Extra Shots: Last Coffee Shop Drabbles, Outtakes, and More

BONUS EPILOGUE: Guys Like Us . . .

<Set after the final chapter of 'The Last Coffee Shop,' but before the Epilogue. Just a short fic to explore Graynard/Vul'Peck's thoughts/reactions while escaping Ga'naa. VERY unedited brain vomit, so please tell me if there is anything embarrassing I should fix>

The brilliant Atelian doctor Vul'Peck, most recently known as Captain Graynard Peck, had been many things in his eighty-six years (GST). He was still young, but he felt incredibly old as he guided the tiny shuttle on its bumping trajectory away from the hellscape known as Ga'naa for what was (hopefully) the last time.

It wasn't uncommon for Atelians to live to three hundred on their home planet of Rax, which meant that by Ateli standards, Vul'Peck was insignificantly older than Jupiter Jive himself. But that gap felt like centuries sometimes.

A bolt of pain from his arm took his concentration from the cramped, spider-like gear shafts and knobs in the shuttle. It was a hopper, meant for short distances only. But he didn't need to make it far, just to one of the smugglers' bolt holes where he could tend to his gunshot wound and switch to a skimmer. If only they hadn't met that bloody, cursed woman, may her angry ghost haunt this Waste forever. If only idiot Jive hadn't decided to take her hostage instead of dumping her the minute they left town, like Vul'Peck had suggested.

If only, if only. This entire hellscape was a burial ground filled to the brim with "if only."

Vul'Peck thumped a many-fingered hand against the pain in his arm, feeling the heat and the anguish flare up in his body and his soul. He didn't know which part was the worst. What Jive–Luc, hellscapes, how Vul'Peck hated that name–what Jive had made him do, or what that woman had done to them both. Vul'Peck fully believed that she would turn in Jive for the money. The look on her face when she'd shot him; it could have frozen all the lava in Ga'naa. And Vul'Peck felt a touch of childish, vindictive satisfaction that this same woman was the one Jive had made himself such a fool over. A worse fool, amended the Atelian, in his thoughts, than usual.

At least Vul'Peck no longer had to deal with the way those two looked at each other, when they didn't realize it, or thought he wasn't watching. Stars, but it made his skin crawl. If he hadn't been so angry, so betrayed, so in pain, he would have laughed at the way it all ended. They deserved each other. If there hadn't been so many Galactics involved, he wouldn't have even resented it.

Of course, not that Vul'Peck was innocent. Anything but. He knew that he'd betrayed Jive (Luc) from the minute they'd docked on Helen's Point. Until then, it had only been a little half-formed wish, nesting and nourished in over a decade of little frustrations. He was half-convinced these ran both ways. But what bothered him more than all the crossing and double crossing was the suspicion that maybe, just maybe, had the roles been reversed, Jive wouldn't have betrayed him.

As he flew across the blank sun-scorched face of the Waste, Vul'Peck's thoughts and emotions swirled along with the spiraling sand his skimmer kicked up. Not for the first time, he regretted having given that humanoid ratling a second glance those fourteen years ago. The boy had been all angles back then, legs as long and bony as an insect, with bright hazel eyes that twinkled up at Vul'Peck with a suggestion of the irrepressible spirit behind them.

At first Vul'Peck had thought the human was a girl, although his knowledge of human biology and genders was admittedly slim. The sharp chin, the colorless, delicate face, and the matted curtain of mud-colored hair that fell to the boy's waist had been his only indicators to go on. Not that it mattered. The child was human, and a waste of space.

But then the kid had pulled out a handful of Galactics, and Vul'Peck had found himself growing curious. How did such a dismal, discarded snack wrapper of a creature have enough Galactics to buy passage on an elite freighter, and why was he using it to try to bribe Vul'Peck instead. Vul'Peck had been even more shocked when the boy (he thought) offered to buy him lunch in exchange for listening to his story.