Chapter Text
The Tulpar was a shithole of a ship, even before she’d crashed. Pony had cheaped out on every single thing they could, which meant things were constantly breaking down as fast as Swansea could put them back together. Which was how Swansea found himself once again, hunkered down over yet another sputtering valve, locking down the oxygen before it could run out. Daisuke was sitting nearby, supposedly paying attention, though Swansea doubted if there was any truth to that. He could see the kid out of the corner of his eye, fiddling with a set of pliers.
“Hey,” he barked, the slight slur to his words doing nothing to soften them. Daisuke’s eyes snapped up to him; wide, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. “Fuck’re you doin’?”
The kid opened his mouth to speak, before thinking better of it, his lips pressing shut again. Instead of a response, he put down the pliers and reached for the bottle of mouthwash he kept beside him, holding it out to the engineer. “Drinking?” The statement read more like a question, the beginnings of a smile pulling at his face.
Swansea reached out for the bottle, taking salvation between his fingers and raising it to his lips. It didn’t burn like one would expect, the minty taste cooling the back of his throat as it went down, settling in his stomach. He drank until he needed to come up for air, and only then did he pull the bottle back and pass it over to Daisuke. The kid took the bottle, taking a quick swig before his eyes bugged and he started coughing, practically hacking up a lung.
Laughing, Swansea looked over at him with a raised eyebrow, watching him as he doubled over where he sat. “You alright kid?”
Daisuke’s eyes were red when he looked back up, still coughing a little as he cleared his throat, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “It uh- down the wrong pipe. Yeah.”
Swansea rolled his eyes, turning back to the valve he was meant to be fixing; the reason he’d even dragged himself out of cargo in the first place. “Pay attention,” he said, picking up his wrench again and turning back to the valve. Shit was hissing pure oxygen instead of filtering it with the rest of the air, which meant their supply would run out much faster than any of them wanted. He frowned, but locked the wrench around the valve and yanked down. The metal creaked under his grip, the nut tightening around the joint on the pipe. He wasn’t sure how it had slipped, but it didn’t matter now. All that mattered was buying them a few more weeks of breathing.
Why, he wasn’t sure. It wouldn’t matter; in the end, they would all still be dead, just having suffered a little more before meeting the Reaper. But Daisuke still held out hope of rescue, spending his time tinkering with the destroyed radio to try and get a distress signal out, and Anya was still caring for Curly ‘until she could get him to a hospital’. They still had hope, holding it deep in their bones.
So, Swansea would fix the oxygen.
“Alright kid,” he turned back to Daisuke, who was paying significantly more attention now, staring at Swansea from where he sat cross-legged on the floor. “What do we need?”
Daisuke hummed slightly, looking at the pipe for a long moment of stretching silence, before he spoke. “Sealant?”
“You askin’ me or telling me?”
The kid frowned, getting up from where he was sitting and moving over to the valve. He bent down, looking at it closely before nodding and straightening up, turning to Swansea. “Telling,” he said confidently, hands on his hips. “It’s sealant.”
Swansea nodded, a little nugget of pride settling in his gut alongside the mouthwash. “What’re you telling me for then? Go get it.”
Daisuke nodded, scrambling off to the toolbox and rummaging through it for a moment before pulling out the tube of sealant. He loaded it into the applicator and brought it over to Swansea, handing it down to him. Swansea took it from his grip, turning his attention back to the pipe and beginning to apply the sealant, curling around the joint. He held a hand up, signalling Daisuke to be quiet so he could listen for any oxygen hissing out of the valve, and in the silence…
“Get off me!”
Anya’s voice was quiet, though not because that was how she was speaking; because she was far enough away that he’d barely heard it. But Daisuke’s head shot up when Swansea heard the voice, and that was all the proof he needed that he hadn’t imagined it. Curly was out of commission, and Daisuke was with him, so there was only one person left that she could be talking to.
Jimmy.
Anya had told him about what Jimmy did to her nearly two weeks ago now, and he hadn’t done a thing about it. He didn’t know what his excuse was, why he would let Jimmy continue wandering the ship; maybe he was a lazy piece of shit like his wife always said, maybe he was just too fucking drunk. Whatever the reason, he hadn’t done anything, and now Anya was stuck with Jimmy again. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Swansea got to his feet, swaying slightly from the amount of mouthwash he’d already drank, barely having been convinced to take a look at the valve in the first place, and only then because Daisuke had said he needed help. The kid stood when Swansea stood, though he could see in his eyes that he had no idea what he was doing. Didn’t matter now; so long as he stayed out of Swansea’s way, he couldn’t hurt anything. Hell, Anya might appreciate him there, once all this was said and done.
“Come on,” he said gruffly, already moving towards the door. Daisuke followed immediately, his eyes a little wide and his mouth a little open.
“Where are we going?” the kid asked, following after Swansea despite his confusion. He was a smart kid, Swansea knew he could put the pieces together if given time, but the kid wasn’t much one for thinking in silence, preferring to ask his questions the second they popped into his mind.
Swansea headed off down the hallway in the vague direction he’d heard the shout come from, stumbling slightly as he walked. Normally he wouldn’t be moving this fast, having drank as much as he did, but something in his gut was telling him he had to get there now. “We’re gonna go find Anya. See what she’s yellin’ about,” he slurred, a frown settling on his face as he moved towards the medbay. He wasn’t entirely sure he was going in the right direction, but he was hoping she was where she usually was.
Uncharacteristically silent, Daisuke followed Swansea without further comment. Maybe something in his voice had given away the seriousness of the situation, or maybe Daisuke wasn’t as dense as he pretended to be, but whatever it was, Daisuke had caught on to something. The closer they got to medbay, the more voices they could hear; muffled at first, but quickly becoming discernable. Swansea didn’t like what he was hearing.
“I did everything for this crew!” Jimmy’s voice carried through the hallway, barely audible over the humming of the Tulpar, but his words couldn’t be clearer now that Swansea was listening for them. “Who’s been keeping us alive all these months!? Not Curly! Me!”
Something in his voice made Swansea pick up the pace a little, breaking into a jog as he continued down the hallway. He sounded different in a way Swansea couldn’t place; he knew machines, not people. But something about Jimmy wasn’t quite right, like an engine with a screw loose. Something was rattling around inside him, and if it wasn’t fixed soon, someone was going to get hurt.
“Jimmy, stop-”
“Shut up!” Jimmy roared, and Swansea was running now, moving down the hall faster than he’d moved in years. “You never understood! Everything I did, I did because of you! I crashed this ship because of you!”
What?
He’d known there was something off about the crash – Pony’s systems were shit, but they wouldn’t fail like that, not for no reason – but he’d kept his thoughts to himself. It wouldn’t have been helpful, pointing fingers when they were all already doomed. But never in all his theories about what had happened did he guess it had been purposeful. He’d always assumed someone – probably Curly, given how close he’d been to the cockpit when they’d crashed – had been messing with something they weren’t supposed to and broken something. Apparently, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Let go of me! You’re hurting me!” Anya’s voice carried across the hallway, and Swansea could hear the slight tremble in her voice. She was doing good, standing up to him the way she was, but he could hear the fear in her. It couldn’t be easy, standing up to him like that, especially after what he’d done to her.
“Oh fuck you!” Jimmy’s voice was loud again, Swansea just outside the door now. He heard a pained gasp, followed by a crash, before he turned the corner and barrelled through the open door, Daisuke hot on his heels.
Anya stood, back against the cabinets, holding a bloody scalpel in a white-knuckled fist, breathing heavily. A few steps away from her stood Jimmy, a medical cart knocked over at his feet where he seemed to have stumbled into it, a large slash across his face, dripping blood down his skin.
And a gun in his hand, raised to point at Anya.
Swansea had never put much stock in those stories about people in dangerous situations, how they acted before they could think. He’d always passed it off as horseshit, people downplaying themselves for pity. But before he could really think it through, he was already rushing Jimmy, barrelling into his waist like a linebacker and tackling him to the ground.
The shot went off, and Swansea whipped his head around to look at Anya, eyes scanning over her in a moment. No blood. He then dragged his focus back down to Jimmy, who was already pulling the gun back around to aim at Swansea. He vaguely heard his name shouted twice over from behind him, but it faded into background noise.
Swansea had been mugged once, when he was seventeen. He hadn’t grown up in a great area of town, a single mother working two jobs just to keep their shitty apartment. When he’d found the barrel of a gun shoved in his face, he’d just about pissed himself. He’d made it out of the ordeal with nothing more than a lighter wallet and a pounding heart, but something in him had changed that day. He’d signed himself up for self defence classes at the community center, gone every Friday; it had been the closest thing to getting him to quit drinking, before his wife. Point was, he’d learned how to handle himself when a gun was pointed at him. Drilled it over and over again until the motion was old hat, second nature.
Didn’t make it any less terrifying.
He could have sobered up then and there; felt like all the mouthwash drained from his body, leaving just Swansea behind. But he knew what to do. So he reached for Jimmy’s gun, grabbed his wrist, and pulled it away from his face just as the shot went off.
It was the loudest thing he’d ever heard, the gun going off right beside his ear. He could see Jimmy’s lips moving, but he couldn’t hear anything over the deafening ringing, the throbbing pain in his ear that wasn’t there before. Whatever the damage was, he could deal with it later; right now, he still needed to get that gun away from Jimmy.
He wasn’t worried about Jimmy shaking him off; Swansea wasn’t a small man, and while Jimmy was strong, he doubted he could lift his entire body weight. So he reached over for the gun with his other hand, the barrel still hot from the shot, and twisted as hard as he could, just like he’d been taught. Sure enough, the twisting motion got the gun out of Jimmy’s hand and into Swansea’s, the engineer now adjusting his grip so his finger was on the trigger.
Jimmy was shouting now; Swansea didn’t need to be able to hear him to know that, his face red and veins bulging. He was scrambling to throw him off, but Swansea’s guess about his strength had held true; Jimmy couldn’t get out from under him. He could see the moment Jimmy realized what was about to happen, see the impending death settle in his eyes. Maybe if Swansea was a kinder man, maybe if he was a sober man, or maybe if he was simply a better man, he would have found another solution. An option that didn’t involve ending a life, that didn’t consist of death.
But Swansea had never been a better man.
And he pulled the trigger.