Chapter Text
It was a dreary sort of day. The type of day where everything is still too soggy and wet from last night's torrential volley of piercing watery arrows. Hard and furious, water pelted down so hard that it stung like tiny razors. It was too violent to simply call it rain.
Now, droplets of water drip down from the weaved together branches that form a canopy of overhang above your heads.
It might be more than wet and still much too boggy but there's a stillness, a calm and quiet to this morning compared to last night. There's a softness to the jungle now when compared to the howling wind last night and rain splattering so loud that it might sound more like waves crashing into a shore, but constant and forever, never pulling back out to the tide. So loud had it been in fact that you'd wondered last night as you finally fell asleep if the rain could maybe even drown out the entire world.
And no matter how the trees might be watery and sopping, the sun still greets the sky, diligently dragging the day along with it.
But it's still the kind of day where you'd rather just lay back down and slip back into a quiet slumber, whether there's a bed or not. Your back is sore, your legs too, not to mention your arms. There's a crick in your neck like you slept on a pillow made of bricks. That pillow had in fact been your arm and your satchel. You probably slept on your tricorder or something.
It was the kind of day that you just want it to be over already because it feels long and tedious even though it's still early in the morning.
The day has hardly even begun.
The first day here, you think you'd been in a state of shock. The second day you had a zeal about you, an adrenaline pumping through your veins. The third — you decided the circumstances could be far worse, there had been a tranquility to your fervor. And then there's now. Day four.
Four days on this rock and you've found nothing but swamp. No matter how much ground you cover, the landscape doesn't change. You've grown accustomed to the scenery by now though it still leaves you feeling weary.
Swamp and more swamp. And trees. All the trees you could want. Tall trees. Thick trees. Short and fat trees. Little, thin trees that seem more like sticks standing up and out of the water. Even trees that twist and curl and look dry as the husk around a cob of corn once it's been roasted. Those dying trees mostly seem to be ones with thick and large vines twisting up them, reminding you of a snake that might constrict its prey to suffocate its victim until the last bit of life leaves their eyes.
And the water — can you even call it that? You're up to your knees in thick, murky sludge. The scent of algae and dirt has long saturated your senses and it's so muggy and damp, it makes everything stick to you. You feel hot and sweaty but there's also a chilling breeze that makes you feel much too cold because of the glossy layer of sweat you wear.
Before coming here, you'd only gotten the basic information. Class M planet, no intelligent lifeforms, named Premonora.
But you hardly want to know much of anything else to do with this terrible place.
You just want to leave already. It's worn its welcome. Or maybe you're the one wearing the welcome. Either way, you're ready to say bon voyage to this planet and all of it's monstrous inhabitants.
Whoever sent for help, you don't think they're here anymore. You've seen zero signs of life. Intelligent life that is. You are both certainly up to your necks in lifeforms otherwise. There's more life than you can handle here really.
The jungle itself seems alive. Things screech every two seconds from somewhere off in the distance. Ripples poke up from the watery mud you traverse through. There's a hum and buzz in the distance, a loud croak and hiss coming from somewhere. The leaves shake as if the trees are quivering. At the very least, the morning light welcomes you. It maybe even beckons you to come out on some other side and be bathed in light. But there is no other side to burst out from, not that you know of.
You're still walking. Your feet are sore, your legs feel stiff. Morning has only just begun, and you're already tired.
Premonora. More like a planet of asshole predators. More like a hell-scape of jungle and swamp with humid heat during the day and a cold, damp chill at night. But the worst part of all of this is that you can't get in touch with anyone.
You can't get a connection to even contact The Enterprise with your combadges.
Maybe you should feel hopeless right about now. But you feel anything but. If anything, you're angry. At the circumstances perhaps. Maybe at yourself for the first day you'd been here. It could be that you're just angry at the world right now.
You've had it really. With everything. But especially with this place. You've long since decided you hate this planet more than any other planet that can possibly exist.
The sun hasn't risen to the center of the sky yet, and unlike yesterday, there isn't a cloud in sight. There are only the treetops you walk under to cast a voluminous shadow. The branches overhead have thickened enough to weave together and shield the sun's illuminating warmth. Even so, where the sun hits right now, beams of light rush through larger gaps between lower branches. You can feel the heat against your face, a light but warm breeze tickles at your senses. That's nice at the very least, even if it's only for the moment.
You come to an abrupt stop and the absence of your feet mucking about causes your commanding officer to slow down too. When Worf stops, he gives pause to his current task. This entire time he's been following a route via tricorder while casting it with a much too scrutinizing glare. He stops only to direct his eyes at you.
He looks grumpy more than anything with his lips pulled into a thin and annoyed line, his eyebrows furrowed at you, making the lines that mark his forehead crease more intensely than is usual.
"I'm going to double check the direction really quick," you explain. Worf gives you a look like you can't be serious. He flashes the screen of his tricorder at you.
"The tricorder says to continue—," he's already gesturing the way with his hand.
"And I'm telling you it was sending us the wrong way last night, you really don't want me to at least double check?" You try your best to sound civil, but even to you, your voice sounds abrasive.
"If you really feel the need to waste time and energy checking on something that does not even need to be checked—," his voice does that heated thing it does when he's chastising you, but if you just take his words at face value…
"Alright, good then, I'll be right back," you say as you rush off to what you think looks to be the tallest and straightest tree within the vicinity. As you turn, you catch his face becoming exasperated but you don't want to chance going in the wrong direction.
Already the combadges aren't working. What if the tricorders aren't exactly working either? Yours had been acting strangely last night and you think Worf's was too though according to him it's unproven as of yet.
You get that he wants the tricorder to be in perfect working order. You want that to be the case too. But if it isn't, then you'd just be wasting your time. And that to you is unacceptable in a situation like this.
It doesn't take you long to begin your ascent. You get a tight grip with your palms biting into rough bark and then pull yourself up, branch after branch until you reach almost the very top. For a moment, the tree sways like a particularly bendy ballerina, so you go down a step or two and stop there.
You stare out ahead and catch a face full of sunlight. It's too bright, stunning almost, you close your stinging eyes for a moment and blink them back open with a hand up to cast a small shadow over your vision.
"Have you reached the top yet?" Worf calls from down below.
"Yeah, and it looks like — we've been going the wrong way!"
"What did you say!?" Worf's answer only makes you roll your eyes. How pleasantly annoying. You keep your sight on the hilly terrain and the sheer cliff that pokes up in the distance, more rightwards than you'd previously been wasting time going for the past, what? Three hours?
"I'm coming back down! Wait a minute," you gaze downward to catch scraps of him between twigs and branches and spindly long yellowing leaves that jut out from almost every which way.
You find a good hold with your hands, and step one leg down at a time and lower yourself gradually while bringing your other foot to a different branch.
And so you make your way steadily down the tree you've climbed, being cautious where you place your step and deliberate of which branches you take a hold of because there's no point in injuring yourself now.
"So, what did you find out?" Worf asks as soon as you're at least three quarters of the way down. He looks more invested in the matter than he'd previously led on but you don't say anything until you've fully reached the solid — more like murky puddle of a ground.
You face him but not without grimacing. It's a comforting dread you suppose, to plunge your feet back into watery mud. You could easily twist an ankle if you weren't careful with your step. The terrain you've traversed for the past four days has been like this the entire time. It's likely to give your feet blisters for as long as you've both traversed it. How lucky for the both of you. It's a damning thought.
"We need to go," and you wave an arm to gesture which way, you'd been sure to remember the orientation before coming back down, "that general direction."
"And we have been going this way the whole time?" Worf points in the direction that you had both been walking for the past couple of hours since you'd woken up and started stumbling along the way that had been based on the scan of his tricorder this entire time. He eyes his tricorder too, judging it with both a critical and a vexing look to his face.
"Uh-huh," you say but he should have more than enough evidence to confirm the reality of the situation. The tricorder is likely not functioning properly after all.
His eyebrows, which seem to be particularly wily today, try to eat his eyes with how he furrows them, his lips protruding in — well, definitely not joy. It's not that Worf looks particularly upset, just that he looks certainly the opposite to a basket of yarn and kittens and sunshine. His jaw tenses, an obvious sign of his silent ire.
"I do not understand why it isn't working," he stares at the tricorder with a glare that threatens a slow and not so painless death and even goes so far as to give it a good shake or two. If a look could make something combust into ten million pieces, well, that goes to say the tricorder would be toast.
"Well, honestly, I trust my eyes more than this damn planet," you mutter. He gazes up at you finally though he still looks just as vexed either way. Worf grabs at the satchel over his shoulder. He stuffs the tricorder back into it while grumbling something under his breath about it being worthless.
He gathers himself for a second, his face maintaining some rigid tension no matter how hard he tries to make himself look calm. He faces you more fully to speak.
"How far?" He asks, eyes on you in a way that someone might stare out a window when they're bored and hardly paying any real attention.
"It's pretty far still," you say. And you feel glum for having to say it. There's no one more than you that wants to be out of here already.
"Will we make it in time?" His voice is low and serious, maybe he feels as glum as you do?
You tap your opposite arm as you think. It doesn't add up all that well in your head. But you have to try. And if you try hard enough and really cover some ground, you think you can still make it.
"If we get moving soon, we should."
He seems to take a breath in just to exhale some overdrawn sigh. From your peripheral vision you watch as he rubs his eyes and then tugs down on his uniform shirt.
"Then I suggest we get moving," his eyes leave no room for nonsense. Hell, his tone comes off like it's some sort of strict command. There's no arguing with him. But you finally smirk.
You knew checking was a good idea. And now you're going the right way for it. Technically, you told him so.
"After you sir," you say, trying your best to hide your impishly triumphant look. You're met with his glance. His eyes judge you like he's waiting for you to say the line. So that goes to say that you failed in your attempt but you don't say anything.
Eventually, he steps in front of you, stepping through muck and going around tangles of thickets and brambles that stick up and out of the water. You both still try to keep closer to the taller and thicker trees with decently sized branches.
It feels like the swamp will go on forever. You just want to be back on The Enterprise already. The jungle is already kicking your ass. That is to say, you're getting hungry and tired and sore. You just feel gross at this point. You can deal with feeling gross, but you can't say that a shower curtain might look to you as grand as golden gates surrounded by clouds and that sort of thing. A shower would be literal heaven right now.
You trudge forward. One step after another, your feet sinking into smushy mud with your every step. You wonder if this might be similar to walking through very wet and watery concrete, but you're just endlessly walking through that crap.
You sigh. And sigh again. But Worf doesn't say anything. So you don't say anything either. You follow him as you go and listen to the strange birdsong that comes from the jungle. That is to say they aren't exactly birds but more reptilian and scaly in nature though they chirp and fly just the same.
But there's a whistle and a click and a repeated three note melody to let you pretend it could very well be a bird of some sort.
It's still early in the day. You wonder what tomorrow might bring.
And will that day also be the sort of day that you'd much rather toss over your shoulder too?