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Scott has his back to Martyn, rummaging through the wall-compartment that came with the cluster. Scott argued for it, the two of them cramped together in his old room connected to the flower shop and picking through endless index cards of listings. Said they’d want somewhere to stash things that wasn’t obvious. Martyn thinks, watching the pieces of the cover hover like mosaic tiles, it’s obvious enough to only barely be worth the money.
“You said they got your shoulder?” Scott glances over to where Martyn’s perched on the bed.
Martyn touches careful fingers to the injury, and winces at how it sends tiny, prickling sparks through his nerves. “Grazed it, but yeah. I think it’ll need some cleaning.”
Scott makes a noise, baring teeth. “We’re running low on cleaning kits. You think I can get the pieces out with tweezers?”
Martyn leans as far to the side as he can to squint at his shoulder in the mirror propped against the wall. It clarifies nothing, except that he should wash his hair. “Couldn’t tell you.”
Scott shuts the compartment with an armful of supplies. “Your sorting system is different.”
It’s been a point of half-hearted contention for going on two weeks: Scott keeps insisting they focus on stocking medical supplies, and Martyn keeps stashing things Scott refuses to concede are necessary. The trouble is mostly that they both like knowing where things are, and they disagree often about where they should be.
“I haven’t changed a single thing,” Martyn protests.
Scott narrows his eyes, though the corner of his mouth rises too. “You moved the towels.”
“I changed one single thing!”
“We don’t even need towels in there; we can just put them in the washroom. No one’s going to come in here and steal towels. ” Scott sits on the bed, on Martyn’s injured side, and it’s a testament to how disarming Scott can be that Martyn barely registers the movement.
“You don’t know that,” Martyn says. “I would.”
Scott turns his head to the side to laugh, hands stilling just over Martyn’s shoulder. “And that’s why I live with you, so you’d only be stealing from yourself.”
“Right, right,” Martyn sighs. “True enough.”
Living together. That is what they’ve been doing, isn’t it? Their two separate beds (small and cheap because the wool place two clusters over owed Scott a favour) pushed together so they can sleep back to back. The slump of Scott’s rucksack by the main entryway, the steady weight of Martyn’s bag he stashes by the bed instead of under these days. The tile hanging in the kitchen tallying who cooked what and how well.
The longer he stays in this place, the more Martyn itches. There’s so much Scott just puts down around the cluster like it will grow roots wherever it lands. But as he does every time the thought comes up, Martyn puts away the ache in his chest for later. He feels it like the rising whine of a barge taking off, something better understood by your bones than your ears: there is the sense that later is coming fast. He’ll be gone from this place soon.
“What are we running out of?” Martyn asks, as Scott gets to work cleaning the injury. He hisses as a touch skitters hurt down his arm and Scott shushes him absentmindedly, pulling back for a moment to adjust the jagged, ever-present bracelet on his wrist. “Do you want me to pop down to Thursday’s and see if I can get it?”
Scott hums, nudging their trashcan closer with his foot and dropping something into it. “We could, but but I’ve still got an IOU from that other guy, and I hear he’s come into some wealth recently? We should go see if he’s feeling generous.”
“Do some persuading if not?” Martyn grins, then wrinkles his nose as something particularly sharp parts from his skin.
Scott mumbles an apology. “I do still plan to use the IOU; we don’t want him to hate us. But if he’s still rich the next time we stop by, yeah, persuading! Some of that new merchandise looks very flammable.”
It’s not a surprise anymore, and it’s not so difficult anymore, to reconcile the mischief that dances in Scott’s eyes with his terrifying honesty. Martyn still barks a laugh. “I like how you think.”
“I know you do.” Scott sounds pleased as he sets the tweezers aside and reaches for gauze and ointment. Touches his bracelet again and pauses. “Hm.”
Then he flicks his wrist and the bracelet he wears comes apart like breaking glass, the crystalline shards coming up to orbit just above his head.
Martyn jerks back. “Oh my god! You didn’t tell me it could do that!”
Scott laughs. “Why are you so surprised? You see weirder things than this all the time.”
“Not from you! I thought I knew all your secrets! Are you secretly an escaped prince or something?” Martyn demands. He’s playing up his outrage even as he grins. “Come from another star system to hide from your royal family?”
“No, I—” Scott stumbles over his words, blinking. “No, that’s not what happened.”
Huh. Scott discomposed like this is rare, and always in part an act. Martyn backs off a little. “More personal than that?”
Scott returns to the matter of dressing Martyn’s wound. “Yeah. Yeah. It was… You know those old-school voice recorders? You could embed them in, like, jewelry?”
“Oh, yeah, I saw a couple of those around.” Never got one for himself — couldn’t hardly justify the cost. What was he going to do, record himself? Record everyone he spent a mission and a couple of nights with? Wouldn’t last, would certainly run out of space too fast. Him and his blabbering mouth and his memory for so few of the people he’s worked with. “You do, like, audio logs?”
“No,” Scott says mildly. His hands are warm where they press against Martyn’s skin. “It’s completely broken, at this point. I don’t even know if you could pull out the stuff I had saved on it.”
“Oh,” Martyn says. “Why keep it, then?”
Scott smiles, hard to read, and Martyn’s seen Scott like this before, but never in their bedroom when it’s just the two of them after a mission. “Part of my brand, now. The bracelet.”
“Of course,” Martyn says. “Couldn’t forget the brand.” He looks toward the compartment so he doesn’t have to bear Scott, shard-crowned. (Martyn’s done it again, hasn’t he? Fallen into something he shouldn’t have and woken to what he’d won only in time to sense the last grains of sand falling through the hourglass.)
“It’s the pieces of my broken heart,” Scott continues, tone light as it is when he knows he’s just said something terrible.
“Your what?” The only reason Martyn doesn’t sit up is that Scott isn’t done with his shoulder yet. He does turn his head though, which makes Scott hum disapprovingly at him.
“I had a husband once,” he says.
“Didn’t think you were the marrying type.” (Didn’t think at all, did he? Just blinked and suddenly they were sharing beds and medical supplies and food. Didn’t think, because he figured he’d be gone tomorrow, but tomorrow was forever becoming today.)
“Well, not anymore.” Scott makes a little performance of dusting off his hands before collecting the remaining supplies into a pile with deft fingers.
“Ah,” Martyn says, watching him, soft. There’s something on Scott’s wrist — with the bracelet gone, it’s clear it’s not a shadow.
“Yeah. He’s dead now.” The admission is accompanied by a cheerful shrug. “Same thing that killed him broke my recorder. I’m just lucky it didn’t hit me worse.”
Right. Martyn feels it like a collar around his throat. It’s not often people catch him off-guard, make him want to linger near them when he knows full well he’ll have to dash again in a day or a week or a month.
“I had a husband once,” Martyn volunteers. “Married for tax benefits,” he adds, lying.
“Tax benefits?” Scott asks, amused.
“What’s that on your wrist?” Martyn jerks his chin and Scott stills, gazing down at his own skin as if surprised by it. Martyn reaches over to catch his forearm, pull it closer—
Scott doesn’t resist because he never resists, because he’s never been afraid of Martyn, because he’s awful like that. Cleo was right about him.
“Ah. Those are because I was an idiot,” Scott says, voice too tender to be scornful. “It was a crown originally. I made the modifications to turn it into a bracelet, and it was too tight, and the shards, they— They were so sharp? I got all the pieces out eventually, but.” He gestures, exposing his wrist. The scars speak for themselves.
“Do you still miss him?” Martyn asks.
Scott’s strange smile again. “I don’t know. I— After the accident, the recorder would just— start playing his voice sometimes? Even if I didn’t touch it. And then it started doing it less and less and I… don’t know when it stopped.”
“That’s not really an answer,” Martyn points out for both their sakes.
Scott shrugs. “Do you miss the people you’ve loved?”
It’s a rhetorical question. Martyn decides it’s a rhetorical question.
Scott plucks a piece from his crown, jagged and beautiful, and hands it to Martyn. It almost doesn’t cut him when he takes it. Scott laughs at Martyn’s griping about it, goes to the compartment, and lets Martyn leave their bedroom only after there’s a band-aid on the cut, a little circle of dancing fish wrapped around his index finger.
Scott doesn’t put his bracelet back on that night, so when they settle in to sleep, Martyn loops his hand around Scott’s wrist just to hold it, and Scott touches fingertips to the raised starburst under Martyn’s eye.
They got a private room in the bathhouse, and Martyn won’t ever volunteer to say it but they all know it’s because the proprietor loves Cleo and generally tolerates him. They’re getting dressed, the two of them on opposite sides of the room as if there’s a line drawn on the floor between them, but maybe it’s telling that both of them looked at the lockers in the corner and opted to leave their things out. Rather keep it where you can see it — those are so easy to break into anyway.
“I feel like we know each other well enough by now for me to ask: what kind of trouble did you run into to need stitches like that?” Martyn says this over his shoulder, shrugging his shirt back on. His headband, damp from grabbing it while his hands were still wet, he loops lightly around his wrist.
Cleo replies, already laughing as they pull on their stockings, “We couldn’t have just had a nice after-mission bath? You had to go and ruin it by asking about sad things.”
Martyn sputters indignantly. “Excuse me for being curious! Maybe I’m just worried whatever did that to you is gonna come after me too. So go on, spill.”
Cleo raises an eyebrow, one stocking only halfway up their leg so the stitches in question draw a visible line up their calf. “Yes, the mourning rituals of my home fragment are definitely going to come after you. You will be chased through the whole star system by the ghost of an abstract concept! Ooooh, better start running now, actually. Get a head start on them.”
Martyn lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Could’ve just said it was nothing to worry about, jeez.” He points at her. “And nice try, but I’m not going to just up and leave the barge to you. I paid good money for that.”
“I seem to recall I paid good money for that and you watched me do it, but okay, whatever helps you sleep at night.” Cleo pulls up the remainder of their stocking decisively. They pause thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours.” They jerk their chin in the general direction of Martyn’s face.
Cleo ties back her veritable waterfall of hair while Martyn sits down, eyebrows raised. She knows perfectly well what she’s just suggested. Martyn’s never a breathed a damn word about where the scar came from, hardly even hinted at having other mission partners when he was trying to court her into going on that first one with him, but of course, they all had to start somewhere. You don’t get someone like Cleo — baring teeth when it matters, attentive to reputation, sharp-eyed — without having done this a few times. You don’t get people like the two of them who can’t read the other like flight paths carved over the stars.
“You go first. So I know you aren’t messing with me,” Martyn decides. Runs a hand through his wet hair to get it out of his face.
“Fine,” Cleo says. She looks like she’s trying not to smile, which she does to everyone who’s trying to cut her a bad deal. Martyn doesn’t take it personally — he doesn’t tell her what he does with his share of the mission profits. “Come over here?”
Martyn crosses the room and sits on the bench next to her. “We should’ve done this in the bath. Would’ve made it easier; now your clothes are covering them up.”
Cleo lifts an arm. Short sleeves today, so the stitches are visible where they curve along their forearm, over their bicep, and up under the fabric of their shirt. “You can see them here.”
Martyn wonders vaguely as he leans closer whether he’ll just fall right through this time, like reaching for his reflection in the water. It’s been occurring to him a lot lately, stretching for her hand in a firefight or getting her elbow hooked around his to drag him toward a shop selling hammocks. (There are two, back on the barge, hanging maybe not even an inch off the floor.) Then he’s got his hand on her arm and the thought dissolves.
“Oh! They’re— smooth?”
“They’re not really stitches,” Cleo says, the start of a genuine smile at the side of their mouth.
Cleo’s skin is almost abnormally cool, which Martyn is very slightly surprised to relearn every time. They complain that Martyn’s hands are always too warm. He traces the stitched line, and the skin is smooth all along it, excepting where scars have left their mark. “What are they, then?”
“You know how—” Cleo puts her stockinged feet on top of her shoes instead of pulling them on. Her smile grows wider but not more genuine. “Let’s not pretend — we’re here because the people we’d rather be with went and died.”
“Uhh, ‘fraid you might be alone in that boat, actually,” Martyn blurts.
Cleo snorts. “Really? All this about fleeing your home fragment and never talking about your past and sighing wistfully at the stars and you’ve never lost anyone?”
“Sighing wistfully? I’ll have you know my sighs are perfectly wistless, thank you very much.”
Cleo shoves his shoulder. Martyn reciprocates. It doesn’t become a slap fight but it does get close, and then they are sighing, half-laughing at each other, as they only can in the clarified air of post-mission exhaustion. Next to Cleo and after the scrubbing they both gave themselves, Martyn feels a little translucent.
“And in my defense, you don’t talk about your past either,” Martyn adds. “I was just being polite.”
“I don’t think you know what that word means, but that’s— fine. It’s fine.”
Martyn pokes her and doesn’t feel bad about it. “You said you’d tell me about the stitches. C’mon, hold up your end of the bargain.”
Cleo takes a deep breath. When Martyn’s in the mood to flatter himself, he thinks they do it more often with him than with most other people. “When you lose someone. You want something to remember them by. You want— some kind of representation of what it feels like.”
Yeah, Martyn thinks but does not say. He settles for a grunt.
“So.” Cleo traces with a finger the path his hand travelled up their arm. “I got stitches. That’s what they did on my home fragment. They usually get little ones. You know. Around the wrist like a bracelet. Maybe on the cheek like tear tracks, if you’re tasteless.”
Martyn glances up. The marks continue over Cleo’s face. They notice where his gaze has turned and laugh.
“Look,” she says. “I can judge my past self if I want to. Not much, they don’t deserve that, but a little.”
“You do stupid things when you miss someone,” Martyn offers, trying not to sound careful. Then gives himself away by adding, “I would.”
“Yeah,” Cleo sighs. “Yeah. I’d like it if I didn’t have to think about eventually running out of space, but that’s not how any of this works, is it?”
“No, not really,” Martyn says. Decides, “I’ll get one for you. On the arm or something.”
“Bit rude,” Cleo says, turning sideways on the bench to face him better, “acting like I’m dead already. You think I’m dead already?”
He should probably say no. Though he had an odd dream the other night, Cleo gone from their barge, the whole fragment echoingly deserted. He doesn’t think it meant anything, and he tells himself the handful of wordless hours that followed were part of the dream too: watching dancers glide in the diffuse light of Cleo’s scavenged holography machine, his side pressed to hers. Listening to her breathing slow.
“I mean, just to commemorate,” Martyn says. “We’ve been pretty good together.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cleo says, which is just the thing they do sometimes, throwing out the bait to see if he’ll bite.
“C’mon,” he wheedles, falling easily into the next part of their dance. He flashes teeth at them, quick. “I get the job done. You know I do.”
Cleo huffs, smiling smaller, truer. “You do get the job done, Martyn, you do.” They lean their head against the wall, feet tucked up on the bench. It’s not a position that’d be easy to get out of, and it puts their legs nearer to Martyn, so he touches their shin, over where he saw the stitches before the stockings went on.
Cleo doesn’t jerk. They aren’t surprised, though Martyn can nearly feel it in the air that they get a bit tense. He’s not offended by that either. “Are they all for different people?”
“Mm,” Cleo hums. “Not all. I haven’t lost that many people.”
And here they are again. Here he is again. Martyn can lie to anyone in this or any star system, but he’s no good at lying to Cleo. Still, he has to pretend, doesn’t he? The way they both pretend they haven’t seen the other bare-skinned, their soft underbellies exposed.
“Still a lot,” Martyn says, mentally shuffling through all the thin lines of black on pale skin he’s seen.
Ren— Ren was easy to lie to, because he could walk away from a firefight talking like fire wouldn’t touch him. Cleo’s far more careful about going around advertising that there’s no world where she’d ditch him in a bad spot, and she would never ask Martyn to say anything so dangerous as that for her. It works out okay, just about.
“They’re not heavy,” Cleo points out. They lift that arm again, the one with the bold, elegant line like a slow wave travelling up. “Not literally, anyway.” Cleo blinks. “I guess things that aren’t literally heavy can still be— a lot.”
Martyn doesn’t have anything to say to that. The silence of this private room is strange and alarming, all of a sudden. “We should head back to port,” he says. He misses the low thrum of ever-present active machinery. He realizes, belatedly, that he still has his hand on Cleo’s shin.
“What about the star?” Cleo asks, in a tone that is trying to be mild because (in this room) their bark is worse than their bite.
“My own personal stitches, if you want to think about it like that,” Martyn says brightly. “Bet they needed more cleaning than yours did.”
There’s a silence. Cleo’s hand finds Martyn’s, and rests on top of his. “Are they heavy?”
The real answer is yes. The answer he gives is, “Are yours?”
Cleo shrugs, face turning away. They let go and start to put on their boots, and then the two of them leave together, back to the barge, and the hammocks, and some kind of warm, temporary promise.
Curled against Ren with Ren’s arms around him, Martyn feels like— a bad dog. The position is a little uncomfortable for his neck, but the other option is to have the whole side of his face pressed to Ren’s shoulder and that would probably be worse, given even touching the bandages still feels dangerous.
“I’m glad you’re okay, Martyn,” Ren says softly. “That was—” He pauses, maybe to search for words, maybe because he’s always loved a bit of drama.
Either way, Martyn braces for a scolding, filled with a quiet, sloshing sort of misery. It’s out of character for Ren, but then, this whole affair was out of character for Martyn, wasn’t it? What is he still doing here, crawling back to Ren instead of hiding away to lick his wounds in the final hours before Ren leaves not just this fragment but this star system entirely?
But Ren only exhales instead of finding the sentence’s end. Martyn can feel him nuzzling his hair.
“Yeah, let’s just admit it, boss — that was a dumb thing for me to do,” Martyn says, breathing out and trying to turn it into a laugh. “You’re not— Man, I feel like a kid who threw a tantrum because he can’t stay up playing pirates with his best friend all night. We’ll see each other again.”
Adding Right? to the end of that would only make him sound more forlorn, so he doesn’t.
“Yeah, of course,” Ren says, giving him a little squeeze. “Of course. I’ll come find you, when I’m done. I’ll search high and low, across the whole system, in the spaces between the stars. All of it.”
Martyn can’t really bring his knees up closer, curl any tighter around himself, but he tries as he laughs. It hurts his face, the dull and faraway hurt of a wound he knows is going to sear like fire once the painkillers wear off. “Do I—” he asks suddenly. “Do I sound weird? Because half my face is—”
He can’t see out of one eye and the other is squinting from having his cheek smushed against Ren, but Ren has him, and the smell of Ren’s barge — wet dog, clean metal, wood polish — is in his nose. Someday he’ll wake again to this smell. He just has to hold onto it. Just has to remember.
“Nah,” Ren says. “Sorry about the— uh. The face. Situation. I mean, I don’t think the scar will be too bad, but—”
“Nothin’ you could’ve done,” Martyn murmurs, trying to convey a reassuring squeeze without actually moving much at all. “Shame about my incredible good looks, but I’m scrappy; I’ll get by.”
Ren chuckles. “Yeah. You’ll be all right, my dude.”
He feels selfish. He wants to be selfish. The thought of carrying on without Ren, even temporarily, makes Martyn feel a little hollow. I’m gonna miss you sits on his tongue like a dying star. He’s going to keep holding it behind his teeth until it explodes, immolates him from the inside out.
“It can be something to remember you by, then. Yeah?” Martyn asks.
“Yeah,” Ren says. “I’ll— I’ll miss you, my dude.”
Because being around Ren is so easy. As easy as breathing. Easier — there’s some kind of tightening in Martyn’s chest lately, makes him pant like there isn’t enough oxygen in any room he walks into. He’s been alone for so much longer than he’s been with Ren, but Ren still fills every space in his memory like galaxies colliding.
Sometimes, Martyn will start a sentence unsure where it will end and Ren will say the rest, as smooth and unerring as the glass-boxed tunnels connecting the clusters of this planetary fragment.
“My liege,” Martyn breathes. It was only a joke, he told himself, the first time he said it, a supernova bursting inside his chest and begging to speak all the things Martyn couldn’t bring himself to say. Boss had been an ironic little twist, a secret bit of laughter for Martyn and no one else; it wasn’t enough anymore. Ren replied, My hand, and then the pretense fell away.
“My hand,” Ren rumbles now, right on cue, slipping into that lower register. If these titles were a joke, it was a joke shared. If they were a game, it was one played together.
“I—” He can play the role of the broken knight who stumbled home, pleading for his king’s grace, right? That’s more bearable, maybe. Martyn will take it, because he must. “I’m afraid I’ve failed you, my king.”
“My hand, you could never fail me. Never in a thousand moons.” A slip of something closer to the dirt and truth of the world when Ren adds, “There was nothing either of us could’ve done to prevent this.”
Martyn has to start laughing or the grief might consume him.
He’s been caught, hasn’t he? Didn’t mean it to happen. Idiot. (He can’t help himself. He can’t help himself. He’ll learn this again and again: he can’t help finding people, can’t help the tug at the base of his throat when he thinks of them — a leash he’ll hand out over and over again.)
“Our separation will be brief,” Ren continues, still in that low voice, half playing their game, half not. “We will be reunited in due time. My kingly duties demand— demand I be elsewhere.”
Martyn swallows down the hurt, mosaic shards in his throat. “I think you mean demandeth, my lord.”
“Of course,” Ren says. His hand comes up, falters, then brushes briefly through Martyn’s hair. “My mistake.”
“And when you come back?”
Ren shifts, and Martyn, grasping and hungry and greedy to the last, tightens his grip on the back of Ren’s shirt. Maybe he thought he had longer than they did in the end. Maybe he thought if he could get this job right, it’d be okay, and their little life on Ren’s barge would carry them, hopping fragments and telling bad jokes, forever.
“We should drive the barge through the tunnels like you wanted.”
Martyn laughs, feels how it shakes him. “That wasn’t a real suggestion, my lord, I was delirious from sleep deprivation.”
God, he’s going to hold even that fondly now, isn’t he? Trapped in the port on the barge, three whole days’ worth of arguing about permits with every gaffer that stopped by and polishing the hull and getting jolted from a doze by the high, unbroken tone of an alarm.
And Ren there with him, the two of them holding their hands over each other’s ears to get some relief from the noise. A perfect gesture, for all that it did nothing for either of them.
The grin is audible in Ren’s voice. “I liked it! Sounds like fun. And trouble.”
Martyn sits up and hooks an arm around Ren’s neck, pulling them forehead to forehead. “Didn’t think you had that much of a taste for trouble. Maybe I did have some positive influence on you.”
“Well,” Ren says, smiling back, “I’ve certainly developed a taste for you.”
“True!” Martyn cackles. “Oh, ow, actually— Don’t make me do that, jeez, that hurts— ”
Ren squeezes him, fierce and worried. Tucks his face into the crook of Martyn’s neck. Holds him. The barge falls silent for a breath — one of those few moments all its systems decide to take a rest at once.
“I’m fine, Ren.” Martyn inhales. He has to hold onto this sense-memory for the rest of his life, or die trying. “Should be more worried about you, off to a whole other system.”
“I’m sorry,” Ren whispers. “My hand. My heart.”
You’re forgiven, you’re forgiven, Martyn’s heart chants, and he has to say it out loud, or Ren might go and never know it. Ren touches tender fingertips to Martyn’s cheek, the wound under Martyn’s eye burning beacon-clear.
Some days from now, Martyn will unravel the bandages from his face, almost expecting the clarion sting of it to resolve into light. He’ll see the star, and know it will guide him home.