* / SHINE BRIGHT

“sensible reason?” she repeated, eyes going wide like lina had just asked her to recite advanced quantum mechanics. one of the clones gasped loudly in mock horror, while the other nodded gravely, as if this were the most serious accusation they’d ever heard.

“linaaaaa” all three esme whined, stretching her name into three syllables. esme rushed forward towards her “you wound me. do you really think i’d sabotage dinner? our first dinner? this is just…” she raised the balloon like it was evidence in her defense. it wheezed pitifully. “…ambience. everyone loves a squid centerpiece, right?”

her tone softened, just a little as she shuffled closer, lowering her voice so only lina could hear. “look, i know you want everything perfect tonight. i do too! but perfect doesn’t mean stiff and boring. if people laugh, if they relax, twe will be that much betetr going into the first day. trust me, i’ve got the chaos, i mean fun covered.”

still, someone has to keep the ship from tipping.

“you’re right,” lina admits at last, voice pitched low, steady. their arms unfold, but she doesn't step aside. “we need people to breathe, not choke on nerves.” a pause, and then she angles a look at the balloon, which has deflated into something vaguely squid-like and mostly tragic. “but if your definition of ambience involves property damage, we’re going to have words.”

her gaze catches esme’s, sharp but softened with a flicker of warmth. “so. you want laughter?” she leans in just a fraction, conspiratorial despite herself. “fine. you can set the tone. but you do it without turning my dinner into a salvage yard showcase. deal?” there's no mistaking the underlying truth in her voice: she trusts esme with this, even if she’ll never say it outright.

"It's the truth," he said, tone dropping to a lower register, his arrogance pared back to something colder. "I've known what the stakes were since the day I first wrapped my hand around a throttle, Captain. Don't mistake me for someone who's forgotten what happens when things go wrong."

They passed him on the way to the viewport, and for a moment he let them have the silence and the stars. He studied her backlit outline against the darkness, tense and heavy with a burden that he could almost feel. It was same one that gnawed at him each time he sat in the pilot's seat, the weight of failure perched on his shoulders and whispered in his ear.

But that was also where they differed. Risk sharpened him, made him bolder. He ran towards it and embraced it with both arms like a partner. Every close call, every brush-with-death maneuver wasn't defiance, it was devotion to the space that thought it could deter him from loving it. And if he was reckless, it was because he'd already learned the cruel fact of the matter: guilt wasn't an emotion dead people could feel. "Blame me for enjoying the job if you like, but it's this insanity that's going to keep us ahead of the Blight if it chases us," Neon said, finally turning his eyes to the viewport. The Supernova sailed smooth and steady through the black, Argos a distant sparkle ahead.

"You don't have to like how I fly," he added, quieter. His thumb brushed the throttle with unconscious tenderness. "You just have to believe I'll get us home."

her eyes flick shut. for a moment, she lets herself imagine what it would be like if she gives herself permission to trust, to let go of the reins, to let someone else shoulder the weight for once. the thought is terrifying. the thought is intoxicating. when she turns back, the starlight cuts across her features, softening them despite the iron in their posture. “it’s not about liking it,” she says, steady but quiet, the words dragging from somewhere deeper than orders or protocol. “it’s about whether i can afford to trust you when the line between brilliance and recklessness is razor-thin.”

she lets that hang for a beat before stepping closer again, her gaze catching his. “you want me to believe in you? then stop hiding behind the grin and the theatrics. show me the part of you that isn’t trying to outrun ghosts.” her voice dips lower, almost a whisper now, the kind of honesty she rarely lets slip. “because the crew may need your genius. but i-” their breath catches, jaw tightening around the words she doesn't quite want to name, “-i need to know the man we’ve put at the helm won’t burn us all down just to prove he can rise from the wreckage.”

the silence that follows is heavy, but not hostile—an opening, carved sharp and vulnerable between them.

“I think you get to do whatever you want,” if she just lets herself, but Stellan doesn’t continue beyond that primitive—and perhaps selfish—sentiment. He doesn’t want to keep bothering them about it. After all, he’d already made his thoughts known to Maverick, who must’ve known Stellan would be a butt about this during the expedition, but otherwise felt secure enough that his 'almost' children—his maybe children, or whatever they are to him—wouldn’t be easily influenced by his negative opinions. 

Stellan breathes out a chuckle and raises a brow, turning to look at them and taking a step away from the counter. “What, you don’t like it?” Sarcasm drips from his voice. He knows the answer; he lets the comment slide off him with another shrug. “Fine, I'll lead by finishing these damn dishes so that we can crash out.” He steps back to the dining table and begins gathering the leftover plates and cups. “I hate touching wet food, by the way.” 

she lets the silence hold a beat before moving, stepping forward to take the plates from his hands before he can stack them clumsily. “then you shouldn’t have volunteered,” she says, tone dry but not unkind. their fingers brush his briefly in the exchange, cool against the warmth of his unsteady grip. “go sit. you’ll only make it worse for yourself.” it isn’t a command, though it could be mistaken for one. her voice naturally carries that edge, but there’s a flicker of something gentler beneath it, a quiet acknowledgment that she doesn’t expect him to be anyone other than who he already is.

she turns back toward the sink, rinsing the dishes with quick, efficient movements. over their shoulder, she adds, “if you’re trying to prove a point about leadership, this isn’t exactly the gesture that will win me over.” her lips curve faintly at her own words, though she keeps their face angled away so he won’t see. the water rushes steady over the plates, a rhythm to match the low hum of the ship, and for the first time since dinner ended, she feels something close to ease settling between them.

"Relax, Captain. I've only shaved ten minutes off our ETA to Argos," he said, his voice lazy and satisfied. "Insanity would've cut at least twenty." He ran his tongue over his teeth, the picture of unbothered confidence. Most pilots saw a ship's limits as a wall. Neon saw them as a starting line. Just the thought of chaining gravitational assists from planet to planet like a ping pong ball made his fingers itchy.

But the adrenaline faded fast, leaving a hollowness in its wake. The hum of the engines suddenly sounded too much like the silence that came after the explosion. For a flicker of a moment, he wasn't in the Supernova. He was back in a shattered cockpit, the air thick with the smell of burning metal. His grin stiffened, a shadow brushing across the corners of his eyes. He drew in a long, careful breath, as if it could chase the memory away.

"Thing about these missions is that they don't mean a damn thing if you don't bring the ship home," he said, his voice stripped of its earlier swagger, leaving something quieter in its place. His bionic hand caressed the console it was attached to, his fingers fondling the wires and the ports with a strange, loving tenderness. "Lucky for this crew... I'm real good at making it back."

Neon tipped his head back against his chair, a glint of mischief returning to his eyes as he looked up at them again. The mask of the reckless thrill seeker slid back into place, but the fit wasn't as perfect as before. "Besides, if I screw up from here on out, you won't be around long enough to regret it anyway."

“you think that’s funny?” lina asks, voice low, cutting. she steps closer, enough for the light of the console to catch in the steel of their gaze. “that’s not just you out there playing hero or martyr. that’s all of us.” her hand brushes the chair back as she moves past him toward the viewport, needing the stars in their sightline instead of his grin. the longer she looks at him, the less she trusts herself. out there, endless black and glittering light stretch in every direction. it should make them feel small. instead, it reminds her just how much rests in her hands, and how badly part of her wants to let go of the controls, just once, and fall with him.

she exhales, slow and deliberate, before speaking again, quieter now. “don’t make me the bad guy, neon. not tonight.”

Though he doesn’t blame Lina for hoping to get more from him. Sure, Stellan is adding more to their plate by getting drunk and... whatnot, but there’s nothing going on at the moment that requires him to lock it in. Stellan is starting to see that this is the most significant difference between them; Lina never turns off, and Stellan is only on when he has no other choice. 

He turns Lina’s words over in his head. After a pause, he nods in full agreement. “Yeah, yeah,” he passes a hand through his hair, a motion which makes him sway in place. “So follow mine,” Stellan points towards himself, giving Lina a smile. “You don’t need to be at attention all the time, doing every task you can possibly find,” his tone takes on a gradual lilt. “Listen, Lina, I’m reporting to the Cherish,” he says, “I’m the liaison,” he emphasizes the pronunciation with a drunken slur, “so don't worry about having eyes on you from over there. If you want to take a day off, or just tell everyone to fuck off for a night, or you know, whatever,” he shrugs. “No one here would question you.”

The look Stellan gives her is honest and friendly, and despite the less than ideal promotion of his argument, there’s an undertone of Stellan’s concern for them that makes a vague impression.

“i don’t think that’s how leadership works,” she says at last. the words aren’t cold, but they’re deliberate, and their gaze doesn’t waver. “if i take a day off, someone else pays for it.” she knows he means well (she can feel it in the way he looks at her, even blurred by the sway of his balance), but his kind of freedom is a language they've never learned to speak. “and besides,” she adds, quieter now, almost like they're thinking aloud, “someone is always watching. maybe not the cherish. maybe not maverick. but…” her eyes flick briefly toward the empty chairs around them, the plates waiting to be washed. “them.” their voice steadies again, gentler but certain. “i don’t get to tell them to fuck off. i set the tone. that’s what i signed up for.”

she exhales slowly, letting the hum of the ship fill the silence for a beat before tilting her head toward him. “if you think i should be more like you, though,” her lips curve in the faintest trace of humor, “maybe you should try giving me a better example to follow.”

He settled back into the chair, his posture shifting from a casual slouch to something more symbiotic. It was as if the chair became a part of his spine, his hands moving over the controls with the speed of intuition and the certainty of skill. The Supernova responded instantly, a deep groan shuddering up from the ship's core as the inertia dampeners struggled to compensate for the sudden, violent surge of the engines.

The stars outside the viewport stretched into colourful smears as the ship screamed around them, metal shrieking under stress and the engine snarling at the pressure. Through the viewport, a field of space debris and asteroid fragments loomed before them like a glittering deathtrap.

Neon didn't slow. Instead, he accelerated, plunging them directly into the heart of it. He was a blur of motion, his eyes darting between the chaos outside and the data scrolling across the main screen. The ship rolled onto its side, narrowly avoiding a chunk of rock the size of a fighter craft. The proximity alarms blared frantically.

He felt their presence behind him but he didn't look back. The memory of Hakkun's face flickered like a warning but he didn't feel guilt or grief right then. Only the fuel of adrenaline burning cold and keeping him empty. "For the record, I love consequences," he grunted as he slammed a fist against the throttle, pushing the ship into a dive that seemed to defy physics. "Especially when they're hard and fast."

Just as suddenly as it began, it was over. The Supernova burst through the other side of the debris field into the silent black of open space. The alarms cut out one by one and the engines settled back into a contented purr.

For a moment, Neon just sat there, the tension gradually bleeding out of his shoulders. A small tremor ran through his organic hand, the only outward sign of the adrenaline that had just flooded his system. Slowly, he leaned back and swiveled around to face her again, the movement unhurried and lazy. The razor grin was back, but this time it held a different quality. It wasn't daring or warm, but rather something wild and unguarded, boyish and brilliant. His neon eyes shone brightly in the dim cockpit, seeming to cast their own light.

"Still with me, Captain?"

finally, her eyes cut back to him, the burn of adrenaline still hot and restless under her skin. “barely,” she says, her voice rougher than she means it to be. she straightens, forcing their hands to unclench, forcing her spine back into something resembling command even though their legs still hum from the rush. she should be furious. she should call him reckless, call him out for gambling with more than his own life, lay down the kind of law that the captain should. but instead, the corner of their mouth twitches. it's not quite a smile, not quite surrender, but something that betrays the truth she hates most: she’d loved every second of it.

lina shakes her head, exhaling sharp through their nose. “you’re insane,” she mutters, though the words land closer to admiration than condemnation. her gaze lingers on him a fraction too long, on the tremor in his human hand, on the way his grin had shifted from predator to something far younger, rawer, unguarded. she hates how much that version of him draws her in, how it cracks the armor they've worked so hard to keep sealed. stepping back from the console, lina folds her arms again, as if trying to rebuild the distance she’d just let slip. “don’t make me regret letting you keep the wheel,” she says finally, though her voice is softer, the edge dulled by the echo of their own heartbeat still racing to match his orbit.

esme’s arms were full. like, dangerously full. two of her clones hovered at her sides, each balancing their own strange load of nonsense. an old traffic cone, a bundle of neon scarves, and what looked suspiciously like a hologram projector missing half its casing. esme herself was juggling an equally bizarre haul. three salt shakers, a half-inflated balloon shaped like a squid, and (don’t ask why) a frying pan.

she tiptoed down the corridor, biting her lip to keep from laughing. the clones mirrored her, though one was already grinning too wide, giving away the game.

dinner was supposed to start soon. the very first dinner before their very first real mission, which meant obviously it had to start with a bang. a little prank, something to lighten the mood, to make sure no one sat down feeling too heavy about what was coming.

esme was just about to duck into the mess hall when…

“…oh. uh.” she froze mid-step, arms wobbling under the ridiculous pile. the frying pan clattered against the balloon with a sad wheeze of escaping air. the clones stopped too, exchanging a quick glance like, busted.

but esme recovered fast. she flashed her brightest grin, eyes sparkling as if she hadn’t just been caught red-handed sneaking contraband chaos into dinner.

“hi there!” she chirped as if the moment were perfectly ordinary. “don’t mind me. just, uh…team-building exercises. totally normal. definitely not suspicious.”

esme, arms stacked with the kind of debris scavenged from the bowels of a forgotten storage bay, and two carbon-copy shadows flanking her like accomplices, all frozen mid-scheme. the balloon deflates with a sad hiss, the sound dragging on just long enough to make the silence more unbearable. for one long beat, lina simply looks at her. not with anger (though the muscle in her jaw tenses), but with the weary, measured patience of someone who's lived through this exact scenario a hundred times before in different shapes. esme always trying to turn the world into a circus, lina always stepping in before the tent collapses.

“team-building,” she echoes at last, voice even, clipped, not buying it for a second. her eyes flick over the traffic cone, the scarves, the frying pan, then back to esme’s beaming face. “you’re about thirty seconds from turning dinner into a disaster drill,” lina says, folding her arms across her chest. a captain’s stance, though their gaze softens despite herself.

she sighs, a thread of exasperation twined with something more protective. “esme. tell me you have at least one sensible reason for carrying three salt shakers and a squid balloon into my mess hall.” the corner of their mouth betrays her, threatening the ghost of a smile she tries very hard to suppress.

He let them stand there in the doorway, stewing in the words she'd come to say, letting the quiet become a pressure chamber. It was a stillness he cultivated, a weapon he'd learned to wield far better than any blaster. The hum of the ship seemed to amplify in the void he created, each second ticking by as a deliberate act of dismissal. His cybernetic hand-- stripped of its skin and plugged directly into the Supernova's panel-- rested on the console, fingers tracing patterns of light only he could see.

"Yeah? Sounds like you're projecting, Captain," he murmured, voice flat but carrying an edge of challenge. "You can stand there and pretend you came to give me an order but your body is telling a different story. Your pulse is so loud I could use it for a nav beacon and it's telling me you liked the ride."

With a a slow creak of worn leather, the pilot's chair swiveled around. His neon eyes were piercing in the low light of the cockpit, predatory and intense as they finally locked onto theirs. He smirked, mirthless and knowing. "Let's stop pretending this is about the flight plan," he said, his tone dropping low as if were imparting a deep secret. "You didn't come here to put me on a leash. You came here to see if I'd bite the hand that holds it."

Neon leaned back, sprawling deeper into the chair with the casual ease of a king descending upon his throne. He cocked his head, gaze unblinking. It was a dare cast in violet light. "I fly by my own gravity. I carve my own orbit through whatever shit the cosmos throws at us. That's the deal. So you can stand there and try and make a dog out of me, or you can strap in and see exactly why not even death could hold me."

her arms tighten over their chest, but it feels less like armor and more like restraint. she hates that. she hates the part of her that wants to step closer, to test whether his bite is as dangerous as promised. the hum of the engines fills the pause she lets stretch between them. her eyes flick to the cable fused with his hand, the faint glow of the console lights threading through him as if the ship itself recognizes him. it makes something knot tight in her chest, a reminder of how precarious this all is—not just him, not just her, but everyone sleeping in their bunks depending on her to keep them alive.

“i’m not here to make a dog out of you,” lina says, stepping inside at last, the door sliding shut behind her with a soft hiss. “but if you think i’m going to let you drag this crew into your orbit without consequence, then you don’t know me as well as you seem to think you do.” she stops just short of the pilot’s chair, close enough to catch the reflected starlight in his eyes, far enough to keep herself from being pulled entirely into his gravity. her jaw tightened, but there's a flicker of something else in their gaze. hunger, yes, but laced with restraint so taut it aches.

“show me why i should trust you,” lina says finally, voice dropping into something sharper, daring in its own right. “and maybe i’ll let myself enjoy the ride.”

closed starter for @diamcndskin location: supernova dining area time: morning after the welcome dinner

“Lina, tell me what you’d do if you were me.”

Victor and Lina had decided to grab breakfast together the morning after the welcome meal. To Victor, meeting Lina was the perfect opportunity to see them—to understand who they were as captain of the Supernova Expedition and why they approached it with such bravery (which was already plain to Victor); to know the ins and outs of her communication style; and, perhaps most importantly, to get a read on what she thought they’d be up against. That was what Victor had thought about the entire restless night prior. Argos, and the Blight.

“I feel like I’m making a decent impression on everyone else,” Victor told Lina as he pushed a sausage around his plate. “You know, me being me, which is…well. A lot.

“But I still feel as if I’m not doing something that someone like you would catch instantly.” Or doing something like scheming against fellow crew members on the daily. Victor pushed that truth to the side, though he noted that changing his ways would help people get along with him better. (...As if he ever would.) “I guess I’m less interested in the answer to that, though,” Victor admitted, “than I am intrigued by how you’re intending to get along with everyone. All the time. What’s your big secret to running The Supernova…seamlessly? Because I can already tell,” Victor told them candidly, “that you plan to do this right.” He offered a supportive half-smile.

for a moment, she lets her gaze drift toward the viewport on the far wall, where the faint shimmer of argos’ orbit is only just visible in the artificial daylight. “the truth is,” she continues, quieter now, “i don’t expect it to be seamless. i just expect it to be honest. the crew deserves that much. if i stumble, i’ll say so. if someone doesn’t agree with me, i want to hear it.” her eyes cut back to him, steady, almost challenging in their directness. “what i need is for you—all of you—to be more than just passengers following orders. if this crew is going to survive, it won’t be because i played captain flawlessly. it’ll be because we acted like something closer to a family than a collection of strangers. that’s what i’d do if i were you.”

lina allows a beat of silence, then reaches for their mug, the warmth of coffee grounding her fingers. “as for impressions,” she adds, a faint curve tugging at her mouth though it didn’t quite reach her eyes, “you don’t need to worry. people notice you, victor. that part’s never going to be the problem.” she leaves the last part hanging there, deliberately unfinished, inviting him to decide whether being noticed is the same as being understood.

“Well, enjoy this feeling while you can,” he says. “You’re going to miss just being a glorified babysitter.” There’s a different edge to his tone in spite of the faint slur at the end of his words. Not sarcasm, just vague detachment and the quiet severity of an oracle who has seen the end of their world. It’s only there for a moment before the edge is gone from his face altogether. Stellan meets their brief glance before he shrugs. Criticism of his drinking habits no longer fazes him. Lina’s question seems less like she’s chiding him and more like she’s trying to figure out what to expect, but Stellan defaults to one mode when his proclivity toward drunkenness is brought up. 

“I wish. Do you know how great that would be?” He exhales as his lips curve into a smile. “But no, I’m not always—you know—whatever. During downtime, who cares.” He shrugs. “Anyway, don’t you all have your…” Stellan motions vaguely toward them, “things?” He awaits a response proudly, feeling like he made a good argument for himself despite being nearly incomprehensible.

“our things?” she repeats, tone level, almost patient. “if you mean our powers, then yes. we all have them.” her eyes hold his a beat longer, sharper now, though not unkind. “but i don’t think being able to heal quickly or create clones of ourselves excuses us from carrying ourselves properly.” she doesn’t say it to sting him, though she suspects he’ll hear it that way. to her, it’s just fact—discipline and duty drilled into her so deeply that it threads through every word, every decision. maverick taught her that control wasn’t just survival, it was respect: respect for the crew, for the mission, for the worlds that depend on them. and maybe, for people like stellan, who didn’t seem to care whether or not they made it to tomorrow.

“downtime or otherwise,” she adds, more gently this time, “we set examples. whether we like it or not.” their hands flatten against the counter as if to ground herself, the hum of the ship vibrating faintly beneath her palms. she doesn’t look away from him yet, though, waiting—curious if he’ll brush it off again or if something beneath the slur and bravado might actually answer her.

Stellan’s been pulling out his flask and pouring shots into his cup over the course of dinner, and by the time everyone’s done eating and most have retired to their quarters, he’s hunched over, nearly falling asleep where he sits. Lina’s been across from him at the head of the table, and as he watches her get up and start gathering the plates closest to her, he sighs and drags himself up to do the same. They clean up in silence for minutes; clinking cutlery and the faint sound of the dishwasher being loaded after Crush ducks back into the kitchen are the only sounds that accompany them.

“I got it,” he says when they both go to pick up a bowl, finally breaking the silence. He adds it to his pile, and through a drunken whim, attempts to make conversation. It’s nearly ruined by the sarcastic tone his words take on. “So, how’s your first day of being a captain?”

“it feels less like being captain,” she says evenly, her voice soft enough to keep the words from sounding like a challenge, “and more like making sure no one forgets to eat, or sleep, or keep the ship from falling apart.” a pause, not heavy but thoughtful, and they add, “not exactly how mr. maverick described it.” she allows herself a small, almost imperceptible smile—meant more for herself than for him—before returning to the task at hand, stacking utensils carefully into the bin.

their gaze flicks sideways once more, just long enough to catch the faint glaze in his eyes, before she asks, quiet but pointed, “will it always be like this?” the question isn’t accusatory, but there’s curiosity in it, genuine and restrained, the kind that lingers between them waiting for him to decide whether or not he wants to fill the silence.