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“Huixing?”
Huixing jumps too hard, twirling about to face Drake. “Sea Drake!” she chirps, her voice cracking. She tries to laugh it off with a giggle, but judging by the unchanging look on his face, it doesn’t translate well. “Sorry, I’m a little on-edge today! Don’t know what all that’s about, sorry. Is there something you need?”
He just frowns, looking between her and the broom she’s clutched between her hands. It makes her conscious of just how tight her grip is, and she forces herself to loosen up.
“Did you sleep last night?” he asks.
Her grip locks up again. Dang it. “I slept!” she says, nodding. “Why do you ask?”
“Usually,” Drake says, crossing his arms, “you only get like this if you haven’t slept enough. You weren’t up late tinkering around with our spyglasses again, were you? Beidou and I have already told you they’re fine.”
“N-No, it wasn’t the spyglasses!” Huixing shakes her head this time. “No, not the spyglasses. But…” She meets his eyes, just to make sure, and, yep. Yep, she won’t be able to lie her way out of this one. She bites her lip. “I didn’t sleep well last night, you’re right. But it’s not something you need to worry about!”
“Why didn’t you sleep?”
“It…” Huixing pauses to look around them; Furong and Juza are painting, Xu Liushi is in the crow’s nest and Beidou is at the galver, shouting orders and far out of earshot. “Don’t tell Beidou,” Huixing says. Drake raises an eyebrow, but she plunges forward before he can start. “I was up with Kazuha.”
“Kazuha.” Drake’s expression and posture don’t change. “What for?”
“He… well,” she says, slowly, “I’d gotten up to check on the mast. I was worried we’d forgotten to tie down the sails, and I always like to doublecheck before going to bed. But, on my way back to my quarters I passed by his room, and I thought I heard him crying. And I was worried his hand might’ve been infected, or that he was in pain, so I knocked and asked if I could come in, so—”
“Huixing.”
“S-Sorry, sorry! He wasn’t hurt,” Huixing says, “but he’d… had some sort of nightmare. I don’t know how to explain it, but he was really shaken up over it. He didn’t even recognize me at first. I didn’t want to just leave him alone like that, so I ended up sitting up with him. I did get some sleep, after he fell asleep, but it must not have been very much if I’m so jumpy today…”
“Well.” Drake sighs, but not without understanding. “I can’t fault you for worrying about him. But I think it’d be worth talking to Beidou about.”
“No—!”
“Unless he told you not to,” Drake says. “For whatever reason.”
She stops again, squeezing the broom handle. “He didn’t want her to think he’d somehow be a problem,” she says. “And he said that he’d had them before, so it wasn’t like he couldn’t deal with them alone… but, I told him I wouldn’t tell the captain, and I’m going to keep my word.”
Drake sighs again. He can respect the loyalty, but it makes his job harder. “Where is he now?”
“Oh, down below,” Huixing says. “He’s on laundry, so I imagine he’ll be to himself most of the day.”
“Alright. I won’t tell the captain,” Drake says, “but if it becomes a nightly occurrence, we should at least get Suling involved. I’m sure he has a sleeping draught that would help.”
Huixing nods, relief pooling in her chest. “Thank you, Sea Drake.”
It isn’t worry. Drake tells himself it’s curiosity that leads him to check on Kazuha in the middle of the night, when the ship is sleeping and he, sensibly, should be asleep with them. Huixing hasn’t left her chambers since retiring for the night—he imagines even if she wanted to, in spite of her willpower, she’d be too exhausted to check on Kazuha. And he’s curious (not worried; curious), so might as well be him.
He’s barely reached the door when he hears shuffling inside. It isn’t a shuffling with intention, or a shuffling to reach a specific place; it sounds jumbled, four-footed instead of two, combined with a drag and a rattle and a thud. Drake stops dead in his thoughts and his steps, staring.
Then he catches just the tailend of a bitten-off sob, and it is worry, not curiosity, that causes him to knock.
“Kazuha?”
The room goes deathly silent, so Drake knocks again.
“Sounds pretty rough in there,” Drake says. “Can I come in?”
More cobbled shuffling, and then: “S’Sure,” and Drake lets himself inside.
Kazuha’s space is small, but he maintains it almost clinically like it’s the last straw as to whether or not they’d kick him overboard. But tonight, Drake sees his room unkempt for the first time, bed unmade with books scattered about the floor—opened, half-opened, opened and facedown. Kazuha presses against the corner opposite of the bed, hair undone and shoulders trembling. He’s clutching his right hand against his chest.
“Evening,” Drake greets. Kazuha stares wide-eyed at him and Drake puts up his hands. “Don’t apologize for the noise,” Drake says, shutting the door with his feet before shuffling closer. “I was already awake, and you haven’t woken anyone else. What’s going on?”
Kazuha doesn’t answer right away, but he doesn’t shrink back, either. Drake sits by the wall close enough to reach out if he wanted while still keeping out of Kazuha’s personal space.
Closer, Drake hears Kazuha’s breaths, short and wet. He’s been clutching his right hand since Drake stepped inside, but it’s only here he realizes that it’s unbandaged, a half-spooled roll of gauze tucked against his palm.
“Is your hand giving you grief?” Drake asks. “Suling’s got plenty of painkillers, you need only ask and he’d be more than happy to get you sorted.”
“Maybe,” Kazuha says. He says it so quietly that if Drake weren’t looking at him, he wouldn’t know whose voice it was. “But I worry about becoming reliant on it.”
“Yeah, I get that. But it is your hand?”
Kazuha swallows and shifts, digging his shoulder blades into the wall and gripping at his wrist. “Can I… wait on answering that directly and ask you a question instead?”
“‘Course.”
Kazuha glances out the window, and Drake worries (for barely a second, sure, but worries nonetheless) that the kid is gonna make a mad break for it. “Sometimes,” Kazuha says at long last, “when I have… When my memories replay as nightmares,” he backtracks. “I wake up, and… and my hand hurts. It hurts exactly the same as it did the day I was injured. I don’t understand why, but it can’t just… That is to say, there is nothing new under the sun, is there? So I must not be the first, to have felt this. Is that sound?”
Drake lets the information settle, arms snugly crossed over his chest. “Kid,” he says, “let me tell you something important. Listen good. And don’t forget it.”
Kazuha nods, eyes simmering a plea in the moonlight.
“There’s not a single person on this ship who hasn’t felt at least a little of what you’re feeling,” Drake says. “I’ve gotten to know ‘em personally, each and every one. Heard their stories, their woes. We all bring our own shit with us when we become a part of this ship. You aren’t the first person to wake up with nightmares. You aren’t the first person who’s needed painkillers and sleeping draughts from Suling to soothe injuries that’ve already healed.”
Kazuha bites his lip. “That—”
“Don’t make yourself an exception to that,” Drake cuts in firmly. Kazuha’s head snaps up, and guilt presses in for roughly an instant, but it’s what Kazuha needs. Kazuha needs to understand. “You don’t have to earn your place here, kid, you’ve had it since day one. No one’s gonna rip it out from under you for needing some extra support. You know Beidou wouldn’t hear of it.”
As expected, Kazuha does shrink back at the captain’s mention, clutching at his scarred hand even tighter. Drake wants to know, but there are better times to ask. Maybe better people to ask him, too, to get to the heart of why he’s so dead-set on keeping this from her.
“Alright.” Drake gets to his feet, retrieves the oil lamp and matchbox from Kazuha’s desk and returns just as quickly. He settles in front of Kazuha instead of beside him, and sets the lantern ablaze. “There, that’s better.”
Kazuha squints against the warm firelight. “What for?”
“Gonna bandage your hand.” From his inner pocket, Drake withdraws a small vial and holds it close to the lantern for Kazuha to see. “A buddy of mine from Sumeru patents this stuff,” he explains. “Still pretty in the works, but he’s an excellent healer who knows his trade like you know the wind. You don’t have to use it, but it’s helped me through a great deal of bad nights when my knee acts up.”
“What is it meant to do?” Kazuha asks.
“It’s an external numbing agent,” Drake answers simply, turning the vial over in his palm. “You won’t be able to feel your hand for a good sixteen to twenty four hours, but it’ll take the edge off any ache or pain you’ve got going on there. And you don’t have to ingest it, either, so it doesn’t have any serious side effects.”
“It’s imported from Sumeru?”
“Imported, no. Buddy of mine, right? He’ll sell it to me whenever I make my rounds there, but like I said, it’s still enough in the works that he doesn’t want to market it outside Sumeru.”
“Then,” Kazuha leans back, and shakes his head, “I can’t take it from you, as much as I appreciate the offer. Your supply is limited, and it isn’t mine to use.”
“No, but it is mine to give should I decide that’s what I want to do with it,” Drake says. “You need to sleep, and you won’t sleep if you’re in pain.”
Kazuha must really be in more pain than he’s showing, because that’s all it takes before he relents. He still won’t meet Drake’s eyes, even as Drake spreads the salve across his scarred skin and wraps his hand in gauze afterwards, but that’s fine. So long as he knows Drake wants to help, he’ll get over the guilt himself. He’s a reasonable kid with a good head on his shoulders. Drake doesn’t doubt it for a second.
“Alright, should be good to go.” Drake ties off the gauze and blows out the oil lamp, rising to his feet before Kazuha can utter a word. “To bed with you, now. No objections.”
Kazuha definitely has several objections, but in the end, Drake watches them withdraw from his eyes, replaced by a relieved (and, maybe sad) smile. “Thank you,” he murmurs.
Drake didn’t plan to, but he reaches out instinctively to ruffle his hair. “You betcha. Now get to bed.”
The next day comes and goes without incident. Kazuha keeps to himself in the crow’s nest, watching the ocean and listening to the wind, occasionally calling down to Beidou at the helm if the weather seems to be on the verge of change. They course-correct, chip rust and paint, repair the frayed corner of a sail and rope it down again. Normal day aboard the Alchor. Normal day exchanging chores and conversations for the Crux Fleet.
Then, that night, Xu Liushi bumps into Suling in the hallway, from different directions for the same reason. They don’t notice each other in the shadows until they’re nearly face to face, standing just outside of Kazuha’s room.
“You heard it, too?” Xu Liushi says, eyes wide and voice startled.
Suling’s eyes hadn’t been wide before, but now he mirrors her. “No; only a bad gut feeling,” he says. “What did you hear?”
“I thought—” Xu Liushi almost repeats it, but stops short, shaking her head. “Gah, if I was only being paranoid then I don’t want to spread rumors. But it’s about Kazuha, right? You wanted to check in on him too?”
Suling nods. This gut feeling really must have put him on some dramatic edge, because he’s brought his med stash with him and everything, gripping the strap anxiously. “It’d be alright to just check in on him, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t see why not.”
Suling has too big of a conscience to do it himself, so Xu Liushi does it for the both of them, pushing Kazuha’s door open silently and peering inside, well aware of Suling’s chin just over her shoulder.
His room seems normal. Clean, kept, tidied. Kazuha himself is turned away from them, quiet and wrapped in blankets and still. There’s nothing visibly wrong, but the air is restless, nearly uncertain in a way she could reach out and touch, and she steps into the room and gestures for Suling to follow.
“Is something the matter?” Suling whispers, voice barely there. “I think he’s asleep, Xu Liushi, we don’t want to wake him—”
Kazuha sobs.
Suling snaps to attention and Xu Liushi whips around, peering through the darkness. “Kazuha?” she says.
He doesn’t answer. She moves closer, enough to peer over his still form and find his face in the shadows. Tear-lines ribbon across his cheeks, his eyes closed.
Her nerves withdraw from the edge, and she breathes deeper, but it’s quickly replaced with a weight in her stomach and a drawn strain in her chest.
She feels Suling’s presence behind her and hears his choked inhale. “Oh.”
“Should we wake him?”
“I… I don’t know,” Suling says. “Huixing told me he hasn’t been sleeping. It might be best not to.”
“But—” she begins to argue, but it dies. She hadn’t heard anything from Huixing, but Kazuha has been noticeably less like himself. The whole ship knows something’s up with him, just not what or why.
She turns around to properly face Suling, and finds a mutual feeling in his gaze. “I’ll switch out with you in four hours,” Suling says before she’s gotten the chance to open her mouth. “Let me know if anything changes before then, though.”
He’s not usually this upfront, or even this determined—not unless the health and well-being of the crew is at stake. She guesses it makes sense. He is their healer.
“Sounds like a plan,” she agrees. “Sleep well, Suling. Don’t worry about us.”
Suling nods, thanks her again and shuts Kazuha’s door silently behind him. Xu Liushi drags Kazuha’s desk chair to his bedside and encamps there, elbows on her knees and chin on her knuckles.
The crew is still getting to know Kazuha. He hasn’t been with them long. But he isn’t a hard person to come to care about, and it’s clear he cares for them too despite how short a time they’ve spent together. There weren’t many doubts to begin with when Beidou decided to let him stay—they trusted their captain and her judgement with their lives, after all—but even what little doubts were simmering fled within the day, like they’d never been there at all.
To some, Kazuha is a little brother. To others, he is a trusted friend and companion. To others yet, maybe even a son. The simple way to say it is that they love him and he loves them back.
Huixing noticed something wrong and told Suling; Xu Liushi noticed Drake keeping a closer eye on Kazuha lately; and she’ll do the same tomorrow. Furong and Little Yue don’t know for certain, but have their suspicions. Beidou knows something is wrong and will mostly likely confront him soon. Whatever it is Kazuha’s wrestling with doesn’t scare them. And they aren’t going to run away and leave him behind.
Kazuha jolts awake, eyes flying wide with tears a steady stream down his face. Xu Liushi grabs his unbandaged hand.
“Don’t freak out,” she says when he inevitably freaks out, whipping around to stare at her with his mouth open like he’s about to shout. “You’re fine. It looks like you were having a pretty bad dream—or, nightmare, or whatever—but it’s over now.”
“Xu Liushi.” Kazuha pushes himself upright. The panic has ebbed, but now he looks confused. “I-I don’t understand, wh—what are you doing here?”
“Keeping you company, of course,” she says. “You’re crying.”
“Oh.” Kazuha pulls out of her grip to scrub at his face. “Sorry, this—happens. Sometimes.”
“To the best of us,” Xu Liushi agrees with a nod. He looks confused again, and she smiles and ruffles his hair. “Don’t overthink it. Hey, do you want me to tell you a story until you can fall asleep again? I’ve got a million of them. No, I do, I’m not joking. We could be here all night.”
She gets through three before he slips away, and she smiles, pleased. She’ll save the rest of the stories for next time.
Late into the night, Furong finds Kazuha on deck gripping the railing of the Alcor, his face waxy and ashen and his breath like he’d just been sick.
“Erm,” Furong wants to get this firewood to the stove so he can go back to bed, but the whole thing just seems wrong and he can’t pretend he didn’t notice. “Kazuha?”
“I’m fine,” Kazuha croaks, too practiced to be anything real. “Just… remembered some things, and didn’t feel great about it. Please don’t stop on my account.”
Furong doesn’t stop on his account, delivering the firewood where it needs to go; but he returns to the deck as soon as he’s finished, with a water bottle and a blanket. He shuts up Kazuha’s blabbered attempt at saying it’s unnecessary by simply throwing the blanket over his head and the rest of him and dropping the bottled water into his lap.
“If nothing else,” Furong says, “be warm and stay hydrated. The stove’s just been lit if you wanna sit in front of it. I’ll be around if you need me.”
He leaves Kazuha behind and trusts the kid will take him seriously.
“Kazuha,” Grub says, fully prepared to make off with her lost-now-found book, “what are you doing?”
“Hm?” Kazuha lifts his head. His eyes are bloodshot, his face weary. “Oh, hello, Grub.”
She found him in the supply closet, only because she’d been on janitorial duty yesterday and put her book down with the rest of the cleaning supplies. She hadn’t been able to sleep a wink so far tonight, her mind swearing she’d forgotten something important. Before finding Kazuha asleep in the broom closet, she thought that something only went as far as her book.
That is not the case.
“Why do you look like you’ve been pulling all-nighters?” she asks, half accusative, because she already knows (or, at the very least she has a fair suspicion backed up by plenty of circumstantial evidence). “And why are you in the closet?”
“Just needed a change of scenery,” Kazuha says shyly. “But, if… if it’s a problem I’ll leave. I can always sit in the crow’s nest.”
“And sleep?”
“No, I wouldn’t sleep up there—”
Grub huffs. Then she sits down beside him and cracks open her book to page one.
“Fine, then,” she says stiffly. “If you’re too tied up with whatever’s going on in your head to get a decent night’s sleep, allow me to read to you for a while. Reading is soothing to the soul, but having someone else read to you is something else entirely. Do you agree?”
“I—I don’t disagree,” Kazuha says, and he seems so starstruck by even this simple friendliness that her heart breaks a little bit, what the hell. “But I wouldn’t want to keep you from sleep, either, it’s import—”
“ ‘The Wishing Rain of Paper Lanterns’, ” she reads loudly. “Chapter one: Remember Me Fondly. ‘There is naught more precious than the love of a friend, painted crookedly along the inward husk of a paper lantern…’ ”
Kazuha listens as she reads for hours before finally falling asleep on her shoulder. She reads on like nothing had happened.
“Wake up! Kazuha!”
He jolts hard, shooting upright with both hands clawing at his chest, breathing hard. Little Yue grabs his shoulder with both hands just as fervently.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” she says in a rush. “You’re okay! You were having a nightmare. I wasn’t going to wake you, at first, but you looked like you were in pain, and I couldn’t just ignore it, so I—”
He hugs her, tight, with one single, shuddering sob before falling silent, tears drying, but she continues to hug him for long after that.
“It’ll be okay,” she promises, rubbing his back. “You’ll be okay.”
Juza doesn’t know what the shit he’s doing, but it started when he ascended to the upper deck to trade out with Kazuha on night watch, and spoke with Kazuha barely half a minute before Kazuha tipped sideways and plunged into the ocean.
It was one of those surreal, “wow, this has never happened before, that’s weird,” moments that took time to settle, that quickly became, “holy shit it just happened” the instant those settling moments passed. Juza dragged him out of the water with a rope—Kazuha was perfectly conscious, and mirrored how startled Juza felt with his whole face—and now Kazuha won’t meet his eyes, and Juza is bundling him in blanket after blanket after blanket.
“I just haven’t been sleeping,” Kazuha says when pressed again. “Please, I—please. Please, stop. This isn’t necessary.”
Juza knows he’s fine bodily, but can’t help but flutter over him some, unsure of what else to do. He wants to get Suling, but Kazuha shot that down with such a look of panic that it almost scared him. Now Juza shoulders the panic alone.
Well, “alone.”
Juza steels his nerves and sinks down beside Kazuha on the deck, ignoring the puddle of sea water spreading beneath and around the kid. “So, uh, Kazuha,” Juza says, going for casual and ending up with awkward, “listen. We all know something’s not been right with you. Some people know more than others, but we all know it. What’s… you know, what’s wrong? You don’t have to tell me, but, you can’t blame me for panicking a little when you pass out into the ocean. What if I hadn’t been here?”
“I didn’t completely lose consciousness,” Kazuha says.
“That’s hardly a reason.”
Kazuha breathes in and exhales shakily, drawing the blankets closer. “I… I’ve been having nightmares,” he says. “Suling has been calling them ‘night terrors’ these past couple of days.”
“Night terrors?” Juza echoes. He’s never had one, not that he knows of, but he’s heard stories and none of them are wholesome. “That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“Does Beidou know?”
Kazuha flinches. He flinches like he’d been slapped, and the intensity of it makes Juza flinch, too.
“Don’t tell her,” Kazuha says. That panic is back, bone-rattling and desperate. “Please don’t tell her.”
“Why not?” Juza asks before he can think better. “I mean… Sorry, I’m just not understanding… she’s the captain, she’s going to want to know if you’re going through something like this. Even if she wasn’t the captain, she adores you. I’m sure you see it! Why wouldn’t you want her to know?”
“Because,” Kazuha says, half through his teeth, entirely full of frustration and fear, “I want her to—I want her to know that she can rely on me.”
Juza blinks. “She already knows that?”
“But she might—” Kazuha stops with another flinch, shaking his head. “I need to be strong enough to get through this,” he says. “I need to be strong enough to get stronger.”
“Uh.” Juza doesn’t know what to do. “You’re… already getting stronger, though? You’re always getting stronger. I mean, it takes strength to be honest with people, too. I know you wouldn’t have been this honest with me a few months ago. That means you’ve gotten stronger!”
Kazuha looks away. “I don’t disagree with everything,” he says. “But I don’t want to disappoint her. I don’t want her to think I’ve become a burden.”
Juza isn’t the right person for this. Not just because this conversation topic has nothing to do with him, but because he’s never been one for emotional beats or reading the room or catching subtleties and implications. But he has been told that he’s a natural big-brother, whether or not the people saying it meant it as a compliment. So there’s at least something.
He ruffles Kazuha’s wet hair until it sticks up on all ends. “I don’t have an answer,” Juza says, “not one you’ll believe, anyway. So, uh. Talk to the captain? Tell her what’s going on, with your nightmares and your brain. I can’t tell you how she’ll react, but I can promise she wants to know. And that she won’t think less of you.”
Kazuha doesn’t reply. Juza lets it slide off his shoulders with a shrug, and sits with Kazuha until the sun rises.
The Crux Fleet is awoken in the deadest of night by a long, tortured scream.
Simultaneously they snap awake, reaching for weapons as their feet hit the floorboards in tandem.
It’s Furong and Drake who reach Kazuha’s room first, the door flung so hard it bangs the wall. And there’s only Kazuha inside—crumbled into the shadows in the corner of the room, fingers twisted into and pulling hard on his hair. Juza, Suling and Xu Liushi file in behind them and momentum nearly sends them ramming into their stopped backs, their weapons stayed. Kazuha gasps in air like it’s his first breath, and lets it go like it’s choking him.
“What’s happened? Let me through!”
Beidou shoulders her way between her paralyzed crew until she stands in front of them. She barey hesitates half a second before her claymore hits the floor and she’s rushed to his side.
The Crux Fleet had promised Kazuha they wouldn’t tell her. But now that she’s finding out, they do nothing to stop her.
“Kazuha, what’s happened?” She kneels down and tries to find his face, her fingers wrapping around his wrists. “Hey, stop, you’re gonna hurt yourself, kid. What’s going on?”
Grub, Huixing and Little Yue arrive quietly, frightened and relieved with bated breaths. Kazuha tries to curl away from her, shaking his head frantically as she pries his fingers out of his hair.
“Kazuha,” Beidou says, some of her captain voice seeping in as the panic settles and self-assigned guilt replaces it, “tell me what’s happening—”
“No.”
He sounds small, in a voice she doesn’t know, and he won’t stop shaking his head.
“No, no, no, no,” he keeps saying, “no, you weren’t supposed to—you can’t, Beidou, you should—I… leave. Leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” Beidou says.
Kazuha sobs dryly. “Please.”
“No,” Beidou says again, with more conviction as she begins to understand. She finally untangles his fingers and wraps her hands over his, giving him something to hold onto that doesn’t involve torturing his scalp. “You can’t give me a reason good enough to make me.”
Kazuha tries to twist himself out of her grip, but she holds fast and tries to meet his eyes. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” Kazuha says—a plea, an admission, an apology like he’d made an oath and shattered it. “I want you to be able to rely on me.”
“I can,” Beidou says. “And I do.” She snorts, but tucks his hair away from his face with a tenderness that contradicts and promises. “Why’s it so hard to get that people want you to be able to rely on them, too? Where’s this shame coming from? You know I won’t stand for it.”
Kazuha shakes his head helplessly. “N-No, no one said—”
“I won’t stand for it from you, either,” Beidou says. She squeezes his hands. “C’mon. Why don’t you come sit with me up top for a while? And you tell me what’s been going on with you.”
Kazuha swallows, staring between them at their hands. She doesn’t fight for his gaze anymore, giving him the chance to process and settle.
“I don’t know what to do,” he hisses quietly. He tugs a hands out of hers and presses it to his forehead, rounding his shoulders and shaking his head over, and over, and over— “I don’t know what to do, and I’m… I’m tired, Beidou. I don’t know what to do.”
Beidou draws him into her arms and he returns the embrace with fervor she wasn’t expecting, but in hindsight could have seen coming. She flashes Drake a gentle but firm look, and there’s the cue for him to silently usher the other sailors out of the room, to their own cabins.
When Kazuha begins to talk, Beidou holds him and listens. When it’s over, she helps him wrap his hand again and he promises not to hide these things anymore. When he falls asleep under her gaze, she wraps him in several extra blankets and leaves to find Drake and the others, who did not in fact return to their cabins, but congregated on the top deck with tea, coffee and scrambled nerves.
‘Forward’ is a hard concept to manage, but not one they’re afraid of. They’ll figure it out.