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It starts on a cool night.
Maxwell stands on the deck of the Zephyr, looking out into the night. He counts the stars, identifies constellations he remembers from his textbooks, and reminisces on how he got here. He may well be the happiest he’s ever been, but he’s not quite ready to admit it yet.
He may not feel like he has friends here yet, but there is a fellowship he feels with the Wind Riders that’s not like anything else he’s ever known. When coupled with the brightness and excitement in Olethra’s eyes, he feels at home in the sky.
Even if he feels he must play the part of the straight-edge curmudgeon, he can’t help but smile to himself when he watches the Wind Riders put their heads together to create some half-baked plan that somehow ends up working. When he swears he can see Olethra’s ears perk up at the prospect of a new chapter of their adventure, he often has to turn away to keep Van from teasing him for the blush that creeps across his cheeks.
On this cool night, Maxwell can’t sleep. It’s no one’s fault; just one of those nights.
On this cool night, Olethra lays awake, staring at the ceiling.
She’s turning over all the events of the past days in her mind. She’s wondering how she managed to get so lucky to have a grandma like hers; to get the chance to sail the skies and travel through all these amazing places with the most famous adventurers in Gath.
She starts tracing patterns in the ceiling, looking for recognizable images and trying to lull herself to sleep, but her mind is racing.
Olethra pushes herself up from the bed. If she can’t sleep, she may as well try and keep watch; not something she ever does, given that the elder crew members cite their experience and apparent lack of a need for sleep as reasons why they should do it instead. She pulls a coat on to protect against the chill of the wind.
Olethra makes her way onto the deck very quietly. It’s pitch dark; twilight has already passed. There is only one figure out on the deck, and Olethra has to squint to make out who it might be. It’s Maxwell! She smiles and continues to tiptoe over to him, trying her very best to keep her footsteps quiet and to remember where the creaky boards are. Pappy is a light sleeper; Monty had warned about it with a tale about how he’d nearly been shot one night while trying to get himself a midnight snack.
With no immediate dangers on the horizon, Maxwell lets himself be lost in thought. He wonders how his father and brothers are holding up. Fine, he’s sure, but it’s been a long time since he went so many days without seeing any of them—save for Wealwell, of course.
Maxwell does not have the sharpest senses aboard the Zephyr, so he doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him. It isn’t until Olethra announces herself that he startles, snapping out of his daze and whispering what are you doing? to Olethra.
She smiles at him, fixing her eyes to the point Maxwell had arbitrarily chosen to stare at while he lost himself in thought. “Nothing,” she says. “Just couldn’t sleep.”
Maxwell nods curtly and turns his eyes back to the horizon. “I suppose I’m here for the same reason,” he says.
Olethra cocks her head. “Is everything alright?” she asks. “I hope Pappy isn’t snoring too loud.”
Maxwell smiles slightly and shakes his head. “No reason. I may have had too much of Bert’s dessert coffee, now I think about it,” he says.
Olethra laughs, then catches herself and snaps a hand to her mouth. She looks back at the doors and watches for a moment.
Maxwell watches her. It’s a very pretty laugh. Loud and boisterous and downright rowdy. It’s everything Maxwell wishes his life could be.
As no one emerges from their quarters to chastise either of them, Olethra turns back and bites her lip to keep from laughing more. “It is good coffee,” she says.
Maxwell nods. “So, why are you out here at this hour?” he asks.
Olethra shrugs. “Same as you; just couldn’t sleep,” she says.
“I see,” Maxwell says.
The conversation loses its footing there, drifting off into the wind and leaving the pair in silence. Olethra’s every instinct wants her to strike something up, to say something to break the silence. Instead, she takes a seat, dangling her feet off the edge of the ship, and pats the spot next to her.
Maxwell obliges. What point would there be in fighting this tender moment? Here and now, who does he need to impress? What does he need to prove?
He sits cross-legged, with every one of his limbs firmly on the Zephyr.
Olethra still bites her lip. She wants to sit in this moment for as long as she can, but she still burns with the desire to know more. She knows Maxwell will shy away from personal questions, but she can’t help how much she wants to figure him out.
“Why did you decide to do this?” Olethra asks. “Come here, I mean, on this quest to find my grandma?”
“Because…” Maxwell trails off. He knows what steps lead him to the beginning of this adventure; he knows that he made the choice that he and Olethra had to be the ones to find Comfrey. More than any of that, though, he was—and is—besotted with Olethra. She’s beautiful, funny, witty, and so damned smart. She cares so deeply and, like Maxwell, is going against everything she’s been brought up for.
Their lives had each been marked by a significant amount of sheltering. Maxwell was meant to be prim and proper at all hours of the day, to never speak out of turn or go against his father’s wishes. Maxwell has been hiding for his whole life, pushing back that sense of wrongness he’d always feel when he had to don gloves to hide the cuts on his hands.
Olethra grew up free as a bird, at least in Maxwell’s eyes. But, even if she had been afforded every freedom Maxwell never had, she still wasn’t allowed what she knew would make her happiest. Olethra loves her parents, and she understands why they raised her the way they did, but she never wanted to be safe forever. She is far too much like her grandmother to stay cooped up her whole life, and she thinks her parents knew that from the beginning.
Olethra looks up and down Maxwell’s face, awaiting his response. In the dark, she can’t quite make out his expression.
Maxwell quickly turns his head away, facing out to the sky once again. “I believed that nobody else would find her, so we had to do it,” he says.
“Is that it?” Olethra asks. “It feels like…I don’t know, like there’s something else there. I know you like fighting—or, uh, gentlemen fisting, is that why you decided to come?”
Maxwell shakes his head. “No, not really. I have plenty of opportunities for that at home, I didn’t need to find a lost continent to get into a scrape.”
“To get away from your family, then?” Olethra presses. She has a bad habit of asking too many questions and finding out more than she ever wanted to know. Despite this, she has a charm that makes people want to keep talking to her.
“I… yeah, something like that,” Maxwell admits. That’s probably more true than anything else he’s said until now, though it was mostly in the hopes that Olethra would back down. He doesn’t need her figuring him out before he’s even figured out how he feels for himself.
“I guess I did it for the same reason, just in a different way,” Olethra says. “I just wanted to be free, you know? I wanted to see the world.” She pauses for a moment. “I think you saved me, kind of, from the farm. I don’t know where I’d be if you hadn’t been sent to take all my family’s stuff.” She giggles a bit at those last words, realizing how silly they’d sound in any other context.
Maxwell looks up at the wooden structure of the Zephyr, the rigging that’s held all these years, the deck that’s seen the footsteps of an entire generation of Wind Riders. He looks at Olethra, continuing her grandmother’s legacy, just as he continues his own grandfather’s.
“I think you’re right,” Maxwell says, looking down at his hands. “And…” he considers his next words very carefully, “and I think you saved me too. I don’t know what I would have done if we’d never met, or if one of my brothers got sent to your family.”
Olethra scoots herself a bit closer to Maxwell. “I’m really glad we met, then,” she says. She tentatively places a hand on top of Maxwell’s own fidgeting hands; lays her head on Maxwell’s shoulder and looks out to the sky. The stars shine through the dark sky, though the moon is not out to provide further light.
Maxwell swallows around the coil of anxiety building in his throat and places one hand on top of Olethra’s, trying to relax into the feeling. Her hand is soft, contrasting his own calluses and split knuckles. He rubs a thumb along the back of Olethra’s hand and tries with all his might to say something—something normal and cool and chill.
Olethra beats him to it, as always. “I really like you,” she says.
Maxwell’s breath catches.
“I think we’re gonna do great things.” Olethra turns her hand over, wriggles it a bit, and pushes her fingers out to interlock with Maxwell’s. Her head still lays on his shoulder, staring out over the horizon.
Maxwell lets his head fall to the side, landing on Olethra’s. Her hair is soft too, he notices. He squeezes her hand just a little tighter as he gathers the courage to say something to her.
“I really like you too,” Maxwell whispers.
Olethra’s smile is audible, though she doesn’t say another word. There’s no worry of the sun rising for some hours yet, so there’s no need to end this moment until then. If the crew notices that Max and Olethra look tired, they don’t say anything, and if Max notices that Pappy gives him a little wink and nudge when he moves to approach Olethra, he doesn’t mention it.