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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/TheCurserHasntMoved on 2025-07-01 12:57:11+00:00.

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“Jason,” Vai weakly said as Jason gently strapped her down on her berth within the IMCAS, “are you gonna fight again?”

“Aye,” Jason whispered.

“Are you gonna be okay?” she asked, and Jason sensed deep currents in her simple words.

“Of course,” Jason answered, “I’m a fighter. It’s what I do.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Vai said. The Long Way was silent around them. Jason realized with a pang that her heart would never beat again. “I mean after.”

“I have friends to help me out of trouble," Jason whispered past a lump in his throat, and Jason saw Vai try to nod, but the IMCAS didn’t have enough space open around her face.

“Chief,” Vincent said from the doorway, “we need to get ready.”

“We can’t run away, we can’t hide, so I gotta fight for you guys,” Jason told her as he stood up, “Because I won’t let them get you.”

“I know,” she said, and Jason blinked back tears when he realized that she had no doubts about his victory.

The boy grown-up too-soon found he had nothing to say to such complete trust in him, so he turned about and joined Vincent. A heavy, calloused hand fell on Jason’s shoulder. “Did you feel the harpoons hit?”

“Aye,” Jason answered, and anger bubbled up in his voice as he spat, “They have tractor beams but they want us to know they have us on a line like a fish!”

Vincent steered Jason toward the hatch leading down to the engine room and said, “Yeah. Pirates are like that. They want us afraid, panicky, stupid.”

“Well I’m fucking furious!”

“That’s not much better, Chief,” Vincent said as they entered the engine room. It was disorienting for Jason to pull himself down the ladder in the absence of The Long Way’s artificial gravity, but that was a small thing. Trandrai cleaved to the blast shield covering where the access panel to the reactor used to be. She was weeping. Jason’s heart lurched from rage to grief, and in the space between his mind knew that Vincent’s words were right. “Feel your anger, acknowledge it, but it is your anger. You are not its man.”

“Aye,” Jason growled, and he took a deep breath. He didn’t feel much calmer when he let it out.

Trandrai tore herself from her weeping at the blast shield, and looked up the ladder where Isis-Magdalene hung from the lip of the hatch leading to the galley. “Cadet will not leave the cockpit,” she said softly, “he weeps at…” Trandrai had pushed off of the blast shield, and caught herself on the ladder with three of her hands to reach out to Isis-Magdalene with her lower left hand. A sanguine hand with bony protrusions on her knuckles met a sapphire hand calloused at the fingertips by long hours of tinkering. “He also weeps for her.” Then, Jason saw that tears ran freely from Isis-Magdalene’s eyes in a glistening trail of grief-filled droplets. He touched his own face and found it dry. A deep part of him knew that there would be a time for tears. A time for tears would come, later.

Trandrai drew Isis-Magdalene down into the engine room and said, “They killed her.”

“I thought it a passing strange thing that you spoke of her as though she lives-" Isis-Magdalene’s voice caught in her throat, and she corrected herself, “lived.”

“Her name will be recorded in the clan rolls, and The Long Way will sail again.” Jason said, and he was surprised to hear his voice was hard. He realized that he had pushed his grief away as Trandrai twisted to look mournfully at him, “I promise." Those two words carried an entire conversation, and his cousin just nodded. Jason pressed the ceiling to twist himself toward Vincent.

Despite the lack of gravity, Vincent had oriented himself to be kneeling before his locked armory. It took a little doing, but Jason managed to maneuver himself to take his place at his uncle’s right and kneel as well.

Vincent felt, rather than heard the Chief kneeling beside him. In the same way he felt himself drifting less than an inch above the floor, he felt the boy slowly drifting toward him. His mind was right. His fury was in rein. He made the sign of the cross, then unlocked his armory. “Saint Michael, Master of Battles, pray for an old servant and a child of God,” he prayed as he reached into his armory to draw out his adaptive cammo suit. It’s ballistic weave would offer at least a little protection, even if its main function wouldn’t be much use here and now. “We sought not this battle, but it has come upon us, and struck at our very heart.” Vincent pulled a load bearing harness out of the armory and passed it to the Chief. He began shrugging it on without question. Vincent nodded as he clad himself in the adaptive cammo suit. “We have done as bidden, the message is sent,” Vincent continued as he pulled a magacc pistol out and passed it to the Chief before he took one for himself. “Yet our labors are not finished. Here are children, precious to Christ and all who revere Him." Vincent pulled out another magacc and passed it to the Chief before he pulled out two revolvers for himself. “Here I and one grown too soon shall do battle for them.” An all too familiar shotgun was in his hands, then in the Chief’s hands. Then, Vincent passed the boy two reload blocks for the shotgun, and two for the pistols. “Let our fury be tempered by wisdom, let our vengeance be tempered by justice, let our aim be true and our hand be mighty.” Vincent clipped two grenades and two flashbangs to his suit, and passed two flashbangs to his companion. "Let all things obey His will, and we pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.” Vincent held his carbine in his left hand and made the sign of the cross once again.

“And they will call me Oathkeeper, and the only way to escape is to fail.” the Chief whispered under his breath before saying as he too made the sign of the cross, “So be it, amen.” Vincent’s heart twisted for the boy, under a legacy he wished to uphold and escape at once, thrust too soon among those men and women that children look up to with stars in their eyes.

The tug of mass secured in his adaptive cammo suit’s magnetic holsters tugged at him in that strange way mass in freefall does, and Vincent saw that a change had come over the Chief. He was still angry, still grieved, of course, but it was sharpened, focused. Good, or rather better. There wasn’t any good to be seen until they were on the other side of this situation. “Tran,” Vincent snapped, then he tried to make his voice less harsh, “they want us afraid, panicky, stupid. What do afraid, panicky, stupid people forget when their ship is stuck on a line?”

The burgeoning engineer relinquished her friend and said, “Oh Stars!” She pushed herself to the engine room’s main console without another word, and the lights dimmed to emergency red while she muttered, “A/C, water heater, kitchen power, don’t need sensors at this point, and the battlescreens don’t need to keep trying to spin up…”

“We have maybe an hour or two of waiting, unless they’re watching and think we just lost power.”

The Long Way’s corpse lurched around them and the Chief said, “Aye, looks like that’s what they think. To the boarding ramp, Captain?”

“Yes,” Vincent said, and he watched as the Chief pushed off and floated out of the engine room. Vincent idly wondered if the boy had ever played any zero G sports to be so deft when the gravity cut out. But watching Trandrai easily drift from place to place in the engine room brought another explanation to his mind: emergency drills. Vincent drew one more magacc from his armory and pushed off to follow him. However, he took hold of the lip of the hatch leading into the galley to halt himself beside Isis-Magdalene and pressed the handle of his final pistol into her hands. “Don’t let yourselves be taken alive,” the old man whispered.

She took it from him with wide, frightened eyes, blinked to free her eyes of fresh tears. “I have faith,” she told him seriously, “yet this shall give you clarity. We shall not be taken, Path Seeker.”

Vincent grunted and pushed off to drift to the cockpit. Once he reached the hatch he pulled himself in where Cadet’s tears floated around his head like orbiting asteroids. “I was right here,” the boy said upon sight of Vincent, “right here. My wing-claws were on the yoke, there were enemies coming to get us, and I knew. I knew she was alive, that Jason and Tran were right. She was alive, Dad. She was alive.”

“I know.” Cadet fixed a dark eye on Vincent, ruffled his feathers from head to toe, and Vincent saw that the boy understood how he felt. “I need you to be with the girls, they’re still alive and so are you.”

“I’m sorry… it’s just…”

“We won’t forget her,” Vincent said, “there will be time.”

Cadet nodded and started working to extricate himself from his safety webbing. Vincent nodded to himself, that was done.

Jason ran his hands over the old surplus RNI boarding shotgun in another check. This was different. He’d been in fights, and even deadly fights before, and quite recently. However, he could feel in his gut that this was different. He hadn’t come under sudden attack out in the open, but his sanctuary had been destroyed. He would counterattack, which wasn’t the same as defending against attackers. It amounted to the same thing, he wouldn’t let his friends be taken. …

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