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Swansea doesn’t wake with a shout, or a jerk, or anything so dramatic. He just opens his eyes to his cabin ceiling looming above him, a ceiling he hasn’t seen since the Tuplar crashed, and feels like cursing.
Damn, he was counting on there not being an afterlife. Oblivion had started to sound pretty damn appealing long before Jimmy fired that gun.
He rolls onto his side on the narrow, hard bunk that nevertheless feels extravagantly comfortable after sleeping in front of the utility room door for months. The door takes up nearly half the opposite wall, and he stares at it, waiting for something to burst through the closed but unable-to-be-locked door and start tormenting him. He’s always known that if there was an afterlife, he’d be going down, and besides, no heaven would ever take the form of this rundown, godforsaken monument to corporate greed and the foolishness of expecting anything good for yourself.
Swansea lays there for a long moment, but nothing seems eager to burst into his space and start the torture. Typical. Well, nothing for it. He forces himself out of bed and starts pulling on his uniform, grease-stained and almost comforting. He’s certainly not going to sit around and torture himself, even if just with boredom. Time to get this horror show started.
He slides the door open and immediately spots a figure standing in the narrow hall. The light is dim and blue from being in the middle of the night cycle, leaving the person little more than a silhouette of a man resting his hand on one of the doors. Of course it’s fucking Jimmy, because who else would be here to torment Swansea but the man who caused everything in the first place.
The asshole is tall and rangy, oddly proportioned in a way that probably means he didn’t get enough to eat growing up and still doesn’t get enough of the right stuff. God knows that the shit Pony Express provides wouldn’t help at all with nutrition, even if there is usually plenty to eat. His shoulders are broad in a way that means he could certainly have an impressive amount of muscles if he tried, but that he almost certainly never tried.
Swansea could definitely take him, now that he’s not half out of his mind on mouthwash and rubbing alcohol.
“The fuck you doing up?” Swansea says, because apparently the way his thoughts slide out of his mouth in the mornings applies even when waking from the dead.
Jimmy jerks around, and for a heart-stopping moment Swansea can see a gun in his hand, glinting in the minimal light, but there’s nothing there. “Jesus,” he hisses, “don’t sneak up on me.”
Swansea raises a brow, unimpressed. The doors are plenty loud enough to alert anyone actually paying attention that someone’s around.
“Well?” Swansea prompts, impatient. All he wants to do is clock the asshole in the face, but something — maybe the late hour, maybe the creeping feeling that not everything is as it seems — holds him back.
“Can’t sleep,” Jimmy finally says, sounding defensive. He pulls his hand away from the door and turns to face Swansea directly. “What about you? The fuck you doing up?” He echoes Swansea’s words like knives.
“Going to the shitter,” Swansea lies. “Would be real awkward if you were headed there, too.”
Swansea can just barely see Jimmy’s face wrinkle in disgust.
“Whatever,” Jimmy spits. “I’m going back to bed.” He turns on his heel and opens the door across the narrow hall from the one he’d been touching, then stalks into the room and slams it shut behind him.
The clang of the door slamming echoes through the small area. Swansea narrows his eyes at the door Jimmy disappeared through, then the door across the hall. This area had been sealed off by foam during the crash, so it’s been months since he’s actually been here. But his mind isn’t so addled by what happened to forget whose room is whose. And that room, the one right across from Jimmy’s, the one the other man had been lingering outside of like the creep he is… that room is Anya’s.
Fucking hell.
Swansea sits in the lounge, staring at the artificial night sky, and wishes desperately for a drink. A beer, a cocktail, some fucking coffee even. But the coffee machine is already empty and there’s no alcohol allowed aboard Pony Express property. None except the mouthwash they’re hauling, anyway, and Swansea has had enough of that for two lifetimes.
Everything is quiet save for the normal clinking of the pipes and the faint yet omnipresent hum of the engines. Before, Swansea had never thought much of the sound, but after those nightmarish months where it was gone and its only replacement was Captain Curly’s agony, that constant hum is somehow more comforting than any other sound he could think of.
The more time passes, the less this seems like an afterlife. Everything just feels too real. There’s no weird looping hallways or non-euclidean angles, no strange visions or flashes of what occurred. Just the ship, slightly more real than he remembers before the crash.
And that’s the thing. Nothing is bothering him or torturing him, nothing except Jimmy’s continued presence on the same plane of existence. Maybe whatever hellish creatures are going to torture him are laying in wait somewhere, prepared to jump out as soon as he lets down his guard, but Swansea isn’t feeling terribly inclined to bet on it.
Swansea has witnessed some freaky shit in his life. Has seen a vision of his own bloated corpse. Time travel? That’s a little far out there and yet… it feels right.
Honestly, even if that’s not what’s going on, even if this is some sort of morbid dying dream or an indecently patient hell, it’s probably best to proceed as if it is. Being here means that he can change things. Means he can make things better, or at least less bad, for however long he has.
Swansea doesn’t really consider himself to be a good guy. He’s pretty convinced he’ll be going to hell, for chrissakes, and not just because he took an axe to a kid’s head to spare him further suffering. He’s just never been inclined to consider more than himself and the people important to him. But if he has the chance to fix things, to take responsibility and make things right, and he doesn’t take it? He might as well have never woken up.
So. Time to make a plan, because like fuck is Swansea going to let that shitstain of a copilot drive everyone to their deaths a second time.
The thing is that Swansea could solve everything by just straight up killing Jimmy. By walking into his unlocked room and smothering him with his own pillow. By smashing his goddamn head in with any number of heavy implements that a mechanic has access to. By stabbing him twenty-eight times with the knife the captain isn’t supposed to leave in the kitchen but keeps there anyway. By beating him to death with his bare fucking fists.
Swansea lets himself imagine it for a long moment. The unstable light leaving the fucker’s eyes. The blood and skull and bits of brain exploding from the site of impact and splattering across the walls in a pleasing way.
It would be so easy.
And yet Swansea can’t actually kill Jimmy, no matter how much he wants to, no matter how many problems it would solve. Jimmy hasn’t actually done anything yet, as far as the rest of the crew are aware, and killing him would mean the rest of Swansea’s life in jail. Or worse. If he picks his moment wrong, it could mean being stopped by the rest of the crew, unable to finish the job and the scrutiny landing on Swansea rather than its proper target. And with so few people in such a cramped space, that’s a recipe for disaster.
So. Swansea needs both patience and a plan. Patience has always been in short supply for him, but he does know how to bide his time, even drunk off his tits, and he’s doing this stone-cold sober. He can manage.
A plan, on the other hand… that’s going to be trickier. He doesn’t know how much time he has to work with before everything goes down. Even if he knew what day it is, which he doesn’t, that wouldn’t help much because he’s never been in the habit of tracking time on long hauls like this one. The days all feel the same anyway, why bother keeping track? He’s feeling more than a little annoyed by his past attitude now.
So the first step has to be establishing a timeline. And for that, well, the only point of reference he has is Anya. Anya, whose struggle he was fully, maybe even willfully blind to, until she tried to confide in him far too late.
He’d been massively hungover during that conversation, or maybe even still drunk from the previous evening’s overindulgence of fucking mouthwash. Either way, it’s hard to remember her exact words, what she said before Jimmy burst in and killed the conversation. She’d been dancing around the subject, not willing or able to say it outright, and Swansea had tried to listen, he really had, but… he didn’t put all the pieces together until Jimmy had him tied to a chair with a gun pointed at his head.
Anya doesn’t trust Swansea, not enough to confide in him. She’d barely trusted him then, when everything was going to pieces and they were all backed into a corner. But he needs to know if the creep has done more than stand in front of her door in the middle of the night. He needs to be able to protect her. He needs to become someone she’ll trust, and he needs to somehow make sure she knows that she can trust him.
Swansea scrubs a hand over his face. Figuring out what to actually do with Jimmy seems almost easy by comparison.
“Good morning, boss!” someone chirps way too close to his ear. Swansea jerks, not having heard anyone approach over the sound of his own thoughts chasing each other in circles, then shoots a glare at the offending person.
Daisuke’s smile seems to take up half his face. Swansea has no idea how a person can be so perky so early in the morning without mainlining caffeine or sugar, but somehow the kid constantly manages it. His face is open and whole and free of any trace of pain. His gaze is clear and bright and not the terrible emptiness Swansea last saw there. It’s such a contrast from the worried, small look the kid had developed the further out from the crash they were — the way he smiled with his mouth but not his eyes, like he was trying to trick everyone including himself that things were fine.
Speaking of. The longer Swansea stares at Daisuke, the tighter his eyes get and the less real his smile seems. Swansea tears his eyes away to look back at the screen, now showing a sunrise that bathes the room in pink light.
“What are you doing up at this god awful time?” he says gruffly, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the kid’s shoulders abruptly lose their tension.
“I’m usually up by now,” Daisuke says. “Gotta get up early to do all the homework you assign me! You’re not usually up, though.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Swansea grumbles. “Besides, a kid like you should be sleeping in. Sleep’s good for your development.”
“I’m not a kid!” Daisuke protests, sounding exactly like every one of Swansea’s three kids when they hit this same age.
Swansea raises a pointed eyebrow at Daisuke, and the kid looks away, flushing.
“Did you actually want something, or are you just here to bother me?” Swansea says. He can see the moment his words hit Daisuke, the way the kid’s expression shutters, and he wishes he could pull them back. Dammit, he’s no good at this shit.
Daisuke laughs awkwardly. “Ah, just wanted to see what you were doing,” he says, a little too quickly, “and see if you wanted breakfast, but I can go if I’m really bothering you.” He takes a step back, weight shifting, and starts to turn away.
The kid is clearly trying to retreat, which strikes at something deep in Swansea’s chest. God fucking dammit. How is he ever going to get anyone to trust him if he drives away the one fucking person he spends nearly all his time with? He needs to be better.
Swansea puts up a hand. “Hold on, kid, don’t go tearing off. I could probably use a little bothering.” He gestures at the seat next to him on the couch. “You can sit if you want. Your so-called ‘homework’ can wait a bit. Though if you’d rather grab some grub first, don’t let me stop you.”
Daisuke’s face shifts into an expression Swansea has never seen on his face before, and can’t quite decipher. After a long moment, he sits down a little gingerly, and then, when Swansea does nothing but raise his eyebrow again, he relaxes into the back of the couch.
They sit in silence for a while. Swansea lets himself just… be. It’s been a long time since he was able to just sit with himself. He has time. Well, he probably has time. He needs to take his time, at the very least, because anything other than gutting Jimmy is going to take time.
Although, if he even gets an inkling that things are going south, bashing the fuckwad’s head in is still plan B. Damn the consequences.
Daisuke starts fidgeting pretty quickly after sitting down, clearly not as willing to just sit in silence as Swansea is. Swansea almost asks what bee got in his bonnet, but he bites his tongue before the words come out. Commenting on the kid’s discomfort will probably send him running again.
After another long moment of Swansea ignoring the way the kid can’t sit still, Daisuke pipes up. “The, uh, the sunrise is pretty, isn’t it?”
Swansea makes a noise, not quite a grunt, and watches the screen. The image of the rising sun bathes the lounge in pale pink light, a far cry from the fiery, oppressive orange that they all existed in after the crash. “It’s better than the sunset,” Swansea agrees.
Daisuke gives him a look that Swansea doesn’t acknowledge, then resettles into the sofa with a sigh. He doesn’t try to make any more conversation, and Swansea lets the silence stretch, comfortable.
Swansea’s thoughts are still going in circles by the time the fake sun has risen, but at least this time he actually hears when someone else enters the lounge. Beside him, Daisuke perks up from where he’d been slumped half-asleep.
“Good morning, Captain!” Daisuke calls, bouncing up off the couch as if he hadn’t been inches from nodding off just a moment earlier.
“Good morning, Daisuke,” another voice says, rough with sleep. It’s a voice Swansea hasn’t heard in months, a voice that sounds so much better speaking than moaning in pain. “Swansea, you’re up early.”
Swansea grunts. He turns slowly, hoping his hesitation reads as tiredness.
Curly isn’t even looking at him, instead shuffling to the kitchen in the way of someone who isn’t fully awake and is desperately hoping for some caffeine. His fine blond hair is rumpled and snarled, clearly not tended to, and he runs a hand through it. His blue eyes narrow to a close as he yawns, and Swansea can’t help the way his gaze catches on them, two eyes, whole, both set properly into the sockets on his face.
Those eyes glance his way, and Swansea looks away, caught. “Everything ok?” Curly asks, humor and concern threaded through his voice.
“Didn’t sleep,” he says gruffly. It’s not a lie.
Curly makes an agreeing noise. “Let me know if there’s something I can do,” he says, like it's that easy, like he can just use his position as captain to will away their problems. Like the position wasn't just a fucking title, so easily taken away.
Swansea tries to find something else to focus on, and his eyes stick on the narrow open space between the door towards medical and the kitchen counter. Nothing more than a corner, really, completely empty. No piles of plastic bottles forming drifts around the room, no filthy bloodied mattress, just clean carpet and open space.
He stands abruptly. The room, despite being one of the largest on the ship, is suddenly too small. He can’t fucking do this right now.
Swansea ends up in front of the utility room without really knowing how he got there, because of fucking course he does. This is his room, more than even the one he sleeps in, the place he’s spent years of his life fixing and months of his life guarding and the last moments of his life in, staring down the human monster that destroyed them all.
Except they weren't the last moments of his life, were they, because he's still here and none of it has happened. He throws the door to the utility room open and it’s the same as it's always been but not the same as it should be, the floor clear and scuffed with no foam, no blood, no chair.
No evidence of what hasn’t happened yet, what will hopefully never happen again, what might have never happened at all except inside of Swansea’s head.
Swansea doesn’t sink to his knees, or grab at his hair, or anything so dramatic. He kind of wants to, because that would at least be doing something. He just stares at the cryopod, the only one of four still functioning in the future that Swansea will make absolutely goddamn sure will never come to pass, and feels a little bit empty.