Doprel dug through the drawers of the kitchen until he found the vegetable he was looking for. He had used it in cooking hundreds of times to add a rich, bitter flavor profile to his dishes. In theory, at least. Doprel had no idea what it tasted like. As a Doccan, he had entirely different nutritional needs, and no tastebuds to speak of. All he could do was hand off his cooking to others and try to appreciate the looks of delight on their faces.

“Hey Doprel?”

“Almost done, Corey.”

“You’re leaking.”

Doprel looked down at the ground, and saw that a puddle of blue fluid was forming at his feet. He followed the dripping trail upwards to a recently-bandaged wound on his arm that was apparently not bandaged well enough.

“Hmm. Whoops.”

“You alright?”

“I’m fine,” Doprel said. “Biggest loss is that you guys probably shouldn’t eat this dinner.”

There was no sign of Doprel’s “blood” having dripped into the food he was preparing, but that wasn’t a risk he wanted to take. Xenobiology didn’t play well with digestive systems, and after everything they’d lived through, Doprel didn’t want his friends to shit themselves to death. He scraped his half-finished meal into the waste disposal chute while Corey waited.

“Are you sure you don’t want to get a new bandage on that?”

“Nope, I’m fine,” Doprel said. “It’s not the important stuff.”

Doprel shoved one rag under his arm to stop the leaking and then used another to wipe up the mess he’d made of the kitchen floor. Only once he was done cleaning did he finally leave the kitchen and start lumbering towards his room.

“You need help with anything there, Doprel?”

“I suppose I could use help with the new bandage. I apparently didn’t do it right the first time.”

He didn’t really need any help, but he could tell Corey was concerned, and trying to help him out. Hopefully contributing something to Doprel’s “recovery” would put his mind at ease.

Doprel’s room was, naturally much larger than any other room on the ship, pieced together from two separate rooms after the wall separating them had been knocked down. The extra size was mostly lost to a massive cot in the center of the room, as Doprel’s body was too massive for the bed built into the wall, which he had repurposed as a shelf. At Doprel’s direction, Corey retrieved some rolls of fabric from that bed-shelf while Doprel himself took a seat on the bench.

“So,” Corey said, as he started awkwardly wrapping Doprel’s arm in fabric. “How are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“Alright. You’ve just been really quiet this whole time, is all.”

“Well, we’ve been talking almost exclusively to things that want to eat me,” Doprel said. “Helps to stay in the background.”

“Right.”

Corey finished up wrapping the bandage and set the roll of fabric aside. Doprel had plenty of holes in him, but the bandages on the rest were holding. It was still hard for Corey to wrap his head around the fact that Doprel could have multiple bleeding holes in his body and not even be bothered.

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“Does that ever bother you? That your own people want to eat you?”

“No more so than anyone is bothered about wanting to be eaten, I think,” Doprel said. “It helps that I don’t really think of them as ‘my people’. I look like them, but I don’t think like them, and that’s the important part.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Corey said.

“Don’t go feeling sorry for me. You guys are my people.”

“Hell yeah we are,” Corey said. The enthusiasm made Doprel feel a little better, and a little bit less like he was lying.

Doprel couldn’t eat the foods they ate. He couldn’t smell what they smelled, or even see what they saw. He’d learned long ago that he saw a different spectrum of light than anyone else on the crew. Things he saw as garish and bright were dull and muted for everyone else. Even Corey’s current outfit looked like a horrific balance of mishmashed colors. Doprel assumed it looked normal to Corey, but he had no way of knowing. Colors were impossible to communicate across the barriers of perception. He’d tried with Kamak more than once, and it never worked.

“Thanks for the help,” Doprel said. “Could you put those bandages in that drawer there? Bending over does hurt a little, I’ll admit.”

“Yeah, I got you,” Corey said. He pulled back the drawer and listened to it rattle loudly, then rattle again when he slammed it shut. Out of curiosity, he opened and closed the door again, and the rattle repeated. The drawers in his and Tooley’s room didn’t make noises like that. “Did I break something?”

“Nah, it’s been like that since I moved in,” Doprel said. “I think there’s something jammed in there.”

The rattling noise was an annoyance, but Doprel mostly avoided it by storing his least-used belongings in that drawer. Corey snapped the drawer open again, and bent down to peer into it.

“I think I can see something,” Corey said. It was tucked into a back corner, far out of sight for a creature of Doprel’s stature, and definitely out of reach for Doprel’s massive hands. “Want me to try and grab it?”

Doprel shrugged. He didn’t particularly care, but it might be nice to have a slight annoyance removed. Corey stuck his arm into the drawer up to his elbow and started digging around.

“I think I got it,” Corey said. “One second.”

After a bit of finagling, Corey managed to grab hold of the strange obstruction and pry it free. He pulled it loose from its long rest in the drawer and discovered it to be a bracelet of some sort. Two loops of metal were connected by crossed strands of red fabric in an “x” shape, with each strand of red covered in a few beads of various colors. One of the fabric strings was slightly frayed where it had gotten caught in the drawer, but it was none the worse for wear otherwise.

“Huh. How did this get here?”

The bracelet was clearly much too small for Doprel’s wrist, so it couldn’t possibly be his.

“Don’t know,” Doprel said. “Maybe the last person to use this room got it stuck there.”

“The last person?”

“Yeah. Kamak’s had whole other crews on this ship before us,” Doprel said. “He’s been at it nearly forty years, you know.”

In retrospect, Corey had known that. He’d done jobs with Ghul, at the very least, and mentioned a lot of other missions. A lot of other pilots, especially. Tooley was the fourteenth, or maybe thirteenth, as far as Corey could remember.

“Guess I’ll ask Kamak, see if he knows who it belongs to,” Corey said. The bracelet looked handmade, the sort of thing that might have sentimental value to someone. That meant it probably wasn’t Kamak’s, at least. He didn’t seem like the sentimental type. Corey said goodbye and headed back to the central common room of the ship, where Kamak was napping on a couch. So as not to be impolite, Corey took a seat and waited. He’d been waiting about five seconds when Kamak snapped one eye open and looked in his direction.

“You need something, rookie?”

“I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Everything bothers me,” Kamak said. He hadn’t survived this long by being a heavy sleeper. “What is it?”

“We just found this in a drawer in Doprel’s room,” Corey said. He held the bracelet in Kamak’s direction. “He figured it belonged to an old-”

Before Corey could even finish, Kamak got up out of his chair, snatched the bracelet out of his hands, and started walking off with it.

“Kamak, what-”

Once again Corey found himself unable to finish a sentence as Kamak walked into his quarters and slammed the door behind him.

“Well fucking okay then,” Corey said. He put that one down as another unsolved mystery and moved on with his life.