Work Text:
Red raised the straw hat to eye level and gave it a long, thoughtful look. She liked that Mira allowed its employees to customise their suits with fancy accessories, but who would wear a straw hat on a spaceship? It belonged more on the fields back home than in a sterile metal shell flying from planet to planet.
The little girl in bright red stamps her feet with excitement. "Daddy! Daddy! The harvest's today, and you promised to bring us to watch!"
Her older sister, wearing a much darker shade of red, raises her head from her game, jumps to her feet and nods vigorously.
Their father chuckles. "Alright, alright, you two. Let's go."
Red grabs his sleeve with an excited squeal and drags him to the door.
Her sister catches up and takes her other hand. "You'll see, Red, it's awesome!"
The harvester is even bigger than Red had imagined.
Sat on her father's shoulders, Maroon by his side, she watches the imposing machine make its way slowly through the golden wheat field, leaving shaven soil behind. She waves to the farmer, so tiny compared to her vehicle, and the woman waves back.
The next day, the farmer visits Red's family. Her smile when she gives the two girls handmade straw hats pales before Red and Maroon's elated grins.
A yellow hand snatched the straw hat from Red's grasp, and Red from her memories. Too shocked to feel angry, she turned around to face its owner.
"Sorry," Yellow giggled, holding out the hat back to Red. "You were so caught up in your thoughts you didn't hear me. Are you using it?"
"Nah, you can take it if you want. It just brought back memories of where I grew up."
"Thanks!"
After adjusting the hat on her head, Yellow did a little dance, earning a laugh from Red. Now fully back to the present, Red went through the wardrobe and opted for a black fedora.
"Classy!" Yellow approved. After a second, she spoke again: "I know we aren't supposed to exchange personal info, but I take it you're from one of the farming colonies? Me too!"
Red nodded. "A tiny remote one," she confirmed. "But my family moved to a large refuelling station years ago. Now that's a hub of activity!"
"Lucky you. It means you can still see them often between missions. I've seen mine perhaps once or twice since I left for studying," Yellow sighed. She fetched a photograph from her backpack and handed it to Red. "My last visit home!"
Red smiled wistfully at the picture of a family on the countryside, with a patchwork of fields growing in the distance. Before she could give the picture back to its owner, a jolt and a clang announced the dropship had reached its destination –a long-hauler bringing supplies to the last outpost before Polus.
"Oh, we've arrived to the Hald," Yellow announced happily. "See you later!"
She rushed into the ship, leaving her newfound friend behind. Smiling, Red stored the photo carefully into her backpack. She'd have to remember returning it to Yellow before they reached their destination!
Not for the first time, Red sighed to herself at how poorly designed Mira's ships were. How many wires had she reconnected since starting work? And she was still a rookie. She was sure she'd dreamt of wires recently.
She closed the panel, turned around, and jumped as she saw Yellow standing right behind her.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to spook you," the other woman apologised. She hesitated before adding in a small, sheepish voice, pointing to another task: "Can you help me calibrate the distributor? I'm confused about how it works."
Red walked to the open panel and watched the rotating dials. "I've never had to do that one," she admitted, biting her lip.
Yellow straightened up happily. "Oh, you're new too? This is actually my first mission!"
"It's my fifth… no, sixth." Red tentatively pressed the first button. The distributor buzzed in protest and reset. "Damn."
Yellow lowered her voice to ask, "Have you ever faced–" She lowered her voice further. "–Impostors?"
"Thank goodness, no," Red answered, finally managing to engage the first dial correctly, and keeping her eyes on the next one, now rotating in turn. "Not personally, at least. I'm crossing my fingers I won't in the foreseeable future." Her tone became grim. "But several people I knew were murdered." Distracted, she missed the mark for the second dial and the distributor reset again.
Yellow shivered. "Let's hope there aren't any Impostors on board," she whispered. She took off her straw hat and lowered her gaze to it. "Red, have we made the right choice? Should we have stayed back home?"
"But then, we wouldn't have met," Red smiled warmly; she quickly added, flustered, "I like meeting new people. Before we moved, I knew everyone around and nothing interesting ever happened. I miss the countryside a bit, though," she admitted. "The wind on my skin, the patchwork of colours in the fields, the smells…"
Yellow put the hat back on her head and patted it fondly. "I know what you mean. Thanks for letting me take the hat, now I can almost pretend I'm back in a field, among wheat ears, gently undulating in the wind…"
"And you're yellow, too. More colza flower than wheat, but who cares," Red chuckled.
Yellow joined in the laugh, then, more relaxed, she nodded towards the distributor. "Thanks, Red, I understand how the calibration works now. I should be able to do it."
"No worries." She looked at her own list of tasks. "I'd better get moving, too, we have so many tasks."
"Since we've already started going against company policy, would you like to stay in touch after the mission? Nourish our roots and all that," Yellow chuckled.
Red felt her chest warm up. "Sounds like a plan!" she agreed.
While her hands connected more wires mechanically, Red's mind wandered back to her conversation with Yellow. Was she eager to get to know Yellow better? Heck yeah! Did she miss home? Perhaps. Did she regret moving to the refuelling station, and getting hired at Mira? Not really.
Now teenagers, Red watches out of the window while Maroon concentrates on doing school homework.
A light knock on the door frame announces their father's arrival. "Want to go see the harvest?" he smiles.
Maroon doesn't even raise her head from the desk. "I can't. The assignment's due tomorrow and I'm super late."
He turns to his younger daughter. "Red?"
She shrugs wordlessly.
He comes to lean against the wall near her. "Is something bothering you? You know you can talk to me if something's wrong."
Finally turning away from the window to look to him, she sighs. "No, no, it's not like that. I'm just… bored."
"We can go watch the harvest," he offers again.
"It's always the same. You've seen one, you've seen all. And I've seen more than one. I'm not a kid anymore, Dad."
He raises placating palms. "I know you aren't. Why not go out and do something with your friends?"
She frowns. "They're all dating each other, and I don't want to play gooseberry. Green and Orange went hiking together, and Rose's watching movies with Grey, and–" She goes on listing how her friends are all spending their time as couples. Her rant isn't long: it is, after all, a small community.
She wishes she could meet more people.
All things considered, Red was glad her parents had moved to the refuelling station. She really enjoyed meeting new people –people like Yellow. Thinking of her newfound friend brought a smile on Red's lips. Suddenly remembering she had, again, forgotten to return the photograph to its owner, she kicked herself mentally. Talk about Freudian slip.
She finished a couple of tasks quickly before returning to electrical, hoping to find Yellow still there. As she passed through storage, however, the door to the electrical corridor locked in front of her, and a cold pit formed in her stomach.
It could only mean one thing: there were Impostors on the Hald, and they were out for blood.
She jumped and stepped away when someone in a coral suit joined her at the door, having been locked with her in storage.
"It's alright, I'm not an Impostor. I didn't lock the doors," the man tried to reassure her, with moderate success.
Soon enough, the storage doors released their lock and let them go through, only for their path to electrical to be barred again.
"Yellow! Yellow, are you in there?" Red shouted, hammering at the door.
After several agonising seconds, she nearly fell when it opened with a hiss to reveal a gruesome scene inside the room.
For a moment, Red's brain refused to process what her eyes were seeing. The absurd image of a cut wheat ear imposed itself to her. A straw stump, reaped before its time and stomped upon.
Yellow had been killed. The top half of her body had gone missing, devoured by an Impostor. The murderer had even eaten the straw hat along with the head it had sat onto and the torso.
Why. Why did the Impostors commit such heinous acts. And why did it have to be Yellow. Why couldn't it have been Red instead; at least she was the colour of blood. Not Yellow with her inner sunlight and her straw hat and–
Red barely registered that Coral had reported the body and dragged her to the meeting table.
In the end, caught between bad timing and accurate crewmate information, the killer was easily identified and ejected. Red's heart didn't even beat faster when her finger pressed his icon and condemned him to an agonising death in the void of space. It wouldn't bring Yellow back. The Reaper had taken its due.
Red spent the rest of the mission in a daze. More people died, the second Impostor was found out and ejected too. Red's suit felt damp and cold like rotting straw after the harvest. She even thought she could recognise the smell, only for it to vanish when she returned, however briefly, to the present.
Red survived. Back in her flat with a decent paycheck and a bared heart, she emptied her backpack mindlessly until her eyes fell upon Yellow's photograph. Thoughts swirled in her mind, settling on the one thing she could do to preserve Yellow's legacy.
With renewed purpose, she went to buy some supplies, and soon enough, she sat at her desk with a photo album, scissors, glue, protective film, colourful cardboard and nature-themed stickers.
She stuck the picture on the first page of the album with infinite care. She then cut yellow cardboard in the shape of a wheat ear, and positioned it partly overlapping the photograph. Once she was done, she arranged stickers on the rest of the page, leaving room to write the date and what Yellow had told of herself.
Red didn't count how many hours she'd spent on her scrapbook when she finally put the protective film in place.
"Goodbye, Yellow," she murmured to the happy woman on the photograph.
The photograph didn't answer back, but Red could've sworn she heard the wind, and even a harvester's motor in the distance.