Chapter Text
The cerulean fights the joystick with all her strength, but the ship is veering and there’s nothing her slipping mittens can do about it. Gamblignant boarding shuttles flitter about the Aurora like sweatnibblers on a musclebeast, the battleship’s canons swatting at them just as ineffectually as a rope-braid tail on a hindquarter. The ship bucks again under her palms and sends her flat on her spinal crevice.
“Darn it!”
It’s a valiant effort to repeal the pirates, but unfortunately for her
YOU’RE ALREADY HERE
“Maybe give it another go?” her goldblood co-pilot says with gleeful pep as he helps her to her feet. She snaps her arm away immediately and harrumphs, “I can take care of myself!”
The goldblood is about to reply when the looming bronzeblood, the final threat in this section of the bridge if Jjaakk’s perimeter comes back clean. He stands between the two of them, grunts an indeterminate grunt, and pulls them apart by the back of their necks. The cerulean pouts at first, but then she joins the goldblood in looking appropriately baabeastish.
But the machinations of beleaguered middle leafs are not your focus, for Jjaakk has just returned, and he’s given you The Nod. You spring out behind the shield of abstracted archway cover, the metaphorical fins of this battleship meant to help its crew defend should ever a boarding party ever breach its insides, and unleash your attack.
SLEEP
You’ve only accomplished this in training before. Using psionics on three adult trolls is for mutants and accomplished highbloods, for those who have more than SLEEP at their disposal. But a twisting, un-trolllike part of you hopes that if the ship can be taken and spare a few lives in the process, then that is a possibility you must grab.
Blessedly—Demoness watch over you—three sets of knees buckle as you press your shrike’s eye into their thinkpans like an unsubtle knife. The cerulean fights you the longest, but that is still less than a second, not enough to press the alarm under the command console. Instead, she smacks her nugbone on the edge of the platform on the way down, and the ship is yours.
“Showoff,” Jjaakk says.
You smile. He reminds you of Gabe so much sometimes.
That thought leads to roads and winding paths so you simply choose not to follow it. You go to the console, and radio into the secured channel of the gamblignant fleet: “objective secured. The Aurora is ours.”
You can imagine the violent cheer that that is happening on each individual fighter in the frothing sea of battle below you, one of snarls of and triumphant howls and fists raised high. Does it echo in Doomfist’s flagship? Is the command center there silent, contemplative?
Is he even still there?
It disturbs you to realize you don’t even know. Gabe, the old Gabe, would have been back in his fighter before the sutures had been removed, but you have been increasingly aware over the past five sweeps that he has…changed. He’s more scalpel than knife now. He calculates. He actually listens to his auspistices and Demoness knows you never got him to do that for you. It almost makes you wish…
Your fingers idly trailing along the chittering feelers of the control panel assay your wandering thinkpan, but the hard proof comes when the bronzeblood comes slamming into your back.
“Ana!”
He cracks what feels like your entire spine as he slams you into the bridge’s elliptical window, a forearm as big as your waist pinning you by the throat. You were sure he was out it must not have taken entirely, and now you pay and pay again, Jjaakk’s voice warbling through your consciousness as he spins his weapon on the troll holding you. SLEEP you demand, but it’s so much harder while your lungs are in the process of being snuffed out. The bronzeblood picks you up and slams you again. Jjaakk’s rifle fires. The combination of force and plasma and the window behind you shatters.
Space.
There’s no air here, but that doesn’t make it all that different than before honestly. What they never say is that it’s the vacuum that kills you, the moisture getting sucked through unprotected ganderbulbs and subnegative temperature that eat your skin your digits your throat. They say the higher your caste the heartier but you wonder. You wonder, as you float further away from the change in pressure that shot you from the ship like a canon, how long an empress could survive in space. If the Condescension could be brought down in one fell swoop, would she survive out there, floating? Untethered? A queen surrounded by the remains of her greatest achievement.
It is with this image, of flakes of metal flittering around like stars, that you feel a hand close around your wrist.
It isn’t Jjaakk. He was too far, you are gone, gone…aren’t you? Yet there are voices, and back in through the shattered hole of glass, then finally to a section of ship re-pressurized as an airlock closes behind you. “Stay awake, Captain,” he says, and you do not do as he says. Though, that only lasts for a minute and then you are
bombarded
with psionics. Though not like any psionics you’ve ever felt before, your own nor those you’ve on the rare occasion battled against. This…you open your eyes. Eye. Your shrike’s eye is woefully damaged, you can feel it, but you can still see the un-alternianly yellow light surrounding you in this tiny little airlock at least four others are crammed into with you.
Jjaakk is one. But the psionic is the one that draws all attention, the one who is glowing, who is healing you instead of turning your mind to mush. Her hair is free of its tie and there is no doubt it the light is coming from her.
Because she has wings.
When the light fades, and you sit up and pat yourself over, you give her a look. “Well now. I see why our aspirant is so keen on you.”
She flushes mustard in her cheeks.
The wings are a pale yellow and gossamer, just like the legends of the Summoner’s mythical mutation. Apparently there was more truth to those tales than even you realized, and you still breathed when the Summoner walked Alternia.
Jjaakk shakes his head. The others, which you are finally taking stock of, are less surprised. Mercy’s morail, you can’t recall his name, is sitting by her side, steadying her after what was most certainly an extreme exertion of psionics energy.
And there. The one who you know is called Pharah because you figured this all out rather quickly and couldn’t help but ask.
Your descendant cannot decide to shyly avoid your eye or to stare in abject wonder. You cannot but help but muse how such a thing could come to be, so soon after your own hatching, to spawn something a whole caste above your own. Yet here she is. To look in her face, there is now denying it. You reach over and pat her hand.
“There there ḥabībti. It takes more than that to kill me.”
It makes sense that your first words to her would be as such.
Cut short is your reunion. Your Royal One is boarding.
Less than an hour after being dead and you salute straight backed as the Aspirant and Doomfist come to see what you have claimed for them. (For you are of the fleet, and centuries do not change in sweeps, no matter how devoted you are to the cause.) The bridge is no longer a suitable place to receive them thanks to your little oopsie, so instead the ‘inspection’ takes place in a grand amphitheater where the grand ceiling bubbled itself upwards into the grand dome of the sky. Ships still flit about as the Successor makes great sweeping paces of the ship, and untroubled and victorious grin on his face.
He is still grinning that grin when he forms as sweeping bow to the Aspirant and offers the ship to her in its entirety.
Zarya obviously isn’t expecting it. No one in her entourage is, and if you know anything of her Strategos from the brief times you’ve met, you’d bet their mind is a bunch of little cogs someone is shaking around in a desk drawer as they try to calculate their next move and the political ramifications of being awarded a war prize.
But spoils and political dealing are beyond you. More to your interests is that the violets are at it again, and Zarya is handling them quite well thanks to your training. You smile
The amphitheater is a mess of cheers and calls. Jjaakk still manages to sidle up and say, “showoff.”