Chapter Text
Corpse's groan came from somewhere close to his diaphragm, deeper by far than any of his usual utterances. Not that he cared much what his current crewmates thought about his voice at the moment, of course. Being shipped off to the Skeld, of all places, wasn't what he'd had in mind for his next assignment; not after looking forward to getting the hell back on solid Earth for several weeks. But the Mira HQ incident had been such a shitshow from start to finish that it made sense not to allow anybody involved access to sizable human populations — not until they (they meaning Corpse himself, Rae, Tina, and Ash) proved their innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. So the powers that be sent emails with all the paperwork attached, and Corpse and his friends dragged themselves out of bed to face their new crew assignments at 06:00 hours sharp outside dropship number five as ordered.
"Whoop de fuckin' do," Rae shot him a sympathetic look, arms crossed over her chest. For those who didn't know her, her body language screamed aggression, but Corpse recognized the subtle way her shoulders hunched in as if to defend against an enemy that she feared but couldn't quite see. "I just hope we don't get a bunch of newbies this time."
A high, almost childish voice piped up from the doorway. "Oh, yeah, like adding a bunch of newbies to the team went well on—"
"Don't say it, Ash," Tina and Rae said in unison. Their distaste was palpable: even naming Mira HQ aloud these days brought suspicious glances from others. The company's nondisclosure agreements hadn't helped with all the rumors, including the borderline conspiracy theories that the survivors themselves were impostors, and that it was just a matter of time before they snapped and started killing.
As if Rae, Tina, or Ash could ever kill for no reason. Corpse fought back a grimace. He fucking hated Command sometimes.
He didn't have to stew over their newest assignment for long, though, because a few new faces began to filter through the claustrophobic tunnels to join the congregation. Well, faces and colors. Since crew sizes averaged ten or less per ship these days, the deep space crews tended to differentiate themselves by customized spacesuits, unwilling to rely solely on memorizing features when so much could be obscured underneath a helmet or a mask. And Corpse for one didn't fault that logic, knowing firsthand the ease with which Impostors blended in with regular people. Who needed the added complication of someone assuming another's appearance to wreck havoc if it could be avoided?
Rae had claimed red. She also commonly wore a miniature hockey mask like a hat to stand out even further. Tina had claimed a carrot-orange suit, and further joked around by gluing a floppy fake carrot to her headpiece when the mood struck her. She'd left that particular decoration for another day, though, which was a shame. It made Corpse grin whenever he saw it. But Ash's suit was objectively the coolest overall. Hers cycled between colors on a second-by-second basis so she couldn't be mistaken for anyone else, further cementing her reputation as a fashion genius.
Corpse? He'd chosen black, in part because he never washed the damn thing unless he had to and in part to honor the aesthetic of his favorite music.
He watched, conscious that the others gathering around them cast odd looks at the mask he wore even when he didn't have his helmet on. He took a deep breath, trying to keep the anxious itch crawling across his skin as unnoticable as possible. It wasn't every day people met a dude who wore a literal demonic mask with a bunny ear on one side under his spacesuit. But glances aside, nobody made any move to confront him, and the pre-flight meeting began without a hitch, demanding all crewmates' undivided attention. Corpse shrugged the tension from his shoulders. Things could have gotten off on a much worse note.
A man wearing cyan gestured for their focus. "Alright, people, let's do this. My name is classified, but you can call me Toast. Don't ask why. If you were there, you get it."
Chuckles erupted from the five people who'd entered alongside him — wearing dark green, light green, pink, yellow, and dark blue respectively. Toast let the laughter die down before continuing:
"I'll be serving as captain on this mission, which means that it's my job to help you fulfill your duties as crewmates and ensure our safety as a cohesive team unit. We can go over any questions later, so hold them until we're on the ship. There's a lot of dead space between us and our target. But before we go I'd like to hear a proper introduction from each and every one of you, so sound off. The sooner we nail down who's who the better."
One by one, all eyes turned to yellow. His boyish face and soft brown hair marked him as the youngest crewmate there, an impression that was only intensified when he perked up, recognizing his turn to speak. "Hi everyone! I'm Tubbo."
Light green was 'Spedicey', whatever the hell that meant. Dark blue was Bretman. Pink was Lily. Rae, Ash, and Tina were already so familiar to Corpse that he zoned out a little during their quick speeches, preferring instead to watch the others, wondering what the faces that lay beneath Spedicey, Bretman, Lily, and dark green's helmets looked like. And why they had theirs on already when Toast and Tubbo held theirs for the moment. Some people were shyer than others, but Corpse was used to most crews having a helmets-off rule between active missions.
"-orpse?"
Rae's voice drew him back to reality with a jolt. Corpse blinked, raising one hand in a lazy wave. "Must be my turn, huh? Hi. Name's Corpse."
"Butter, butter, in my ears!" Spedicey said, his distinct accent thickening a little as he went. "Hello, Corpse!"
A deep blue arm wrapped around the excited Irishman's shoulders as Bretman leaned in to shake Corpse's hand. "I know, right? What a beautiful voice, oh my God! I'm gonna look forward to hearing you around, Corpse. Don't be a stranger~"
The voice. Yeah. It captivated most people when they first met him.
To be honest, that had some serious benefits. He wasn't going to deny that it did, given that he'd supported himself by singing and songwriting until he'd finally gotten into this line of work. In fact, it had even drawn his current friends' attention in the first place and helped smooth the way to their becoming such a successful team through tough circumstances. Corpse had a lot to be grateful about when it came to his voice. He just wished that someone, someday, would look beyond it when they first met him and appreciate him as a living, breathing dude in his own right — the constant flirting, while flattering, got old fast.
Dark green covered his mouth as he giggled, despite the helmet (adorned with a realistic plant) that did that for him. "Hi Mr. Corpse! I-I-I'm Sykkuno, and, um, yeah."
Oh God. He was cute.
Corpse could tell.
He opened his mouth without hesitation. "What up baby?" was his ready default for when he was in a flirty mood, both because it made people smile and because he enjoyed the easy flow of the words themselves. Easy, yes, and also distant, not promising more than he could handle giving. A bit more flirting, maybe a cheeky joke here or there. They were perfect words for a situation like this. Which left him completely unprepared for "H-hey Sykkuno, it's nice to meet you too," to fall out instead, marking him as the flustered mess he was under his suave exterior.
Damn. He'd been hoping to play it cool for a bit longer than three minutes after meeting a bunch of new people. And where had that stutter come from? Sykkuno wouldn't think he'd done it on purpose to mock him, would he?
"That's everybody," Toast said, breaking the silence before it could become awkward. He indicated the airlock before them with his chin. "Time to get outta here. We can learn more about each other once we pick seats and figure out who's bunking with who. All aboard!"
In retrospect, Corpse should have looked the others up as soon as he got the manifest, like he knew Rae and Tina had.
Then again, do I even want to know?
He'd been planning on ignoring this new crew. He knew their names now, liked what he'd seen from a couple of them, but that made no difference to the dangers outer fucking space threw at the human beings crazy or desperate enough to plumb its depths. All he needed was his friends. The ones who'd had his back when the going got tough and he had no idea who else to count on. Why get attached to yet more people when he'd end up losing them or alienating them anyway? Cleaning up blood splatter and viscera was hard enough when all he remembered was their suit color.
(He really, really didn't want to have to mop up bloody Sykkuno strips, or face the grim task of taking Tubbo's bones to be turned to so much ash and dust.)
Corpse settled into a seat between Ash and Tina, ears ringing as nine other voices traded stories and swapped tips that had made previous trips bearable. He chose not to complain, didn't so much as open his mouth again for the entire journey; the din at least had the dubious benefit of helping him ignore the sharp dread that worried at his stomach like a ravenous wolf. Because those were just nerves. Nothing more. He needed to focus if he wanted to be on task when they arrived.
(If shit went downhill this time around, he had a horrible feeling that he wouldn't be able to do what it took to survive.)
Riding to the Skeld went okay. That was the first surprise.
After his minor panic attack subsided, Corpse started to pay attention to the conversations going on around him. None were crazy or exciting, but he was glad that Ash, Lily, and Spedicey were laughing over some of his friends' more chaotic hijinks. He thought about stories like that himself when he needed a reason to get up in the morning. Especially the microwave incident. Their old captain had gone ghost white when he discovered them gathered around a broken, burning microwave in the cafeteria, still holding the pressurized hairsprays they'd been killing flies with. It had almost been worth the lingering smell, and his insistence on tagging along to make sure that nothing else got broken for shits and giggles.
Careful to not think too hard about what had happened to that captain, Corpse met Toast's gaze across the aisle and offered a small, jerky nod; seeing it returned eased his aching shoulders, which had been so tense that they popped and crackled with even that minor release.
"Oh, Corpse, Corpse, we're almost here!"
Tina's squeal might have broken his eardrums a little. Ow.
He slapped his chest to release the harness that held him to the seat. Tina stood beside a large porthole, peering outside, so he figured it was safe enough to stand and join her. "Fuckin' technology these days, huh? Gettin' faster."
Lifeless.
Empty.
A bright, pinpricked void that stretched beyond comprehension.
The thing about space was that it defied Corpse's ability to define or describe it. No song he wrote, no lyric he toyed with, came close. Perhaps he could come close, someday, if he compiled those lines into a single book, but he doubted that human words were capable of encompassing the kind of mind-boggling lonesomeness that separated their planet from the rest of the cosmic neighborhood. Yet lonesomeness also implied that there was an alternative, a choice to be made, when out here there were no options except stay with the ship or float through a dead black universe until your oxygen ran out. So there was no emptiness. Just like there was no real life for a human being to lead, either. Life meant surviving, plain and simple. Any further happiness or joy came at a steep cost.
A bonus.
Their destination rolled by fast, or perhaps the ship rolled, showing the massive outer atmosphere structures that docked Earth's starship fleet. Linked together to form a total ring around the planet, they could hold and sustain a solid thirty percent of humanity's current population, with room to spare for industrial-scale agriculture, energy harvesting, and manufacturing. An engineering marvel by anybody's standards — it sent chills down Corpse's spine to imagine how the people who'd built the original infrastructure must have felt, watching their work lock together like so many metallic spiderwebs. Additions had been made since those times, reinforcements and extra features, but even now he couldn't help wondering at how fragile it all looked against the gaping maw of the universe.
"Damn," he whispered, a low, throaty rasp beneath the engines' steady throb.
Sykkuno poked his head over Tina's shoulder to see as well, peeking around her as if to spy on their surroundings. "Oh Jesus! Wow! I've seen simulations, but that's amazing. The stars are so bright..."
He'd taken off his helmet to reveal a shock of soft black hair that swept to one side and deep brown eyes darkened by pronounced epicanthal folds. He stared outside with rapt attention nonetheless, lips parted just a fraction as if he'd forgotten to keep his mouth closed. A real, honest-to-God newbie, then. Corpse's stomach flipped at the thought, nauseated all over again as what that could mean sank in. Dead meat. He's dead meat, isn't he? But he was starting to realize that trying not to get attached might actually kill him, because Sykkuno's enthusiasm and innocence touched something tucked away inside that he had no idea how to articulate, let alone live without.
So he reached out to nudge the other man's chin up, reminding him to close his mouth. "Yeah. Kinda nice, huh?"
The pink blooming across Sykkuno's cheeks answered that question better than whatever stuttered reply he could manage. Who said having the most seductive voice on the planet had no perks?