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Eridan Ampora was a hell of a soldier, was the thing.
Of course he was. It was basically what he’d been hatched for. He came by it honest, in his blood, passed down from his ancestor, but he’d also worked at it. He’d practically worked at it his entire life, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even as a wiggler, his hobbies had followed the path he’d known he was supposed to take someday: FLARPING was just war practice, military history was studying for the future he’d be assigned. Eridan hadn’t had friends: he’d had sparring partners. He hadn’t played: he’d built his skills. He’d had a deadly combo of genetic predisposition and a willingness to work hard ever since he’d been old enough to know what was expected of him.
He’d been doing this for a few sweeps. Not nearly as long as some of the people around him, but he’d already excelled -- going from a field soldier to giving input on Alternian strategy in a short time. Of course, he’d never been at the lowest canon fodder infantry level, he was a highblood, but he’d still advanced quickly through the ranks, working to help control the latest conquered Alternian planet and push their further advance.
That’s why he was here today, outside the office of his direct superior, invited directly. He was getting a commendation. He thought so, at least -- the letter hadn’t been specific. He’d only been back home on Alternia for a couple of nights, fresh off their last conquest, and he’d received the missive almost right away. Even in the most self-deprecating light, Eridan couldn’t think of something he’d done wrong that he would need to be summoned over, so it only seemed to follow that it was about something he’d done right.
The on-planet base was sprawling and familiar, used largely for training and planning, rather than the active war effort. Eridan adjusted himself in the nearest hallway window; he checked that his hair was neat, that his collar was upright, that his medals hung straight. Only then did he knock on the door to his direct superior’s office, an action that was followed by a prompt “Come in!” from beyond the door.
He entered, and performed a picture-perfect salute, the kind that he practiced in the mirror.
“You wanted to see me, ma’am?” Eridan had spent a lot of time working to round out his natural accent when he was speaking to superiors. You wanted to stand out for your skills, not for anything you couldn’t control. It still leaked out in his general life, but he tried to be aware of clipping his ‘g’s or falling into wavy vowels when he was talking to someone that could chart the course of his future.
Eridan’s superior was an older cerulean woman, and chronically hard to read. Her only two expressions seemed to be judgmentally narrowed eyes and a keen stare, no matter what she was saying. Tonight was no different. She sat with her chin propped atop her folded hands, scanning him before turning back to an array of papers across her desk.
“Congratulations, soldier,” she said, her voice flat despite the words. “You’re being considered for a promotion.”
Eridan tried not to look surprised. It would only be pathetic to seem shocked that he was being recognized, only diminish their confidence that he was the right person for the job. But truthfully, he hadn’t been expecting another advance so soon.
“I’m honored, ma’am,” he said.
“Yes, well,” she drawled. “It wasn’t my decision. This came from higher up. Honestly, Ampora, if it was up to me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Another thing Eridan had to work on when he joined the army was holding his tongue when he was disrespected by the people in charge of him. She may have been lower than him on the hemospectrum, but that didn’t matter in this room. The army ran on rank and respect. He’d had that beaten into him early on -- you couldn’t get anywhere if you mouthed off every time someone above you was rude.
“Understood, ma’am. To what rank?”
The cerulean pursed her lips. “Empress’s General, apparently.”
It was all Eridan could do to keep his fins from flapping. Empress’s General wasn’t just a promotion; it was tiers above his current rank, significantly higher than his supervisor. And if he was remembering correctly --and he usually was, with this sort of thing-- getting promoted to that rank would make him the youngest recorded Empress’s General. It was more than good; it was the kind of thing that made the history books. He’d serve as an example to generations of future soldiers. He saluted again, needing to do something with his body to deal with all of the energy suddenly thrumming under his skin.
“I promise, ma’am, I’ll make the Empire proud. I’ll do everythin’ I can to perform admirably.” He couldn’t help the slip of his accent, could hardly bring himself to hope she wouldn’t notice. There was too much running through his pan to care.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Ampora,” his supervisor said, rearranging the files in front of her. “You’re being considered. You’re not promoted yet. You’ve been assigned a task to prove your readiness for it. Considering your relative--” She flicked her eyes over him, assessing. “Inexperience.”
“What do I have to do?” He’d do it, whatever it was. He’d already proven himself as a combatant, as a strategist. There weren’t too many other relevant skills, surely. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
His superior’s mouth twitched, a strange digression from her usual fixed expression.
“A role like that,” she said. “Requires the ability to make quite a few difficult decisions. To handle things others cannot, under extreme circumstances. So. You’re being designated as the new captain of the somewhat… problematic crew on an exploratory science vessel. There’s three main troublemakers, two rusts and a mustard, but the whole group is a bit unruly. Stubborn. Occasionally insubordinate. The higher-ups think they’ve spent too much time away from the main Alternian civilization, need reminding of their place. Your job is to get them to shape up -- or, if you think they’re a lost cause, get rid of them without causing a fuss. Unfortunately, their mission is of some interest to those up top, so we do genuinely want you to attempt reeling them in, not just run in and start a massacre. It’s no irreplaceable loss if they die, of course, but they are skilled, and their work supposedly has some potential. You don’t just waste Empire resources like that unless there’s no other option. It’d be a bitch to replace them.”
Eridan’s pan felt blank, like he hadn’t finished absorbing all that information. He tried to pull himself together enough to seem unphased.
“The goldblood,” he began, looking for something to say to show he’d been listening. “A helmsman?”
“No, actually. Not yet. He’s doing some--” The cerulean waved her hand in the air. “Scientific role that utilizes his psionics, as far as I can tell. Their ship runs off a lesser fuel, rather than psionic power. Nothing that could power the armadas, of course, but good enough for them. That vessel isn’t big or important enough to waste a fully-functional helmsman on, and their goldblood has plenty of sweeps left in him to be a battery once his current role loses value.”
“So I’m being --” Eridan swallowed, and tried to hold on to his professionalism. “Shipped off to join the crew of a miniature science vessel?”
“Temporarily, soldier,” she reminded him. “And the quicker you fail or succeed, the quicker you can get back to the real work. This is a test. It’s not supposed to be easy.”
Maybe that was true, but Eridan couldn’t help feeling like this seemed more like a punishment than a reward for all his good work. A science vessel. Away from the field, from the vital war efforts, from the respect he’d earned. There was no point arguing -- Eridan knew well enough that you didn’t get to decide where you were assigned, that bitchin’ about it usually got you sent somewhere worse. And if he refused the test, there was no way they’d promote him. The only way out was through.
“Is there anything else I should know, ma’am?”
His supervisor hummed, thoughtful. “Well, their last captain did die. Oh, don’t look like that, soldier, we didn’t kill him. And neither did they. It’s a dangerous area and a risky mission. But top brass seems to think that if you’re good enough to be Empress’s General, you should be able to handle something like that. You are worthy of the promotion, aren’t you?” Eridan’s pusher surged in his chest.
“Yes, ma’am. Yes. I am.”
“Wonderful.” She didn’t sound like she thought it was particularly wonderful. “You’re dismissed, then.” She scooped up a handful of files and held them out to him. “The relevant files and your travel itinerary are here. You’ll be leaving early tomorrow night. I do hope you haven't unpacked too much yet.”
“No, ma’am.” Eridan replied, snatching up the files. It was even true. He was usually ready to move out whenever necessary. He was glad for it, now, because he couldn’t possibly spend too much time packing when he was going to be reading and re-reading these files all throughout the day.
Eridan saluted one last time, and headed for the door, feeling a daze begin to settle over his shoulders like a cloak.
Two rusts and a pissblood. One crappy little science vessel. Okay. He could do that. He could.
“Oh, and Ampora?”
“Ma’am?” Eridan asked, stopping in his tracks.
“If you do decide they’re a lost cause, keep the psionic. It can be repurposed.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He started towards the door again.
“Ampora?” his supervisor called again.
“Yes?” he asked, turning his head in her direction.
She smiled for the first time since he’d known her, slick and sharp and with too many teeth, icy in a way that froze even his cold-blooded bones.
“Good luck.”
---
“What do you think’s in there?” Eridan asked. His rifle was a sturdy presence across his back. The ruined palace rose before them, newly accessible, long-abandoned and overgrown but still mostly standing.
If the rest of the planet’s ruins had been any indication, it was probably armed to the teeth with booby traps.
“Hopefully something worth all the shit we’ve done for it,” Sollux said, rolling his eyes. He was adjusting his psionic conductor gloves, one of many pieces of technology Sollux used in his work that Eridan had never seen anywhere else. They needed all the focus they could get for this foray.
Aradia hummed, thoughtful. “A cool skull for my collection, maybe?”
“Fuck’s sake, Megido,” Karkat muttered. “If the only thing we find in there is a cool skull after everything we’ve been through on this accursed planet, I’m personally killing you for jinxing it.”
“You can’t kill me,” Aradia pointed out. “You need me to help you get out afterwards.”
“I’ll kill you after. Or just retrace my damn steps, I don’t know, it’s not rocket science.”
“No, you won’t,” Aradia said, warmly.
“Bold talk for a man who nearly died via pressure plate, like, two trips ago,” Sollux said, simultaneously.
“Guys,” Eridan interrupted. “Lovely as it is hearin’ you all bicker, do you think we can get a goddamn move on?”
“Whatever, captain,” Sollux retorted, his grin a little too wide, a manic edge building from the anticipation. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do this shit.”
---
In the time it took him to travel to his newly assigned post, Eridan memorized his files.
This wasn’t particularly difficult -- it wasn’t a short trip. Rather than the science vessel coming his way, he had a couple of weeks of travel towards the outskirts of Alternia’s owned space. A bit like a shell game, Eridan was shuffled from one space-faring vessel to the next, each one decreasingly nice, as they shot past the usual outposts and owned territories and into vast, uncontrolled space. Longer trips between fuel stations and centers of trade, less easy amenities, less space stations, less cities. Eridan was dragged through a connect-the-dots game that tried to get him closer to his goal without sending any individual ship dangerously far away from theirs.
When his last transport finally arrived at the dinky little ship, hovering in blank space over a planet that had never shown up in any of the interplanetary maps that Eridan saw while planning for the current war efforts, he was almost glad to see it.
Eridan, along with all of his luggage, was (rather unceremoniously, he thought) passed between the two ships in the traditional space-borne manner -- a tangible beam of energy that formed a sort of hallway between two airlocks and the sealed chambers beyond them, a method of travel that made his pusher jump to his throat no matter how many times he did it or how few steps he had to take above the shimmering stars.
Safely ensconced in the new vessel, and with his only way back to his real life returning to its own goals at top speeds, Eridan took inventory.
The airlock chambers on this ship were just slightly dirty in a way he didn’t quite trust, for something that required constant maintenance to ensure a small crack wouldn’t doom everyone onboard. This vessel felt like something held together with duct tape and pluck, significantly less clean and technologically advanced than the sprawling warships Eridan was used to, and much more cramped.
And he wasn’t even entirely certain what the crew did, yet, despite thoroughly perusing all the information he had been given.
Eridan used the map he’d been provided to find the (small) room he’d been assigned, and stowed his things there. Then, he returned to the ship at large, and used the ship-wide intercom to call his very first all-hands meeting in the bridge.
Most of the crew filed in wide-eyed and unsure, awaiting information. However, his main interest didn’t lie with most of the crew, but with his three troublemakers -- Captor, Vantas, and Megido. The three of them joined the rest of the group but seemed unconcerned, less hesitant than the others.
The main meeting was simple: Eridan introduced himself to the crew as their new captain, with all the most relevant information. His rank, his name, his military history, a brief and frankly generous mention of what he expected of them. Easy enough, and still firmly within the territory of things he had done before. The more delicate part came next, after he dismissed the crew and they began to file out of the room with trepidatious salutes.
“Hold it,” he said. “I want a separate word with some’a you.” Eridan had their names well memorized after reading those files again and again, but he still paused like he was trying to recall. It wouldn’t do for them to start thinking they were too important. “Vantas, Captor, Megido. Stay back.”
The rest of the crew vanished down the hallway, murmuring amongst themselves, and the door slid automatically shut behind them, leaving Eridan alone with three faces he’d studied for weeks, lined up in the center of the room and staring at him blankly, like they had no idea what they could’ve done to provoke this.
Their official records, however, said otherwise.
Eridan folded his arms behind his back, his spine ramrod straight like he’d been trained.
“I’m talkin’ to you three because I’ve heard you’re some of the key figures of this little operation. I’ve also heard you’re all trouble. That’s part’a why I was chosen as the new lead on this expedition. I can see how it’d be easy to think yourselves big swimbeasts in a small pond like this, but I’ve been informed you’re in need of some old-fashioned Alternian discipline. Make no mistake, I’m here to get the three of you to shape up. And I can guarantee, you ain’t had a captain of my caliber before.” Not with a sidequest mission like this, they hadn’t. Eridan doubted that a single one of their prior captains had half his hands-on legitimate military experience. The very last one, a tealblood who’d died in an accident during an exploratory trip, had by all accounts been zealous and loyal but wet behind the ears — and not in the honorable seadweller way. He’d probably gotten overeager. Eridan didn’t make those sorts of mistakes anymore.
Eridan thought his little speech had been good enough. Not perfect, but there was always room for improvement. The right mix of firm, intimidating, and demonstrative.
The surprise hit him before the offense did, when he realized that a member of his captive audience (Captor, Sollux Captor, the goldblood) was openly sniggering. The offense wasn’t far behind, though.
“Sollux,” one of the others (Vantas, Karkat, a rust) hissed, elbowing him sharply in the ribs. At least one of them seemed to have some sense. The third (Aradia Megido, the other rust) didn’t react either way, staring straight past Eridan with a mild, pleasant look on her face.
“Sorry, KK,” Captor said, not sounding all that sorry, especially not through his inappropriate chuckles. “It’s just —“ He gestured broadly with one of his bony little hands, deceptively breakable looking for someone that Eridan knew had enough fuel in him to power a fleet. “All that, with the old-fashioned Alternian discipline, how the hell am I supposed to react?” Megido’s mouth twitched. Captor turned the full force of his fangy smirk on Eridan, his teeth a travesty. “You here to try and tame us, Ampora?”
It was sweeps of practice that kept Eridan’s voice level and cold, that kept him from boiling over like he might’ve when he was younger and more impulsive.
“You’ll be cleaning the galley after meals for the next perigree if you don’t watch your damn mouth, soldier. And that’s the very gentlest end of the punishments I have in mind.”
“I’m hardly a soldier,” Captor scoffed. “I’m mostly a scientist. Or do you not even know what we do here? Whatever. I get it, you’re a hardass and you’re here to reel us in.” He looked at Eridan for a simmering moment, his eyes glowing and pupiless yet still somehow searing. Eridan hadn’t been disrespected like this by an underling in sweeps, though he still got it from his superiors. “Give it your best shot, captain.”
Then, before Eridan had time to gather himself and respond, Captor was vanishing through the door and into the hallway, Megido, grinning, at his side. Vantas hung back for just a second, giving Eridan a hasty, unrefined salute.
“He has fucking issues,” Vantas muttered, presumably by way of apology, but then he was gone as well, rushing after Captor and Megido like he didn’t want them to leave him too far behind.
Eridan sighed, already feeling the beginnings of what would be a monster of a tension headache.
He truly had his work cut out for him, here.
---
The early areas of the palace had clearly been lushly decorated, once, something you could see echoes of even now, when it had been uninhabited for sweeps. Eridan wondered, not for the first time, what had caused a planet like this to be emptied of sentient life in such a way, where some of the trappings of it still remained, threadbare and grown-through with creeping blue-ish vines.
It wasn’t unlikely that some people had been here before them, to see what was left behind to plunder, but Aradia’s argument was that it wasn’t likely anyone before them had penetrated the inner sanctums where the most valuable things were likely to be hiding. Eridan had to admit he couldn’t imagine ordinary treasure hunters being nearly so skilled or dedicated, willing to invest perigrees of time and effort into every step of the expedition.
They weren’t expecting it to be undisturbed -- just to not be emptied. Even knowledge could be useful in the long run, though Karkat had made it clear he was hoping for a more tangible haul.
In these foremost halls, the danger was lesser, but their approach was still careful, keeping an eye on any darkened doorways or strange-looking stones.
Aradia was feeling up a wall with careful attention, a well-used notepad tucked under her arm. She had access, of course, to the more technologically-advanced tablets and screens and palmhusks, but she insisted she preferred the manual way, and no one could argue with the results.
The wall finally clicked and gave way, to reveal the maze of secret tunnels Aradia’s translations had described, and the smile she gave them lit up the room more than any of their electronic torches possibly could.
Eridan took in a breath that was half nerves, half genuine anticipatory excitement, the likes of which he hadn’t felt on an assignment in a long time, and followed the others towards the passageway.
---
Before Eridan could decide his approach to this mission, he needed a better understanding of how everything worked. He needed to know how every individual gear slotted into place among the crew, how they interacted with each other, and where the hell his three rabble rousers got their gall.
The first step was exploration. The ship itself would hold answers: what was being underutilized, what could be reorganized, where people gathered and where they avoided. A well-running ship was like a stream with all blockages cleared away, and Eridan had been on his fair share of such ships before, even if he’d largely captained divisions and operations rather than entire vessels.
He had his map, so he followed it, charting what was held in storage rooms and labs, where things were kept and what supplies were low.
It was in this endeavor that he first stumbled upon Captor and Vantas alone in one such room, darkened and otherwise still. The door had been partly open, and he’d nearly stepped inside before he realized they were there, fully absorbed in each other. Their faces were pressed close, forehead to forehead, Captor’s luminescent eyes squeezed shut with light still leaking out the corners and Vantas’s broad hands cupping his face. Captor was bending to make it work despite Vantas’s height, but he didn’t seem to mind in the slightest.
It was -- probably pale, though Eridan couldn’t rule out flushed with just this one look. It was also the kind of thing that quadrants did when there was no time to go anywhere else. Captor was trembling, very faintly, and Eridan felt a brief, satisfied flicker --so he did have a soft underbelly, under the bravado-- before it all turned to a blistering discomfort at seeing them this way, so intimate and vulnerable that Eridan might’ve felt less exposed if he’d come across a faceful of squirming bulge.
Eridan turned and headed back down the hallway before they could notice him, thinking that at least this new insight might provide some usefulness in bringing them to heel. If he could get a better sense of this, all of this, where the weaknesses were and how well they knew each other, he could use it.
---
“Watch your back!” Eridan called, just in time for Aradia to duck a swinging axe. Even while she was doing it, her attention was half on the notes she was guiding them from, ancient script translated in her own messy hand.
“I think we made a wrong turn,” she said, gracefully stepping out of the way of danger.
“Jeez, AA, you fucking think?” Sollux responded. With one hand, he psionically stilled the axe. With the other, he was holding a gadget that was scanning for heat signatures in the area, in case they had unwanted company. It likely wouldn’t be other sentient creatures, but plenty of the less cognizant life on this planet were nasty pieces of work.
“Hold it there,” Karkat requested.
“Yeah, KK,” Sollux said, “because I was going to just let go if you hadn’t said that, let it continue trying to chop our heads off. Thank you oh so much for your sage and helpful advice.”
Karkat ignored him. With a slight grunt of effort, he lifted a large rock, rubble from where one of the adjoining walls had crumbled with the passage of time, and swung it at the axe -- one, two, three, four times, a heavy clang with each hit, until the metal warped and twisted, and it fell.
“Oh,” Sollux said. Karkat shot him a breathless grin that made something in Eridan go taut, despite the smugness in it.
“Yeah,” Karkat said. “Oh.”
“Nice one, Kar,” Eridan said, gathering himself up. He ignored the look Karkat shot him in response to the nickname -- it had just come out without any planning, easy as anything, and Eridan didn’t know where it had come from either. He cleared his throat. “Now, which way next?”
---
Getting the lay of the land on such a small ship wasn’t a very time-consuming endeavor, but even after he felt he could comfortably navigate without a map, Eridan made a point of regularly patrolling. This was, in his opinion, an elementary aspect of keeping an eye on the night-to-night happenings.
Given the underwhelming amount of information in his files about the crew’s actual work and goals, it was possible his superiors weren’t expecting him to be this hands-on. At the very least, it seemed likely that his predecessors hadn’t been. But Eridan felt it was a captain’s duty to be aware of everything that happened on their ship — especially when there were troublemakers onboard.
And it wasn’t exactly a difficult ship to patrol. There were only so many places the crew members might be.
It only took him a few nights to discover that Megido could usually be found in the main lab.
Tonight, she was hunched over a carved stone tablet that she had mounted on a table, illuminated by a lamp so bright that Eridan couldn’t look at it directly for more than a few seconds. She was sitting with her back arched forward a little too far, her tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration and her hair in her face.
Slowly, methodologically, she magnified each carved hieroglyphic on the tablet, and made notes on every single one.
She didn’t react to his presence at all, even as Eridan made a show of poking around the laboratory and examining the other half-finished projects on display. Eventually, he was forced to approach her table and loudly clear his throat.
Megido jolted, but didn’t sit upright -- she peeked at him from under a curtain of dark bangs, and then returned to her notes.
“Captain,” Megido said.
It wasn’t the salute Eridan would prefer, but he supposed at this stage he’d take it.
“Megido,” he acknowledged, propping himself on his elbows to peer at her work. The carvings meant nothing to him yet, and her notes were in some sort of shorthand that was perhaps even less comprehensible. He adopted a thoughtful squint anyway, to present a semblance of understanding. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t learn it fairly easily, if he was provided with the appropriate materials. Eridan was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. He turned back to Megido after a moment of affected contemplation. “I was actually wonderin’ if I could get your perspective on the goal of this vessel, the work you do here. Just to get a better understandin’ of how you come at it, from the science side of things.” And absolutely not because none of the Empire literature on the subject had been particularly forthcoming.
Megido lit up more brightly than the damn lamp she was working under, finally turning to face him with an expression she’d never pointed in his direction before.
It was a little unnerving.
“Absolutely!” She tucked her pen into her ponytail, where it promptly vanished. “Right now, I’m deciphering the writing on a slab we brought back from one of the on-planet ruins. We’re hoping to utilize our understanding of other writings we’ve retrieved from the planet to decode tablets like this one, which should lead to some more useful ruins like the ones we’ve found before! Like a temple, or a palace, or I’d adore a non-traditional graveyard. I love graverobbing.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, and continued, breezing right past the fact that she loved graverobbing. “Overall, the planet we’re currently working was discovered during an Alternian conquest, fully empty of sentient life. But no one’s been able to properly retrieve the resources and riches we believe are there, because some of the ruins are booby-trapped to shit, and have all sorts of puzzles and mazes to solve, and a different ecological set-up than Alternians usually encounter! That’s just this one, but we’ve worked on similar projects in the past, and when we move on from here we’ll be sent to another area like this one.”
That was definitely the most words Megido had ever spoken to him directly in the nights he’d been here. Eridan had heard her laugh echoing in the canteen, seen her speak so animatedly it utilized her entire body from afar, but never had cause to have that pointed at him.
And it was quite a lot of information at once. He cleared his throat.
“So, to sum up, this crew generally does what’s required to analyze, understand, and recover resources from planets that are… for lack of a better word, difficult?”
“Yep! The last one was a mining mission where the Empire wasn’t sure how to best extract the minerals without dangerously compromising the caverns. And there were some -- uh, for lack of a better word, difficult natural gases. It’s not just planets, though. If an entire planet was normal but there was an area that was impenetrable or needed further examination, we’d be sent there. The military squadrons are usually too impatient. On to the next thing to shoot, I guess!”
“Interesting,” Eridan said, and was surprised to realize that he meant it.
“I think it’s more interesting than what the army does, that’s for sure!” Megido replied, chipper. “More important, too, probably.”
“That’s practically heresy, soldier,” Eridan said.
Megido’s eyes had already returned to her notes, and she’d procured a different pen from somewhere -- not the one that had disappeared into her hair, a different color. She refocused on her work with startling speed, like the interruption had never occurred at all.
“Well,” she said, her voice going further away as she adjusted her magnifying lens. There was a long pause, where Eridan wasn’t sure whether or not she was going to finish the sentence. “You’ll just have to be patient with me, Captain Ampora. I’m still being trained out of heresy.”
---
“Holy shit,” Eridan said, eyeing the ancient rope bridge that traversed the passing between one half of the tunnel and the next. He couldn’t tell how far down the drop below it went, and he didn’t particularly want to find out.
“I’m sure it’s perfectly safe!” Aradia announced. “Or safe enough, at least!”
Sollux sighed, the entire weight of the planet in it.
“Will you dumbasses just let me float you across already?”
---
Captor’s location was generally harder to predict than Megido’s. He spent his fair share of time in the labs, but he could also be found buzzing around the entire ship in patterns Eridan couldn’t yet understand, doing things Eridan couldn’t always pinpoint.
Tonight, however, he was on the floor of the engine room under a major piece of machinery, on his back. Even with everything hidden but his skinny legs, Captor’s identity was made tragically obvious by the stupid, mismatched shoes he always wore. The machine hummed above him. It was always humming. Captor might’ve been humming, too, but Eridan wasn’t sure with the cacophony of the engines all around him. One of his feet was tapping, though.
“Thank fuck,” Captor said.
Eridan startled. He hadn’t been here very long, but he already knew that Captor wasn’t the most observant of trolls at the best of times. Noticing another person approaching while he was absorbed in his work seemed truly unnatural, though perhaps not as unnatural as the fact that Captor sounded glad to see him.
“What--” Eridan began, but Captor cut him off before he could get even halfway through the word.
“I need the A4 screw,” Captor said, and Eridan realized there was a rather messy array of tools and machining miscellany spread across the flattest part of the engine piece.
Not really seeing any reason to argue (any repairs the engine required were likely too crucial for Eridan to get fussed about rank at the moment), Eridan handed him one of the screws.
“And the darktwist screwdriver,” Captor added, and Eridan handed him that, too, receiving a wrench and no thanks for his efforts. “Another screw and two bolts,” Captor said, and Eridan obliged, still a little taken aback. “Okay,” Captor said, once he’d been given everything he’d asked for. “This is going to start vibrating like a motherfucker in a minute, and I need you to hold it as still as you possibly can. You’ve got two seconds.”
Two seconds was no time at all, with the contents of a toolbox still laid out on the very part that was about to move, but Eridan planted his feet, trapped as many tools under his hands as he could manage, and pressed down with every ounce of his considerable seadweller strength.
Captor had said vibrating. It was not a vibrate, when it began. It was more like a boat on choppy waves, or a crow's nest in a windstorm, the entire engine piece shifting and rocking with an awful, shrieking metal sound and a sudden emergence of hot steam. Eridan held on as well as he could as it shook. Several screws were lost forever to the floor, though he managed to keep most of the larger tools in place. He had no idea what Captor was even doing down there. The sound and movement went on just long enough that Eridan started to worry he’d lose his grip — and then it stopped, all at once, the noisy engine room abruptly comparatively quiet.
“Alright, so that bitch won’t blow for another couple of perigrees,” Captor said, scooting awkwardly out from under the machine, his palms streaked black. He floated to his feet, and instantly did a double take. “Ampora?”
“Who the hell did you think it was?” Eridan demanded, a little flushed. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants, and then immediately hoped Captor hadn’t noticed.
Captor shrugged in response. “I dunno. Anyone else, really. I did message the crew chat that I was going to need another set of hands, if they didn’t want a higher likelihood of explosions.” Eridan had not been informed of any crew chat, and he made a note to ask someone else about it later — someone more easily intimidated and less arbitrary than Captor. Captor, who was still talking: “I would’ve thought you’d be too important for the manual labor shit us peons do.” The look he was giving Eridan was assessing, and went on a little too long. Eridan wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
“I’m on the ship too, you know,” he snapped. “It affects me just as much as anyone else if we all die in space.” He drew himself up to his full height. “Besides, any captain who can’t put their globes where their mouth is and assist with vital tasks ain’t worthy of their post.”
“Huh,” Captor said, after a long moment.
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Eridan asked.
“Nothing,” Captor said. “Just... huh.”
---
“We’re getting close,” Aradia declared, turning the hand-drawn map in her hands this way and that. Occasionally, she held it up to one of their lights and squinted at it, though Eridan couldn’t determine what she was achieving with that.
“We better fucking be,” Karkat grumbled.
“Oh, like you can talk, KK, all this walking is right up your alley. I should be complaining. I’m not made for this shit.”
“Yes, Sollux,” Karkat retorted. “I know you’re a stick bug who wouldn’t move from a larval position all night long if he could help it, thank you for the reminder--”
“If you would just let me--”
“For the last damn time, Captor, you can’t fucking float everywhere because you might use too much power early and then when you really need it--”
“I’m powerful enough not to need to--”
“And what about the times when you aren’t--”
Eridan exchanged a look with Aradia, amused and weary.
“Are you two going to need a couple more hours to snipe at each other?” Eridan asked. “Or are we finding that damn inner sanctum?”
---
Eridan got further insight into crewmember relationships when he was heading towards the hallway to his respiteblock and caught Megido and Vantas in the doorway to her block, which was next door.
It seemed pitch, something intense and filthy in it that made Eridan’s abdomen tight, even though they were both fully dressed. They were halfway through the door, Megido pressed to Vantas’s front, fervidly whispering something in his ear that was too low for Eridan to hear but had Vantas’s face going ruddy. There were visible tooth marks on his jaw, underneath a layer of smeared red lipstick that matched the mess around Megido’s mouth. As Eridan watched, trapped and slack-jawed, Vantas lifted a hand and tucked a lock of Megido’s hair behind her ear with an immense, gentle tenderness that did not match the pitch tone of the rest of the scene. Even stranger, she didn’t push him away, but instead leaned into the touch, her eyes going half-lidded.
Eridan ducked back around the corner, and waited until he heard the door close until he continued his procession to his block. They were the ones who should have been embarrassed, not him, but he still felt an odd, hot tightness to his skin, along with the sensation that there was something he wasn’t getting.
If he’d thought he was confused then, however, it was nothing compared to how he felt the night he realized his block had a hole in the wall behind the provided dresser (of course it did) that afforded him an uninterrupted view into Megido’s (of course it did).
Through it, Megido and Captor were ensconced in what was clearly a pile, snuggled up against each other, pale as anything.
What kind of soap opera shit was going on around here?
Eridan really didn’t mean to look. He had just been trying to assess the damage -- he frankly couldn’t believe he kept winding up in these situations. But right in front of his eyes, Megido and Captor transitioned from gentle pale talking to a kiss on the mouth that was decidedly not, deep and familiarly intimate.
There was the sound of a door sliding open, and Captor looked up (saving Eridan from having to whirl around in fear that he’d have to explain the entirely innocent situation without sounding like some kind of pervert).
“Hey, KK,” Captor said, clear as day. “It’s about fucking time. Get in here, already.”
Eridan’s pan just about shut down after that, and he scrambled to cover the hole again as quickly as he could.
“No way that was what it looked like. No damn way,” he muttered to himself, and then promptly resolved to not think about it again.
---
The area directly around the castle’s inner sanctum was the most densely trapped and difficult to navigate part of the building. Of course it was -- all of Aradia’s findings indicated this was where the most highly coveted treasures had been kept.
On the positive side, it was probably a good sign that most of the traps closest to the sanctum were still active. It meant it was unlikely other adventurers had beaten them here.
On the negative side, most of the traps closest to the sanctum were still active.
It was a group effort, significantly more so than most missions Eridan had been part of in all his time in the military. In those, rank was omnipresent. Some soldiers universally accepted as more important than others, some known as reasonable losses or even intentionally disposed of to draw fire, or distract, or protect those that were truly valued.
Rank couldn’t hold as much sway here. It didn’t matter that Eridan was technically their captain; each of them was doing their part in a way where they couldn’t afford to lose a single one, moving in fluid collaboration like any of the well-oiled ships Eridan had seen.
Sollux used his psionics to hold traps closed or divert them out of their way so they could pass. Aradia read the writing on the walls and used her extensive notes to lead them through the maze of tunnels. Eridan used his bullets to test for traps before they could be triggered naturally, or stop something oncoming in its tracks. Karkat used every ounce of his strength to push open doors that wouldn’t respond to them, and to keep them open while they went through, and to hold off anything that might’ve stopped them.
It was sort of exhilarating, to be this in-sync with other people. Eridan had spent so long striving to be better than other trolls, to stand out from the crowd. He’d never considered what it might be like to be a part of them like this.
---
It had become clear to Eridan fairly early on that, by and large, the only members of the crew that actually went on the on-planet away missions were Vantas, Captor, and Megido. When he’d asked why that was, Captor had said something about the rest of the team being “squishy scientists”, and, when pressed about how he himself had made a point of being called a scientist rather than a soldier, Captor had snapped back “yeah, but I’m a scientist with the power of a small planet” and left it at that.
Vantas had a slightly stronger point: the planet was dangerous, the work was specialized, and a small three-troll crew boasted a higher chance of success with a smaller chance of casualties. Eridan suspected that Vantas had gone out of his way to elaborate because he didn’t want Eridan messing with the away mission rosters. And upon further investigation, it was true that the three of them seemed to have the most experience and the skills best suited to the work. Megido’s archeological expertise and abilities to check directly with the dead. Captor’s psionic power and technological know-how. And Vantas’s physical skills, taking care of some of the more hands-on tasks and guarding the other two while they focused on the science, so they could watch each other’s backs without relying too heavily on psionic ability. You never wanted to be left with psionics as your only recourse, not when there was always a non-zero chance of running out of juice.
Even if that was all true, Eridan needed a sense of all of the workings of his crew -- especially those three.
So, he insisted on accompanying them on a ground mission. At least once.
Their oddly cagey response only reinforced that he was making the right decision.
That was how they’d ended up here: Eridan battered and bruised, dirt on his ordinarily pristine uniform pants. Karkat panting heavily on the ground, where Eridan had shoved him. Sollux with his hands out, a dozen poison-tipped arrows simultaneously halted mid-air just centimeters from Eridan’s skin.
Aradia had realized her mistranslation the second it had become too late. Karkat had gotten too impatient (or too trusting, perhaps) to wait for her to double check, and stepped on a pressure plate in the intricately tiled floor they had been navigating through on Aradia’s orders.
And Eridan, all instinct, had bodily pushed Karkat back to safety, taking his place in the process.
If Sollux had been slightly slower, if he had missed a single arrow when they launched --
The four of them stared at each other for a silent moment.
“Ampora,” Sollux finally said, through his teeth. “Fucking step back.”
Eridan unfroze, stepping backwards into the hallway with the others, and every single arrow dropped uselessly to the ground, their psionic restraints lifted. Aradia helped Karkat to his feet, and there was another long minute where no one spoke.
“Well!” Aradia finally said, sounding surprisingly perky even with her hand still tight on Karkat’s arm, gripping so firmly that her knuckles were pale. “This is still the furthest we’ve gotten! And those crystals are going to be fascinating to analyze.” She turned her eyes on Eridan, stepped towards him on the thankfully-secure floor beneath their feet, and then clasped him companionably on the shoulder with the strength of a troll twice her size. “You,” she said, “are definitely joining our celebration when we get back.”
She said it like there was no arguing.
Eridan supposed there wasn’t.
---
They had made it.
The four of them stood in the palace’s inner sanctum, worn by the sweeps but untouched by other people in that time. The design was intricate even here, patterns woven into the walls and floors by tiles and dedicated carvers, the stone rich with more of that script that only Aradia could read.
And on every wall were lines of inlaid coffers, intact. The floor was dotted with podiums with mounted boxes. Each one could contain anything: natural resources, ancient writings, weapons from bygone eras, mountains of the gold and gems they knew the planet naturally produced.
Aradia let out a gleeful, relieved laugh that bounced around the room, and the other three relaxed on cue, unable to stop themselves from joining her.
It was at that moment that a massive beast, feline and serpentine at once, like nothing Eridan had ever seen, launched itself out of the waiting shadows to sink its fangs into Karkat’s forearm.
There were shouts, scrambling, the sudden earthy scent of blood.
Karkat’s blood.
Karkat’s blood, seeping through his sleeve where the monster was latched with viciousness, was a rich, vivid red, thoroughly unnatural.
---
A few hours after they’d returned from the away mission, and before the proposed celebration, Eridan sought out Karkat.
He found him in one of the multi-purpose blocks on the ship, cleaning, checking, and reorganizing all of the gear they’d used. His face was intent, working through each piece one after another with single-minded focus, but he still nodded at Eridan as he came in. Eridan leaned on the table and just watched Karkat work for a minute, his hands broad, steady and practiced as he wiped down screens, checked the contents of bags, polished sickles.
“Whatever else I think about you, you all work like a well-oiled machine,” Eridan said, when the silence had stretched too long. “How long have you been doin’ this together?”
“A few sweeps,” Karkat said, his eyes still on his work. “We met Aradia right about when we were assigned to this vessel.” A little smile curved his lips. Eridan wasn’t sure he knew. “Sollux, though, Sollux I’ve known forever. I’ve been stuck with that asshole since wigglerhood. Lucky me, huh?”
“Lucky is right,” Eridan said, his eyebrows going up. “Legitimately, of you two endin’ up on the same adult vessel? Especially a little thing like this, with a crew so small, and in a specialized field? The odds are fuckin’ infinitesimal. That’s crazy.”
Karkat coughed into his elbow, and the smile vanished while he was doing it.
“Yeah,” he said, after a moment of continued polishing. “Crazy.” His voice had changed, suddenly flat and humorless. “Yeah, I’ve heard that. We’re really fucking lucky, I guess. Not in a sarcastic way this time.”
The conversation abruptly seemed like it was over. Eridan waited another couple of seconds, so it didn’t seem like he was bothered, and then turned to leave.
“Eridan,” Karkat said, and Eridan stopped.
“Yeah?”
Karkat released a shivery exhale. “Thank you,” he finally murmured. His voice was different again, though Eridan couldn’t explain how it sounded this time. “For -- you know. What you did earlier.”
“Oh,” Eridan said, caught flat-footed. He swallowed past whatever was rising in his throat. “Yeah, of course. I mean -- what kind of captain would I be if I just hung you out to dry?”
“A normal one, I think,” Karkat offered, bitter. “But, yeah. Seriously. Thank you.”
---
The monster was dead, a clean bullet hole through its head and several more for good measure. It had happened so quickly, too quickly to think. Eridan’s gun was still in his hand, and his eyes were stuck on the bloodied gash on Karkat’s arm, red, red, red.
And then, all at once, his gun was wrenched from his grip and he was being slammed back into the nearest wall by the heavy ozone of overwhelming psionic force. The nearest coffers flew open, jewelry of all types scattering across the floor.
Sollux rounded on him fast, his eyes wild.
“Choose your next words very carefully,” Sollux hissed. “You’re not entirely the kind of stuck-up bitchweasel I thought you were at first, so I might even feel a little bad about it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t kill you like the last captain that put us in this position.”
“You killed your last captain?” Eridan wheezed out, still stunned by the immense psionic pressure pinning him into the wall.
“Not a great start, Ampora,” Sollux said.
Karkat was quiet, eyes on the ground even as he tore a strip from his shirt and carefully wrapped it around his wound in layers, as if it could possibly obscure what Eridan had already seen. Aradia was watching them, her mouth pressed into one thin line, which was what drove it home for him; they’d all known, all three of them. The whole time, they’d known. There were a thousand questions in his mind about how they could have possibly pulled this off, how Karkat wasn’t discovered well before he was even old enough to be put on a ship and given a job.
He knew what he was meant to do, if he was following his training, if he was following the rules that had been drilled into him his entire life. He was supposed to kill them. All of them. He was supposed to kill them, or die trying, or if he couldn’t do that he was supposed to talk his way out of the situation and then report them the instant he could and get them killed by someone else.
He knew that. He did.
For once in Eridan’s entire life, the idea of going back to the army and advancing through the ranks and fulfilling the destiny that was expected of him sounded hollow to him. Lonely, somehow. He didn’t know when that had happened.
He let out a dusty cough, very aware of the pressure on his chest.
“I was initially sent here to kill you three,” he said. “If I couldn’t get you to rein it in, that is.”
“Still not a great start,” Sollux said, and the electric crackling in Eridan’s ears got louder.
“I don’t want to do that,” Eridan said.
There were a lot of things Eridan had said, in his life, just because he was supposed to. This wasn’t one of them.
“You don’t want to kill us if you can’t make us behave?” Aradia asked.
“I don’t want to kill you, period,” Eridan said, his voice thick with it. The compression of Sollux’s psionics eased slightly, but not enough for Eridan to breathe easy, certainly not enough for him to move. He tried to catch Karkat’s eye, but he was like a caged animal, uncharacteristically quiet, searching for an escape. “I don’t want to kill Kar.”
Sollux looked at him a moment, flickering with sparks.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Sollux asked. “It’s an easy lie.”
“I guess you don’t,” Eridan said. “And I can’t really make you believe me. You could kill me right here and no one would have any idea. No one would know. I don’t think anyone would miss me. My superior would probably rejoice, rather than investigate.”
Aradia’s voice was steady and clear as a bell. “That’s a lot of reasons to do it,” she said. “Now give us a reason not to.”
“I don’t know that I have a good one,” Eridan admitted. “I know it’s a risk. I probably wouldn’t let me live, in your position. But… I don’t wanna rat on you. I can’t prove it, a’course. But I don’t.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Sollux asked. “That’s -- fuck, isn’t that against everything about your life? Doesn’t that run contradictory to literally everything you do?”
“I think,” Eridan said, thoughtful, tasting the words as they came. “I think everything about my life might suck, actually.” Saying it aloud was the kind of relief it’d be nice to have without the element of imminent death, but he supposed he couldn’t be picky. “I just -- if lettin’ you get away with this is against what my life is, maybe it’s not the life I want.”
“Shit,” Karkat said, and then gulped air like he’d been holding his breath. His voice was quiet, intense. He had a hand pressed to the makeshift bandage concealing his wound. “I think I trust him. I think I want to trust him.”
“KK,” Sollux said, all worry.
“I know,” Karkat said.
“If he tries to betray us we can just kill him then,” Aradia pointed out. “There’s three of us, so at least someone would be alive to wreak vengeance.” She looked at Eridan for a moment, her gaze searing. “I think I kind of trust him, too.”
Sollux let go, and Eridan dropped a few feet, his pusher hammering in his chest. There was another moment of silence, while they looked at each other, wary, waiting for any unexpected movement.
“They’ll want me back eventually,” Eridan said, finally. “Obviously I can’t carry out the mission as intended, so -- you all have to go before that happens. Strand me somewhere, steal a smaller ship, leave.”
Aradia had a smile growing on her mouth, irreconcilable with the mood.
“Actually,” she said. She glanced at Sollux and Karkat, waiting to be stopped, and when they didn’t say anything, she kept going. “Are you sure?” she asked Eridan. “About how your life sucks, and you want us to run?”
“Well, yeah. Wouldn’t be throwin' away my future if I wasn’t sure.”
Her smile widened. “Can I interest you in a new future?”
“You’re not gonna consult us first?” Karkat asked, gruff.
“Why, are either of you gonna fight me on it?” Aradia said. “It’s not like I don’t know you like him.” Karkat just shrugged, no fight apparently forthcoming. Sollux had his arms crossed over his chest and an impenetrable look on his face, eyes fixed on Eridan, but he didn’t seem inclined to argue either.
“What the hell are you guys talkin’ about?” Eridan asked, bewildered.
“We weren’t planning on doing this forever,” Aradia said. “With this last score--” she spread her arms to encapsulate the entire inner sanctum. “We have more than enough to go anywhere we want in the known universe, to do this on our own with our own ship, well out of the reach of Alternia. Whatever they want you to believe, whatever propaganda they’ve sold you, the Empire doesn’t own everything. I have contacts who buy artifacts like this. There are other Alternian deserters, spread across the interplanetary underbelly. People have done it before. People will do it again.” She leaned in close, voice hushed like she was telling a secret. “You’re right about one thing, Eridan. We do need to leave. This is how we’re doing it.”
Sollux cleared his throat. “You in?” he asked, when Eridan looked. Suddenly, his expression wasn’t so impenetrable: it was more expectant. Karkat was meeting Eridan’s gaze, finally, a private little smile tugging at his mouth.
Sollux. Aradia. Karkat. The warm feeling around them that he couldn’t quite put words to. And a future that wasn’t planned for him by anyone.
“I’m in.”