Pair

Genre: Steampunk
Prompt: Pair
Time: 80 min


The vessel was a small, agile sort specifically designed for dogfights. If it had been in top condition, the wider pirate drones would not have stood a chance. As it was, Brogan's ship was not entirely fixed up. The fact that it worked at all was impressive, considering that they had pulled its wrecked carcass from a junkyard not even a full month before.


Brogan's eyelids fluttered as flashes of colors darted past his eyes. Blue, green, white, over and over. Blue green white. His stomach turned disagreeably and he had half a mind to be sick where he sat. His eyebrows scrunched and his mouth turned in an expression truly portraying just how he was feeling. The telegraph was rather unnecessary, though, as he was alone in a small fighting glider and hurtling rather swiftly to the ground in it.

His mouth tasted strongly of copper and he could feel blood on his face, warm and thick. His panic over rode the pain throbbing in his head. He had no time to deliberate on exactly which part of himself he had struck on which part of the ship. As long as his body worked and the ship functioned, he could straighten everything out later.

The ship's controls stared up at him, daunting, unmoving, apathetic to his peril. For a moment, he could not remember what anything did. The panel was foreign. The labels that had once marked the switches and dials had long since worn off, preventing him from giving himself a crash course. He reached a shaking hand out and rested it on a tarnished knob. It controlled the wings, this he remembered. He squeezed his eyes shut and prepared to jerk it back. Maybe it was the concussion or maybe it was the lessons coming back to him, but he swore he could hear E.D's voice drone out in her flat American accent, "If you feel like dying, go ahead and pull that one now." (And maybe listening to voices in his head was not the wisest of ideas, but she was a pilot, and it seemed like sound advice.) At the speed he was going down, opening the wings up would probably tear them straight off.

He pumped his foot up and down to work the billows and pulled the column up with all his strength. Unenthusiastically, the nose obeyed him. He revisited the knob that E.D had warned him away from and pulled. The switch mechanism locked. The wings did not open. "Bloody hell, Percy," he cursed under his breath, jerking at the stubborn switch as the nose began to dip again. "Fuckin' Brits can't fix a damn thin--" His violent tantrum ended abruptly when a sturdy kick knocked the rust-locked ballbearings loose and the wings jerked free with such explosive force that the leather seat straps instantaneously bruised his chest.

The glide was unsteady and it took him far longer than it should have to stabilize it. Now that he wasn't dead he could worry about fighting off the pair of pirate jousters currently engaged with punching holes int he vessel he called home.