Bleak meter: Cute and cartoony
Timeline: After Season 10/MotO
Context: The original thing I wrote for this same prompt was . . . extremely different. Just, that one was bizarre. But in the end I think that one is never going to see the light of day. Have this instead!
It was a nice evening, at least by Faith's standards. She'd finished her rounds a little early, just in time for a heavy downpour to start. Everyone was holed up at home, avoiding the rain, so she could have a nice restful evening at home without worrying about who was creeping around getting into trouble overnight. She had just made herself a nice hot bowl of stew, and the rain was drumming soothingly on her roof. Even the plinking of water sneaking through that one loose tile seemed pleasant; this was as close as she got to relaxing.
Suddenly there was another tapping, coming from her door, louder and steadier than the rain. Faith tried not to groan. Of course, it was illegal for her to have a nice quiet evening.
She went over to open the door, and this time was unable to fully repress a groan. Yep, the universe was officially out to get her.
"What is it, Jet Jack?" she asked, already tired.
"Can I come in?" said Jet Jack plaintively. She was holding a tarp over her head but was still soaking wet. Knowing that Jet Jack was high on the list of Hunters who disliked water, Faith sighed and stepped back, waving her in. Still, she spared a glare when Jet Jack lowered the tarp and the puddle of water collected atop it sluiced to the floor.
"Sorry," said Jet Jack, uncharacteristically subdued.
"So, what is it now?" said Faith. She went over to her stove, squinted at the bowl of soup for a minute, calculating, then sighed and handed the whole thing over. It was too small to make any sense splitting. Jet Jack hesitated, although she was visibly shivering.
"Just take it," said Faith. "Now. What did you do?"
"Um." Jet Jack looked stricken and took an unnecessarily slow sip of the stew. You could see the gears turning in her head. Faith watched her impatiently, trying to ignore a sudden stupid urge to smile at Jet Jack's mohawk, which was soaked past recognition. She looked ridiculous, but then again she looked no better dry, in Faith's considered opinion.
"So, before I tell you about the real problem," said Jet Jack at length. "Could I ask a . . . theoretical question?"
Faith rolled her eyes, but decided it wasn't worth the extra dithering to call Jet Jack's bluff.
"All right," she said instead.
"Sooooo," said Jet Jack. "Theoretically. Um. How angry would you be iiiiiif . . . I . . . um, sank the Dieselnaught?"
"Sank it?" Faith started back. "How did you manage to sink it?! Where?"
"Hypothetically!" sputtered Jet Jack. Then she caught Faith's look and swallowed. "Um, just outside the village."
"Really." Faith folded her arms and gave it some thought. "Well then. Let's just say it's a good thing this is a hypothetical question—"
Jet Jack gulped, set aside the soup bowl, and headed for the door.
"You get back here!" Faith caught her by one wing and spun her back around. "Start talking, Jet Jack."
"It's fine, I'll fix it!" said Jet Jack, still trying to edge away backwards. "Sorry to bother you!"
"Well, now that I'm bothered I can't very well stop!"
"Please don't be angry," said Jet Jack, holding up her hands pleadingly. Faith faltered, her heart clenching against her will at Jet Jack's pitiful tone. Screw this; if she could be remorseless with anyone it should be Jet Jack, who had her seething a good fifty percent of any given day. And yet.
"Ugh. All right." She took a deep breath and let it out, resigning herself to a miserable upcoming evening. "All right, damn you. Talk. Why were you driving the Dieselnaught? You know you're not allowed."
"I know," mumbled Jet Jack, her eyes on the floor. She was broadly banned from driving anything, let alone the Hunters' biggest rig; she couldn't steer worth two shakes. "But it was the only vehicle strong enough to lift up the aqueduct."
"The aqueduct?!" Faith had her second heart attack of the evening.
"It's fine, it's okay!" squeaked Jet Jack, throwing up her hands again. "I shut off the water supply, it's not flooding! A-anymore," she added very quietly.
"Jet Jack!" Faith was beyond even feeling sorry when her second-in-command flinched. "You could have flooded the entire village! Or the fields! Or both."
"I know," whispered Jet Jack.
"How did you manage to knock down the godforsaken aqueduct?"
"Well . . . you know that big water pump that pushes the water over that one part that's uphill a little, over the wall? . . . "
"You knocked that down?" Faith was out of heart attacks for the day. "How?"
"By accident," mumbled Jet Jack.
"So I should hope," bit out Faith. Jet Jack flinched again. When she volunteered no more information Faith folded her arms.
"Jet Jack. What were you doing."
"I was just hiding from the rain," said Jet Jack. "You know, there's that sort of platform on top of the wall, for the pump to stand on. I was underneath that."
"And?" demanded Faith. Jet Jack shrugged miserably.
"And?" Faith pressed again. "Enlighten me here. You were sitting under a platform hiding from the rain, and what? You suddenly decided to push on it and tip the pump off the wall? For fun?"
"Not for fun!" sputtered Jet Jack. "By accident."
Faith glared, silently demanding further explanation.
"I was startled," said Jet Jack, shrinking.
Faith continued to glare. Jet Jack shrank a bit more.
"There was a spider."
"Jet Jack—"
"I'm sorry!"
Faith pulled herself together and stood still for a moment, trying to process.
"Let me make sure I have this," she said at last. "You were sitting under the platform for the water pump. You saw a spider. You hit the platform trying to get away, the pump tipped over and fell on the aqueduct, and then the aqueduct fell over. Then you decided to use the Dieselnaught to fix the aqueduct. Instead, you managed to sink the Dieselnaught."
" . . . Yes ma'am."
Faith dragged her hands down her face, sighing.
"Unbelievable." Back in Ninjago she had been educated on the use of the word "wow," but she'd never felt any urge to use it until today. After a moment she sighed again and went for her waterproof coat.
"All right. I'll get Muzzle and No-Legs, you get Chew Toy and—"
"No!" yelped Jet Jack. Faith turned around, startled, and Jet Jack quickly subsided, reddening. "I-I mean . . . Can you . . . Could you not tell them?"
"What?" Faith looked at her in fresh disbelief.
"They'll laugh," mumbled Jet Jack, ducking her head again. "That's . . . that's why I came to you."
"Of all the—" Faith didn't know how she had any more disbelief left in her today, yet here they were. "Listen. You manage to dig yourself into the world's deepest hole, and then you want me to be the one digging you out of it, just so you can save face over your stupid fear of spiders?"
Jet Jack hunched her shoulders in mortified silence. She had at least that much decency. Faith glowered.
"And you do realize that if anyone in Dead's End deserves to get laughed at—"
"I know, I know!" Jet Jack moaned. "That's just it! Everyone's got it in for me. I'm going to be hearing about this for the rest of my life—"
"And it serves you exactly right!" said Faith hotly.
Jet Jack was silent for a moment. Faith continued to glower, caught in a bizarre tug-of-war between indignation and pity. She did kind of see what Jet Jack had to be afraid of; when it came to her relationship with spiders even Faith made fun of her, and when things reached that point you knew you were badly off. Not to mention she could just imagine how much satisfaction the others would get paying Jet Jack back for a lifetime of teasing and tricks. She'd be massacred. But on the other hand, who was Faith to interfere with cold, raw, richly-deserved justice—
"I'll be good for a week," said Jet Jack suddenly.
"Eh?" Faith raised an eyebrow.
"Or, or—a month, even," said Jet Jack, looking up at last. "No stunts, no sass. I won't pick any fights, I won't tease you, I won't do anything reckless, I—" she gulped, but forged onward "—I won't even mess with Chew Toy. I'll be a, a model citizen. If you just keep this between you and me." She tilted her head hopefully. "Please?"
Faith digested this for a moment.
"Well," she finally said. "When you put it that way . . . "
The disaster area was just that—a disaster. Faith was again tempted to use the word "wow." Daddy No-Legs had upgraded his rainwater collection system a while back, and it was now so efficient it needed extra tanks. There was no more room for water tanks inside the village walls, so part of the collection system had been routed up over the wall and channeled through a short wooden aqueduct into another, larger tank. No-Legs had insisted it was more efficient to just add a pump to help the water slightly uphill, rather than knocking a hole through the wall. Meanwhile the aqueduct was just a series of wooden troughs held up on large beams, but these beams were attached to large crosswise bases at the bottom. They weren't supposed to topple over for anything—yet somehow the falling water pump had apparently succeeded.
The one piece of slightly better news was the Dieselnaught. From Jet Jack's degree of panic, Faith had expected to find only the exhaust stack poking up out of the water, but actually it had only mired one of its treads in watery sand. Probably that watery due to the spillage from the broken aqueduct, as well as the continuing rain.
Jet Jack stood in shame-faced silence while Faith surveyed the damage. Eventually she glanced back to her right hand.
"Was it at least a decently big spider?"
Jet Jack groaned, reddening.
"It better have been at least the size of Muzzle," said Faith, hitching a coil of chain up on her shoulder. "Come on. Dieselnaught first."
Hunters had never heard of quicksand, which was maybe for the best, at least in this case. Technically the sludge around the Dieselnaught's treads qualified, but it was only knee-deep and Faith and Jet Jack didn't know enough to be uneasy about it. As it was, Faith walked Jet Jack through the process of hooking chains around the Dieselnaught's treads for better traction, then clambered up into the cab.
"If this doesn't work we'll have to hook the front to something for a winch," she said, then looked down at the controls. "Huh. Why did you put it back in first gear?"
"First gear?" Jet Jack looked confused.
"You . . . did try it in second gear, didn't you?" said Faith.
"There's a second gear?" said Jet Jack plaintively. She edged back a little as Faith stared at her. "What? Look, I don't drive . . . "
"Dear forsaken sands, Jet Jack," Faith finally breathed, turning back to the controls. She yanked the engine to life and threw the giant rig into second gear, and it crawled effortlessly up out of the quicksand.
"We probably didn't even need those chains," said Faith, glaring over her shoulder. Jet Jack looked away in silence.
The remainder of the process wasn't as bad as it could have been. With the Dieselnaught's prodigious hauling power and Faith's knowledge of rig handling, they easily got the aqueduct back upright and nudged it back into position. It was a little sandy, but the rain would remove the evidence quickly enough. Then they winched the water pump back to its spot atop the wall. It was broken, but not terribly battered. It wouldn't be impossible to pass it off as routine mechanical failure.
Jet Jack worked hard all throughout the grueling process, almost over-eager. Faith was snappish initially, still annoyed that she was sacrificing a snug, peaceful evening at home to bail out this incompetent hussy she didn't even like, but Jet Jack tolerated her mood so quietly that she soon felt guilty and toned it down. The steady exertion finished the work of smoothing her over, aided significantly by the fact that nothing went too terribly wrong.
Finally everything was sorted. Faith backed the Dieselnaught into its covered parking spot and tossed a rag at Jet Jack.
"It's going to rust," she said, and went to get a rag of her own.
Jet Jack was quiet as they worked. Quite probably it was the longest span she had kept her mouth shut in the entire contiguous year. It got to the point that even Faith, who loved her silence, felt compelled to fill it.
"We'll lose the whole night's worth of rain collection," she said morosely. "But I suppose the tanks wouldn't have held that much anyway."
Jet Jack grimaced, wringing out her sopping-wet rag and moving on to the last portion of the Dieselnaught's hull.
"Remind me about this the next time I complain about you being too serious."
"I just might take you up on that," said Faith. "That'll almost make up for how sleep-deprived I'm going to be tomorrow."
Jet Jack grimaced again.
"And thanks for not being too angry, either," she said softly. Faith looked up, startled; she had expected the previous foray to be the most thanks she was going to get.
"I was really in a bind there, for a while," continued Jet Jack, wringing out the rag one last time and hanging it up to dry. "I couldn't figure out which would be worse, everyone else making fun of me or you yelling at me. But I guess I chose right." She gave Faith a hesitant smile.
"Huh." Faith tossed her own rag aside, surprised to find herself touched. Now that she thought about it, the evening hadn't really been so bad. Definitely not as unpleasant as she'd have expected, given her choice of company. Maybe even a little rewarding. Not like she'd ever let on, of course.
"Ah, well. I didn't want to give you any grounds to take back your promise about being good for a whole month."
"O-oh." Jet Jack's eyes widened behind the visor. Clearly now that the worst of the crisis was over, she was regretting her brash bargains. "Right, uh . . . You know . . . " She gave Faith an anxious glance, trying to assess what she could get away with. "You know I wasn't maybe . . . entirely serious when I said that, right?"
Faith looked back at her flatly, not surprised in the least, and wrung out her ponytail.
"Oh. That's a relief."
"I-I mean, a whole month, that's a long time, that's—" Jet Jack came up short. "Wait. A relief?"
"Now I don't have to feel guilty," said Faith, striking out homewards through the rain. "I didn't mean it when I said I wouldn't tell anyone about this, either."
"Wha—" Jet Jack scrambled to her feet. "Hey. You know, on second thought—wait. Hey Faith, wait! I take it back!"
Faith gave her a serene glance as she caught up, still looking mildly panicked.
"Blackmail," she hissed, wounded.
"If you say so," said Faith blandly.
Jet Jack looked chagrined for a moment, then abruptly snorted and bubbled into frustrated laughter. Faith cocked an eyebrow, puzzled, but eventually had to look away to hide a smile herself. She had expected to enjoy Jet Jack's irritation over the deal, but if she was taking it in stride, that . . . actually wasn't disappointing, somehow. For just a second she felt oddly close to her first officer; it verged dangerously close to affection and it bewildered her thoroughly. She caught a nearby slick-hopper watching her with its bulging eyes, and quickly sobered, giving the frog a stern look as if expecting it to carry tales.
"Fiiiiiine, you've got me," Jet Jack was groaning, giving her a grudging smile. "Fine. All right. I'll be good."
"Hmph." Faith yielded to temptation again and gave her a wry smile back. "For how long?"
The slick-hopper brooded over its puddle, watching the two Hunters vanishing into the rain with its usual froggish face of disapproval. Jet Jack's laugh drifted back again, mixing with the soughing of water pouring off the eaves.
"Ehhhh . . . how good's your memory? . . . "
Prompt was "Secret."