Work Text:
“Is is just me, or is this totally ridiculous?” Wilson complains, and he lets out a disgruntled sigh as he wanders over to stand behind Rob.
“What, how long it’s taking this computer to access a local database?” Rob grumbles. The loading bar is frozen at 66%, so he smacks the side of the monitor with his palm, and it starts chugging along again. “David’s already pulled the photos off the sub; this shouldn’t be the hard part.”
“No, not that,” Wilson replies. “I mean that they drag us all the way out here on the tugboat and don’t even let us double-check our work. Isn’t that the whole point?”
Rob takes a moment to look away from the computer screen. Wilson has migrated back to the door of the docking bay and is standing against it with his arms crossed, squinting through the foggy plastic window as if he might glean something new from it. “They don’t want civilians near the convict,” he reminds him, flatly. “We’re civilians.”
“Jack is in there.”
“Jack has to make sure that the sub doesn’t fall apart.”
“But he doesn’t know everything to look for—yeah, he helped put it together, but I’m the one that designed the damn thing.” Wilson shakes his head. “How dangerous can one convict sealed inside a metal box be, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I just do what the captain tells me to do.” The computer lets out a loud beep, and Rob turns back to it, only to be greeted by the grainy jaws of some massive skeleton filling the screen. “Woah. Come look at this.”
“The fuck is that?” Wilson asks. “Is it alive?”
“I have no idea,” Rob confesses. “This is the most recent photo off the SM-13.” He stares at it for another moment, until a chill runs down his spine, and he jabs the back arrow on the keyboard. The picture clicks to a much less sinister image of some blurry rocks, but the unsettling sensation remains. “I hope it’s not alive. Because if it is, it’s probably underneath us right now.”
“Jesus. Yeah. Okay. Don’t like that,” Wilson replies. “I’m glad I’m not the one going down there.”
“Yeah. Poor guy.” Rob hesitates; he doesn’t want to think too hard about the stranger on the other side of the photographs. He turns to look back at Wilson and starts, “Do you—” before he’s distracted by a sudden flash of light from the window. “What the hell was that?”
“Oh, fuck,” Wilson swears. “The camera.”
“The cam— you mean the fucking x-ray?!” Rob exclaims, and he stands up so fast that he nearly knocks his chair over. “How is that even possible? How much radiation—”
Wilson looks back at him, and his face is deathly pale.
Rob decides that he doesn’t want to know anymore, and crashes back down into his chair. “Oh, God,” he croaks.
Wilson slams his fist into the wall beside the door, creating a resounding bang. “Fuck!” he shouts. “I knew I should have been in there, that fucker probably hooked it up wrong, I knew it—”
“Maybe it’s not that bad?” Rob offers, even though he knows better, and he regrets it immediately. “It is that bad. Fuck. That just… happened. Right now. In front of us. Fuck.”
Wilson drags his hands over his face. “Two weeks. That’s how long. Two weeks.”
All of a sudden, the door slams open, revealing two familiar figures. Ava’s expression is twisted into pure rage, and her arm is curled around Jack’s torso, holding him upright. Jack, on the other hand, is practically draped over her shoulder, and he looks sickeningly green. At least, the parts of his face that aren’t riddled with fresh burns look sickeningly green.
“Keep this door shut!” Ava barks at them immediately. “Don’t let anybody in or out without my permission, and that includes David. I’m taking Jack to medical.” She doesn’t wait for a response before storming off, practically dragging Jack with her, and Wilson hurries to shut the door behind her.
“Yes, ma’am,” Rob says, just for good measure, even though he knows she can’t hear him anymore.
Wilson’s eyes continue to stare at the spot where Jack disappeared, and Rob watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. “Maybe less than two weeks,” he amends. “But I’m not a doctor.”
“I don’t think you have to be a doctor to know when someone’s fucked.” Rob feels terrible saying it, but ever since the Quiet Rapture, terrible things have become so commonplace that he doesn’t think twice. “I’ll, uh… I’ll write the eulogy if you tackle the scheduling.”
“Jesus,” Wilson mutters under his breath, and he hangs his head. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
Wilson drops his bag on the floor and slumps down onto the couch next to Rob. His head immediately falls into his hands and he lets out a defeated sigh, which tears Rob’s attention away from the game of Solitaire But Worse he’s been playing all afternoon on the card table.
“Still no luck?” Rob asks, sympathetically.
“I’m beginning to think he’s died and they just won’t tell me,” Wilson admits. “They won’t even take his stuff to him for me. It’s bullshit.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry, man.” Rob scoots closer to Wilson and puts his hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly. “We’re both doing the best we can, yeah? That’s all we can do.”
Wilson looks up at him slowly, and he sniffs back a tear. “Yeah… God, it just all happened so fast, and after everything, I don’t know how to—”
Rob’s about to pull him in for a hug when both of their pagers abruptly go off in unison.
Their eyes lock, and they both say, “Fuck.”
Wilson stands first, and snatches up Rob’s jacket from the back of the empty armchair. Rob instinctively opens his arms to catch it before Wilson even throws it, and in what feels like the blink of an eye, they’re both rushing out the door.
When they reach the tugboat, the SM-14 is tipped on its side in the docking bay, and the air is full of smoke. David stumbles towards them, and Rob immediately grabs him by his collar and shakes him, while Wilson splits off to find something to bust the sub open with.
“Who’s in there, David?” Rob demands, but David just coughs in his face. Rob grimaces and shakes him again. “Tell me who’s in there!”
“Ava— fuck, Ava… and the convict, I think…” David chokes out.
Rob doesn’t bother to thank him before he lets him go, and David lands on the floor with a dull thunk. Then, he turns to Wilson and shouts, “Ava’s in there! With the other guy!”
“Already on it!”
Rob frantically looks around for anything he can use to help, and his gaze lands on a crowbar. He snatches it up and races to Wilson’s side, where he’s using some sort of fancy laser cutter thing to slice through the welding. The seams look sloppy; Rob swallows thickly as he realizes Jack must have done this after the accident.
As soon as Wilson’s finished making the first line with the laser cutter, Rob wedges the crowbar into it and, with some effort, pops the sub open like a tuna can.
A fresh cloud of smoke billows out of the opening and directly into Rob’s face, tearing into his throat and making him cough violently. He nearly drops the crowbar as he reflexively turns his head and brings an arm up to cover his eyes, but then Wilson is there, deftly snatching it out of his grip and continuing to peel back the layers of steel.
“Here, I’ve got—” For once, David does something helpful, as he rushes up to Rob with a pair of goggles clutched in his hands.
“Fuck, you’re a lifesaver.” Rob plucks them from his grip and slides them over his watering eyes. Then, he sheds his jacket, leaving him in only a tank top and vest, and yanks up his bandana over his mouth before he forces himself to turn back to the sub. He takes one deep breath of clean-ish air, then clambers up into the hole.
Inside, it looks like a murder scene. He barely recognizes Ava, only able to identify her by her braid, with the amount of blood drenching her clothes. Luckily, most of it doesn’t seem to be hers, but when she looks up at him from where she’s attempting to drag herself across the angled floor, he realizes what’s wrong.
One of Ava’s pant legs is torn to shreds, revealing flesh mangled by some kind of animal bite, judging by the tooth marks—and a big animal bite at that.
Rob swallows, remembering the skeleton on the SM-13’s camera, before he pushes that thought away and grabs Ava’s outstretched arm. He hauls her up, then immediately scoops her off of her injured leg. She doesn’t even protest, and that’s what makes him realize how much shock she’s in.
“Here, give her here!” Wilson shouts from atop the gap in the sub, and Rob heaves Ava up into his waiting arms. “I’ve got her, get the other one!”
Rob’s lungs are screaming at him to stop, and even the shallowest of breaths sends horrible pain clawing at his throat, but he pushes forward. And there, curled up in a ball in the far corner of the sub, is a vaguely man-shaped mass of rags and blood.
He can’t speak to him, so Rob can only hope that the man doesn’t try to fight back. As he draws closer, he realizes that the odd shape of his body is because one of his arms has been violently ripped off, and that combined with the stench of blood makes his stomach twist. But he persists, and he doesn’t think twice about plunging his bare hands into the congealing blood surrounding the convict.
The poor man doesn’t struggle either; in fact, he barely moves at all except to tremble in Rob’s arms. Blood seeps onto his skin and soaks his clothes as he hauls the convict towards the exit, almost as if it’s gushing from the man’s body itself rather than just leeching off of his bloodstained clothes.
Once again, Wilson reaches in and takes the man from Rob’s arms, freeing up his hands to get himself back out of the sub. For a single, terrifying moment, his blood-slick fingers almost can’t find purchase, and his heart leaps into his throat. But, then, Wilson reappears, and with his two sturdy hands grabbing the back of Rob’s shirt, he manages to climb free.
Rob jumps down from the side of the toppled sub and stumbles, his legs not quite sure how to respond to the amount of adrenaline coursing through his veins. David appears at his side, and for a brief second, Rob thinks that he’s going to steady him, only for him to rush past with his hands clutching a fire extinguisher instead. Slowly, Rob lowers himself to the ground to catch his breath and look around.
Ava has pulled herself up to sitting and is currently emptying the contents of her stomach onto the floor. It’s disconcertingly red, though Rob doesn’t know if that means she’s bleeding internally, or just that she swallowed some blood in the chaos. The convict, on the other hand, is laying completely prone, with his eyes squeezed shut and his one arm splayed out to the side, panting raggedly like a dog.
“Captain,” Rob croaks, and his voice grates against the inside of his throat, making him sound like he’s smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for life. “What’s his name?” He shakily raises a hand to point at the mangled, human-like shape.
Ava blinks at him with one bloodshot eye, disbelief contorting her face, as if she can’t believe that he’s asking this now. But, she answers him nonetheless, with a simple, “Simon.”
“Simon,” Rob repeats, slowly. “Figured after all of this I should at least know the poor bastard’s name.”
Ava gazes at him with an unreadable expression, then nods.
“Jesus Christ, Mousey, are you okay?” Wilson appears at Rob’s side, and Rob nearly laughs at hearing such a stupid nickname at such a serious time. However, he holds himself back when he sees the dead sincerity on Wilson’s face. “You’re insane, you know that, right? I’m the engineer, I should have been the one going in there, but you just went—”
Rob genuinely doesn’t know why he did it; he just acted, without any sort of serious, conscious thought behind it. But, he doesn’t say that—instead, he says, “Well, I’ve got bigger lungs.”
Wilson snorts a reluctant laugh. “Guess that’s fair. Can you walk? We’ve got to get these two to medical—and you should probably get checked out too.”
Rob’s limbs still feel like jelly, but he thinks he might be able to push the adrenaline a bit further. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he replies. “Just winded.” He extends a hand, and Wilson hauls him to his feet. “Thanks.”
With surprising gravity, Wilson responds, “Always.”
“I didn’t get the data,” Ava confesses, through gritted teeth, and Rob stares at her.
“What?”
“I didn’t get the data,” Ava repeats, in a low hiss. “There wasn’t time— fuck, this hurts.” She shifts her injured leg further up onto her pillow, grimacing. “I got to him before he got the black box, and there was this— this thing right on top of me, so it was either him or nothing. And I owed him that much.”
“How did you get him out?” Wilson pipes up, from the other side of her bed.
Ava hesitates. “I’m going to be honest, I…” She shakes her head, then finishes, “…I really don’t know.”
It’s late, and Rob is wedged into one corner of the couch, slowly making his way through a book he’s read a thousand times. It used to be his, before the COI formed and the necessity for communal libraries arose; even with the paper rations, the COI still understands the need for some form of entertainment, so confiscating all books into a collective was the solution. Rob doesn’t mind it very much; the books far outnumber the people left alive to read them, after all.
Wilson is sitting on the opposite end of the sofa, shuffling a tattered old deck of playing cards. Those, he had been allowed to keep—apparently, something about the way the material was treated made it hard to reuse. Nonetheless, they’ve seen a lot of use in their apartment over the years.
Suddenly, Wilson flops over onto his side, landing him squarely in Rob’s space, with his head mashed up against his chest. When Rob raises an eyebrow and looks down at him, Wilson just mutters, “Don’t say anything. Shit’s just been hard recently.”
Rob happily obliges him, and silently goes back to his book.
However, he only makes it a few more pages before there’s a frantic series of knocks on the apartment door.
Confused, Rob pats the pocket of his vest, but finds his pager silent. “Who the hell is coming by to visit at this time of night?” he questions aloud.
Wilson shrugs. “Sounds urgent, though.” The knocking hasn’t stopped, nor even slowed down. “C’mon, your book can wait.”
Rob sighs and stands up, then follows Wilson to the door with as much haste as he can muster. By the time he reaches it, Wilson has already slipped the bolt free and pulled it open, revealing—
“Jack?!”
“No time to explain,” Jack wheezes. There’s another man leaning on him, and Rob doesn’t recognize him at first. “David tried to kill me. We need to hide.”
“Holy fuck, yeah, get in here,” Wilson exclaims, and he reaches out to haul Jack and his companion inside. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Jack replies, dryly. “Is there somewhere Simon can lie down?”
Rob turns around from where he was re-locking the door, and the name suddenly pings in his mind, bringing back memories of acrid smoke and blood-slick bodies. “Put him on the couch,” he decides, hastily. “Sevens, grab the first aid kit. You two really do look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Jack repeats, with even more exasperation, and he limps over to the couch like there’s something seriously wrong with his legs. “Getting shot will do that to you, apparently.”
Rob rounds the sofa as Jack settles himself and Simon down on it. “You got shot?” he questions, aghast. “How the hell are you even—” He’s giving Jack a once-over as he speaks, and when he looks down, his train of thought derails instantly.
Something is seriously wrong with his legs, Rob realizes, numbly. Because they’re not Jack’s legs anymore.
From the knee down, Jack’s skin is firm and scaly, and his feet sport three large, hooked claws.
Rob swallows, thickly, and decides to deal with the gunshot wound first.