Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Plato and Cain downed their thirteenth shots and slammed their glasses down. 

“Feeling weak, little boy?” jeered Plato, a massive, broken-nosed hulk from Colony Six. “Do you need to borrow my phone so you can call your mama to pick you up?”

“I’ll call your mama to pick her up,” Cain asserted, pronouncing his words carefully.

“Ooh,” hummed that guy who was always in the background smirking and smoking and saying “ooh” and no one ever seemed to know his name.

“Ha! My mama only likes real men. Not little girls who get tipsy at a whiff of the bottle.”

“Drink! Drink! Drink!” shouted the crowd around their table. 

Deimos, who was acting as barman for the contest, poured out Plato’s shot, but the bottle’s last few drops glistened reproachfully as they fell into Cain’s glass. 

“We need more vodka!” shouted Cain. “So I can drink this peony under the table.”

“I think you mean pansy,” muttered Praxis from the table in the corner where he and Athos were playing a halfhearted game of heads-up poker.

Cain ignored him. “Deimos, go get some more!”

Deimos ducked down to whisper in his ear. 

“She won’t? Fuck! I thought the witch liked you. Someone else get some, then!”

There was a lot of shuffling and muttering. 

“Seriously? You’ve all pissed off the witch?”

“She is pretty easy to piss off,” said Helios. “All you have to do is look at her wrong, or show up at the wrong time, or say basically anything at all.”

“What about you, Cyclops? You don’t drink or smoke or fuck, I bet she’s never even met you before.”

Praxis cleared his throat. “You obviously know nothing about my personal life. But even if I wanted to supply you with alcohol that you’ll just vomit back up when Plato kicks your ass, I couldn’t. Baba Yaga says I have the evil eye hidden behind my eyepatch and it radiates bad luck from two meters off.”

Athos discreetly edged his chair further away. It shrieked in protest, and all eyes fell on him. 

“You don’t drink or smoke either, Athos,” Helios pointed out. “And weren’t you just saying yesterday how you’d been single for—”

“You don’t know what I do in my free time, either,” Athos tried to defend himself, but the crowd was already chanting his name. “Fine,” he sighed. 

Chapter Text

“God Ethos, your code looks like scrambled eggs with hair in it.” Phobos leaned over the back of his chair and sniffed.

“Leave him alone, Phobos,” Abel snapped from the next workstation.

“It’s okay," said Ethos, rubbing his aching eyes. "It’s true. My vision has been really messed up lately. Everything keeps blurring and moving around.”

“Maybe you should go to medical, then?”

“I already went. They said it was just a bit of eyestrain and I should take more breaks when I’m using a screen.”

A chorus of scoffing filled the room. Like anyone had time to take breaks! And it totally ruined your concentration, and gave everyone else time to get ahead of you. Medical officers had no concept of reality. 

“You could try dimming your screen,” Selene suggested.

“It’s already as dim as it will go.”

“Just like its user,” Phobos muttered.

“You know what I’ve heard works really well for eyestrain,” Porthos broke in.

“What?”

“Eumgyeong.”

Phobos coughed, but then recovered. “Yes! Eumgyeong! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s something we have back home. It always works. It cures eyestrain, bad moods, stomach ache…all kinds of things.”

“It makes your hair shiny, too,” Porthos said.

“Yes! It hydrates so well. No more dry, frizzy, strawlike mop.” 

Ethos felt his head. Was it really that bad? 

“You should go ask Baba Yaga for some. She has everything—she must have a supply of it.”

“Is it expensive? I don’t even know how to pay someone for, you know, unauthorized transactions.”

“Don’t worry,” Phobos declared. “I’m sure once she sees how badly you need it, she’ll give you a sample free of charge. Oh, and make sure it’s fresh.”

“Nothing worse than stale eumgyeong,” Porthos intoned.

“Um, okay. I guess I could use a break now anyway. Thanks, Phobos!”

Phobos gave him an unsettlingly sweet smile. “Anytime.”

Chapter Text

No one knew the quartermaster’s real name or where she was from. But she looked about three hundred years old and always had a kerchief tied around her wispy white hair, and it was terrifyingly easy to imagine her biting off the head of a grown man, so everyone called her Baba Yaga. She seemed to enjoy this.

Baba Yaga ruled the markets above and below with an iron fist, and legend had it that if she really liked you, she could get anything you wanted, even fresh fruits and vegetables. Some people said that she had a secret hydroponic greenhouse in the hold, and a room full of nothing but rare seeds to plant in it.

If she didn’t like you, on the other hand, you would get nothing but an earful. Baba Yaga didn’t like many people.

Athos was not so conceited as to imagine that she would like him, so he was not looking forward to making his request. Nobody had given him anything to pay her with, for one thing, and it wasn’t like people carried credit cards around the ship.

He was startled but pleased to see Praxis’ navigator Ethos approaching from the other end of the hangar. Ethos was so cute and nice that he would put anyone in a good mood, even a cranky old witch.

“Athos, hi! Do you know how to get to, um—” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Baba Yaga’s office? I heard it was somewhere in this hangar, but I don’t see any doors, just these crates and spooky machines and half-dismantled old starfighters.”

“I think this whole hangar is supposed to be her office. You just have to wander around it until you find her.”

“Wow. Okay. That’s a big office. Maybe we should try calling her.” He cleared his throat. “Um. Quartermaster? Baba Yaga? Are you there, ma’am?”

Something creaked ominously in a corner, and a gentle rumble came from the opposite direction, but no one answered.

They began to wander, staying close together by unspoken agreement. “Ms. Yaga? Are you there? Ma’am? We need to ask you something.”

SKREEEE!

A huge rounded shape leaped up and charged toward them on metallic chicken legs, clanging with each step. Athos instinctively shoved Ethos out of its way; they crashed into a pile of small crates and landed in an heap of flailing limbs. Two of the crates toppled and burst open, spilling piles of seeds everywhere.

“Sorry!” Athos rolled off and scrambled to his feet to face the thing, whatever it was. It looked like an escape pod with long, jointed metal legs grafted onto the underside. No obvious weapons. 

With an eerie whine, the legs folded and the pod descended to the floor. The hatch opened, and Baba Yaga’s scowling head emerged. “Look at this mess! You boys, so careless!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Ethos, brushing poppyseeds off his uniform. “We can clean it up.”

“You mixed seeds! No way to separate now!” Her feet dropped to the floor with an angry thump. "You trying to grow everything bagel?"

“No, ma'am. Do you have a floor cleaner?”

“A what?”

“A little robot that cleans the floor.”

“Ah, rumba! Yes, of course.”

“If you call the cleaner, I can program it to recognize different types of seeds and sort them into separate piles.”

Baba Yaga regarded him skeptically, but turned her head and shouted, “Dolly! Come here!”

“Aww, you named it! That’s—” Ethos fell silent at her predatory glare. 

After a moment a little square robot whirred up, and Ethos gently lifted it into his lap.

“You better not break Dolly too, or I make Earth boy sushi and sell outside mess hall.”

“I won’t break her,” Ethos promised. “I’m just going to teach her how to eat in a smarter way. Let me just open the hood here…” 

There was a long, tense silence, broken only by tapping and gentle clicks. Baba Yaga and Athos eyed each other warily.

“All right!” Ethos announced after a few minutes. “I think we’re ready.” He set the robot down, and it moved over the scattered seeds and began to vacuum them up. 

The quartermaster folded her stringy arms. “So? Nothing new.”

“Just wait till she’s done. I’ll show you.”

When the floor was clear again, Ethos called Dolly to him and opened her hatch again. The main compartment was divided into two uneven sections, and each contained only one kind of seed.

“Not bad, Earth boy,” Baba Yaga grudgingly admitted.

“I can send you the code I used. You can alter it to teach her to distinguish between any two sizes or shapes of object. It’s a lot like the code we use for threshing grain back on Earth.”

She nodded slowly, then planted her hands on her hips. “So, now that you boys cleaned up the mess you made, what you want?”

Ethos hesitated.

“Well,” Athos ventured, “I need a bottle of vodka.”

“No! No way. You boys drink it all too fast. You drink it all first month in space and then whine, whine, whine when no more. You gotta pace yourselves. I give you more in...two weeks.”

“But—”

“No buts! Enough buts on this ship! You go do something useful. Start chapter of Anonymous Alcoholic.”

“I’m useful,” muttered Athos. “I do a lot of useful—”

“No one cares,” she snapped. “You. Earth boy. What you want?”

“Um, I’m supposed to ask you for some fresh…not sure how to say this…im yong?”

Baba Yaga stared at him for a full five seconds. 

Ethos shuffled his feet. “Phobos said it would…cure my eyestrain?”

The quartermaster doubled over. A horrible stuttering whine squeezed its way out of her body, like the last reluctant glob of toothpaste from an empty tube. Athos was about to call the medbay when he realized she was laughing. 

“Cure…your—cure—”

Ethos gaped. No one had ever heard Baba Yaga laugh before.

“Cure…” She was actually hiccuping now.

“Porthos said it would make my hair shinier, too. If that helps.”

“Shy—shine—shinier—hair—ahahahaha—ha—” She finally recovered. “I have no eumgyeong. But I tell you what. I give you vodka. And you trade it to your friend for his eumgyeong.”

“You have some?” Ethos blinked at Athos.

“I have no idea what that is.” 

“I can tell!” shrieked the witch, doubling over again. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said Ethos. “How do you know that Athos has it?”

“He has it,” she said with complete confidence. 

“Is it maybe…something common, that you know by a different name?” Ethos asked Athos.

Baba Yaga pried open a large crate and pulled out a bottle, shoving it into Ethos’ hands. The label contained an Art Nouveau illustration of a soulful blonde maiden gripping a staff topped with a flaming skull. “You two, go to vodka boy's room and look for eumgyeong. You will find it.” She shooed them out of the hangar, and as the door closed behind them, they could hear her cackling like a gleeful chicken.

Chapter Text

“Well, it was nice of her to give me the vodka,” said Ethos after a moment. “Although I don’t understand why she didn’t just give it to you, since you were the one that wanted it. I hardly even drink at all.”

“Oh, me neither,” Athos said quickly. “A couple of the guys were having a contest, you know, like they do sometimes. And they ran out, and sent—it was my turn to get more.”

“I’m really curious what that stuff could be.”

“Yeah, me too. Some kind of traditional medicine, maybe? My mom sends me care packages sometimes, but it’s mostly just food.”

“Maybe it’s a food, then?”

“Or a food ingredient? Who knows.” Athos scratched the back of his head. “Do you um, do you want to go look for it in my room? I know it sounds crazy.”

“She did seem really sure you had it. I guess we could check ingredients, and look them up and see if something that looks like…im yong...turns up in the translation app? Or I could just try looking up the word itself, but they didn’t spell it for me and I’m probably pronouncing it wrong.” He pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen. “No, it’s not giving me anything that makes sense. So, um—sure, let’s go.”

—

They sat on the floor by the bunk, bags and boxes scattered in front of them like larger, more varied seeds.

“This could take hours,” Athos moaned. “There are like 30 ingredients in most of these.” He had dimmed the room lights and insisted that Ethos read the labels to him so he could look them up, so that Ethos wouldn’t have to keep looking at a screen. He was being so nice that Ethos didn’t have the heart to tell him that squinting at tiny text in a half-lit room was not doing his eyestrain any favors.

“Why don’t I just text Phobos and ask him to spell the word,” he suggested. 

“Oh!” Athos’ relief was evident. “Good idea! I don’t know why we didn’t think of that before.”

Phobos replied in seconds—he was being unusually helpful tonight!—and Ethos pasted the word into the translation app.

He promptly dropped the phone. “Oh my god.” 

“What? What is it? Is it some really addictive drug?”

Ethos shook his head. He could feel his face getting hot.

“Is it poisonous? I know he’s mean, but I can’t imagine him actually trying to poison you.”

He cracked up. “Not—poisonous.”

“Or something gross? That would be just like him.” Athos snatched up the phone and looked at it. “Holy shit.” 

“I feel so—dumb,” Ethos wheezed. “Go to your room and find the—”

“Just think, you could’ve gone to your own room and found it. Or just...looked in your pants.”

“I think she meant, um—they meant—you know. Someone else’s.”

“I know! I know that now.” 

The waves of laughter finally receded. “God, how will I ever show my face again? I just said, ‘Sure, Phobos, I’ll go do that, thanks for the suggestion. Sure Baba Yaga, I’ll go to Athos’ room and look for his dick.’”

Athos froze.

“Sorry! Omigod. I am so stupid. I can’t believe how stupid I am.” Ethos covered his face with his hands. It was nice and dark inside his hands. Restful. He was never going to leave.

“You’re not stupid! Hey!” Athos pried the hands away, and his face was suddenly very close. “You’re super smart. You reprogrammed a roomba in what, two minutes? You code. You decrypt alien languages. You fly a spaceship. You fix spaceships. You are literally a rocket scientist.”

“Well, technically I’m not because I don’t make the spaceships—”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know, I know. I just feel really stupid.”

“I didn’t know what they were talking about either. Does that make me stupid?”

“No, of course not!” Athos was still holding his hands, and it was becoming increasingly hard to think of anything else.

“Don’t worry about them. They’re just jealous of how cute and nice you are.”

“What?!”

Athos’ eyes dropped. “I mean, you know. Even Baba Yaga likes you.”

“Oh.” That kind of cute.

“What’s wrong?”

“When you’re not cool or good-looking, people say that. When they’re trying to find something nice to say about you.”

Athos blinked. “But you are cool and good-looking.”

“Really?”

“I mean, you’re not trendy. But you don’t have to be, because you’re already yourself. Trendy is for people who are too insecure to be themselves.”

“Huh. I never thought about it that way.” Ethos resisted the impulse to cover up his shamefully trendy (but still awkward) haircut. Barbers could smell weakness and he usually ended up leaving with something they chose rather than what he’d asked for. But maybe Athos wasn’t just talking about hair. “You really think I’m…good-looking?” He laughed nervously before Athos could answer. “Now who’s insecure?”

“Everyone’s insecure about something. But like, the question is, do you let it take over your whole personality?”

“Wow. That really makes sense.” 

“But, uh, yeah.”

“Hmm?”

“I um, I do think you’re good-looking. I was just trying not to sound, um, sleazy. Or whatever.”

“Oh! Oh wow. Um.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to—if you’re not—” Athos let go of his hands and sat back.

“What if I am?” Ethos asked.

“Oh! Um—really? You mean—”

Ethos leaned closer and touched the side of his face, trying not to think about what if he had misunderstood the whole thing and made a fool of himself again. But he hadn’t, because Athos swallowed and leaned forward too, and there were warm hands on his shoulders and the tender thrill of their lips sliding over each other. Athos sighed into his mouth, and finding a way to feel the living heat of his skin pressed up along Ethos’ entire body was suddenly more important than anything else.  

—

“How does this sound? Dear Phobos,” Ethos intoned. “Thank you for your kind suggestion. I tried some eumgyeong and I feel a lot better now. The quartermaster didn’t have any, but she told me to look in your boyfriend’s bed and I found quite a lot of it there. Looks like he’s been holding out on you.” Technically this was true. Athos’ bed was on the top bunk, but since Porthos always slept over in Phobos’ room, they hadn’t bothered to climb up the ladder.

“Oh my god. Are you really going to send that?” 

“I haven’t decided yet. Should I attach a picture, maybe? To prove I found it?”

“Ethos!” Athos hastily grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to his waist.

“I guess not then. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“He definitely doesn’t. But I know someone who does.” He rolled on top of Ethos, and the phone dropped to the floor.

After a moment it beeped softly. 

“Oh shit,” said Ethos. “Hold on. Shit. It sent itself. And he answered.”

“What did he say?”

He held up the screen. FUCK YOU ETHOS. FUKC YOU FORVER.

They burst out laughing. 

“Well,” said Athos after a moment. “That sounds like a serious order. I guess I better get started on it?”