Bleak meter: Leans only a little bleak, but a touch of gore as well

Timeline: Starts before Season 9/Hunted, ends after Season 10/MotO

OrchidHill: Hai fren! Thamk. Yaaaaas, Hunters.
"Goodnight Moon" would fill them with rage, they'd want to know why this inane little rabbit keeps saying goodnight to inanimate objects. And ya, that's something I wondered about myself, but then I remembered that in Season 9 Cole and Wu briefly find that cave with dragon cave paintings. They do have art.
Only for lack of more permanent inks, trust me.
Let me put it this way, not a day goes by that she doesn't ask herself when she became a nursery worker. :P
Eh, that was a factor, let's put it that way. I've already been hinting at it over in the dumb Season 10 fic and I wanted to make it official.
Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of tone shifts.
Nar, they just wrap fabric around their hands or wear welding gloves. Not too exciting.
Eh heh. She's opposite to Faith in just about EVERYTHING. I don't know if she even qualifies as a foil anymore, I thought with a foil you were supposed to have at least something in common. XD
Thamks again!

It was a searing hot day—no surprise there. There were multiple mechanical failures after the most recent hunt—also no big surprise. An uneven sound of hammers and wrenches wove through the repair yards as Hunters tried to piece their speeders back together.

Chew Toy was gnawing the vine of a desert gourd as he worked. Tasteless and completely without nutritional value, but it was something to chew on.

"Would you rather taste nothin' for the rest of your life, or everything tastes like sandapples?" he said out of nowhere.

He quickly regretted opening his mouth as multiple puzzled gazes turned his way, including the silent dark eye of Heavy Metal.

"What kind of a question is that?" said Iron Baron. "If you don't have anything worthwhile to say, keep your mouth shut."

Chew Toy tucked his head down and returned to work. The others did as well, without further comment. It was very quiet for a while.

Later that day he was still tightening bolts in the hull of a speeder when Heavy Metal passed by on rounds. He stopped and looked at Chew Toy, who tucked his head down again and continued working, praying that the cold dark gaze would slide off him soon.

"Since you asked earlier," said Heavy Metal, oddly hesitant. "Probably nothing."

"Huh?" Chew Toy looked up nervously. Then his face brightened in understanding. "Oh! Really?"

Heavy Metal shrugged.

"I could eat to stay alive even if it had no taste. But I would get sick of sandapples."

"I could never get sick of sandapples," said Chew Toy earnestly. "I just think I'd get confused if everything tasted like them."

Heavy Metal rolled his one visible eye, but Chew Toy was fairly sure he was smiling. The Baron's right-hand man dipped his head in acknowledgement before traveling on, leaving Chew Toy with his spirits much improved.

Heavy Metal was an enigma. Not only where he'd come from and what he was, but even his next move was hard to figure out.

He took orders without flinching. He listened to the Baron's fits of rage with unruffled, unmoving silence. He could be plenty harsh himself when enforcing the Baron's will. He offered no excuses, made no contradictions. He was obedient.

Wise of him. He was also the one watching in silence as blood dripped steadily from the Baron's elbow, each drop swallowed by the sand; the final destination of a stark crimson rivulet pulsing from around a dagger in the chest of one of their former archers. The man himself stood with unseeing eyes, supported only by the Baron's blade. When that withdrew his corpse crumpled to the sand.

"Does anyone else want to offer some objections?" grated the Baron, looking around at the silent watchers. "Good."

So Heavy Metal would have known the price of defiance. Everyone who lived in the realm more than twenty minutes did.

But apparently he was a gambler. Behind the Baron's back things quietly went undone sometimes. There were silent eyerolls now and then. His counting skills seemed to fluctuate wildly depending on how unfair the task being counted was; once or twice there was a whispered discussion ending in an agreement of, "if we both say it happened, technically it happened."

Hunters knew where their bread was buttered. Everyone had a private sense that the right-hand man was secretly on their side, at least a little; the permissive parent, the one you could turn to for a scrap of mercy after Iron Baron had finished steamrolling you. But nobody talked about it much. If it became too broadly known the Baron would get word of it, and then Heavy Metal would die and their days of clemency would be over. So it continued mostly unspoken; obedience on the surface and every sympathetic hand on a shoulder a small, quiet rebellion.

Old Redskull sometimes said annoying things like, "don't put rocks in a Hunter's backpack unless you want to be the one carrying it later." These things were annoying because they kept being right too often. After years of quietly undermining Iron Baron from her second-in-command position, Faith suddenly ended up in charge herself . . . and all too aware that she was now the one whose back it was cool to whisper behind. She could no longer play the good cop to Iron Baron's bad cop. When the orders were unpleasant she was no longer just the messenger; when she was kind or lenient she was no longer heroically risking her neck to do it. She was just Faith. The one to blame when everyone resented having to work in the fields.

It was one of several reasons that Jet Jack just maybe got away with just a little too much. She never disobeyed or even openly questioned an order, which already left Faith feeling like she had dubious grounds to punish her. And while she could certainly have stood to be more respectful, there were always voices in the back of Faith's head chattering that if she told Jet Jack to watch her mouth, it would either make her look too harsh, too much like the Baron, or too weak, too easy to upset. How both of those managed to be in force simultaneously, Faith would never know.

And then, a part of her found the smart comments perversely reassuring. Better to let Jet Jack run her mouth as she pleased and believe—hope—that that was the full extent of her dissatisfaction. Better that than demand she bite her tongue and then wonder what she was saying behind Faith's back.

And lastly, and perhaps most self-defeating—

A small crew was disassembling one of their oldest speeders for scrap. During a short pause in all the hammering and crashing, Chew Toy sat back, mopping at his face, and asked out of nowhere, "If you never had to drink water again in your life, would you still do it?"

"What?" said somebody, while a few others looked at Chew Toy blankly.

"Would I still feel thirsty?" said Jet Jack, without missing a beat.

"Nah, no feeling thirsty."

"Then of course not," put in Faith, who had been passing by on her rounds. Several Hunters started and turned as if they'd never heard her speak before; Chew Toy included. "And waste all that extra time looking for water you don't really need?"

Chew Toy blinked, looking like a lizard pinned to a wall.

"Yeah, good point," he said at last, and hastily picked up his hammer again. He was a deferential sort, if a poor actor. Faith watched as the others resumed work, aware of a strange ache somewhere inside her but unable to put a name to it.

Self-defeating and an all-around terrible policy. But some days she let Jet Jack talk back just to feel like anyone talked to her at all.

Prompt was "Defiance."