Rush was the first to wake. Blinking emergency lights, no sound of any engine. Smell of scorched metal and burnt insulation and blood. He took stock.
He was draped over his console, head down, arms dangling, fingertips grazing the floor. Dust and grease and metal under his hands, they briefly fascinated him before he identified the hyperawareness as a problem and deliberately turned it inwards. Bruises all over his chest. His abdomen felt tender, but there was no swelling, no heat - nothing ruptured.
Pushing himself off the monitors he collapsed back into his seat. No head trauma, both legs seemed to work. His back hurt, but no more than you'd expect from being rammed into the edge of a table at high speed. He patted himself down. The blood wasn't his.
Well, good. That was one thing that didn't need worrying about then.
He blinked his eyes into as much focus as he could achieve, levered himself up and over into the pilot's chair, flipping the switches for lights and power and life support. The emergency lights wavered off and on again. Nothing else happened. By the feel of the switches, every relay along the line was burnt out, irreparable.
Memory hit him in an overwhelming deluge of information, almost as though he was there again, coming out of the phenomenon straight into the upper atmosphere of a planet, watching Young struggle and curse at unresponsive controls, flames streak up past the screen, as they tried to airbreak with a vehicle that was rapidly turning into an unguided meteor.
Not going to deny that he thought they wouldn't make it. He was so used, by now, to Young failing at everything he set his hand to to hold on to the hope they'd crash land in one piece. But the man had some skill, perhaps, if he was driven to it in extremis. Even /he/ couldn't manage to be entirely useless all the time, though God knew he made a more thorough attempt at it than anyone else Rush had ever known.
Speaking of Young, he had obviously been thrown out of his seat when the shuttle slammed in a shallow belly-flop against that little hill. He must have hit his head against the wall, been tumbled about the rear compartment of the shuttle like cement in a mixer ever since. He was just visible, in the dim light, jammed bonelessly into the far corner of the bay, a dark streak along the wall showing how he had finally slid to rest.
Not eighty percent sure of his course of action, Rush approached, got his hands under Young's shoulders and hauled his limp, unresisting form out into the middle of the floor, where visibility was a little higher. The man's eyes were closed, his face crimson and wet, but his breathing was steady and his pulse strong.
Looking down, the feel of yeilding tissue defenceless under his fingers, Rush considered the benefits of a life without Young. All he would need would be to press a little harder, and the man's unconsciousness would slip painlessly, untraceably into death. Scott would have to take over the military side of things, and the poor wee lad was a lamb to the slaughter next to Young's tough mutton. Get rid of the Colonel and the military would finally be back where they belonged - under the control of people capable of higher thought, a useful resource instead of a constant thorn in his side.
But there were disadvantages to this course of action too. One, he didn't know at present exactly how fucked up his current situation might be - a man with a gun might come in handy. Two, when he did get back to Destiny, and he refused to believe in any other outcome, if he turned up alone the crew would condemn him, evidence or not. Three, he refused to be the fucking savage that Young was. There was no way he was abandoning the moral high ground now he'd finally seized it, and there had to be more civilized methods of removing Young as an obstacle, if it carried on being necessary.
Young's black hair was sticky with blood, but it had begun to stiffen, and the veil of gore over his face was drying. The wound must be closing up by itself. Grateful for small mercies, Rush stopped touching him, rocked back onto his knees. As he did so he heard the noise for the first time. A little scratching clatter overhead, like a cat's claws scrabbling for purchase on the shuttle's sleek metal hull.
He scrambled up, too quickly, dizziness and nausea almost overwhelming, a headache pressing in like a stiletto over one eye as he raised his head to focus his gaze on the ceiling.
Nothing to see, but the scurrying scratch came again. Outside the shuttle its running lights were glimmering, glow-worm faint, drawing scarcely any power, illuminating nothing outside the screen. Nothing, that was, until something torpedo shaped, carved out of black jet or wet leather, came flying directly at the sensor. He got a nightmare glimpse of spreading tentacles around a piercing mouth, jabbing at the metal, sucking, thrashing its powerful tail to try to drive itself forward and through the shuttle's skin. Though he knew what he was seeing was only pixellated images from a camera outside, that really five inches of metal plating separated him and the creature, he still recoiled.
"Shit!" He hadn't given a toss for the girl in those days, but still the memory of one of those things slamming through Chloe's chest, wriggling itself completely inside her to feed - God, it still was enough to make him want to heave. "Shit."
He slammed his hands down on the dead controls, the offensively useless machine, and raised his face to the sky, challenging the kind of gods who'd chosen to decree that /this/ should be his life. "No! We left this place behind in another galaxy. We took the warning and never came. We cannot be back here. Is this some kind of cosmic joke? Because I don't think it's funny."
"Rush..."
Speaking of offensively useless. Young was back. He had rolled over, shakily hauled himself to his feet, was now holding himself upright by the molding on one of the shuttle's pillars, his fingers leaving red streaks on the gold. He had the gall to look annoyed, like any of this was Rush's fault.
"Rush, shut up and calm down."
It was like tipping one smoldering coal into a full drum of petrol. The explosion was glorious, burning away fear and thought and caution all at once, a blessed blessed relief from what he had been feeling before. He darted forward, jabbed Young in the chest with two fingers. "Don't you tell me to shut up. It was you who brought us here. You who got us trapped in that thing, because among the many things you can't do at all it turns out you can't fly a spaceship worth a damn."
The jab connected, sending a satisfying wave of impact up Rush's arm. But Young didn't even sway back, just took it, emotionless, impassive, immovable as always. It was like talking to a rock. Endlessly, maddeningly frustrating. He escalated his tactics to try to get a response, shoved Young with both hands, sending him reeling back into the wall. Young pushed himself back off, and there, there was the little flicker of the thin cold smile that said that Rush was finally getting to him.
"You can't get up in the morning. You can't think. God knows, Scott follows you out of pity. You're totally incapable of making a single decent decision, and you must leave me to pick up the pieces when you're done. It's your inadequacies that have brought us here, so don't-" He punctuated each word with a shove, feeling it work, feeling the violence rise closer and closer to the surface with each little blow. "Don't- tell me- to shut up."
Gleeful, giddy, he was waiting, and yet Young's right hook still caught him by surprise. He'd expected an attack to the face but this was straight into the belly, no nonsense, driving the breath out of him in a great 'Oh' of victory and joy. He got his right hand into Young's hair, yanked where the head-wound was, and when Young hissed with pain he smacked the side of his head into the shuttle's pillar.
This was more like it.
Young staggered, bent as if to fall to his knees. Rush took the chance to lace his fists together and bring them both down like a hammer on the base of his neck, but instead of collapsing, Young surged forwards, got his arms around Rush's legs and lifted him bodily off the ground, slamming his back into the clearly now even more defunct instruments. He rolled off onto the ground and lost track of exactly how the fight was going - a blur of impacts and knees. At some point he rammed his elbow in Young's mouth and got it bitten for his trouble. At another Young lifted his head by the hair and slammed it down twice on the floor, making him grey out.
It must have been after that that things started to go poorly, because the next thing he knew he was flat on his face, with Young's knee between his shoulderblades and Young's hand hard on the nape of his neck, pinning him to the floor.
Cool metal against his cheek, and a strength greater than his telling him that for once there was nowhere he needed to be, nothing he needed to do but lie down. His panic grounded itself, and all the aches and throbs of the fight turned into a reassurance that he was still alive.
"Are you done?"
Not quite the same question as last time, unless he had misinterpreted it all along. Sometimes Young's laconic ambiguity was difficult to parse. Perhaps he wasn't asking about their enmity in general, but only this one specific instance - not asking whether he could trust Rush to work with him in future, but only asking if, right now, it was safe to let him get up.
"For the moment," he said, glad to offer this one small concession in exchange for the endorphins, the distraction, the temporary feeling of relief.
Evidently this was the right answer. The hand and the knee disappeared from his back. Young limped into his peripheral vision, sitting hunched against the wall, with his head down, looking sullen and resentful, like a bear roused too early from hibernation. Rush smiled inwardly. The truth hurt, didn't it?
Young rested his chin on his hand. Split knuckles. A slide of new dark blood from his hairline down to his eyebrow. Rush gave himself another moment to enjoy the floor. In the silence between them, the claws or teeth or tentacles of the creatures could still be heard, skittering across the hull.
"Alone on the planet of the vampire lizards," Rush said at last, once he had regained the ability to mock. "What next?"
Young clasped his hands together and pinched the pale band of skin where his wedding ring used to be. He was all gathered back together now, calm and quiet and solid, as though the animal inside had never existed at all. "As you never stop reminding me, Rush, you're the genius. So. Ideas?"