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"Where's Jonny?"
"Fuck if I know. Sulking somewhere, I guess."
"... I guess."
And that’s that for a few hours. The crew disperses to lick their healing wounds and nurse their ever growing list of grievances against the others.
No one thinks much about where Jonny is or isn’t, because no one really cares.
*
It’s the Toy Soldier who finds him first.
"There You Are, Old Sport! Isn't This Rather A Strange Place For A Nap? Oh, You're Dead! That's Rather Strange, Isn't It?"
It considers him for a moment, then shrugs. Maybe Jonny decided he wanted a break from all of them, and who is it to judge? Things have been rather tense among the fleshy crew lately, after all!
"Revive Quickly, Dear Chap! Marius And Ivy Have Baked A Batch Of Truce Biscuits, And If You Tarry, None Will Be Left For You!"
It pats him on the shoulder, and leaves. Pretending to eat Marius' and Ivy's baking is always a delight!
*
"Jonny? Jonny, I saved you a couple of biscuits, I'm sorry about earlier."
Marius peeks warily around the corner into the empty stretch of corridor that the Toy Soldier pointed him to, not particularly feeling up to being murdered again this daycycle. Of course, it’s much more likely that he isn’t there at all, and –
Oh. Nope, still there. Still – Huh.
“Um, Jonny?” Marius pokes the body with the tip of his boot. No reaction. He steps closer, and bends down for a more thorough inspection.
Jonny’s shirt hangs in bloody tatters, and several stab wounds are easily visible through the gaps. That’s – that’s fucking weird, actually, Marius thinks with a sudden prick of dread. It's been hours since the fight ended, and everyone else has long since healed up. While it's far from unheard of for Jonny to shoot himself when he wants "Some fucking peace and quiet, is that really too fucking much to ask for around here?!", these wounds have a distinctly… crew-inflicted look. In fact, they look exactly like Marius would expect the aftermath of a general crew knife fight to look like – immediately afterwards, that is.
Not this late. Not without the slightest hint of healing taking place.
"Oh, fuck."
He waits around for half an hour, just to be sure, more on edge around a dead body than he's been for fucking centuries. At least.
There's no change. Jonny lies as still and dead as he did when Marius found him, despite several kicks in the ribs and loud yells into his ear. The prick of dread has grown into an icicle in Marius' chest.
Don't panic, he tells himself. His mechanism has gone a bit wonky, that's all. It happens. Raph will take a look and get it working in no time. Okay, right, Raph. I need to get him to Raph.
Jonny's body is heavy and unwieldy, stiff in a way that makes Marius' blood run cold. They don't get far before he needs to stop for breath, and after considering his options, Marius decides to leave Jonny where he is. Better to fetch assistance than to drag him across the whole bloody ship.
And who knows? With some luck, the situation might have resolved itself by the time Marius returns with reinforcements.
*
Ashes kicks at a discarded knife, then winces at the clang when it bounces off the wall. Their head aches from the constant fucking bickering among the crew, even during what was supposed to be a fucking truce meal.
Well, at least the biscuits were good, even if the company wasn't. They were still among the first to leave; only Marius had gone before them. Hopefully a stroll through this part of the ship will at least give them a break from the rest…
They turn a corner, and stop dead. Jonny is sprawled on the floor, unmoving. His shirt is ripped, and soaked with blood – dried blood. Numerous stab wounds are visible, with yet more dried blood crusted around them. When Ashes touches him, he's cold and stiff to the touch.
Before they have time to more than brush the surface of the implications of this, Marius' agitated voice drifts down the corridor towards them.
“– no sign of healing, and it’s super weir-”
“Yes , Marius, you’ve told me. I got it the first five times, okay?” Raphaella flutters into view, then Marius, a few steps behind her. “Yep, definitely dead. What’s the problem, Marius? It’s not like you haven’t seen him dead bef-”
“He’s cold”, Ashes says.
"-ore – Oh." Raphaella crouches down to feel for herself, and Ashes fixes Marius with a steely glare.
“You found him like this? Why the fuck didn’t you tell us?!”
“I did! I went to get Raph! And TS was the one to point me to where to find him!”
“What?”
“Let’s get him somewhere where I can examine him properly. And call everyone together.”
“Okay.”
Marius takes the excuse to escape, while Ashes and Raphaella start lugging Jonny’s body towards the nearest rec room, which contains a disused spingpong table. They heave him onto it, and Raphaella steps back for a moment to dig through the pockets of her lab coat. Ashes watches her, wondering what she’s going to do. Making a show of listening to his heart feels redundant, to say the least.
Evidently Raph comes to the same conclusion, and shrugs dejectedly.
“I can’t do anything outside the lab. He’s dead, has been for a few hours, doesn’t show any signs of healing or revival, but that’s just things we all can see. I’ll open up his heart later, but…” She shrugs again, and Ashes nods dully.
Feeling as cold as Jonny, they sit down on a stool in the corner and light a cigar, unable to take their eyes off the stab wounds showing through his shredded shirt.
*
Marius’ words don’t make any sense. That’s the thought Brian clings to while he hurries to the rec room. Marius is simply talking nonsense, and when they arrive, it will all prove to be a terrible mistake.
Of course the universe has a different idea.
“Who the fuck did this?!”
Brian freezes, then speeds up. Inside the rec room, Tim continues shouting.
“WHO?!” he yells when Brian enters.
His heart squeezing, Brian takes in the sight in front of him. The others stand in a loose semi-circle around the spingpong table, where Jonny’s body is laid out. Someone has ripped his shirt open – probably Tim, judging by the way he stands with his hand spread over Jonny’s chest.
Marius’ words suddenly make perfect, awful, horrible sense.
“What –” Brian stares at the body, his own statue still, with only his heart pounding wildly in his chest. Across the table, Tim is breathing heavily. His eyes swivel around the room, his gaze gliding over each crew member in turn, his gaze somewhere between panicked and accusing.
“Who”, he says again, quieter this time. When no one answers, Ivy clears her throat.
“All of us, by the look of it. Count the wounds, Tim.”
Brian looks down, chilly horror seeping through him, because she’s right. Seven stab wounds, discounting the shallower cuts and scrapes. Each one is made with a different knife. He doesn’t have to look up to know that Tim has come to the same conclusion.
“How long –” His tinny voice echoes in his ears, and he isn’t sure whether he ever finishes the question. Ivy answers anyway.
“It’s been eight hours and forty two minutes since the rest of us called a truce. Jonny’s average regeneration rate from similar injuries has fluctuated between six minutes and fifty-seven seconds to eighteen minutes and twelve seconds. Visible regenerative progress has always begun within four minutes after death. Full body damage has historically taken him between two hours and seven minutes to a full five hours and fifty one minutes, which was a personal record for him.”
No one says anything for a long, long minute, all of them too busy processing the data onslaught. There are no observation windows in the rec room, but Brian could swear that the void, full of its swirling stars, is there with them anyway.
Finally Marius pipes up, his voice quivering.
"But that's not… that's not so much shorter… is it?"
*
"None of us have ever stayed dead – or whatever death-like state we do enter when mortally wounded – long enough to develop rigor mortis." Raphaella's lips feel stiff and clumsy; the words are hard to get out.
She knew it the moment she touched him, knew that it was too late. Of course she will poke around inside his mechanism, try to shock it back to life, wind it up like some bloody toy ship if she needs to… but she'd stake her wings on the certainty that those stab wounds aren't ever going to heal. Raphaella has catalogued the workings of their mechanisms for millennia, and not even the most serious malfunctions have exhibited themselves like this.
Over at the spingpong table, Brian and Tim are frantically studying the wounds. Maybe their eyes can see enough detail to discern which knife made which one. Raphaella can’t. And even if she did, it feels like a bad line of inquiry…
The thought startles her. Never before has she shied away from any line of inquiry at all, but this? Raphaella swallows. She really doesn’t want to know.
*
Ashes’ lungs aren’t working right. Each breath feels strained and heavy, like when they were new, before they got used to the new weight in their chest – a feeling they haven’t revisited for millennia.
Distantly, they hear Marius’ talking to the others.
“– at least four of these are deadly in their own right, so –”
“Shut UP!”
For half a second, Ashes thinks they were the one to shout. Then they realise that it was Raphaella. Ashes themself sit frozen, still staring at Jonny, and they can’t fucking breathe.
*
What knife did I use? What fucking knife did I use, come on, Gunpowder, think! Tim swallows, his throat clicking dryly. Seven stab wounds, all made by a different knife. One of them was his.
He zooms in on the wound high up on the left side of Jonny’s ribcage. The one that must have gone straight into his heart. Tim has stabbed and been stabbed enough times to agree with Marius’ assessment on which of the stabs are deadly in themselves, but the other three would probably have done the job together, too. And well… no one survives a knife in the heart. Not even Jonny, only he usually comes back.
Where did I stab him? Was it – no, it wasn’t, can’t have been. I would remember, right? Or –?
"Wake up, Jonny", Brian murmurs across the table. "Wake up."
Tim feels sick.
"Toy Soldier!" he snaps. "Marius said you found him earlier, why the fuck didn't you tell us!?"
"I Did Not See Any Reason To! I Thought The Old Bean Simply Had Elected To Have An Extended Death Nap, Even If I Did Find His Choice Of Venue A Tad Odd!" The Toy Soldier's salute is as crisp as always, and it smiles brightly at him, but the shrill note in its voice betrays it. Tim vaguely wonders whether it 'pretends' to feel any guilt for not informing them sooner.
Then he wonders, less vaguely, whether it remembers where it stabbed Jonny. He's just about to ask when Raphaella smacks him with her wing, knocking him off balance.
"Hey –"
"Move. TS, help me carry him to the lab so I can – work."
"Um", Marius interjects, "wouldn't the medbay be better, since it's a medical –"
"Why? He's dead, Marius. Your fuzzy bandaids aren't going to help, and all my equipment's in the lab. Tim, I said move!"
*
Ivy stumbles, but manages to steady herself against the wall. He's dead, Raphaella said, and her words shook Ivy to the core. This was not a probability she had accounted for today, or ever.
She replays her encounter with Jonny during the knife fight, to see if there were any clues she should have seen.
There weren't. Ivy had bumped into Jonny early on, and had noted that he seemed somewhat less enthusiastic than usual, but not yet mortally wounded. Bleeding, yes, but not dying.
Nor healing, her brain supplies, but she dismisses it. While probably true, it isn't something she could (should) have realised from the brief encounter. Ivy aimed for his stomach, but he deflected it. Instead she slashed a long, diagonal gash down his side, and took a stab to the shoulder in return…
She crashes into Marius with a yelp. He stares at her, looking as lost as Ivy does. She feels untethered, as if her moorings have been cut, and she’s cast adrift into the void.
"Marius…" she says, reaching for him without quite knowing why. He makes a choked noise and rushes away, his flesh hand clenched in a white-knucled fist.
*
Raphaella's hands shake when she unscrews the cover plate over Jonny's heart. A couple of the screws escape her, falling to the floor with small, pinging noises before rolling off in different directions. Usually she would have retrieved them. This time she can't be bothered.
It's easy to find the spot where the knife went in. One of the flexible bits that allowed it to move with Jonny’s breaths and movements is completely torn, and inside it, the gears and pistons are bent all out of shape. A few of them have broken off entirely. Raphaella carefully picks them out with a pair of tweezers, and holding them in the palm of her hand, she sinks down onto a rolling stool beside the exam table.
Their mechanisms always take care of themselves first. That was one of her first, long running experiments after joining the crew, to see if everyone else’s acted like hers. They did. When the mechanism itself was damaged, it prioritised repairing that before moving on to the organic wounds.
“Marius?” she calls softly. “Marius, you can come in now.”
There’s no answer. Raphaella frowns, and still clutching the bits of broken heart, she goes to peek outside the door. She’d been sure he’d hang around in the corridor, even after she asked to be left alone for the examination, but Marius is nowhere to be seen.
Feeling very alone, Raph goes back to screw Jonny’s heart cover plate back in place.
There is nothing she can do.
*
The one who calls himself the Ship’s Doctor is crying. This is unusual enough for Aurora to rouse herself from her torpor to investigate it closer.
She casts her consciousness about her body until she finds the rest of them. Seven complex sentient beings – although one of them would protest to be called such – when there should be eight.
No, nine. But there haven’t been nine for a very long time.
So, seven. Where is the eighth?
Slowly she activates cameras that have been turned off for centuries, and quickly becomes aware that something is wrong. Very wrong, even for this crew that creates chaos and wrongness wherever they set foot.
She finds him in the lab, where the Science Officer sits, staring numbly at the First Mate’s corpse. Aurora watches them for a while, but when nothing happens, she turns her attention back to the Ship’s Doctor, who remains curled up in a secluded alcove, crying quietly.
It takes her a moment to remember how to do it, how to talk to him, and if he had not been next to a convenient screen, she might not have bothered to. But he is, so she does.
? she asks. The Ship’s Doctor startles at the flash of light.
“Oh, hi, ‘Rora. ‘S been a while.”
She flashes the question mark again. The Ship’s Doctor sniffs.
“It’s Jonny. I think he’s – I think he’s dead? I mean… dead for real.” He quirks a sad smile, and gently pats the wall. “Good to hear from you though, ‘Rora. Didn’t know you still paid attention.”
The screen goes dark. After being quiet for so long, even this simple interaction feels overwhelming. Withdrawing her consciousness from the majority of the ship, Aurora thinks on what the Ship’s Doctor said. The First Mate, dead?
He used to laugh and shoot her walls. Vaguely she thinks that he must have stopped laughing long ago. He never stopped shooting her walls, though.
Dead? That’s such a strange word to use in a permanent context inside her.
*
The Toy Soldier wants to be alone.
That is a very unusual feeling for it, and it isn’t quite sure what to do with it. It has started to come around to the conclusion that it should leave the room to find somewhere more private to sort through its thoughts, but the habit of time unmeasurable prevents it.
As does the fight going on by the door. Not that either Tim or Ashes would actually stop it if it tried to leave, but the thought of bypassing a fight makes it feel strange. Except that it’s sure that it doesn’t want to join in. Not right now, which is another nigh unheard of feeling for it.
Slowly it begins to creep along the wall towards the door. Tim and Ashes don’t appear to notice. They’re too busy screaming at each other, sounding mere moments away from drawing weapons.
“ – didn’t even fucking try to find him!”
“Neither did you! I saw you stab him, you fuck, you –”
“What? Did I – fuck, you fucking stabbed him too! We all fucking did!”
“But if we’d fucking found him right away, we might –”
“Not from what Raph said –”
“Maybe Raph’s fucking wrong! You didn’t even want to look for him when he was missing afterwards –”
“You didn’t go search for him either, don’t fucking blame me for this!”
“Fuck you! If you hadn’t –”
“If Marius hadn’t –”
The Toy Soldier slips the door shut behind it, abruptly cutting off their voices. It pauses for a moment, at a loss for what to do. Then it climbs into a nearby vent, hoping to find the solitude it craves inside the air ducts.
*
Tim drew first, there’s no way around that. But he also came to his senses first, and released the trigger before the shot went off. Ashes hadn’t.
They’re sitting beside him when he revives, hyperventilating with their face buried in their hands. When they see he's alive, they make a choking noise and hurries away. Tim lets his head fall back with a thunk. It hurts, so he does it again.
Maybe if he does it enough times, he can stop his mind from picking and pulling at the memories of the knife fight.
Jonny had been bloody when Tim got to him. No. Jonny had been bleeding. Bleeding from unhealing wounds, and Tim hadn't realised. Instead he'd just stabbed him in – in – where?
Now when he thinks about it, it had been rather odd. Usually Jonny was one to match him stab for stab, but this time his knife had barely grazed Tim's arm before he staggered off, his movements sluggish and unsteady, and how the fuck didn't Tim fucking notice?!
Slowly he clambers to his feet and sets off towards Raphaella's lab. He needs to see the corpse again, to try to jog his memory, try to remember which of the wounds are his.
*
"Marius?"
Marius sniffs. For a second he considers staying silent, but Raphaella’s voice is shaking as much as his hands. Suddenly Marius wants nothing more than to hold her tightly and feel her heart beat against his chest.
“I’m here, Raph”, he calls, and a moment later she comes into the alcove where he’s hidden away. It’s so small that her wings brush the walls, so she has to tuck them tighter against her back before she can sit down beside him.
“He’s dead”, she says. If Marius thought he couldn’t feel worse, he’s immediately proven wrong; Raphaellla isn’t prone to obvious statements like that, never. She looks at him, her eyes pooling with tears. “I don’t think I could have saved him”, she whispers, her voice cracking. “But what if I could have?”
Marius only shakes his head and pulls her into his arms. Raphaella trembles when she hugs him back. There is nothing he can think to say to comfort her, because there is no comfort to be had.
*
Brian is cold. Icy, deathly cold. Cold as the void between the stars, as Jonny's body in the rec room.
He stares out into the stars, and there are stars in his mind as well. Cold, distant pinpricks of light, too far away to warm him with their heat. Brian's limbs feel as frozen as they must have been when Carmilla pulled him from the void and declared his body a lost cause; he doubts he could move if he tried.
So Brian doesn't try. Instead he sits statue still in the pilot's chair, wearing a battered, mended tophat decorated with a fresh cut rose as an invitation to illicit target practice. Only that Jonny won't take him up on it this time, or ever again, and that thought makes Brian's heart feel full of ice.
Outside the starry void stretches on and on and on.
*
Ashes paces their room in frantic circles. The smoke from their cigarette stings their eyes, but they can't cry.
Not yet. Not until the awful reality of what's happened sinks in for real. Part of them still half hopes that it's a bad dream, a nightmare they can wake from, but deep down they know it's not.
*
The Toy Soldier is good at pretending! In fact, sometimes it thinks it might be the best in the universe at it!
So why can't it pretend that Jonny is still alive and believe it?
*
Raphaella cries softly against Marius' shoulder. She doesn't tell him that his metal fingers dig bruises into her arm.
The helplessness is choking her, and she hates it, this inability to do anything, to fix what's wrong. It's almost worse than the grief itself.
*
Tim sits slumped against the wall in the shooting range. He was going to shoot something, blow something up, destroy something… but somehow he didn't get around to it.
So instead he just sits there, staring blankly at the wall. He should have gone to the lab instead, like he intended, maybe there he could have got some fucking answers… But his legs had locked up, and he’d stood frozen until he’d changed direction towards the shooting range instead. He wants – he needs – he – fuck –
Shuttering his eyes to ease his pounding headache, Tim gropes blindly for his gun.
*
Marius holds Raphaella tight to him with his face buried in her hair. His own tears spent, he sits mute and frozen as she sobs. The residual sweetness of the biscuits that still clings to his tongue is nauseating. He baked, for fuck's sake! When Jonny lay dead and alone, Marius made a fucking batch of biscuits!
He doubts he'll ever be able to eat that kind again.
*
Ivy is tired, her eyelids heavy over stinging eyes. She rubs at them, angry at her body’s weakness, knowing how powerless she is to stop it. In a few hours, her brain will probably simply shut down, no matter how hard she tries to fight it.
The next morning, she will wake up surrounded by sheets of paper, covered with messy drafts for songs, most of them never completed. She will put them away, neatly labelled as Jonny's work, his death filed in her archive as another fact. During the days, she will see her crewmates grieve, unable to share the emotion with them.
At night, when she clutches her sheets with sweaty hands, tears streaming down her cheeks, she will call out for two lost crewmates now, instead of one.
*
Aurora watches the silent, unmoving corpse still lying on the exam table in the lab. She's scanned the room for signs of life several times since the Science Officer left, but all she finds are a few octokittens lurking in the vents.
Slowly Aurora begins to withdraw her consciousness again. Maybe one or two of her inhabitants notice a subtle shift in the engine’s hum or the brightness of the lights, but none of them thinks any further of it. The last place she leaves is the Science Officer’s lab. She lingers there a minute, watching the First Mate’s body through her cameras, perhaps waiting for some belated sign of life. When none comes, she turns off the lights there, one by one.
When the last one has gone out, she shuts the cameras off, and returns to slumber in the heart chamber, intending to rest there until the end.