Chapter 1: Crash
Chapter Text
At first when he breaks atmo, all Crowley sees through the shuttle’s wide transparent viewscreen is water.
Clear, calm liquid. A panorama of sparkling ripples, spread out below him in an endless plain, as far as the eye can see. He knows a bit of what to expect from the briefings, but it’s still arresting to see. Marvellous. Stunning. Ethereal, even. Hey, that’s probably how Aethera got its name in the first place? Whoever named it.
And yet…it feels wrong, somehow. To be sailing down over that gleaming unstable surface, even if his shuttle does have appropriate float landers. As if his Terran ancestors are kicking up a fuss, deep in his genes: Where’s the bloody earth?
Water, water everywhere, and not a place to land.
But he can’t really worry about evolved psychology bullshit, because the shuttle goes dead.
Dead dead. A wild futz from the electronics and then? Navigation, diagnostics, scanning. All of it! It all fizzles out in a blitz of black-and-white jitter. Crowley manages to switch over to manual for guidance before the power goes completely, and he’s left feeling every twitch and shudder of the shuttle through the grip of his hands on the yoke and throttle.
And suddenly, all that gorgeous gleaming water takes on a very different, very threatening feel. It yawns in front of him, beckoning and hungry.
His gut clenches. At the thought of drowning, mostly. Of implacable waters closing over his head, filing his lungs, eating his life. Dying and dead, lost and alone, (probably) unmourned.
C’mon, Crowley. He’s crashlanded before. He’s piloted on manual before. He can do it again, for all it feels like he’s pulling an elephant up a rocky slope. He bullies the shuttle’s nose up to slow his descent, and lets the tug of the heavier gravity in his churning gut and trembling legs guide his balance, his senses, his instinct.
Gradually a serenity settles over him like a cloak. He’s fallen before, yes. And this feeling is familiar, too. A heavy inevitability of what’s to come – a fall, a crash.
His hands steady, thank the stars. His vision sharpens.
He’s skimming over the glittering water of Aethera, silent, dead, in a long hop like a skipping stone, when he sees it. There! There’s something there, distant but not too far.
A long strip of pale beach, and the stretch of rocky land off behind that.
Land. Land! A place to drop. His relieved heart begins to beat again, and he breathes, shaky, one-two-three-four.
Then he slams at the manual override for the float landers, but it’s gone completely unresponsive. Like punching a rock. The shuttle rattles around him, and then goes quiet, and he’s falling down through the alien sky in a final, graceful, terrifying pitch.
He tries to relax for the landing. It’s the first thing they’re taught, indentureds like Crowley who arrive at flight training without ever having touched a shuttle throttle. Go limp as a snake. But it’s too much. He’s so tense for the landing that when it comes, it nearly jars his bones right out of his skin. Well, at least his skeleton’ll make it.
The shuttle bounces and skips and lets out a horrible shrieking-groan as it skids across the strip of pale crystalline sand, and then…stops.
Breathe, one-two-three-four. Breathe.
Crowley unsticks his hands from the flight controls. It takes a moment for his brain to recover from its heavy kathunk against the inside of his skull, but gradually he is able to grasp some basics:
He is down.
He is in one piece.
He is alive.
The shuttle’s front end is half-buried into pale sand, but there’s no death on sudden massive impact, and no drowning. Nice work, Crowley.
He takes a few hundred more deep breaths until the landscape beyond the shuttle’s viewscreen stops trembling. Then he makes himself stand up, shake out the shakes, put on the rest of his suit—protocol, even by Bea’s generally lax-assed standards—and ventures out like the explorer he’s supposed to be.
The sand is soft and giving under his boots. The water gleams a placid silver, mirroring the sky.
Despite the tinted faceshield, he still has to squint. Of course it’s bright as fuck; Aethera has two suns. The brilliancy of his sandy-rocky landing area is a migraine waiting to happen.
He doesn’t have time for a migraine. He’s got his mission, and before he can even get started on that, he has to dive into the shuttle’s cramped diagnostics array, figure out just why he’s crashed.
He takes another step, and another.
Beep.
Fuck.
Beep-beep.
Okay, Crowley tells himself. Two beeps. His suit could be resetting to deal with the alien atmo and possibly, possibly whatever it was that maybe knocked him out of the sky.
Beep-beep-beep.
Three beeps.
Lost power. Crashed the shuttle. And now, two steps onto alien soil, his suit—Crowley taps up the diagnostic panel—has a leak.
Supposedly. Hell if Crowley can see where or why. But in the event of any leakage, the sleek black STARLITER 7000 model S (for shit, thinks Crowley viciously if unoriginally, but originality isn’t his primary concern at the moment) will throw all its impressive power into maintaining system filtering and integrity.
He can’t even send a priority distress beacon message. All he has is the piddly rocket that comes standard in the Duke’s shuttles. Would that even break Aethera’s heavier grav?
Shit. Cosmic, elemental shit.
He stares up at the wide stretch of pale grey sky, the awful even paler sandy beach and the calm, colourless ocean that seemed to stretch on forever and ever.
Definitely he’s had better first days on wild planets.
But this isn’t just any wild planet, is it?
Aethera’s surface is supposed to be twenty percent landmass in the middle of planet-wide ocean, so he should probably be grateful he came in with his planned trajectory—the chances of his crashing into water were much greater.
Most of that land that he can see, apart from the sand, is grey-white and rocky, with sections here and there that look more shimmery and pinkish in the sunlight. Fascinating from a geologic standpoint probably, though that’s not Crowley’s specialty.
Despite its supposed capability of supporting life, there’s nothing much indigenous here, apart from compatible bacteria, some kind of pretty clam that Bea swears up and down is a twin to Earth’s geoducks, and a cold creeping golden lichen that apparently turns yellow during the long winter. Whenever that is.
With Crowley’s current luck? Probably tomorrow.
Anyway. Greenery, chlorophyll and photosynthesis, might not be a thing here. Crowley grins at that, and pats his specimen case with its tiny leafy transplants. Yet.
The pale sand glimmers beneath his feet, and look—there’s one of Bea’s clam things now, nudging his boot. Crowley squats down for a better look.
It is pretty. The flat shell is a little larger than the size of his palm, and as pale as the rest of the washed-out surroundings, but its rubbled lines run in pleasing patterns. Crowley carefully picks it up for closer examination. The dying glare from Aethera’s second sun catches a glitter of gold, like veins of liquid light, glittering all through it.
“Look at you,” Crowley whispers, enchanted despite himself, despite his wretched circumstances. “Lovely thing. You’re gorgeous, aren’t you.”
He fancies the clam gives the tiniest wriggle, and then a bit of the bivalve peeps out. Like it’s inspecting him right back, hah. It’s a creamy colour, and it looks soft. Malleable. As if it would be pleasant to touch, rather than slimy or toxic.
Hmph. And what are we basing that on, Doctor Crowley? Instincts aren’t worth shit here. Aethera is still alien. Still uncharted. There’s no cause for false optimism.
His suit beeps thrice at him again. Speaking of false optimism. That’s Crowley’s cue to stop faffing around and set up the rocket beacon—no time for romantic detours into discovery when his equipment is acting up. So he carefully returns the fascinating little clam to its scuffed line in the sand, and gets to it.
The rocket beacon is undamaged. He gives it a bit of extra oomph with a jury-rigged battery pack cannibalised from the shuttle backup console, and then sets it for a direct intercept to the Grand Duke, Bea’s command ship of the small Stana Corporate fleet. Stars willing, Bea’s still got them all trundling along the proper course.
He ducks down as it blasts off, and then watches as it soars high, trailing red sparks, into the darkening sky.
He squints. It looks a bit…wonky. Is it suffering from the same weird malfunction as the shuttle? The same reaction to whatever it is about Aethera that didn’t show up on the scans. That wasn’t in Bea’s reports.
He can’t tell if the rocket clears atmo or not.
His suit beeps again. The panic creeps back, tightening round his chest like a steel band, and he takes several deep breaths, tries to center himself. Rearm himself with his usual easy flippancy.
No need for worry. C’mon. Not really. Bea will declare him missing (or AWOL) at the seventeen day mark. He has more than enough food and supplies till then. Veritable feast, really, considering how much—or how little—he eats. He can patch the suit leak for any trips outside the shuttle and shelter, until the computer verifies his breathability survey of Aethera’s air.
Hey, he still has the computer and its cache. If he can power up. He tinkers with the battery pack, and manages to get one of the main consoles online for long enough to pull the cache and drop it into the portable computer. The remote connection seems to be functioning, even if the main console is still hiccuping. The portable should have at least a few days of battery, too. Hopefully by then he’ll have main power back up and running.
Crowley pokes at the main console controls, but the screen goes dim again. Something properly vital must’ve come loose in the crash. He won’t be able to lift off until he gets under the hood and figures out what.
To give himself a bit of breathing room, as well as something to do, he erects the emergency shelter around the shuttle. The sand, though clinically safe according to his instruments, isn’t suitable for the seal. But luckily his shuttle nosedived right next to this lovely massive hunk of solid rock. The pinkish stuff, rather than the grey. That’s nice. He stretches the shifting fabric-metal-plastic tube of the shelter up to it, and…hrmh. It’s covered all over with an abundance of the shiny, scale-like clams.
Crowley scans them. Yep. They register more as kind of a conglomerate life like this, in these weird overlapping clusters, but still harmless. Just like Bea had reported. Phew.
The whole uneven surface works very well for mounting the wall of the shelter. Out of relief, he gives the rockface a pat between the scaley clusters—it’s sunwarmed, he can feel it even through his glove, and it’s surprisingly comforting—and goes inside to pressurise the whole thing.
He presses the last seal into place. The shelter inflates in a giant cylinder, and the sunlight glows through the transparent pieces in startling rays of pink and orange and gold. And his suit stops beeping every five minutes. Finally.
Crowley runs the filters. Does one final air, bugs, and integrity test, and everything’s in the green. Safe.
He strips out of the big suit. Ahhh. Better. Clad in only his lightweight black workshirt and trousers, he feels more capable. He stretches his legs and wriggles his hips. Stifling, those things. Like he’s a block-man.
He does the necessary stuff: toileting, sterilising, double-checking the shuttle’s systems via the portable computer for power and backups. And everything stays all beautifully in the green. He’s got a charge in the main battery for at least two solar years, thank fuck—though not even Bea would let him rot here that long.
He still can’t tell what knocked him out of the sky. The portable isn’t reading any glitches. But seeing those healthy indicators for stored power? That goes a long way towards easing the spiky tension in his shoulders. His wrist monitor doesn't seem to be working, but he leaves it on anyway. Maybe it'll come back, too.
Still. Crowley adds some of the longer-lasting foodstuffs to the backup bag. Or the SIF bag, as he and Eric have always labeled it when they’ve gone on scout-trips together. As in, if you’re using this bag, shit is fucked, and so are you probably.
It adds to the SIF bag’s bulk of filters, meds, and other basic necessities. Glorified fucking first-aid kit. But it’s something.
With a sigh, Crowley flops down in the pilot’s chair with the portable computer. He eats a delicious concentrate meal while he reviews Bea’s overall report on Aethera.
It’s written in typical Bea style, unfortunately. Broad and sweeping and full of assumptive leaps without evidence. The only real research deep-dives are into the little clam guys. Due to the atmosphere and distance and whatever else is going on, Crowley doesn’t have any connection to the interstellar comm net. But! He’s still got that cache from the latest update, so he searches through it for any known data on the planet.
Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of info he doesn’t already have.
Aethera’s part of an infamous planetary map: the Ineffable Road. A winding route of potential planets that most terraforming collectives avoid like the space plague. The tale goes that the planets and systems were investigated and catalogued ages ago by some super-race, but for whatever reason, left be. One or two of the planets have turned out to be habitable. Some of them have warning beacons bristling round their systems for hundreds of lightyears, on account of all the missing people.
Bea’s version of the map has each of those planets crossed out with a big green X. HERE BE DRAGONS.
Aethera has no such mark. No such lore. It’s a dead, wild planet. Deadish, on account of the clams and lichen. But no one’s touched it. Even the Arches, their biggest rival in the terraforming collective game, have passed it by. And this despite Gabriel’s insistence on being, unprovably, a descendant of the oh-so-hallowed mapmakers. Crowley’s team—well, Bea’s rather—have been competing with them for years now, and he knows Gabriel would rather eat an asteroid steak than cede them any ground.
So why have they avoided it? Maybe their copy of the Ineffable Star Road map doesn’t show Aethera at all?
On a whim, Crowley does a query—but there’s nothing in the databanks. No recent news from their enduring nemeses. Though Gabriel’s smarmy face pops up in the streams from about six months ago. Lost a member of their team on an exploratory mission, apparently. Such a loss, sacrifice not made in vain as long as humankind benefits, and blah blah typical Gabriel blah. Blahbriel, more like. Crowley snorts at himself, and trawls through the stream results for a few more minutes. No further info.
He dislikes Gabriel, so much. He dislikes Gabriel’s team, and their smug self-assurance in their own supremacy, their star-blessedness. But he imagines someone on Gabriel’s team going through what Crowley did today. Dropping out of the sky. Controls unresponsive. That yawning, pitiless stretch of water…
He can’t help but feel sympathy. Kinship. And a bone-deep dread that he might be about to follow in an Arches explorer’s empty footsteps.
Crowley shuts down the portable, suddenly exhausted. No doubt the adrenaline rush of OH FUCK OH SHIT OH FUCK CRASHING has faded. As well as the smoothed-out zen. He stares up at the darkening sky through the transparent ceiling of the shelter. There’re a few distant moons, but between their distance and the stars, Bea’s report says Aethera has no tides to speak of.
Lucky for him. It’d be pretty annoying to crash on the beach and then get submerged, eh? Tomorrow he’ll find the problem and fix the shuttle. Then he’ll fly up again and do a proper circuit. Find a better place further in from the shore to set up camp.
Despite how appealing he’s finding this particular spot. The view of the open sky through the window is…nice. And that rock seems so stable, so sturdy. Best thing about today so far.
Crowley leans back in the pilot’s seat, and drifts off.
Chapter 2: Wet
Summary:
Dripping. Second only to beeping on the List of Ominous Sounds for Space Travellers. And then, there’s an even more ominous creak.
Notes:
Click the arrow for detailed CW:
Confusingly sexy dreams. Also your basic general survival fear, panic, anxiety, dread, slowly falling apart.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He’s dreaming of flying over the Aetheric ocean. He knows it’s a dream.
Has to be a dream, right? With all the easy weirdness, like the twin suns and the heavy warmth between his legs? It’s exciting, that feeling of riding, for all the surface he’s straddling has the appealing rubble-feel of a rock…or maybe a shell…beneath his palm, against his thighs. Naked thighs. Nudity—also an excellent indicator of dreamland.
His face is wet with the spray of water. Or perhaps tears. His eyes are burning. His mouth is open in a wild ecstatic yell. All of it a consequence of the sheer bright euphoria spinning through his entire body. No, it’s not just euphoria—it’s a conversation somehow, a match of feeling for feeling, delight twining round delight that he doesn’t have words for.
He’s alive and awake, he’s safe and warm and flying without a shuttle. He’s held aloft in pleasure and security. It’s like heaven.
Can’t be real. It’s a dream. But a lovely one. So vivid. He can feel the pressure and the thrill in his belly, the air and mist on his bare skin. He lingers in the happy, sensuous abandon of it, even as his consciousness prods at him to wake: you’re dreaming
—drip—
Probably should wake up
and the heat between his legs cools, and the smooth shell beneath his palm fades, the elation of companionable flight lingering the longest but still fading, resolving into green-grey shadows of—where? Where has he gone to sleep tonight? Doesn’t seem like his quarters. Did he get lucky? Ugh, and with who?
—dripdrip—
The spray of the water is the last thing to fade. Except it doesn’t. His face is still wet. He’s not crying. He’s not ecstatic. He’s not safe. But his face is still wet, and he’s waking, he’s up, he’s awake—
—dripdripdrip—
Dripping.
Crowley opens his eyes. Stares at the blank greeny-grayish ceiling of the shuttle. Shouldn’t that be white? Or the putty colour white fades to long past its glory days?
Dripping. Second only to beeping on the List of Ominous Sounds for Space Travellers. And then, there’s an even more ominous creak.
And then there’s a wet splat on his forehead.
Crowley bolts all the way awake.
Oh. Oh, fuck.
He stares at the rippling lap of water against the top of the shuttle’s window. It’s day now and the suns are overhead, their light filtering down through the water in a multitude of glimmering rays.
The entire shelter, the entire shuttle have all been submerged in the waters of Aethera.
But only just. Crowley is floating just beneath the surface. The only things anchoring him are the connections. Shuttle to shelter. Shelter to clam-covered rock. The rock hasn’t floated away yet. That’s good.
He’s scared to move. The greeny-grey light flooding the shuttle makes him feel ghostly. Dead already.
Shut up. Not now. Figure it out.
Some infinitesimal movement of the water ripples the shuttle with another creak, and it’s enough to snap him out of his throat-gulping terror. Crowley moves. He untwists himself from his sleep wrangle with the pilot’s chair.
Alright. Water’s coming from above, obviously. Slow drip.
Proximity alarms would’ve given him some warning, if he’d had main power. Crowley tries to wake up the portable computer, and it won’t respond. It’s gone dead as well.
The blank screen snaps him out of the dreamy panic and into full-blown action. Dead! What the fuck? He can’t believe it. He had a charge! It was on battery! Unconnected to the main console! Why would submersion knock out power to a battery? How is this water any different from deep space? How—
The shuttle creaks again, and he freezes. The water looms. Gentle, lapping, implacable.
Drip. Drip. Dripdripdripdrip drip.
Suit. He needs his damned leaky suit.
Crowley seizes it up from the floor and shoves his legs in, seals everything. It feels like it takes forever to do so, his breath stuttering hot and close inside the helmet as he struggles, his chest aching, spots flaring over his vision.
Calm the fuck down, Crowley. Calm the fuck down or—or—
The suit beeps happily, the beautiful fucker. He’s got air and pressure support. He closes his eyes against the panic and takes one deep breath. Holds it. Lets it out. Another. The adrenaline is still rushing through him, but he’s okay, he’s holding.
Crowley opens his eyes.
Alright. Find the water leak. His hands are clumsy and thick within the gloves as he searches for the fucking source. He sees the drip of liquid over the pilot’s chair, but it’s running from a connection along the side of the ceiling, and along that is a crack. A crack he didn’t notice yesterday. He doesn’t remember it being there yesterday. Even if it had been tiny, the shuttle shouldn’t have been able to seal and pressurise with it present at all.
Creeeeeeaaaaaaak.
With this groan, the shuttle floor shifts gently beneath his feet, and the whole thing begins to tilt sideways. Downward.
Crowley seizes the SIF bag. It feels so pitifully light. But he isn’t sure what else to grab—if he gets bogged down like that he’ll still be going through compartments as he sinks to the bottom of Aethera’s yet-uncharted ocean. It’s probably kilometres deep, given how bollocks everything else has gone so far.
He backs slowly, sloooowly over the boundary of the shuttle. Into the shelter, which has floated up from the sand and is now stretched out to its full transparent length, the water pressing in around it. Shining, soundless. His weight is too much at first, and the whole shelter tube dips down deeper.
Where’s the fucking coastline gone to? Just how damn deep is this tide?
The shuttle is attached to the shelter. The shelter is still stuck fast to the now fully submerged clam-covered rock. Crowley can’t tell whether or not the anchors are straining, whether or not it’s pulling away. If he adds weight to it, it might? But there’s nothing else for him to hold onto. So he grits his teeth and tethers himself to that wall with his suit’s clamp and belaying line.
It holds.
He puts his full weight on it. It still holds.
Paying out line as slowly as he can, Crowley creeps back down to where the shuttle and shelter are connected. He scrabbles for the heat-sealing gun and the rolled-up portion of excess shelter material. It’s meant for creating additional airlocks. Hopefully it’ll work for this. His breath is deafening, but he can’t stop to breathe now. The creaking drift of the shuttle is constant. He has to move.
He does it quick and dirty. Holds the material, seals it tight. He doesn’t have much for leverage, and the shuttle is pulling the shelter tube down with it as it sinks. If he doesn’t get it up in time he’ll just slide right back into the cockpit and the whole thing will go. A slow, silent, helpless descent.
Now there’s water coming in around the edges of the existing seals as the shuttle’s weight begins to separate it from the heavy-duty shelter material. Water pressure, pushing in. No time. He keeps working anyway—no time, no time—slapping the flaps up against the shelter fabric, sealing it into itself like he’s closing an envelope. If it holds, it’ll be a pocket of floating air that at least is buoyant.
He shoves the last bit into place just as the shuttle groans—
just as the dripping ceiling crack gapes wide, water pouring in a sudden deluge—
just as the whole blasted thing tilts downward.
There’s a terrifying tug against all the shelter seals as the craft tears away from the main connection between shuttle and shelter.
Then Crowley’s watching through the transparent material of the shelter as the shuttle sinks away. Drawn by some deep tide or current. The shelter tube settles down again, and without the pull of the shuttle being carried out, he can feel the submerged shore under his feet again. He’s still tethered to the rock side of things. He still has land beneath him. Even if he no longer has a shuttle.
He creeps back to the rock, his belaying wire feeding back into the suit’s belt, and crouches against the rock as the shelter settles again.
Now what?
His suit beeps at him. Right. Integrity fault. He can’t even muster the energy to swear at it.
The rock beneath him feels warm, even through the shelter and his pressure suit. He huddles up against it, the adrenaline still thrumming through him in waves.
He’s completely fucked, isn’t he. He’s a lost explorer. Another casualty of the Ineffable Map. He’s fucked, he’s fucked, he’s fucked he’s—
He closes his eyes for a moment before the blackness can claim him.
When he opens them again, he’s curled up against something solid. The rock. His anchor.
The first thing he sees is that the tide is receding. He can still feel the soft give of the submerged shore underneath his knees. But the water around the shelter has drawn back to leave the upper half of it above the surface.
No sign of the shuttle. But that’s to be expected. Murphy and Michael’s Laws, of course. Whatever can happen, will happen, and a lot sooner than you think. No way to look up in the databanks or the intergalactic streams whether there are oceanic surveys, even theoretical, done for Aethera. If there were, he should’ve seen it yesterday, before he went to sleep in the cockpit like a gormless…gorm.
He should probably get up. Do an inventory. Shake out some of the gut-twisting fear still coursing through him. But instead he stays where he is. The rock feels good against his shoulder, his side, his thigh. Even through the suit and the shelter fabric, he fancies he can feel a kind of comforting warmth.
He reaches out and presses a big blocky gloved hand to it. Crowley’s no astrogeologist—his focus, when required, has always honed in on astro- and xenobotany—but he can’t help but feel fascinated by the rock. There’s a strange tactility to the surface of it. And of course the warmth. Could there be some sort of tectonic or volcanic activity going on?
Stellar messiahs, that’s just what he needs: a volcano.
All terrible jokes aside, it’s obvious the clams like it too. They’re still layered over the surface, exuding their own ripples of warm…serenity? Satisfaction? Welcome.
It’s something even stronger than welcome. Something that feels better than hanging out with Eric and his coterie, or dropping into his berth on the Duke at the end of a long workday.
…home?
The word births into his mind fully formed. It’s unpleasantly intimate, and it’s right.
Damn. Crowley must be more strung-out on panic chemicals than he thought. He closes his eyes. Gives himself another few moments to hunker there, as if he’s one of those little clams, snugged up close. Welcomed and warm without reservation.
The thought of himself as a bivalve is great. Hilarious, yes, and enough to wake him up properly.
With an effort Crowley stands up, and begins to pace out the length of the shelter, timing his breathing with his steps.
Once he gets to the first thousand steps, the water’s down to knee-level outside, and he’s a bit more like himself. He can take stock, just like yesterday after the crash. His limbs all work. His head’s clearer, despite the too-bright light of the rising suns. He probably has a small stock of painkillers for headaches in the SIF bag—he checks again to make sure the SIF bag is still where it was two hundred steps ago—but he should try to preserve what he can. He has bisolar glasses he can wear, but they’re burning a hole in the front pocket of his shirt, inside the suit.
Which means he should probably start by checking over the emergency shelter integrity and pressure.
He does another circuit or two before he feels like he’s okay to do that.
Shelter integrity, good. Pressure, fine. Despite his haste, the seals are all still tight. Of course they are. If they weren’t, the fucking useless suit would be beeping, wouldn’t it? He’d never found the leak.
Crowley gets out of the suit.
Strangely, this doesn’t help as much as he’d hoped; the sheer physical barrier of the damn thing really contributed to a sense of security. But he’s more agile like this, even if he feels more exposed.
Crowley finishes his inventory. Air filtration, in the green. His wrist monitor beeps. Seems like it's working again. There’s a pack of emergency tools sewn into the shelter wall, but they’re simple things for cutting and heating and patching. SIF bag, check. And in the SIF bag:
- Food
- Oxygen mask
- Potable water bottle, full
- A piddly amount of additional potable water in a jug
- Water filtration and treatment pods and (empty) bottle
- First aid kit
- Cord and wire
- Folding blade/laser cutter, though that battery would die as quickly as a fucking human marooned on an alien planet (quicker, if the portable computer battery was any indication)
- Plant and bio samples
- Pathfinder brick (navigating, mapping, and orientation tool that despite its weight is worth the lug, since Crowley had programmed it pre-liftoff with Aethera’s known specs)
- Some really old firelighters that he or Bea or someone should’ve replaced years ago. Fuck, he hopes they work. Aethera doesn’t seem to have two sticks to rub together.
It’s a pitiful collection, really. But it’s what he’s got. People have survived on wild planets with less. Not many people, sure…but playing the odds wouldn’t be helpful right now. Not if Crowley wants to live.
He paces and paces, working out his next step with each of his own.
The water is receding, but slowly. After a while he realises his hips are aching, and he’s thirsty as hell. He needs to preserve his water. Water, most important thing. First thing. He’s surrounded by it, but can he filter and drink it? He needs to go outside, and find out just how quickly this little survival effort will either be doable, or over.
Once the tide is down. Once he gets up the courage.
He finds that he’s stopped alongside the rock again, that he’s leaning against it. From inside the shelter it’s easy enough to imagine it gently rising and falling beneath his arm. Weird-arse alien comforting thing. Weird-arse clams. Weird-arse Crowley, getting weirder by the second.
Whatever. Crowley will take whatever comfort he can get right now. And he’s always been a bit weird, so Bea has told him, so nothing new there.
He opens his single bottle of water and wets his mouth.
An endless couple of hours later, the waters have receded fully, and peeking out through the shelter wall, Crowley can see the gleaming wet-packed sand. A long stretch of it. An endless stretch.
He suits up. Grabs the SIF bag. Tries not to feel too nervous.
And then he unseals the side of the shelter and steps out.
Notes:
Thanks for reading! ❤️
Chapter 3: Meanwhile, back on the Duke
Summary:
Meanwhile, back on the Duke, people actually try to do their jobs.
Notes:
chapter CW:
swears and references to alien cheese (possibly) used sexily
Chapter Text
“Better get up here, Cap’n.”
“Do you enjoy bilge duty, Eric?”
“Er. Sorry, Captain. But yeah, I think that it would be really, really good if you came up to the bridge. Sir. You’ll wanna see this.”
Bea sighs, and steps into their clothes as they log in to their system messages. No alerts. No update from Crowley. Although Eric is smart enough not to say so over the public comm. Not like this, not while they’re docked. Comms get hacked and overheard while ships are docked.
They’ve been stuck at Hinnom Station for three days now, getting repairs and refueling. The crew is happy enough to enjoy the comforts of fresh-ish food and updated entertainments. But Bea itches to be gone. Back on the Ineffable trail.
And no word from Crowley.
It isn’t like Crowley to not update. He’s diligent. Best member of the crew when he’s not moping around. Normally when he draws the first-boots-down duty, he’s irritating—and exciting, yes, Bea can admit it—them all with a barrage of images and vids of the planet or moon within minutes of touchdown. And he takes their competition seriously. Given the way those coddled fuckers the Arches had beaten them to their last mark; given how Eric had barely escaped with his skin the last time he’d touched down planetside first? Bea tends to worry.
Bea knows they shouldn’t. Worry was useless, counterproductive to clearheaded thought. But it invades them like a cold worm, unbidden and undesired. Arches are space-shit, yes, but they certainly aren’t the only ruthless bastards out there. And those are just the human dangers. Planetary exploration comes with a host of natural ones. And because it’s on the Ineffable Star Road, Aethera is unknown.
Bea contents themself with revisiting the Aethera probe data while they climb up to the Duke’s bridge. Atmosphere, water, airborne bacteria, land mass. All reasonably nontoxic, at least by Earth standards. The probe has mysteriously fizzled out, of course. But the Duke’s probes are as old as the main ship, so. Hence the shuttle. The shuttle should have been more reliable for Crowley’s survey.
Probably. Hopefully. Bea doesn’t like to rest long on probabilities or hopes.
Then they’re up through the bridge doors, and Eric is turning from his post in the pilot’s chair, and…shit. Yep. Something is up.
“Tell me,” Bea says.
“Crowley’s emergency beacon fired off.”
Cascading singularital fucks. Bea leans over the console. “You sure?”
“Er. No.”
“Then get sure.”
“That’s just it.” Eric pokes at the console and then the viewscreen lights up. “See? It’s just a blip.”
The screen is black, showing nothing for long seconds. Then a brief green blip of a rocket beacon, spreading across the screen in waves before it abruptly goes dark again.
Bea chews their lip. “Could’ve fired by accident as he was hitting atmo.”
“Yeah, but he would’ve sent a message about it if that happened.”
“Maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s indisposed. The pair of you forgot to check in on the planet Drood—”
“Are you ever going to stop bringing up Drood—”
“Because you both decided to get high and join the local orgy.”
“For the last time, it was not an orgy, it was a cheese-tasting.”
“With homegrown psychedelic cheese cultures. And licking.”
“Chaste licking. And it wore off eventually.” Eric sighed. “Look. Captain. He’s not always the most cautious, but he doesn’t ignore shit like that on a one-man mission.”
“When did this happen?”
“Can’t tell, the metadata is fucked. Could’ve been when he hit atmo, like you said. Or it could’ve been after. Either way he’s been out there past mandatory check-in of forty-eight hours.”
“Frequencies are odd, coming from Aethera. Nothing that should’ve knocked him out of the air. But still.” They just don’t know enough about the planet. Bea makes a quick decision. They’re good at that. “We’re undocking early. Let’s go see what happened.”
Eric looks stricken, despite the fact that he’s been the bearer of the bad news. “You don’t think…”
“Won’t know until we get there.” Another thought occurs in the wake of decision, as they so often unfortunately do. “If he’s only forgotten to check in, then he can cover the early skip fees.”
“Er. Hastur and Ligur are still off-duty and off ship. I dunno where they went, but it was probably for some—” Debauched cash-blowing at the nearest local watering hole, Bea thinks. “—alone time?” Eric finishes.
“Then you’d best go disabuse them of the notion that they deserve any, hadn’t you,” Bea says. “Take Aldric and Eryka and Jerrick with you.”
With a sigh, Eric heaves up and surrenders the pilot’s chair. Bea monitors him and the others out the hatch and airlock, and then taps up Crowley’s profile and stats sheet. They snort at his profile image: ginger hair a mess, wry brown eyes glaring. Such an appearance of rebellion. One that matches his background, too; indefinite juvenile indentureship on one of Stana Corp’s little orphan planets, with a pittance of pay to avoid the legal charges of slavery. As Eric had been, before Bea plucked the both of them for the Duke. Dirty, feral, untrainable.
And yet his stats tell a different story. Every one of his missions has had a hiccup or two—see also psychedelic Wensleydale, for fuck’s sake—but Crowley has a near-perfect success and completion rate. Regardless of route or expectation, he gets shit done for them.
They steeple their fingers. There is no need for this sudden knot of worry in their stomach. Crowley’s gotten into trouble before—just like the rest of them. And Crowley, even more than any of the rest of them, has a gift for slithering out of tough situations.
It’s all probably a lot of fuss and worry for nothing.
Chapter 4: Nothing
Summary:
Back on Aethera, there’s nothing.
Notes:
CW for this chapter (spoilery):
more fear, more isolation, fast-acting dehydration due to ::handwave:: alien planet stuff. Crowley is not doing well. Also he has a first encounter with something that he doesn't realize is entering his mind.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
There’s nothing.
How can there be…nothing?
Crowley has done the typical mapping stuff, but he can’t find anything other than…sand. Beach. A few bits of rock and lichen. No clams, but maybe he’s just lucky where he is. For miles and miles and miles, in all directions. Except where there’s more of the shimmering water.
Salt water.
Judging from the marks in the sand, he can see the tide seems to extend…everywhere. There’s no higher ground to seek.
It’s unsettling. If he and Eric were watching this whole nightmare as a show in the Duke’s communal lounge, this would be when they’d be shouting at the screen for the idiot bumbling about to do—something. Anything. Crowley would have a billion one-upping suggestions about how the hapless protag could save their life and live in relative marooned comfort, even if they only possessed toothpicks and a battery.
And right now, he can think of none of them.
He imagines dying here. No—he jumps over that part, skips ahead to Hastur or Ligur finding his body. They’d probably have bets going. Better to imagine Eric finding him; he’d at least have the decency to wait till they get an autopsy to make comments.
That was if they could find him. What if they couldn’t come down? Or what if they could, and crashed just like he had?
He had to warn them somehow. With no functioning comm equipment—his suit is still janked somehow—and only a pathfinder brick that’ll likely lose power before the day is out. But he has to. Somehow.
Crowley stares out at the glimmering water, and the endless sky that meets it, and the strange suns that keep him wavering on the edge of a migraine despite the painkillers—though he supposes that he also could be having some lingering effects from the crash. He has been functioning largely through shock. In fact…ah. Yes. He’s also forgotten to eat, hasn’t he.
“Cmon, Crowley,” he says. “Basics.”
He disassembles his mapping setup and stows all the pieces in the SIF bag, and begins the short trek back to the shelter. He can’t quite see it from his current vantage, and it gives him an awful, heavy feeling. What if the tides are even more unpredictable than he’s thinking? It’s not like he’s had a chance to sit down and calculate tide tables. Not like he has a functioning computer to help him do it. What if he tries to retrace his steps and they lead into water? Or what if he retraces his steps and they lead back to his beach, but there’s nothing there? No shelter? What if—
—and then he comes over a rise he didn’t remember crossing, and he sees it, the shitty gorgeous grey-black-red transparency of the shelter, still sealed to the sand and the clam-barnacled rock. His rock.
Crowley lets out a breath as the tightness in his chest evaporates, as the pounding in his head feels more like relief than pain. He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s okay.
He grips the SIF bag strap to remind himself it’s there, across his body.
His suit beeps.
For FUCK’S sake.
Crowley gets into the shelter and gets out of the fucking claustrophobic beeping suit. He thinks about using the entirety of his roll of sealing tape to just…wrap the fucking thing top to bottom, like a mummy. And realises if he’s thinking that’s a good idea, he really needs to eat.
He wolfs down a wrapped protein snack, then another. Then, out of the suit and hunger slaked, he steels himself and counts his supplies.
The SIF bag has enough for maybe a week of food, but only three days of water. Three days.
Okay. So first off, he’s got to figure out how to make all this abundant Aetheric water surrounding him potable to a human. Right, that’s one task. He’s also got to figure out how to stay above the tide. Which doesn’t seem possible right now, but it must be. He just hasn’t walked far enough. The shelter should be able to withstand repeated submersions, but he doesn’t want to test it.
He’s also got to figure out the suit’s leak beep, or if that’s impossible, whether the biosphere here will kill him if he goes outside without it.
He’s so tired. He must’ve walked further today than he thought. Or maybe he needs to eat more. Even though he probably shouldn’t. Or maybe, it’s the fact that he’s been living on a spaceship and he’s on a fucking alien planet he doesn’t know nearly enough about, thanks to Everything Everywhere.
He spends the rest of remaining daylight going over the suit’s diagnostics, and then its actual fabric. He can’t find a leak. But there has to be one. It wouldn’t be beeping otherwise, right? Its power is fading as fast as the pathfinder brick.
Unless…oh sweet fucking starways, he is an idiot.
There’s a leak, the alarm is accurate. But after he tried to send that initial distress hail and failed, Crowley forgot to shut down the program. The suit has been trying to send the distress beacon ever since. Trying and failing, and looping back on itself with each new attempt, eating up power in the bargain.
Fuck. He’s not doing well, is he? Sure, that was right after the crash, when his head was scrambled, but…shit. He’s not doing well.
The leak is a small nip near the left ankle. Easily tapeable. He tapes it with shaking hands.
He should probably get back into the suit to sleep. But it’s so claustrophobic, and he’s so overwhelmed and dejected he can’t face it. His head aches. His entire body aches with the tension still from the crash, and from being on constant alert all day.
He doesn’t want to climb into the suit and die in there. He can’t explain to himself why that’s so terrible. At least it would preserve his body, yeah? But it feels like zipping and sealing himself into his own perfectly-sized coffin.
Instead he curls up against his rock, and watches the suns chase each other down into the horizon. He can see there’ll probably be an eclipse soon. What will that look like? Dark. Scary. Strange.
But beautiful, he thinks. It’s the little things when you’re not sure when your last breath will come. But that’s every day anyway. At least it’ll be beautiful. Probably.
Yes, it will be, my dear.
As he cuddles close, cheek warming against the alien rock, he thinks it odd how reassuring that little inner voice is. Crowley’s never been good at self-soothing. Never called himself dear either, ha. Asshole, idiot, useless lump, all those similar terms of endearment, sure. Stranger and stranger. But he’ll take it.
He drifts off into sleep.
Notes:
Thanks for reading! ❤️
Chapter 5: WE
Summary:
Thoughts.
Chapter Text
This creature is the same finite, enclosed thing as the others who have come. It is familiar now. No longer anathema, this thing closed off in and of itself, packed into a body that can only reach out with sound and touch and the quivering look of its eyes. It is nothing to fear, really. It is known.
Nevertheless, we should end it.
Shake off the hibernation, wake fully, and drown this creature in the waters, yes. That would be quickest. Then place the remnant with the others—a full accounting, for when the Elders return with their demands for those who have trespassed. And then revert to another long hibernation session until replenishment is complete. Melding its energy to the waters, no matter how paltry, will speed that process.
It is the safest course. End it. Yes, we should.
And yet this one is different. There isn’t merely physical and biological potential with this one. The others had that. The others were still lacking somehow. This one is…fertile. Curious. Open to exploration.
We feel it. I feel it. We all sense it.
It is lovely.
It is…verdant? Yes. Like the green. This creature has a feeling of growth, a feeling of shining leaves curling towards the sun, of soft furled buds rising and spreading into lush open velvet. Soft and sleek and so touchable. Hot, thrumming, palpable with its excitement. Like the way the creature’s skin feels through this strange material concoction they have attached to our body for their survival.
I find myself wanting to touch.
Would that be allowed?
None of this, none of these new wishes and feelings dispels the necessary caution we feel with regards to the outsider. To any interloper on Aethera. There is still the need for guardianship. That is paramount. But this is all so different enough to warrant…exploration of our own.
And despite my multitude. Despite the group of us, I am…
I am lonely.
Strange, I know. We are sorry and regretful and truthful. We are not supposed to want. We do not desire. We do not need. Usually. Those are wishes; those are beside the point. We serve. We follow our duty. I wait and watch, we guard. We protect Aethera. We guard the seal of water and land. We do wear down and rest and replenish, and we are sustained. We have guarded Aethera for over a century now. And I will continue guarding, for as long as we are needed.
But I would so like to…
To spend this long waiting and watching and tending with another. Someone new. Someone not me, not already part of me. This particular creature could not be farther from me. So solitary, so unlinked. With its head crammed so full of wonder, of look and come and see. So full of interest that I can’t help but taste the gentle overflow of it.
The others were lacking. But this one may not be.
We will share the dreams again. I will see what we can learn. See if the intentions are so petty as this creature’s forebears.
If so, I will follow our duty.