Chapter Text
Salvor stirred.
Images flashed through their mind; a town in the middle of a freezing tundra with an ominous structure floating in the distance, the tight, dark corridors of an abandoned jumpship, a desert infested with broken, decaying robots, a forest teeming with life, a man.
Him.
“Hugo!” they cried, shooting up in their bed. Their head throbbed with the worst headache they had ever experienced, and they instantly regretted moving so fast.
They tried to open their eyes, but the minimal lighting of their surroundings felt like someone was shining two lights directly into their eyes.
They groaned and rubbed their eyes for a moment before eventually deciding to bear the brunt of the pain and just open them.
Once their eyes had had enough time to adjust and the pain began to subside, they were able to examine their surroundings; their room on the Beggar’s Lament, seemingly converted into some kind of medical suite with some of the emergency medical equipment from the Beggar's hold set up.
They heard the sound of clothes rustling from once side and their head snapped toward the direction of it, once again regretting moving so fast as they began to feel as if someone had taken an ice pick to their skull.
They forced their eyes to focus, and they fell upon the figure of someone, standing awkwardly at the side of their bed, looking intently at them. They knew that they recognised the figure – dark skin, burn scars across the side of his face – but their thoughts were moving at the speed of pitch. But there was a name in their mind. Just one.
“Hugo?” they said again. Their voice was gravelly and their throat felt like it had been scratched by a particularly ornery bishop’s claw.
The figure seemed to squirm at the mention of the name.
“I’m afraid not,” he said, in a pleasant, familiar voice, albeit augmented by awkwardness and what Salvor somehow knew to be shame.
They tried to swing themself out of the bed, but the figure put a hand on them to stop them.
“You need to stay put, your mind isn’t going to be in good shape right now.”
Salvor lay back down on the bed.
“What happened?” they croaked.
“You took a shot intended for Gaal. You should have died.”
They chuckled. “I’ve never been one for ‘should have’.” They stared into the figure’s eyes and it felt for a moment as if their name was right on the tip of Salvor’s tongue, but it just wouldn’t come to them. “So, if you’re name isn’t Hugo, then what is it?” Even they were impressed themself for managing to be so smooth.
“Loron,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.
They tried to think back to see if the name Loron rang a bell anywhere – their mind was starting to feel more like molasses than pitch at this point – before a sudden realisation came over them. “I tried to kill you in the Beggar’s airlock.”
“I tried to kill you first,” Loron responded.
“Touché. In that case, I guess we’re even.”
“Not exactly,” Loron began to say, before they were interrupted by the door opening.
“Salvor!” Gaal yelled as she practically fell on top of Salvor in glee, causing them to groan in no little amount of pain. “Oh my god, I thought you weren’t going to wake up. When I saw you dive in front of me, I was sure that you were–“
“I’m fine, Gaal,” Salvor said, trying to stop her rambling.
“You’re sure you’re fine?” Gaal seemed to be looking over them to try and find any sort of wounds that hadn’t been tended to yet.
“Some painkillers would be nice,” they deadpanned.
Gaal immediately tried to get up to fetch something for them, but she was stopped by one of Salvor’s hands firmly grasping hers.
Salvor stared deeply in Gaal’s eyes that were so full of worry. “I’m okay,” they said. “Really.”
A tear dropped from one of Gaal’s eyes and she collapsed in a heap on top of Salvor, desperately clinging to her child that she so nearly lost, crying every tear that she had held back.
Salvor simply lay there, holding their crying mother.
They briefly looked around the room to see if Loron was still there, but he had evidently left before that. That just left them to wonder, why were they ‘not exactly’ even?