Cando was almost in the creature’s mouth by the time Enzo reached him, vibrant drool dripping off of the white skin of his forehead. Enzo had scampered up a tall rock formation, and as he jumped in the general direction of Cando’s body he aimed his sword at what was left of the creature’s slimy tongue. When his body collided with the other man and his sword sliced through the creature’s appendage, he had a moment of breathlessness, a moment of blinding pain that ripped through the side holding the sword like fire. There was no time to stop, though, no time to think as he and Cando rolled with no grace whatsoever and he pushed back up onto his feet. He rustled around in his pocket as he ran back at the creature, which was howling and flailing so much Enzo was surprised the ground wasn’t quaking with it.

Once he’d scrambled back up onto the rock and had the orb he wanted grasped in one gloved hand, sword still crackling with electricity in the other, he steeled himself. “Alright, bitch, let’s go,” he hissed.

Cando shouted for him to wait a split second before Enzo launched himself bodily off the rock, propelling himself right at the back of the creature’s thrashing head. He just barely missed a snapping jaw, managing to land on top of its head where he grasped one of its massive eyelids and held on for dear life. It screamed and bucked, slapping with too-short limbs at its own face as it attempted to dislodge him.

Enzo dodged around until he had a moment of sure footing, and then a second later he rammed his sword into one massive eye. The electricity fizzed, sending up a puff of acrid smoke as the eye popped under the hot pressure. He ignored the viscous, bubbling fluid pouring out of the creature’s new hole, shoved his entire arm inside the socket and dropped the device inside. Then he launched himself off the creature’s back and he was pelting towards the entrance of the vault.

“Come on! We’ve got, like thirty seconds!” Enzo yelled over his shoulder as he passed Cando, who, to his credit, took him very seriously and dashed after him.

They weren’t fast enough, and Enzo knew it even as Cando took the lead. His suit was absolutely not meant to do it, and the ship’s tech was going to be so pissed when she had to fix it, but he had no other choice. As the entrance to the cave loomed in front of them, Enzo pressed a button on his suit and leapt right at the broad back of Cando. He wrapped his arms around that thick waist as his propulsion unit kicked in and then they were roaring the rest of the way out, the thrusters on his hips - which were meant for strictly no gravity propulsion - stuttering under their weight.

They hit the ground just outside the vault’s entrance, right when the explosion went off, and Enzo landed on top of the pirate, hard, before momentum tossed him off and he skidded through the loose gravel and dirt of the moon’s surface. 

The mines, it turned out, were like giant electrical bear traps. He was damned lucky not to hit one, had completely forgotten about them in his haste to get out. A piece of alien flesh, grey now that it was no longer in the dark cave, landed on one a few yards in front of him and the mine release, snapping up the chunk of meat and charring it. The impact had knocked the breath out of him, and he hacked out a wheezy cough from inside his mask. He laid there, each breath like a punch to his abused chest, until his heart rate finally slowed and he could pull himself to his feet.

Cando was a few feet away from him, groaning as he propped up on an elbow and surveyed the mess of monster guts that had fountained out of the cave after them. He was clutching Echo to his chest, and Enzo felt a little bad that he hadn’t even considered the other creature. “Damn, kid, you don’t do things half-assed, do you?” Then, when he glanced up from his appreciative surveillance of the havoc Enzo had wreaked and saw that Enzo was headed back into the cave, “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

“To get what I came here for,” Enzo grunted, too tired for animosity, clutching at the gaping wound in his side and marching with determination back into the vault. Now that the adrenaline of the fight had left him, he realized that the wound he’d gotten from the monster’s teeth was likely serious. His suit was built to hold things together, so to speak, in moments like that, but even still he could feel blood slowly seeping out of the wound and pooling in his boot.

Cando scrambled to his feet and caught up to him. “You think a stunt like that went unnoticed? There’s gonna be a godsdamn army here before you can blink - we gotta hightail it out before we get arrested. I mean, I could break us out, but that's so inconvenient.”

“Uh, no,” Enzo snarled, though there was no heat behind it. “Kade trusted me with this, and I’ll be damned if I’m leaving here empty-handed. You don’t like it, get your fool ass back to your ship and get out of here. I’m not giving you the stone anyway. Might as well get.”

“You’re crazy as hell, aren’t you?” Cando laughed. Echo had woken up, and he squeaked once before burrowing into the pocket at the breast of Cando’s coat which Enzo was willing to bet had been added just for him. “I think I like you, kid.”

The tiara was on a pedestal in a chamber just beyond where they’d met their slimy friend, pulsing with that purple light. Enzo picked it up, holding his blaster to Cando’s head with a warning glare which he was sure lacked some of the heat he’d wanted to put behind it. Cando barked out a laugh, holding up his hands in mock surrender. It was condescending, to say the least, and Enzo had to stop himself from punching him right in his stupid smirking face. Not only was that a grade A, shit idea, but he was rapidly losing energy due to blood loss. By the time they had made their way back to the surface, he knew that consciousness wouldn’t be with him much longer. His vision was starting to go in and out of focus. 

Worse, though, to his horror when he peered down into the crater where he had parked his ship, it wasn’t there.

He didn’t have time to panic, didn’t have time to react at all, except for a weakly mumbled expletive as he fell to the ground, unconscious, and the lights of approaching army ships pierced the horizon.

“Aw, hell,” Cando mumbled, bending down and picking up the kid, who definitely was not as scrawny as he’d been the first few times they’d met. Cando was strong, though, and he pushed the kid’s head into his chest and was able to take off towards his own ship at a jog. The Terran’s long legs jostled over his arm as he went, and he wondered just what the hell he was about to get himself into.

------

Enzo woke with a jolt, disoriented, and tried to sit up, a hand immediately going to the amber amulet still mercifully resting against his chest. If the searing pain that roared through his side at the action hadn’t halted him, the large ivory hand pushing at his chest would have. He jerked in surprise and immediately regretted it as the action yanked at his wound, and turned to look into sharp amber eyes. He took rapid stock of his situation, noting the pile of mismatched, ratty but warm blankets he was nestled in, the unfamiliar belly of what was unmistakably an S-Class starship.

When he remembered the stone, he hastily reached down to the pack he already knew was no longer at his hip.

“Relax, kid, I didn’t steal it,” Cando said, and Enzo wasn’t looking at his face but he could practically hear the man’s eyes roll. “It’s right there on the table, see?”

Sure enough, there it was. He could see the light from the pulsing purple stone through the synthetic leather of the bag. Relieved, he relaxed just a fraction back into the admittedly comfortable bed.

“What are you going to do with me, Cando?” he asked, meeting the pirate’s eyes with a bravado he certainly didn’t feel, wounded and at the mercy of the other man as he was.

“I’m not going to do anything with you, you dumbshit. You saved my life - twice, actually - and I don’t take an act like that lightly.” He pulled back the blankets and tapped a finger against Enzo’s side, and Enzo tried not to flinch. “I patched you up. You’re going to have one hell of a scar, unfortunately, because I don’t keep a dermal regenerator on my ship, but you’ll live. You can stay with me until you find a way to make it back to Hagen, and then we’ll just consider ourselves even.”

Enzo didn’t have the energy to be distrustful anymore. He fell back into the pile of blankets and pillows and, as if they had a mind of their own, his eyelids began to droop closed. “Better not be lying,” he mumbled as the deep black of unconsciousness took him once again.

------

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he woke next, but he knew where he was this time when he pulled apart his crusty eyelids and blinked away the hazy film fogging his vision. The pain in his side had dulled, and the way his head spun told him that Cando had likely given him some kind of injection for pain relief. He took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up gingerly, the blankets falling down to pool around his hips. Cando wasn’t in the room, so he lifted up the side of his blood-crusted undershirt and surveyed the damage.

The wound was bigger than he had originally thought. It stretched all the way from the top of his hip bone to his armpit, a long jagged cut which he had no doubt was going to leave a wicked scar. Cando seemed to have cleaned and stitched the wound with care, but it was going to be a long recovery without the medical tools Hagen’s infirmary was stocked with. When was the last time he’d had a wound this bad? He couldn’t remember. Maybe that time he and Talon had gotten into it in the engine room and he’d tripped, falling right onto a piece of old piping.

He wondered how long it was going to be before he could make his escape - he didn’t think he could pull on his Gift even a little bit at that moment, too sick, too hazy from drugs and blood loss. As he contemplated that, the pirate wandered into the room and Enzo let his shirt drop. Cando had a tray with him, laden with honest-to-goodness fruits, and an ochre-red bread that made Enzo’s mouth water. They got almost no organic food on Kade’s ship. It was too expensive, too hard to keep around with so many people.

Cando put the tray down next to the bed and sat on the edge by Enzo’s hip, and Enzo couldn’t help his flinch when the other man reached towards him. Cando snorted. “What, you think I patched you up and took care of you for three days just so I could kill you when you woke up? I need to check your wound, jackass.”

“Sorry,” Enzo mumbled, lifting his arm and turning away so that Cando could do what needed to be done. His species ran hotter than Enzo’s, apparently, because when he lifted the hem of Enzo’s shirt and prodded at the healing wound the heat coming off of him was startling enough to make Enzo jump. Cando, not amused, glared at him to stay still and Enzo made an effort to contain himself. He felt vulnerable like this, wounded and stripped of his exosuit. He had no weapons on him, had no idea, really, what this guy was going to do to him.

Cando hummed in the back of his throat and dropped Enzo’s shirt, picking up the tray and handing it to him. “You sure do heal slowly. That a Terran thing?”

“It’s a ‘none of your business’ thing,” Enzo quipped as he picked up the bread with a hand he had to exert physical effort to keep from shaking. He almost groaned at how good it felt to take a bite of real, actual bread, the way the crust felt between his teeth, the way it all but melted in his mouth. Gods, he loved organic food.

“Hell, you’re a feisty little shit,” Cando said, but he didn’t sound angry. Amused, more like. “Not even an ounce of gratitude.”

“I don’t trust people Kade doesn’t trust,” Enzo said, shrugging like that was the end of it. And wasn’t it? He looked up to Kade so much it was probably painful for others to see, and if Kade didn’t like someone, well, he supposed he probably had a really good reason for it, life-saver or no.

“Hagen isn’t a god, kid, and you’d do damn well to remember that,” Cando spit out, rolling his eyes before pulling himself to his feet and making his way to the door. “There’s some clothes for you in the bathroom. You can shower, but you’ve got five minutes before the auto shut off. I’ve been too long in here already, and my water reserve’s running low.”

Enzo didn’t say a word, just gulped down the rest of his food, and maybe that made him seem ungrateful but at just that moment he couldn’t be bothered to care. He waited a few minutes after Cando had left before limping his way over to the bathroom and stripping out of his bloody clothes. If he were honest, he’d say that showers were one of his greatest joys in life, one of the only things he truly loved about smaller ships and being on planets. The refreshers on the Hesperia were clinical, a sterilization of the body more than an actual cleaning because the ship needed all the water it could get for the men to drink, couldn’t waste on showers.

He groaned as the first jet of hot water hit his back, washing dirt and dried blood down the drain. There was a blue bar of soap dangling from the shower head, and he quickly grabbed it, scrubbed his body down from the top of his head to his toes.

By the time his five minutes were up he felt parsecs better. His clothes were ruined, and he wasn’t prideful enough to put them back on and ignore the clothes the other man had left for him but it was a close thing. The deep purple synthetic leather pants Cando had left him were too big, and he cinched them at the waist with the black belt he’d also been left. There were no underwear, which was probably a blessing all things considered. The shirt was large for him, too, a soft, worn black t-shirt that felt good sliding over his sensitive wound. At the bottom of the pile was a thick jacket with a hood, and his own boots, which were worse for wear but had been washed of blood. He pulled the heavy, worn coat over his shoulders and dragged his boots on his feet without bothering to lace them, adamantly denying the fact that he was already starting to feel worn out again.

On his way out, out of pure stubbornness, he grabbed his knapsack, checked that his prize was still inside, and slung it securely over his shoulder.