scavenger.

11 - lovely

Anri was fucking exasperated.

It was nice having help, to be honest, but at what cost?

The two seemed to be turning this into a competition—whether it was friendly or not depended on who you were asking. Jace was cordial, but he was always cordial. He never truly seemed to detect bad intentions from people—or if he did, which Anri suspected was the case, he never let on. And the hunter was all bad intentions, for some reason.

Well, okay, not "for some reason." The bounty hunter was so green it practically glowed through his tanned skin. Anri crinkled her nose at the feeling.

At first she'd only suspected him of being overprotective. She hated it but she couldn't blame the hunter too much—that was just in his nature. He'd suffered a lot and he'd lost a lot. He had plenty of connections but she was his only friend. And even then, she only stuck with him out of obligation.

But now he was just crossing the line. He was going from protective to possessive.

Anri belonged to herself and to her ship. He had no right to her.

Nor did Jace.

So what were they fighting over?

"No wonder the lights weren't working," Jace mused out loud. "Who did the wiring?"

"The hell's wrong with the wiring?" the hunter grunted from under the floor, where he was messing about with the flux stabilizers.

Jace seemed to pick up on the bloodthirsty tone in the hunter's voice, and shook his head, abandoning the subject. "Nothing. Wiring's fine."

Anri didn't miss his dimples creasing briefly in amusement as he unsoldered two mismatched wires. He turned to her and Anri realized she was smiling as well, and they stared at each other for a moment, as if sharing some private joke.

Anri wiped the smile off her face and whirled around, returning to her work. She was cleaning bits of sand leftover from Jace's little crash out of the ship's hyperdrive. It was tedious and it was mindless. She started humming to fill the silence—a little drinking song she'd learned when she was younger, during darker days.

The hyperdrive, as well as the rest of the ship's main controls, was fully functional. Well, Anri supposed it was. It started up when she told it to and it powered down when she told it to. The switches corresponded with their parts. If the galaxy weren't so unforgiving Anri might've flown out of here months ago, the minute she'd been able to. Not all of it she was able to figure out herself, but she'd managed to seduce a certain engineer years ago that helped teach her the workings of these things, and whenever there was a starship blueprint to be found in the bazaar she made it hers. Not to mention the durability of her humble freighter wasn't to be questioned; even when in ruins, covered in sand and teeming with roaches, the walls were still practically air-tight, other than the ramp having been left ajar. But Anri's main concern had been the little things—the details that would keep her alive on her voyages. Temp regulators (check, easy), oxygen converters (Anri had found it difficult to figure out, but Jace had helped with that—easy for him, he said, because his oxygen was apparently always running out in his fighter back home. Which was..concerning), the navigation computer (this was especially hard, being that Anri knew nothing of programming—she couldn't read Basic, to begin with—but Jace promised to work on this part, after fixing the generators, which, granted, was slightly more urgent)—

The world was narrowing, her vision tunnelling as these thoughts swirled through her head, her mind mapping out every last little task she would need to accomplish so that she could finally set forth into the galaxy.