Chapter Text
“At our next stop, you get off. I don’t know where it’s going to be, but you’re getting off. There’s not going to be any Ted Empire, there’s not going to be any Tednoughts or chemical ice. It’s just going to be you and the cosmos. It’s going to be rough. Like it is for all of us. Good luck, Ted.”
. . .
Fuck Caspar Scott.
Fuck him for jettisoning K’aazprh into space, subsequently getting him fired and landing him at that shitty surveilance job. Fuck him for somehow managing to catch K’aazprh’s escape pod after the Tednaught blew up. Fuck him for sparing K’aazprh and abandoning him on a random planet. Fuck him for being the most irritating person alive, and fuck him for having a kid. None of this would have happened if K’aazprh had just used Caspar’s memories about David against him from the beginning.
K’aazprh was very much regretting his decision not to do that as he trudged through what must have been his one hundred millionth mile of grassy, rocky nothingness and sparse forests. It had been a few days since that Ted-forsaken diner had dropped him here, and he’d surmised pretty quickly that he was– by some miracle– on Earth. Unfortunately, it did not appear to be the Earth he’d become familiar with.
“Edith?” K’aazprh wheezed, falling on his ass in the shade of a pine tree and resting the back of his head against it.
“Yes, K’aazprh?” his tangle responded from his pocket. He let his eyes slip closed against the too-bright sun and the whitening edges of his vision. The bark of the tree dug into the back of his head painfully, chasing away the urge to give into unconsciousness.
“Scan for Ted ships planetside.”
“There are none. Same as the first time you asked. And the second.”
“Then look for any signals in the system,” K’aazprh snapped. “The galaxy. The fucking triad , I don’t care! Find them!”
“I can’t locate something that isn’t there, K’aazprh. There are no Ted signals out there. No signals at all. None that my scanners can detect at the very least. It’s as if they’ve all disappeared.”
K’aazprh scoffed. “Or like they were never there in the first place.” They sat in silence, for a moment. There had been a lot of that, for the last few days. In the beginning, there was a lot of strategizing. K’aazprh was injured and poorly stocked, but he could walk. Edith had detected civilization on the planet, though not in the same places it would have normally been. Since things were different here, Edith’s maps could be completely wrong. Though they were just as likely to be spot on. There was no way to know, so they’d started marching.
It had been about five days since then, and K’aazprh was tired. He was in pain. His entire body was beginning to digest itself, and if he went any longer without water he was pretty sure he’d shrivel up into a little Ted-raisin. Well, he’d probably die first.
It wasn’t a terrible place to go, he supposed. The forest wasn’t incredibly dense, but he didn’t really mind. What it lacked in shade it made for in being able to see the sky. The bluest, most cloudless sky he’s ever seen. It was like someone had draped a blue blanket over the entire planet. And that brilliant blue was reflected in the lake, peeking out from between the trees. It was a fair distance away, so it must have been big, to take up as much space in his vision as it did. Or maybe it was that his vision was getting smaller. There were mountains.
And the trees were nice. Recognizable. Almost comforting, in that way. He had been able to recognize and name every tree he’d come across. He’d been keeping a list in his head, checking them off every time he found another species. There had been some birds flitting about between them too. And singing. He’d never heard birdsong in person before. He remembered the audio they’d recovered from probe 1 on Planet 3. He’d likened it to crickets at the time, too frustrated to really take in what he was hearing. He wondered if it had sounded anything like this. If he’d condemned anything so musical and beautiful when he sent in that report.
“K’aazprh? Come on, open your eyes. You have to stay awake. You’re severely dehydrated and your nourishment levels are low too. If you go to sleep now, you probably won’t wake up.”
“Thank you, Edith, for your inspiring words of encouragement,” K’aazprh mumbled. Despite his body’s own protests, he pushed himself to his knees with a groan, using the tree trunk as leverage. “Which way were we headed again?”
“We were going due north, toward–,”
“Shh.”
“What?”
“ Shh , Edith! Just, be quiet, for a second? Okay? Listen.” K’aazprh’s entire body was tense, in a way it had never been before. He wasn’t even sure what he’d heard, if anything. If Edith hadn’t picked it up, it was unlikely that–
Snap.
“There.”
“Where? What are you talking about, K’aazprh? I’m not picking up any audio.”
K’aazprh’s head was on a swivel as he scanned the trees, desperately trying to get an idea of where the noise had come from. As he turned his head, the sound seemed to echo in his ears: snapping twigs, as if underfoot, coming from the south east. Four legs, but... different strides. Two sets of footsteps. He couldn’t see who yet, but someone was approaching them.
“Someone’s coming,” he whispered.
“I think you’re right,” Edith replied. “Put on your–,”
“Earth suit, got it,” K’aazprh said, already reaching into his uniform’s breast pocket for the tiny nano suit, no larger than a pinhead. He pressed it onto his shirt with shaking hands and tapped it once to activate it, ignoring the unsettling feeling of nanobots crawling over his body as the disguise settled into place. It was an old thing, barely field worthy at all. But it would have to do. He tried to stand to his full height, but the best he could manage was leaning pathetically against the trunk of the pine tree, sweat making his now human hair stick to his forehead. “This is it, Edith.”
“It’s probably someone coming to help .”
“I don’t know if they made it in time,” K’aazprh panted, blinking hard to fight back the wave of dizziness and nausea that was trying to overtake him. He tried to take a deep breath, but he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs with air. The whiteness at the edges of his vision was slowly closing in, blocking out the clear blue sky and the lake and the mountains beyond it. Ringing was starting to stuff his ears like cotton. It was far less pleasant than the bird song.
Man, dying of thirst fucking sucked .
“HEY!” Edith yelled, suddenly, making K’aazprh flinch. “HEY! I’M OVER HERE! HELP!”
“Edith? What’re you doin’— doing?” K’aazprh said. Talking was getting really hard really fast.
“Saving your life, obviously. PLEASE, I NEED HELP!”
“Stay here.” A quiet voice from beyond the trees. Gentle and stern, as if speaking to a child. And… unnervingly familiar. “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, please, I’m over here!” Edith yelled. Then, quieter, “Stay awake, K’aazprh. He’s almost here.”
“Who is?”
Then, emerging from the whiteness and the trees and the blue sky, was a man. A familiar man, with a face and demeanor K’aazprh recognized. But not quite right. A man with greying black hair that was just a bit too long, and dark eyes that didn’t have dark bags beneath them. With lines around his nose and mouth from scowling, but also smile lines by his eyes. A man just left of the most irritating person alive.
“ You? ” K’aazprh hissed.
“I— yes. Me,” said Caspar Scott.
And then K’aazprh crumpled at the knees and lost consciousness.