Chapter Text
Olethra’s head is killing her. She groans, raising her hand limply to shadow her face, a fruitless attempt to block out the sunlight shooting daggers through her closed eyelids. Somebody really ought to turn that thing off.
“I hope I die,” she moans. To her side, she hears someone laugh, then hack into their elbow. Smoker’s lungs.
Olethra almost trips over her skirt, her feet diverting course before her mind has caught up. She pries her heavy eyelids open enough to squint at the world around her—this is important business.
Marya broods in perfect, beautiful tragedy at the gunwhale, one elbow leaned up against it, chin in her hand, hip cocked. Olethra has to suppress a dreamy sigh at her haunted, thousand-yard stare, hangover momentarily forgotten. They really don’t make tortured souls like they used to anymore. So glamorous…
She shakes it off. This is her moment. Her window of opportunity. She’s got to lock in.
To succeed in her questioning, Olethra knows she’s going to have to be subtle. She’s going to have to be cunning. She’s going to have to be sneaky, to scheme. No problem. She’s spent her whole life slipping out of her house, tiptoeing around secrets, getting herself into and out of trouble. She was born for this.
“So… guess you like women, huh?”
She’s going to have to kill herself.
One thin eyebrow raises. “I think you are a little young, jo, myšička?”
Olethra imagines the ground opening up beneath her. She imagines Lord Kensington Cosgrove Murderchesti-whatever showing up to firebomb the Zephyr out of the sky. She imagines throwing herself overboard.
“No, I just mean—“ There’s no way she can mention the photo. She’s going to need to pivot, pronto. “It’s just—I didn’t see a lot of people like me, you know, when I was growing up. So it’s cool to learn that the woman I looked up to when I was a kid was kinda—knows what it’s like.”
It’s difficult to tell through all the mortification, but she thinks Marya’s face might soften a little. On her shoulder, Kočka twitches into movement, starting to groom his whiskers with his little brown paws.
“Ah, to see yourself in another…” Her voice trails off into a sigh as she turns to gaze wistfully down the deck. Maybe, Olethra thinks, this isn’t the time to push.
Yeah, right. “Did you ever—is it possible to find love? Out here, doing this?”
Marya’s face shutters. “Your first and only love should be the sky. Anything else will just disappoint.”
“Oh,” Olethra says, aiming for light-hearted and landing somewhere around uncomfortable. “Haha. Okay.”
One of Marya’s gloved fingers comes up to stroke at Kočka’s back. Now finished grooming his whiskers, he scrambles up her neck, burying himself in the lanky hair fallen loose of her braid.
"Um," Olethra starts again, against her better judgement. "But you love tinkering too, right? Like, other than the sky?"
For a moment, something lives again in Marya's eyes. She nods, acquiescing. "Jo. The freedom... there was nothing like it," she sighs, speaking more to herself than to Olethra. "Oh, my first flying machine; you should have seen Auntie Zuzu's face. It exploded in her kitchen," she confides. Olethra has to stifle a surprised giggle.
"And you kept working on it anyway?"
Marya smirks at her. "I knew it could only get better."
Olethra feels kind of hot, all of a sudden. The sun is crazy strong up here. "Yeah, definitely," she says, mouth dry.
"And it did," Marya continues, gaze distant, as though she's forgotten Olethra's presence entirely. "But then, no matter what, it has only ever lead to hurt," she glances at her bag, "and to ruin." Her gaze flits over to the mast. Olethra doesn't have to turn to know where Van's taken up post today.
Alllllright then. “Hey, actually, you know what, I just remembered this thing I'm supposed to go help Max with,” Olethra says, rocking back on her heels and thumbing over her shoulder, “so I gotta run. But you look nice—I mean, this was nice! A nice talk! Catch you later!”
As she walks calmly and confidently away—it is not a retreat, thank you very much—she starts to mentally revise. This might take more skill than she first realised. At least she can rest easy knowing she’s left Van in Maxwell’s capable hands.
—
“So,” Max clears his throat, eyes flickering to the stranglehold Van has on her bosun’s whistle, “you were married to a man. But before that you were, ehem, romantically entangled with Marya?”
The world blurs before he even registers movement. “Who told you that?”
He would answer, but something happens to be cutting off his airway. He punches at the obstacle ineffectually. When that doesn’t work, he tries biting.
“Fuck off, Gotch!” Van roars. Spittle falls into his face.
He brings a knee up, aiming approximately for a soft bit of his opponent. But carefully, of course, in case this turns out to be another Tone Issue and it might be considered ungentlemanly to fight another of his crew members.
“I finance this ship, might I remind you,” he chokes out, teeth aching from meeting metal prosthetic. Van slams him down into the deck by his hair, grip tight. His skull makes a rather dull thunking noise upon the impact.
“Your rat bastard good-for-nothing sod of a father finances this ship, ‘s what you mean,” Van spits, letting out a hiss when his knee finally connects with something other than pure muscle. “And from your grandad’s funds besides.”
Hrm. He didn’t expect to be called out so quickly. He tries to buck her off.
“Still! I am a vital—“ he throws his head back to avoid taking a nasty hook directly to the nose. Instead, it impacts with his cheek. “—A vital member of this team!”
Van scoffs. Luckily a Revington man never flinches, or he might find his pride bruised by her easy dismissal. “Right now you’re about as vital to me as a bullet to the brain, and less every second you don’t spend talkin’!”
Somehow, in the ensuing scuffle, Max ends up with a clump of Van’s hair in his hand and two metal fingers up his nose.
“I swear it on my life—on my honor as a Revington man!—nobody told me! I swear it, I swear it,” he cries, tapping frantically at the deck. “Lucky guess!” The plates at the base of her wrist let off a plume of steam directly into his face; he goes near cross-eyed trying to watch it.
There’s a long moment where he thinks he’s never going to have the chance to explain to his second-favourite brother how he’s managed to get himself killed for the sake of one of Olethra’s hare-brained schemes, and then Van takes the weight off her arm and sits up, face stony. Max takes in a jagged, gasping breath.
“Sensible of you,” he gets out. “Good fight.”
“There was no entanglement with anybody on this ship, romantic or otherwise. You hear? What happened between Wind Riders stays between Wind Riders.” She doesn’t look at his face when she says it. “And all that’s long past, besides.”
He probably shouldn’t say anything. He suspects she may be working through a few things. “It just—it looks an awful lot like you were entangled, is all.”
Her eyes flash dangerously and suddenly his airway is cut off once more. “You fixin’ to brawl again, mate? ‘Cos I’ll have you crying for mummy faster’n two shakes of a rat’s ass.”
He’s fairly certain that’s not the expression.
“Of course not,” he gasps, doing his best not to look too enthusiastic. Here, a confirmation: brawling amongst crewmates is not only a respected art, but one he can instigate at will. If only he could manage to get at his gloves…
Van’s body does a good job of blocking his hands’ path up to his teeth. “Sure seems like you are,” she says as one makes contact with her ribs.
He shakes his head as convincingly as possible. “Another time,” he chokes out, wistful. Olethra will never forgive him if she comes across them acting like—he shudders to think it—rowdies on the deck.
Van’s face contorts in confusion, then fixes out something he can’t decipher. “Right, up you get,” she says, moving from seated to standing in much less time than he would expect from somebody of her age. “We’ll forget you asked, and call the whole thing done. Yeah?”
“Of course,” he allows, accepting her hand. She pulls him to his feet with a strength that causes him to nearly overbalance. “Though, Van?”
The sigh out her nose indicates to Max that she may be reaching the end of her rope. “Wot,” she asks, but so flatly it may as well not be a question at all.
“I can’t help but wonder—you seem so suited for this,” he says, gesturing to the crew running across the deck around them. “Why did you leave?”
Van’s hand drops from his. If he thought she was shuttered before, she becomes something entirely different before him now, an impenetrable cliff, the wild froth of the sea beneath.
“Sometimes something bigger calls you away,” she says. Her face is an alien landscape. “Sometimes loving something isn’t enough.”
He wipes his hands off against his trousers, still in their gloves. Somehow, he is very conscious of the way he’s begun to sweat.
“Right, then.” He clears his throat. “No further questions. You may commence your,” he waves his hand around, “boatswaining once more.”
One of Van’s brows lifts. “You want to run that again?”
As it turns out, he really does not.
—
They confer that night while Olethra patches Max up. He adjusts the cold compress on his face with a wince.
“So they were never together, as it would appear.”
“She was lying to you, Max; c’mon, they totally dated! I bet it ended bad, that’s why they won’t talk about it.”
Olethra dabs more cream onto his split knuckles and he hisses.
“What, then, do you propose? If they won’t tell us more?”
Olethra appears to consider this conundrum very seriously, lips pursing in concentration. “We need to dig further.” Her eyes go distant. “We’ll have to take a different approach.”
Max shudders to think what Olethra’s idea of a next approach may involve. “Ought we to be digging this far?” Even as he says it, the part of him desperately curious and desperate to belong with his childhood heroes wants to take it straight back, lest Olethra reconsider.
To his quiet relief, she shakes her head. “These are the Wind Riders, Max. C’mon, this could be important! We’ve just been going about it wrong. It’s time to break out the big guns.”
Her smile tells him he’s in trouble. Still, what else is there for it? "Alright," he sighs, "let's break out the big guns."