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Jonny stared at what Nastya had once considered to be Aurora’s heart. He listened to the low, pulsing hum of electricity it emitted, kept his gaze on the amalgamation of metal and flesh that kept their ship alive.
Nastya was wrong. Aurora wasn’t gone – her heart was still beating, for fuck’s sake.
He huffed into hands crossed over his knees.
Stupid Cyberian. Stupid idiot ship-fucking viola-playing pea-brain arsehole.
She was wrong.
And now she was out? And she’d said she wasn’t coming back? Who even fucking said they weren’t coming back? The Mechanisms couldn’t not come back.
… Right?
Except Scuzz and Carmilla had never come back.
Jonny tilted his head backwards, so it fell against the wall of the Aurora’s engine room. He listened to the non-silence, and realised he’d been in the room alone for longer than ever before. Because Nastya had always chased him out, claiming that that was her room and that it weirded her out for him to be there when she wasn’t.
Well, if she had a problem with him being there now, she could just come the fuck back, and tell him that herself, the twat.
For a moment, he half-expected her to do just that – come hurtling into the engine room, gun aimed at his head (her aim generally wasn’t great, but when on board the Aurora, she was always extra careful when shooting at people and she never missed her target), yelling in half-Sprussian for Jonny to get his arse somewhere else.
… But after a minute or so (he had no idea how much time had passed, actually), the room still remained Nastya-less.
He huffed again.
“Why…” he started, his voice hoarse from disuse. “Aurora, why did she leave?”
There was no beeping, no descending screens, no blinking lights. It seemed that Aurora didn’t know what to say, either.
Of course, both of them knew what Nastya had said before she’d left. That Aurora wasn’t herself anymore. That she was a different ship than when Nastya had joined the crew, than who Nastya had fallen in love with.
(... Had she been right? Was that why Aurora wasn’t answering Jonny now? Had she been acting differently without him noticing?)
(Was she a different person than who Jonny had known, all those millenia ago?)
At least there had been an explanation here – Scuzz had just up and gone, on some random day.
Jonny had felt that there had been something wrong, but for her to just disappear? It had been in character for a fucking ninja, of course, but there hadn’t even been a single specific sign or a cryptic goodbye or anything. There had just been one last time for everything, and no one had even known that it had been the last time.
(Nastya’s exit would have been much the same, had Jonny not run to the airlock when he had. That thought… was not helping.)
It had only dawned on the crew that Scuzz was gone when it had been centuries – and then centuries more – without a single appearance from her, and even then Jonny and Nastya had remained in denial over it, hoping, praying to non-existent deities to have her just crash out from some vent and scare all of them with the sudden reappearance.
That had never happened, of course.
If Jonny had to guess (and he very much didn’t want to), Scuzz had likely taken a shuttle and shot off on her own, possibly chasing down Drumbot Beta, possibly deciding she was more suited to a life led solo.
(Sometimes he wondered if she was simply stranded somewhere, with no way of contacting them. While that thought made him feel so fucking guilty, it was still better than the alternative of her just having up and left them.)
(Left him.)
Carmilla’s exit was the only one he understood. She and the rest of the Mechanisms hadn’t been on very good grounds for a while before her departure. The “pushing her out the airlock” bit had been a childish act of mutiny on Jonny’s behalf, but that alone hadn’t been what had pushed her away from them. No, Carmilla and the rest of the crew had… simply drifted apart over time.
Jonny was only now realising that Carmilla had already been gone before she’d physically left the ship.
It… stung.
She’d been the one to take him in when Billy Vangelis and that fucker Jack had treated him like dirt. She’d taken him upon her ship, she’d made him immortal, she’d given him the world. And now?
His stomach grumbled.
Jonny hadn’t been up about the common spaces in what felt like days (he hadn’t died of thirst down here yet, so it couldn’t have been more than a week). It was his duty as first mate (Carmilla would always remain Aurora’s captain, he knew that), but he was simply unable to look his crewmates in the eyes and tell them that Nastya had gone out and that she wasn’t coming back.
(She wasn’t coming back. She’d left him.)
Jonny decided to ignore his hunger.
He’d thought about getting himself something to drink, though, something that could make him forget that this had ever happened. But then he would have been liable to damage Aurora, and he just couldn’t do that when that had been Nastya’s whole reason for leaving.
Not to mention he would have forgotten the last moments he’d had with Nastya. The memory hurt, yes, but there was a memory, which was more than he could say for the departures of his other sister and of his mothe–
He swallowed down the saliva in his mouth to stop the sudden wave of tears.
… The three of them really had been his family, hadn’t they? Sure, he was close with the rest of the crew, too, and he would give up his own immortality to keep them all together for the rest of time, but…
Nastya, Scuzz, and Carmilla had always been family. He couldn’t deny it any longer.
One tear escaped, and he could feel it running down his cheek.
They were his family, and now they were gone.
And none of them were coming back.