![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: One Moment, Balanced On The Edge
Rating: PG-13
Type: Gen
Continuity: between the end of S2 and the start of S3, during that running battle we saw nothing off that almost totalled the Liberator.
Characters: Avon-centric. Gen. Family.
Summary: Liberator is on its last legs. They all know it. Only Zen's implacable programming, Jenna's admittedly rather superb piloting skills, and his own relentless efforts are keeping them together at all.
Wordcount: 968
One Moment, Balanced On The Edge
He is lying on his back, curled awkwardly around exposed machinery, his gut aching where it has been pressed to hot metal for what feels like hours, but is probably more like minutes, his face twisted and peppered with tiny burns from the sparks. Avon barely notices them anymore, when they do not directly affect what he is trying to accomplish. In fact, he might possibly have been asleep for some of them, dead and beyond reach for glorious minutes at a time, in some position almost exactly like this one, only earlier, much earlier in this running battle of theirs. No time for sleep now, days in, drained, depleted and damaged as they are. It's why he's here, buried in his ship's innards, mind and fingers flying, twisting, drawing every last scrap of fight Liberator has left. Zen cannot help him now. Zen has far more pressing concerns. Like maintaining life support and manouverability with multiple hull fractures and who knew how many Andromedan and Federation ships warring for supremacy with them caught so masterfully in the middle.
Only Blake, he thought. Only Blake could have brought them to this.
Sparks bite and snarl viciously at his fingers, and he snaps out an exhausted curse, but his hands remain buried in the depths of the engines, because if it is a choice between saving them and saving his life, Avon is perfectly happy to wish his hands goodbye. Not that they'd last long without them, mind, but it was the principle of the thing. A survivalist should strive to the very end, no matter how hopeless.
Liberator is on its last legs. They all know it. Only Zen's implacable programming, Jenna's admittedly rather superb piloting skills, and his own relentless efforts are keeping them together at all. They're limping towards a planet, any planet, any haven. Before life support fails utterly. Before some bastard gets a lucky shot in. Before Jenna's exhaustion prompts her to dodge left instead of right. Before the fog floating insistently behind his own eyes causes him to wake up inside a cascade failure. Before Vila's unfailing badgering, whining and forced cheer fail to annoy him sufficiently for revival. Before Blake finally curls up on the flightdeck and surrenders to bloodloss, despite Cally's best efforts.
Before they die, in short. But damned, damned if he will let that happen.
He feels Liberator move around him, ducking into a shuddering roll to the left as Jenna compensates for the fact that the force wall had become unsustainable fourteen hours ago. He feels the shudder as something wings their uppermost engine, hears the stream of foul, piratical profanity their pilot lets fly in response. Liberator screams around him, coolant hissing above his head as he frantically squirms his way across the room, to the panel flashing alarmingly at the latest damage, listening with half an ear as Zen calmly explains why self-repair is unfortunately not an option right now. He ignores it, hands flying without conscious direction, caution abandoned for the kind of reckless surety he had so often accused Blake of using to get them all killed.
Ah well. At least he would die vindicated, and he can feel his face stretching at the thought, baring his teeth in something caught perilously between a grin and grimace. But the black humour of the situation can't be denied, not by anyone with an ounce of self-awareness, and of all the people in the galaxy, he is the only one he trusts not to lie to him.
Well. Maybe Vila, if they were talking life and death. Money, not a chance, but your life? That, Vila could be trusted with.
Such a shame he couldn't say the same of their valiant leader.
And then, before he has time to fully process it, Liberator rights itself around him, and the sounds over the communicator from the flightdeck descend from cacophony to mere din, and he realises belatedly that it is over. The dogfight, at least. They have ... survived, apparently. Again. And a second later, while he lies stunned and blank beneath the singed metal of alien technology, he hears Vila's voice, calling him, frantic and concerned until he manages to pull himself together enough to answer.
"Vila," he rasps. "Kindly ask our illustrious pilot if, the next time she wants to do a vertical roll in the middle of complex repairs, she might deign to warn people?"
He tries very hard not to hear the obvious relief in the thief's strained voice as he suggests that relaying such a message might not, in fact, be good for his continuing health, or to feel the ridiculous surge of ... warmth ... in his chest as he slips easily into the to-and-fro of insults between them, with occasional acidic interjections from a tired and extraordinarily cranky Jenna, soothing murmurs from Cally, and the quiet snort from Blake.
He lies there, in the belly of this ship of fools, in the midst of this bright and anarchic dream, populated by relentlessly, terminally optimistic idiots, battered and burned and barely alive, listening to the strained, comforting chatter of people he might, just, consider true friends, and somewhere inside him the laughter bubbles, rich and black and self-amused, and somewhere deeper still, where only terminal exhaustion and the very real knowledge of impending death can reach, he feels a sense of ... peace. Home. Family.
And at the thought, the eternal cynic behind his eyes cannot help but flash a blind, diamond grin.
One of these days the irony really is going to kill him. He just knows it.
