Chapter Text
It was busy work saving the stars. After about a year of teaching on Erid, the Hail Mary was fixed up enough to start distributing Taomeoba to other stars. Other spacefarers had started the process but Joaquin was excited to get back onto the final frontier himself.
On top of his main mission, intel from the Gaurdian's network of ships had let him know to keep an eye out for anything strange. Something somewhere was causing things to fall through the cracks of space, time, and reality.
It had been a total of five years since Sharon Carter shot him off into space and look at him now.
Joaquin had fallen asleep over his laptop again.
"Joaquin! Joaquin wake, exclamation!" Red's translator voice said. Not completely awake but he could hear the familiar sound of his companions xenonite ball quickly aproaching.
Thunk!
Red slammed his transport ball into the desk Joaquin had fallen asleep at.
"I'm up! I'm up!" he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Red chirped excitedly.
"What's up buddy?"
"New object detected. Joaquin tell Red what screen says!"
A flicker of excitement spread across Joaquin's face. This could be another ship.
He hopped into the pilot's seat. "Mary, what am I looking at?"
"Gravitational anomatility detected, behind that, Blip-E."
"Could be atmosphere, question?"
Joaquin looked at the screen. "Hmmm, it looks to small to be planet,"
"Joaquin careful, like fishing,"
Joaquin cringed. Not his finest moment. "I will. We'll take it slow."
"Mary, can I get anogther reading on the anomily?"
"Of course Captain Torres."
Joaquin drummed his fingers. According to the readings the gravity was receding around it. With luck, they'd have their window.
After what felt like forever, he had a visual on the object. It was far smaller than the Hail Mary and—
Holy shit.
It was a submarine.
Freedom was not worth all of this, Shangqi thought as he coaxed the rusted tin can he was stuck in further.
Technically he'd fulfilled his end of the deal. He'd gone down and taken the dang pictures but no, apparently getting attacked warranted a second trip down there.
To top it off the radio had disconnected and the oxygen meter was getting dangerously low.
Hope was few and far between this late into the rapture. But it was also why he let them weld him into this death trap, jumping at his fragment of a chance for freedom.
Now what? He'd die surrounded by proof of his destruction. It had to be some sick joke reusing parts from filiment station specifically, not to mention finding the tree pendant.
He smiled. Xialing was so excited when she finally received hers. He'd lost contact with her after the (failed) raid on filiment station. Shangqi hoped she'd made it out, that this pendant wasn't hers.
Lost in thought, the sub crashed into the wall, controls hissing at him. Shangqi braced himself on the control console as best he could.
He shook himself off and took another god damned picture.
Wait a minute. It looked like something distinctly man made.
Another submarine.
So the COI had lied, that was almost expected.
But there was something worse about the discovery.
The submarine didn't have C.O.I. architecture. It had Eden's.
"Fuck."
Shangqi did have a family. Once. But, like the stars, it disappeared all at once with the death of his mother. From then on, Shangqi was his father's perfect soldier, destined to right the wrong and set Filiment Station ablaze and Wenwu wore a stern face and his metal bracelets; a status symbol more than anything, not needing to be reused to repair the ship.
He still flinched at the sound of jingling metal.
But when he wasn't overseeing his training, he was researching. Rumor was that he'd found something, somewhere, that let him hear his beloved wife again. Shangqi didn't like to think about it.
He especially didn't want to think about it now.
Even if it was true Shangqi never thought his dad would go this far.
Anger rose in his chest. If his father was inside the other sub, it meant he'd left behind the whole station, countless families behind. Shangqi would never say that his dad was good but it was true that leaders—especially leaders that could hold stations together—were as hard to come by as stars. All that—all those resources used on the sub instead of fixing the station Shangqi knew was in desperate need of repairs—gone to waste at the bottom of an ocean of blood.
"Convict! What are you doing?! How are you even still alive?" The speaker crackled back to life, distinctly the Captains's voice.
"You! You're not real!" Shangqi shouted back. After finding the other sub, the voices had started to get more persistent. There were from his past, people he'd killed, all sounding so ever-so-slightly off.
"Convict what are you talking about? You should have run out of oxygen days ago."
"What's my name. Tell me my name!"
He could hear breathing over the other end of the speaker.
"…I never actually got your name."
There it was. The cruelty he was familiar with. The captain was undoubtedly real.
"Why didn't you tell me there were other subs down here?"
"Hold on. You found the SM-8?"
"Yeah," Shangqi said and read off the coordinates.
"Holy shit, this is something Convict. The SM-8 has technology on their black box that we can't make anymore. If you can get close enough then you can download the data onto the ship's computer."
"Then— then I'm done?"
"Once you have the data I'll see what I can do." This part was quiteter like she'd moved away from the mic. "John, what's the condition of the other subs?"
Shangqi felt somewhere beyond a dead man walking. As much as he tried to clamp it down in his chest, that last message sounded like hope.
The ship had groaned the whole time. Something he desperately hoped was just currents assaulted the SM-8 from every angle.
But he'd gotten the data.
"Convict?"
"Yeah?" Shangqi said breathlessly.
"My name is Ava."
"Shangqi."
So close. He was so close.
Shangqi repeated it to himself like a prayer as the ocean crashed into the ship. The heat was excruciating by this point.
"Shangqi I'm sorry the—" He could hear banging from her end of he radio. "—can't get you out."
The words dropped on him like a pile of bricks.
"No no, we had a deal!"
"Shangqi, it's not up to me. This is bigger than us. The physical black box is in the crawl space. Get it to the surface, please just—" The sound cut off with a scream and the puncturing metal.
He didn't have the time nor energy for devastation. Instead he could feel the exhausting start to weigh on him.
He ducked his head. The crawlspace was full of blood by this point.
"Absolutly fucking not."
Shangqi emerged from the crawlspace with the black box clutched to his chest like a life line. His skin felt and smelled like burning. It was either that or the walls of the sub. He wrapped the black box in the life vest.
Foolishly, he rested his hands on the sub wall for support.
The seed pendant cracked, tendrils trying to meld him to the wall. Fuck it, he was not dying without killing this thing.
The cacophony of voices was back.
Come join us in the forests of Eden
Shangqi closed his eyes and ripped.
Flesh was torn from flesh as the overgrowth of tree secured firmly to the wall.
WAS VIOLENCE ALL YOUR MOTHER EVER TAUGHT YOU?
"You want The Butcher? Well come and get me!" Shangqi roared and with remaining strength slammed onto the control panel, forcing the ship forward.
The impact slammed him face first into the panel. Shangqi could feel himelf slipping away from that pain of…well everything by this point.
You will always be one with us
YOU WILL ALWAYS BE ONE WITH US
Shangqi hoped, at the very least, death would be kinder than man.