Chapter Text
Rhythmic vibrations quiver from train tracks to the feet of passengers. The sensation seems to comfort them.
Dooby unconsciously punches the last of five tickets handed to her, regarding the travel-eager party with a robotically polite bow and a smooth enjoy your trip before continuing her regular maintenance checks. Faux leather seats and the distant, pressing reek of burning locomotive fuel greet her every step and breath as she presses her weight against the emergency exit handle, confirming for the fifth time that day that it does, in fact, still work.
Satisfied for now, Dooby rings the train bell three times, a signal to the driver that things are fine enough and the trip can start.
She bites back a scoff while she waits twenty minutes for her brother to get the train moving.
—-
If Dooby could fool herself, she’d call her current line of work engineering.
She ponders on the thought, picturing what it might be like to truly live an engineer’s life. To be curious by nature and a troubleshooter by nurture. To take things apart until their foundations show, and to put them back together fuller, stronger. To be someone who chases the world’s moving parts, admiring them, understanding them, until she knows in her bones what they are and where they belong.
Her train wails, meeting her ears uncomfortably as the railcar comes to a screeching stop at its destination near the West coast, throwing the jerboa girl out of her thoughts.
Customer service face, she demands herself, You got this.
The Western Coast is a popular vacation spot, clear from the waves of exiting travelers leaving the train. Dooby thinks it makes sense, the beach is nice and the local town is tourist friendly.
The Jerboa hides her tiredness behind a smile, escorting clamoring passengers into the pitch black outside, her tail pointing towards the door as if the passengers would need a sign pointing them out. She watches them pause to sigh contentedly as the foreign saltwater greets their noses.
She rests a gentle hand on the head of a young girl bidding her goodbye at the door.
“Make sure to have lots of fun, ok?” Dooby advises.
The girl beams in a way only a child could. “I will!”
Dooby raises an eyebrow as the girl’s expression hardens—suddenly that of a trained assassin, serious and unmoving.
“I’m gonna catch a shark,” she says.
Dooby smiles awkwardly. “I… see?”
“They aren’t ready for me.”
Brown-Blonde hair is ruffled as the girl’s father ushers her off the train. “Give ’em hell, Gigi,” he says with some mix of love and exasperation.
Dooby smiles genuinely at the absurdity of the interaction, closing the door and feeling just a little lighter as she turns to an empty car and logs the time.
—
60 minutes. We make for our last stop in 60 minutes. Her headache marginally soothes at the thought of her work day ending.
She sits on her faux leather seat, allowing herself to sink into it, seeing if her restlessness would give her a break.
Dooby takes the deepest breath her heart would allow. She just needs to ground herself. Remind herself where she is. Dooby rubs circles on her seat, memorizing the feeling. She just needs to tell herself where she is.
She’s in her train. Where else could she be?
Her heart beats faster at the question. Not because she couldn’t answer it, because she knew it all too much.
No where else. She couldn’t be anywhere else.
Dooby breathes, as much as her heart would allow. She takes another, sharper this time. Then another, with fervor. Another. Then Another until she can’t tell where her breath begins and ends. She feels dizzy.
All of a sudden, the seat is drawing her too deep, the corridor in front of her too long and narrow, the walls containing it and everything else too tight, too oppressive and getting closer, closer, closer–
A yawn disrupts her daydream. Dooby gasps and looks around her.
Her darling, apparently exhausted little brother shows himself laying on the seats in front of her, attempting to stretch his 6’4 frame over the two seater.
Part of Dooby wants to laugh at him. She would have, had the underlying panic not taken a hold over her. Instead, the Jerboa shoots her brother with the blankest look she could.
Unbothered, he returns the stare, and then proceeds to swing both of his legs over the seat’s back rest for… comfort? Dooby wasn’t really sure. It does finally make her laugh though.
“What’s up, Doony”, she asks, smiling.
“We need better seats”, he replies instead.
Dooby rubs her temple, trying to rub the prevailing dizziness out. “Maybe if you weren’t so freakishly huge, the seats would like you more”,
“Why should I need to bend for the world to love me?”
“Yeah, you do look pretty bent up right now”, she says while watching her brother rear his head out of its ninety degree hold against the wall.
“Shut up, dude. At least my wife enjoys my height”, Doony says, enunciating the word wife deliberately.
“Your wife enjoys not being able to see your face properly?” Dooby makes a pointed look at his facial features. “Figures”,
The once lethargic jerboa male doesn’t seem to need a rest anymore as he untangles (quite literally untangles) himself and pounces at his older sister.
Dooby lets out small breaths of amusement while sprinting through the narrow car, keeping her lanky pursuer out of reach for as long as she could. It’s nice, Dooby thinks, nice to have things like this sometimes.
—
The remaining 55 minutes pass without fanfare.
And not a single passenger, Dooby realizes. Maybe business could still use work.
Nevertheless, she begins the departure checklist, confirming emergency supplies and exits, meticulously stepping between each of the five train cars to scope out the couplers, rods, and driving wheels.
Same as always, she tells herself with a frown, but with perhaps not as much bitterness as she would have done earlier that day.
Dooby trots back to the train door, planning what she’ll do with the next two and a half hours to herself. She hopes to just fall asleep, but she knows herself better than that. She’s never been able to sleep while aboard her locomotive.
She would try anyway, she decides, trying to fill her mind with that idea of falling asleep to distract her from the idea of consciously spending more time in between the train’s beige walls.
Dooby can feel thoughts spilling out at the thought of it, making her wince. She knows these thoughts. They’ve clung to her like a loyal friend, or a burning wound, for years now. It wasn’t like before in the train car. Not panic. These thoughts were deliberate, lucid, and rational enough that she couldn’t even disagree with them in hindsight.
She thinks there’s nothing to learn here, nothing to see.
She thinks its cruelly ironic that she’s been to so many places across train tracks, yet only remembers beige walls and rolling wheels from all her travels.
She wishes she was smarter, that life was different. She wishes she didn’t have to think so much.
She reserves herself to her pointless wishes as she walks towards the light of the train door as it dimly carries itself against the thick black of nighttime. Her mind nearly races uncontrollably enough to not pick up the rhythmic shuffling of footsteps near her.
Before she has time to even turn-
“Hey.”
A weak, unnervingly small voice calls out to her from the shadows, interrupting her thoughts.
Dooby pauses mid-step, swivelling her head in an attempt to locate her caller.
“Here.”
She catches the direction of the voice, waiting in anticipation at pitch black before she sees a shadow move slowly towards her, stopping just far enough to appear nonchalant about the conductor in front of her.
The silhouette of a girl was outlined only by the distant cabin lights of the train. Regardless, Dooby took note:
She’s short.
She has a tail. Shark-like. Limp.
Her second set of ears may be the most noticeable thing about her, though.
She’s acting weird.
“Can I help you?”, Dooby speaks cautiously.
The stranger’s fox like ears twitch at the stimulation of another voice, one of them rotating left slightly as if blocking the jerboa girl’s question.
“Are you going somewhere?”, the hybrid girl asks instead,
Is she drunk? Or just… not that smart? Dooby hesitates to make hurtful assumptions. For some reason, she wanted to maintain politeness, even in her own thoughts.
Curiosity and customer service keep her from dismissing the small voice entirely. “We are, in fact, going somewhere, miss. Is there something I can help you with?”
The small girl’s posture relaxes. Dooby isn’t sure why.
The stranger turns her head towards the train. She keeps it fixed there long enough to make Dooby wonder if the girl even knew what a train was.
“Can I come?”, The girl asks softly, carefully – as if priming an old friend to do a favor for her. She inches closer, bridging the gap between the two as gently as she could.
“Well, did you buy a ticket?”, Dooby questions humorously.
The tailed fennec was close enough now that Dooby could see her brow furrow. The stranger asks, “It costs money?”,
Wow. Dooby leaves that thought unspoken as she continues,
“I’m very sorry miss, but if you don’t have —
…
Dooby’s throat tightens on instinct, cutting her off. A smell hits her.
A wave of brine and sand meets her nose. It would make sense, the girl is near the coast and even has a fishes tail. She must be just out of water. Nothing special.
But Dooby picks up something else. Wholly overshadowed by the other scents but stubborn enough to poke through it all. The sensation makes her nose wrinkle and body shiver.The smell is unnatural to the point that Dooby knows for a fact that it doesn’t belong on this stranger.
It smells of violence. Of viscera and grief.
The stranger is looking at the train again.
Dooby breathes in.
Metallic. She knows what this smell is.
She knows, and it drives Dooby’s feet until she’s inches away from the stranger. The jerboa’s hands move unconsciously to cup the smaller girl’s face. It’s moist, but sticky too. It’s been there for a while, Dooby concludes.
“You’re bleeding.” She says roughly, more harshly than she intended.
Wide, uneven eyes between Dooby’s hands look back at her. The stranger looks too stunned to speak at the sudden proximity.
Dooby doesn’t wait for a response, dragging the girl by the wrist closer to the cabin light to further assess her damages.
Dooby, poring over the aquatic creature in front of her, sees remarkably pale skin matted crimson over the entire left side of her face. The stranger’s eyes reflected a deep ocean blue, with her left conspicuously redder and smaller than the right by curse of blood funnelling and pooling in its socket. Dooby looks helplessly at the glaring cut plastered slightly above and to the left of the girl’s hairline.
Dooby takes a step back. She tries to breathe in but can’t find much clean air, so she goes back to looking.
A trail of red follows along where the girl was standing and the lighter area Dooby directed her to. The girl’s tail was limp. Now she knows why.
Just how much blood did she lose already?
Dooby takes another step back. She tries to breathe again but fails again to alleviate her aching dread. It frustrates her even more.
“Listen. You’re bleeding.” Dooby repeats, “You are hurt. Badly. Why haven’t you gone to get help?”
The stranger stares in continued surprise at the jerboa girl’s assertiveness. Her words flounder trying to come up with a response.
Dooby doesn’t wait for her. “You’re from the ocean, right? How did this happen?”, she asks in quick succession.
The stranger physically staggers, as if being reminded of her injuries manifested her symptoms to return. Her hand finds her temple as she tries to rack her brain for any sort of response to the interrogation. The effort makes her dizzy, reaching out at the air to support her as she feels her cognition waning.
Dooby realizes her being aggressive at the stranger’s already hurting condition too late. She tries to force her panic down to keep the ailing girl calm.
“Listen, just—” Dooby fumbles for a gentler tone. “Just breathe,” she says finally, her voice softening. “Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
With half-lidded eyes, the stranger only manages, “Just… Just give me a sec–” before collapsing, unconscious.
Dooby swears. Kneeling down and confirming her vitals offered less relief to Dooby than she thought. She was too forward, and now the already injured stranger was out cold.
She needed help. Get Doony first. Then to a hospital.
Dooby tries to breathe again.
She chokes.