FlowerGirlHaru: A crisis like this is an opportunity to reflect on your relationships. To all my exes out there: I'm thinking of you, and I hope you get attacked by robot owls

They had a lot to do.

When Andross' computer was their only lead, it had all fallen to Bentley. He did his part with typical excellence, and now there was a plan. While Sly and Judy hiked through the woods, and Nick and Carmelita portioned out food, the most important job was fielded by Murray and Fox.

Murray had worked on planes before. Briefly. Spaceworthiness had not been a concern.

But Fox was handling the task with impressive certainty. Murray was a car mechanic and Fox was a pilot and Bentley (currently taking a nap, at Murray's insistence) was an engineer, so between the three of them they mostly knew what they were doing. Mostly. Whenever Murray got stuck, Fox was right beside him with the answer and a smile.

"Oh, I get it," said Murray. "If the seal doesn't follow the curves already on the jet…"

"It'll break almost immediately because of the external forces. That's right!"

"Okay. But it won't be hard to make sure the angle is right. Right?"

"I'd say so." Fox raised both arms. "If you could just, uh-?"

Murray obliged, easily hefting the much smaller mammal and helping him onto the wing. Fox moved along it with a practiced, careful grace, ensuring he wasn't damaging the jet. He indicated a corner.

"This will be the hardest part to get right, but rest should be easy. I think we should handle it first."

"Makes sense. Same on the other side?"

"Yes!"

Murray picked him back up and set him back down. Fox lightly adjusted his jacket.

"Thank you."

"No worries. I'm used to it. And you're a lot lighter than Bentley's wheelchair."

"Heh…" Fox smiled at the floor. "I have to be."

"What?"

He blinked. "What?"

"You just said you have to be lighter than a wheelchair," said Murray, "which is, like… a weird thing to throw out there."

"Oh. Right. Sorry." Fox tugged at his scarf. "I'm told I say a lot of weird stuff…"

"Me too, little buddy. Don't let it get you down."

Murray stood there for a moment, watching Fox's expression. Then he sat down on a nearby crate.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"Talk about what?"

"Whatever's making you stare sadly into space every so often."

Fox's ears rose in alarm. "I'm sorry if I've been unproductive! I can-"

But Murray raised a hand. "You've been doing great. Like, I can't tell you how much harder this'd be without your help."

"Right. Thank you."

"So if you want some of my help," said Murray, "I'm a pretty good listener."

Fox nodded. "Bentley said so…"

Murray patted the crate, and Fox hopped up beside him. His legs kicked slightly. An almost inaudible whirr with every movement.

"It's Wolf," he said finally.

"Kinda figured…"

"I haven't seen him in so long… and this is how he re-enters my life?" He sighed. "It's just a lot to get used to."

Penelope had a lot to get used to.

She was in space, now. Now she was in space. Every so often she would traverse these long white corridors and pass by a view of outside, and outside would be space. Blackness and pinpricks of light and a blue, unsuspecting world. Space.

She didn't consider herself small-time. She hadn't for years. And yet this felt out of her depth. Things were spiralling out of control. And she was much less flippant about supplying Andross with his insane demands, now that she was trapped inside a pressurised tin-can with him.

And Wolf.

She tried to stay focused. There was certainly enough to work on. She had barely made progress on cracking open Clockwerk's black box - deliberately so. Right now, she was testing the capabilities of Andross' production line, uploading some personal designs into the system. It felt like an extremely expensive equivalent to using the office printer for tabletop gaming supplies.

There was plenty to do. Too much. So she would just sit here and-

"Heya."

Her whiskers twitched. Not for the first time, she wished there was more structure and security to these rooms. With the exception of Andross' precious office, the architecture was irritatingly open.

And now there was a wolf in her doorway.

She looked up from her laptop. "What?"

He shrugged at her. "'m bored."

"And?"

"And I got whiskey."

Penelope paused. She glanced to her laptop's screen. Clockwerk's face, even starker in the cold lines of the Jet's blueprints, glared back at her. "Alright, screw it," she said. "If Andross asks why I'm slacking off, I'll blame you."

"That's what I'm here for…"

Wolf pulled up a chair, and Penelope sat cross-legged on her desk, and Wolf produced a cracked bottle of whiskey and a glass and a much, much smaller glass. Penelope thought about the artificial gravity, and how eating and drinking normally was far easier than what astronauts usually had to do, but also she felt like she was kind of missing out on that experience? She didn't say any of that.

For a while, neither of them said anything.

"We're in space," she blurted out.

"Yeah," he said.

"I'm kinda freaked out."

"Don't blame ya," he said.

With that, he was content to lapse back into silence.

Penelope sipped from her miniscule glass. She wasn't normally one for alcohol, and although this whiskey seemed to be about as good as horrible burning water ever got, there was a distinct lack of fun bubbles. Still, by going slowly, she hadn't embarrassed herself so far.

"This is some macho façade, right?" she said. "Or are you really okay with this? Like, all of this. Not just being in space, but… what we've been contracted to do. It's nuts."

"It's well-paid."

"Oh, work with me here. Even you can't be that s-"

He gave her a look - not even an angry look, but enough of a look to make her change her last word.

"…single-minded. For money."

"I like money. Thought you did too."

"Everyone likes money. It's not a personality." She tilted her head. "Isn't there anything else that motivates you?"

"No."

He sniffed, disinterested.

"So far, money's the only thing that hasn't bit me on the tail."

"Things used to be great."

It was dark out. Fox and Murray could see the night sky through the open hangar doors.

"Well," amended Fox, after a moment's thought, "maybe not great-great. Never perfect. But it was better when Wolf was around. Don't get me wrong, I love my new teammates! They're very nice people." He tugged his scarf again. "Nicer than Wolf ever was…"

He shook his head.

"But I still miss him."

Murray took a moment to revisit what he knew about Wolf. Mean. Angry. Motivated by greed; would do anything for money. Smelt smoky, and faintly of alcohol. Kinda cool voice? Consistent fashion choices. Not good, necessarily, but consistent.

He tried to sound tactful.

"Um… why?"

"I know how he seems," said Fox, "but he's more than just a greedy thug. He's more complex than that, even if he won't admit it. Plus, we've got such a shared history. Wolf has done so much for me." He beamed. "He's the reason people call me 'Fox'!"

"That, uh…" Murray tried and failed not to frown. "Is that the only thing you can think of? Because it doesn't sound… great."

"You guys really don't like my name, huh?"

"What? No!" Murray quickly held up his hands. "Not at all! It's got a good ring to it! It's just, uh - unusual, is all. Nothing wrong with that." He coughed. "Could you… explain the story to me? What did Wolf do?"

Fox paused for a moment, assembling it in his head. "My legal name," he said, "is James McCloud Junior."

"Oh," said Murray. "I getcha…"

"Yeah. I never liked being called 'Junior', even as a little kid. And it felt weird calling myself 'James', because that's what my mom called my dad! Or it was, until…"

Murray laid a huge hand, very softly, on Fox's shoulder.

"It was lose-lose," he continued. "I worry about changing it, because it's one of the few things I still have of my parents-"

"Don't," said Murray. "Naming babies is crazy hard. People end up with stuff they don't like all the time. I'm sure your folks would just want you to be happy."

"Thank you for saying that." Fox gave him a timid smile. "Bentley was right. You are good at this."

Murray just shrugged.

"So eventually," said Fox, "I made it into the air force. And there were two kinds of people there. Some had heard of my dad. They remembered how good he was, and they expected me to be just as good, all the time."

"Because you're literally James McCloud Junior."

"Yes!" said Fox, a touch desperately. "But some hadn't heard of my dad at all."

"Oh. Cool."

"They didn't understand why a fox should be allowed anywhere near expensive weaponry."

"Oh. Very not cool…"

"It wasn't," agreed Fox, and for once Murray caught a hint of misery in his breezy voice. "We were supposed to be a unit, but it's not like everyone's biases disappeared. Some people thought I wasn't… trustworthy."

"Which is ridiculous!" said Murray. "You're like, incapable of lying!"

"Yes!" said Fox. "But there were still people who didn't like me, just because I'm a fox."

His eyes were distant, lost in the past.

"I was so worried about it. I didn't know how Dad handled it, and I thought I was going to mess things up. Then I met Wolf. I remember one of the first things he ever said to me…"

He tried to dip his voice to match Wolf's husky baritone. The results were unconvincing, and adorable.

"'I don't dislike you because of how you were born, pup. I dislike you because you're you.'"

"Oh," said Murray. "Great…?"

"From that moment, I knew I could trust him. He was mean about it - he had a lot of anger to work through - but he didn't see me as a fox, or a McCloud. He just saw… me."

Murray began to nod. "Okay, I get it. Even if it wasn't nice, it was exactly what you needed."

"Yes. And from there, I did my best to befriend him. I had to give him his space a lot, but people noticed how I tried to stick with him. He was the only wolf, and I was the only fox, and he was already called Wolf, so…" Fox shrugged. "The system worked. Someone would yell 'Fox!' and I knew they meant me."

He smiled.

"And that's how I got to be Fox McCloud. Wearing my species with pride. I really love my name, and when he saw how much I liked it, Wolf made sure it caught on. He's good with people when he wants to be! And I guess it helped that he was the hugest guy there…"

"Yeah?"

"Oh, definitely. You know about the air force's hiring practices, right?"

"Uh," said Murray evenly, "no."

Fox smiled. "It's pretty simple. A lot of professions are angled toward certain species, right? Nocturnal animals taking night shifts, smaller mammals being kept away from combat…"

"That was why Judy had to work so hard to be a cop." Murray rubbed his neck. "Not that police departments are supposed to act like a military, but - y'know."

"But," said Fox, "the air force isn't like the infantry. It's more about how suited you are to flying."

"Oh, got it. The smaller you are, the better, right?"

"Exactly," said Fox. "It's much easier to calibrate a design to work for a smaller pilot than a larger one. And some aircraft just can't be flown by animals above a certain weight."

Fox's gaze wandered to the horizon.

"I'm… actually the largest pilot in my squadron now."

"Woah. Really?"

"Lena is a squirrel, and Poe is a vesper bat. They're both much lighter than I am. That's the direction things are going. Smaller pilots, making room for more tech." His smile was hollow now. "And that's what happened to-"

"Me! The best damn pilot those idiots had ever seen! And how do they repay me?!"

Wolf slammed his empty glass back onto the table.

"Kicking me out on my tail. By calling me fat!"

"Yikes," said Penelope.

He really had gotten himself going. Part of her regretted prodding at his past, but she had gotten sick of the silence. This was something, at least.

She knew about the weight differential for pilots, of course. It was a rare advantage of being a mouse. She had many fun and interesting anecdotes about balancing her false Black Baron persona against her natural form. Now was not the time to share them.

Wolf was reaching for the bottle. "We're all obsolete eventually. You know that. How much of your work do you hand off to a robot? How much is stuff you thought a machine could never do?"

She grunted sympathetically.

"I was just the guy who got cut first." He refilled his glass. All the way. "Thing is, though, Fox is next. And he knows that. He must, he ain't as dumb as he pretends. And yet he clings to them, like the naïve idiot he is, just waiting 'til the day they ditch him like they ditched me."

For a moment, he glared into the glass.

"Why is he like that?"

Penelope sensed he wasn't really asking her. Or the whiskey. She still made a tentative attempt. "Like what?"

"…I don't have the word. What's the opposite of 'ambition'?"

He took a swig, then locked eyes with her.

"Thing about Fox is that he likes doing the right thing. That's all he likes to do. The air force was something he had to try, on account of his dad, and sure enough, he's amazing. But if he wasn't a pilot, he'd be a kindergarten teacher, or a social worker, or one of those poor schlubs you can call when you need a good reason not to jump off a bridge. He'd find some job that's all stress and no pay and throw himself into it. And he'd be great."

"You're saying all this," said Penelope guardedly, "like it's an insult…?"

Wolf's mouth tightened. "It annoys me."

He drank, and so did she. Penelope supposed that was the end of it.

"It annoys me," said Wolf, in the sudden tone of a closed-off man who is just drunk enough, "because I don't get it. And I don't mean that in a 'oh, different strokes' kinda way, I mean I don't get it. I don't get how he can put strangers in front of his own needs, over and over."

His grip on his glass was too tight.

"I don't get why I'm a bad guy for wanting things."

Penelope nodded. Sombre.

She knocked back a bit more whiskey. It didn't help, but maybe it looked like it did.

"Look, bud, I dunno what to tell ya. I'd love to say greed is good. That you should reach for whatever you want, and ditch all the losers who try to hold you back."

She indicated the cold, white room.

"But that's what we did, and we've ended up in a weird place. Literally and metaphorically. We know what we did. We made our choices. The only decision now is to give up and get nothing, or keep going and maybe get a huge amount of money." She shrugged. "You gotta stay practical, y'know? What's done is done."

Wolf sighed. "And now we're stuck up here with Emperor Bananas the First."

"Until we get paid," she said. "He's assuming we - and everybody else - will love his weird system so much we'll just roll over. But I'm already thinking ahead. If he wins, someone else is gonna want him gone. And they're gonna offer good money for it."

"What? You just gonna keep helping and then betraying mad scientists who wanna rule the world?"

"As long as it keeps paying."

"Amen to that," he said, and they clinked their glasses together. The sound from Penelope's was comically small.

"I feel very small sometimes."

Fox gave Murray a more bittersweet smile.

"Not literally, I mean."

"I getcha."

Fox moved his gaze to the jet. "I want to help Wolf," he said. "But I want to help people in trouble, too. And Wolf puts people in trouble. The choice is pretty obvious, but that doesn't mean it's easy." His ears were low. "I wish I was more like you guys. You're all great friends to each other, but when it's time to fight, you can just focus and do it. I'm… not sure I have that in me. To be scary."

"Being scary's overrated," said Murray.

He hoped he sounded coherent. But he wasn't overthinking his choice of words. He knew he had to just speak from the heart.

"Take it from somebody who's beat up a million punks - it's not about hurting the other guy. It never is. It's about protecting who you love, and protecting yourself! Sometimes, the only way to do that is to get ugly. But if you need something to get you through the ugly times, just remember how nice it'll be when you and your friends come out the other side. That's what it's about."

Fox sat on that for a moment. "But… do you think I can stop Wolf from hurting anyone else? Without getting… ugly?" His voice was quiet. "Bentley said I shouldn't try…"

"Bentley's very smart," said Murray, "but also a big pessimist. Forget what he thinks for a second. Forget what I think. Ask yourself - what do you think?"

"I don't know."

"Then all you gotta do," said Murray, "is figure it out. It's that simple." He patted Fox's back. "I trust your judgement."

Fox smiled up at him, shy but grateful. "Thank you."

Murray let the moment hang, for as long as he felt he could. "No problem, pal. You, uh, ready to get back to it?"

"Alright!" he said. "I'm…!"

And then he yawned. It was an adorable yawn, a showcase of tiny fangs. Murray would have said so, but he wasn't sure he was allowed to use the word 'cute'. "You alright, little buddy?"

"I'm fine!" Fox tried to rally. "I can keep helping! Don't worry about me."

"It's okay. Really. You aren't just working on this plane - in the morning, you gotta fly it too." He looked Fox up and down. "How much sleep do you usually get?"

"Um… the normal amount?"

"Yeah, see, that's gonna be a problem. Me and the guys keep weird hours! We can work on this all night and still be in fighting shape tomorrow. But if you're not used to it, it's gonna mess you up real bad."

He patted Fox's comparatively tiny shoulder.

"You wanna be a good team player? Head to bed when you get tired. Me and Bentley will do the rest, I promise."

Fox nodded. "Okay. I'll help you finish the preparations, and I'll go to bed right after. Does that make sense?"

"Sounds perfect! Thanks."

"Okay. And thank you, too." Fox smiled up at him. "For listening. And for looking out for me."

"You wanna know a secret, Fox?"

Murray matched his smile.

"Looking out for each other is why we always win."

"Must be nice."

Wolf gave her a look. "Which part? All seems like garbage from where I'm sitting."

"True. But I meant how the guy you left behind is a total creampuff."

She slowly rotated the glass in her hand. She had decided she really disliked whiskey. She wouldn't drink any more.

"If he's really the ball of unconditional love you say he is, he'll probably forgive you. Just finish the job, and find him after Andross dies in a tragic accident-"

Wolf chuckled.

"-and say 'I'm really sorry I worked for the guy who killed your folks, here's three billion dollars and a hug', and he'll be like 'thanks, I don't even need the money I'll just take the hug', and you'll be fine."

"Easy for you to say."

"It is," said Penelope, "because it's not on the cards for me."

She put down her glass.

"My former gang have made it very clear they won't forgive me. They have these… notions. Honour among thieves and that stuff. I violated their little code, hard. They're never gonna take me back after I did that."

He raised an eyebrow. "So why did you?"

"Why does anyone do anything?"

"That's not an answer."

"Sure isn't."

After a moment she gave another shrug.

"I've just gotten used to being by myself, really." Penelope aimed a tiny smile at her tiny glass. "But it's good to know I have a friend up here, at least."

"What was that?"

His voice was quiet. Too quiet.

Penelope dragged her eyes up, meeting his cold gaze. His expression had shifted. Mouth curled with disdain.

The room felt colder. Like the void outside was eager to get in.

"How goddamn stupid," he said, "do you think I am?"

She blinked. "Wh… what?"

"You think we're friends?" He sneered the word, lips pulling back into a snarl. "I'm only here because slugging whiskey by myself is too depressing. Don't go misunderstanding this, Earhart. I thought you were smarter than that."

Penelope stared, but caught herself. "What's your problem?!"

"Oh, it ain't my problem." He met her tiny glare. "I know what happens to your 'friends'. The Cooper boys were your friends. Bellwether was your friend. With a track record like that, you ain't gonna drag me past 'work associate'."

"Those were… different."

"Sure they were." His anger was rising now, a growl in his voice. "They were different from each other, and they're different from this. And the next time someone is dumb enough to trust you, you'll tell them this was different too."

"I-!"

"Don't," he snapped. "Just don't. I don't wanna hear it."

He went to stand. Part of Penelope knew it would be smarter to just let him leave, but… "You knew, right? That I was the one who…?"

"Yeah. I heard. Even I'm not that stupid, right?"

"Then… why?" She stared up at him. "Why are you fine with working with me? I lied to you and manipulated you - you coulda died!"

"First off," he said, "don't flatter yourself. Nothing's gonna kill me, least of all you."

He matched her gaze, his organic eye somehow as icy as the new one.

"And I can work with you because I'm a professional. You give me a job, and I do it. Doesn't matter if I know the boss is a scumbag, or if my quote-unquote friend tries to stop me, or if my only coworker nearly got me killed. I'm not letting anything personal stop me from getting paid. And I'm gonna use all that money to buy a damn island so I never hafta look at anyone ever again."

He gathered his bottle and his glass, roughly. She saw the sheer power in his shoulders, and tried not to show she was shaking.

"I changed my mind," he said. "I'm better off drinking alone."

And without another word, he stalked off.