(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Waking up in safety.

-x-X-x-

Sarah is fully expecting to wake up again, to be clear. After all, with the cerebrates killed and Myk-Zod and Mystique freed from their control, she had complete faith that the two incredibly powerful individuals would be able to keep her safe even after she’d scrambled her brain seven ways to Sunday.

That said, she’s not entirely expecting to wake up to Myk-Zod looming over her, the handsome man smiling down at her. Nor is she expecting to look past his head to see the sleek glowing lines of a ship’s medbay ceiling above them.

“Wha…”

“Welcome back, Sarah. You were out of it for quite some time.”

Blinking rapidly as she takes in the unfamiliar yet also familiar ceiling, Sarah’s brow furrows in consternation. Because her training and experience were telling her that she was specifically looking at the ceiling of a Leviathan-class Battlecruiser’s medbay. And that was… well, it wasn’t entirely out of the question, but it was weird.

Wetting her dry lips, Sarah sits up and tries to speak only to cough, her throat just as dry if not more so. A straw is provided after a moment and she greedily sucks down the water at the other end, drinking the crisp, cool fluid like a woman who just got out of the desert.

When she’s done, she looks around the medbay, brow furrowed even harder. Its just her, Myk-Zod… and Mystique, the blue-skinned red head sitting nearby with her arms crossed over her chest and those piercing yellow eyes focused solely on Sarah.

“Where are we? What happened after I passed out?”

Myk-Zod opens his mouth to respond… only to pause, tilting his head to the side. Sarah feels it before she hears it… or rather, she feels him before she hears him. Boots pounding down the hallway outside of the medbay are the last bit of warning she gets before the doors to the medbay cycle open and James fucking Raynor stands in the doorway, eyes wide and breathing heavily.

“Sarah… you’re awake.”

She tries not to flinch too hard at the sheer yearning in his voice. Their last conversation hadn’t been a good one… he’d tried to make her see reason and she’d refused, preferring to keep the blinders on. And now… well, suffice to say, Jim had every right to say he told her so.

He doesn’t though, because he’s not that kind of man. Instead, he steps into the medbay carefully, like he’s afraid she might bolt or something. And hell, maybe she would if she thought she could get away with it. His eyes dart to Myk-Zod for a moment before returning to her.

“… Glad you’re alright, darlin’.”

Frowning now, Sarah crosses her arms over her chest, trying her best not to let herself feel any certain sort of way about his words.

“Its good to see you too, Jim. But again, where are we? And how?”

Myk-Zod steps in there, clearing his throat.

“Right, well… first of all, you’ve been out for a week.”

Sarah’s eyes widen but she stays quiet, letting him continue on with his retelling of events.

“… After you dealt with Daggoth and saved me and Mystique, the Zerg became entirely feral. It was much easier to drive them away after that… killing a few hundred more taught their animalistic instincts to just avoid us altogether.”

He tilts his head to the side and quirks up a corner of his mouth.

“On top of that, they seemed to be more interested in fighting and killing each other as well. It made things… easier, after a fashion.”

Jim grunts, drawing Sarah’s focus back to him.

“Easier for us too.”

At her baffled look, he shrugs and averts his gaze.

“When Mengsk decided to leave you behind… I didn’t agree with it. Took what men would follow me and got back down to Tarsonis by any means I could. Couldn’t find you but wound up finding some survivors anyways. We evacuated to a local spaceport but were getting pretty pressed when all the Zerg sort of just went insane.”

Jim’s brow furrows at that, his lips pulling into a grimace.

“Your… friends have explained what happened. These cerebrates… hard to believe that the damn Swarm had an intelligence behind it all this time. And yet…”

Smiling crookedly, Sarah chuckles and finishes for him.

“And yet… it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?”

After a beat, Jim nods, scowling angrily. Not at them, but rather at the situation.

“Yeah. Fuck… yeah, it does. Anyways, we were still securing the spaceport and enough transports to get everyone off Tarsonis when these two arrived carrying you.”

The look Jim shoots Myk-Zod at that… ah, they had definitely arrived flying through the air, hadn’t they? It’s obvious that there’s a bit of honest wariness in the man’s eyes. Frankly, it’s deserved… whether Jim knows about Myk-Zod and Mystique’s true power or not, two people flying in under their own power would spark so many questions.

After a beat though, he continues on.

“… We finally got off planet… and shortly after that, we ran into the Thunder Child. Leviathan-Class Battlecruiser formerly in service to the Confederacy. But the Confederacy is gone now and the crew mutinied… so it’s our home for the time being, at least until we can get something better.”

Sarah narrows her eyes at that last part. She knows Jim well enough to be able to hear the leading lilt in his voice… the one that means he’s got a plan.

“Something better, huh? And what might that be?”

Jim smiles crookedly at her, crossing his arms over his chest as he shrugs.

“We’re enroute to Dylar IV. Gonna raid the Dylarian Shipyards for what we need before anyone else can get to them.”

Then, he jerks his head in Myk-Zod’s direction.

“Already promised your friend here a Science Vessel if they have one, and his own lab on whatever ships we do scrounge up if they don’t.”

Again, Sarah knows Jim well enough to hear the question in his voice… he’s wondering what she might know about Myk-Zod and what she might be able to tell him. Alas, even if they could get some alone time… Sarah isn’t sure she would say a word.

She trusts Jim, don’t get her wrong… but some secrets aren’t hers to tell. And the secrets Myk-Zod and Mystique are carrying in particular were potentially galaxy-shattering. Frankly, she’s starting to realize they never should have told her everything they did…

Instead, Sarah slowly nods her head, giving Myk-Zod a look.

“That seems like a fair deal… more than fair, really. I owe you two my life, you know.”

Amusingly enough, both Jim and Myk-Zod make a face at that, neither of them happy with her words. Mystique just nods though, acknowledging the debt. But Myk-Zod…

“If you owe us your life, then we owe you ours. It cancels itself out. Without you, we’d be under the control of the Zerg right now. And we both know why that would have been very, very bad.”

Sarah lets out an explosive breath, slowly nodding. Then, before she can say anything else, her stomach suddenly protests. Loudly. The gurgling of hunger fills the room prompting everyone to look at her abdomen. Sarah doesn’t flush or anything like that, being too professional to let her mortification show… but she does feel a little heat rise to her face when Myk-Zod laughs and Mystique smirks.

When even Jim chuckles, Sarah scowls angrily at him, causing the man to raise his hands placatingly.

“Sorry, sorry. You feel up to getting up and moving around? We can go get you some grub… or I can have it brought to you.”

It only takes her a second to consider that before she swiftly nods and moves to climb out of bed. Her body protests a bit, but Sarah forces herself to her feet all the same, only wobbling a little bit.

“Whoa there. You good?”

It doesn’t stop Myk-Zod from coming to her rescue though, something Jim takes a step forward to do as well before aborting his attempt while narrowing his eyes at how fast the alien man moves. Sarah just bats Myk-Zod away though.

“I’m fine. And I’m more than ready to get out of here, so lead the way Jim. Also, tell me what else has been happening while I was out.”

Jim pauses at that, looking stricken for a moment before quickly schooling his features.

“… Not sure what you mean, exactly.”

Sarah rolls her eyes, even as she marches determinedly for the door.

“You already admitted the Confederacy is gone, Jim. So what the fuck is happening in the rest of the galaxy, exactly? How bad is it out there?”

She wishes she could say she was more optimistic. They’d both fought with the Sons of Korhal for so long, all because they believed the tyranny of the Terran Confederacy needed to come to an end. But they were also both fairly pragmatic people too. Sarah, at least, had always known in the back of her mind that things would get worse before they got better, even after the Confederacy fell.

Now though… well, she was forced to admit that Mengsk wasn’t the man she’d thought he was after how he’d handled everything on Tarsonis. And that scared her… because Arcturus Mengsk was probably the most powerful human man left in the entirety of the Koprulu Sector at this point…

-x-X-x-

As Myk-Zod and Mystique follow Sarah and Jim out of the medbay and towards the spaceship’s cafeteria, Mystique’s fingers find his and interlace with them. Smiling slightly, Myk-Zod slides his fingers through hers right back, holding her hand in his own securely.

To say the past week had been a wild ride would be an understatement. Though only the first two days had truly been that overwhelming and chaotic. After they’d rendezvoused with Jim Raynor and his men at the spaceport and then made it onto the Thunder Child, things had actually quieted down a fair amount and the past few days had just been watching over Sarah and waiting for her to wake up.

Myk-Zod might not be a full-fledged doctor, but he was a scientist with all that entailed so he’d familiarized himself with the Terran technology in the Thunder Child’s medbay and taken Sarah’s treatment upon himself. It was the least he could do after she’d almost killed herself saving them.

In hindsight, going straight for Daggoth had been a stupid move. Just because he hadn’t tried to attack Myk-Zod and Mystique’s minds all the way on the island hundreds of miles away didn’t mean he never would. And of course the cerebrates, being psionic creatures as they were, would be able to join forces and combine their power to try and overwhelm even someone as strong as Sarah.

Put simply… he considered it his fuck up that the Zerg Swarm had very nearly gotten access to Kryptonian DNA. Neither he nor Mystique had suffered a single bit of damage until that moment when their minds had been overwhelmed and they’d been directed to harm themselves in order to give their blood to the Swarm.

If not for Sarah seemingly tapping into some strange new well of power… this galaxy would be doomed and he would have led Mystique into a trap that completely and utterly stripped them of their free will and agency. And if things had continued along that vein, he might just have given the Zerg Swarm access to the entire multiverse through his armband.

Suffice to say, it had been the closest call of his short journey yet. Nothing on Mystique’s Earth had come even close to being as dangerous to them, especially not once they’d had enough time under Earth’s Yellow Sun.

But… all was well that ended well. Now they were here and the resources and level of technology that the Terrans had access to, while nothing compared to Kryptonian Technology, was literally hundreds of years beyond the tech level back on Mystique’s Earth.

That meant he could probably make some modifications and even upgrades to his armband here in this universe, where he would have had to wait decades if not centuries in the last one. He just needed the right tools and resources for the job, which was why he’d ultimately accepted the offer of a ‘Science Vessel’ from this upcoming shipyard raid.

Though, Myk-Zod had to admit… he was a little bit leery about it all. From what he understood of the state of this galaxy, with the destruction of the old human government, lawlessness and anarchy were going to prevail for quite some time. And the people they were traveling with were intending to take advantage of that in order to ransack this shipyard they were heading to.

Piracy. Plain and simple piracy. And maybe it was necessary piracy… there were plenty of civilians from Tarsonis aboard the Thunder Child and other transports that they’d used to get off planet… refugees who just deserved somewhere safe to live, even if that was on a ship taken from this shipyard.

But still, Myk-Zod found himself questioning it all the same. He… he needed access to the right sort of tools that would let him continue his work if he wanted to begin modifying the armband. His invention was currently far too restrictive. Imagine if he and Mystique could take more than just skintight bodysuits with them to their next universe? It would make things so much easier.

… The Science Vessel was already promised to him though. So technically he and Mystique didn’t need to raid these shipyards with Jim Raynor and his men. They could leave it to them and simply wait to claim their prize after all was said and done.

But then, was that any better than participating? Either way, they’d be benefiting from piracy…

-x-X-x-

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