up at him, instead he fished around in one of his pockets and pulled out a sparker. Ezra just shook his head. Clearly the stranger wasn't open to debate. Hopefully the sky was dark enough and trees thick enough to keep their presence hidden for the night.
Soon the man got the fire fully lit, gently crackling in front of them, and Ezra settled down on one side of it, sitting up on a tree stump and leaning to one side on a nearby branch. The stranger took up a similar position across from him.
“You got a name?” he asked after a moment, looking up from the flames in front of him. The stranger didn’t follow suit, continuing to stare into the dancing light of the fire. He ever so slightly shook his head.
“Well I’m gonna need something to call you.” The man offered no solution.
Ezra leaned back on his branch, silently searching for an appropriate moniker for the stranger. He went through the obvious choices, all to do with the man’s silence or impressive skills with his rail gun, but none of them fit quite right, so he dug deeper. That got him where he needed to go.
“You ever heard of the, uh, the Yrzen of Randaah?” he asked. There was no response, so he just continued. It was already starting to become a habit. “Yeah, well, they never thought it fit to illuminate me as to what “Yrzen” meant, but they were really just your average cultist. Ran into them on a job once, and they really checked all the boxes. They worshipped some god of suffering, think that was the “Randaah” in there, and did a whole bunch of fucked up stuff for the guy. Cannibalism, sacrifices, blood rituals, extreme punishment, did this thing where they poisoned themselves and lived on the verge of death for a week or something.” He paused, thinking back on that job and all the memories that came with it. Most of them were horrible, but he found himself smiling. “Tried to burn my brother at the stake.”
He waved his hand dismissively, pulling himself back on his own train of thought. “Anyway, that’s not the point. Point is, they all took a oath of silence, which I’m sure had some logic to it, but it had the eerie side affect of being creepy as fuck.” He shook his head. “Now, I’m not saying you're a cultist, but on the very surface level, just skimming the water really, you do share an affinity for silence and somewhat extreme weaponry. So, if you are not opposed, Randaah could fit just fine, at least for the time being.”
The stranger finally looked away from the fire, but it wasn’t at Ezra, it was at the rail gun sat next to him. He picked it up, and then he turned his helmet to Ezra, the tip of the gun following in perfect harmony.
Ezra swallowed thickly. Not approval then, got it. He quickly put his hands up in the air. “Alright, alright, not approval then. I’ll think of something else, calm down now.” The gun remained pointed at him, silently urging him on. “Uh, right. We can keep it simple then, sound good? How’s uh… how’s Number 2 sound?” he asked, offering a grin at the stranger.
Slowly, the gun was lowered with a soft grunt from the stranger, coming back to rest by his side. Apparently he approved, then.
Ezra hesitantly lowered his hands, but the man was already looking back at the fire as if nothing had ever happened.
Number Two… he thought, carefully testing the name out in his head. It wasn’t the best, and a little lengthy if he insisted on pronouncing it in full each time, but he didn’t think he could be judged too harshly when there was a rail gun trained directly on him. Regardless, it would work.
Ezra smiled, loosening without having to stare down the barrel of death. “Well, Number 2, I’m quite pleased to make your acquaintance.”
+++
The stranger did have a name, but it had been a very long time since he’d used it to introduce himself to anyone. No one could ever pronounce it right, anyway, and anytime anyone used to insist on trying, it was always nothing short of an embarrassment. He couldn’t write it either, didn’t know how to translate the grating syllables of his own language to any alphabet anyone would recognize, and even if that was possible, he couldn’t read or write any words of Centrallian anyway.
He understood the language when it was spoken perfectly, although he couldn't speak it back and had never bothered to learn any other methods of communication. He could’ve picked up some sign, but the stranger had found long ago that no one expected much input from their hired guards anyway, and silence just worked better for him. He rarely regretted the choice.
But the nicknames… those always brought him close.
Mostly he just had to bear whatever his current crew had decided fit him best. Many of them were insults, more were just dumb, and a few he didn’t really mind.
Being named after murdering cultists had to be a new low.
But the stranger couldn’t complain too much. Without the restraints of a job and payment hanging over him, with just him and one other man in the middle of some dying mining planet out in the Fringe, the stranger was free to threaten his way to a better title.
And he got “Number 2.”
And he liked Number 2. It was simple, utilitarian, and the stranger had always appreciated such things.
What more could he ask for?
+++
Ezra could smell the crash before he could see it.
They had headed out again first thing that morning, after sleeping through the night in shifts. Then, in the morning, once the sky lightened just enough to navigate by, they stomped out their fire, kicked away the ashes, scattered the moss of their makeshift beds and left their camp as though it had never been such a thing in the first place. Just another bit of forest amongst many.
The trek through the forest was long, but a full night's rest made a world of a difference over their eventful days they’d tried to follow with a hike before, and they made much faster progress once they shook off the final vestiges of sleep. Ezra started talking, the closer they got to whatever was left of his ship, feeling the need to fill the silence with something other than the sound of leaves crunching underfoot or his ragged breaths being pushed through a filter.
But he’d cut himself off when he smelled the chemical burn in the air.
Filters made for life on the Green were grated fairly wide, in comparison to some of the products on the market. The bits of dust that floated through the air were much larger than the atoms of some gasses or virions that needed to be protected against in other situations, and since the layering of fine, protective materials invariably cost more money, filters were made with the bare minimum guard against the dust that threatened their owners.
Point being, they didn’t do much of anything against most smells.
It wasn’t smoke that Ezra smelled, none of it trailed into the air above the trees and it didn’t burn his nose in the same way. No, the scent was a bit fainter, more subtle than that, the smell of lingering damage, instead of an ongoing assault.
When he entered the clearing, this theory was only confirmed.
No fires burned amongst the wreckage of the Testin Screamer , but the blackened scars they left behind on the ground practically screamed of their past presence. The scorched ground radiated out from the remains of the ship in a silhouetted supernova, and the darkest spot in the middle was the only evidence of where the engine used to sit. Nothing of it remained.
The rest of the ship wasn’t much better. Only fragmented bits of wall still stood, crookedly sticking out of the dirt without the bracers of the ship to hold them in the right position. Other bits of scrap that once made up the vessel sat embedded in the dirt or just strewn across the ground, with a couple particularly sharp pieces ending up slicing their way into the side of trees. There were bodies too, stabbed through with bits of debri or charred beyond recognition, but he didn’t linger on them too long. Instead he just glanced over them for a rough round of identification (Silas was there, his helmet shattered by who knew what with blood pooling in what was left from it from a dried and yellowing cut on his head. The man that had attacked him, Rulk, he thought, was there too, rolled over on his stomach with his back cut up from debri, and Ezra briefly wondered if the man had accidentally saved his life. Kresh was there too, maybe, as one of the burnt bodies a little too close to the engine of the ship. Again, he didn’t look too close.) He just surveyed the sheer number of them and wondered how he’d been lucky enough to survive.
Number 2 pushed ahead of him, apparently tired of Ezra’s silent gazing out on the scene of the explosion, and probably finding nothing too significant about the scene himself. Ezra himself hesitated for another moment, looking out at lost chances and dissipated final hopes, and then followed.
Number 2 stopped at the small bit of the ship that was still somewhat intact, although even that was a generous bit of praise. It was just a corner of their cramped dorms, with its doors hanging sideways and the ceiling and walls peeling up where they met each other. The whole section sat crooked on the ground, its back end held up by the shaky remains of a bracer with its front pitched down into the dirt, unsupported. Number 2 reached out to one of the doors, pulling on its handle. But its base caught in the dirt, the horrible angle of the room driving it straight towards the ground. Number 2 just pulled harder on it, scraping the dirt out of his way bit by bit.
“Now hold on-” Ezra started, reaching forwards to assist his companion, maybe offer up another, more logical solution, but the hinges of the door let go before he could grab on.
The door slammed into the ground with a dull, bone shaking thud, and Ezra had to quickly stumble back to avoid his toes being crushed into nothing but the fine powder of bones and the red paste of everything else. Number 2 himself just calmly stepped aside. He paused for a moment to stare at the fallen door, completely ignoring the incredulous expression Ezra was sending his way, and then turned and headed into the scrap of ship.
Ezra followed with a slight shake of his head, pulling himself up by the jagged edge of the doorframe. The floor shook slightly, but ultimately held, letting Ezra walk further into the space with only the minor complaints of creaking joints and small jolts of unexpected movement under his feet. The “room” was indeed small, fitting only two beds stacked on top of one another, with an assortment of random belongings erratically thrown about the space. Number 2 was crouched over on the floor over some of those belongings, rooting through the heaps of manavelins for anything good, Ezra figured. He stepped forward to look over 2’s shoulder, hoping to pass some extra judgement as to what his silent partner would deem as “useful”.
And that was the final straw that fluttered down on the camel’s back.
The combined weight of both Ezra and Number 2, so close to each other and standing right about where the one bracer holding them up, was, seemingly, too much for that lone pillar to handle.
There was a horrible metallic clanging as some final support crumbled under the stress, metal grinding upon metal and edges crackling away for the ship to suddenly lurch forwards, the floor under their feet hurriedly descending away from them, caught in the tendrils of gravity once more.
Number 2, from his crouched position on the ground, suffered little damages, managing to catch himself on his hands with an annoyed grunt and easily pushing himself to his feet again once the floor under them was stable.
Ezra, on the other end, found himself in not quite so lucky a position. Instead, as the floor disappeared from where it was supposed to be underneath him, the momentum from his step just kept pushing him forward, and he was sent crashing to the ground. He groaned, half out of sheer annoyance and frustration and half out of complaint for the pain that still lingered in his skull, before hauling himself to his feet. Number 2 just stared on unhelpfully. Ezra brushed himself off before heading back outside, the floor no longer swaying under his feet.
Yep, the bracer had buckled alright. The entire thing, clearly already damaged from the explosion and probably hanging onto to usefulness by a fraying thread, had cleanly folded in half, with bits of metal and flaked paint scattered in the flattened grass around it. It left the bit of the ship it was supported flat on the ground which was, Ezra admitted reluctantly, handy if they needed to root around in it a bit more. Or…
He stepped back around the side of the room, where Number 2 was trying to prop the fallen door back on the sliding track that kept it from potentially swinging around in the perils of space travel but still let it be opened. Ezra stepped forwards to help, using his knowledge of the ship (and specifically of cleaning up after a particularly rough entry or minor squabble-turned-minor brawl was able to knock the track loose again) to help Number 2 guide the door back in place. And, quite frankly, there was only one reason they’d need to do that.
“This’ll be temporary,” he said, forcefully shoving the door back into place with a final push. There. That should hold it for now. He turned to Number 2 for understanding and was only met with a cocked head. “Posting up here,” he clarified. “That was the idea, right?”
Number 2 was quiet for a thoughtful moment, and Ezra could only imagine what was going on in his head. Probably something pointing out that, actually, the idea was to find a ship more or less in operational condition, fix it up, and get off of the Green before it had the time to take either of them. Maybe he was thinking that Ezra had brought him to a ship under false promises and wrongly raised hopes and was wondering whether or not it was really worth keeping him around, if he wouldn’t be more useful to 2 dead.
Or maybe he was just thinking that of course that was the idea, because he wasn’t just fixing up the door for the aesthetics of it all.
But, either way, no matter what he was thinking, Number 2 offered Ezra a slow nod.
Ezra clapped his hands together, unsatisfied by the dull, muffled thwap his gloves had to offer, but the effect was achieved enough.
“Well then, let’s get to work, shall we?”
+++
It wasn’t easy, turning the small, broken and battered space into something resembling livable, but they didn’t have many other options, unless they wanted to sleep with the Saters or spend another night braving the dust. And Ezra didn’t mind the small distraction from his thoughts either, even as he chattered them aloud half the time anyway.
They’d cleared out all the bodies first, which was admittedly for their own comfort (or at least Ezra’s; he couldn’t yet speak on behalf of his companion) instead of some utilitarian need, but after that they got a lot more practical.
Of the tools Ezra knew they had on the ship, little was to be found. Their fuser, for example, was completely missing, but a caulk-gun presented itself after only a bit of rummaging. It could , technically, be used for a project of such scale, but admittedly that wasn’t its primary intended function. Still, it was no matter, as long as they managed their use of it sparingly and administered each application with a steady hand.
So the other door was straightened back onto its track, the last bits of the bracer cleared away, and new bits of scrap were hauled over to patch up the tattered walls of the room. By the time another cycle was coming to a close and Bakhroma’s sun was dipping down below the treeline, they had… well they had something.
A shack would probably be the best word for it. Or shithole, Ezra thought as he stepped back with Two to admire ( judge ) their handiwork and make a final sweep for any major gaps in their attempts at mending. It was clear even at a passing glance that the space wouldn’t provide them the proper respite needed to take their helmets off, without a proper space-filter of its own and no proper sealing on the doors, but it would be better than another night outside, with absolutely nothing protecting them from the harsh poison of the Green. Ultimately, it would just have to do.
Number 2 claimed the bottom bunk, forcing Ezra to climb into the top, and they both rested as best as they could until morning.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 6: Tent Time!
Summary:
They hadn’t stopped in any sort of clearing. The trees didn’t part to effortlessly show their prize, the ferns didn’t grow any less thick around their feet, the grass wasn’t suddenly short and flat where they stepped. For a moment, Ezra thought they were just stopping for another break, taking a moment to rest, but then he saw it. A tent.
It was a little underwhelming.
Notes:
im sorry all my chapter titles are so dumb im bad at coming up with them and it feels like A Thing now, y'know?
Anyway, hope you enjoy the chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Waking up to face the interior of the Testin Screamer was disorienting at first, and it took Ezra’s sleep-addled brain a moment to piece the conflicting bits of information (the ship was gone but he was… in it?) he was being given into a sensible picture.
The drying bits of sealant on the crooked metal walls and loud, grumbling snores of the man sleeping below him helped.
Ezra hopped off his top bunk, not bothering to be too quiet. Number 2 would need to be up soon anyway, if they were going to further their own survival and attempts at escape from the Green. Ezra had a feeling his new partner wouldn’t be much help in any of the strategy or planning of the work, but he would be plenty helpful for sorting through the rest of the wreckage and hopefully finding some things they could use to their advantage. Yesterday, they’d managed to uncover a sizable piece of the ship’s old radio, and if they could get it working, it was easily their best shot off the moon. It was a stretch, sure, but what other choice did they have but to try?
+++
Ezra spent the better part of two days trying to fix up the old radio. It was hard, frustrating work, and Number 2 offered little advice when requested. They did manage to dig up some more parts from the wreckage, like some sad archeologists searching the remains of a long-forgotten civilization, but even that only got Ezra so far. Soon he’d turned to the corpses they had, as much as it made his stomach turn, and carefully detached radios from suits. It got him further, further than he expected.
Maybe, he thought from where he sat in front of his cobbled-together communication device, heart pounding heavy in his own ears, maybe it got him far enough.
Number 2 sat off to his side, his impenetrable black visor creating an emotionless wall between the two of them that left Ezra guessing as to what might lay beneath. Quite frankly, he couldn’t imagine not being jittery with excitement, but he and Number 2 had already proved to be quite different, in more ways than one.
He reached out for the side of the radio. “Ready?”
Number 2 nodded.
So he flicked it on.
And got nothing .
There’s supposed to be static , some annoyingly correct part of himself thought, but Ezra shoved the thought away, brow furrowing as he reached out, adjusting the dials on the side of the machine. Nothing. Still nothing.
He turned them this way and that, with a careful precision at first, and then more wildly, as if he expected to just stumble upon the right answer, some good fortune. But the universe had never been so kind to him, and he only got more silence.
“Fucking damnit ,” he muttered to himself, wrenching off the top of the machine to inspect his wiring, not stopping his stream of curses as he found no obvious problems with the mess in front of him. When he ran out of ones in Centrallian, he just switched languages. But more cursing did nothing and fiddling with the wiring did nothing and resetting the device did nothing. He got nothing .
Ezra stood up, deciding he was done with the damn radio if it didn’t want to offer him the bare minimum of fucking cooperation. His foot was slamming into it before he could try and stop himself, but he couldn’t deny the loud crack as the flimsy metal bent in on itself and wiring disconnected with a small pop of sparks was very, very satisfying.
Number 2 let out some annoyed grunt, and then stood up and left. Ezra, for once, didn’t say anything.
New plan, then.
+++
“Alright so, we need a ship,” Ezra established, looking down at the map in front of them, already marked with an “X” over where they were. Number 2 didn’t even nod at that, which Ezra couldn’t help but frown at a bit. He thought they were making progress. “Or at least some way to contact one, the means by which we would also find on a ship.”
That got a nod. Wonderful.
“Now I know the Green and her Rush are living on their last legs at the moment, but if you’d visited before then I’m sure you’d remember that it didn’t used to always be that way. Heat of the Rush brought a lot of strange folks round here, all chasing the same golden goose, and if they found failure in digging their prize up from the ground, well, they were plenty happy to snatch it from the dead body of a prospector.”
Another nod, even though Ezra hadn’t paused for one.
“Point being, there was a lot of bloodshed and with that came a lot of old abandoned ships, forgotten camps. None of ‘em will be in any shape for flying, but if we can pool together enough parts, we might be able to get something going, even if it is just a working radio, which I would certainly not be opposed to at this time. Is that a viable enough proposition for you?”
That Number 2 just shrugged at, and Ezra had to force a grin.
“Then let’s go.”
+++
It took another two days of searching for them to decide it was worth it to split up, and three after that before they found anything actually worthwhile.
Most of what they stumbled across was long-abandoned dig sites, with nothing to find but tattered tents and rotting corpses, the dust helping to peel away their skin quicker than it would flake away on its own. The closest thing they found to a ship was the remains of a wreck in even worse condition than Ezra’s own craft, just bits of scrap long grown over with ferns and vines that hid it well enough Ezra rammed his foot into a piece of metal before he saw any of it.
So they had split up, and expanded their search further away from their makeshift shack and further out into the bowels of the Green. They returned less and less frequently, and their rule to return nightly was quickly disregarded. They resettled on a timeline of a week’s absence before the other person could assume death and do whatever they saw fit with that information. Ezra had decided he’d steal all of Two’s shit, and he expected the other man would do the same for him.
It was on the evening on the sixth day when Ezra started planning how he’d pack it all up.
He’d just gotten back from a longer, more arduous search himself, and as the light seeped out of the trees around him, he settled in for night same as the darkness did. The ever-approaching deadline for Number Two’s return wasn’t lost on him, and as dull and silent as the man was, well, he’d proven useful enough, and Ezra didn’t want to have to sign off on his death certificate so soon. The company was nice too, to be completely honest.
So he waited a bit longer than he needed, posted up outside with the light of his helmet pointed at the trees, leaning (carefully) against the side of their shack.
Not for the first time, he heard Number Two before he saw him. He smiled to himself with a bit of chuckle, making a mental note to never take the man on any job that required any sort of stealth.
“Well there you are,” he said, pushing himself away from the “ship” to greet his companion. “You know I was beginning to wonder if you’d seen it fit to keel over somewhere in that forest and die. Glad to see-” but Number 2 just passed by him without a word, cutting him off as he closed the door, forcing Ezra to quickly follow after him lest he lock it shut. Ezra wouldn’t put it past him. Instead Ezra locked the door, only complaining about the close call and lack of acknowledgement in his head. When he turned back around, Number Two was kneeling on the floor, pulling his belongings into his bag. Ezra raised an eyebrow.
“You have plans of going somewhere there, Two?”
He only got a grunt in response, and Number Two paused for just a moment to wordlessly point at Ezra’s own bag, already hardly unpacked.
“You find something good?” he asked, already grinning, already grabbing his pack so he could fasten it shut and strap it onto his back.
And Number Two was already gone.
Oh so now he can be stealthy. Ezra thought, quickly unlatching the lock on the door and following Number Two out into the forest.
“You know, we could always wait to do this until morning,” Ezra suggested once he caught up with Two, flicking the light on his helmet back on and using its meager beam to guide the way. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Two shake his head. He let out a low whistle.
“Well, if it's of such importance I suppose I must trust you,” he conceded. “Although I must warn you, you’ve raised my expectations quite a bit.” Number 2 just grunted in reply, and Ezra smiled easily. He certainly hadn’t been lying; he felt fit to burst with excitement and anticipation at Number Two’s eagerness to take him to whatever he’d found. There was no tattered camp or rusted beyond salvation ship or even old aurelac dig (Number 2 had shown no interest in any aurelac, so far as Ezra could observe. In all candidness, he wasn’t entirely sure Two knew what the stuff was) that would warrant such a reaction, that could spur on the need to not take even a moment’s rest, and Ezra was beside himself wondering what such a thing could be.
It took them only a little over a day to get there. They rested quickly, slept little in favor of moving on as quickly as possible, and their fast pace and endless determination was rewarded with a quick arrival. Ezra fought his way through the foliage after Two, until suddenly the man in front of him came to a stop, and Ezra almost ran right into him.
They hadn’t stopped in any sort of clearing. The trees didn’t part to effortlessly show their prize, the ferns didn’t grow any less thick around their feet, the grass wasn’t suddenly short and flat where they stepped. For a moment, Ezra thought they were just stopping for another break, taking a moment to rest, but then he saw it. A tent.
It was a little underwhelming.
Oh it was most certainly a nice tent, don’t get him wrong there. A cursory glance revealed no gaping holes or clear damage in its exterior, instead the structure stood strong and sturdy. It was fairly big too, probably bigger than their cobbled together shack, which wasn’t the greatest honor to bestow upon it, but an upgrade was an upgrade, simple as that. Besides that, it blended into the forest much better than their old accommodations, sitting in the middle of the Green as though it had grown up from the ground same as the trees all around them, and Ezra knew that camouflage would be as protective as any other shielding they could find. But it was still, just a tent, and all the walking had got his spirits up a bit higher than that.
Still, when Number Two ducked inside, Ezra followed.
And the inside was where things really got good.
Four beds sat in the back two corners of the room, stacked in the pairs Ezra was accustomed to seeing, all covered with ratty blankets and pillows that Ezra hardly took note of the condition of simply because of the virtue that they were there. In front of that, closer to them, a table was pushed against one wall, and on top of it sat a number of sacred treasures Ezra couldn’t wait to uncover in more detail. Food packs, some nutrition bars, a sitting radio, a couple filters, a foam gun, all laid out just for them. But even better than that, the true jewel of the spread of fortunes in front of them, was the standing filter, tucked away to Ezra’s right in all of its beautiful, shining glory. Already, Ezra’s fingers itched to reach out for it, yearned to tug at the seals of his helmet and disconnect them from his head.
But first, there was the dead body to reckon with.
A corpse sat on the ground in between the two sets of beds, dried blood caked around a wound in their neck and more pooled on the ground by their side. Ezra just stared at it for a second, and Number 2 followed his gaze for a moment before his helmet turned back to Ezra and watched him instead. Ezra gestured out to the body with a lazy hand.
“You find them here like this?” he asked, briefly looking up at Number Two.
The man didn’t move, hardly breathed, didn’t so much as shake or nod his head for an answer, just stared back at Ezra with that impassive black void where his face should’ve been. It felt, vaguely, like a challenge. Ezra just turned back to the body thoughtfully. Under different circumstances, he might’ve had more questions, pushed a little harder than that. But his circumstances stretched far from anything normal, anything he had a manual or strict moral code for, and Ezra found himself just shrugging.
“Good enough, but you’re moving them,” he said, and Number Two just nodded in agreement as Ezra himself stepped further into the tent, over to the space filter.
He ignored Number Two as he hefted up the dead body and headed for the flap of the tent.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, afterall.
+++
Later, after the body had been moved, the filter left to run and the sun had started to dip back below the trees, Ezra checked his filter for the nth time in the past ten minutes, looking over its saturation levels with silent prayers to every deity he’d ever heard of that the line, which had been precariously bobbing between yellow and green since he’d turned on the damn filter, would have finally settled. The machine was certainly taking its own leisurely pace to warm back up, but finally, Ezra was rewarded for his obsessive diligence with the lowest saturation levels he’d seen since he’d fled the Sater camp.
He reached up for the air-tight seals that connected his helmet to the rest of his environment suit, and, with a quick, practiced motion, yanked them free.
Air hissed from the disconnected tubes for a quick moment as the pressure released, and as the system breathed out, Ezra sucked a breath in, relishing the taste of cool, fresh air in his lungs. It felt damn good, especially after night after night of no break from the confines of his bulky, stuffy helmet. He swept some of his sweat-slicked hair out of his eyes, nodding over to Number 2, who was sat on the cot across from him, staring.
“Filter’s doing its job now, if you’d care for a moment of reprieve from your own helmeted prison,” he suggested, chuckling slightly at his own exaggeration. “It’s getting dark enough in here that we might as well be calling it a night right about now,” he added. The tent did have lights, he’d noted earlier, but they needed battery power he wasn’t willing to waste just for anything. Could be a while until they could find some way to score a ride, afterall.
But Number 2, as usual, didn’t find the same amusement in his comments. He just fidgeted slightly, staying quiet, and for a moment Ezra thought that would be the end of it. Maybe Number 2 just wouldn’t take the helmet off. The man already didn’t talk or sign in any way, and Ezra knew there were all sorts of cultures scattered across the systems that had all sorts of rules. Maybe that’s why the visor was blacked out. He wouldn’t push it, especially not when Two had a rail gun on his side.
But then Number 2 reached up, and pulled off his helmet.
It decompressed with a slightly quieter hiss of air, and then, very slowly, Number 2 brought the helmet down to rest in his lap.
The horns were the first thing to catch Ezra’s attention.
They curved away from Number Two’s face in an upward point, a slightly dirtied white but no less sharp for it. They connected to a light gray skin that passed simply “sickly” and landed firmly in the territory of “unnatural” that covered his entire head. A head that was, Ezra noted silently, shorter than he expected, almost compressed. His features, in contrast, stood out more than they usually would, taking up more room on his smaller face. His eyes (of which there were two) were a few shades darker grey then his skin, and a pair of bushy, black eyebrows sat above them. The rest of his head was devoid of such hair. His nose and ears were nothing nearly as attention-grabbing as the rest of his face, but his mouth certainly was.
Or, should he say, mouths.
There were two of them, on either side of his long, wide neck. Each was lined with sharp, pointed teeth that jutted out at seemingly random directions, and without any lips, that’s really all they were; just two holes filled with rows of teeth.
Ezra pulled his gaze away from his companion, calmly setting his helmet on the floor next to his cot and setting his thrower next to it. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a non-human. His own species held the majority in most parts of the system (or at least the parts he’d been to, mostly in the Fringe) but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a wide variety of other beings that roamed the planets. He didn’t recognize Number 2’s species (unfortunately) but he knew just staring at him wasn’t going to give him much more of an advantage. He probably should’ve guessed he was dealing with a non-human, but for some reason the thought had never really crossed his mind.
Huh.
Either way, Ezra pulled the ratted blanket of his cot over himself, keeping the corner that was splattered with the blood from earlier… unspecified incidents away from him. He heard Number 2 shuffle a bit in his own bed, presumably to get himself in a similar arrangement, and Ezra smiled a bit, taking in another clear, clean breath. Maybe their tent wasn’t the most glamorous or lavish living arrangement ever thought up, but there were some pretty ornate living arrangements to be found out there. Ezra himself was more than happy with a helmet out of his face, an only slightly bloodied blanket on his back, a cot under his body and a reasonably low chance of death in the foreseeable future.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, afterall.
Notes:
Before I tell you to follow me on Instagram, a couple notes on my thoughts on Prospect's world for the purposes of this fic.
To start with the obvious: Two's an alien! I got this idea from a post @takacollective made about him ages ago, which was a big part of the inspiration for his fic. If we ever get more Prospect content, I'd love to see some aliens involved
Also, I imagine the Prospect world as being in a single solar system. These don't seem like the types of ships that are going to be traveling between stars, so a bit of a tighter setting makes sense to me. Still multi-planetary, a little more grounded.
More importantly, the tent. I don't really know if that tent was supposed to be Ezra's and Two's. In opinion, some of what he says and does implies it is, but then some of it implies it isn't? I assumed it was on my first watch, so that's what we're going with!
Finally, I know this chapter and the last have been a bit more... slow, I guess? Filler-y? They still focus on Two's and Ezra's relationship, which is the point of the fic, of course, but if you want a bit more then don't worry, the drama is coming up next. ;) These next two chapters might be my favorite in the whole fic, actually, so I'm excited to get them out there.
Uh anyway, yeah go follow me on Instagram! I (sometimes) talk about Prospect @emeryductie
Chapter 7: A Bad Deal
Summary:
But Oruf just shook his head, and Ezra fought to keep the easy smile frozen on his face. “Under a different situation, on a different path, I might consider your offer, Ezra. But I have not forgotten the havoc you wreaked last time you were on this encampment.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Ezra agreed. He’d started to hope, though. “I simply did what I thought I needed to survive. Surely you, a fellow man of the Green, of the Fringe, could understand.”
“I do not."
Notes:
Okay so first of all: I'm sorry this is late. I don't really have an excuse I've just been busy haha. If it makes up for it, there will still be a chapter on Sunday so... not much of a wait there. :p
MORE IMPORTANTLY!!! Prospect news!! If you don't follow @takacollective on Instagram and Twitter, then go do that (and hit up the @fringedrifters acc while you're at it). They've been hinting at a new, Prospect-related project that seems to be called "The Fringe" and from what I've been able to put together based on the short, cryptic posts, it seems like Number Two might be involved??? I don't know, no one really knows anything right now, but honestly I'm excited to see whatever they have to offer.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
In the absence of a formal joining with the likes of the Sater population, Ezra found his lifestyle becoming something closer to theirs regardless.
He hadn’t forgone all material possessions or anything along that vein; his container of aurelac sat in the same spot stowed under his cot or strapped to his back as it had since they’d moved into the tent. He still kept a heaping amount of supplies on him whenever he ventured out into the Green, and his Puzo keychain, a worthless, frivolous, unnecessary thing to own if he’d ever heard of one, still looked over at him from its spot on a table. He figured if there was any luck to be wrung from the thing, it was about time it made its appearance.
But no, Ezra wasn’t like the Saters in any of those ways, and he doubted he ever would be. He had picked up scavenging as a hobby, however. Out of necessity, really. The supplies in the tent were nothing short of a damn miracle, of course, but as more cycles passed Ezra found himself in a position no closer to salvation, and miracle or not, the supplies they had been gifted were a finite resource. So they turned to wherever else they could, scraping any useful bits from old aurelac mining sites or long-abandoned camps or ships and taking them back to add to their horde.
But even with that, there was only so much that could be harvested from the dying corpse of the planet, and they had yet to run into any new blood to suck dry. Ezra and Number Two headed out each day, stretching their limbs further and further each time with less and less to show for it. Some things they still had in abundance; water was no scarcity on the Green Moon and their filters held strong so long as they remembered to care for them right. Ezra wouldn’t have minded a refresher or two, but instead he settled for scrubbing his down each night and dealing. Food, however, was starting to run dry. Few plants in the Green were edible, too many of them had adapted to the poisonous dust in the air with toxins of their own, and Ezra didn’t trust his memory enough on those that were safe for consumption. A wrong step could mean a quick, painful death. Without the plants around them to fall back on, rationing quickly grew tighter, and soon Ezra was staring in the face of the very real threat of starvation, and without the consolation that Number Two wouldn’t try to eat him if it came down to it.
He needed a plan.
And, unfortunately, the only thing he could come up with that had half a chance to work was to appeal to the other scavengers the pair of them shared the moon with.
The Sater.
Truly, it was a distressing prospect, but Ezra couldn’t find another solution they hadn’t already exhausted. He didn’t wish to be too hyperbolic, but it was starting to feel like they’d relentlessly foraged in every corner of the Green they could feasibly search. His last interaction with the Sater had ended in nothing short of disaster, that was a blatant truth he could not afford to shy away from, but he was getting desperate.
It would have to be an endeavor he undertook alone, or at least not with Number 2 in view in any way. Whereas Ezra had been a one-time annoyance that snatched away some of their supplies and maybe fired a couple shots (or maybe he didn’t, it had been a hectic skirmish, afterall), Number Two seemed to have a much bigger impact on the Saters. A repeated problem instead of Ezra’s single infraction, who’d taken from them an entire rail gun and proceeded to use it (too clearly for even Ezra to argue) to kill several of their people.
…A solo mission indeed.
He didn’t jump right into things, of course. No, Ezra took his time to prepare for the task, think over what he was going to say, what he could offer for trade, how he would present himself. He proposed the idea to Number Two, who silently agreed (as he so often did) and they (Ezra) decided the best of course of action would be for himself to go in alone while Number Two waited off to the sidelines, hidden in the bracken out of sight but ready to interject just in case things went South.
It was a simple plan: Number Two would wait off to the side, Ezra would go in with some medical supplies, filters and one of the previous tent owner’s spare weapons for an attempt at trade, barter best he could, get the food they needed, and they’d leave without even knowing Two was there. So long as the bargaining and trade went well, it would be an easy enough mission.
They left the next morning.
The forests of the Green were already becoming easier to navigate the more times they had to traverse them, and their travel time was decently cut down without the hassle of constant map-checking and the occasional backtracking. They only had to camp in the forest a single night, and they arrived at the edges of the camp before the sun was even right overhead.
Ezra stopped, of course, once they were close enough to barely, just barely, see the browns of the Sater camp though the trees. He signaled for Number 2 to get in position, taking some of the supplies the man had been holding for him, and his companion disappeared into the trees. He waited until he could no longer hear the footsteps, and then he stepped forwards.
Ezra approached from the main entrance to the camp, leaving no room for assumptions of deceit or trickery as he walked, hands raised above his head once he was in clear view of the camp. He wasn’t completely unarmed, although he’d left his own gun behind to further communicate his message of a solid truce. Still, several knives remained concealed in the pockets of his clothes, and the sharp, serrated blade of the old tent owner rested against his hip.
“Hold it!” a sater at the front shouted as he approached. Their voice was muffled by the layers of helmet in between them, but the spiked club pointed at his neck made up for whatever they lacked in volume. “What do you want?”
Ezra kept his hands in sight, but raised his fingers to, slowly, non threateningly, hold up two fingers. He’d much rather engage in clear, productive discourse over the alternative of shouting at each other from ten feet away. Given his recent luck with the Saters, he’d probably be misheard. Pleasantries would be misconstrued into death threats and Ezra would find himself with a spiked club embedded in his neck, an accessory he was not eager to adorn. Luckily, static crackled in his ear, and the voice repeated itself within the confines of his own helmet.
“What do you want?”
“I am simply looking for trade, my friend. I bring no throwers, just supplies and aurelac, if you’re interested.”
A moment’s silence, and then the Sater stepped forwards. “Just trade?” they asked, a sarcastic doubt coloring their voice. “We aren’t as blind as you seem to think, prospector. I know you’ve been here before. Your last round of negotiations didn’t exactly end well.”
Damnit, apparently he’d built up more of a reputation than he would have liked. He’d been hoping maybe his own transgressions had paled when compared to the havoc Number 2 wreaked, but evidently he wouldn’t be given that much space to breathe. He just nodded. “I’d like to apologize up front for my hurried leave last time, but to be fully transparent I had been pushed to desperation after a… jarring day. I can assure you I come to you much calmer this time.” And of his own accord, too. “I only wish to trade.”
More silence, and then the Sater pointedly jabbed their club more firmly in his direction. “Wait here,” they ordered, and then they were gone.
Ezra did exactly that, only moving to lower his hands into a more comfortable position and double (or maybe triple? Quadruple? He was losing count) check that the knife by his side was still hidden and ready to be accessed.
After a couple minutes, the Sater returned.
“Follow me.”
And so he did.
He was led through their camp, past the clusters of tents that they had made their home (a home he might have scoffed at once, might have stared at questioning why anyone would choose to live there. On his second viewing, he just remembered his own shared tent that had become a home and stared at it in wonder.) and soon they came to a stop in front of one of them. The Sater pulled open the tent flap, and Ezra followed them inside.
Oruf sat on the ground in the tent, Rahn by his side and, hovering just behind them, the boy that had watched over Ezra during his first visit.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to see you all again, although quite frankly I wasn’t expecting our paths to cross so soon. You know I must-”
“Sit,” Oruf interrupted, gesturing to the floor in front of him with a cold stare.
Ezra nodded, glad to relieve himself from his position awkwardly hunched over in the tent. His back was even more grateful.
“I have a proposal for you, prospector.”
Ezra cocked his head. “Well you certainly have my attention, I have a business proposal of my own, you know.”
“Yes, Inlef told me as much. What is it you require from us?”
“Well, as a matter of fact I have indeed found myself stranded in these unforgiving forests of ours, and well,” he paused, chuckling to himself at the absurdity of it all, “well, my scavenging skills are not quite as advanced as your own and I have found myself running perilously low on adequate sustenance. In return I can offer you some medical supplies I have been able to procure, this fine piece of weaponry, and several filter refreshers.” He smiled. “All depending on how much you’re willing to barter.”
But Oruf just shook his head, and Ezra fought to keep the easy smile frozen on his face. “Under a different situation, on a different path, I might consider your offer, Ezra. But I have not forgotten the havoc you wreaked last time you were on this encampment.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Ezra agreed. He’d started to hope, though. “I simply did what I thought I needed to survive. Surely you, a fellow man of the Green, of the Fringe, could understand.”
“I do not. Maybe once, when I was a different, more desperate man but now? I do not sympathize with whatever arbitrary justifications brought you to not only reject our hospitality, but also steal from us and, in doing so, attack my people.” His gaze hardened, looking at Ezra with a grave, deadly expression. “Quite frankly, at this point I should just have you killed now. That would be justified.”
Ezra returned the glare with only a removed concern, as if he was being threatened with a mere lecture and not what he was sure Oruf would make a painful, bloody death. If he had it his way, he’d give Oruf a winning glare of his own, but the scales of debate had been tipped against him, and anything other than perfect civility would get him nowhere, he knew. So had the politeness to look concerned by the threat, and then moved on to speak.
Oruf interrupted him before he even got the chance.
“Unfortunately, although I’m sure you’ll be pleased, I believe you might be able to help me.”
Now that was a proposal. Ezra titled his head. “Well Oruf, I’m all ears. How so?”
“The man you were with, who’s assault on my people you took advantage of, I’m sure you remember?”
Ezra wasn’t sure if he was facing the brutal passive aggression he’d only seen in the most devout of religious leaders, or if Oruf was truly trying to get a rise out of him. Either way, it was a rhetorical question, but he did remember, and he was feeling a little passive aggressive himself. He nodded calmly.
“Well I’d certainly expect you to. It was reported to me that you two left the same way, that you might know where he is.”
“And why are you so keen on knowing that, hm?”
“Because I want him dead. He had terrorized my people for weeks and I’m not convinced our last altercation with him will be the last. So my deal for you is this: I can get you the supplies you need, some aurelac you might want, and I can even forget about any differences we might have shared in the past if you can bring me his head.”
Ezra was laughing, he was actually laughing . He was doubled over, he was gasping for breath, he was losing his absolute mind. He was cackling and chuckling and guffawing and just howling with laughter because that was the funniest damn thing he’d ever heard. Because the Saters, the holier-than-thou protectors of the Green, who’d spat the word prospector at him like it was a slur, who’d stolen from him under some twisted pretense of self-righteousness, were trying to get a killer for hire. And they just so happened to have chosen the one person Ezra could just maybe call an ally to put a target on. And, hell, maybe Ezra had just been in the Green for too long, but he found that quite perfectly, hilariously, ironic.
Mentally, of course, he was doing all that mentally, he was laughing mentally because he needed to redeem some level of professionality and he had long become an expert at hiding his emotions. All the Sater saw was a pair of raised eyebrows in measured surprise.
“That’s quite the generous offer, I must admit,” he said, voice still calm and even. “And I would be more than willing to accept if it were not for one, glaring detail: I have no leads on the whereabouts of your tyrannical friend any more than you do. We parted ways soon as we hit the trees.”
Oruf’s expression creased with frustration. “Not even an idea of where he might have went?”
“Most I could do would be to point you where I saw him last but well, it’s a big moon. Straight shot won’t get you far.”
“And that’s all you could do?” Oruf leaned forward slightly, eyes narrowing into a glare.
“Past that, we are in the same boat of knowledge, my friend,” Ezra confirmed.
Oruf leaned back, staring at Ezra thoughtfully. “Then I’ll have to take up the search myself, it seems. Although I will say this, prospector. If I find that you have concealed the whereabouts of this man from me. If I find that you have been working with him, have been fraternizing with him, then you will be considered an enemy to the Sater, and you will be dealt with accordingly.”
Ezra forced a smile. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect any less.”
+++
Ezra stood up, offering a hand to Oruf that was only denied as they wrapped up their trade. It had been quick, after Oruf’s initial proposal had been turned down, and Ezra was eager to take what he’d managed to barter his way into getting. It wasn’t a bad trade, he’d gotten the food they needed for their immediate survival without losing too much in return. Rushed, perhaps, but if time was just another commodity on the table, Ezra would trade it all the same.
“My offer stands,” Oruf reminded him as he reached the flap to the tent, one hand already pushing it aside. “Bring me that terrorizer’s head, and I can make you spend your time in the Green in nothing but comfort. Your time after, too, if you can get it.”
Ezra looked back over his shoulder, and smiled. “Oh don’t worry, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”
And then he left, Oruf’s hard glare burning into his back with all the fire of a blazing blue star. Ezra didn’t know if Oruf was angry at his own failure, Ezra’s easy smiles or if he was just suspicious, seeing through the lies but stuck in the frustrating position where he wasn’t yet sure enough to act on it, to prove anything. Ezra didn’t much care either way. If he played his cards right, he was hoping he’d never have to interact with a Sater again.
What a dream.
Ezra rejoined Number Two the same place he’d left him, more glad than ever that he’d decided to have his companion stay outside. He couldn’t see them having gotten a peaceful resolution otherwise. They made the trek back to their tent in silence, and if Ezra was a little quieter than usual, it went uncommented on by 2. He figured the other man appreciated it, even. Besides, it’s not like he needed a check up or anything, he was fine. Just a bit… distracted, maybe.
It would have been real damn easy to put a hole through Number Two’s neck.
+++
They made it back to camp easily enough, and Ezra began to unload his bag, organizing both what he’d traded for and what he’d simply come back with. It wasn’t enough, but if they rationed properly, they might be able to stretch it thin enough to reach whenever they stumbled upon food next.
Number Two just watched, watched as Ezra organized the food into piles, then he looked at how disappointingly few it was and reorganized it: smaller piles, but more of them. 2 didn’t help, and Ezra didn’t ask him to.
If only he’d taken that deal. Then maybe he would actually be able to eat. The math wasn’t hard, less mouths would mean more food. More resources he didn’t have to share in general. It’s not like Number Two personality was his saving grace; he refused to communicate so much as a single emotion, a single thought to Ezra in all the time they’d spent together. He just listened to Ezra’s eloquent, loquacious speech without a drop of interest and then, when he got tired of it all, he’d put his thrower to Ezra’s head to try and shut him up.
Number Two turned, pulled off his helmet and set it in his lap to fiddle with the connections on some of the tubing. His back was open to Ezra. His head, exposed, unprotected, was open to Ezra. Ezra’s fingers itched for his thrower, his hand began to drift there, eyes still glued on Number Two and then… and then Two turned around.
Reached out to set his helmet on the table and Ezra’s hand jerked right away from his thrower, eyes slid back to the piles in front of him. He curled his hands into fists. He wasn’t going to- He wouldn’t have-
… right?
He was better than that. Oh Ezra took lives, there was no shying away from that fact, but only when he had to. Only when he was backed up into a corner and it was either him or someone else. Only when he couldn’t let it be him. Only rarely. Only when a thrower was pulled on him and never when his opponent had their back turned, weapons abandoned, trust, against all odds, given.
That wasn’t him.
He wouldn’t have.
Wasn’t going to.
Ezra shook his head, and a half-haunted smile ghosted on his face. He’d been out in those damn woods too long already, and if the sentiments of the Sater were starting to twist themselves into something rational in his mind, that was as good a sign as any he needed some rest. He bid Number Two a goodnight, and shut down the lights.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 8: Too Late
Summary:
Regardless, Ezra chose not to accompany Number Two. Instead, he was plenty happy sitting alone in that tent, scrubbing the grime and buildup out of his filters with nothing to keep him company but his own tangential mutterings. He found it wasn’t much of a downgrade from usual anyway.
Looking back, it might have been a good idea to keep his thoughts in his head for once. He might have heard the footsteps approaching, or he might have been quiet enough for no one else to hear him.
Notes:
Sorry I skipped a week, idk why I'm so bad at posting when literally all I have to do is copy+paste the chapter in. Oh well.
ANYWAYS I saw The Fringe trailer and it looked so good!! The set is as good as ever, the concept seems very interesting, it has the same feel of Prospect that just makes me sooooo excited. Then they had to show the nft stuff at the end and crush my good mood, unfortunately. Rude :/
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Their next day trickled by slowly. The rushing river of time thickened into sweet, viscous sap, hardly tugging itself along where it had previously raced. Ezra didn’t mind it. He found slow days were often easy days, and he needed a bit of easy. Number Two set out sometime later in the day, as the sun began to set and the planet cooled.
Ezra asked where he was going. He didn’t get an answer, so he wished the man good luck instead. He didn’t get an answer to that either, so he just chuckled a bit to himself.
Contradicting personalities, that’s what they were.
Regardless, Ezra chose not to accompany Number Two. Instead, he was plenty happy sitting alone in that tent, scrubbing the grime and buildup out of his filters with nothing to keep him company but his own tangential mutterings. He found it wasn’t much of a downgrade from usual anyway.
Looking back, it might have been a good idea to keep his thoughts in his head for once. He might have heard the footsteps approaching, or he might have been quiet enough for no one else to hear him.
Looking a little less far back, he didn’t think he’d learned that lesson. Cee would tell him that, he knew.
But in that moment, he ranted to himself same as he always had, and that was enough to deafen him to those tell-tale footsteps, to attract attentions he would have rather let pass on by.
In that moment, the flap of the tent was pushed open before he was able to prepare for it, and someone entered the room with their thrower already raised.
Ezra was on his feet in a second, filter in his lap clattering to the ground, legs already moving.
In that moment, he was very glad their tent was very small. It meant he could get there in time.
He grabbed onto the attacker’s wrist before he had time to think, pushing their aim away from his chest so their thrower bolt exploded into the ground, shooting dirt through the hole it made in its wake. Quick as he could, Ezra twisted the stranger’s arm back, and with a shout of pain the thrower clattered to the floor.
His assailant struggled in his grasp, boots connecting with his feet, his shins, but Ezra didn’t so much as flinch. He just gripped twice as tight, reached out for his own thrower and-
The stranger twisted in his grasp, took advantage of Ezra’s one-armed hold and shifted to drive their elbow into his stomach. He grunted, his grip loosened, and they were free.
A fist connected with his face.
Ezra took a stumbling step backwards, gathering his bearings just in time to see the stranger lunging for their thrower on the floor. Shit. Without a second thought, he lunged forwards, his body slamming into the stranger and knocking them both to the floor.
It was chaos after that. They both grappled and struggled and kicked and fought dirty , each scrambling to try and reach the thrower, the one thing that could possibly offer them the upper hand. If there were rules to good, honorable fighting, you didn’t learn them out in the Fringe, and Ezra gladly broke every single one.
And somehow, Ezra found himself on top, stranger pinned below him. With the adrenaline rushing through his veins and zapping through his brain, he couldn’t have recalled how he did it, he just knew he wasn’t making the same mistake twice. He didn’t even bother reaching for the thrower, he just pulled back his fist and-
And suddenly he was on his back, wind knocked out squarely out on him as their roles were quickly reversed. The stranger reached out for the thrower again, and Ezra scrambled to stop them, but not quick enough. Not quite enough.
Their fingers curled around the barrel and they yanked it back with a small shout of victory. They were holding it all wrong, fingers nowhere near the trigger, hands in all the wrong places for proper aim, but apparently that didn’t matter. They just raised the thrower above their head and brought it down on Ezra’s.
And just like that, everything went black.
+++
The stranger was not hard to kill.
They were standing above Ezra with their thrower aimed and ready when, summoned by the sounds of shouting and scuffle, Number Two entered the tent. They turned.
Too late.
Tried to react.
Too late.
Tried to raise their thrower.
Too late.
Number Two already had his aimed at their chest, and one shot later they were dead. Two fired three. He walked up to the stranger, nudged them slightly with his foot.
Yep. Dead.
He decided to drag the body outside before it started to smell or anything, also because it had landed on top of Ezra a bit, and that probably wasn’t ideal. Ezra had a thing about bodies in the tent.
That “thing” was that they weren’t supposed to be there. Full stop, no expectations, needed to be moved out as soon as possible.
Dramatic.
Regardless, Number Two tugged the body outside of the tent, dumped it a bit a ways away and then just… left it there. Not his problem. Not anymore.
It was only when he got back to the tent and pulled off his helmet that he realized Ezra was bleeding.
The space filter hummed in the corner of the tent, and Number Two had walked over to Ezra as the thought occurred to him that it was worthwhile to check if his companion was alive as well. He wasn’t too sure what the answer was.
There was a lot of blood, but the cut was still easy to miss at first. Ezra’s clothes were stained with the blood of the stranger that had fallen on him, and the bright red was attention-grabbing, loud, and, most importantly, made the blood snaking its way down Ezra’s forehead and matting his hair seem like no big deal.
There was a cut on his forehead, it seemed, and that was the source of the blood. Number Two cocked his head. It was a good amount of blood, and he knew head wounds, especially on humans, were serious, deadly. There was a good chance Ezra would not wake up in the morning, and after that there was an equally good chance he would miss every morning after that.
But none of that meant Number Two was a medic. He could’ve tried to help, sure, but he was just as likely to make things worse as he was to make things better.
It was better, he decided, sitting down on his cot and looking down on Ezra, to wait, and to watch.
Number Two was, more often than not, not a very patient man. When Ezra had instructed him to wait outside of the Sater camp his finger hadn’t been away from the trigger of his gun and he paced the entire area half a dozen times. When he’d been on his mission to reclaim his stolen possessions, he’d attacked three times in one week. He’d always preferred action, continued to scoff at his new partner’s attempts to smooth things over with words instead.
But when it struck him, Number Two could indeed wait.
When it was of his own volition, when there was no action to be had, when it was simply a chance to sit and be still, Number Two could wait.
He could wait, and he could let fate run its course. Either Ezra would wake up, and things would continue as they had been, or his breaths would stall and then stop, and Number Two would add another body to the pile. He would prefer the former, maybe, but he’d gotten most of the benefit from a partnership with Ezra. If the man died, Number Two would continue on as he had been, if he lived, the same. It hardly made a difference.
+++
Ezra woke to the unpleasant sensation that his brain was beating against his skull like a bird trying to escape its- oh he was too tired for metaphors.
His fucking head hurt.
He raised a hand to his head slowly, oh so very slowly, unable to repress a pained groan as his fingers grazed against sticky, crusted blood. His eyes cracked open, taking slow, lazy blinks as his eyes adjusted to the dim light and took in the sight of the bloodstained fingers he’d come to raise in front of his face.
And for a moment he just stared at the streaks of red, giving his brain the time to process what had happened, to pick up the shredded threads of the story that had been destroyed and tossed aside the moment someone decided to crack his skull open and weave them back together with the care they deserved.
Right. The intruder, the scuffle, the thrower coming down on his head and then… nothing.
How the hell was he alive?
Carefully, Ezra sat up, pressing his eyes closed again as his head spun with disorienting pain. He opened his eyes again and found Number Two staring back at him. He was helmetless, but that was an appearance Ezra was getting used to. He offered a slight wave in greeting. Number Two gave no acknowledgement that he even saw. Not for the first time, Ezra found himself wondering if the man’s species could sleep with their eyes open.
He pointed to the medkit sitting tucked into the corner of their tent, right by the door for easy access should one of them be as unfortunate as to stumble into the place already wounded. “Number Two, would you perhaps consider grabbing me that medkit we have sitting over there?”
Two just stared at him for a moment, and Ezra became more and more convinced of his whole “sleeping with their eyes open” theory as the time ticked on. But then, slowly, Number Two’s eyes flicked over to the corner of the room, and then he stood. Ezra grinned as Two ambled across the room, grabbed the medkit, and dumped it at Ezra’s feet with a loud clattering.
“Thank you kindly.”
Number Two didn’t stop watching him as he opened the medkit, as he scrubbed away as much excess blood around the area as he could and only left the cut behind. He simply sat and stared as Ezra rinsed the area with disinfectant and bit his cheek against the pain, didn’t so much as blink.
And as Ezra brought the foam gun to his forehead and carefully felt around for the area he needed to seal, he realized without a doubt that the man in front of him had most certainly saved his life.
Unless, of course, Ezra’s unconscious body had tripped his assailant and they landed on a perfectly-placed knife, Number Two must have been the one to come in at the last second and stop the stranger from taking his life. Ezra smirked to himself a bit as he capped the foam gun, hell, he must’ve just missed him.
And although he couldn’t help but wish Number Two had finished the job a little bit better (foam gun really isn’t that hard to use, you just point and pull the trigger) the significance of Number Two’s actions was not lost on him. The bitter irony was not either, that he had just the day prior thought to point a thrower at the man who now raised his in allyship, who pointed his only in defense, defense of Ezra’s life.
But you weren’t going to do it! A part of him, a small, growing smaller part of him wailed. Insisted he would never, that it was just a fluke, that he’d just been lost in thought- no not those thoughts. Whether it was true or not, Ezra ignored it.
All he knew was he certainly wouldn’t be pulling that trigger now.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D (just posted a new Two drawing today, actually ;))
Chapter 9: Finding Nemo
Summary:
They whirled around to face Ezra and Number Two, face suddenly lit up in a grin. Ezra couldn’t help but match it. Either they did have something good, or Ezra and Two had been led into a trap, and were about to die.
He couldn’t wait to find out.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They were out scavenging again, forced to turn to the Green in the vain hope it would give them something in return. Sometimes it did, often it didn’t, but Ezra had to admit the ratio was starting to tip more and more in their favor with each passing day. Oruf would probably credit the flow of the Currents or whatever nonsense he proffered those days. Ezra was of the opinion they were quite simply getting better.
Scraps of cloth and metal stuck out to them more as they learned to look for them, little signs that would point them towards abandoned camps or old dig sites that could be their salvation depending on how tough times were. Most of what they found were dig sites, but as they continued their searches, camps became more commonplace as well. Tents just like their own scattered across the map, with bodies just their own nestled within. Ezra ignored those. It got easier to.
Regardless, with each new find, Ezra’s mental maps grew, patterns cataloged away until he didn’t need those scraps to find their next hit. He could just look at the type of trees, or the way the thicket had grown in, or even how the dirt was packed and, with increasing accuracy, point them in the right direction.
If he thought too much about it, about the time that it took to develop such intuition, about how much time he’d been out there, he’d get a little nagging itch in the back of his mind, one that only grew the more he mentally scratched at it.
So he left it alone, and counted the days with a scientific detachment.
It had been about four Centrallian months.
Ezra wasn’t sure how much thought he wanted to put into just that number either.
So he left that alone too, for the most part, and focused on survival.
And in that moment, maybe survival was less about “what the hell am I going to eat tomorrow?” and more about… securing future funds but hey. It was all part of the process.
Ezra sat crouched in the dirt, the fleshy form of the organism that served as a safe for the precious aurelac sat on a cloth in front of him. He’d forgotten their true, scientific name after years of nothing but slang, so he just thought of them as husks. That’s all they were to the prospectors, anyway, just another obstacle between them and their fortunes. Ezra couldn’t say he thought about them any differently.
He just peeled back the layers of flesh, carefully going through the process on a sort of autopilot, letting the subtle sounds of the forest fade out while he worked. Number Two stood nearby, idly watching him, but Ezra made no attempts to monologue or start up a “conversation”. He just went through the motions.
Ezra poured the fazer solution over the last bit of the husk, and sat back as the gem made its appearance. He picked it up, wiping the last bits of fazer off on his suit before holding it up to the sunlight that filtered through the trees.
It was shiny.
Bright.
Valuable.
It might have even been better than the gem he’d dug up with Kresh, all those months ago. About the same in size and clearness, but the central amber on this one looked deeper, just as the jewelers liked it.
It was great, the type of pull that would usually be a cause for celebration, the type of pull you might gesture a friend over to check out, and then they would celebrate right alongside you, and you would forget for a moment that you were stuck in a job where people rarely struck rich enough to make up for the costs of setting out in the first place on a planet that was constantly trying to kill you if you, quite literally, so much as breathed wrong.
Ezra just wordlessly packed up the aurelac and checked his filter.
They started to head back after that, picking their way through the thicket without much more conversation.
Then a branch broke somewhere in the trees, and both of them froze, hands reaching for weapons and triggers.
On another planet, in another situation, their hastiness might have been dismissed as paranoia, but on the Green, where hardly any lifeforms bigger than your pinky finger could live in harmony with the toxic spores in the air, a broken branch wasn’t just some harmless rodent hopping through the bushes.
The forest was quiet for a moment. Still. Silent. The lack of moving, breathing life meant the Green could be awfully silent when it wanted to. Awfully lonely.
Then the foliage shuffled again, and out stumbled a figure, hands raised in the air.
“Don’t shoot!”
They were human, Ezra noted immediately, something he felt a little more prone to taking note of after all his time hanging out around Number Two. Their bulky envirosuit made it hard to pick out too many exact details, but they looked to be somewhere in their twenties, younger than Ezra, and their fingers flexed nervously where they held them in the air.
Ezra didn’t lower his thrower. “You’re going to have to be a bit more convincing than that. Care to enlighten my friend and I as to what you might be doing out here, all alone?”
“My crew ditched me. We were looking for aurelac but…” The let out a soft, frustrated huff. “There was a bit of a disagreement. It didn’t end well.”
“Yeah? Just you out here then? Did you crash down here or did your troop fly off without you?”
“Flew off without me. I’m the only one still stuck here.”
Ezra cursed under his breath, thrower dropping to his side as he paused to crane his neck up to the treetops, hands on his hips. That pod could’ve been his ticket off that damn moon, but instead it was probably halfway back to Puggart Bench, sailing through the stars with all his hopes in tow. They could’ve fucking lead with that.
“Listen, I don’t want in trouble, alright? I don’t even a thrower I just… I need a ride, okay? I can pay you back, I promise, but if I could just tag along with you guys whenever you head back to… wherever you’re going, I’d really appreciated it.”
Ezra just stared at them for a moment.
And then he turned, and he stared at Number Two for a moment.
And then back at the stranger.
And then back at Number Two.
And then he just smiled, and chuckled dryly. “You got a name, kid?” he asked.
“Uh, Nemo,” they said. They tried to edge slightly away, back into the trees, but Number Two just powered up a charge in his thrower, and they froze.
Ezra took a step forward, a predator cornering its prey. “Well then, Nemo, I hate to disappoint, but I can assure you with much confidence that if my compatriot and I were in possession of a ship, we would no longer be wasting away upon this wretched moon. That right, Two?” He turned back to Number Two, who didn’t offer him so much as a nod, still as a statue. Helpful, buddy. Real helpful. He turned back to Nemo. “So, unless you can give us a real damn good reason we might want to stick around, I do believe we’ll be off.” He pushed his thrower back into the holster at his side, and then headed past Nemo, nodding for Number Two to follow him.
They made it no more than five paces into the forest before they were stopped again.
“Wait!”
“Yeah?” Ezra paused and turned to face Nemo. “You come up with something good?”
They whirled around to face Ezra and Number Two, face suddenly lit up in a grin. Ezra couldn’t help but match it. Either they did have something good, or Ezra and Two had been led into a trap, and were about to die.
He couldn’t wait to find out.
“Listen, I don’t know when I’ll be able to get off of here, but I know my crew isn’t coming back for me, so I’m going to have to make do.” They were talking fast, then, words speeding along. After months of nothing but one-sided monologues, it was a strange adjustment to make. “But, even if you guys are stuck here, you seem to have some sort of operation going on, which is a lot more than I have. So, here’s my reason, here’s my deal: You two let me tag along, offer whatever protection and aid in survival you can and, in return, I can offer you the locations of potential aurelac sites my crew didn’t get around to scoping out, and I can help you dig them out.”
Ezra cocked his head at the offer, thoughtfully considering it. Nemo had tossed all their cards to the table face-up, that was for sure. If Ezra boiled it down a bit, it was the same deal he’d seen a million times: aurelac for resources, resources for aurelac. Maybe the circumstances were a bit different, but the deal remained constant. The aurelac , that everyone on that moon revolved around (even the Sater, for as removed as they were, Ezra had seen them trade with it.) All Nemo added was the added gamble of trust (which was always there, to some degree) and the unknown offer of companionship.
He looked over at Number Two, and got nothing in return. Good enough for him. Ezra decided he could take that gamble.
“Alright, Nemo, welcome to the team.”
+++
“We’ll sleep in shifts tonight.” Ezra had tuned into a different channel over their radios, one that left the newcomer out and left him to converse in private with Number Two. “I’d like to extend the hand of trust to our new friend, but to be quite frank I don’t think that’s something we can afford.” He paused for a moment, looking over to Number 2 for at least a nod of confirmation, something to confirm he was being heard if nothing else. He got one, short and curt. Good. He flicked back over to the main channel just as their tent came into view, its dark brown form slowly making itself more clear as they approached.
Nemo, apparently, took several extra moments to notice the structure already clear to him. "Oh shit, that it?" They asked, nodding over to the tent. Apparently they weren't used to the enviro-suit, because the gesture didn't really transfer. Regardless, Ezra found Nemo’s late recognition of their tent a comforting reassurance of their secrecy, so he decided to humor them.
“Indeed it is. Not the most luxurious living conditions, by many standards, but out here she might as well be carved out of aurelac itself.”
That got Nemo to crack a smile. “Looks good enough to me. Better than sleeping with the dust anyway.”
“Many things are.”
“Yeah… do you guys have filter refreshers, by the way? I could use a switch, don’t have any.”
Ezra raised an eyebrow as they reached the tent, and he pushed the flap open for Nemo to enter just after Number 2, still sandwiched between them. “Packing light?”
“Didn’t really get the chance to pack at all, with the whole “being abandoned” thing.” Nemo was carefully looking around the tent, taking in their surroundings and, Ezra reminded himself, potentially looking for something to steal. He clicked on the filter in the corner of the room, keeping an eye on them all the while.
He let out a humored snort. “Fair enough. Why’d you come down to the Green anyway, then? Most people steer clear of this area, these days.”
“Why does anyone come to the Green? I wanted the riches. The gold, the luxury.” They were grinning then, wide and full of something like hope. (Greed, maybe. Ezra found they were two surprisingly similar things, sometimes.) “I wanted that shiny, glimmering aurelac I’d heard so much about.”
Ezra smiled to himself, unclasping the latches on his helmet and pulling it off, letting his lungs fill with slightly fresher air and his gaze sharpen into something clearer and harsher than before, in the exposing lights of the tent. “Well, then I suppose you better hope we find some, hm?”
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 10: Fucking Channel Rats
Summary:
“Do you hear that?” they asked, just as he was about to speak up. The ship creaked again, and with it more shadows shifted.
Ezra raised an eyebrow, shoulders tensing up, hand moving once again to his side. “Hear what?”“I don’t know… it’s like scuffling?”
Notes:
This one's a bit longer than my chapter usually are, so buckle up buckaroos
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“There’s a ship here,” Ezra said, because apparently he needed to break the silence if he was going to get Nemo to explain anything.
There was, indeed, a ship there.
It sat in the middle of a somewhat there clearing, bigger than any ship Ezra had seen touched down on the surface of the Green before. Given some time, maybe they would’ve cleared the soil of trees for landing pads, or even gone as far as to pour concrete onto the ground to make something really promising, but they’d never quite gotten that far.
But even without fancy landing pads, this ship had apparently found a way to puzzle itself between the branches and make itself at home right in the middle of the forest.
And the forest had not repaid it kindly.
“I know there’s a ship here. I don’t know why though, it didn’t show up on any of our maps. I promise I’m as surprised as you are.”
Ezra hummed thoughtfully, trailing his fingers along the vines that covered the ship, fingers occasionally dusting across the layer of rust that spread from the joints of the metal. He carefully put a foot on the edge of the ship, where a ramp might have once extended. But the ship had tilted so much he didn’t even need the ramp; he just stepped right on. The metal groaned under the weight. He turned back to Nemo.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, where’s the aurelac supposed to be?”
“I- I don’t know, this exactly where the deposit is supposed to be, I didn’t hear anything about a ship here.”
“Seems like an awfully big thing to just skim-”
za-POW
The tang of a thrower shot whizzed through the air, slamming halfway up a nearby tree with an explosion of bark and wood. Ezra had his hand to his own thrower in an instant, and was halfway to taking cover when he saw the source of the shot and logic overrode panic.
“You goddamn asshole, I told you not to do that!”
Number Two stood there, lowering his thrower after the shot, and he raised a hand to point at a spot somewhere in the trees.
“Yeah, there’s better ways to get someone’s attention, if you weren’t aware.” Ezra’s eyes flicked up to the tree with a new piercing above him. “Ways that involve less damage, both to our arboreal friends and the people around them. ”
Number Two just kept his arm raised into the air, pointing same as before. Ezra relented with a sigh, his eyes following Number Two’s guiding finger to a spot between the trees. The soil had been carved out of the ground, leaving a small pit behind, and on either side lay a slumped body, surrounded by a scattering of tools and supplies. It was an old dig sight, a scene Ezra had seen half a dozen times and looted just as many. Number Two was already lumbering that way, so Ezra joined him, gesturing for Nemo to follow.
Number Two flipped over one of the bodies, poking around in their numerous pockets for anything while Ezra hopped into the shallow hole, inspecting its walls. Numerous indentations still marked the soil walls, and it didn’t take much poking around for Ezra to find the severed ends of the system of tubes that kept the husks anchored to the Green, but nothing else.
“Is this it?” a voice interrupted his train of thought. It was a novel thing to him, all the sudden, the notion of interruption. Sure, when Two got really impatient he would grunt at Ezra, or swat him in the arm or, lately, fire his thrower off into the sky, but those moments were few and far between. For the most part, he was silent, and Ezra was left to his own thoughts. For the most part, Ezra was not kind to interruptions, but all the sudden he found he didn’t mind them so much.
“Is this the aurelac sight? Did you find them?” Nemo’s voice was filled with excitement, and it made him crack a smile of his own. Oh, what young, naive bliss.
And he was going to ruin it.
“Well, this certainly was an aurelac sight, at some point in its history. Now, unfortunately, she’s been bled dry. All she has left to boast now are husks and dirt.” He hoisted himself back out of the pit. “But, considering the corpses we find in our midst, both machine and human, well-” he turned to look at the crumbling ship not twenty paces away, wondering how fast those fools' luck must have turned. “-I don’t think it could’ve made it that far.”
+++
“We’ll split up.” Ezra stood with one hand on the ship, as if he needed to hold onto it just to make sure it didn’t suddenly whizz to life and fly away. There’d need to be a miracle to do that, with the state it was in, but he’d learned long ago not to take chances. “I don’t mean to have any distrust in what is clearly a fine piece of machinery, but this ship’s certainly been battling the elements for a while, and I’m not sure she’ll take all of us added to the fray too kindly. So, we split up, don’t focus our weight too much in one place, and we can be in and out before there’s time to feel our feet. Just keep your radios on and your eyes peeled and you-” he jabbed a finger over in Nemo’s direction. “-keep with me.” Ezra looked back up at Two, making it very clear who he was and was not talking to. “Sounds good?”
He got a simple nod. Nemo’s head bobbed up and down as well, but he didn’t particularly care one way or the other.
“Then off we go.”
Number Two looped around to the back entrance they’d scoped out just before, while Ezra and Nemo stayed out in the front. He gestured for them to go first.
“After you.”
They grinned, and then hoisted themselves up onto the rusted metal. It creaked and groaned with their weight, but held firm. Ezra’s glee battled ferociously with his disappointment.
But, regardless how he felt on the matter, the resiliency of the metal meant it was his turn and, almost to a fault, he had never been one to back away from a challenge. He wrapped a tangle of the vines that draped from the edge of the ship in his hand, and pulled himself on board. The metal grumbled its complaints under the added weight, but apparently he hadn’t vexxed it enough for it to give up on him entirely.
He reached up and flicked the light on the side of his helmet on, cutting a thin blade of light into the darkness. All it revealed was more rusted metal, lined with the creeping vines that marked the Green’s slow claiming of new property. Ezra tilted his head forwards, motioning for Nemo to follow him deeper into the ship. Each step was a new gamble, as the rusty ship toyed with the idea of collapsing out from under his feet. Nemo stepped lighter, but even they left a symphony of creaks in their wake, which meant Ezra could only imagine the time Number Two was having.
As a matter of fact, he might as well check.
Ezra pressed the button on his chest to activate his radio, not breaking his stride as they went further into the ship. “Number Two, ping me if you’ve successfully arrived on the ship.” A moment of silence. Ezra came to a stop by a pile of white crates, motioning for Nemo to check them out.
Ping!
“Message received.” The ping system was supposed to be utilized to get someone’s attention over the radios, but Ezra found it was the only way to communicate with Two when they had any sort of distance between them, so he’d gotten a little creative with it.
He pushed of the lid to one of the crates, and a shine of his light revealed only the reflective shine of shredded food packs, without a crumb left.
They forged on.
“Does he really not say anything?”
Ezra jumped slightly, a stutter introducing itself into his stride for just a moment before he smoothed it out like nothing had happened, like he’d just caught his boot on one of the many vines twisting around their feet. Shit. He’d forgotten what having another person around felt like, one who made it clear they still had their mind by speaking it. He shook his head.
“Not a word. To be honest, I haven’t been able to clearly discern if he can. I don’t know what he is, but I can assure you quite confidently he’s not human.”
“He’s not?” Nemo’s voice was brimming with excitement, barely contained in the seams of their envirosuit. “Huh. I’ve never actually met a non-human before. I’ve seen plenty, but never met one.”
“Well, if you count having a rail gun pointed right at your chest as having “met” someone, then congrats.” He heard the pair of footsteps next to him suddenly come to a halt. Ezra turned to meet the sudden silence, the flashlight affixed to his helmet sweeping towards Nemo, half-expecting them to be gone, swept away by some lurking shadow, or even with a hidden thrower suddenly pointed at his chest, taking advantage of the old, dying ship to take him out where no one could care. Of course, no one cared for lives lost in the Green anyway, but he didn’t think Nemo had yet come to understand that the whole planet was one, big, dying ship.
But when he turned, there was no thrower raised and Nemo still stood there, perfectly still and silent, mouth dropped open just a bit.
“What?” he demanded sharply, one hand firmly planted on his thrower while he tried to shake the feeling he already should’ve shot them.
“That was a rail gun?”
Ezra’s hand dropped back from his thrower. That was it? All that, just to learn Number Two had a rail gun, one of the most prolific, recognizable throwers in all the Fringe. Either the kid was from Central, too sheltered to know the delicate intricacies of the weapons more deadly than even the dirtiest of their criminals dared to wield, or their damn visor needed to be prescription. He shook his head, already marching forwards once more.
“‘Course it’s a rail gun. You saw it splinter through that tree just like I did, right? I’d wish you only the best of luck trying to find me another thrower that could pull off such a feat.”
It took a moment, but Nemo’s footsteps followed him. The ship creaked under the pressure of both their weights moving forward, and the shadows in his periphery shifted. “I had a rail gun pointed at me,” they said, voice a mix of awe, fear, and overwhelming pride. He chuckled slightly.
“Indeed you did. I give you my congratulations, although I will say that’s not an interaction you should seek to repeat.”
“Oh trust me, I don’t want to. Although …” Their voice was suddenly filled with mischief. Ezra smirked. “I wouldn’t mind being on the other side of that rail gun.”
Ezra snorted. “Ask Number Two to use that thing, and that’s a good way to find yourself staring down its barrel.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “And if you find some way to steal it, he won’t need that gun to take you out anyway.” Ezra remembered what happened to the Saters that had the poor misfortune of crossing Number Two in such a dire way, and he smiled to himself a bit. “Last people that tried that didn’t get a happy ending, I can tell you that much.”
That earned him a laugh, short and nervously high-pitched, but there. “Yeah, maybe I’ll be better off watching from afar.”
Ezra snorted. “Just don’t piss him off, otherwise it won’t matter how far you are. He’s not the type to take kindly to… well many things. Lot of ways to anger a rhykor, afterall.”
“Have you found any yourself?” Nemo asked. It felt like a gentle prod, a low-stakes gamble to see what they could get out of him, how deep his walls went. But Ezra loved telling stories, and he was happy to indulge.
“Oh I certainly have. He hates the Saters, for one. They’re the poor souls that thought it would be a good idea to nab his rail gun. To be honest I have no clue how he did it, and considering how reticent he is, I doubt I’ll ever get an answer to that question. If I had to guess, I’d assume someone else icapacitated him, and then they simply swooped in like the scavengers they are.” He paused for a moment, remembering his own injuries that the Sater had taken advantage of, his own ship that left him as stranded as anyone. But none of that was important to the story, so he pushed on. “Why, one of the first things he did when I met him was point that damn gun at my chest. Scared me shitless, the first time, I’ll tell you that, but now he just does it to shut me up.” He looked over his shoulder at Nemo. “Although I assure you, you won’t be given the same… tolerance.” His voice trailed off a bit, and his boots came to a halt. Nemo was standing still behind him, looking up at the pipes and wires weaving their way around on the ship's ceiling, their head tilted to one side.
Great, he couldn’t even keep this audience’s attention.
“Do you hear that?” they asked, just as he was about to speak up. The ship creaked again, and with it more shadows shifted.
Ezra raised an eyebrow, shoulders tensing up, hand moving once again to his side. “Hear what?”
“I don’t know… it’s like scuffling?” They looked away from the ceiling, back towards him. “Is your external microphone on?”
He shook his head. He’d been patched into the radio with Two and Nemo, so he’d left it off, not wanting to clog the channels too much. He raised a hand to the control on his chest.
“Number Two?” he asked, voice clear, but a little softer than he’d intended. A ping of acknowledgement ringed off, and he winced a bit at how loud it sounded in his helmet. “I’m going to disconnect for a moment. Everything okay on your end?” Another ping. He disconnected from the line with Two and instead flicked on his external microphone.
For a moment, there was silence. His radio detected nothing but the faint creaking of the ship and his own breathing rattling around in his helmet.
Then he heard it.
It wasn’t much, and he wasn’t surprised it took him so long to detect it, especially without his external mic on. But it was there all the same, a faint scratching from just above him. In a normal ship, he might have not thought twice about it. There was always machinery running, dials clicking, people moving, never a true moment of silence. But he lived in that world no longer. Instead, the ship he was in was a corpse, and corpses were supposed to stay quiet.
Slowly, Ezra stepped towards the sound, letting Nemo back away from it as he looked up at the ceiling, trying to pinpoint the source of the faint noise. He turned up the speakers in his helmet with one hand, keeping his other on his thrower as he slowly pulled it out of its holster.
The amplified noise led him to a vent on the ceiling. He vaguely noticed it was big enough for a human to fit in, but he pushed aside the frivolous thought as soon as it came to him. It was just them.
He peered into the vent, craned his neck so the flashlight on his helmet could illuminate the space. Shadows moved around, shifting and twisting around each other, only occasionally pierced by the smallest glint of red. Ezra stepped back slightly, suddenly sure that whatever was in that vent, he wasn’t interested in meeting it.
It didn’t give him that choice.
One of the shadows broke away from the mass, and suddenly the cover of the vent was flying towards Ezra’s face, a squirming shape in hot pursuit.
The vent grate bounced off of the metal surrounding his visor in a lucky, harmless shot, but it snatched away any time Ezra might have had for what followed.
Some sort of creature landed on his visor with an uncomfortably loud smack , covering his entire field of view in a wall of fleshy pink while he stumbled backwards in surprise. The creature squeaked violently, his enhanced audio turning each one into screams to his ears. Clawed feet scrambled over his visor, and he could feel as others joined it, as more sets of small paws thudded down on his helmet and scrambled all over the outside of his enviro-suit, curious noses poking between the folds and yellowed teeth pinching where they could before moving on from what was clearly not a threat. Nemo shouted something he couldn’t make out, or just let out a cry of fear.
With an annoyed grunt, Ezra regained his own senses and tore the creature from his face to toss it aside. It landed with another squeaking scream, joining its group of compatriots that Ezra could suddenly see clearly.
Channel rats.
Damnit.
He roughly swiped more of the rats away, shooting off a couple bolts into them as they hit the ground, hoping he could at least scatter them, get them to fuck off .
But they remained persistent, shifted around his feet in a mass of disgusting, fleshy blobs, and as Ezra kicked the last of them off of him, he could hear the wet gurgling that signalled a build up of acid in a channel rat’s throat.
And if nothing else was clear enough, that was a damn good sign they needed to leave .
“Come on!” Ezra shouted, grabbing onto Nemo’s wrist and promptly sprinting down the dilapidated corridor of the ship, metal screaming out with each step.
Rubble started to sprinkle down from the ceiling, screws already clutching onto life finally let go, and bits of paneling flaked off the ship all around them, like a xine lizard shedding its skin. At one point, a whole section of paneling collapsed from the ceiling in front of them, and it was all Ezra could to to quickly switch directions before continuing their mad dash.
He switched around the knobs on his radio, cutting off his external mic (and oh how he wouldn’t miss the scrabbling of dozens of footsteps) and instead patching back into the radio line.
“Number Two!” He didn’t wait for a ping in response. “We’ve run into a bit of a problem.” They came to a closed door, and he just turned down the next hallway. “Evacuate the ship immediately. We’ll meet you-” Then the metal of the ship lurched under Ezra’s feet, and he was being knocked off balance, thrown to the floor.
He landed hard, jagged, broken metal digging into the gloves on his hands, even as one of his legs landed in a hole of soft dirt. Ezra sat up, and then stood, trying to find his bearings again. The floor under his feet stayed tilted, and his best guess was that another one of the ship’s crumbling bracers had given out under the strain of all the sudden movement, bringing them close enough to the ground for him to feel the dirt of the Green on his boots once more, though a panel knocked loose in the floor. It was never a feeling he thought he’d find himself missing, especially not when compared to the cool metal of a ship supporting him, but he was pretty sure these counted as extenuating circumstances.
Aside from the ship itself, Ezra also took stock of the organic beings around him. Nemo was on their feet a little ways away from him, and it didn’t seem like their flashlight was anywhere to be found, which was another unfortunate turn. Luckily, Ezra couldn’t find any channel rats around either.
He swept his own flashlight-equipped helmet towards what might be their only escape: a door right by them, long-since dented and someone bent open by new damages. He nudged Nemo.
“We don’t need the flashlight, and it’s long gone now anyway. Just help me with this damn door so we have a shot at getting out of here.”
They nodded, and the two of them made it over to the door together, grabbing onto any seams between bends that they could snake their fingers into. “On three,” Ezra grunted, already tightening his grip on the door. “One… two… three!”
They tugged at the same time, and the door let out a horrible screech. Old, rusted metal grated against itself with a terrible vengeance, moving in agonizingly slow steps until it released all at once. The door slid back into the side of the ship, almost swinging Ezra off balance enough to fall again. But he managed to just avoid such a fate, instead straightening out again to peer into what their efforts had revealed.
The corridor in front of them was dark as the rest of the ship. The fuzzy light of his small flashlight illuminated some of the passage, but past a couple feet, everything was left to the imagination. A dark, brackish liquid seeped from disconnected pipes, and more vines threaded their way through the cracks.
Other than the incessant, erratic dripping, the hallway was still, silent.
Ezra raised a hand to his radio, and then realized it was still on. "Number Two?" He asked. "You still with us?" Static fizzled on the other side of the line, waxing and waning in what might of been breathing. It was impossible to tell. Regardless, there was no ping. He cursed under his breath and turned back to Nemo.
"Number Two has stopped responding so we're bereft of assistance at the moment." He pulled out his thrower. "Stay sharp, don't know how many of those damned rats are still down here."
"Do I get a weapon?"
Ezra snorted. "I'm not giving you the thrower, if that's the prize you have your eye on." He dusted off the weapon. Its outside was dusted, but looked as functional as ever. He only hoped the fall and debri hadn't messed with its inner workings. "You're welcome to grab a length of pipe of the wall in defense, unless you'd rather have just your flashlight in aid." He started walking down the dark hallway. "Either way, make it quick and stay behind me."
Nemo muttered something that Ezra would be willing to bet was a curse, and he heard the scraping of metal behind him as they, presumably, salvaged some jagged rod of metal from the ship for defense. He quickened his pace just a touch once they caught up with him.
Water splashed with every other step, pools of it spilling from the ends of the ship's severed veins. Sparks flashed from smashed electronics, bringing sudden light into their world in brief, stunning displays, casting creeping shadows from draped vines around the ship.
Ezra picked his way over the debri carefully, no longer stopping for crates or storage containers. He had to keep pushing forwards, lest the vines of the ship latch onto his ankles and pull him back to die with the rest of the ship.
Shuffles and scratches tickled his eardrums, so faint they might have just been audio glitches, but Ezra was no longer taking chances. He kept his thrower at the ready and his finger bent around the trigger. It didn’t end up mattering.
The first rat darted out of the darkness like a horrible apparition, before launching itself at Ezra’s boot to try and get a meal he knew it was starved of. He kicked its pink, hairless body away easily enough, sending it slamming into a wall. The shot was easy to line up, an easy target not a foot away from him, close enough to spit on without a helmet in the way. Instead he pointed his thrower at it in less than a second and pulled back the trigger. Sparks sputtered out of its end, but that was all.
For fucks sake.
That, of course, was when the backup showed up.
The rat’s backup, that was. It was still the lucky one.
The creatures emerged with dozens of clawed feet abusing the already scarred bottom of the ship in their quest of pursuit. Any rats that fell were swallowed up by the crowd, and sometimes its friends would even stop for a snack.
Ezra quickly holstered his thrower as the first of the rats made it to him and Nemo, who already had their pipe at the ready, flashlight clattering to the floor as they pummeled the channel rats. Ezra quickly dodged to one side, hands reaching out for the paneling and tubes on the side of the ship. His fingers looped under sections of pipe, tested the strength of tenuous support beams and pried at the edges of metal floor panels, all in search of something he could use to defend himself. Then a section of metal groaned under his fingers, rusted joints begging him to stop before they finally gave way. Ezra was rewarded with a jagged bit of pipe, a club. He smacked it into the first rat that found itself in its path, and the contact was wickedly satisfying.
Fucking channel rats.
It was almost therapeutic, it turned out, the methodical killing of channel rats. It didn’t start that way. At first, Ezra just wildly swung his pipe at his feet, crowded by so many rats that accuracy didn’t have to be a factor. He pushed on whenever he could, taking small steps forwards. Instead, he lost himself in that violence; relished the sick bit of satisfaction that came with each rat dead.
Soon, his and Nemo’s combined efforts were rewarded, and the crowd of vermin began to thin. Ezra found he could take more frequent steps forward, and instead of violence interrupted with walking, the tables turned the other way around. But he stayed quiet, didn’t say anything to Nemo, didn’t cheer for a battle not yet won. He just carried on the same way he had been, hoping the rats were fleeing the poisoned dust of the moon like any creature with a will to live would.
He walked right into it.
Despite the envirosuit’s diligent protection, Ezra wondered if that said anything about him.
But that didn’t matter either, not when the rats started turning around and Ezra’s flashlight stood out less against what was once a pitch black backdrop. Instead, it was becoming more of a muddled grey, and then he could see past the boundaries of that weak light, and then he could make out the edges of shadows again, and then there were trees. The light at the end of the tunnel grew from a mere pinprick of brightness into a window of freedom. Ezra sped up, boots burning with anticipation, steps quickly alternating between clanging metal and muffling plants with no real pattern.
The tunnel closed.
A shadow snatched away his freedom.
A humanoid figure stood tall, as much a door as any of iron and steel.
Ezra raised his pipe, not ready to back down, too fueled with the adrenaline and the ecstasy of violence to bargain for diplomacy.
The pipe was unceremoniously ripped from his hands.
Wait no, he’d take that diplomacy, he could-
A rail gun was pressed against his chest, and Ezra’s vision finally cleared enough to make out what was in front of it.
Kevva fucking damnit.
“Hold on, hold on!” he demanded. “I didn’t realize who I was facing, after my endeavors below.” It wasn’t really below, Ezra supposed, but the dark, twisting corridors had tricked him into the sensation.
Number Two just stared at him for a moment, and all Ezra could hear was breathing. His own rattled harshly in his ears, syncopated with Nemo’s higher, quicker gasps just behind him. Number Two’s breaths, on the other hand, could hardly be heard, but they were there, rumbling low and even through his helmet.
“It was hard to tell if you were friend or foe,” Ezra continued hesitantly, figuring Two needed more convincing before he would drop the thrower. “And after you neglected to give any updates on your radio, I figured I was running a bit low on the former.”
Number Two grunted, and his rail gun fell back to his side. Ezra lowered his hands in tandem, and then hopped off the ship, Nemo trailing just behind. He couldn’t help but notice Number Two seemed to have stumbled into the same storm of bad luck, when it came to looting the ship. They were all empty-handed.
“You know you had me worried for a second there, partner,” he said, clapping Number Two on the shoulder. “Though you might pull the trigger just to get rid of me.” Number Two didn’t respond. He just stood still as a statue, staring up at the trees and sky and nothing at all.
Ezra sighed, and then turned back to the more talkative of his two compatriots. “Nemo! Come-” Then, without warning, Two grabbed onto his shoulder, forcibly jerking him around. He supposed it was a preferable method to firing off shots, but Ezra wished the asshole could find some gentler methods of communication.
“Kevva above Two, the hell is it?” His hand had drifted over to his thrower, because he couldn’t imagine Number Two demanding his attention like that unless something was really, really wrong. Two just silently pointed above them, and Ezra turned his eyes to the sky.
At first, he saw nothing. His eyes were still adjusting to the brightness of the day, and turning them so close to the sun didn’t help. But then his vision cleared, and those bright spots dancing in front of his eyes faded until only one remained: a sphere of light hurtling down from the sky.
A pod, he suddenly realized, coming in hot.
“Holy shit,” Nemo muttered from behind him. Ezra nodded in silent agreement.
Far too hot.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 11: Dust to Dust
Summary:
Then something shifted in the pod, metal grunted and groaned and the whole thing pitched to the side a bit. The weakened engine coughed and hacked over its own smoke and- wait.
Ezra stepped forward, strained his ears to hear.
That wasn’t the engine.
“There’s someone in there.”
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Ezra’s bag thudded into the dirt.
He followed just after, kneeling down in front of it and quickly pulling open a pocket, ruffling through the papers that resided there. All the while he took quick, glancing looks up to the pod, just to make sure it was still there.
He procured from the bag a map, and then, just after it, a pen.
Still kneeling in the dirt, Ezra quickly unfolded the map, eyes scanning to find the spot where their group was currently standing. Once he found it, he hurriedly pulled out the pen, clicked on and-
God fucking damnit shit balls ass dicks the fucking thing was out of ink.
Ezra stabbed the paper.
Then he turned his eyes to the sky again, where the pod was getting terribly low, hurtling towards the treeline. He needed to be higher, undoubtedly. The trees were blocking his view; he’d never be able to get a perfect view of where the pod landed. Instead, he could just watch as it finally broke the treeline and, with another stab into the paper, Ezra marked the spot as best as he could.
The pod looked like it was approaching the Green at about a 60 degree angle from the ground, and which meant Ezra could give his best guess on where it might land.
“Uh did you-?”
He stabbed the paper again, and Nemo cut themself off. “Let’s go,” Ezra announced, standing up.
“Right now?”
He turned to Nemo, and found them staring at him with an eyebrow raised. “‘Course right now. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t too keen on waiting around any longer, and I can assure you my companion here feels the same way.” He spread out his arms. “You wanted a ride, now didn’t you? Let’s go get us a ride.”
===
Smoke curled into the air. It trailed a lazy path above the pod, tracing loops and weaving around itself and bubbling up in clouds of grays and browns in the sky. It fanned out into a huge display for all the Green to see, but it narrowed as Ezra looked back to it's source: the pod itself
It had stabbed itself into the ground, two of its bracers consumed by the dirt, one broken off with its stub crumpled, and one somehow still standing. The single remaining bracer set the entire thing jerked sideways.
But evidently that had taken the worst of the damage.
Oh the pod was banged up, that was for certain. Bits of metal stuck out where they shouldn’t have, sparks flew off from a dislodged panel on its sides and the smoke poured out through a crack in the top. But as Ezra came to a halt, silently observing the damage, that silent feeling of hope (or maybe it was greed) sparked to life as well. Silently weighing the utterly broken versus the fixable, the odds that there might be something salvageable here, a chance they could get the pod into orbit.
Then something shifted in the pod, metal grunted and groaned and the whole thing pitched to the side a bit. The weakened engine coughed and hacked over its own smoke and- wait.
Ezra stepped forward, strained his ears to hear.
That wasn’t the engine.
“There’s someone in there.”
There was more coughing, and the door of the pod creaked with more sounds of grating metal. Ezra put a hand against his thrower, and stepped forwards. “Nemo, come give me a hand over here, Two, be ready to shoot as needed.” Ezra wasn’t entirely sure how Two would interpret ‘as needed’ but he didn’t have time to lay it out for him.
What he had time for was grabbing onto the door of the pod with Nemo and pulling , with all of his might. The door had been knocked crooked off its track, which made it a struggle to push open, fighting against the dented metal. But slowly, surely, it started to creak open until, with a final push, it gave way.
Someone fell out of the pod.
Ezra took a step back, pulling out his thrower and pointing it at the person’s head. They were on all fours on the ground, and still coughing their way through the smoke that hung in the air. Nemo scrambled back as soon as he pulled out his thrower, evidently content to observe out of the way of fire. Smart kid.
He turned back to the person on the floor, powered up his thrower. “And who might you be?”
“Just a prospector that-” they, no she, he could hear it in her voice. She broke down coughing. Ezra waited patiently. He heard Number Two charge up his rail gun behind him. “-that made a wrong turn.”
“I suppose you could say the same thing of all of us but, well, most people just call me Ezra.”
The stranger finally looked up. She squinted through the smoke that had undoubtedly made its way into her helmet. Her face was smudged with black that matched her hair, cut short in a way that, currently at least, stuck out from her head in a wild spray. She looked up at Ezra thoughtfully, like she was sizing him up. He was used to the treatment.
“You can call me Illian, then.” She reached a hand up to him, let it hover in the air. “Mind giving me a hand?”
“I don’t know, suppose you wouldn’t mind giving us a hand in return?”
“I’m always open to a good deal, Ezra.” She smiled weakly, barely missed suppressing another cough. “Hell half the time I’m open to the bad ones too.”
Ezra returned her smile with one of his own, and then clasped a hand onto her forearm to pull her off the ground. “Sounds like we’ll be able to make a deal then.”
They all moved away from the smoldering pod, mostly because it was technically still at risk of spontaneously combusting. Ezra kept his thrower out, but let it dangle non threateningly at his side. Number Two kept his at the ready, pointed at Illian, and Ezra let him.
“So, you were saying you had a deal for me?”
They had decided to really put some distance between themselves and the pod (because Ezra wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about finding himself in the crosshairs of an exploding ship again) and head back to the tent. Number Two was still on edge, like a wildcat coiled and ready to pounce, but he hadn’t protested to the idea in any meaningful way, so Ezra figured he was letting it slide. Illian needed a new filter anyway, so it simply made sense for all of them to venture that way. They outnumbered her three to one, anyway.
Ezra nodded. “I do indeed, one I believe could be mutually beneficial.” His eyes caught Nemo’s, and he nodded. “For all of us.”
Nemo tilted their head, interest quite clearly piqued.
“Go on,” Illian urged him, voice almost sounding bored.
“Well, when your pod came streaking down to us, we at first hoped that pinpoint in the sky would be our salvation, freedom from the bindings of the Green we wish to shed. Instead, as I’m sure you know all too well, your vessel came to us as a prison bus, with just another inmate to drop off, and no clear means of salvation. However, I believe we could reach that salvation, so my proposal is this:”
Illian raised an eyebrow, listening, Ezra was sure, intently.
“We will help you fix your waywards pod and when the time comes you will, in return, give us a ride.” They made it to the tent, and Ezra pushed open the flap for everyone to trail in. Illian followed, and Ezra let her. It would be easier to change filters that way. Number Two bristled, but did nothing to stop her.
“Nice place,” Illian said dryly.
Ezra snorted. “Well it’s certainly not a carpeting lander or anything, but it gets the job done, out here in the Green.” He dug out a filter replacement and held it up so she could see. “So, we have a deal?”
“Almost, we almost have a deal, but I was hoping maybe you could sweeten the pot.”
Ezra raised an eyebrow. “Not sure you’re in the right spot to bargain here, maybe you shouldn’t take your chances.”
“You gonna kill me for asking?”
“No, but I can’t speak for my friend here. He gets a bit testy around certain people, you know how it is. Better choose your words wisely.”
She licked her lips, her eyes flicking from the filter in Ezra’s hand to Nemo leaning on a bunk beside him to Number Two, standing with his thrower at the ready. Then she looked back up at him. “I’m sure you know why I came here,” she started.
“Well why does anyone come to the Green?” Ezra asked, giving an easy shrug. “We’re all greedy bastards.”
“Oh we sure are, myself included.” She straightened up, looked Ezra right in the eye. “I want some aurelac.”
“What makes you think I have any of that?”
“Who on the Green doesn’t have aurelac?”
“The Rush has passed. The Green’s been all but sucked dry, unless you can dig up the fabled Queen’s Lair or have Lady Luck on your side. As evidenced by my presence here, I am in possession of neither. My time on the Green has been dedicated to surviving ever since I got stranded here, not much time to go digging around for jewels I have no purpose for.”
“I’m not a fool Ezra, I know an aurelac case when I see one.” She gestured to the case that was, indeed, poking out from under his cot. Nemo awkwardly reached out a foot to try and shove it back, which was a bit of a late gesture. “Unless you're using that to store your laundry.”
Ezra tilted his head. He could’ve continued to deny it, could’ve let Nemo shove that case under the cot and have that be the end of it. But, well, it was a case of aurelac, now wasn’t it? “I don’t think you’re in the right spot to bargain,” he said, repeating his words from earlier.
“Why not? I’m your only hope of getting off this rock. Without me, it’s just more time trapped in here, for all of you.”
“Same goes for you. Fixing that pod won’t be a one man job, and if you decide you have no interest in being our ally, it wouldn’t be hard to stop you. You’re outnumbered here, so I suggest you take my original deal and we leave it at that.”
“Why not just give her some?”
Ezra turned. Nemo was still leaned against the bunk, their foot still propped up against the case of aurelac, their mouth, suddenly, turned against him. “What was that?”
“I said why not just give her some? I’m sure you have more than enough, after all this time. I mean-” they kicked the case with their foot, and the aurelac faintly clanked around. “-you’ve been here for long enough to have quite the collection. You can give up a bit of aurelac, and everyone can stop threatening to shoot each other.”
Illian pointed at them. “I like the way you think, kid.”
Ezra chuckled. “Oh I’m sure you loved that idea, certainly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling too amicable towards such sentiments, and it is my stash. Original deal, labor for a ride.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
“I will be getting off this moon.”
Ezra heard the whirring of a thrower charging up behind him, and Number Two stepped forwards, rail gun in hand. He held it up, higher than before, his head tilted in the way it always was when he took aim. He held it not with threat, but with purpose. Ezra gritted his teeth. “Two, stand down.”
===
Number Two wasn’t interested in whatever Ezra thought Illian had to offer.
She came in a pod, a vessel that could bring their freedom. She was trying to keep that from them, trying to bargain for the same gem everyone on the Green seemed obsessed with. She was causing them problems , had brought those problems to their very front door.
Ezra was giving her too much trust. He was too confident she could be of no harm to them.
Number Two would be a lot more confident if she was dead.
So he stepped forwards, and raised his rail gun with deadly aim-
“Two, stand down.”
Ezra’s voice was firm and commanding. He was giving orders. It was Number Two’s job to follow orders. It was what he was good at, what people paid him for. The hired muscle, the gun that didn’t need to talk, that couldn’t talk in a tongue any of them would understand. People liked it that way, they liked when he followed orders, and Number Two liked getting paid.
However, he also liked staying alive. He would do what it took to stay alive. He would kill this problematic newcomer, if that’s what it took to stay alive.
He wasn’t on the job anymore.
He didn’t stand down.
“Number Two, stand down. ”
His finger hovered over the trigger. Illian didn’t have a thrower.
Nemo didn’t have a thrower.
Number Two had a thrower.
Ezra had a thrower.
There was a click, and he had it pointed at Number Two’s head.
There was a click, and his voice was right there as well.
“We need her.”
Number Two hadn’t taken his helmet off, (because of course he hadn’t) and neither had Ezra (for some unknown reason). Ezra’s voice filtered through his speakers then, quiet enough that he was hoping Illian couldn’t hear.
“Like or not, Two, but in all of my years of travel through the Black and all the distant planets it has to offer, I have never had the pleasure of traveling in a pod that resembles what’s fallen for us today. I wouldn’t know how to get her back on her feet.”
Number Two’s finger itched for the trigger. He wondered if Ezra’s itched for his, wondered if he’d pull it, if Number Two pulled his. He didn’t really care in the end. It didn’t really matter.
Number Two liked staying alive.
He would like it more with the freedom to roam the stars. He’d never wanted to feel tethered down.
He lowered his thrower.
Ezra followed suit. Without another word, he clicked out of Number Two’s helmet.
===
“Deal.”
Ezra glanced over towards Ilian, still not entirely turning away from Two. “Pardon?”
“I said you have yourselves a deal. Labor for a ride, just as proposed.”
Ezra looked her over, and then looked back at Two, who was still and silent as ever next to him. Then he tossed the filter over to Illian. “Deal.”
She grinned at him, and then got to work hooking up the shiny new filter to her suit.
Ezra thumbed a finger over the trigger of his thrower, ran his mind over all the places he could point it. “Although I implore you to head back to your ship at your earliest convenience. It’s not wise to try and traverse these woods after night has claimed them.”
Illian’s movements slowed, but refrained from halting completely. “You have four beds, if my math checks out.”
And? Ezra though incredulously. “You want to push your luck again?”
Ezra watched her eyes flick over to Number Two, and a flame of satisfaction sparked within him. “I think I’ll take the extra space in the ship.”
Ezra raised his eyebrows. “Wise choice.”
===
She left soon after that.
Ezra, Nemo and Two had all gone with her (“An escort, for your convenience,” Ezra had said with a smile. No one was under the illusion that he was being remotely honest, that their procession was anything other than assurance Illian really went back where she promised to go. They all pretended otherwise, however.) They didn’t return with her, just returned to the tent.
“We’ll sleep in shifts tonight,” Ezra said. He was pulling off his suit, stripping back down to just his black and gray underclothes. He couldn’t have imagined he’d be saying those words again so soon, not too long after he’d pulled Number Two aside and, making sure Nemo wasn’t listening, hissed the same words. He casually gestured to Nemo then. “Three ways.”
Neither of them paid him much mind, but they split the shifts that night all the same. In wordless agreement.
Notes:
I love it when I get to write Number Two's POV, should've thrown it in there more lol
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
Chapter 12: The Rush
Summary:
“Oh I think I can manage it. Be a shame to get so close and have it slip away now. That, on the other hand, might do me in.”
Illian smiled warmly, finally letting her hand slip away from his shoulder. “Well then, you better make sure you’re well rested. Still have four more days of work ahead of us, and I don’t plan on letting you and Two off as easy as I have been.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her.
She smiled. “Sleep well, Ezra.”
Notes:
And here we are, the (almost) final chapter. All there is after this is a nice little epilogue, so it's sort of the end? We're pretty dang close, anyway.
Also the working title for this chapter was just "fuck fuck fuck" and I am 0% joking when I say I very nearly kept it.
EDIT: Full disclosure, the epilogue for this fic just wasn't working out. It was just a retelling of the events of Prospect where Two is killed, and as I wrote it, I just couldn't get into the concept. I am sorry, but I still think this is a fine ending, and I hope you all agree. Thank you for everyone in this tiny fandom that's joined along for the ride. Your kind comments and kudos have truly meant the world to me!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They started work on the pod the very next day.
None of them were welcoming towards any delays. Ezra, Two, and even Nemo had been stranded on the Green for too long to not lunge at the dangling opportunity like it was a piece of meat and they were a pack of ravenous dogs. And as for Illian, Ezra had the feeling she was still living with only one foot on the Green, hoping she could outrun the reality of the situation and be in orbit once more far before it caught up with her.
The reality, of course, being that she could be stranded too, that she could turn into one of the ravenous dogs slobbering over their singular chance at salvation. It was better a reality to not consider.
Luckily, with all the work there was to be done, there was plenty of time to ignore unpleasant realities. Ezra became proficient in that himself. He stuck by Number Two more than he did Illian or Nemo, sure, but that was mostly to ensure his companion didn’t break and punch a hole through Illian’s skull with his rail gun. Nemo too, kept their distance, suddenly much more interested in the newcomer than the people who had oh-so-generously shared a roof with them.
Ezra blamed Two for that one too.
But he kept those thoughts to himself, and worked on the ship in silence.
The time started to move quicker, with hope in sight. Days whizzed by, time being drowned out by the procession of whirring machinery, clanging tools and, once they made enough progress, engine tests.
Ezra sighed, stepping back from the pod after another long day of work. Things had been moving a bit slower, recently. There was more computer work to be done, Illian had reported, more work that was out of his area of expertise. He had a basic understanding of the computational systems on your basic pod, but even that was only enough to operate them and occasionally do a bit of troubleshooting. Besides, as he knew very well after weeks of work, Illian’s pod was not your standard parcel-class drop pod. It was something fancier and, as realized by he pushing his hands into its innards and rooting long enough, it was entirely foreign to him.
So Ezra was pushed aside to busywork, not even needed to assist Illian as she worked, as that job had already been claimed by Nemo. Altogether, it gave him too much time to be around Number Two, and not enough work to ignore the strain between them.
He sighed, and went to drag his hand down his face. Unfortunately, his domed helmet got in the way, and he just slammed his hand into his visor like an idiot. All he could do was hope no one saw and he could just pre-
Someone chuckled behind him.
Goddamnit.
Ezra held in an exasperated groan and turned to face Illian. “Don’t suppose you're laughing at some great joke you just remembered?”
Illian smirked, and then clapped a hand on his shoulder. He let her. “Oh don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Bet it’s easy to forget you’re wearing a helmet when you’ve got that big of a view anyway.”
“Even easier to forget when you’re running off more hours of work then you are sleep,” he admitted. It was hard to sleep when it was hard to trust, and Ezra’s trust was slipping out of his fingers, splayed as open as they were. He should’ve put more of an effort into closing them, snatching up his fallen trust. He found it easier to just watch.
Illian smiled at him, just as joking and carefree as she had been when she was laughing at him, but she gave his shoulder a reassuring little squeeze. “Well, then you’ll be happy to hear what I have to report.”
Ezra turned to her, raised an eyebrow in a silent urge for her to continue.
“We’re close enough to being done that Nemo and I decided to come up with a final estimate.” She smiled even wider, a little bit more real. “4 cycles Ezra, and then we’ll be out of here.”
After months of loose counting, of time slowly slipping away from him, the number hardly seemed real. In fact, it took Ezra a moment to fully grasp it, to turn it from a number into something he could really understand.
Four more times Bakhroma’s sun would rise, and by the time it rose a fifth, Ezra wouldn’t be there to see it.
“You underestimate,” he finally said, feeling his own face split into a grin to match Illian’s. “I am indeed happy to hear it, but I’m not sure that brings the emotion justice, hm?”
Illian chuckled again. “I might have undersold it a bit. Hell, I’ve only been here a couple weeks, and I’m already dying to get out of here. Can’t imagine how you’ve lasted so long without trying to fix up an old ship around here and blowing yourself up. Hell, I’m surprised you haven’t tried climbing one of those old trees to the nearest port and breaking your neck halfway up.”
That got a laugh out of Ezra. “Well I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but I’m not quite that mad, at least not yet.”
“Think you can make it four more days?”
“Oh I think I can manage it. Be a shame to get so close and have it slip away now. That, on the other hand, might do me in.”
Illian smiled warmly, finally letting her hand slip away from his shoulder. “Well then, you better make sure you’re well rested. Still have four more days of work ahead of us, and I don’t plan on letting you and Two off as easy as I have been.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her.
She smiled. “Sleep well, Ezra.”
And later, stripped of his suit and lying on his thin cot, Ezra thought he just might.
===
Ezra woke up in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t entirely sure why.
It took him a moment to even register he was awake, as he blearily opened his eyes and shifted in his cot. It was dark, still the middle of the night, and quiet, with not so much as a single-
Wait.
Ezra’s breath stilled; he froze staring up at the roof of their tent, at canvas stretched thin.
Faintly, he could hear something rustling, at the foot of his bed.
Keeping as still as he could, Ezra let his gaze slide down, ever so slightly tilting his head towards the source of the noise.
There was a figure, hunched over in the darkness, reaching under his cot, groping around for something. Their head was hidden under the cot, submerged in the shadows it provided, hunting for whatever they were trying to steal.
If Ezra had to take a wild fucking guess, it would probably be the tens of thousands worth of aurelac he had stashed in his case.
Ezra gritted his teeth, slowly shifting his feet towards the edge of the cot as he sat up. He kept his movements restrained, careful, like a predator sneaking up on his prey. He’d went back to his old habit of storing his thrower under his pillow, after Number Two had pulled his gun on Illian weeks ago, and although it had made him feel paranoid at the time, he was suddenly glad he did. He reached for it then, fingers curling around the grip.
The figure by his bed jerked suddenly, retreated out from underneath with their prize in hand. Ezra threw all caution to the wind, suddenly on his feet with his thrower at the ready. The intruder scrambled to their feet as well, and Ezra’s finger almost pressed down on the trigger.
A flash of blond hair stopped him.
The familiar, fidgety movements stopped him.
The “shit” uttered by the figure as they stood up, stopped him.
Nemo.
Ezra froze, his finger wobbling on the trigger.
His face flashed to a confused hurt, then to boiling anger, and that’s all it took for Nemo to disappear out the tent flap.
Ezra cursed, his emotions landing fully in the realm of anger. He turned on the lights with an angry flip of the switch, kicking the side of Two’s cot just for good measure.
“Time to get up!” he shouted, pulling on his suit as Two sat up, looking at him with clear confusion. Ezra grabbed Two’s helmet off the table and tossed it to him. “Nemo’s a traitor, we’ve been robbed, and I have a feeling we don’t have four days of work left on the pod,” he explained, yanking on his boots.
Number Two was up just as quickly, but Ezra was still quicker. By the time he had his helmet and filters clipped in, thrower at his side, Number Two was just starting to clip on the tubing. “I’m heading to the pod, do the same when you’re ready. Got it?” Number Two nodded shortly, probably only half paying attention to him, but Ezra didn’t mind. The moment he had his confirmation, he was darting out the tent flap.
The Green was no longer a stranger to Ezra.
He navigated it smoothly, with knowledge accumulated after nearly a year of battling for his life within the moon’s bowels. It was knowledge he wished he was never forced to acquire, but it did help him then. Ezra launched over logs that Nemo stumbled over, avoided vines that tripped them up, stepped over moss-filled pits in the ground that threw them off balance. They had an impressive head start, but slowly, surely, he had to be gaining on them. Slowly, surely he could hear their footsteps in front of his. Slowly, surely, he caught more glances of their white suit through the trees.
Then they broke through those trees, into a clearing.
The pod sat, glistening. Probably fully fixed, Ezra realized. He’d been lied to, to ensure he wouldn’t be ready to go when it was time to abandon him. He gritted his teeth, and pushed those thoughts inside, ignoring the useless sentiment and only taking the anger to fuel him onwards.
He had to get to Nemo before they reached the pod.
There was no other way.
He reached out, and his fingers curled around a random piece of tubing, some vital life support against the dust the Green provided. At that moment, it was nothing more to Ezra than an opportunity.
It was a short-lived one, at that.
As quick as the tube was in his hand, it was gone, yanked out of his fingers the moment Nemo felt the tug, twisted around to free themselves.
But it was enough.
Nemo was thrown off balance, and they crashed to the ground. The case flew out of their hand, skidding to a stop against the mossy ground. Ezra nearly met the same embarrassing fate as he came to a sudden stop, but he managed to stay on his feet. He scrambled after the case, half driven by the need to keep its hard-one contents, and half hoping Nemo and Illian wouldn’t leave without it. His fingers curled around the handle, firmly, and snatched the case up to his chest like it was a lifeline. As far as he knew, it was.
He straightened up, turning around to face Nemo, to question the nature of their betrayal, maybe, or to rub in their failure, or to demand passage.
He did face Nemo.
He also faced the blade they pointed directly at his chest.
The pod was just behind them, taunting Ezra, the lights on its side turning it into a taunting beacon in the night. The air was filled with the hum of engines eager to take off the moment the last of its cargo was on board. Instead, the hissing of pneumatics opened a hatch, and some of that cargo unloaded itself; a shadow slipped into the night. Ezra gritted his teeth, bemoaning opportunities he never would’ve thrown away.
“Give me the case,” Nemo demanded, the shaking point of their blade just barely betraying their nerves.
“We could’ve done this together, Nemo,” Ezra started, slowly raising his hands in the air. “It’s not too late, even. You put down that knife, and we can all ride off into the sunset together.” Ezra heard shuffling from behind him, the unmistakable grunts and groans of combat. It was far enough away that he wasn’t worried for his own safety, but that wasn’t his only concern. Still, Ezra kept his gaze straight ahead, focused on Nemo.
Nemo took a breath, steadying themselves against the filtered air, forcing Ezra into awareness of the steady whooshing of his own filter. He could almost taste the crisp bite of clean air, untainted by filters and the remnants of dust. “It’s not personal, Ezra,” Nemo finally said. Their voice stayed steady, although their hands still refused to match. “I was offered a better deal, so I took it. No point in stopping by the Green without nicking a little aurelac, huh?”
“Well then you can imagine the predicament I’m in. Afterall, this is my haul on the table.” He bit the inside of his cheek, silently weighed his options. “But I am nothing if not a reasonable man,” he said, spreading his hands out slightly. “You get Illian out here, and I’m sure we can come to a conclusion that will get everyone what they want.”
Nemo looked at him for a moment, debate crossing over their face before desperation triumphed over it. “I’m sorry, Ezra, but it’s too late for that.”
Footsteps.
There were footsteps behind Ezra, lighter than Two’s, trying to be stealthy. In one move, he took a step back from Nemo, from the blade, and whirled around just in time for a thrower shot to go whizzing past his side.
Illian stood, one arm raised, thrower in hand. It wasn’t a model Ezra had seen before, and later he would wonder where the hell she got in from. For the time being, he just reached for his own thrower, and tried not to wonder where Number Two was. He was nowhere to be seen, but, then again, Ezra didn’t really have the time to look.
He grabbed his thrower from his side, raised it in the air and then-
Illian lunged.
Ezra’s finger tightened on the trigger and a shot rang out through the night just as Illian collided with him, forcing his hand to the skies and knocking both of them to the ground, pinning him under her.
The case hit the ground at an angle, sending it flying away from his hand, and Nemo scooped it up from where it fell in the grasses. His thrower slipped from his grasp as he raised a hand to grab onto the barrel of Illian’s, trying to free it from her grasp.
She held on tight, kept her grasp firm.
The barrel of the thrower wandered towards Ezra’s helmet.
He gritted his teeth, pushed back.
It wavered in between them, pointed at nothing but trees and sky.
The pod hummed to life behind them.
The butt of the weapon was firmly pressed against Ezra’s thigh, and Illian pushed it there harder, her position above him giving her the critical advantage of leverage. She looked down at the thrower, and then at Ezra, and then, ever so slightly, her mouth twitched up into a grin.
Ezra didn’t have time to question it before she pressed down on the side of the thrower and then, with a click and a shhnnk! a blade stabbed into Ezra’s thigh.
He let out a strangled cry, pain shooting up his leg. His fingers loosened from the grip on the thrower, and Illian easily pulled it away from his grip as she yanked the blade out, lifted it above her head and angled towards his own.
Ezra reached for his thrower, from wherever it had tumbled amongst the grasses.
Too late.
He abandoned his search and raised a hand above his head in defense.
Too late.
The blade was pointed straight at him, on a perfect course for his neck, right where the edge of his helmet met his suit.
It soared towards its target, too fast for him to be anything other than too late.
Then Illian’s helmet exploded.
The sharp za-POW of a thrower whizzed through the air, and glass shot outwards, raining down on Ezra like frozen teardrops, catching the bits of moonlight whenever they could.
Illian shouted, her hands flying up to her head, one of them uselessly clamping itself over her mouth and nose.
Ezra pushed her off of him, rising to his feet without a second thought, snatching up her thrower from where it fell away from her hands.
Number Two shuffled back into the bushes, but Ezra hardly had time to give him a nod in thanks.
The growl of the pod grew to a ferocious roar, heat thrumming in engines. Ezra rushed forwards.
There was still time.
He was mere feet away; it wasn’t too late to grab onto the handle and pull himself into the pod. It wasn’t too late to hitch a ride to the stars.
His fingers wrapped around the handle of the pod, and for a split second he held freedom in his hand, so firm and tangible and mind-numbingly real.
Then there was a final woosh from the engines, and a wall of heat forced Ezra to stagger back.
The heat grew, smoke trailing out to meet it, and soon the pod was launching itself into the air. It looked more and more like a shooting star the further and further it made it from the moon but instead of granting Ezra a wish, it was whisking them all away.
“So close, yet so far away, huh?”
He turned to see Illian lying on her back, staring up at the sky. She’d moved her hands away from her face, silently accepted her fate.
“What was that you said the other day, again?” she asked, craning her neck to look over at him. “That, uh, it would be no good to fail now that you were so close? That would be the final straw?” She smiled. “You feeling that itch yet?”
He glared at her, slowly stalking forwards until he was standing right over her, blocking out her view of the stars. “Seems you’re goddamn crazy enough for the lot of us. No need to start losing my mind when you’re out here stealing aurelac and throwing away your own pod. You’ll be the same as the rest of the dried up, spore-filled corpses on this damn moon. Just another fool who got too greedy for their own good. Just another hopeful drifter eager to break your deals before you even make ‘em.”
She let her head rest back on the wreckage of her helmet, her gaze sliding lazily away from Ezra’s face, eyes becoming unfocused.
“You’ll lose it too. Dust in your lungs or-” she paused, coughed violently. “-or otherwise. The Green is a slow-digesting beast if your armor is thick enough but it’ll-” more coughing. “-it’ll getcha.”
He gritted his teeth, raised his thrower. “Doesn’t matter how thick your armor is now, huh?” And he pulled the trigger.
Once.
She cried out in pain, mortally wounded.
Twice.
A shot sailed through her skull. Dead.
Three times, four, five.
Mutilated, mutilated, mutilated.
Six, seven.
Click, click.
The thrower refused to fire, and Ezra slowly lowered it to his side. Illian didn’t move, and sick satisfaction bloomed in Ezra’s chest.
She stole from him, robbed him of his aurelac, tried to snatch away his life and then, finally, wrapped her sticky fingers around his prospect of freedom and pulled it away from both of them.
It was only fair that he stole from her in return, let her life seep out into the dirt, turned black with corruption in the moonlight.
In the end, it was real damn easy to put those holes through Illian’s neck.
Ezra regarded her thrower in his hand for a moment, ever-aware of the blood seeping from the throbbing wound in his thigh. With the press of a button, the knife slid out, deadly fast. Eyes still on the blade, Ezra kneeled down, let his gaze flick over to Illian’s body.
“We are far from even, my friend, but I see no need to raid your hopeless corpse.” He shifted the thrower in his hand and then, in one swift movement, buried it in her chest, letting it fall between her ribs. “Consider that a gift,” he said, standing up. “From a, uh, from a gracious prospector.”
===
kssshhhh
Ezra unloaded the foam cut into the gash on Number Two’s side, carefully tracing the line of red. The muscle twitched under the cool foam, but otherwise Two was still, silent.
Ezra tried to let it be a comforting constant.
“How’s that feel?” he asked, putting down the gun and tilting his head to carefully admire his handiwork. The line of foam was clean, bright white shining against a dirtied red. He couldn’t imagine the foam would keep its purity for long. Another trip to the Sater for juice was undoubtedly in his future.
Number Two grunted an affirmative, and Ezra nodded along, gathering up his supplies before limpingly retreating to his own cot to scrape out the black that festered in his wound.
“She got us good, huh?” he said after a moment, once again desperate to fill the silence. Everything had been so loud recently, conversations with Nemo and Illian in no short supply, the buzzing of tools filling the silences they didn’t. The quiet felt as much a poison to him as he was sure it was the antidote for Two.
He got nothing in response, not even a grunt or snort. Ezra gritted his teeth, picked up the foam gun and pressed it harshly against his side.
ksshh
Pain flared from the cut, more insistent than he expected, his wounded side calling out in protest against his harsh treatment. His fingers fumbled on the trigger, and the line finished sloppily, foam bunching up around the end.
“Shit,” he muttered, and Two made some noise from across him.
Ezra’s gaze flew up, settling on his companion.
Number Two sat across from him, helmet off. His skin was pale, even more gray and lifeless than usual, and slick with sweat. He sat hunched over the filter in his lap, scrubbing it clean, but when Ezra looked over to him, Two’s eyes flicked up to meet his gaze.
Words flashed in Ezra’s mind.
You were right.
Maybe if you hadn’t acted out, they would’ve taken us.
Sorry.
You saved my life.
I saved yours.
I couldn’t save both of us.
Say something, goddamnit.
Sorry.
Thank you.
They all died in his mouth, and he was rendered, for once, completely mute.
Number Two pointed to his filter, sitting on top of the rest of his suit, and Ezra tossed it over.
Wordlessly, Two scrubbed away.
Mutely, Ezra packed up the field kit.
Quietly, they fell into companionable silence.
The Green had a talent for inducing claustrophobia. It pressed in on all sides as a restrictive, omnipresent force. The air was never free of its poison, the venom of the beast they all resided inside. Illian was right, probably. It would wear him down eventually, and Ezra was far more likely to crumple and fall than he was to claw his way to freedom. The Green had a grasp on him tighter than he could shove off, and it seemed so, so determined to keep him close, hoarding him like the precious gems he’d come to collect. The moment he’d first seen that ad, calling for naive men to scrape aurelac from the soil of a far-away moon, he’d been a dead man. RineCor, Len, mutiny, Illian, Nemo, all that was just unnecessary postage on an already sealed fate.
The moment he’d set foot on the Green, it’d claimed him, and now he was just a ghost overstaying his welcome.
Number Two kicked his foot, and Ezra looked up just in time to catch his filter. It was far from shining, but it had been scrubbed free of the buildup of dust that had steadily begun to grow around its edges. Ready to start, not over, but somewhat anew.
“Thanks,” he said shortly, letting it fall to his lap. “Here, hand over your suit. I’ll patch it up for ya.”
Number Two tilted his head at him, but then he acquiesced, tossed his ratty, torn up suit over. He watched Ezra, as he threaded the needle, pressed the edges of the fabric together, and started to sew.
It was a damn miracle they were both alive, Ezra figured as he worked, returning Two’s watchful gaze out of the corner of his eye. A testament, perhaps, to the endurance of ghosts.
That’s what they were, afterall.
Stubborn, ghostly bastards.
Notes:
If you like Prospect, I sometimes draw stuff about it on my Instagram @emeryductie Feel free to send me a message or just check out my account over there :D
fais_do_do on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jan 2022 08:02PM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jan 2022 09:47PM UTC
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fais_do_do on Chapter 2 Sat 29 Jan 2022 08:30PM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 2 Sat 29 Jan 2022 09:52PM UTC
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fais_do_do on Chapter 3 Sat 29 Jan 2022 10:33PM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 3 Sun 30 Jan 2022 01:34AM UTC
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fais_do_do on Chapter 4 Sun 30 Jan 2022 01:53AM UTC
Last Edited Sun 30 Jan 2022 01:53AM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 4 Sun 30 Jan 2022 03:30AM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 9 Tue 29 Mar 2022 04:09AM UTC
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fansnob on Chapter 11 Tue 29 Mar 2022 09:13AM UTC
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HTG_zoo on Chapter 12 Fri 04 Aug 2023 05:07AM UTC
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Ductie on Chapter 12 Fri 04 Aug 2023 05:48AM UTC
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