BONUS EPILOGUE: Guys Like Us . . .
<Set after the final chapter of 'The Last Coffee Shop,' but before the Epilogue. Just a short fic to explore Graynard/Vul'Peck's thoughts/reactions while escaping Ga'naa. VERY unedited brain vomit, so please tell me if there is anything embarrassing I should fix>
The brilliant Atelian doctor Vul'Peck, most recently known as Captain Graynard Peck, had been many things in his eighty-six years (GST). He was still young, but he felt incredibly old as he guided the tiny shuttle on its bumping trajectory away from the hellscape known as Ga'naa for what was (hopefully) the last time.
It wasn't uncommon for Atelians to live to three hundred on their home planet of Rax, which meant that by Ateli standards, Vul'Peck was insignificantly older than Jupiter Jive himself. But that gap felt like centuries sometimes.
A bolt of pain from his arm took his concentration from the cramped, spider-like gear shafts and knobs in the shuttle. It was a hopper, meant for short distances only. But he didn't need to make it far, just to one of the smugglers' bolt holes where he could tend to his gunshot wound and switch to a skimmer. If only they hadn't met that bloody, cursed woman, may her angry ghost haunt this Waste forever. If only idiot Jive hadn't decided to take her hostage instead of dumping her the minute they left town, like Vul'Peck had suggested.
If only, if only. This entire hellscape was a burial ground filled to the brim with "if only."
Vul'Peck thumped a many-fingered hand against the pain in his arm, feeling the heat and the anguish flare up in his body and his soul. He didn't know which part was the worst. What Jive–Luc, hellscapes, how Vul'Peck hated that name–what Jive had made him do, or what that woman had done to them both. Vul'Peck fully believed that she would turn in Jive for the money. The look on her face when she'd shot him; it could have frozen all the lava in Ga'naa. And Vul'Peck felt a touch of childish, vindictive satisfaction that this same woman was the one Jive had made himself such a fool over. A worse fool, amended the Atelian, in his thoughts, than usual.
At least Vul'Peck no longer had to deal with the way those two looked at each other, when they didn't realize it, or thought he wasn't watching. Stars, but it made his skin crawl. If he hadn't been so angry, so betrayed, so in pain, he would have laughed at the way it all ended. They deserved each other. If there hadn't been so many Galactics involved, he wouldn't have even resented it.
Of course, not that Vul'Peck was innocent. Anything but. He knew that he'd betrayed Jive (Luc) from the minute they'd docked on Helen's Point. Until then, it had only been a little half-formed wish, nesting and nourished in over a decade of little frustrations. He was half-convinced these ran both ways. But what bothered him more than all the crossing and double crossing was the suspicion that maybe, just maybe, had the roles been reversed, Jive wouldn't have betrayed him.
As he flew across the blank sun-scorched face of the Waste, Vul'Peck's thoughts and emotions swirled along with the spiraling sand his skimmer kicked up. Not for the first time, he regretted having given that humanoid ratling a second glance those fourteen years ago. The boy had been all angles back then, legs as long and bony as an insect, with bright hazel eyes that twinkled up at Vul'Peck with a suggestion of the irrepressible spirit behind them.
At first Vul'Peck had thought the human was a girl, although his knowledge of human biology and genders was admittedly slim. The sharp chin, the colorless, delicate face, and the matted curtain of mud-colored hair that fell to the boy's waist had been his only indicators to go on. Not that it mattered. The child was human, and a waste of space.
But then the kid had pulled out a handful of Galactics, and Vul'Peck had found himself growing curious. How did such a dismal, discarded snack wrapper of a creature have enough Galactics to buy passage on an elite freighter, and why was he using it to try to bribe Vul'Peck instead. Vul'Peck had been even more shocked when the boy (he thought) offered to buy him lunch in exchange for listening to his story.
Vul'Peck had been what some humans called 'between flights,' trying to distance himself from Rax, even though he ached to go back to the cold, lung lancing fresh air of his mountain village. But that was impossible, since that last operation had gone so wrong, and he'd been using his medical and mechanical skills out in the Galactic talent pool for the last twenty years. He'd only stopped over at this miserable mining colony to refuel.
Even then, covered in years of grime and stinking of engine grease, the boy Garou had a spark of something. At first, Vul'Peck found it amusing. Especially when the kid had managed to convince the crusty old barkeep to give them a free side of fried Nearly-Fish™(1) crips. But when the kid sat back like a man twice his age with the confidence of a king, and told Vul'Peck to pick anyone in the room for him to rob, that was when Vul'Peck got interested. He was mildly amused by the idea of watching the runt get torn to shreds by some heedless space wrangler, so he picked the meanest looking grunt in the room.
Vul'Peck was shocked and delighted when the boy Garou presented him with the target's custom 6-shot side arm, its silver beetle carapace winking promises of lethal functionality.
"Anything," said Vul'Peck, as he turned the piece over in his dominant, seven-fingered right hand. "You can steal anything?"
The boy had lifted his pointy chin, still as confident as a little lordling. "Anything," repeated the boy. His speech was heavily accented, and whatever language he was speaking was unfamiliar to Vul'Peck, but that's what automated translation in-ears were for.
Unfortunately, whatever language the boy continued to rattle on in also seemed to be a sort of cobbled together criminal's argot, and the translator kept giving Vul'Peck conflicting options on whatever else the filthy brat was trying to say. Vul'Peck resolved to restrict the boy to one word responses until he could consult with the rest of the crew. But without realizing it, Vul'Peck had found himself thinking as if this child would come with him. And that was what had happened.
The boy had quickly proven to be more useful than Vul'Peck would have ever suspected. First the boy stole Vul'Peck's crew some extra funds. And then he stole them a ship. Next, a surgeon's kit that belonged to the Imperial High Sub-Chancellor Lorn's private doctor. The smile on the boy's face when he presented the kit to Vul'Peck had almost stolen the crusty Atelian's crustier heart. Almost.
And somehow, after three years of living as a slim, slight, darker patch of Vul'Peck's shadow, the boy, who had since recreated himself with the pretentious and incredibly laughable moniker "Jupiter Jive," was invaluable. And worse, he was very quickly becoming in charge.
This didn't bother Vul'Peck, not exactly. Vul'Peck himself had always preferred to do his work in the background. The medical bay, in particular, was as close to his past as he could get. But Jive craved the spotlight like a junkie craved hits; there was no end to his hunger, and he moved on to another success as soon as the current one sweetened his lips.
Vul'Peck had a longer-term philosophy, an end-game that involved him lounging atop a pile of victories (and maybe the heads of the Ateli Medics Guild who had dared to discharge him and strip him of his rank). But for a time, he thought they could make use of each other. He had not expected to feel something for the boy. Not until it was too late.
The first time Vul'Peck realized he cared about the child was when, after several months of letting the kid trail him, he realized the boy couldn't read. Not just Galactic Standard, but any language. Garou/Jive only knew crude symbols that were unfamiliar even to the most expansive and comprehensive translation bots. Vul'Peck knew he could have had a bot teach the kid. But he did it himself. And he never quite knew why. But there was just something so pathetic and fragile about the boy, like the synth-snowflakes Ithir was famous for. Vul'Peck never decided if it was a carefully cultivated trick or not, but whatever it was, he couldn't deny the efficacy. Garou, later Jive, was absurdly good at getting what he wanted.
As Vul'Peck's crew had become Jivers, as they'd all become besotted with the boy who was very quickly bending and stretching into a pick-your-pleasure, customizable hologram of a man, Vul'Peck had drifted to the shadows himself. Vul'Peck was the guide and teacher, the one who patched them all up after every escapade. He helped with escapes and entries, and he stitched up endless slices of Jive.
When everyone and everything in Jive's life was forgotten, discarded, or ensconced in a treasure room to be a mixture of both, Vul'Peck felt a touch of warmth at being the only moon in Jupiter's orbit. Vul'Peck was too old and realistic not to see it exactly like that. He was as snared by the kid as the rest, but the only one who had managed to get in his own snare in return.
It had been just the two of them, for fifteen years, and they'd always had each other's backs. Even the three years of Jive's curse had only strained the bond, not snapped it. Vul'Peck had been the one who scraped him up from wherever he'd collapsed, "dead" again and covered in someone else's blood and guts. It was Vul'Peck who had monitored the ankle tracker and helped to shock, prod, and guide Jive's nightmarish cursed form away from the innocent victims that Jive was so strangely concerned for.
Was Vul'Peck bitter? No. Yes. Maybe a little. He'd thought of the little sharp-faced and sharp-toothed prostitute's brat he'd first met, on that grimy nowhere station, and forgiven a multitude of inconveniences. But a rope can be worn down for years, and all it takes is a shift to finally snap it.
Vul'Peck had been against the stopover in Springs Village from the start. Just go to Ga'naa, he'd said. Get it over with. But Jive had insisted on it being the exact same time as when he'd stolen that cursed icon (a mistake of a theft that Vul'Peck had highly cautioned against in the first place). Jive was sure that this thing was different from everything he'd returned. Sure that this was the piece that had caused his curse. And so Vul'Peck listened, just as he always did.
They stayed in the village for far too long. Longer than either of them had planned, or wanted. And there, that was the shift that caused the rope to snap. Of course, Vul'Peck had enjoyed himself a bit, at first. The barista's grandmother had been charming company, and it was entertaining to watch Jive play the socially inept and completely boring Luc.
Vul'Peck had kept his end of the bargain. He'd kept Jive's cursed form from hurting humans, he had helped ready everything, every tiny piece of the plan to get Jive un-cursed, out alive, and both of them off planet with the PK's none the wiser. While Vul'Peck couldn't place exactly when his own plan had started to brew (maybe it was even before the village, if he were really honest), but by the time he'd seriously considered turning Jive in himself, Vul'Peck was already half-committed.
The plan had a sort of poetry. Jive would be the key to Vul'Peck's success and future security. And if the boy wanted to come back to haunt him as a vengeful ghost, or even as a living man who'd spent a sobering holiday in a brutal prison, Vul'Peck could have borne that. But it was the way Jive had let everything fall apart, after fifteen bloody years, all because of a prickly barista with a stick up her butt, who sincerely believed she wasn't even interested. It had made Vul'Peck furious.
He'd tried to turn it back to his advantage, of course. Tried to salvage the situation. But it was too late. He should have known she would betray him. But he'd thought she was just as big of an idiot as Jive. Just as likely to fall for him in the end, just like everyone else. And that had been Vul'Peck's only major miscalculation.
And it was an understandable mistake. Vul'Peck had seen Jive charm anything that breathed for fifteen years. And just like he had as Garou, Jive had always gotten everyone and everything exactly where he'd wanted them.
But not today, Vul'Peck thought to himself, with a little bit more satisfaction than he'd expected. He'd no doubt that those Peace Keeper dogs would bundle Jive off to some ultimate security facility, probably sentence him to death, and then he'd slip into their hearts and their heads and make them want him too. That was just how he worked. Would they kill him, in the end? Only if that somehow figured into his plans, which Vul'Peck doubted.
No, Vul'Peck was sure Jive would get out exactly when it suited him–and only then. But if and when he did get out, Vul'Peck knew where Jive would go, and he even suspected why. And when Jive dared to show his pretty face Ithir-side again, Vul'Peck would be waiting. But this time, Vul'Peck would be the one calling the shots. And if that venom-tongued barista got in the way, Vul'Peck owed her a different kind of shot. And unlike her, he never missed.
(1) Nearly-Fish™, Nearly-Pork™, and Nearly-Beef™, now available in marts or for delivery anywhere in the Semi-Galactic Empire. The Nearly™ series is a registered trademark of the Better Than Ever Food Corporation. Look for new additions next Galactic Standard Year!
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