He doesn't tense at the demand, but he does go very, very still. His eyes flicker from her face to her gun and back again, his expression shuttered as he considers her. "Didn't think this was going to be that kind of party," he says lightly, easy tone belied by the renewed wariness in his gaze.
The gun is loose at her side, her grip relaxed around it. It's a hair more reassuring than being pointed directly at him, but only a hair; there's only so much difference a detail like that can make when the simple fact of the matter is that she has a gun in her hand and he doesn't. Nothing he's seen so far has given him any reason to think that she doesn't know what she's doing with it. Nor does he have any delusions of being some kind of quickdraw gunslinger. Half a mile out with a sniper scope or on the other side of a blast wall with a detonator, that's more his niche. If it comes to gunfire she's going to get the first shot.
Of course the ace that's still tucked away up his sleeve at this point is that thanks to his hardware, he can take a hit that would put a human down for good. Odds are he takes a bullet either way, but with the crates of supplies piled up behind the cargo netting, even if half of it ends up being useless he can still afford to stay holed up here and heal for a while. There's even real medkits. He doesn't need to walk away from this unscathed; all he needs to do is be the last one standing.
There is another option, of course. His gaze slides away from her and off to one side to land on the hatch release. Much as violence is always an easy Plan A, he could just do what he's been doing since he washed up on this shithole planet and run. The odds aren't great, but if he goes now, he might have a chance. The dead are persistent, but they aren't fast. If he makes it out of the clearing without getting swarmed...
It's a big if. Too big.
So his options, as they stand, are fight or cooperate. Roughly 99% of him wants to go for 'fight'. But there's always been a clever, whirring little part of his brain that likes to take what's in front of him and fit it together into something new and useful, and right now that part is whispering that someone who's still got access to aircraft and a team that's moving supplies in this quantity might just have access to the kind of intel — the kind of tech — he hasn't been able to get his hands on anywhere else. Survival is muscle memory at this point, but it's only going to get him so far. He's not spending the rest of his fucking life here.
So what it comes down to, really, is whether he wants to prioritise avoiding awkward questions about the cybernetics, or taking a chance on getting a step closer to getting off this fucking rock. Put like that it's not much of a choice.
"...fine," he says eventually, raising his hands in the universal gesture for you win. "I'm just uh. Gonna need you to be cool about anything weird you see that's not a bitemark." And with that, he begins shrugging out of his jacket.
NO PRESSURE AT ALL my brain just finally supplied me with what happens next nine years later
The gun is loose at her side, her grip relaxed around it. It's a hair more reassuring than being pointed directly at him, but only a hair; there's only so much difference a detail like that can make when the simple fact of the matter is that she has a gun in her hand and he doesn't. Nothing he's seen so far has given him any reason to think that she doesn't know what she's doing with it. Nor does he have any delusions of being some kind of quickdraw gunslinger. Half a mile out with a sniper scope or on the other side of a blast wall with a detonator, that's more his niche. If it comes to gunfire she's going to get the first shot.
Of course the ace that's still tucked away up his sleeve at this point is that thanks to his hardware, he can take a hit that would put a human down for good. Odds are he takes a bullet either way, but with the crates of supplies piled up behind the cargo netting, even if half of it ends up being useless he can still afford to stay holed up here and heal for a while. There's even real medkits. He doesn't need to walk away from this unscathed; all he needs to do is be the last one standing.
There is another option, of course. His gaze slides away from her and off to one side to land on the hatch release. Much as violence is always an easy Plan A, he could just do what he's been doing since he washed up on this shithole planet and run. The odds aren't great, but if he goes now, he might have a chance. The dead are persistent, but they aren't fast. If he makes it out of the clearing without getting swarmed...
It's a big if. Too big.
So his options, as they stand, are fight or cooperate. Roughly 99% of him wants to go for 'fight'. But there's always been a clever, whirring little part of his brain that likes to take what's in front of him and fit it together into something new and useful, and right now that part is whispering that someone who's still got access to aircraft and a team that's moving supplies in this quantity might just have access to the kind of intel — the kind of tech — he hasn't been able to get his hands on anywhere else. Survival is muscle memory at this point, but it's only going to get him so far. He's not spending the rest of his fucking life here.
So what it comes down to, really, is whether he wants to prioritise avoiding awkward questions about the cybernetics, or taking a chance on getting a step closer to getting off this fucking rock. Put like that it's not much of a choice.
"...fine," he says eventually, raising his hands in the universal gesture for you win. "I'm just uh. Gonna need you to be cool about anything weird you see that's not a bitemark." And with that, he begins shrugging out of his jacket.