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I HAVE 3000 HOURS ON RIMWORLD??? what the fuck.
#guys play rimworld so i can talk about rimworld more#i mean i can talk about it regardless. but play it so you all know what im saying#the first time i ever bought my colony a pet goose his tail got obliterated#and yes the game used that term.#his tail was obliterated by i think a space pirate punching him too hard#also the other day one of my character's new child got struck by a freak meteorite#theres thousands of tiles for a meteorite to spawn and it happens maybe once a year give or take on average#and the little bastard got shredded into a fine mist#also in the games words.
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part 1 ; had we but world enough and time
when the call comes in, jaewon is in the piloting seat on the right side of serenity’s bridge, the day slow and dark, the sky spotted with stars and void, all the verse spread before him like a plate, open and waiting and smooth, clear sailing between worlds as far as he knows, a job already in haul, a mission already half finished. it’s a smuggling run, a simple point-a-to-point-b type of trade, but it’ll be a substantial enough payout to get them to the next phase of their profession, and they’ll be delivering it to higgin’s moon, which is usually steady enough with work that they shouldn’t need to travel again to hunt for errands. they’ve had a slew of dependable business lately, nothing too fancy, but with jaewon being most of his own crew at the moment, he doesn’t want to let on to dealers that they’re running a little thin.
he doesn’t even currently have a pilot, most of serenity’s flight determined by autopilot features, except during check up times, mornings, afternoons, and after dinner, when jaewon comes up here to inspect everything, make sure it’s all running smoothly, maybe give the auto-run a little break. she’s not used to flying so long on her own and he doesn’t want to wear her down too soon, doesn’t want her to forget too easily that she’s not abandoned out here, that she’s still in good hands, that she still has his heart. old machines, ones like these, need care and precision and regular tuning, old machines like these need reminding that they still belong to someone, or they’ll rust, they’ll fade, they’ll die.
space is too cold for either of them not to check in on each other once in a while.
when the call comes in, jaewon is cruising serenity, relaxed and informal, staring off into the distance like he’s sleeping with his eyes open, and the sound of cutting buzzes jolts him out of his trance like a lightning bolt, immediately leaning up and frowning over the console. the call blips in and out, pieces of words, something shattering, something screaming, the fuzz of static deafening and rattling through the speakers. he fiddles with a few of the controls, lighting up the booster, shifting around the frequencies.
“are you-- for the--- iver side---- at, can yo--- his---”
his face darkens as he begins catching words, hearing the tone, hearing the voice, recognizing it just a bit, just enough to raise his blood pressure, enough to focus all his attention on this transmission, flipping on the autopilot once more so he has better reign over the other controls.
“rat---” the sound fizzes and shudders, the screen glitching through white noise before finally bringing in a picture, messy and disastrous, the image of a man with a death-grip on his console, wide eyes, bare teeth, sparks and warning lights crashing all around behind him. “rat!”
“saito?”
jaewon doesn’t speak much about his past, his history buried deep in the lining of his stomach, in the threads of his skin, in the pupils of his eyes; he doesn’t brand his experiences across his face for the verse to read and pick from, every curious gaze licking and pulling him apart; he doesn’t give anyone under stars or suns first dibs about the horrors he’s witnessed or the hells he’s climbed out of. those who know him, know that he is a mountain, built upwards towards the sky by his own hands, stone by stone, coal by coal, the whole of him a creature of kept secrets and sewn lips, of teeth that keep words locked tight behind them. for all that he burns, he burns alone.
but saito is everywhere in that history, as littered throughout jaewon’s memory as vera, the two of them a pair of pseudo parents jaewon hadn’t ever imagined he’d get as a child, but whereas vera was a mother who taught him how to read, how to captain, how to live, how to breathe, how to fly, saito was as vallurian as he was, and therefore much less verbal with his input, much less apparent with his influence.
saito was a firm character in jaewon’s upbringing, able to weather any storm brought by vera or her crew, able to handle the constant missteps and hazards a smuggling pirate ship often amasses; he was vera’s first mate and the archetype jaewon followed for what a vallurian offworld could look like. he taught jaewon how to fight like a vallurian, how to stand like one, how to run towards dangers instead of flickering between them, instead of snarling his way through them, instead of slipping around them, his atmosphere shifting gradually from a thief in the alleys to the heir of his heritage. saito taught him that it didn’t matter if he was an orphan, it didn’t matter if his family had or hadn’t abandoned him next to a dumpster, no name, no age, no memory, all of valluria had raised him instead, all of the universe was inside him, everything he ever needed, he already had.
when he thinks of saito kyoji, he thinks of him with three blades strapped across his back, burly and stronger than a god, walking at the right hand of vera blackhound as they stream through the stars together.
not like this, not in a ship that’s falling apart behind him, not with panic and determination in his gaze, not with something tugging and desperate in his tone. “jaewon! can you hear me?”
“i hear you,” he responds back. “what the hell? where are you?”
“i’m on a ship called ‘the emerald dragon,’ i’ve been hailing out as many sos as i can and i saw the firefly, can you get to me?”
jaewon makes quick work of opening up the ship’s range, tracking the signal from somewhere behind them, out towards the cygni contra system, a group of partially formed asteroids in a belt formation, the mining operations there making it difficult to locate the other vessel pinpointedly. alarms scream and flash through the transmission and saito’s ship crashes into something, making the older man curse and struggle with his controls.
“i’m an hour away if i really push it, can you hold on?”
saito’s systems tell him they’ve been hit. “not much.”
“fuck.” jaewon leaves the line open but pushes away from it in a hurry, reaching for the comm and connecting it down to the engine room, where he hopes henry is hiding out at this hour, still busy with his list of repairs he intends on doing now that he’s back. he’s not going to like this. “henry, i’m about to raw-drive serenity into the cygni contra system, i need you to direct as much energy into the engine as possible, shut everything unnecessary down.”
“what?” henry doesn’t sound amused. “why?”
but jaewon doesn’t answer him, doesn’t feel like he should need to, hanging up the comm immediately and shifting back to the handles of the ship as he shuts off the autopilot and kicks on the brakes, the thrusters rumbling and growling beneath him as they turn. he tilts the yoke wheel to a hard left, which always bugs out the artificial gravity unit, the velocity pulling at him forward and sideways, something falling and crashing behind him loudly enough to make him wince, but not loudly enough to make him stop.
in the transmitter, saito fuzzes in and out, his ship obviously crashing, obviously falling to pieces, obviously obliterating itself through the tangle of asteroids, and jaewon grits his teeth in frustration, in need, in fury, as he turns his ship in the opposite direction and punches serenity’s blaze-through, kicking the ship into a higher gear. again the gravity module shivers and takes a minute to right itself.
“saito, why the hell are you in an asteroid belt? you know the cygni contra system is--”
“i know,” saito snaps, just as stressed, if not more, than his protege. “it’s volatile. but it was our only shot at ditching the tail on us.”
“you’re being tracked?”
“jaewon, its--- they’re--- from the---”
“saito?” jaewon tries, glares, his eyes dodging between the screen on the console and the window up above him, all the stars and planets so frustratingly large and far away that it doesn’t seem like they’re traveling hardly at all. he knows serenity is moving, he knows she’s flying at top speed, at a hard pace, pedal to metal, but the illusion is enough to gnaw on his insides, to sink heavy into his gut like a stone. “you’re breaking up, can you hear me? saito!”
“i’m--- for the--- at?--- time---”
“fuck.”
“what’s going on?” harper’s voice rings in through the bridge door, alert and worried, maybe a little angry and ready for anything, but jaewon can’t stand to look back at her right now, can’t stand to look at anything other than the two pillars of his life still alive, the two things left in jaewon’s sphere that he still has who have raised him-- saito and the sky.
his lips are pulled back, his jaw clenching, his hands white-knuckled around the yoke, burning through serenity’s fuel like they’re made of it, like they’ll never run out. “saito! can you hear me?”
“with the-- give you--- boy--”
harper leans over the console, careful not to get in jaewon’s way, but wanting to see what it is he’s seeing, what it is he’s hearing, recognizing the situation too clearly, either from jaewon’s expression or from the way saito flickers in and out, the image of him blurry but catastrophic. “can we get to him in time?”
an hour. an hour out, flying like this, an hour flying with their wings outstretched, with their arms pitching forward, bending forward, inclining forward, and he knows serenity won’t like this, won’t thank him for this, won’t recover easily after this, but he also knows she can survive it. he knows she can hold fast and stay true, and fly steady, even if she’s churning, even if she’s scorching, even if she’s angry about it.
he locks his fears and his doubts and his hesitations behind his teeth, where they cannot get out, where they cannot breach the space around him. “saito, if you can hear me, i’ll get there. i’ll make it. i’m coming.”
“aewon--- uctions--- put it--- on---”
and then the screen cuts completely to black.
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