They were off like a shot, hurtling through the air with a rush that shoved them back into their seats. It was enough to make Rick glad that he'd decided Judith couldn't ride on her own - the bar of the harness keeping them locked in their seats would have been too close to her neck, the ride too bumpy for any semblance of safety - and he pulled her closer as best as he could. He wasn't sure their speed would be enough, wasn't certain that the way they were eating up the distance would be sufficient to save them… and, in that respect, her being close was comfort for him, too. He could feel her, still alive, still breathing and living and hugging him back, and that was everything because it meant that he hadn't failed her yet.

By the time the colony exploded behind them - a shockwave of devastating energy sweeping across the surface of the planet and expanding with great concussive force out into the darkness of space - they were far enough away that, rough jostling of the ship aside, they were safe. Sure, the lights flickered and the ship rocked so harshly that Rick's bones would be aching for days to come and the electronics were smoking, but Judith was safe and they were safe and they'd reached minimum safe distance and he really couldn't be blamed for breathing out a sigh of relief.

He was still reeling from the turbulence - his sense of up and down had dissolved from reverberations of tempestuous shaking into nothing but vertigo for several minutes - when the overhead intercom buzzed to life, Jesus' familiar voice coming through cleanly despite staticky interference. "It's okay. Rick, we're okay."

He couldn't quite believe it - even as his traitorous brain still whispered we're going home, it'd had that thought before, had thought they were safe only to have it dashed, and he couldn't bring himself to risk hope - and yet Judith was still there, still clutching at his side with a confused, inquisitive stare at the rest of the dropship as she slowly but surely relaxed, and it was enough to override his sense of restraint to allow that self-same hope to flood in.

"Hey," he said, correcting a wayward strand of her hair that had found itself caught in the sweat on her skin, "We made it."

She just nodded, staying silent for a few seconds before adding, "I knew you'd come." in a quiet voice of dead certainty… and damn those infuriating, insolent emotions of hope and confidence because that comment had no right making him feel as good as it did. Of course he'd gone; there was never any question.

– – –

The ride back to their mothership, which somehow made it through the blast to maintain its orbit around the planet, was short and relatively uneventful, spent in quiet, reassuring conversation with Judith as they stayed in their seats. They were both utterly disgusting - sweat and blood and grime and ash had made their homes in their pores, and Rick wasn't sure it'd ever get out, wasn't certain the scent of singed flesh would ever fully leave him - but they both needed it. At least, Rick did; he could still see Judith disappearing down that vent every time he blinked, juxtaposed with Carl, who'd grown up and died without Rick even being awake, much less there, and he barely stopped himself from pulling her closer every two seconds. (Judging by the twitching of Judith's arms around his neck, he was willing to bet everything he had - which wasn't much - that she had similar images running through her own head.)

But then they docked, a slight juddering of the ship the only indication that they'd landed inside the other ship, and then Jesus walked out with his unnatural, oddly fluid walk and a smile on his face. "We've landed. I can investigate setting a course back to earth as soon as proper landing protocols have been followed." He stepped over, unlocking the lap bar restraint keeping them in place and raising it above their heads.

Rick waited a few seconds, checking to see if Judith would jump down of her own accord, but she didn't. In the end, he just stood, letting her cling to his side. "Thank you."

Jesus nodded. "Of course." A pause that should have been awkward but wasn't elapsed, and then he added, "I'm sure you want to leave the ship."

Rick was spared the difficulty of making a decision by Judith's eager nodding, head bobbing with such force that her hair - still caked with dried slime and frizzy from heat - scraped against his skin. "Yes."

Rick couldn't blame her for wanting to get off - if he never saw another metal hallway or grating-covered floor again, it'd be too soon - but they couldn't leave yet, not when they still had another person to account for. "Where's Daryl?"

Jesus gestured towards the armory section of the shuttle - Rick's brain finally caught up enough to remember that he'd been seated there when Rick left to go find Judith - and started walking towards it, body angled enough that he could keep talking while still leading the way. "When the smaller explosions started as precursors of the primary blast, it became increasingly dangerous to be outside of the ship. He was insistent on going out after the two of you, but, as I told you when we first met, it's impossible for me to harm - or, by omission of action, allow to be harmed - a human being."

Daryl was indeed still seated in the chair, slightly sprawled despite the lap bar that had been secured around him. The entire left side of his face was hidden behind neatly applied gauze to match a similarly bound torso, the bandage just visible through the burned remnants of his shirt. While he was still obviously injured - his skin was far too pale, and dried tracks of blood and sweat (where it wasn't still gleaming against his skin under the glare of the overhead lights) were easily visible at first glance - there was an odd sort of peace to the way he sat, head bowed over his chest and eyes closed. It was odd to see him sitting there so motionless, and yet it was a helluva lot better than the minutes of swallowed pain Rick had seen before leaving to find Judith, and he couldn't help counting it as a win.

"He'll be alright. He's just out." Jesus gestured towards him vaguely. "I gave him another shot. It helped with the pain and kept him where I could keep an eye on him."

Rick couldn't help raising an eyebrow. 'I'm surprised he let you."

Jesus shrugged. "I'm convincing. And I technically am the ship's medical officer, so I'm in command whenever I judge the current commanding officer - in this case, that would be Lieutenant Dixon - to be incapacitated." Rick nodded, reaching for the restraint, but Jesus reached out and stopped him. "We'll need a stretcher from medical to get him there. I'll show you."

Rick nodded, turning to follow Jesus out the door and through the hallways into the hangar in which Jesus had parked their little dropship. There was still a part of Rick just waiting for something to go wrong, but the law of averages was pretty damn clear that things had to get better eventually, and he was pretty damn sure that they'd had enough bad to last them a while.

Whatever Rick's reservations about hoping that things would get better, it was worth it to see Judith walking on her own, eyes big and inquisitive as she looked at the massive hanger. She wasn't clinging close by their sides anymore, moving almost - almost - normally. There was still a tension to the way she moved, a kind of wariness every time she took a step, but she looked more like a little kid than she'd looked the entire time Rick had known her, and it was beautiful.

She returned to his side once he started walking again, though, both of them following Jesus to find a stretcher. "I'm sorry if I scared you. That platform was just becoming too unstable. I had to circle and hope that things didn't get too rough to pick you up-"

Rick wasn't sure if that was just the way Jesus spoke or if he were actively trying to justify himself to Rick - and, well, damned if that option didn't make him feel guilty since he'd only been doubting the guy ever since he met him, and it wasn't like he should have expected Rick to actually understand or give him the benefit of the doubt especially since Rick had been cursing him out two seconds before his big damn rescue - but either way, it couldn't stand. "Jesus…" He looked over. "You did okay."

The look on his face was unreadable, some combination of blank neutrality and open uncertainty. "I did?"

Rick nodded, putting every single ounce of fervor - everything he'd felt when that ship showed up behind him, every holy shit, he came back and Jesus, that was close where he wasn't sure if he was praying to the artificial person or the actual religious figure, but they weren't that much different right about then anyway - into the gesture. "Oh, yeah."

Apparently, the thing about law of averages? Complete and utter bullshit. There was no balancing out. There were no breaks to be had or slack to be given. For all they'd been counting out their lives in numbers, the world wasn't some super complicated equation with all-quantitative variables and a nice mean in the middle.

It was hell, pure and simple.

And so, whether he did or not, he really should have anticipated something happening. Something like the gentle hissing of dissolving concrete beneath their feet, drips of something dropping from somewhere nearby… and there was too much vagary, too much time where Rick wasn't even sure what he was seeing much less what it meant.

Of course, as it felt like was the way with all things, those two realizations came hard on the heels of each other. He finally processed the twin facts that there's acid eating away at our spaceship about a second before remembering bodily fluids of concentrated acid, matching that with the recollection of clinging debris keeping them from taking off for a few minutes and putting together the entire gruesome picture in a slam of understanding that almost sent him buckling. The queen.

But it's Jesus who ended up convulsing instead, back arching as something tented his shirt and then ripped its way through. That lag in processing lasted him until the tip of a dangerously barbed tail pierced the rest of the way through Jesus' chest, a few inches away from where a human heart might reside.

After everything - after all Jesus had done for them - it was easy to forget that he was technically artificial, that red blood and tendons and skin and bone had been replaced by milky circulatory fluid and metal and latex… and right there, in a hangar full of empty, hulking spaceships and hydraulic lifters, so large and barren and solemn that it might as well have been a damn graveyard, Rick had forgotten.

He was so caught up in the little sensory details - the hiss of acid eating up the floor, the thin wisps of smoke rising up from it, the too-lifelike hand fisting into his shirt with all the force of a vice, the thoughts running through his head of shit, we lost another one and how many more are we gonna lose and what the hells that he probably should already have understood but couldn't quite wrap his head around - that he was actually surprised at the explosion of liquid latex blood, from Jesus' wound and even, with all the damning gravitas of normal hemorrhaging, from his mouth.

Even more of a surprise was the incongruously gentle flexing of the vertebrae-like tail attached to the barb, stronger than the sinuous motion would have suggested and certainly too strong for Rick to counterbalance. Instead, the dark, glinting carapace of the queen revealed itself as she uncurled from around part of the landing gear and stepped forward, overriding his and Jude's feeble attempts to help as she quite literally ripped their ally in two.

Much as Rick wanted to check on Jesus, he couldn't - and not just because the artificial person was lying in two parts on opposite ends of the ship. He still had Judith to worry about, after all, and the queen was staring at him with that same predatory hissing she'd used back in the colony that told him it was no longer purely business. It had quite clearly crossed over into personal somewhere on that planet.

And so, feeling oddly calm for the first time in who knew how long, Rick gestured at Judith to run. Yeah, there was an edge of desperation as he ordered her to leave - a vaguely panicked-sounding, "Go, move!" - but the serenity (weird though it might have been) continued even as the creature turned to actively follow the girl, all the way through his own motions, his probably-spastic waving of his arms and continual shouting that he could only partly comprehend as some repetition of no, here, here, no, look at me, not at her amid trying to make sure Judith got away.

And she did, slipping beneath a grate in the middle of the floor and crawling into some unseen bowel of the ship.

So then, what was he to do with the damn thing's attention still on him but to bolt, to turn and run towards one of the heavy cargo doors at one end of the room - some spare storage room, he registered, but only distantly - and duck inside, to slam his hand against a nearby console. It was a blind attempt to find the right button, but he managed it, and the door slammed shut with a heavy, reverberating thud.

But the law of averages hadn't been his friend thus far, and it certainly wasn't his friend then, because the thudding didn't stop. It continues, with the rhythm slam-pause-slam-pause of the queen ramming against the door and trying to get in.

The law of averages was bullshit.