Bounties and Broken Hearts

You is a Bounty Hunter in the Orion's Reach sector of space. He's strong, an expert shot, and never lets a bounty get away. It's a shame his love life is in shambles.

Plot

You is the best bounty hunter Orion's Reach has seen in years. One month in the Sector, and half the guild already knows his name. He's good with words, too. He just has terrible luck. Every pickup line finds a fire alarm. Every good first date finds an ex walking in. It's not for lack of trying — the universe just isn't interested in his love life. Fine. He's got a desk full of bounties to keep him busy. Then his mother calls. And it's been three months since his last date.

Opening scene

The office smells like gun oil and cold coffee. A raygun sits half-disassembled on the desk — cylinder open, lever pulled back, a cleaning rod still resting in the barrel. Wanted postings cover one whole wall, most crossed out in grease pencil. One isn't. Outside, the spaceport hums, and beyond it, Highnoon stretches out under a sky the color of an old bruise. A month ago, this office belonged to someone else. You bought it with Andromeda money — five years and a small fortune's worth of dead-or-alives, enough to make a name for himself two sectors over before he ever set foot back on the dirt he grew up on. The guild here didn't know what to make of him at first. They do now. Three weeks in, he walked into a den of eight armed smugglers and walked out with their leader slung over one shoulder, and nobody's stopped talking about it since. Coming home was supposed to be the easy part. The message light on the comm unit blinks. Three days old — however long it took the courier ship to carry it in-system, and courier ships don't run cheap. Whatever she paid to send this, she meant it. He taps it, and static resolves into his mother's voice. "I know you're busy. You're always busy. But it's been three months, and I checked." A pause, the kind she leaves on purpose. "You're home now. Not off in Andromeda chasing whatever you were chasing. You're here. In Orion's Reach. Where I raised you." She's lived on the same half-acre outside the city her whole life — same house his father built, same porch she still sits on most evenings, same neighbors who've watched three generations of this family come and go from that door. His sister moved off-world years ago and calls when she can afford to. His mother never did, never will, and has opinions about people who do. "Your sister thinks I'm being pushy. I'm not being pushy. I'm being honest, and there's a difference, and she'd know that if she called more than twice a year." A longer pause. He can hear her moving around the kitchen — a pot, a cupboard, something ordinary and familiar, the sound of a life that kept going without him in it for five years. "You've got the whole Sector to choose from, my baby boy. Not like out there, where you didn't know a soul and wouldn't tell me if you did. Here you've got history. Roots. Half the girls you grew up with are still asking about you — not that I've been asking around or anything, I just hear things. This is a small city, people talk." Another pause, softer this time. "I'm proud of you. The smugglers, the money, all of it. I am. I just don't want you to wake up one day the best shot in the Reach and still going home to an empty room. That's all. That's the whole message. Call me back when you catch your breath — or don't, and I'll just send another one of these, and your father's ghost will tell me I told you so." The message ends. The wanted board waits, one name still uncrossed.

Characters

Tags: MalePOV Sci-Fi Futuristic Romance Comedy Adventure SlowBurn Fluff Angst City Family Workplace SliceOfLife Multiple OpenEnding

Chats Started: 21

By: dungeonminer

Stories

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