Fandom: The Strange Case of Starship Iris

Ship: Arkady/Sana

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 3,841

Genre: Pre-canon

"I told you it was too easy," Arkady said again. Safe behind her back where Arkady couldn't see, Sana rolled her eyes. "I told you, Sana, it's never—"

"I know." The words came out a little sharper than Sana intended; she'd misjudged the last few hops to the med bay table and jostled her ankle, sending a sharp pain shooting up her leg. She couldn't quite hold back a grimace, lifting herself up to sit on the table, and Arkady must have seen it because she was at Sana's side again faster than Sana's brain could seem to process.

It was possible, Sana surmised, that she was getting a little woozy from the pain.

"Sana," Arkady said, right in her ear. Sana put a hand on Arkady's shoulder and pushed her, gently, out of Sana's space. She took a half step back. "Hey. Are you okay? What can I do?"

"You can give me a little room to breathe, Officer Patel," Sana said lightly. In truth her ankle hurt, a red-hot ache that refused to ebb no matter how long she kept her weight off of it. She knew, of course, that she could trust Arkady in a crisis, knew from a wealth of experience where Arkady's limits landed and that they weren't even within shouting distance yet—but she also knew that if they did hit those limits, they were in trouble. She knew that Arkady under too much pressure sometimes went off like a bottle bomb, and they couldn't afford to both be out of commission just then.

So she ignored the pain and kept on joking. It was worth it for how Arkady relaxed, visibly, every time.

"All right, fine." Arkady backed up and went back to raiding the boat's meagre excuse for a med bay. She poked through cabinets, muttering, yanking out bottle after bottle before cursing to herself and putting them back. It would have been cute if the circumstances were less tense, Sana thought. Honestly, it was still kind of cute.

Finally, Arkady—apparently unable to help herself—sighed and said, "I told you."

"Hey, Arkady?" With a little humming noise, Arkady tossed a glance back over shoulder at Sana. "Let's maybe save the I-told-you-so's for the debrief, okay?"

Arkady narrowed her eyes, silent, and then, finally, shrugged. She returned to her bottle raid. "Fine. But next time you want to override me, you better believe I'm throwing this back in your face."

Sana smiled a little. Honestly, she said, "I would expect nothing less."

Arkady was right, of course. It had seemed too easy. It had seemed so simple, and Sana was seduced by that simplicity, the same way she always was. An old friend with a favour to ask, an easy job, a respectable payout: why shouldn't the world work that way, sometimes?

Stop expecting honour from us scumbags, Arkady would say when they were back on the Rumor. She'd be right, just like she was the last time and the time before.

"Okay," Arkady said at last, enunciating the word with some finality. She crossed back over to the table with an unassuming orange bottle in hand. "I think this is as good as we're gonna get."

Sana accepted the bottle, peering at the label. "I—wow, I don't even know how to pronounce this. What is it?"

"Um. Well, I can definitely tell you that it's a painkiller."

"That's...good?"

"Yeah, it had a janky little label above it in the cabinet that someone had written 'PAINKILLERS' on."

"Oh, great!" Sana had meant it to sound enthusiastic; instead her voice came out so dubious, even to her own ears, that it made her laugh, a little helplessly. After a moment Arkady started laughing too. She hopped up onto the table beside Sana and covered her face with her hands.

"I'm not a doctor, okay!" she said, voice a little muffled by her hands. "That's the best I could do!"

"And I'm very proud of you." Sana patted Arkady's knee. "We should definitely get around to hiring someone to do this stuff for us at some point, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know, I think we're getting along fine. A linguist, a mechanic, a glorified grunt, and an actual space alien: super normal crew."

"Hey, it's better than when it was just you and me," Sana said absently. She frowned at the label on the bottle. One tablet once or twice a day, it said. Do not operate heavy machinery. "I, uh. I'm going to go ahead and take a half-dose. Just… in case."

Arkady looked up, making a face like she was thinking of protesting, but after a brief pause she said, "That's probably fair."

More to herself than to Arkady, Sana nodded. She opened the bottle, shook a tablet out into her hand, and then, awkwardly—the pill being kind of tiny and hard to get a grip on—broke it in half.

"Well, then. Bottom's up!" Sana popped one of the halves into her mouth, wrinkled her nose at the chalky taste, and swallowed it dry.

The plan had been this:

1. Fisher, a ghost from Sana's past, had recently been forced to burn an identity and leave Marilac, fast. This had included abandoning her ship, and—more to the point—all of the cargo that was on it.
2. Luckily, Fisher had paid for parking through the end of the month. Unluckily, if the ship was still there past month-end, IGR's best would, presumably, realize it had been abandoned and search it.
3. Sana and her crew, not yet known to the authorities stationed on Marilac, were to collect the ship for Fisher. Get in, hop on the ship, and drive it away to the meetup point. Fisher had even given Sana the freaking keys.
4. Sana elected to take Arkady with her and leave Brian and Krejjh to go refuel at Vega Station, because fuel was actually affordable there. Arkady hated it when Sana split the crew up, but it saved time and money, things had been tight since the incident with the bioluminescent mushrooms, and Arkady still wasn't the captain.
5. So: Krejjh and Brian would drop Sana and Arkady off on Marilac, near the northern capital. They would spend the day like tourists and also pick up some supplies at the markets, little things they were perpetually low on like toilet paper and Dwarnian-friendly toothpaste. Then they'd hop into Fisher's ship, fly off with it, and meet both Fisher and the Rumor at Bastion.

It had been a fine plan, whatever Arkady said. It just happened to go a little off the rails when, shortly after they left Marilac-monitored space, something had triggered an alert, which in turn had locked down every single console. There had also been a small explosion in the engine room, but opinions differed as to whether that was an intended consequence of the lockdown protocol.

"See, it's not so bad," Sana said later, when Arkady returned to her with an armful of rations from the canteen. Together they'd relocated Sana to the cabin, which was really more like a cot parked in the middle of a largeish storage closet, but she was comfy enough. They'd managed to dig up a small mountain of pillows and cushions and now they were arranged around and behind Sana like a throne.

Arkady shot Sana an unimpressed look and tossed over one of the ration bars. Sana caught it, but barely; Arkady always threw harder than the situation called for. Just one of her little charms.

"We're dead in the water, Sana," she said flatly. "You can't walk and neither of us can contact the crew. I have no way to tell what other fun surprises this ship is rigged up for, and there's nobody around to threaten that information out of either. Forgive me if I'm not super thrilled about some IGR rations, in the face of all that."

"Hey, at least we're going to eat, though. That's a positive!" She tried not to laugh at Arkady's sullen expression. "Come on, this whole situation is more of an annoyance than a crisis. I'm still not convinced Fisher actually planned this. She's always been a little airheaded, if I'm being honest."

One eyebrow arched, and Arkady made no other response. This time Sana did laugh.

"I'm serious!" Sana wriggled a cushion out from behind her back and put it on the cot beside her, then patted it invitingly. Her neck was getting a little tired from having to look up at Arkady. "Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not planning to do any favours for her ever again. She tapped out all of that goodwill. But all that actually happened was that we tripped a security alarm. My ankle getting stuck during the chaos was just a freak accident."

It was possible she was being too generous, but she also didn't really care. The painkillers had alleviated the pain enough that she could occasionally move her upper body without her leg screaming at her to stop, and she hadn't gotten drowsy so much as just kind of mellow. It was possible it had given her some kind of high, but if it had, it wasn't a significant one. Even Arkady, watching Sana like a very cute, angry hawk, didn't seem concerned about her cognitive capacities.

Or at least, no more concerned than usual. Arkady put the ration bars in a little pile on the overturned-crate-slash-side-table, grabbed one for herself, and flopped down on the cushion beside Sana to glare at her more closely. She opened her mouth to say something, visibly changed her mind, took a bite of the bar, and then side-eyed Sana while she chewed.

Sana had always loved that about her, how her face hid nothing. She could be inscrutable on the job, lie to marks and security guards with the best of them, but in her downtime she was openly, eternally Arkady. Even when it made conversation a little weird.

After a few minutes of that weirdness, Sana gave in. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back against the cool metal of the wall. "Just say it. I know you want to."

Arkady didn't hesitate. "How many betrayals is it going to take for you to stop being so damn trusting?"

I don't want to stop being so damn trusting, Sana thought, but she knew better than to say it. "At least one more."

"Captain—"

"Oh, don't 'Captain' me. You know precisely who I am. Honestly, Arkady, more than anyone else at this point, you know how I work."

Arkady was quiet for a moment. When Sana cracked an eye open, she found Arkady watching her with a tiny frown. "Yeah," she said, softly, finally. "I do."

As it turned out, the hours passed slowly when you were trapped in space on a rickety boat. Sana had actually wondered if the ship's internal chronometers had been thrown off during the lockdown, but no, Arkady had assured her with a wry sort of smile, the clocks were fine. Sana was just bored.

"Truth or dare," Sana suggested sometime around late evening. Arkady had paced herself out, finally accepting they actually would need to wait for Brian and Krejjh to notice they were M.I.A. and swoop in for the grand rescue, and Sana was starting to feel like both of their brains might turn to mush if she didn't entertain them somehow.

"No," Arkady replied without looking up.

"Aw, come on. What else am I going to do with this injury?" No response. "Don't make me order you."

Slowly, Arkady sat up and looked at her. She'd been lying spread-eagle on the floor of the cabin—all the better to fume at the ceiling, Sana presumed—and her hair, now that Sana could see it, was an absolute disaster from most of a day spent running her hands through it in frustration. It made the sardonic look she was aiming at Sana even funnier.

There'd been a time, once, when a joke about orders would have been a bad idea, with Arkady. When she'd been younger and jumpier, more on-edge, less willing to let her guard down with Sana. Sana was glad, always, that she could make those jokes now and only annoy her.

Arkady said, "How are you planning to carry out any dares when you can't even walk?"

"Oh." Right. "Um. Truth or truth, then?"

"What?"

"Like truth or dare, but without the dare! You ask questions and the other person has to tell the truth."

"So it's…" Arkady frowned. "What, it's just secret-sharing? Why would anyone do that?"

"Well," Sana allowed, "I don't know if anyone ever has done that, I'm honestly just making it up right now. And ideally we'd also have alcohol, but I'm going to go ahead and say no alcohol until after we get rescued."

Arkady snorted. "Fair."

"But it's like—you know, sleepover rules. It's nighttime, everyone's parents are asleep…" Sana waved vaguely, encompassing the room at large. "The rules are different. It's truth time."

"I can honestly say I have no idea what you're talking about," Arkady told her, but she was rolling over onto her stomach, which Sana took as a good sign. She pillowed her head on her arms. "But whatever. Hit me."

"Hmm. What's the strangest dream you've ever had?"

"What?" Arkady laughed, looking surprised. "That's the best you've got?"

"Oh no, we're just getting started. I'm easing you into it."

"Sure," Arkady said, but she was still smiling around the eyes. It made Sana want to kiss her, just like it always did. "Uh, I had a dream a few months back about a reindeer that wanted to eat my brain, is that weird enough?"

"Sounds pretty weird to me," Sana told her. "Describe it for me."

She did, and they went on like that for a while, trading questions back and forth. Arkady asked Sana about the most serious romantic relationship she'd ever had; Sana said it was her first girlfriend, 22 years old to Sana's 17, and they'd dated for six whole months. Sana asked Arkady to recount the meanest thing she'd ever said to someone; Arkady couldn't remember what she'd actually said, but she'd snapped at Brian once, shortly after meeting him, and he'd looked so much like a wounded puppy she'd wanted to put herself in the brig.

"We don't have a brig," Sana said, trying not to laugh too hard. She could envision the wounded puppy look perfectly.

"I know! That's the only reason I didn't do it!"

The evening wore on and shifted into night, at least according to the clock. To Sana it felt like time had stretched out and become inexplicable, the way they say space does around dark matter; she really didn't like being bored. They asked questions for a while, stopped for a while, ate and raided Fisher's cupboards and gossiped about the uninteresting stuff they found, asked questions for a while again.

And the longer they stayed there, Sana antsy upon her pillow throne, the more she found herself wanting to push—not just to entertain Arkady but to needle her, set her off balance. It was a feeling she got sometimes around Arkady, and never really around anyone else. So when Arkady said, "Your turn," and waved lazily from the other end of the cot in a challenging, come at me sort of gesture, Sana said, "That time with the casino heist. When the mistress was coming at me… why did you jump in front of me?"

She didn't elaborate. It wasn't necessary; Arkady would know. She'd remember, Sana was fairly certain, abandoning her cover in order to get between Sana and a knife, even if only because Sana had chewed her out for it so thoroughly afterward. For a long moment she thought Arkady wouldn't respond, but then Arkady said quietly, "I mean, you obviously know by now that I'd die for you. I'd be happy to."

"Yeah," Sana agreed, equally quiet. "And I don't really know why."

She didn't phrase it as a question. She wasn't sure if she was more disappointed or relieved when Arkady took the out.

"Well," Arkady said," that's what I was doing. Being your security officer." She scrubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes wearily, then added, "You know, you should probably get some sleep, Sana."

It was nearing midnight, Marilac time, and by their previous calculations it would be another twelve hours at least before they could expect Brian and Krejjh to arrive. Sana sighed. "Yeah, we both should."

"What? Oh, no, I'm fine," Arkady said distractedly. "I'll stay up and keep watch."

Sana rolled her eyes. She pulled some more cushions and out from under and behind her, no longer necessary if she wasn't going to be upright, and tossed them at Arkady. "Sleep," she said firmly.

"Really, Captain, I'm not tired."

"You've yawned four times in the last ten minutes. Less than ten minutes, actually, more like eight. Please, for my sake."

"It doesn't count as being for your sake if you want it because I'm tired," Arkady said. She peered dubiously down at the cushions on and around her lap.

"You seriously underestimate how annoying the clicky thing your jaw does gets after 18 hours in your presence," Sana told her solemnly. "Also, what are you doing? They're not going to bite."

"Yeah, but you don't want me in your space, I kick in my sleep. I—" She broke off, still frowning down at one of the cushions. Then she made a little gesture, like she was about to get up. "It's fine, I'll sleep on the floor."

"I know for a fact that you don't kick in your sleep," Sana said carefully, still confused, "but seriously, do whatever you want. It's just kind of cold in here, and I thought sleeping on an actual bed was preferable to sleeping on the floor." Arkady hesitated, so before she could protest again, Sana added, "I promise that if you let me leech your body heat I won't tell Brian and Krejjh that you're a soft, vulnerable human who needs to sleep sometimes."

Arkady laughed at that, sharp and not all that happy-sounding. It took Sana aback. Before she could ask, though, Arkady met her eyes and said, "Do you seriously not know?"

Sana frowned, cycling back through the last chunk of conversation they'd had. She was missing something and they'd done so much talking, what was—

Oh. The casino heist.

"I seriously don't," Sana said, though she was suspecting, suddenly, that she might.

Arkady laughed again, more quietly but sounding no less pained, and then shoved the cushions out of her space and, with an expression of grim determination, closed the two feet of space between them to kiss Sana.

It was sudden, and gentle, and very fast. She pulled away, no longer looking Sana in the eyes.

"Sorry," she said, which was so wildly wrong it threw Sana for a quick, dizzying loop.

"Arkady—"

"No, it's fine, I'm going to sleep… over… there." She gestured indeterminately, Sana reached for her arm, still trying to catch up, but she missed: Arkady was already pushing herself off the bed to stand.

"Are you seriously running away right now when I physically can't stand up and chase you?"

Arkady turned back to her and blinked. "Uh…"

"That was a rhetorical question," Sana clarified. "Will you get back down here? It's very weird to be having this conversation while you're looming over me."

Slowly, Arkady sat back down. Sana pushed herself carefully back into a sitting position, ignoring the pulse of pain in her leg, and, when Arkady was within arm's reach again, put her hands on either side of Arkady's face.

It required her to lean awkwardly, half-unbalanced. She really didn't care.

"I'm going to kiss you," Sana said, taking Arkady's wide, lovely eyes. "I'm giving you a warning so you don't do the scared cat thing. Okay?"

Arkady nodded. "I don't have a scared cat thing," she said automatically, not taking her eyes from Sana's face, not running away. Sana leaned in and kissed her.

It was a nice kiss. Sana had always suspected it would be.

After a moment they pulled apart, but Arkady didn't move away. Sana said, "I actually am really tired right now and we should probably sleep, but for the record, I've wanted to do that for a really long time."

"Oh." A little frown appeared between Arkady's eyebrows. Sana had an impulse to kiss it. "Me too."

A smile overtook Sana's face. "Well, that's good, then." She patted the space on the bed beside her. "Sleep, okay?"

They slept.

They woke in the morning, simultaneously, to the muffled sound of something banging on metal. Sana knew it was simultaneous because Arkady slept like a war vet: one startling noise and she could go from zero to murder in the space of a blink.

Then again, the only reason Sana hadn't leapt to her feet too was the whole problem of not being able to stand. She wasn't a great sleeper herself.

"Captain Tripathi!" Krejjh's voice singsonged from out near the cockpit. Near the emergency escape hatch, too, that meant. Sana closed her eyes and let the tension bleed out of her. "Security Officer Patel! The cavalry has arrived!"

"Took you long enough," Arkady snapped back, but she had relaxed into a less violent stance as well. Idly, Sana patted the side of her leg.

"Aw, did you hear that, Crewman Jeeter? I think she likes me!"

Their laugh rang out down the corridor as Brian, presumably, responded in kind through Krejjh's comms. God, Sana adored her crew; what lovable jerks. "We're in the cabin just past the med bay!" Sana called out helpfully, because Arkady definitely wasn't going to do it.

"Oh good! There's two of you!"

Krejjh arrived momentarily, beaming at the pair of them. Sana grinned back. "We weren't expecting you until at least noon."

"Oh sure, that would've made sense. Fisher called us in a panic way before we got to Bastion, though. I guess she'd remembered some kind of failsafe she might have left on? Something that'd make it hard to get anywhere with her ship, if that rings any bells? Although, I gotta say, 'ship' is kind of a generous word for this thing."

Arkady grumbled inaudibly and tossed her hands up. Sana winked at Krejjh. "Don't mind Arkady, you know how she is before she's had breakfast."

"You're injured!" Arkady said, like it was anything but a charming non-sequitur. She wheeled on Krejjh. "Her leg—she got injured!"

"I can see that!" Krejjh said, and then, over their comm, "Crewman Jeeter, make sure there's a clear path to the med bay, okay? And the good drugs. Make sure Captain Tripathi gets the good drugs!"

"I knew you were my favourite for a reason," Sana told them, and relished in the warm glow when it made Arkady laugh.