#and to be clear dazia falls in love FIRST

[boycaca]

Fem soukoku au where chuuya gets reincarnated into a harem game she played and instead of romancing any of the male leads she falls in love with the villainess….

[spacetimewraithwrites-archive]

Fictober ‘21 Prompt No. 1 — “I need you.”

Category: Original WIP: WASTE Rating: T Timeline: Not too long after Guetry has been implanted with Scotty CW: None Word Count: 1,142 Additional Notes: I love exploring the relationship between these two.

***

Guetry stared through the opening of the mine shaft, flat on his back across austere stone. His eyes were not focused on the night sky painted with diamonds and the rich purple of wines made in his vineyard, as it would have appeared to a bystander. His attention was, instead, zeroed in on the small hole in the visor of his helmet, currently sending the HUD into hysterics and draining him of air with each passing second.

“S...Scotty,” he choked.

“You have twenty minutes before asphyxiation,” Scotty said. Matter-of-fact, directly in his ear, as always. Even in the face of fatality. “I cannot seal the breach as my connection to your equipment has been severed.”

Despite the situation, his cadence did somewhat have a soothing effect.

Guetry closed his eyes and reached up to assess the extent of the damage to the helmet. “What do I do?” he asked. His chest heaved under the breastplate of his armor as he attempted to steady his breath and not waste what little oxygen he could get. “What...what do I do? What button, what switch...?”

“I have no connection to your team.” Scotty sputtered violet in the corner of Guetry’s eye. “Other than the automatic distress signal that went out as soon as your visor sustained damage.”

“Shit...shit.” Guetry rolled himself onto his side, scrambling for purchase on solid ground. “Twenty m—twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.”

“There’s been some trauma to your implant as well, as I’m certain you can discern for yourself.”

Guetry’s frantic gaze darted around the shaft, desperate for an escape or something to close the breach before he blacked out. “Scotty...please stop telling me things that are up—upsetting to me.”

“The fall into the mine cracked the back of your helmet open. The damage is permanent.”

“What the hell did I just say,” Guetry wheezed. He yanked the helmet off his head with shaking hands and threw it farther into the mine.

“Are you in pain?”

“I don’t know. I can’t feel most of anything right now.” Guetry took a few sharp breaths. “You gotta keep me going until someone gets here, or until I get out of here, whichever comes first.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Guetry tried to drag himself closer to the entrance, but his arms had already begun to fail him. “Scotty, I don’t plan on dying today. Keep...keep my brain alive or something. Do literally anything.”

“My designation doesn’t work in that way. I can’t sustain you when there isn’t sufficient oxygen.” Scotty paused as Guetry gave up in the center of the opening and collapsed onto his stomach. “I also don’t think I made myself clear. I’m unable to access life support.”

Guetry went still. “Do something.”

“Guetry—”

“I need you. Please.”

Scotty once again fell silent. “I will attempt to contact your team again.”

With strength he was surprised he had at the moment, Guetry pushed himself onto his back. “Hey, if I...” He broke out into a hacking cough as his lungs strained to sap oxygen out of the air. “If I don’t make it, send my sisters...and my dad a message.”

“When I am tethered to you, the event of your death will permanently deactivate me.”

Nodding, Guetry swallowed. He opened the front pouch of his supply kit and withdrew a flare. “Tell my sisters and my dad that I love you.”

“You love...them?”

Guetry ripped the packaging of the flare open with his teeth, the edges of his vision turning black. He took a couple shallow breaths. “Yeah. We can pretend that’s what I meant.”

He raised the flare and fired it straight through the opening of the mine. A single flash of red light exploded upward, carried a bit by the gaseous wind of the planet’s surface before disappearing into the sky.

“Think they saw it?” Guetry asked weakly, hand dropping onto his chest.

Scotty didn’t answer.

Guetry's eyes grew heavy. “Don’t...don’t give up on me. Not now.”

“I could say the same.”

“Say it, then.”

“Don’t give up on me, Guetry.”

Guetry watched a dark blur move over the mine entrance. The words echoed in his mind repeatedly until he was no longer conscious.

---

He awoke again in a bed, clocking before he even opened his eyes that he was in a med fac somewhere. He’d been in enough of them to pinpoint them by smell alone.

Dazia’s tired face turned to him from her spot in the chair across the room. “Morning, sleepyhead.”

“Oh, shit,” Guetry groaned, bringing a ginger touch to his forehead as a headache slammed into him with the force of a meteor.

“Good to see you, too, jackass.”

“Did you pull me out of that mine?” Guetry peeked at her through his fingers, avoiding the harsh light.

Dazia nodded. “Yep. Your little stunt sent Tux into a panic spiral so I had to pick up the slack.”

“It did not,” the nuaclan said from the other side of the room.

Guetry laughed even though it hurt his throat. “The only thing that would send Tux into a panic spiral is if someone took so long to get rid of my body that it implicated her.” He turned to look at her with a grin. “Ain’t that right, baby girl?”

Tux rolled her eyes, but the smirk stretching across her wide face said enough. “Idiot.”

“They had to take Scotty for a bit,” Dazia said. “It won’t be for much longer. NodeSource fixed your implant—they’re just running diagnostics to make sure everything’s square.”

“Okay. That explains the migraine.” Guetry nodded, a hand coming up to his temple on instinct. His fingers knocked into the cable leading out of his port and into a terminal next to his bed, likely operating to take over a fraction of what Scotty maintained. “He deserves a wellness check.”

When they were united later, after his doctor and a NodeSource technician made sure everything functioned normally and after Guetry had started a game of solitaire on his bed, he sighed into the empty room, eyes following the cable attaching him to the computer.

“Is everything alright?” Scotty asked.

“Yeah, man.” Guetry sniffed. He turned a card over. “Just...hope you don’t make a habit out of scaring me.”

He detected a hint of hesitation. “I won’t.”

“...I guess I owe you an apology, too.”

“Not for doing your job, you don’t.”

Guetry cracked a small smile. “I could say the same.”

“Then say so.”

He glanced through the two-way viewscreen affording him a look out into the hospital corridor while granting him privacy. Doctors, nurses, and patients milled about, some in more of a hurry than others.

“I’ll do my best not to worry you too much,” he finally said.

“Worry is not within my programming.”

“Nah.” Guetry’s smile widened. “Don’t buy it.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while.

[spacetimewraithwrites-archive]

grinding

whoa, if you’re the same anon for this and the next three words, thank you very much! you gave me some challenging stuff and I love it.

[Don’s 1 Year Celebration!]

GRINDING

Words: 1,404

***

“Did you ever think this would end? Because I was starting to think this shit would consume my life.”

Guetry let out a short bark of laughter, dropping out of the shuttle before it made a complete stop on the landing pad. He attached his rifle to his back holster and spun on his heel to face his teammate as she climbed out behind him. “You got somewhere to be, ma’am?”

Dazia hocked a loogie and it splattered against a shipping crate. “I’m fucking your dad later.”

“Oh! Great. Happy for him, but could’ve done without the trauma those words in that order just bestowed onto me.”

Tuxth exited the shuttle as well, ducking so she wouldn’t be scalped by the doorway. “I am not looking forward to the paperwork.”

Guetry pulled a metal cigarette out of one of his many pockets and stuck it between his lips, already setting his sights on the port so he could officially call this mission done. “Yeah, I feel like you’re not telling the whole truth there, Tux.”

“Just a sec, guys,” the shuttle tech called out from the front of the vehicle. “Controls are a little wackadoo, gotta do a diagnostic before I can let you go.”

Guetry waved him off and turned to Tuxth and Dazia, walking backward across the tarmac. “If you cover for me I’ll owe you several drinks.”

“You’re an asshole,” Dazia grunted while Tux rolled her eyes. “But you’re lucky we love you.”

Guetry winked and faced the large glass building several yards away, drawing a hit from the cigarette, coughing lightly around the minor tickle to his throat from the dusting of reaver rock mixed within the tobacco. He started mentally running through the extensive to-do list for when he got home, blocking out everything going on around him.

Beep.

It was an inoffensive blip of sound, but Guetry came to an abrupt halt in his tracks anyway, eyes cast straight ahead. No one else seemed to hear it, and he glanced over his shoulder at Dazia and Tuxth, who didn’t notice it either, chatting away amongst themselves at the edge of the landing pad.

Beep. Beep.

Dazia stopped mid-sentence to look around the area, gaze falling onto Guetry in silent question.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Oh god,” Dazia said suddenly. “That’s the projectile proximity—”

The missile zipped into the glass building out of nowhere, spraying shards through the air a split second before detonating, a fireball pulsing into the sky, followed by a plume of thick, acrid smoke. The shockwave knocked everyone within a hundred yards to the pavement.

Guetry pulled himself to his knees and blindly grabbed for his rifle, blinking the flash from his eyes and shaking his head to will the ringing away. He peered upward, catching the allegiant fighters zooming across the airspace.

“Shuttle!” Tuxth shouted. “Now!”

Guetry looked at the flaming wreckage of the port, eyes wide. He could just make out a charred body or two at the edge of the blast radius and rage overcame him, his grip on his weapon tightening.

He scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the shuttle, diving through the open door before Dazia closed it in his wake.

“Get this fucking thing off the ground,” he snapped at the shuttle tech. “I don’t care if you have to promise it all the riches in the world, do it!”

The tech sighed, annoyed. “That’s not how this works!”

Guetry reached across Tuxth to pound his fist against the console with so much force he nearly split his skin open. The lights in the controls sputtered and flashed, then held steady.

The tech grumbled under his breath before piloting the trio off the landing pad.

They carefully watched for each fighter streaming through the air, choosing to follow one in particular that had launched another missile at the port. Tuxth shifted from one side of the shuttle to another, throwing the door open as they climbed higher.

Guetry and Dazia perched halfway out of the door, aiming their weapons, pelting the passing fighters with bullets and shots of neon energy until one caught fire and spiraled out of control.

"Our target keeps swerving away,” the shuttle tech said, flipping a switch in the ceiling to activate the pressure barrier in the open door. “It’s hard to keep up.”

Guetry watched the fighter make a hairpin turn to pass directly underneath them, a blast of sharp red hitting the side of their vehicle and rocking it precariously. As Dazia kept shooting, he observed their movements, tracked their pattern. Hairpin turn...straight...hairpin turn...straight. An elaborate zig-zag.

“Hey,” Guetry said, snapping his rifle onto his back. “Tell me something you like about me.”

“I like it when you shut up and focus on the mission at hand,” Dazia said, replacing her heat sink.

Tuxth frowned at him over her shoulder. “Is your ego really that starved?”

Guetry drew his pistols from his hips and moved his breather onto his face, activating the pressure field. He gestured encouragingly with a pistol. “C’mon. One thing, Tux.”

“I...guess I like...your hair.”

Guetry grinned, backing away from the door. He watched the radar on the shuttle console, waiting for the fighter to make its hairpin turn, and shrugged. “I’ll take it.”

Before anyone could register what was about to happen, he took two running steps and launched himself out of the shuttle, twisting through the air to aim his pistols at the incoming fighter. The wind whipped violently past his ears and he surrendered to the deafening roar. He could feel his own heartbeat pounding against his chest, desperate to escape as he fell faster toward the ground and the fighter sped closer.

He opened fire. The fighter got closer. Closer. So close he could hear the engines over the wind.

Then he smacked into the roof, absolutely breaking a rib or two, and he hooked a leg around jutting bar in the exterior to keep himself from flying off as he pressed the barrel of his pistols into the red metal.

He looked away and fired, tearing a hole straight into the cockpit of the vehicle in a shower of sparks. He took out the pilot with a headshot and slid inside, shoving the allegiant out of the seat and squeezing himself behind the console to take over.

Guetry piloted the fighter around to the other allegiants, picking them off one by one with the help of the shuttle until eventually, they whittled them down to one very scared allegiant who crash-landed into a clearing several miles away from the port.

Tuxth, Dazia, and Guetry all tumbled out of their vehicles after they touched down, sprinting through the stringy grass after the allegiant dragging herself out of the cockpit.

Guetry caught up first, grabbed the Rotangan around the throat as she tried to dart away, slammed her back into the side of the felled fighter and jamming the tip of a pistol into her temple. “You know what comes next, don’t you, princess,” he chuckled in her face.

The allegiant choked and gasped, stammering in her native language.

“They got the port’s coordinates from a double agent of Hyret’s,” Tuxth said. “That...was surprisingly easy.”

“There were innocent people in that building,” Guetry murmured low at the allegiant. “Did you know that? Did you know there were people going about their business, living their lives day to day, probably wishing for all of this bullshit to finally end? Do you know how many families you fucking destroyed back there?!”

Dazia placed a gentle hand on his arm. “Hey. You just dropped a couple hundred feet out of the sky; maybe it’s time to let that frenzy meter cool down a bit, yeah?”

Guetry took a deep, shuddering breath through his nose as he stared daggers into the allegiant’s skull. He released her, shoving the pistol back into his holster and pushing the sleeves of his duster jacket up to his elbows. “Fuck this. I gotta go.”

He ripped the breather from his face and marched away from the crash, distancing himself from the proceeding arrest and flying the fighter back to port so he wouldn’t have to share space with the allegiant.

He also didn’t speak to Dazia or Tuxth the rest of the day, choosing to brood inside his head far beyond going their separate ways back at the Node.