#catastrophic hull damage

[corvidist]

Background sketch for a larger project

[yeyinde]

SEA FEVER | Sailor!John Price x Reader

When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come-on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, after all, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night? And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep.  But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger.  And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve. 

tags: fluff, angst, unapologetic pining, obsession at first sight (but then love follows), blink and you'll miss it awful coping mechanisms (self-isolation, self-exile) and brief allusions to trauma (unresolved because this is about fucking the physical manifestation of the ocean, lads; it ain't about healing), egregious sea themes, a Newfie and his Newfie-isms, whirlwind romance; questionable sailing choices warnings: 18+ | allusions to smut but everything is brief and vague and more about the Feelings™ than the act, explicit male solo though but also very brief and about the Pining™. word count: 25k notes: unconventional leading man (haggard sea boy) romances local travesty (ambiguous, wishy-washy bartender) in a love affair no one asked for. That's what this is. Enjoy. 

*Suggestive themes are signified by a sailor's knot above the paragraph for those who want to read this, but don't care much for smut. SFW will begin with an anchor and wave divider above it. NSFW & SFW shown below:

—PRICE

The storm off the coast of Newfoundland is stronger than he'd anticipated. 

What starts as a bleak looking cloud on the horizon quickly churns the waters into a rough, sickly looking grey that rocks against his vessel without any respite. The cabin is in utter disarray within seconds of being battered by waves that seem to grow in size with each harrowing shade of charcoal blue the sky turns. 

A few warnings from local trawlers in the area, ones quickly turning into the nearby harbour, and a firm reprimand by the Canadian Coast Guard when he radioed back and asked if anchoring was a feasible option (oh, sure, b'y, the man said, his thick Maritime twang hiding none of his derisive scorn. If ye wan'na meet y'r mak'r, it's a safe place to capsize, luh. We'll risk our arses in the morn' when y'need savin', we do. If there's anythin' left of ya that needs savin', anyhoo), he's quick to follow their example. 

But, unfortunately, not quick enough. 

The sudden squall tears through his hull with a vengeance, ripping the sails from their perch with a gust of wind that seems determined to play chicken with the efficiency of his ballast tanks (a pyrrhic victory for Captain and her unquenchable bloodlust for trying herself on just how far she can list before rocketing back upright). He knows with full certainty, and innate experience traversing through the Gulf Stream when he was younger and much more foolish, that the damage is nearly catastrophic. Nearly, of course, because while it clipped his sails, he has engines to bring him back, limping, to the coast the Guard directs him to. 

"See there, y'er ten clicks away, b'y. Sending coordinates in a minute, now."

He's reminded of the warnings given by gnarled, old sailors who told him about the dangers of solo-sailing as he tries to be everything all at once to get his ship to the harbour they directed him to. Asking him, how can you be the captain, the navigator, and the watch all at the same time? When do you sleep? The answer, of course, is barely, but Price likes the freedom of being on his own. The isolation at sea isn't for everyone, but he takes to it with an ease that seems to defy all the gods of the ocean until he stands triumphant in his own domain, on his own ship. 

Until now, that is. 

Until he's battling with a handicap in the ocean. 

But somehow—luck, maybe—he limps his way to the port where he finds fishermen helping latch the vessels to the marina in the harbour. 

Shaded in a dreary grey, the port looks grimy and desolate from his cabin's porthole. A few wooden shacks on the beach are painted in faded primary colours and bear the quintessential marks of a seaside town—seashells, sailors knots (Carrick bend and Ashley stoppers), seahorses, and anchors. Without the dour grey of the downpour, he thinks it might be charming in a way. Quaint. There's a market to the west of him where stacks of lobster cages sit. Men in wellies and rubber dungarees shout orders amid the chaos of the storm, and he takes a moment to gather his things in a rucksack before he joins them on the deck. 

This late at night, there isn't much anyone can do but hunker down and hope for the best. The men point him in the direction of the closest inn—the only one, another jokes—and he tries not to think about how badly damaged Captain will be in the morning. His own stupidity, of course; he knew there was a storm coming but he underestimated how vicious it would be. 

With a nod of thanks, he sets off. 

Brushing against the Eastern coast of Canada was meant to just be a simple drive-by back to Liverpool. Barely a stop, really. Just a scenic route so he could spend his thirty-ninth birthday over the sunken wreck of the Titanic before continuing on the nearly week-long journey across the Atlantic. 

But instead, he celebrates it with a bottle of rum, and a ship on the verge of sinking—stuck, now, in Nova Scotia until he can find a mechanic to patch her up before he sets sail again. 

He sends a quick text to Soap about the delay—stuck in Canada, fuckin' hurricanes—and tries not to dwell on the sudden ease in his guts at the prospect of not going home anytime soon. 

(There are worse places he could be for his birthday, he thinks. Like Liverpool.)

The port he anchored his vessel to is a bottleneck between the last stretch of land for some hundreds of kilometres and the vast, ungiving ocean.

It isn't much to look at—just an empty boardwalk shaped like a horseshoe with most of the shops closed down for the season (or permanently, if the ramshackle state of them is anything to by), save for a grocer, an inn that takes up most of the middle section of the pier, a fisherman's village on the inlet with locals buying the wares from the lush waters filled to the brim with lobster and Atlantic salmon, a seafood restaurant, a cafe that moonlights as a pizza parlour in the evenings, and a pub—but it's enough for now. It's quaint, he thinks, even in its seasonal destitution. 

The buildings are all painted in faded primary colours that are washed out in the heavy rain that falls from some coastal hurricane just touching down in Labrador. 

It's one of those small seaside harbours that have seen better days. One with an economy wholly dependent on passing sailors just to survive, and he feels the despondency in the air like a thick, humid fog clinging to the skin of his neck. Fading signs. Peeling paint. There's damage to some of the buildings from a hurricane that must have swept through some several seasons ago, but the funds to repair are almost nonexistent, and so it sits. Festers. A broken reminder of how deadly the sea can be, even on land. 

The herringbone pier creaks under his weight as he walks the sandy trek from the marina beside the village to the inn (no vacancy, it reads, with middle letters flickering ominously), and he grapples with the unease that fills him at being on solid land for the first time in months. A strange, unshaky gait, as if the cartilage in his aching knees turned to liquid while he was at sea. 

It doesn't bother him too much—by the time he recalibrates to the weight of land pressing down on his soles, it'll be time to leave. 

Maybe. 

("It'll pass," the innkeeper sniffs when he asks about how long these things usually last. "Give 'er a week or so, and she'll blow right by. Might cause some floodin' in Halifax, but we're on the opposite end of 'er. Should be fine.")

It smells like rotten fish, blooming algae, and old frying oil—a typical thoroughfare for most of the harbours he's saddled up to in the years he's been traversing the open ocean. He breathes it in and finds himself already missing the potent loam that brims from the seawater at night. Salt, humus, brine, eelgrass; the ocean smells distinct in its rot. This, then, is a pale ersatz. 

He's been here for a short, few hours already, and still can't seem to adjust to life on land. To the smells, the sounds, the people—not that there's too many of them around here. Price would be surprised if this town's population was higher than three hundred. 

But it's stifling all the same. 

And cold. 

Being at the very tip of the Atlantic ocean, the weather is a near constant gloom. Grey, lacklustre skies smeared with thick, black clouds looming in the horizon like an omen. Salt-saturated air. It's a strange amalgamation between a chilling breeze from the sea and a dense wall of humidity even this late in September. It's uncomfortably thick under the veiled sun—a pale yellow hidden behind streaks of grey cloud cover. 

The best description for this little place is dreary. 

One he thinks might still be true even without the hurricane looming in the distance; a constant, inescapable chokehold within reach. 

In the interior of the small fishing village, people chatter aimlessly about everything except the hurricane (but he supposes that with the frequency of them happening, there isn't much else to say about them except, ah, fuck, again?). He finds a modicum of comfort in their strange twang—a mangled bastardisation of Irish, Scottish, and something unique to the barren, eastern coast of Canada. It almost feels like home, strangely. Like someone dropped him in the Canadian version of Cork, Ireland. 

The people he meets in passing as he drifts aimlessly between the shops, picking up something for dinner and a set of clean clothes, are friendly in an almost aggressive way. 

Then, of course, there's you. 

You weren't expected. A catastrophe in the making, one that he can see coming from a mile away. It's something he has a keen intuition for—being able to sense the kind of trouble that will make leaving harder than it has to be—and he knows better than to entertain this little fantasy, but there's something about you that makes him keep coming back. 

Maybe it's the booze you ply him with; top of the shelf despite adding it to his tab under a bottom barrel price tag. Or the fact that no one has been able to replicate the perfect whisky sour he had down in Barbados, but—goddamn—you come very close. 

Or maybe it's just exactly what it is:

Loneliness. Distraction. 

He's a man always on the move. One who hasn't kissed land in months. And you're—

Well. 

You're the prettiest thing he'd seen since a rainbow cast a glimmering ring on the horizon eighteen kilometres off the coast of the Philippines. 

He isn't old. Not in the way that matters, but the sea has a way of chipping people apart; ageing them in ways that land just can't replicate. He's not yet forty, but sometimes he wakes up after barely missing a brutal storm in the middle of the ocean, and he feels like he's almost sixty. Battered body, bruised and broken; sunscorched. Salt-weathered. 

You, though, make him feel his actual age. As if he's some young, dumb lad who ought to know better but doesn't care. Flippant in the way only the people in Liverpool can be. Young of heart. Dumb of mind. 

And fuck—

Thinking about that place, those goddamn idiots in the pub who didn't know what quiet meant, makes him realise just how much he misses it. Not home. Never home. Home is the sea. The ocean. Home is this little place between land. A wild, untamed beast. The place where, when he was eighteen and smitten, he threw his heart down to the bottom of that unending chasm of midnight blue. 

But you make him homesick, and he thinks he ought to resent you a little bit for it.

(He doesn't, of course; doesn't think he could ever hate you for making him feel even though he should because you make leaving harder than it's ever been, and he doesn't know what to do about that.)

It starts over a glass of whisky. 

He's no stranger to being the foreigner, the tourist. Price is a tall man with broad shoulders and a permanent smear of sunburn across the bridge of his nose, no matter the season. With his unkempt beard of wry umber curls, his deep timbre that sounds more like the battered engine of a classic, American muscle car, a sea-weathered gaze, and his penchant for a stiff drink and an unfiltered cigar, he has a tendency to stand out. 

(Or so he's been told.)

So, when you round the corner of the bar, brow ticking up in intrigue as he wanders in, sun-beaten and salt-slicked, he isn't surprised to hear you murmur:

"Not from around here, are you?"

Still. It makes him huff. "How'd you guess?"

Your other brow joins the first. "This town has a permanent population of maybe sixty people. I like to think I know every single one of them. You, however, I don't know."

"That so?"

You nod. "Yes, sir—"

And fuck. The way you speak, softly but with a rawness in your tone that's completely void of any false pleasantry, seems to notch somewhere in his ribcage, however dusted it is with barren white cobwebs.

"No. No sirs here," he finds himself saying, unprompted, and a little adrift from his usual character. He likes the importance that comes with being known as an authority figure; respected—the responsibility gives him something to do, and John has never really known how to be anything other than a leader, even when he shouldn't be. 

(Especially when he shouldn't be.)

"Then what should I call you, stranger?"

He shrugs one shoulder in a lofty reply, but doesn't give you his name. Not right away, anyway—he also thinks he likes the mystery of being a stranger in a strange land—but you don't press. Your hands lift, palms facing him, in a mockery of surrender. 

"Okay, stranger. What can I get for you?"

"Whisky," he says, a touch gruffer than he should be considering how nice you're being, but he's also never been the sort to care much about social niceties. "Neat. Bottle of spring water on the side."

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees you mouth the words back to yourself, a little smile clipping the corner of your lips. Bottle of water. It makes him huff again. 

"Good business to mock your guests, is it?" 

It's your turn to shrug. "Only when they don't give me their name."

You're quick in a way he doesn't expect. Snappy. Unpolished. But considering the way you walk around the bar, snatching up a bottle, and then a glass without even sparing a glance to see what's in your hands, it tells him you're familiar with this place. I know everyone, it screams. 

It's an inference—but he's always been rather good at those as well—that you've been here a while. Maybe this place is home to you. Maybe it has always been. 

Growing up in a dilapidated port town must have rubbed off on you in all the wrong ways. Waspish but still deferential to your elders. Quick with your words. Taking everything to the chin without a flinch. 

You grew up around sailors. Around men who can't seem to stand still on land long enough to call any place home. And he almost pities you for it. Almost. 

But he doesn't know you well enough to care. 

So, he doesn't. 

Motions, instead, to the cigar case he lays flat on the table after fishing it out of his front pocket with a small murmur to see if it's alright if he smokes inside. Places like these are so far behind on bylaws, he doubts anyone would blink if he smoked indoors, but it's better to be safe, he reasons, than to find himself on the curb nursing bloodied knuckles and a black eye. 

(One too many nights down in Manila taught him well enough.)

You nod, then look around the empty pub. "Go ahead. I don't think anyone here will mind."

It makes bark out something that sounds too shorn around the edges, too frayed and unevenly cut, to be a laugh, but it still makes your lips quiver, pulling up in a smile. 

"Glad you've got my back." 

He leaves it open. An empty space for you to fill in, give him your name. A proper introduction. 

Price isn't too surprised when you don't, and instead use two, well-practised fingers to slide his drink over to him, not spilling a drop. There's a flash of teeth. A mockery of a smile. 

And then: "drink up. First one is on the house."

"Well, aren't you charming."

"It's just good business," you quip with a little more teeth. "Gotta stay above the competition."

It pulls another bark from his chest. The second in less than ten minutes. He can't remember the last time he laughed this much, however lumpish and unrefined it might be. 

"It's working," he adds, tipping the glass in your direction. "Might come back for a round yet." 

"Just don't be a stranger." 

He should have been. 

Living a large majority of his life floating aimlessly in the vast expanse of the open sea has given him several insights into who he is as a person, as a man, and what makes him tick. The situations he was forced into, almost all of them being life or death, make him acutely aware of himself in a way that only those who have trust pushed past the limits of their mettle know. 

Price is good at spotting danger. Looming storms. Rogue waves. Reefs jutting out in the middle of the ocean.

And everything about you is dangerous.

He knows himself well enough to know that you're his kryptonite. His weakness. That those glossy eyes, your stubborn pride, your spitfire mouth, are all things pitted against him. All designed to make him suffer as much as possible. 

You're more dangerous than running out of fuel near Australia. Almost getting capsized off the coast of Sri Lanka. Surviving a sudden hurricane in the waters around Mexico. 

You—

You make him yearn. You make him want. 

You make him think about things he swore off of when he was eighteen and set sail around the world all on his own. 

For the first time since he left Liverpool in a boat he named Captain, Price thinks about home. Solid land beneath his feet. 

Dangerous, indeed. 

And despite everything warning him away, he goes back. 

Blames it on a litany of things—all half-truths that are only marginally easy to swallow. Things like: it's been ages since he had a stiff drink, and this is the only pub in some ten kilometres, or so. The only licence he cared enough to renew is his boating permit, and he isn't even sure if his driver's licence from Hereford is valid anymore. Never bothered much to check. 

He needs to get out, anyway. Has to find someone to fix the leak he'd sprung crossing the Labrador Strait. Needs to get more fuel. Enough to last him until he can get to Maine. 

And where else is he going to find anyone in this town to do all of that if not at the pub?

It's practical. A necessity. 

(And if he wears his nicest shirt that only barely smells sunbleached, then no one has to know.)

No one. Except you, that is. 

You wave to him in what's quickly becoming known as your usual greeting. A slight widening of your eyes, as if you're surprised to see him. Then a small quirk of your lips that always accompanies the briefest flash of teeth. If you're not busy making a drink, you lift your hand up, fingers loosely curled over your palm. A lazy wave. 

He echoes it all back with a sharp nod as he takes his seat at the bar. His usual, too, because despite having not been a marine since he was twenty-six, he still has the training he picked up ingrained in his marrow. Back to the corner. Exits in his periphery. 

(Old habits die hard, he thinks, and feels his heart leap to the base of his throat when you grin at him from over the counter, wide and infectious—)

He needs a smoke. A stiff drink.

There's an ashtray laid out on the table in front of him, a coaster with an empty glass. You're quick to rectify that, sidling up to his spot with a bottle of whisky tucked between your palm and thumb, a bottle of water secured in your grasp by just your pinky looped around the nozzle. 

"You should try my whisky sour," you murmur conversationally—like this is normal. Commonplace. 

It is in a way, he notes. But there's something much too domestic about the way you take him in. Fluffing pillows. Resting a cool hand against a warm forehead. Sweetness bleeds into his teeth, makes them ache. He needs to rinse it away before he gets a cavity. 

"Mm," he mumbles, fingers curling around the glass. The whisky is only slightly chilled—the way he mentioned he liked days ago—and he wonders if you took it out of the cool, let it sit on the shelf, waiting for him. He doesn't know how he feels about the idea of that. Of being waited for. Expected. "Not a fan of that nonsense."

Your head tilts to the side. Narrowed eyes reading him. Trying to sear through the layers that accumulated over the years, thick growths. Barnacles bunched around his body from stagnancy. He wonders what you think you see when you look at him. 

Wonders, then, why he cares so much about what the answer might be. 

John hides it all in a swallow. A gulp of whisky that never stops burning no matter how many times he washes his blues away with a swig of it. Lights a fire in his throat that catches and spreads through his chest, all the way down to his belly. Smoky. Ashes. He wheezes through the burn of it. Let it strip his insides, taking all the pollutants with it. The ones that build up whenever he catches sight of soft, coy smiles, and warm eyes. 

Dangerous if left unchecked. 

"You never know," you say, and he's already forgotten what you were talking about originally. Too many dips into the margins. Too much reading between the lines. "You might like it if you try."

And he knows, immediately, that he would. That he'd order whatever fancy drink you whipped up for him tonight with lemon and liquid cane sugar and a pinch of salt to cut the sweetness (your secret ingredient), and would do it for the rest of his life if he could. Would drink himself into cirrhosis just to see the way you smiled when you made it.  

He swallows it. Chases it down with water. He's always been rather good at that—running. Avoiding the things that make his heart thud, and the back of his neck prickle. 

So, he says: "nah, m'set in my ways." 

And you smile, let him flee. "If you say so." Then, with eyes that drop to the three wrinkles in his collar, and the ambiguous stain on the breast pocket of his shirt, you add: "don't you look nice tonight. Who're you trying to impress?" 

There's an itch under his skin. He paws at his pocket for his cigars. You meet him in the middle with a lighter in your hand, held out to him when he jabs the butt of one between his teeth. He needs the distraction. Needs nicotine to quell his nerves. Smoke-stained apathy. Just enough to soften the urge to do something ill-advised. To say something uncharacteristically flirty, like—

You. If you'll have me. 

(And then desperately. With a quiver in his voice, and blood in his throat; if you'll let me. I'll be so good to you, so, so good—)

"Mechanic," he rumbles, words muffled and gruff from around the end of his cigar. The way the flames catch the softness around the ring of your irises makes him ache in all the wrong ways. "Boat mechanic, specifically. To help fix up Captain."

"Captain?" You echo, brows rising. He leans forward, pushes the tip into the fire; inhales to let it catch. 

"M'ship," he rolls the word around a mouthful of smoke. "My first love."

"Ah," you say with a smile that tugs on the corners of your eyes. "She must be a thing of beauty, then." 

His mouth is already forming the affirmation—yes, she is—and the question—why do you think that?—but you beat him to it with a softness that hints at more, that lays itself bare on the grimy, acetone bleached tabletop:

"To make a man like you so smitten."

And Jesus Christ. 

What is he meant to say to that? How is supposed to respond with his heart in his throat, and pulse in his ears? 

He's too old for this shite, he thinks. Then, not old enough. Not nearly old enough—

"Right," he grumbles, gruff and unfriendly, and everything that's meant to make you stay away for good, to look at him like the sorry sap of an empty man he is. But there's a tint in his words. A blood-drenched fluster. 

You catch pieces of it, and smile behind the counter as you pour another drink. 

"Anyway," he's grasping at anything with knotted hands, something to take the edge off of his nerves. To put distance between this, you and him, and all the things that will eventually come after it. "This mechanic. Know where I can find one?"

The derision that dances across your pretty face has heat blooming in his chest. 

"Look around. This is basically a town hall meeting tonight."

He likes the way you ride sarcasm and sincerity so finely that he always seems to oscillate between believing your words or wondering if you're making a mockery of him. Most of the time, you seem to be—if only to get a rise out of him. To draw out his sense of humour, mordant and drier than a desert. One that pairs quite nicely with your own. 

(Another tip to the scale he tries not to think about.)

So he doesn't. He huffs instead as he ashes his cigar, and reaches for the glass with his other hand. 

"Well, ain't you funny." 

You are, of course. Of course. He thinks about the things you say to him when he comes down for breakfast at noon and dinner well after the sun has set beyond the horizon, making a meal out of the lobster rolls you make for him in the kitchen, the tuna sandwiches. The garlic shrimp. The salmon and rice. Idle comments about the locals—or lack thereof—and their spotty reputation. The history of the town. Of your Province. 

"You love it."

And God help him, he does. He does. He likes the way you drag snorts out from the depths of his chest, clearing out empty cobwebs, and filling the barren space with warmth. Or something like it. Everyone he's met so far always seems to want something from him, but you don't. You don't even make him pay for the extra heaping of lobster you pile on his plate even though he's heard you say it was an extra five dollars to a passing sailor. 

He seems to be your exception, and he doesn't know why. 

(Or maybe he does, but looking at it too closely fills him with dread. The kind he only feels when he finds out a storm cell is headed toward him. When he has to anchor down in a bay and settle the sickness in his guts as Captain is viciously thrown from side to side.

The morning after when he has to clean up the broken pieces and examine the extent of the damage, it's always filled with a sense of moroseness. Uncomfortable, in a way, like the aftermath of a vitriolic row, a devastating argument when he emerges with a sense of uncertainty, no longer quite sure he was justified in the things he said, the anger he felt. But too prideful to apologise. The awkwardness of navigating the ruins of calamity with a sense of regret that blooms alongside his lingering anger.)

So, he does what he does best:

"Not in your lifetime, love." 

He runs. 

Because lying has always come easier to him, hasn't it?

The mechanic is an old man with an accent thicker than his own. 

He speaks entirely in regional colloquialisms that Price can't make sense of. Even when he makes it known that he has no idea what the fuck the man is on about, he just breathes out his nose, as if to say, what can't ye understand about me words? and continues in the same mishmash of something that might be English, but honestly—John doubts it very much. 

Still. He's quick. He checks the hull, the mast. The engine. Checks off a list as he goes, muttering to himself (himself, because John stopped listening after the third, what? Come again? I can't understand you, mate that went entirely ignored save for a few, luh, buddy, I knows yer not stun but yer gettin' me right rotted, ye'are), and then slaps the side of Captain, nodding to himself. 

Three weeks, he says, words stretched out and stressed, like he was speaking to a child. 'ave 'er all fix'd up in t'ree weeks, b'y. 

Three weeks. 

It's in line with the seasons, too. If he times it all just right, he could be eating jerk chicken, curry, and oxtail soup in Jamaica soon enough. It would be stupid to go against the Gulf Stream (something he knows from experience when he was younger and dumber and thought he knew better), but a short stint across the Atlantic to Bermuda would suffice. Then once he's finished, he could set sail to the Azores, and then to Gibraltar, or Portugal, back up to the UK. 

Well, then. 

It's set. 

He hands the man a deposit, and tries not to think about the hourglass looming in the distance. 

Or you. 

(He always has to leave eventually. This, he knows, is no different.)

A routine forms. It's not terrible—not at first. Just an itch in the back of his head, talons raking across the inside of his skull, right behind his eyes. 

It's fine, he reasons, taking his spot at the bar while you bat away grabbing hands reaching for free beer, more booze. In three weeks, this place will be a memory replayed in his mind when the stretch of ocean idles, and loneliness sets in. A soft comfort for him to break into pieces, into regrets and spots of unhinged laughter when the isolation in a wet, unfathomable desert sinks its maw into his psyche. 

He'll resent himself, he's sure; curse the winds and the squalls that threaten to tear his boat into pieces. The idle sense of listlessness that comes with seafaring long distances. 

He's done it enough times to know that between the inexorable sense of freedom and insignificance in the gaping maw of an untamable beast, he always hates himself a little bit for not taking someone with him. 

Solo-sailing is ill-advised, but he's always been a stubborn bastard. Too prickly to be good company, too gruff to care. 

Maybe he'll ring Gaz when gets close to Europe to see if he's up for a stint jaunting through the ocean to see the Caribbean with him. Or Soap if Gaz is still hunkering away with the military. 

(You—

He doesn't think about that. Carves the thought out of his hand as quickly as it forms.)

But even so—

You're a constant on his mind. The first solid presence he's had in months, too. 

Despite his cantankerous disposition—sometimes he finds himself snarling more than conversing; sometimes he has this urge in his blood to lash out, to push things away just to see how far they go—you navigate his mercurial temperament with ease. His shorn, gruff words bounce off of your skin and fall to the countertop where you pick them up between delicate fingers and throw them right back at him—all with a smile. 

See, you seem to say. Nothing you can do will push me away so just shut up already and drink your fucking whisky, old man. 

He doesn't know if he believes you. Or the phantom echo in his head. 

"You're shedding," you murmur, drawing his attention back to you. At his raised brow, you lift your hand up in front of him, thumb and forefinger pinched together. 

It's only when his vision steadies that he sees the single strand of hair wisping up from between the tips of your fingers. A coarse hair of dark brown with lightened tips. 

His hand lifts to his beard, roaming over the wry curls peppered, unkempt, around the bottom half of his face. His moustache is overgrown, eclipsing the entirety of his lips. He feels the wetness from his whisky staining the ends.

You laugh when he pats along his cheek and jaw, as if he could find the missing follicle amid an unruly basin of knotting hair. 

"Ah," he rasps. "Guess I'm in need of a shave."

It's not a priority anymore. Hasn't been since he left the Navy, or when he realised how troublesome it was to try and shave his face while crossing the Atlantic. It just stopped being something he cared much about. 

But he feels the long ends catching on the rough patch of skin around his knuckles. Straggly and whitening at the tips. 

"Maybe," you quip with a shrug, and he can't really place the note in your tone that tries to linger between feigned indifference, but misses the mark entirely. 

You don't say anything else as you drop the fallen strand into the bin behind the counter, but as the night progresses, he catches your eyes straying toward him more often than usual, lingering on the expanse of his covered jaw. Something flashes in those depths—intrigue, maybe; curiosity—and John tries to convince himself it doesn't matter even as he pulls out money from his wallet at the crux of the evening when everyone has gone home, save for himself and you. The only two left in an empty pub. 

It shakes him, somewhat. As if he's only realising just now how normal this has become. For him to wait for you. To walk you to the edge of the boardwalk, where a little cottage sits across a sandy embankment. Home, you told him once. The first night he kept pace with you just to keep the conversation going. 

Never been anywhere else but here, you said, a touch wistful. Must be amazing, then. Going anywhere you like. Always at sea. 

He swallows down something bitter at the memory. Something aching and acrid. Yeah, he murmured when the silence stretched on for too long and he saw the apology forming on your lips. Nice. It's—it's good, yeah.

The years have muted the resentment he felt toward his home. His father, in particular. He doesn't think he's ready to step back into Hereford—maybe not ever—but he might be ready to see the old bastard's grave. Drop a couple of flowers down. 

The memories he has are embedded in thrown cast iron pots. Fist-sized holes in the wall. Sealed with bitterness, resentment.

He didn't know how to summarise all of that into something digestible for you. So, he didn't. Doesn't. 

(Can't, maybe. Won't.)

You'd stopped aiming for personal and instead focused your attention on the things that made him snort. Made him laugh. He can't remember the last time he had a moment to breathe. Land makes him feel claustrophobic. Itches under his skin in a way that drums up the instinct to flee. Or fight. 

But with you—

It's easy. 

It awakens something in him, too. Something that has been there all along, maybe. Lingering on the periphery. One he tried hard to ignore as it raked down his skull, leaving false starts in his bones. 

There's an attraction there, seeding in the gaps between your bodies. One that becomes harder to ignore as the days pass. And how could there not be, when you're pretty in a way that makes him flounder. That makes him want to bend you over the counter just to see what expressions he could pull out of you with a mere touch. The sounds—

Fuck. You'd sound so pretty, he thinks. Has thought. Many times in the sanctuary of his hotel room that stunk of algae and smoke. Images of you splayed out on the sheets, begging him for more—

His hand goes back to his jaw. Feeling the years of accumulated indifference beneath his fingers, and needing something—anything—to take the heat in his belly, the tremble of his hand, away. To keep the thoughts of you at bay, locked up tight for no one else to see. To know. 

John doesn't walk you home that night, opting instead to duck into a drug mart beside the inn, hands burrowed in his pockets, eyes lidded. Narrowed, almost, as he takes in the rows of cheap plastic he'll inevitably find at sea. 

He stands in the aisle for a moment, taking in the mix of English and French on the boxes, and trying to come up with reasons for why this is a good idea—outside of the way it felt to have you look at him with lowered lashes, flickering from his chin, to his jaw, to his cheek: imagining what might be under the bushel of thick, unruly hair. 

It doesn't surprise him that he comes up empty. That his head is filled with nothing but the illicit image of you leaning over him—

Stupid. 

He grabs the first box he sees, crumpling the cardboard from how tight he's clenching his fist. 

It isn't the first time he's thought of you like that, but it is in your presence. With you staring at him, filling in the blanks his uninspired memory couldn't conjure up. Talking to him, too—bloody fucking hell. 

All frayed whispers of: you alright, John? You sure? Well, if you say so. 

There's anger writ across his brow, more so at himself for thinking these things, for feeling them in the first place, but as he stalks toward the counter, frown buried behind a mess of overgrown, unkempt hair, and eyes narrowed into pinched lines, he's sure he makes quite the sight. Must, if the little jump the skittish man behind the register gives when he drops the box with a growled how much? is to go by. 

John's never been good at handling his anger. Trickle-down toxicity, maybe. He's sure some fancy therapist would be overjoyed to tell him all about it—about how he's never had a good role model when it comes to biting his tongue. Never had to, when his last name is enough to pass tests, climb ranks. 

Mean and drunk, his dad was.

And Price—

Well. Sometimes he feels himself getting there, too.

But this. This. It feels different. 

He's not nearly as angry as he is flustered, and like anything he isn't used to, he lashes out. 

John is sure they don't tip at drug stores, but he conveniently forgets his change in place of an apology when he storms out of the shop, ignoring the hesitantly called, uh, sir…? as he goes. 

It's fine, he thinks and tries not to let his mind wander into uncharted territory, musing about what you might have said. Might have done. 

Swatted at him, undoubtedly. Said something scathing about him being a prick for no reason. Put him in his place, kept him there. 

But he doesn't think about that at all. 

John stands in front of the grimy mirror in his hotel room with a brand new razor in hand, staring at himself, and wonders if you'd shave it for him if he asked. If you'd keep him in line during the long stretch of the ocean where everything is an endless crawl of muted grey-green, and take him down to the bathroom in the boat, one that's barely big enough for himself to fit comfortably, and perch him on the toilet while you tended to the too-long wisps of curls growing over his cheeks. 

The thought is an algae bloom in his chest. Ethereal, beautiful. But beneath the marvel of nature's potent splendour lurks a deadly danger—one toxic in its domesticity. 

Still. He latches onto it. Curls his worn fingers around the edges, clinging to rotting driftwood. 

He likes the way it fits in his chest. The shape of you moulding along the barren brackets of his ribs; slotting in like a puzzle piece. It's winsome. Dangerous. But he's always like a challenge. 

Always liked the way some things were meant to hurt. 

(And you—you look like you were made to ruin.)

Hair rains into the stained basin with each cut. Filling the chips in the porcelain, built up from years of carelessness and indelicate hands, until a light dust of burnt umber sits like a layer of snow across the surface, hiding the blemishes below. 

Each inch shorn off seems to regress him in age until he's less an unkempt seafarer, a wild man who feasts on tuna and loses his mind in the middle of the sea, and more like the thirty-something-year-old who still has decades ahead of him to try and regain his footing. 

The contrast is jarring. 

He runs the back of his hand across clean skin and nearly startles at the feeling of something touching that part of his face that was hidden for so long. 

He's reminded about something his dad used to say—nothing like a shave to make a man feel new again—and isn't sure how he likes the sour twist in his gut when he feels the truth in those words, however hollow and artificial they might be. 

The face that stares back at him is different from the one who wore a military uniform all those years ago. Cheeks sunken in. Hollow. Thinner from months at sea. His complexion is darker, sunkissed and tinged slightly red. A permanent sunburn, maybe. He thinks about the woman from Ghana who warned him with a finger pressed softly against the apple of his full cheek about skin cancer. Melanoma. 

Wear sunscreen, she stressed with a shake of her head that sent gorgeous locks of midnight black spilling over her bare shoulders. It reminded him of the deepest parts of the ocean that he crossed. Endless puddles that looked like little jars of ink across the vast expanse of the sea. You're too pale not to be wearing some every day. 

(After he left—twinned hearts torn asunder—he found a bottle of sunscreen stuffed inside his rucksack. It was the only time he can remember crying in some twenty-odd years—)

That man feels almost as distant as the sea is to him now. A memory. A moment when he was willing to carve off the best parts of himself just to make room for the loneliness; the self-flagellation in the form of isolation. What he'd thought he deserved. Maybe still does. 

He isn't sure what thoughts were rattling around inside his head at the time to make him leave the best pieces of himself with a woman who seemed too good to be true, but still wanted him, of all people, by her side. Those, too, feel far too distant to grasp. 

His hand is worn down. Knuckles more scar tissue than skin. Welts lined the inside of his palms—thickened flesh made from grabbing the ends of rope too many times to count as it reeled out of his grasp, cutting deep and cauterising the wound all at the same time. He should have known better, maybe. But when his anchor was tumbling down into an abyss, unattached to its cleat in the middle of the ocean, time for thinking was negligible. Nonexistent, almost. 

The accumulated scars—some from land, most from sea—discolour his skin until it's patches of ivory, pale pink, and mounted brown, all slightly hidden under a thin crop of wry topaz hair. 

His nails are short and lined with boat oil. Dirt. The beds are yellowing from nicotine. 

He scratches the rosy skin of his upper cheek where it meets the cut of patchwork mutton chops. His signature style when he was Captain. When he was responsible for more life than he knew what to do with or knew how to protect. 

(The men he couldn't save always seem to stack higher than the ones he did.)

John sees fragments of his old self in the mirror. Pieces of an incomplete puzzle he thought he left scattered on the battlefield, and then tucked inside a box when he handed in his medals for a trawler (a trawler for a sailboat). The fit is tight. It sits uncomfortably over his new skin—scarred and sunkissed—and he gives himself a moment to wonder about where he'd be in life now had he stayed behind. 

But a moment feels too long. Not long enough. 

He brings the razor up to his cheek and cuts the rest of that man away. 

He isn't him. Not anymore. 

(Hasn't been for a long time.)

The skin of his cheeks sting from the bitter evening winds billowing off the icy Atlantic and he's reminded why he kept his beard overgrown and thick when he was out at sea. 

November is a cruel month, he always found. Cold. Desolate. This close to the ocean, and he feels the chill deep in his bones, even though several layers of leather and fur. It's enough to make his teeth chatter. 

The fur lining the collar of his Levi's jacket does little to stem the vicious onslaught, but he makes a point to bunch his shoulders closer to the bottom of his earlobes in an effort to salvage some heat. Not that there's much to spare. 

But the walk from the inn to the pub is blessedly short, and the brief cold gives him enough time to clear his head. To think about turning back. Stopping whatever it is he thinks he's doing. 

He isn't a young lad. Not anymore. 

He knows this, of course. Knows it enough to feel the ache in his joints. In the raw scar tissue that is always a little tender in colder weather. Still. It wasn't enough to stop him from washing his clothes in the coin laundry of the inn. Buying fabric softener and forest-scented detergent from the grocer. A beanie (toque, he supposes, though he's never heard anyone out East use that word), some cologne—the expensive kind. Tom Ford, the lady at the cosmetic counter said. You look like you'd like this one best. 

He didn't ask why. She didn't tell him. 

It smells good, though. Like new leather, vanilla, and tobacco—a strange concept considering most of the time people couldn't stand the smell whenever he smoked, but maybe that's only in cigars and cigarettes. 

There was a moment when he stood in the washroom, buttoning up his freshly laundered (and newly purchased) shirt when he felt like a fraud. A goddamn muppet. 

This isn't him. He reeks of smoke, salt, and sun-dried sweat. He scrubs his clothes clean with extra shampoo inside the shower on his boat when they start to smell a little too pungent, even for him. He doesn't shave. Barely showers—

Who needs it when he can just anchor on a reef, or a distant, uninhabited island and take a dip in crystalline waters for a few hours? 

He feels—

Stupid. 

But he can't deny there's something a little invigorating about slipping a clean body inside clean clothes. Dressing up like some young lad taking his girl out to see a film, grab a burger to eat. Maybe bum around Liverpool until he had to go back to the barracks. 

He bit his tongue until he tasted iron and slipped on his jacket. Pulled the beanie over his head. Sprayed some cologne on the sleeves. And then kept his head low to avoid anyone's eyes, even though no one in this town has really bothered to get to know him like you had. 

John just feels a bit like a swindler. This isn't him. 

Fancy shirts. Clean jeans. Boots. A new leather jacket. Cologne. Barefaced. It all feels like a hollow pastiche of some clichè role he's trying to fill. Leading man, or something stupid like that Soap might jostle him about. 

Who're ye tryin'ta be, Cap? Tom Hardy, aye?

Fuck. Fuck. He should leave, just go back to his inn—

But the door is already opening. You're looking up, taking him in, and then—

Nothing. You offer a slight nod. No smile. No wave. And then you're looking away, eyes dropping back to the tabletop you're always cleaning despite the stains and the stickiness never going away. 

He expected worse, maybe. His hand reaches up as he steps inside, feeling the uneven skin beneath his palm. Rugged craters. Knicks from the blade when he got too close to his skin. Scars, maybe. Patches of hair he missed. 

He wonders what you thought when you saw it. Chiefly disappointed, perhaps, that whatever image you had in your head of him, all clean-shaven and dressed up, wasn't quite the same as reality. There's a sinking sense of disappointment in his guts, but it's almost minuscule compared to the relief of knowing that you don't care. Maybe it'll be enough to quash whatever has been rotting in the crevasse between you. Crush whatever idealistic notions of him you have in your head. 

John would rather you were bitterly disappointed now than realise it after. Regret. A mistake. It's good. Fine. 

It's only when he takes his usual seat does your head pops up again, eyes cutting across the counter to stare at him. 

And—

Shit. 

The way you look at him knocks the air from his lungs. The deep appraisal, the shock, the curiosity, and the—

"Wow," you whisper, eyes widening. He isn't sure what you think, but he knows that look in your eye; a keenness. Sees it sometime staring back at him in a cup of amber when you don't notice him looking. Shit. Shit.  

He clears his throat, uncomfortable under the intensity of your stare, and tries to soothe his nerves as quickly as he can, patting down for his cigars left somewhere in his pocket. In one of his pockets. Fuck—

"Well," you breathe, and he dreads your words immediately, not quite ready to hear them without something in his veins to dull the pinballing emotions in his chest. "Don't you clean up nice. Didn't recognise you at first."

He grunts. "Yeah, yeah. Talkin' nonsense now, aren't you?"

"Nonsense?" You echo, tone subdued, now. Soft. Too soft. He hates the way it makes his chest feel like it's caving in. "What? A handsome man like you can't take a compliment? That's a surprise."

Handsome. 

He feels his pulse in his throat. Heat under his collar. Something spreads across his skin at words, glueing itself down, uncomfortably tight—constricting, smothering—and he fights the urge to reach up to his neck, clawing at it until it's all gone. Peeled off in strips, taking with it jagged swaths of too-hot flesh. 

Your words are painted with too much sincerity, and it drips over his skin—thick and oily—until he's stained in the offering they make. Drenched in the sudden realisation that this is far too much than he can handle. 

That he needs. 

The way you're looking at him—bare-faced honesty, scoured of anything other than a genuity that trickles into the gaps in his crumbling chest, sticky filament made of saccharine promises and a dizzying sense of open affection—makes him heave; chokes him on the embers of that tantalising what if you let echo in the recess of words. 

It isn't grabbing, or taking what he wants. This is you lying flat on the table. His choice to reach for it. To curl his fingers around the bulk of it, feeling the heat in the palm of his hand. 

And he wants. Oh, how he wants—

But it feels a little bit like a betrayal. Self-sabotage from within as his body turns against him. Feelings conspiring with his whims, the ones that force out their pleads between bloodied teeth; yearning as they rattle the cages of this forced prison. Lost in absentia. 

He can't make sense of the tremors that follow, roaring through his chest in a deluge of innominated emotions that seem to shake the foundation he stands on. He reaches, but can't seem to grasp them. Temporal feelings without cause. Intangible. They slip through the gaps in his fingers. Slide off of his flesh as he was trying to catch mercury in the oil-slick palm of his hand. 

John can't make sense of it. Why him? What's drawing you to him outside of carnal attraction? It's always been there—that magnetic pull: his marrow to yours. 

But for the first time since he traded in medals for oars, he feels the pull back to shore. That unquenchable urge to dip his toes into the sand. To keep his feet firm on dry land. 

The feeling of it itches in the palm of his hand. 

And like most things, he doesn't understand, doesn't agree with, he feels the unrelenting urge to lash out against it. Push back. Carve out some semblance of distance between the thing he doesn't understand, and what it's making him feel.

And then he snaps. Bites back against the headiness admixing in the back of his head; noxious, dangerous. It's a discomfort. A slash of clarity that makes him all too aware of himself. Of you. This. Everything. It's too much. 

So easily swayed by a pretty word. What a damn fool. 

The snort he gives in response is a gnarled mess in his throat, all mangled up and shredded on the barbs of his sudden vexation. "Flatter all the poor sods like this, do you?"

It crackles in his chest. Smouldering embers. Dampened by the blood filling his lungs, choking him on what spills out of the shattered levee. 

This isn't—

Isn't him. It isn't you. 

He feels claws raking across the inside of his skull. Sharpened talons digging vengefully into the back of his sockets until it aches. Forcing him, maybe, to see the aftermath of his anger. 

"No," you say, pulling back. Stepping away from him. Giving him space. Not enough, and entirely too much. A sad echo snakes through the crevasse. Glass breaking. Shattering. He thinks of self-sabotage. Tastes it in the back of his throat. "Just you."

It's mean, awful, when he huffs, asks: "yeah? Why bother?" 

"Why not?" You volley back, and he can't quite place the look in your eye. Disappointment, maybe. Something tinged in regret. "Maybe I want to. Maybe I—"

You don't finish. 

Good, he thinks. Good. Stay away. Far away. 

And softer. Softer still—

It's for your own good. Better off this way. Don't turn around. You'll only end up hating what you see. Regretting what you find—

"Don't know what you're getting yourself into." His words are stagnant. Hollow. The consistency of ash between dry palms. He tries to swallow, but can't. Can't. Gives up instead, adds: "won't like what you find, either." 

You hum and it hurts. "Maybe I might. Can't be all bad under there." 

They're sharpened with an edge of sincerity he can't bring himself to acknowledge, not now; not yet, so he huffs instead, and brings a cigar to his lips just so he doesn't have to respond. Doesn't have to engage again. Can't, he thinks, with a cigar between his lips, stuffing his mouth full. 

A pathetic escape. He's never been the type of man to retreat when it isn't the best option strategically. Or when he has no other choice, and too many men on the line. 

But he can't—

(Knife to his chest, you walk away. 

Blade against his tongue, he says nothing to call you back.)

A fissure sits at the zenith that once was a sense of ease, comfort. It leaks a coldness that shakes him to the core when it drifts over gaping wounds and milky-white bones.  

(All of his own making, of course.)

In the midst of it all, he tries to convince himself that this is the right thing to do despite never being a man of altruism in his life, and the lie pools in his empty gut where it sloshes around in the shots of whisky you still pour for him even though he can he see the cruel lashes of his words striking over your expression when you look at him when you think he isn't watching you back. 

Better this way, and he downs a shot just to ignore the merciless echo that asks, for who?

Both of you. Both. 

Because despite what you might think, or whatever little fantasies you made up inside your head about him, he knows they aren't true. They aren't him. 

A man who climbed ranks on the back of his last name. A borrowed legacy with no honour of his own. One who had no qualms about crossing lines that others couldn't until they blurred, until his morality was a sickly grey. 

Until a prison cell in Siberia rewired the fibres in his head, and he was forced to reconcile the unignorable truth that stripped of his rank and the protection he offers there is barely any discernible difference between him and them. The enemy. 

He thinks of Gaz, and the words he uttered become a portend for the calamity of a man who always seemed overly keen to take things too far. 

It's them or us, he used to say. Them or us—even as he tossed an innocent man over the ledge to fall to his death. As he let a child watch him emasculate his father when he knew pride was all they had left, doing nothing in the end but creating another monster for him to hunt down at a later date. Threatened families. Threatened men. Women, children. 

His punishment was nonexistent. Self-flagellation in the form of exile. He cast himself out to sea and pretended it was enough. 

How is he supposed to pretend who is he isn't? How is he meant to touch you with blood writ in the lines of his palm? 

Selfish. Mean. Cruel. 

So, he lets it rot—just as he does with everything else.

There have been others, of course; but Price has always been attracted to older women. Laugh lines and crows feet; swatches of grey kissing their temples. A certain coldness to their touch. An unspoken understanding that everything that is, and will ever be, between them is temporal. Love was just a crutch. A fallacy uttered in the dark to soothe the rugged parts of themselves that worried they might never be enough. 

He can handle women like that. Prefers them. 

The youngest he's ever dated was a woman his own age, and he realised soon after that there was a disparity between he couldn't placate. One that left scars. 

He's a mangled soul in a young man's body. Rough and callous and unwilling to compromise. He's more scar tissue than man, and what can he offer someone idealistic with inexperience and youth except a bitter tangle of hurt that cuts deep. 

But you're an outlier, he finds. Only shades younger than himself, really, but it's not so much your age, but the way you carry yourself. Heart on your sleeve. Aching for love. 

He can't give that to you. 

The last time he tried, he ended up sneaking out on a woman in Ghana, leaving the pieces of him behind that dared to even try. 

He can't offer you anything that isn't temporary. 

And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep. 

But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger. 

And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve. 

He thinks about leaving six times in three hours, but you carry on as if nothing has happened even though he catches weariness in your gaze whenever you look at him. His glass is filled but the conversations are bereft of their usual cheekiness. The gaps between are no longer filled with his scored laughter or your amused hums. 

You spend more time away from him than you have since he first sat down. The deviation away from what quickly became a bruised touchstone, laden with clumsy fingerprints is jarring, but he can't claim to be upset by your distance when he was the one who caused the rift in the first place. 

So, he drinks. He smokes his cigar. Tries to not think about why his hand itches in a way that he knows can only be sated by sliding his knuckles across the worn wood of the table, linking his fingers with yours. It's a stupid whim. He swallows it down with a shot of whisky that makes his stomach curdle. Seals it with an inhale of his cigar. Forgotten, now. Covered in ethanol and smoke.  

But even with the crowbar in his hand, he can't stop himself from watching you. Eyes trailing along the paths you carve between old wooden chairs, and scowling men waving their hands at the staticky television set, upset by yet another bad call by the referee. 

(He's always thought it was stereotypical to equate Canada with hockey, moose, bears, geese, and maple syrup but so far, he's seen nothing else play inside the pub—aside from a polar bear warning being issued out for northern Newfoundland—but sometimes, the shoe just fits.)

You sift through the throng carrying drinks in your hand and impish grin at the men you recognise. Words he can't hear, ones he isn't privy to, are spoken softly and reinforced with a small grin. Seeing it on your face, pointed away from him; meant only for another, is a white-hot dagger to guts, scraping across his delicate insides. 

The flashes of anger are directed inward. Each stab is a reminder that they once were for him. That had he not gone and ruined a good thing, dangerous though it might be, you'd have been standing in front of him, curbing nonsensical requests over the bulk of his shoulder, unwilling to leave from your perch across from where he sat. 

(Hindsight is a brutal, bitter mistress, but it has nothing at all on pride.) 

He swallows it. Smokes. Pretends he's interested in the game that plays but it's just flashing colour on an oversaturated screen. A foreign language to his ears despite the words on the chyron flickering past in his mother tongue. 

John thinks about packing it in for the night. Heading back to his empty hotel so he can think about you in peace—in vivid, fantastical images of equilibrium; comfort—and finds that might be for the best. For both of you. Some distance to soothe the ache he caused. To reacclimate back to strangers in a dilapidated pub. A sailor and bartender: ephemeral, the way it ought to be. The way it must. 

With his dwindling pack of cigars slipped into his breast pocket beside the lighter he nicked from you ("people always seem to leave them behind in bars," you'd winked, handing him an ugly lighter in the shape of a bear with a pipe in his plastic mouth. "I picked out the one that made me think of you."), he finds himself at a loss for a reason to stay. All packed up. Ready to leave. 

He raps his scarred knuckles on the table, a final farewell that he can feel heavily in his bones, filled with iron as they may be. Still. Still. It's for the best.

Whose, he still doesn't know. His own, undoubtedly, in that selfish sort of way that makes it feel selfless. Like it's the right thing to do even though he bloody well knows it isn't. Won't be. That he'll think about this moment in time when he's all alone at sea and cuss himself out as he readies for a squall. 

John means to leave, but a man gets to you first. 

The man makes a noise in the back of his throat. A complaint, maybe, but it's swallowed by the creak of the floorboards when he sways on his feet. 

"Listen t'me, you—"

But you're not. You make a move to turn around, and he seems to realise you're not paying him any attention. Anger flickers over his slack face, and he's reaching for you with a clumsy paw before John has time to move. The moment he makes contact, fingers skating off the sleeve of your shirt, he's out of his chair, letting it clatter to the ground. The noise is swallowed by all the chaos. Murmurs, shouts. The music feels so out of place in this moment when he can feel his blood run hot, turning molten in his veins. 

"Hey—!"

But your hand is gripping his wrist, pulling him off of you, before John can finish. Eyes narrowed, jaw set, you shake your head once before pointing to the door with your free hand. 

"It's time for you to leave." 

He pitches a fit. Petulant whinging that cuts through the noise. Vague insults hurtled at you, words of complaint that barely make you flinch. 

John's rushing over before he can even think—thoughts all asunder, bouncing around his head in an unrefined mess of shorn noises and fervent anger—but you stop him with a jerk of your head. No, it says. I don't need you. 

And you don't.

The swelling chaos dims and in the aftermath, he realises he's the only one standing. The only one hovering in your periphery as you shove a man twice your size away from the counter when he tries to swipe a bottle as he leaves. 

Everyone is watching, wary, but there's an unspoken sense of understanding amongst them that makes him feel decidedly like an outsider, and wholly out of the loop. 

Where he's from, if you see someone being harassed, you step in. 

Things, apparently, are very different here. 

He catches your eye when you turn back toward the interior after slamming the door shut, and there's a moment where he almost rushes to your side, checking you over for any marks that man might have left behind, but you're shaking your head before he can even lift his foot from the floorboards. As if you know. And maybe you do. Maybe you know him more than he knows himself. Maybe, maybe—

You give him another shake. No, it says, and the soft quirk of your lip echoes in his head, a soft: down boy that makes him bristle. 

It's telling, of course, that he still heeds your wordless command. Hackles lowering, muscles unfurling from their rigid coil. 

Your nod, then, is a soft purr that rolls through his guts like a marble. Good boy. 

John feels leashed when he settles back into his chair. Anchored. All it takes is a nonverbal cue from you, and suddenly, he's tempered. Tamed. 

As if to reinforce the thought, his hand strays to his chin, feeling the scarred, bare skin under his palm. All done because of a simple glance, a fleeting moment of curiosity from you. 

He isn't sure how he likes the fit of it around his neck. Too tight, maybe. Dangerously claustrophobic. But it sits there, untouched. He has no desire to pull it off. To divorce the collar from his neck. 

(Maybe, maybe, he thinks he could get used to the way it feels.)

As he settles in his chair, his eyes never stray from you, standing lax and unphased against the door, chatting idly to the patrons who murmur in tones too low for him to pick up over the rhythmic echo of the sea shanty and the slew of voices in the background, cheers from the hockey game that hasn't quite held his interest long enough for him to know the score. Nothing is amiss, it seems. As if bullying out men twice your size was a regular occurrence—not even newsworthy enough to pull gazes glued to the flashing television, or stop the minutiae of mindless conversations from happening in sparse passels around the pub. 

But it changed something for him. He feels it in his chest, his guts. Something dislodged from the cornice, falling down inside of him in an endless spiral. A sudden freefall. 

He comes to the startling realisation when you look up at him as you pat someone on the shoulder, smiling softly—all forgiven in an instant, the crevasse sealed over in a thick bed of cobwebs—that he wants. Has wanted since he first lumbered into the pub and was met with a raised brow, and a cheeky wink. Not from around here, are you? and he was gone. 

Lost in the swell of you. 

Your mouth moulds around the words, pleading with him over the heads of everyone else, wait for me.

But John had no plans to go anywhere else. 

"I'm okay," you tell him hours later, hands buried in your pockets, eyes gazing up at the midnight blue sky. "Seriously."

There's a multitude of things he wants to say. All threads of lingering, unresolved anger brought on by that man who put his hands on you. Who thought he could. 

Maybe a little bit of it is directed at you, too, for not letting him rip that man into pieces even though he knows it's not your fault. Leashed, he thinks, and rubs absently at his bare neck. 

"Yeah?" He murmurs, voice raw. Eroded down to bare scraps, scorched and pulsing with the poison of anger. He tries to clear it. Swallows down the acrid tang that coats the back of his throat even still, hours later. 

Your head rolls toward him slowly, chin still held loftily up to the sky, and when your eyes meet, he thinks of rogue waves. Capsizing in the middle of endless azure, exposed to elements and predators. To the murky depths below in burnt sapphire.

He swallows again, but it's hard to get anything down when his heart is in the way. 

"Yeah, John. I'm good."

Your words take the shape of a breath, gently ghosting over a scraped knee. It's not meant to convince, but rather soothe, and something about that, about the softness in your eyes and way you speak tenderly, cautiously, as if he might startle, makes him feel hot beneath his collar. Flustered. Foolish. A litany of things he ought not to feel, but does because it's you. 

(Because it's always been you.)

"Right," he grouses, and tries to find his way out of the canyons inside your eyes. 

It's hard to escape when everything looks the same, when it all beckons him deeper. Stay, stay, it whispers over artfully crafted gorges and deep ravines, a stunning beauty that makes nature feel like a paltry imitation of the carvings in your irises. 

In the sandy shores of a small inlet nearly eclipsed by the sea, you turn to him fully, eyes smouldering embers catching in the flush of the full moon, and say, thank you, John. 

He scratches at the collar around his neck, and thinks about throwing away the key.

"What for?" He says instead, brows knitted together—a perfect pastiche of a fisherman's knot. It's rough: words scraped from the thick of his throat, raw and pulsing and dusted in smoke, but you don't baulk at the artificial ire that oozes between his nicotine-stained teeth. No. You lean into it with a smile. 

"Defending me. Trying to, anyway," you tack on with a small huff at his expense, a finger poking at his inflated pride. In jest, of course, but it still makes him frown. "I guess I just got so used to sticking up for myself that I forgot how nice it was to know someone is looking out for me, you know?" 

"Should be expected." 

There's a heat simmering beneath his tone. An underlying sense of anger that hadn't abated entirely yet, just began slumbering. Dormant, but still burning. Still hot enough to hurt. 

"Maybe," you hum, and the blitheness in your tone makes him bristle. Hackles raising. "But it's probably for the best."

"Tell me how none of those fuckin'—" There's a snarl in the back of his throat. He swallows. "None of them standin' up for you is for the best, 'cause it looked pretty fuckin' cowardly to me."

"If they defend me every time something like that happens, then it'll only be worse when they're not around. Most nights, it's just me working. I gotta know how to take care of myself just fine—"

"—shouldn't bloody 'ave to—!"

"—and I need them to know it, too. That if they try anything like that, I'll kick them out. I won't go screaming for help just because they're being rude. I'll handle it on my own because I have to."

It quiets him. Not enough to quell the anger burning in his chest, or the urge to tear them into pieces for sitting back, watching you get disrespected while they throw peanuts at the television screen, and jeer about something as arbitrary as a fucking game, but he finds something akin to understanding. Common ground. 

It makes sense, suddenly, even though it sets his teeth on edge and makes his knuckles itch. 

"No one else will do it for me, y'know?"

"I will."

The words tumble out before he can make sense of them in his head. A disconnect between his mouth and his thoughts, eroded by the smoke leaking into his throat. The fire in his chest. 

A mistake, maybe, because they're futile. Pointless. More so a whim of pride, a flash of possessiveness just to stroke the smouldering embers of the ego you bruised earlier with the tip of your finger. 

(Or maybe they're the afterbirth of his righteousness; that insatiable beast he conceived into the world he swore he'd save—no matter what—only to realise somewhere after leaking madness into the fibres that he was making more monsters than he was culling. 

A lingering remnant of when he bore the burden of the world on his shoulders during a botched pantomime of Atlas.)

You know it, too. "You won't be around all the time, John."

He tastes salt in the back of his throat. It burns when he swallows. When the words that tore through the seam of his lips dissolve into ash, into smoke. 

Your hand on his shoulder is meant to be placating but it feels like a dagger to his gut. 

"I can take care of myself. Been doin' it all my life, anyway."

He can't make sense of it. Can't understand how your words fill the hollow crevasses inside of him until he feels more like a mortal man than an untouchable mountain. 

You bring him back down to the solidness of land, of the earth. An anchor. 

John touches his neck again. "Yeah," he rasps. "I get it. Now, let's get you home."

He thinks about you. 

A lot would be an understatement considering how many times he's taken you to bed, pulled you down into the sheets with him. Tangled limbs. Rushed breath. He thinks of you now, too, with heavy eyes and a little smile, beckoning him forward. 

His own illicit sanctuary. A place in his head where he ruins you over, and over, and over again until there's a permanent stain on the tips of his fingers, the back of his throat. A constant reminder of you—the way you smell, sound, taste—

It's been a while since he had a moment like this, when he could relax, feel himself—already half-hard when he palms himself through his boxers—and just—

Lose himself. Body melting into the sheets. Tension bleeding together into one mass that pools in his lower belly, coalescing into a tight knot in his groin. It spools, pulls taut, when he runs the flat of his palm down the length of himself until he meets the soft flesh of his perineum. 

It's easy to tilt his chin up, eyes gazing at the seashell colouring of the popcorn ceiling, stroking himself in slow, unhurried rolls of his hand, and thinking of you. Your hand on him. Your breath tickling his ear, spurring him on. 

"Come on, John," you'd say in that voice made to bring him to his knees. "You can go faster than that, can't you?"

He responds instantly to the faint echo in his head, grunting at the pleasure that races down his spine. Tugging on that tightly wound knot until it trembles. 

His hand around the length of him is replaced with yours. Tentative, exploratory strokes from frenulum to his thickened base; up, up, a teasing swipe of your thumb across his weeping slit but only enough to make his hips arch off the bed, and then you pull away, down. Down. Over and over again. He thinks of the way your breath would feel ghosting over his temple. The press of your chest when you leave over his shoulder. 

John rocks into it, hips undulating with each pass of the hand that is too gnarled, too scarred to be yours; lost in the fantasy of your presence around him, on him, in him. 

Maybe your other arm would be tucked under the nape of his neck, bracketing him into your body. A safety net. A security blanket. You'd toy with his cheek—twee and gentle; a ginger touch to offset the illicit press of your thumb into his frenulum. Lean over, too, perhaps, and press those inviting lips to his. A soft kiss. Barely a whisper. A brush.

His tongue rolls over his bottom lip, chasing the phantom taste of you that isn't there. He imagines you'd taste like the sea. Briny, but mild. Salted winter melon. A sweetness, too, beneath the tart tang of iodine, but one that was metallic—copper. Iron. 

Pleasure knots in his groin—tighter, tighter, tighter—and even with each stroke a pale imitation of your warm flesh on him, he finds the spooling coil building in a quick crescendo of bliss to be somehow more potent than it ever was. A feverish heat at the mere thought of you. 

It builds. Builds. And breaks—

Your name is a broken snarl in the back of his throat as he spills over himself in thick, molten ropes. Each pulse of his heart floods more liquid heat onto his hand (hot enough, maybe, to burn), and he leans into the sudden deluge of a chemical frenzy ripping through his synopses—all liquid euphoria, static endorphins, and a heady rush of dopamine that makes the edges of his vision blur just a touch when he blinks his tired, heavy, eyes open, staring back up at the off-white ceiling. 

The surge and plummet of adrenaline leaves him feeling fatigued. A bone-deep torpor that comes swiftly in the simmering aftershocks of his pleasure. 

He could close his eyes now and sleep—even with the mess on his hand, come cooling against his heated flesh, growing tacky and uncomfortably wet as it sat there. The idea is more appealing than standing up and washing himself down, and in his sudden languor, he haphazardly lifts his hand away from his still-throbbing cock softening against his damp thigh, and pats the mess on his hand against the extra pillow he doesn't use. It's hardly the cleanup he needs, and he knows washing the dry come from the coarse hair on his thighs and groin is going be a nuisance in the morning, but he can't muster the energy to open his lids past half-mast let alone stand and hobble his way into the washroom. 

(And maybe he doesn't want to see himself in the mirror right now. Doesn't want to contend with the same routine of thinking of you, getting off to the thought alone, and then slinking into the tub for a quick rinse of his regrets. Not tonight, anyway—)

So, he stays in bed, laying there in his own filth, and still thinks of you. With his eyes closed tight, he doesn't have to face the reality of your absence. Of his dirty whim that sullied you in his head (over and over and over again—). His loneliness. 

And it's nice to bask in the glow. To imagine you beside him still. 

John's never been as delusional as now when he can taste the Caribbean sun on his tongue. Feel the salt on his skin. He smells sand. Feels it under his back as he lays down with you curled over him, hand tucked against his chest where it belongs. Dosing under the shaded pyre. You'll catch fish in the morning. He'll take you out to places you'd never been, all of them. Every single one. Until the world is shaded with your fingerprints. 

He's never been much into lyricism, but you make him contemplate the dividing line between prose and poetry, and where he fits between the two. The bridge, he thinks. The gaps between words, the space between letters: heart and soul (and the tangibility of them both). 

He wants to go there with you. 

The vision of you laying with him in sand embeds itself in the weakened link of his splintering resolve, eroding the chain away until it breaks, and the next night finds him sitting in the same spot, drinking the same whiskey, but his thoughts are subsumed by you. 

Without it keeping him at bay, he makes a terrible decision—one he wishes he could blame on whisky, but he's sober in a way he hasn't been in years—but when he looks up at you, twenty minutes past closing after everyone has stumbled out of the pub, something blooms in his veins. 

It's white-hot—hotter than the sensation of being shot in the thigh by a stray bullet when he was still figuring himself out in a battlefield—and dredges up dormant feelings he hasn't made room for since he was twenty-seven and fell in love in Ghana. 

It's cacoëthes. 

(But maybe it's been heading forward this all along. Ever since he saw you tug around a man twice your size, and wanted to bruise his knuckles on this stranger's enamel. The one who dared touch you. Disrespect you.)

John makes the awful choice to kiss you.

It starts with a look. 

The night ends later than usual—a hockey game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Ottawa Senators draws a big, rowdy crowd of nearly fifteen people ("truly record-breaking numbers," you quip with a grin) that bemusingly celebrate the Senators' victory and mourn the Penguin's loss at the same time ("it's a cultural thing—Sydney Crosby plays for the Penguin's," you tell him as if it explains everything)—and when he finally pockets his cigars, the sky outside is already dusted with crops of mauve as the hazy sun tries to blink through the thick clouds of gunmetal and charcoal. 

You wave to the fishermen on the boardwalk as they prepare their empty lobster cages for the morning haul, and he tries to think of every reason why he shouldn't be standing with you right now, puffing away on one of his last few cigars. 

There are multitudes, of course, all of them eagerly buoying to the surface, and just as viable as the last. Just as concrete. But that's the thing about desire, isn't it? Reasoning is skewed. Malleable. For each con that is squashed by the claws of fatigue, a pro subsumes in its stead. They add up. The scales tip. And all at once, he's no longer oscillating between no and here's why, but how come. 

How come he can't give in, if only just once? 

But once will never be enough. He knows this. He knows it, and yet—

When John happens to glance at you from the corner of his eye, he finds you turned to him already. Watching him. 

Despite what the furious stutter in his chest at this bare appraisal would lead him to believe, this isn't anything new. 

(Neither is his reaction. The blood rushing in his ears. The hiccup of his heartbeat.)

You've always unabashedly worn your curiosity like this. Open, bare. Letting it moulder on the very ledge of a cornice for all to see when they looked into your eyes. Liquid gems, molten coins. They've always gleamed with a sense of misplaced curiosity whenever they rested on him; seemingly lost in the labyrinth of your thoughts as you tried to unravel the reef knot that is John Price. 

He supposes it's the novelty of a man washing up on shore in the middle of what's meant to be the most boring season of the year—your words, naturally. Nothing ever happens during hurricane season, you mentioned to him once. The maritime is quickly forgotten about until summer when stupid tourists head to Halifax or Peggy's Cove in droves. 

Until him, that is. 

(Until you, as well.)

But the look you grace him with right now is somehow on the precipice of being both foreign and familiar at the same time. A muddled sense of jamais vu that seems to wrap itself around his throat, pressing taut to his pulse. Mocking him. Confusing him. It's all a muddled mess of known and unknown and—

Want to know. Need to.

He knows this look. Knows it as intimately as he knows the hand he used to stroke himself, pretending it was you. Your touch. It's want. It's—

Desire. 

Intrigue. 

You stare at him—unabashedly, as always; lost in your perplexing keenness for him, for the man he is (and the one he definitely isn't)—and John sees that same, misplaced rapaciousness in the shaded valleys and unfathomably deep ravines. It's an almost visceral hunger that seems to eclipse everything else; colouring the topography of your gaze in its wake. The glittering scales of a meandering coelacanth. 

Getting caught looking at him in such a way does little to embarrass you. If anything, having his eyes meet yours seems to subsume want with need, merging the two until all that gazes back at him from that prismatic abyss is desire crushed into diamonds from the absolute pressure that leaks from the black holes in the centre. 

He's been warned before about sirens and sea monsters, but standing in front of him with the raging ocean as your backdrop, he finds he cares very little for portends after all. 

John gives you every chance to pull away, to tell him this is a mistake, that you don't feel the same way, that you couldn't possibly do this, but you ignore all of them. Every single one until his hand is around your waist, the other cupping your jaw, and your breath is on his tongue. 

You make the first move. He doesn't know why that surprises him—you have this way about you that reminds him of rogue waves: an untameable suddenness, brash in everything you do; untempered by man and their flimsy metal cups in the ocean—but when you curl your fingers into the Sherpa lapels of his jacket, and wrench him into your sphere, tidally locked in your pull, he finds himself adrift. Lost. The only thing keeping him steady is you. Your touch. 

Your lips are searing when they bite into his, bruising and all-consuming. He likes the burn of it.

It's a kiss just as much as it is a slap to the mouth. A reprimand. How dare you keep me waiting? And somewhere deep in his chest, something unfurls. Something comes loose. Wants to apologise, wants to beg forgiveness, but the words are stifled by your lips sliding against his, your fingers touching the parts of his cheeks that haven't known the feeling of another since he was twenty and grew it out as long as he could get away with it in the military. You hold him. Anchor him in place as you take, as you badger his body into yours, trying to syphon all of the air from his feeble lungs. 

He lets you, rocking with your demands the same way he would a sudden squall, his body a ship in the vast clutch of your ocean. 

The tip of your nose slots into the corner of his own when you tilt your head into the kiss, tongue sliding, liquid, molten, against the seam of his mouth. Humid breath paints the skin under his eye until it's tacky with condensation, and he wants to feel your breath on him everywhere. Wants to touch the places your breath ghosted over with bare fingers to feel the remnants of what you left behind. 

(He wants it to stain him. Leave a permanent mark for all to see. A sailor claimed by the sea, by rogue waves, and the embodiment of a pelagic calamity in the shape of you.)

His lips part just enough to let the tip of your tongue slide in, to touch his in a gentle kiss. A perfunctory greeting for what will, hopefully, become routine because he knows what you taste like now—seagrass, fennel and yew arils—and doesn't think he has the strength to let it go. A new addiction forms somewhere in the catastrophe of his hindbrain, the same place that yearns for nicotine and alcohol to blur the rugged edges of a childhood he can't quite manage to let go of. One that bled putrid blood into his adolescence, his adulthood. That makes running his first thought in the face of anything that has the capacity to heal. Or sacrifice himself for some greater good he could never really bring himself to believe in, despite the words he preached like a scratched record—we dirty our hands so theirs stays clean. A fallacy, of course, like many things in his life. A broken, fractured homunculi trying to navigate a world it wasn't made for. 

But you soothe those parts, don't you? Palliative comfort in the shape of something that has the measure to hurt, to ruin. 

—and fuck, does he want to be ruined by you—

You pull away from him as if you can taste his debauchery, his need, on your tongue and want to skewer him through the heart with it. The distance feels vacant and endless: a devastating bergschrund.   

You blink at him, eyes heavy and full of promises, of wants. The sight of your red tongue brushing over your wet bottom lip nearly makes him ascend to some spectral plane of existence where nothing but the alluring sight of you lives in his consciousness, and it's only your hushed words—raw and tempered—that reign him in. 

"Come back to my house, John."

It's not a question. He knows it in his bones. Just like he knows it could never be one—never—because doesn't have the willpower to say no. And you know this, of course. Have known it from the beginning when you peeled back the rotting layers, flaying his walls from his skin just to learn his name. 

("It's Price," he growled out, words masticating between clenched teeth. "John Price.")

He wears his want in cinder and ash. Feels the fever under his skin.  "Fuck—," he rasps, throat scorched. Brittle charcoal. The words taste like wood chips on his tongue. "What are we waitin' for then, love?"

The billowing sea breeze howls outside of your small house on the mouth of the inlet, an enchanting soundscape that seems to amplify the soft noises that spill from your lips at his touch. 

You burn like the sun bearing down on the desert of the ocean, and he feels your scorching presence between the split of his shoulder blades, liquifying the knobs of his spine until it pools in the clefts of his back. 

Boneless, broken, he loses all sense of himself as he ruts into you like a man who's never been touched before in his life—clumsy, selfish, and unpractised. Your pleasure is the equinox in the centre of his head, a reachable goal he strives for, but each shudder that leaves the column of your throat seems to shatter him into fragments. He wants, wants, wants: there's a war in his head, in his touch. Greedily, he learns your topography until it's ingrained in his marrow. Until he knows where each dip and fold, every scar and blemish, on your skin sits, waiting for the worship of his touch. 

He yields to you. Offers himself up at your altar—yours for the taking—until his sacrifice is met in seasalt and bliss. It's by this flickering dawn that spills into your bedroom window, the one that faces parallel to the sea—always there, in the corner of his eye—where his resolve is laid to rest on a bier. 

It burns on the pyre when your fingers thread through his hair, gripping tight as he falls into pieces in your arms, buried as deep inside of you as he can get. And it's here, safe in the bracket of your legs, spread wide to accommodate the staggering bulk of his body, he finds both nirvana and damnation—his own personal hell nestled in the crux of your thighs.

"Stay the night," you whisper to him, the command slurred on the tobacco that leaks from the burning tip of his cigar. 

One down, he counts; two more to go. The sight of the dwindling pack seems to notch inside his aching ribs, bruised with the cuts you made into his marrow until a scar in the shape of your name formed, seems like a portend. 

He stares at the brittle pieces of the tobacco leaves in the metal tin like they might divine the ancient wisdom of augers and the seers who gleaned hidden truths and hindsight in a teacup, but all he gets is the heady scent of nicotine for his search. 

"Mm." 

Your hands press against his naked back, feeling the taut muscles flex under your touch before they move around his midsection, fingers digging into the plush flesh of his belly—too much lobster rolls, he'd snarked when your teeth sunk into the softness put there by you; a fullness he hasn't felt since he was eighteen. You knead his skin, thumbing over the indents of your teeth, a perfect tattoo, before you hum in satisfaction, the sound of a cat eating its catch, that makes his spine thrum. 

"Good," you husk into his shoulder blade, teeth peppering nips across his sun scorched skin. "'cause I'm not done with you yet, John."

He shudders. "Fuck, love—gonna send me into an early grave."

It draws a simmering chuckle from deep within your chest. Sparking embers. The heat thrills him. 

"A lovely way to go," you murmur, hands drawing intricate webs over his torso, tangling through the coarse hair that gathers in dark swaths of brown across his body. "And I'll even give you a proper sea burial."

The thought alone strips his soul from this prison of bone and flesh. To be known so innately is a dangerous thing, he finds; so deceptively addicting, so achingly good, and he wants to run from it just as much as he wants to bask in the feeling. 

His soul is hungering for something he's never tasted before—until now, until you—and that unquenchable devotion glues to the very essence of him; a tick burrowing into his skin until it rots. 

He fucks you against the window running parallel to the sea instead. Unmaking himself in the clutch of you until your fingers thread him back into some semblance of a man with a soul made for the sea. 

(A place he wants to go with you.)

The unread tobacco leaves in bone china end up spelling out the end in a red flash on his phone. 

A voicemail is a cruel reminder of the looming deadline on the horizon. 

Fixed 'er up fer ya, b'y. She'll be ready in a night or two. Right time for lobster, too, yeah? Anyhoo, call me when you get this. 

What was once anticipatory now feels too much like being caught under a guillotine. He pretends his hands are not shaking when he calls the man back.

The man meets him by the harbour. 

"Should take 'er out," he says, wiggling a tooth pick between his teeth. "You know 'er be'er than I do. Make sure she's good t'go, ya'know?"

He hums something that might sound like an assent to unpractised ears, but the false starts in his rib cage flares up, a deep ache that rattles through the scarred brackets and leaves the seam of his mouth in a muted snarl of discontent.

Ready to go, he thinks a touch cruelly in a shorn off form of self-harm. Just to make it hurt. Just to feel it agony ripping through the gaps between his bones. 

Right. Right. 

How is he supposed to leave when he left so much of himself inside of you?

"Come with me tomorrow. Want to show you something."

"Oh, yeah?" You murmur, brows bunching together in a way that makes his teeth ache. "And what's that?"

His thumb brushes your pulse. "Mm, 'bout time you met Captain."

Newfoundland lingers in the backdrop for most of the day, rising above the waters in a rocky formation of evergreen against dark blue. 

You spend most of it leaning against the port, eyes wide in wonder at the absence of land, a mere pinprick in the vast sea, and he wonders if anyone has ever taken you out this far. Showed you something this haunting, this mesmerising. 

(Selfishly, stupidly, he hopes he's the first.)

The sea is calm. Almost eerily so, but he basks in the gentle rolls of the waves, the serene waters. It's picturesque in a way, the sight of an old postcard with a basin of pure azure and molten yellow sun, haloed in soft rings of ocean. 

As you fawn at the beauty around you, quiet in your musings, he grabs his fishing pole and sets out to catch dinner. John hasn't looked too deep into coastal fishing laws, but from your soft snort, he thinks it might just be on the side of illegal. Still. The coast guard isn't around, and he doesn't think you'll tell on him—at least not if he catches you a salmon and makes you an accomplice. 

The day dwadles, sun fading into a stunning sunset. 

He catches Atlantic Salmon, and spots a commercial lobster trawler in the distance. When he radios over, they offer a trade. Salmon for lobster. You laugh as the men toss over a cooler full of fat lobster for a wriggling salmon that nearly slips from his grasp. 

It's in this exchange—and a day on the water—that he realises just how much he missed this. This. Being on the water. Dependant on no one but his own knowledge, his foresight. Always just on the side of illegal in coastal waters. Making trades, and bartering for dinner. It's peace. Or as close of an approximation a man like him might deserve. 

A tried and true native of the land, raised on fish and crustaceans, you teach him the proper way to prepare lobster and Atlantic Salmon, sucking your teeth at his lack of spices in his threadbare cupboards. You make do, and he can't remember the last time he had something this good. 

"Just wait," you huff. "When I have a full kitchen with proper seasonings, I'll make you something even better."

There's a tightness in his chest at the prospect of next time. "Can't wait." 

It's a lie. Barefaced and ugly. 

He offers beer instead. Brings out some of his hidden whisky. 

"Not gonna be too drunk to get us back home, are you?"

Home. He is home. Has been since he kicked off from the marina, his hands curled around the leather steering wheel. The bumps of the waves against the hill. 

He wonders what you think about all of this; his kingdom at sea is nothing special. Modest, in many ways. Sometimes the toilet in the washroom leaks. He only really has warm water on Tuesdays. Something with the tides, probably. Spiders have taken a permanent refuge in the closet adjacent to the kitchenette. He thinks he might have some exotic stowaway lurking somewhere, too. A mouse of some kind, maybe, from when he was in Madagascar for a brief interlude. 

The boat is never still, always rolling with the waves. Rocking. He's grown used to the feeling of it. Much too accustomed to always moving, never being still, to ever feel any modicum of comfort on land. 

Thinking about it, about returning back to the inn tonight when the water is this serene, and the moon is this sull, pitches something ugly in his chest. Reluctance. And maybe the urge to show off. To share. 

"Want to spend the night?" 

You make a comical picture with your fingers tugging desperately on the cork of a wine bottle you found under the sink, blinking at him owlishly as you process his request, and he smothers a laugh in his chest at the sight. He knows if he lets it out he'll never look at wine or owls without thinking about you, but maybe you're already ingrained in his head. Stuck there in places he can't reach, can't scrape out. 

"What?" You ask, lightly. "Out here?"

"Why not? We're close to the Labrador Strait, too. Could drop anchor now. Head back in the morning."

"Is it—?" You stop yourself from finishing with a shake of your head, and a sheepish smile. "Nevermind. Yeah, um. Yeah, I'd—I'd really like that, actually."

Is it safe, he knows you were going to ask. The question would have made him roll his eyes, and bark out something that could have been a snort of derision or a condescending laugh. He was a bloody marine, he'd have griped. I know these waters better'n I know Liverpool.

But you didn't. You didn't ask. 

The harshness of the nevermind sounded like a self-admonishment for even asking such a thing. It's possible he's reading too much between the lines, but he likes the implicit trust that bleeds through—a touch of hesitation stifled by the immediate certainty that John will keep you safe. 

He likes the fit of it. The way it curls around his pride. 

"C'mon," he murmurs. "I'll show you around."

"It's small," he grouses, a touch uncomfortable as you patter around the bedroom that's barely bigger than a linen closet. It smells like him, he reckons. All smoke, tobacco, and stale sweat. Nothing pretty—not like your sheets that smell of fresh pine resin, or your room the scent of cornflower. 

The ship itself is considered a luxury on the ocean—old, but meticulously maintained—and its age bleeds through the panelled walls, and the clumsy decor. Built largely for dedicated seafarers, the cabin boasts two bedrooms (the captain's quarters being the largest, and the crewmates dorms still stained with rust from where the nails keeping the bunk beds in place during listing started to erode), a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a small space inside the helm that could be considered a small living room—squinting, of course, required. Still. It's home. It's—

The manifestation of his pride. His loneliness. His wants. 

(The walls are drenched in his madness. Do you see his ghosts when you look around—)

"It's cosy," you volley back, barely paying him much attention as you prod at his bare-bones; his sanctuary. He pretends the words don't stroke his ego in the perfect way. "It must be quite the sight to wake up to a sunrise on the sea." 

"Mm, it is."

It's unlike anything he'd ever seen before. A nearly endless roll of cerulean in all directions that almost blends seamlessly with the cyanic sky. Plumes of sea clouds. Birds swooping overhead. 

Often, he finds curious sea creatures coming up from the depths to investigate his boat. Pods of playful dolphins arching through the waves. A mother whale and her calf, nearly the length of his sixty-foot sailer. Rays. The occasional shark when he's fishing, lured in by the struggles and the flash of blood in the water. The feeder fish congregate beneath his boat, picking at the barnacles growing or the smaller fish gathering there for safety. It becomes its own ecosystem after a while, drawing in Remoras, various sharks, tropical fish, and barracuda. 

He mostly gets avian visitors resting on his hull. Great Albatrosses and Cormorants. The odd Pelican closer to shore. Mollymawks, Northern fulmar. 

The open ocean is a vast desert. Sometimes he goes days without seeing any signs of life. It comes with a sense of peace that is indescribable—an awe deep-rooted in his bones, one tinged with fear of the yawning abyss that rolls out in all directions as he knows, without a doubt, that he is less than a mere pinprick in the sea. Humbling. Awe-inspiring. It all coalesces into an experience he can't put into words. One that he yearns for when he's on dry land. 

One that he wants to show you. To share with you. 

A silly whim, of course. Strangers don't traverse the pelagic zone together. 

He shakes it off. Recalibrates. Tries to centre himself, and shuck the thoughts of waking up to a perpetual sunrise with you. The ochre crest of it illuminates a deep blue sea for miles and miles; bare from pollutants that seep into the aether near the coast. Lights that dim the coruscating beauty above. 

But as much as he thinks sunrises and sunsets are a thing of beauty, he knows there's something else you'll like much more. 

"C'mon," he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. "Wanna show you somethin'."

You don't hesitate this time. "Lead the way, captain."

(And oh, how the coy honorific rumbles through his marrow.)

That something is the reason he became so addicted to the sea. It's a darkness unlike anything else he'd ever experienced before—a complete absence of light that usually pollutes the sky in the cities, one that people often think is escapable in the countryside away from bustling metropolises. 

That has nothing on the ocean after dusk. 

To describe the sensation would be pitch blackness. A black hole. Everything is swallowed up by it—complete antimatter—until the horizon and ocean merge together in an unfathomable pit of tenebrousness. It looks like spilled ink across a page, everywhere the eye turns is shrouded. Indescribable. 

When he's in an inlet, or off the coast of an inhabited island, he used to turn the floodlights of his ship off just to see what he couldn't see, and it was endless. A vacuum. Terror drenched over him in almost equal measure to the absolute awe that rolled through his chest like a tsunami. 

It was the infinite darkness of space mirrored on earth. An uncanny image. Pure nothingness.

There was more light when he closed his eyes than when he had them wide open. Phosphenes brighter than the world around him. 

A harrowing, everpresent experience that notched false starts into the parentheses of his ribs, and made him ache when he wasn't surrounded by water. 

He keeps only the navigation lights on when he leads you to the deck, and the sharp gasp he hears makes him burn, knowing exactly what you must be seeing. Feeling. 

Even at the very tip of the ocean, barely with your toes in the vast abyss, the absence of light pollution gives way to a stunning artefact in the ancient sky. Nebulae clouds. Gleaming stars. In the distance, he spots the coruscating light of Mars, visible to the naked eye. 

The moon sits in the equinox, casting out a blanket of light over the rhythmic swell of the still-black water. It paints the surface lily white. 

He stands beside you, eyes greedily taking in every flickering emotion across your awe-slacked face. Each expression categorised and filed away. A preview to the experience going inside you as you gaze up at the night sky. 

"John…" it's a hushed whisper, drenched in a reverence so thick, so palpable, he thinks he can reach out and catch the ghosts of your wonder on the tips of his fingers. "It's…"

You trail off, but he knows. He knows. 

His hand brushes yours. "Beautiful, ain't it?"

Wordless, and maybe a little bit speechless, you nod, eyes still fixed on the indistinguishable horizon as your hands slip into his. 

The stars are still caught in your eyes even after he leads you to a small sitting area with steps leading into the water. He warns you about sea lamprey and cookie cutter sharks when you try to dip your feet into the basin, laughing at the small squeak you give when you wrench your toes out of the water, drawing your knees tight to your chest. 

Sharks hunt at night, he reminds you with the same cadence as a conman. 

The sideward glance you give in response to his mirth spumes a strange effervescent feeling in the pit of his chest. Humour for the sake of it. He can easily imagine many nights like this with you, basking in the bloom of the ocean, the splashes in the distance, the steady rock of waves licking against the boat, and it's something that seems to syphon the breath from his lungs, knocking him offkilter for a moment. Skewing his perspective. 

It's odd, he finds, to be so attune with someone so fast. To connect on a level that feels deeper than what it is. It jars him as it shatters through that ironclad resolve he wore around his heart.

"Why the sea?" You ask after a moment, thumb skating through the pebbles of condensation that gathers around your bottle. 

The sight of your wet finger shouldn't be as enticing as it is, but the way you stroke the nozzle makes his stomach burn with a heat he hasn't felt in a while. It's gentle. Soft. He wonders if you'd be that tender with him—

The thought is shattered when you glance at him, eyes searching for an answer hidden in blooming blue. There's muted curiosity eked into the divot between your brow—unconsciously done—and he forces himself to turn away lest he reach out and soothe the wrinkle for you. 

(You never know how much you furrow your brow around him. Price isn't sure if that's a portend, some archaic warning of the inevitable frustration you'll feel toward when all of this is over. When the hurricane season passes, and the waters are once again chartable—

Another thing he doesn't want to think about.)

He chews on the question for a moment, making a show of reaching for the—nearly empty—carton of cigars from his breast pocket (another run to Cuba is imminent, he reasons, and tries to convince himself he's not stalling). Deft, practised fingers pull one out, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger as he measures just how much of himself he wants to give away to you. 

(All of it. Every part—)

The paper absorbs the whisky staining his lips when he skewers it between his teeth, a futile effort to keep the hollowness between his lungs and ribs from aching. He thinks about blaming the curdling weight in his stomach on the thought of a ruined cigar—soaked tobacco won't draw as good as dry—but he knows himself better than that. 

It's the suddenness of your query, maybe, but a part of him had been waiting for this very question from the onset of—this. You, him. Together. It seems to be one of those things that just comes up, doesn't it? An unavoidable collision into abject disappointment. 

In all his past flings—calling any of them relationships feels juvenile for what it was: quick, ephemeral pleasure in a foreign land, always lasting just long enough to patch up his boat; he won't disrespect the partners he had by giving it more potency than it deserved—this had been the epoch. The moment when they realised he was never really in it. That his foot was already slipping over the ledge of his boat, head full of the places he'd go next. Always alone. Without company. 

Some take it in stride. They know not to expect much in terms of commitment, or loyalty, from a man who reeks of the sea, and wobbles on land. They don't begrudge him the briefness of the affair, or the lack of a promise to write, or call, or see them again, some other time. When you pass through here next… always seems to be the sentiment at the cronis. The end of them. It never goes anywhere, but it's never finished, either—because it never really began, did it?

He rarely goes to the same place twice unless he needs to (Barbadian whisky, Cuban cigars, fish and chips in Liverpool for the holidays notwithstanding). 

And despite how many times he's been asked this very same question, usually with less clothes on, he never really has an answer. Not one that's enough. 

"Where else would I be?" He muses instead, blinking up at the indigo sky. It's an unforgiving nothingness up there, too, isn't it? "Workin' some job in an office? Military? Nah, would bore me too much. M'better off at sea."

"All alone?" You fill the gap he didn't realise he left empty. "Isn't that—"

He doesn't think he can bear to hear you say it—

"Yeah." 

—so he doesn't let you. 

His cigar tastes stale. Wet tobacco. Ashes. He draws in a deep hit on the next inhale but it curdles in his mouth, leaks poison into his bloodstream. He feels dizzy with it. Offkilter. 

When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, afterall, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night. 

He'd take you to the spot where land was swallowed wholly by the horizon, until all you could see was the midnight blue ocean pressing down on all sides. Gentle waves rocking the ship. The stars coruscating in the indigo sky like glittering diamonds held up to the light. The murky haze of Juniper in the distance. A splash from a whale breaching the surface. 

It would have been a nice evening. He'd have drinked whisky with you—smuggled out from his secret stash of the best kind you could find in the Caribbean—and taught you how to smoke a cigar. 

You'd have laid down beneath the stars, head swimming with the buzz of alcohol. John would have leaned over you, charting the open awe in your gaze as you stared up at the heavens. 

Maybe you would have tried to ask a question, or marvel at the wonders of the world that might have only ever been seen by you. The first person to take in this view in all of history. Considering the vastitude of the ocean, it would be a real possibility. The very first. He'd give that to you. The first, the last, the only. All yours. 

In return, he'd steal a kiss. Swallowing the question from your lips with a slow, sensual roll of his tongue grazing yours. All coy and soft. Saccharine. You'd taste of whisky. He'd drink you down in several mouthfuls, unable to get enough, until you were keening into the night, begging for more. More, John, more. 

It blankets his thoughts, and the regret he feels at the loss is potent. Fragments of a good night flash before him—your fingers curling around the quilt he laid out on the deck, digging those talons into the meat of his shoulder until it breaks skin: a permanent scar. A jagged, silver meteor across milky flesh; he'd catch a glimpse in the mirror and think of you. Whisper-soft kisses. Your body opening up for him, eager and needy, calling out in a siren's song for more. 

(Who is he to deny you when you beg so prettily?)

Instead it metastasises inside of him. Malignant and pestiferous. Leaks rot into his bloodstream until all he can taste is the petrified residuum of regret, bitter and acrid. 

Some selfish part wanted something nice for himself. A respite from the eventual end careening toward him at a speed he can't avoid. 

The ruined tatters of it simmers in the air. A noxious miasma that seems to shake something inside of you loose. Maybe you see it, too. The loss. The end. The eventuality of a bitter, and quick, conclusion. 

You're quiet even as realisation darkens across your brow. Flattens the awe in your eyes with the cold douse of water to a burning flame. Clumped ash piles around a damp campfire. 

The flames were not smothered slowly, gently, like they should have been, like he wanted them to. No. No. They were snuffed out in a quick end. Brutal and unforgivable. 

And you say: "oh." 

As if you get it, but you don't. You don't because you think about forever when you look at him. It's not your fault, though—never. Because he hasn't said a word about leaving even though it stuck to his teeth, tarry and vile. A resinous stain he chews everyday, blackening his teeth until they rot. 

But he's a coward. A fool. The taste of you is sweet enough to drown out the bitterness on his tongue, and maybe he's using your kindness a bit too much—no. No. Not maybe. Certainly. Definitely. He's using the cloying taste of you as a buffer to everything weeping from the cesspit inside of his chest. 

Then: "oh."

It's almost prophetic in a way. Cyclical in its heartache. 

He wants to apologise, but he isn't sure where to start. How does he say sorry for something of this magnitude? 

He doesn't. He can't.

John lets it necrotise instead. 

"Well," you say after a moment of silence. "When are you—?"

You don't finish. Can't, maybe, and he doesn't begrudge you the inability to utter that succinct finality. Not when he doesn't think he could, either. 

So, he says, "soon."

But you ask: "how soon?"

And he's reminded, quite vividly, of packing his things in the back of his nineteen ninety-five forest green Tata Estate when he was just shy of eighteen. His dad fuming on the porch. 

You're nothing without me, he'd spat. 

He was right, of course. Despite everything he tried, the only place that ever gave him a chance was the military solely for the thinly concealed awe that leaked in whenever he uttered his last name. 

But there was freedom in leaving. In skirting around the army for a place in the Royal British Navy—separate from the shadow of his father, his grandfather, but still riding on their coattails. John quickly found sanctuary at sea. At the unignorable distance put between himself and all the terrible memories in Hereford. 

In the middle of the ocean, that bastard's shadow couldn't reach him. 

And now—

Nothing does. 

How soon, you ask, but the real question should be: how dare you. 

"Mm, a day, maybe—if the weather holds." 

And it will. He's checked the forecast meticulously. Radioed in and asked about that pesky hurricane that seemed to fizzle out without much fanfare afterall. All the answers he got were the same. Perfect window, they say, is between dawn and mid-morning. There's gonna be some heavy winds on the coast, but if you set sail early enough, you'll miss it entirely. 

"Ah," you murmur, and there's just the faintest echo of your realisation at uncovering yet another one of his half-truths. You know he'll be gone the moment he drops you off on the harbour. "Okay."

John doesn't mean to put all of this on you so quickly. Everything just spiralled, spun, until it was a big, tangled mess beneath his feet. Time a mere whisper in the wind. His absence is a glaring black hole that you can't avoid. 

It's all pithy excuses that do little to assuage the weight of everything he'd done, but you take it right on the chin like he knew you would. A sharp nod. The barest hint of a frown. 

That is the only thing you can do, isn't it? Swallow it whole and try not to choke on it because no promises have ever been uttered between him or you. Nothing to substantiate this growing, cancerous lump of emotions that feel too fast and too slow, and too—

Dangerous. Perfect.

In his silence, a crater forms again, and he's reminded how much he prefers the sea to people; gyres to love. The brittle embrace of his cabin to the warm arms of a lover. 

He was made for the ocean. Meant to sink into algae blooms, and discover reefs untouched. To battle waves bigger, more meaningful than himself, and find sustenance on crated bartletts and scored tuna. 

But—

But. 

His hands curl around your waist, pulling you back into the broad expanse of his sun warmed chest. The heat of him liquifies your spine, and you melt, readily, into him with what might be a sigh. 

It's all so quick, isn't it? And yet, he can think of nothing else except the almost perfect torture of waking up beside you each morning. Of suffusing his atoms to yours. 

"Come with me," he murmurs into your hairline, breathing in the scent of you. Loam. Pine resin. Soft and earthy. And that's what you are, aren't you? Made for the land. The earth. Gaia. Terra. Can he really take you from this place and expect you to live like him on the sea? 

You don't answer. He feels the disappointment like a searing knife to his gut, but he understands. Gets it. This isn't the sort of proposal a sane person would make to someone they've known for only a few, short months. 

He wonders if you think he's only saying it to get into your pants. He probably isn't the first—and definitely wouldn't be the last—to make a litany of false promises just to taste you on his tongue, but he means it. Means it with every fibre of his body. Captain is roomy. Has always been too big for one person—too lonely. But it's a heavy question. A big ask. One that he selfishly presses into your hands as he litters your neck with kisses sharpened with the edge of his teeth. Leaving his mark on your skin. A semi-permanent stain only he knows is there. 

It's easy to pretend this won't be the last time when he lays you out on the sheets, fingers digging into your skin as if he was trying to crawl inside of you—and maybe he is. Maybe he wants to. Maybe he could stay suffused to your ribcage for the rest of his life, waking up and falling asleep to the sound of your beating heart, and die a happy man. For once in his life, something that belongs to him that isn't shadowed by ghosts or regret. 

(Something he will never, could never, deserve.)

There's something heart achingly desperate about the way he clings to you. Folds himself over you, murmuring promises and pleas into the bruised skin of your neck. Soft murmurations easily swallowed by the sounds you make as he ruts into you at a maddening pace. All clumsy and unrefined because he refuses to let go of you. Refuses to unglue his skin from yours, his teeth from your neck. 

He's never had it like this—drenched in sweat, pinned in place over top of you like a weighted blanket; sloppy, messy—but he feels the curl of addiction setting in when he feels the hiccups you make when he pushes in just so. When your flesh dents under the tips of his fingers, and he feels your bones in his grip. Each moan, every tremble and quiver somehow magnified in the small cabin that's much too big for one person. 

John wants to take you to this reef he stumbled onto off the Azores. Wants to walk on the sandy atoll, and fuck you under the stars. The first—and only—people on earth to feel the white sand under their skin, to whisper into the inky black of night. 

You'd like it there, he thinks. This lonely, isolated patch of land just barely rising out above the ocean. Filled to the brim with tropical fish, and hammerheads. Sea turtles. Orcas chasing seals in the distance. 

He presses his lips to your hairline, and breathes life into this little picture of you on the shore, whispering promises wrapped in desperation, devotion, into your skin. 

"John," you gasp, and he's not sure if it's a reprimand—please, please, please shut up, stop talking about that because you know I can't, I can't—or a plea—take me, bring me there, please—but he doesn't stop. Can't. He's too invested in this picturesque fantasy, the same one he dreamed about when he fucked his fist to the thought of you. "John, please—"

His veins are filled with blood-red wine. A sudden potent cocktail that makes him dizzy. Drunk on the wisps of ethanol that burrow deeper into his body until it floods his atrium. 

John wants to lean into it. Relish in the white-hot heat of it all. Wants to drag you down into the sand, into the unending sea, and stay there forever, just at the cusp of where land meets water. Your own kingdom in the domain of Poseidon. Children of Phorcys. Pontus. 

You grip him tight, and he thinks like this he could pretend it's not the last time. That when your body shudders beneath him, it's not out of sorrow or finality. 

"John," you say, but he can't bear it. He kisses you instead. Drows in the taste of you until his head spins. Spins, spins—

He wakes up in a tangle of limbs. Your arm strewn across his broad chest, anchoring him to the bed below. Your head nestled in the crux of his armpit, nose pressed tight to the swell of his ribcage. Mouth open, he notes, drooling into wry curls that blanket his torso in swaths of dark umber. 

With you very much cocooned to his side, thigh trapping his pelvis down, he feels the sharp sting of claustrophobia raking talons over the bone encasing his eyes. He's buried under you—your body the soft swell of tumulus—and for a moment he nearly forgets himself. Nearly bolts from the bed, your arms. The room. Running, running—it reminds him too much of being a captive. Tied down. Restrained. Unable to move of his own free will—

But you mumble something in your sleep, the words lost to the blood rushing in his ears, and he finds the pieces of himself he'd lost. Lulled, almost to the point of complacency, by your breaths ghosting across the thick, coarse hair on his chest. Rhythmic. Calming. 

He leans into it. Buries himself deeper. 

You smell of sweat, sex. Fennel. He burrows his nose into your crown, breathes in the scent of you until his lungs burn. He wants them to scar over with just the thick scent of you. To leave a mark so deep, so permanent, that each time he inhales, all he can taste in the back of his throat is the lingering residuum of you. 

There's this earthiness to you that feels like digging his feet into sand, and he wants to slink deeper into the embrace, into you, but there's a lingering forethought in his head that he ought to get up. That this moment of brief comfort will come at a cost, with its teeth bared and wrapped around his bones, and it's a price he can't afford to pay. 

There's an almost cognitive dissonance between what his body wants, and what he needs to do. 

It takes most of his willpower to divorce himself from your clutch, but he does. Slowly. Reluctantly. With his fingers leadened with torpor. 

Regret is the feeling of cold wood under his feet. His arms relieved from the weight of you. Fix it, something inside his chest screams, but he can't. Can't. 

He doesn't look back when he leaves the small bedroom that smells of you. Not that it matters. 

In the separation, he finds he cut a little too much off from himself, leaving more of himself with you than he intended. 

John doesn't expect much. Hasn't, really, since he set sail with his compass pointed away from home, and threw each sorrowful piece of himself into the reefs he encountered along the way. 

It's the same when he gathers everything together in the morning, running through a mental checklist of what needs to be done before he sets off into the mid-Atlantic, hopeful to reach Bermuda within four, maybe five days. From there, it would be nearly fifteen days before he reached the Azores, some nine thousand and twenty nautical miles between the destinations. 

He expects the winds this time of year to be between zero to twenty three knots. Waves, at most, around four to nine metres. He can keep up with it all, he's sure, but he's feeling less inclined to make the trip solo, and thinks, as he trawls back to shore with you sleeping in the cabin still, if he might pick up a small crew in Carolina before setting off. Or maybe he'll take solitude until he heads into the Azores. He isn't sure. The only thing he is certain of is that, for the first time in years, he doesn't want to be alone at sea. 

An oddity, of course. John always wants to be alone. 

(Until you—)

The notion is tucked away into the space inside his head where all the things he doesn't want to think about go to moulder. To rot. The idea that he's more gangrenous parts than man sits idly behind his teeth, a fleeting whim, but that, too, is shoved aside. Buried. 

—like the weight of you on him. His own personal grave, a tumulus—

Another limb severed at artery. Left to bleed. To rot. He considers leaving it out, making it hurt. Salt to the wound he has no intention of healing. 

He cauterises it instead, and uses the flame to spark up his last cigar for the occasion. 

(There's nothing worth celebrating, but he thinks he's due a belated birthday gift to himself.)

The brackish waters in the inlet are muddied with loess, and he considers taking the longer arc into the harbour to avoid the sudden swelling of waves lapping at the sides of his vessel. Pure pride, of course. He's not a captain of a dirty ship—an oxymoron at best and a idling thought that takes the shape of stalling for time—but he trudges forward in spite of the twitch in his knuckles, the urge to notch his wheel just everso slightly to the right. 

It passes, and Newfoundland curves out of the waters in a splotch of green against dour grey. Another overcast morning. The inlet, he'd heard on the radio, is dense with fog trickling down from the rolling hills in the background of this rugged landscape. 

Fog on the ocean isn't rare. With a simple flip of a switch, he changes his visualisation from naked sight to sonar, and leans back on the balls of his feet, blinking restlessly into the thick plumes of smokey-white. 

The cabin door rattles when you open it—the only indicator that you're awake—and the sound sits heavy across his shoulders. A noise he thinks he could get used to hearing. 

"Give'er a shake," he calls, voice ashen, thick from sleep. He hasn't spoken a word since he radioed in to let them know he was moving down the channel. That was nearly two hours ago. 

You appear in his periphery, wrapped up in a shawl he keeps at the end of the bed. One he thinks he picked up when he was working on a shipping vessel in Pacific, just after he'd split from the navy, and was docked for a week in Taiwan because of bad weather. 

It looks good on you. The colours accentuate your features in a way that makes it difficult to focus on the black screen of the sonar, but you make it easier for him when you pad closer to where he stands, yawning around a good morning as you fic yourself to his side, reaching for him. 

You curl against him as he steers into the estuary, one arm tucked around the small of his back, and the other above his groin in a sideways hug. A small shiver wracks through your frame when the chill from the frigid waters sneaks in through the open companionway of the helm, and you burrow deeper into his side, nose nuzzling against his bicep to keep warm. The weight of you is comforting. Steady. 

It's a clumsy dance to free his arm, but he does it somehow without dislodging you in the process, and lifts his arm, steering with one hand through the maw of the Labrador Strait, before he quickly loops it around your neck, keeping you tight to his side. You fall into him in a hurry—maybe from desperation to keep the bitter cold at bay or for some strained, final moments of closeness before he leaves the docks, and you. 

The silence is heavy. A potent cocktail of shaky uncertainty admixing with all the regret he feels for not acting on his impulsive feelings sooner. It sits low, thick, in his guts, and vacillates between mocking him for what could have been weeks of satiating himself on the fill of you, and taunting him for starting this in the first place. 

Especially when he knew exactly how it was always meant to end. 

And in a rather vicious moment of cruelty, that particular ending bobs up from the brackish waters with its stark brown oak pillars cutting through the dense fog. He doesn't need sonar to see the pier in the distance. Three clicks to the west. 

His throat pinches tight at the sight of it—rather irritatingly unassuming in its lacklustre beginnings, but a garish knife to chest all the same. It constricts. He tries to swallow but can't get the weight around his neck to receed. 

He takes his hand off the wheel, scratching at the raw skin along the column of his neck. 

His jostling seems to wake you from your sleepy stare out the window. You clear your throat. He tenses. Guts wringings themselves into a frenzied coil. Don't, he wants to say. Don't speak. Don't say anything—

"Listen, Price," you start clumsily, cautiously. And despite knowing where this is going—some apology for why you can't go with him, for why you're saying no—he makes a noise to dissuade you from continuing. He gets it. He does. It's a big ask to have someone give up several months of their life to traverse the open ocean with a stranger. 

"I know. S'alright, love. I'll—" the words are bitten through when he realises where they're headed. The offer to call. Or write. Things he knows he won't ever get around to doing, but the loose attempt to placate is better than hearing whatever you might say. A selfish need to keep the silence. 

"No, listen," you stress with a huff. He hears the eye roll in your tone, and fights back a scoff at the image. "You're stubborn, you know?"

It's nothing he's never heard before but it still makes him laugh—some broken, ugly thing in the base of his throat. Clawing up his oesophagus. 

After a moment of silence, you nuzzle your cheek against his peck, pressing a soft kiss to the edge of his heart. 

"I'm not a sailor, and this is probably the craziest thing I've ever done in my whole life, but—" his heart leaps, banging against the cage of his ribs, still scarred with your name. 

"—love—"

"—I don't want to just write you. Or—or wait for a phone call. I don't want to—" 

He hears the click in your throat when you swallow. Feels the herringbone floor open up beneath his feet, plunging his aching heart into the empty maw of his stomach. Still. Through the blooming sense of hope tangling vines around his falling heart, he reaches for the water bottle on the console, wordlessly passing it to you to drink. 

You sniff, and it's an ugly, wet noise that sends a shudder through his being. A sound he could hear, happily, for the rest of his life. 

(Sappy, tragic fool—)

"How long do I have to pack?"

If he'd been a lesser man—or maybe a better one; a good one—he would have crumbled. But he's too grizzled to take his eyes off the shoreline, and maybe—just maybe—too fucking scared to. He doesn't want to look down and find this whole thing has been some horrific joke. Doesn't want to see the derision in your eyes as you ask him why you'd ever pick him, a stranger, over the sanctuary of land. Your home, even. 

But he doesn't doubt you. 

It's an odd juxtaposition, John finds, but he's always been the sort to work in strings of abstract hypocrisy, hadn't he? Implicit trust in the men around him, but not enough to ever let go of the urge so just do everything on his own. To shoulder the burdens a man like him was seemingly built to carry. 

(And made to crack under the weight of them; a thousand fissures that were small enough to go unnoticed—until Gaz grabbed him by the lapels, shoving him against an iron door just to keep him from throwing an innocent man to his death for no other reason than his notched sense of safety—but big enough to leak a caustic ugliness into the word that threatened make the men around him bonesick.)

But he isn't thinking about that right now. Or, rather, he shouldn't be—

Because he believes you. He just believes in himself less. 

So, he has to ask. Has to. "Are you sure? Hard to change your mind when you're in the middle of the bloody ocean, love." 

The exasperated huff let out into his bicep seems to be the only answer he'll get from you on that particular topic, but it's not enough. Despite the miffed squeeze you give when he pulls his arm back, resting his hand against your cheek to pull your face back far enough to peer into your eyes, you go along with his demands, soft as they are. Maybe the way his thumb brushes along the curve of your cheekbone quells the stubbornness that brims at having your choice picked apart until it was nothing but bones. All just to satisfy his own internal dilemma. 

Or a mockery of one, anyway. 

"You gotta be sure," he says, and winces when it comes out rougher than he intended. "This is a big leap. It isn't go to fuckin' Tesco's on a Sunday—"

"First of all," you mumble, eyes narrowing up at him. "We don't even have Tesco's in Canada so that comparison is useless to me. Second of all—" and suddenly, all of that bravado falters. Shakes. You glance away from him—in askance, maybe, at your stutter, at his inability to take something someone tells him at face value. 

"Love—"

There's a fire in your eyes when you turn back to him. A defiant tilt to your chin when it lifts. Sure, and firm, and a little bit proud—drenched in the same shade of stubbornness as himself—and the sight is an electrical shock to his system. A jolt to his chest. One that hangs, heavy, around the nape of his neck, the drape of his shoulders. 

"I'm sure," is all you say. 

And it's enough. Inexplicably, overwhelmingly—enough. 

"Now, how long until we set off? I just need to get some stuff in order before we leave, but I can hurry it as much as—"

It goes against every rule in the book to take his eyes off the horizon and his hands off the wheel, especially this close to shore, but he needs—he needs to touch you. To know. To feel the commitment under your skin like an electric hum. 

"However long you need, love, fuck—" his lips are on yours, stifling the rest of what he meant to say in the taste of you. "Whatever you want, whatever you need—" he makes promises he might not be able to keep, but he thinks if he could, he'd steal the stars and the moon, and let you wear them like pretty gems. 

It'll never come to fruition because all he can really give you is a boat and a broken man who is only good at sailing the seas to escape everything that might get too close. None of it seems to matter. Not to you. Never to you. Every wall he's thrown up has been meticulously chipped down, and this, he finds, is no different. 

You lean into him, heedless of the war in his mind, and breathe in deep. Inhaling the scent of stale tobacco, sex, and sour sweat. There's something facetious about the way you hum into the kiss, nails scratching along his crown, as if you're not committing nearly a year of your life to a man you watched crumble at the altar of your feet just for a sip of you. 

"I've always wanted to go to Spain."

He groans a little into the kiss. Can't help the noises that spill out when you start mapping whimsical plans into something concrete. Something tangible. 

(Permanent, if you'll let him.)

"We'll go. Spain, Portugal, Liverpool, Italy, Cuba, Jamaica, Fiji—" he names each place between a searing kiss and keeps one eye open, listed toward the horizon. He says it all in a hush, caught on the tendrils of desperation. Urgency. There's a quiver in his voice. Blood in his throat. "I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Just name it, love."

And you just smile like you know he will. That those words, caked in some amalgamation of earnestness and madness, are a promise. An oath. 

"Anywhere," he swears again, brassbound in certainty, tangled in seagrass. 

Your name scars the brackets of his breastbone. Notched into marrow. He feels it heavy in his ribs when he pulls you closer, wanting nothing more than to sink into you until your veins are filled with him. 

Anywhere, he thinks, hushed in its reverence as the levee keeping everything he let rot cracks in your hands. Always. 

YOU—

There's a certain dreariness that comes from living by the ocean, one that's often difficult to put into words or explain to someone who hasn't spent their entire youth being told, never turn your back on it. Never trust it. 

(It, of course, because somewhere along the line, the sea stops being a place, a thing, an artefact, and becomes an entity all on its own. A living, breathing manifestation with its primordial history, its own mythology, all so distinct from anything someone on land could ever dream up.)

Because despite what you might wish, the sea will never be your friend. It's incapable of distinguishing the difference between affection and malice, and shows its love by dragging you to the darkest depths imaginable until your lungs fill with its briny breath and your drops to the floor, a human-sized whalefall. 

The ocean loves you in the worst way. 

It wants to make a tomb of you. A graveyard of algae covered bones. Bloated and unrecognisable. Picked apart until nothing remains but the ghost of you treading its pool. 

In spite of this, the ocean doesn't scare you as much as it should. It's a constant in your life. Permanent. Careless guard your iron shackles. 

(And maybe it's a little bit deeper than that because you never really understood the difference between obsession, devotion, and fear when they all make you feel the same.)

And being so far out from the rest of the people who live along the very same coast—well. That, too, is hard to simplify. 

Life by an unpopular harbour isn't as busy as someone might assume. With its deadened boardwalks, gimmicky shops, and lack of personality to draw a crowd or any would-be tourists, it stagnantes. The place begins to look like a tchotchke. A painting on a faded, sunbleached postcard rather than a cohesive ecosystem. The cogs are rusted and broken, and the delineation between them and the people begins to blur. 

And maybe that's because time feels slower in this liminal space perched between the sea and the swell of a bucolic dreamland, as if it's drenched in molasses. Bound with a ball and chain. Boring simplicity, perhaps. 

Sloughing along is the most apt descriptor you think of to describe how your tarry-thick time is spent. 

Work life balance loses its meaning when you feel the same at home as you do behind a counter. Listless. Lacklustre. It's hard to find inspiration when you've been to every nook and cranny in the valley. When all secrets have been exposed thrice over, and gossip is as stale as the bread Lucy always brings to the potluck each year.

It's fine, of course. 

Work. Home. Work. Sometimes, you'll drive down to Halifax. Maybe stop at Shoppers Drug Mart and squint at the overpriced brands on the too-white walls. But something brand name at Marshalls for more than you can afford to placate that gnawing sense of unease that comes with realising your life can be summed up in three paragraphs or less. 

Age does that, you find. Because when you're stuck in a place that never changes, when the ghost of your childhood runs along the same trails you take as an adult and feels more bitter than nostalgic, growing older starts to feel like a taunt. A jeer. 

Burdened by the encompassing emptiness of time. 

Somewhere along the line—or maybe from the very beginning—you start to stagnante, too. The overwhelming, unignorable feeling of growth weighing you down forms; barnacles clinging to your skin, softening your flesh as they burrow deep, deep, until striking bone. 

You're fine, you think.

Until him. 

Until a man shows up, hiding kindness behind a surly disposition, and offers you nothing but gruff company. Terrible jokes. Cloying sweetness drenched in nicotine and dusted in ash. 

John Price makes you consider your love of the ocean in a new, tangible way. 

There have been others, of course. People before John who have offered to pull you away from this anaemic corner of the world, making promises of taking you somewhere else. Or ones who offered to stay. To join you in this dreary town. An accumulation of hydrozoan floating aimlessly down this solitary stretch of ocean. 

They've all come and gone, and your answer has remained unchanged. Fixed. No. And if you're being kind—no, thank you. 

Because, really—

When you can't tell the difference between fear and devotion, how are you supposed to know if the ocean fills you with reverence or dread?

So, you stay.  

This place might be drenched in tar, forgotten by the masses in favour of the bigger, prettier cities that share the same oceanic view, but it's home. And your roots run deep (but your shackles are even deeper). 

It's odd, too, isn't it? That home feels less like a sanctuary and more like an obligation. A pact you have to keep. So, you do. And maybe you resent this place a little bit each year, but it's easy to forget all about that when John fits inside the spaces of your ribs that you didn't know were empty to begin with. 

It's good. Good—

—but this is better:

You wake up to the sound of the naked ocean, unencumbered by the shore. It's quieter than you expected it to be, but you suppose without land to get in its way, there's little reason to roar. 

The change in noise—and sometimes, the absolute absence of any at all—is the biggest shift you have to adjust to, but four days into your journey traversing the untamable Atlantic, the sea teaches you things you didn't know about yourself. That maybe there's a certain sort of madness that comes from being so far away from anything remotely resembling land. And a lethargy that's hard to tie down into something concrete. An abstract sense of disillusion, maybe. Bone-deep torpor. 

Something, too, that feels a bit like an atavistic fear of the yawning abyss that never seems to end. It's one thing to stand on land, solid ground, and admire it from afar, or to hug the coast on a cruise ship. Seeing it like this, in all its pelagic glory, is somehow sickening in its terrifying splendour and incredible enough to snake existential dread along the curve of your fragile insides. 

There's awe, as well, but in more muted shades of tyrrhenian. 

Still. You take to the barren sea like a once captive orca who forgot what freedom tastes like beneath its curled dorsal fin. It's exhilarating. And in equal measures, a true shove against your mettle. Your resolve. There's no help so far out to sea. No one to depend on but yourself and this enigmatic man who brushes his lips across your forehead when he thinks you're asleep, and then snarls at the ocean in the morning about not having any cigars as if he knows nothing at all about tenderness. 

It's a comfort you cling to. Embrace until your fingers ache. 

John mutters something under his breath about needing sleep. Whisky. A cigar. A good fuck in a better goddamn bed—and in no particular order, he gripes when you poke his back with your index finger. 

"Thank fuck," he rasps around a cigarette—a shitty fuckin' imitation—and pinches your side when he draws you close. Payback for the jab but it just makes you giggle. "Bermuda is only nine hours away."

"Nine hours," you breathe, surprised. Nine hours. It feels inconsequential. Brief. And maybe that's because time feels different out here. Inconsequential outside of where the sun sat. The only thing that matters about it is its position, and your internal clock begins to shift, turning into a sundial. To hear a length of time outside of morning, midday, noon, afternoon, evening, and night is strange. 

John's gaze flickers over to you hiding something that feels a bit like an appraisal as those burning sapphires run over the length of your expression, catching every twitch. 

His chest rumbles under your hand after a moment. "Excited for land, then?" 

Land. You consider it—his question, and, of course, the weight of it. The way it feels. Tastes. 

It's only been a sliver into your journey, barely anything at all in comparison to the kilometres left to go, but the sea feels as comforting as it does terrifying. The darker patches of blue signifying a depth so unfathomable that you feel breathless thinking about it. About the unquantifiable pressure, some metric tonnes of atmosphere pressing down on those pretty pools of navy. 

In comparison, Captain feels fragile. Delicate. Brittle bones of wood and plastic and foam contending with the vastitude of the sea that sprawls out in every direction. On a map right now, you'd be invisible. The tip of a pen would be too wide to accurately pinpoint your exact location. That massive gap, bigger than the whole of your country, sometimes gives you nightmares. And some nights, the boat lists as it bobs with the rolling waves that never end, dipping down much too low for your mind to ever feel comfortable with. 

The terror is almost equally as present as the awe. Both one-in-the same, almost. And it reminds you of your love for the sea. Where the lines between fear and devotion blur. It doesn't surprise you, then, that some mornings you wake up with something that curls around your head, and feels like divine euphoria, and others—

You can't stop thinking about every shipwreck movie you'd ever seen, especially when you know you'd passed over the same channel the Titanic sank in, that your bare feet stood right over top of a graveyard at a depth that hurts your head a little bit to even think about. 

But—

Land. 

John said you'd be missing it in due time the first hour into your trip, when you were still buzzing with the adrenaline of cacoëthes and watched the shoreline get swallowed whole by blue. 

In fact, he'd expected it. Seemed to keep himself at a measurable distance, as if waiting for you to turn to him and command that he bring you back home. 

A silly thought, in hindsight. 

You're shackled to the sea just as much as you are to him—maybe with a bit more willingness added in. The sea feels like home in spite of the endless dreams of capsizing in the frigid waters. 

And really. 

You can't imagine being anywhere else but here. With him. 

"I'm excited to see Bermuda," you confess, nuzzling your cheek into the warm Sherpa of his jacket. "But more so because I've never been anywhere outside of my own Country. But I like this better. I like being on Captain with you. It's—"

There's a weight in your chest. One that's almost equally composited into the ashen blue of his eyes when they flicker to you, clinging to each word. Each sentiment that spills from your sun chapped lips. 

"It's home, y'know?"

John goes quiet for a moment. Far quieter than you ever expected a man like him to be capable of—someone who got road rage out in the middle of an empty sea, and screamed himself hoarse whenever he had to talk to the absolute fuckin' muppets of the coast guard or passing ships your eyes weren't good enough to see through Fata Morgana—and it almost humbles you in a strange way. Makes you consider the stunning realisation that you've only chipped the surface of his rough, wonderful, insufferable man. In that, a keen sense of wonder brims, bringing with it an insatiable curiosity. You want to strip him down to nothing but bones, and crack them open like the claws of Snow Crab, sipping from the nectar that is his marrow. His essence. You want to map him out in greater depths than you ever dream of doing to the sea. 

His fingers spasm on your hip in a strange clench and release rhythm that makes you wonder if he's holding himself back for some reason you can't ascertain, but eventually, he breaks. His hand tightens, and pulls you closer to him. You feel his nose press against your hairline. Hear the sharp inhale as he breathes you in until his chest expands under your hand. Wide and broad, and filled with the scent of you. 

"Yeah," he rasps, humid breath fluttering across your skin. "It is. For however long you want it—"

"Forever." You catch smouldering blue just before it's eclipsed by endless black. "If you'll let me."

"Fuckin'—Christ—" 

With his words mangled in his throat, they sound more like an animalistic snarl than anything that resembles something human. The force of it seems to rattle through your flesh, dredging against bone like an anchor on the muddy sea floor until it catches. 

"Forever it is, then." It's a promise. An oath. And maybe a little bit of a threat, too, in the way only John can make something so romantic sound so gruff, and when he speaks again, you smell cinder and taste the ash in the back of his throat. Sealed in charcoal and salt. 

"I guess you're stuck with me, then," you tease, smiling when he huffs in a facsimile of exasperation, but you catch the softening in the corners of his eyes, and the low purr of happiness that rumbles out from his broad chest. 

"Can think of worse places to be."

"Like London?" You quip, echoing his words, and there's something heavy in his eyes, something that blankets around the unease that never really goes away even as you acclimate to the sensation of being landless. Adrift. It's something deeper than devotion. A black hole you could fall into.

"Yeah, exactly." He murmurs. You taste salt on his tongue when he kisses you, and wonder how you could ever dream of being anywhere else that wasn't with him.

Home, you find, is where his heart beats next to yours.

[zaczenemiji]

Could I request a Kenji x Reader where the reader is an Ailen who is very much stranded on Earth and on The run from the KDF who wants access to their tech

Among the Stars I

Kenji Sato x Alien!Reader

Word Count: 1,766

Genre/Warning: Falling in Love, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn

Author’s Note: To me, reader is an alien in the sense that she is a foreigner to this planet; how she looks is up to you. Takes place after Emi. AND I THINK AOSHIMA DESERVES RECOGNITION LIKE 🫢 AIN’T HE HOT TOO?????

MASTERLIST

The stars twinkled in the dark expanse of space as you navigated through the cosmos. This wasn’t the first time you traversed through the void. In fact, you were a professional at this.

Being one of the respected astrophysicists of your planet, you have always been one sent on space voyages. Your mission was simple, something you were good at, so what could possibly go wrong?

At least that’s what you thought a few moments ago.

"Engine malfunction detected. Immediate landing required.”

As if the flashing red lights and blaring alarms weren’t enough, the onboard AI wouldn’t shut up either, all of them adding up to the panic in your already pounding heart.

“Engine failure. Emergency landing procedure initiated.”

Your struggle to regain control was hopeless. Assessing your options, Earth was the nearest habitable planet. With no time to spare, you steered the spacecraft towards the blue planet.

The descent was turbulent, flames licking at the hull as the spacecraft entered Earth's atmosphere. You gritted your teeth, fighting to maintain the little control you had left.

Scanning the residential area that stretched beneath, you spotted a forested area and made a split-second decision. With expert precision, your maneuver slowed down the descent just enough to avoid a catastrophic impact.

The spacecraft touched down with a jolt, skidding through the underbrush before coming to a stop. Smoke billowed from the damaged engines and you knew you needed to secure the craft first.

Despite the damage, the emergency propulsion system still had enough power for short-distance travel. With steady hands, you activated the system again, guiding the spacecraft toward a nearby body of water.

The craft hovered momentarily above with a soft hum. Carefully pushing the controls, you maneuvered it into a controlled descent where it submerged beneath the water, disappearing from view.

In the control room of the Kaiju Defense Force, monitors flickered with data streams from satellite scans displaying Japan’s airspace and terrestrial activity.

"Report," Aoshima commanded.

"Sir, we've detected a significant impact in sector 7G. Satellite images indicate a disturbance in the forested area, consistent with an object of considerable mass landing."

Aoshima scrutinized the images, noting the telltale signs of a recent crash landing, “Any signs of the object itself?"

"Negative visual confirmation, sir. The object appears to have made impact and then moved into concealment."

"Prepare a recon team," Aoshima ordered crisply. "I want a full scan of the area. Notify all units in the vicinity to be on alert."

Aoshima contemplated the implications. For years, KDF had struggled against the relentless onslaught of kaiju attacks under Dr. Onda. His last will was for the survival of KDF.

Aoshima shared Dr. Onda’s vision and if this alien technology held the key to turning the tide in humanity's favor, they couldn't afford to hesitate.

Meanwhile, having just emerged from the submerged spacecraft, you cautiously explored the area. Your advanced sensors warned you of Earth's surveillance systems, but you had hoped to remain undetected.

Your hope, however, was short-lived as the sound of whirring and a shadow passing overhead alerted you to the arrival of drones. Quickly, you dashed into the forest, heart pounding as you navigated the unfamiliar terrain.

Above you, the drones buzzed in pursuit, their sensors tracking your every move. Their operators relayed your position to ground units, who quickly mobilized to intercept.

You emerged onto the outskirts of a bustling city. Buildings towered overhead and streets were crowded with unsuspecting pedestrians. You had to blend in to evade capture.

Tokyo has always been bustling with a sea of people moving with purpose. Among them was Kenji and today, his life would take a turn he could never have predicted.

He was jogging through a quieter part of the city when suddenly, a force collided with him, nearly knocking him off balance. Looking down, he saw a woman his age, face partially obscured by a hooded cloak.

You looked up at him, eyes wide with fear. "I'm sorry," you gasped, glancing over your shoulder. "I... I need to go."

Before Kenji could respond, you tried to bolt, but he gently grabbed your arm. "Hey, what's going on?” He asked, genuinely concerned. “You look terrified."

You hesitated, clearly torn between fear and the need for help. Before you could decide, KDF agents appeared at the end of the street.

“Surrender peacefully, and we won't harm you," one of them demanded sternly.

"No," you replied, a slight determination in your trembling voice.

Kenji’s instincts flared. To him, KDF has been nothing but trouble. So without a word, he pulled you behind him, putting himself between you and the agents.

They slowed, eyes narrowing at Kenji. "This is official business," the leader said, his voice cold. "Step aside."

Kenji ignored the command, gripping your hand tighter. "Run," he whispered urgently, before leading you in a sprint away from KDF.

The two of you took off with Kenji guiding you through a series of narrow alleyways and bustling streets.

"Over here," he whispered, pulling you into a side street. You dodged through a market, running between stalls and startled shoppers. The KDF was temporarily delayed by the crowd, buying you precious seconds.

Kenji's heart pounded, both from the exertion and the adrenaline. "Keep your hood up," he urged you. "We can't let them see your face."

You continued running, the sound of pursuit growing fainter. Kenji led you through a maze of side streets, finally emerging onto a quieter residential road.

"Almost there," he panted, squeezing your hand reassuringly.

Finally, you reached a house guarded by a big gate on the outskirts of the city. Kenji quickly unlocked the gate and ushered you towards the house.

Inside, Kenji guided you to the living room, where you sank onto the couch, hood falling back and revealing your face.

“Mina, emergency analysis,” he said as a spherical robot hovered towards you, red light scanning your body.

"Scan complete," Mina announced. "Subject is experiencing elevated stress levels and minor physical exhaustion. No immediate threats and no tracking devices detected.”

"Thank you," you said, voice filled with gratitude and lingering fear.

Kenji nodded, breathing heavily. "Are you okay?"

You nodded, her gaze lingering on him with a mix of surprise and curiosity, “I didn't expect anyone to help."

"I'm Kenji," he introduced himself, extending a hand.

You hesitated briefly before shaking his hand, "I'm (y/n)."

"You can catch your breath here,” Kenji said, standing up. “I'll get us some water." He returned with two glasses of water; you accepted one gratefully.

"Why were those guys after you?" Kenji asked, his curiosity piqued.

"I'm not from Earth. I'm…” you hesitated but you owed him an explanation and also to save you from the trouble of pretending. “…an alien."

"An alien?” He blinked in surprise. “But you look human."

"Alien in the sense that I'm from a distant planet," you explained softly. "I crash-landed here not long ago.”

You told him everything—your mission, how you ended up being chased by what he referred to as the Kaiju Defense Force, and your spacecraft.

“I would like to ask another favor if it’s not too much,” you said with hesitation; Kenji helping you escape and sheltering you was already more than enough. “I need you to help me find Ultraman.”

You knew about Ultraman and his origin. You’ve been sent to Nebula M78 a couple of times already. If there’s someone who could help you get back to your planet, it’s him.

“Ultraman?” Kenji's eyes widened. “Why?"

“I know of him,” you said. "He might be the only one who can help me.”

Kenji took a deep breath, realizing he couldn't keep his secret any longer. "Well, there’s something you should know,” he said.

“What is it?” You asked, confused.

He looked straight into your eyes, his face set with resolve, “I'm Ultraman."

The room fell silent. "You're...” your eyes widened. “Ultraman?"

Kenji nodded, “Yes, and I’m not supposed to tell anyone but if helping you means revealing it, then so be it."

Your eyes teared up with joy. Just when you thought that this day was full of bad luck, here came your silver lining—a stunning man one at that.

Kenji asked you about the whereabouts of your spacecraft so he, in his Ultraman form, can bring it here in no time. His house had a basement submerged underwater which provided an easy way to bring it over.

His dad, the previous Ultra, happened to live with him. Kenji explained the situation and his dad, an expert in this field, generously offered to help.

Hayao circled the craft, examining it closely. "Impressive design," he muttered, running his hands over the hull. "But clearly, it's been through a lot."

"I think it’s the power core," you explained. "It was heavily depleted during the crash, and I can't get the ship operational again."

"I see. A power core like this...” Hayao nodded thoughtfully. “…it's incredibly advanced. Recharging it with Earth's technology would be almost impossible."

"So, there's no way to fix it?" You looked at him, worried and on the brink of tears.

"Not exactly,” he smiled reassuringly. “While we can't recharge it with conventional means, there might be another way. We need an alternative energy source—something with immense power."

"What about the energy that powers Ultraman?” Kenji stepped forward. “Could it work?"

Hayao considered this, nodding slowly. "It's possible,” he said. “Ultraman's energy is vast and unique. We might be able to transfer some of it to the power core."

Your eyes lit up with hope, “Do you think it could really work?" Hayao placed a reassuring hand on your shoulder, "It's worth a try.”

He explained that he would first need to create an energy transfer device. But with the resources here on Earth, it’s a trial and error to see which would be compatible with your spacecraft. Needless to say, it would take a lot longer before you could go back home.

Kenji led you down a hallway to a cozy guest room. He opened the door, revealing a spacious room with a bed, a dresser, and a big window overlooking the bay.

“You can stay here until we figure everything out,” Kenji said. “It's safer than being out there with the KDF looking for you."

"Are you sure?” You looked up at him. “I don't want to be a burden."

"You're not a burden,” he smiled reassuringly. “I’ll leave you to get some rest. We've got a lot to do tomorrow."

With that, you settled into the room with a sense of peace for the first time since crashing on Earth.

Taglist is open! Comment if u wanna be tagged on future Kenji oneshots

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[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

We're coming up on the 8th paycheck in a row where once the bills are paid there's barely enough left for groceries and like. We're getting by, and so far nothing catastrophic has happened and we've even been able to tank some pretty expensive surprises this year (my emergency surgery, my computer issues, Jaxxi's food reactions, etc.) So like. I'm sure we'll be okay. But I'm also so tired. I spent the last year sending out my little donations, watching allotments shrink, and praying I'd bounce back. But the bank acount hasn't stayed out of the negative for more than 48hrs since 2023 at this point, and as much as that's still surviving, it does not feel sustainable.

The garden is starting to take proper form, but if I'm realistic, it won't be anywhere near subsistence production levels until next summer. The chickens have STILL not started laying, and way more of them were roosters than were meant to be, so we'll be fine for protein when they DO start laying, but we won't have the excess I hoped for, nor will we get anything at all out of it until I can get their environment right for laying.

I think I might pick out a little $50 max bundle of "load-bearing luxuries" to buy as soon as I reasonably can without fucking us, because I really need a water bottle now mine has been damaged beyond repair. I'd also love to buy myself a basic little set of water colors. I know I can usually get ahold of those little all-in-one water color pallets for no more than a couple of dollars apiece, and that should do for now. Lastly, I really need to pick up a hand machine for my sewing. Every time I get anywhere near the idea of sewing, my arthritis is too bad, so I've had to keep putting it off. But I have projects I really need to work on, so a little singer hand machine should help me do the long straight stitch sets a bit faster and less painfully, that way I can save my hand equity for the fiddlier stitches.

I think if I can manage those QoL improvements, it'll be easier to keep chugging through the restriction.

Hmm. I wonder if crab apple berries make a useable ink or stain, because I'd be willing to brew an ink for brushwork art instead of buying water colors for now, I'm just not sure I have the supplies.... hm. Maybe someone on the block has a walnut tree I could beg hulls from.

[thehydromancer]

J03 Hunter Class destroyer & F16A Marathon class Heavy Cruiser, scaled for playing Mobile Frame Zero: Intercept Orbit. Inspired by the MCRN Donnager battleship from The Expanse.

---

The J03 Hunter Class destroyer, designed and built by the First Great Expansion megacorp Northern Sky, was a dedicated seek and destroy platform designed to overrun targets with a single minded ferocity. The class often performed picket duties or acted as forward deployed scouts, but it truly shined when it was able to engage in one sided fights, chasing wounded and/or isolated prey, and was known for pack hunting, multi-dimensional pincer attacks that drove a target into a vector for one of the destroyers to ram for a killing blow.

Its primary weapons were two side mounted dual railgun chase armaments, a capable enough system to damage enemy light to mid armor while being relatively easy to maintain. In lieu of thick hull plating which would have slowed the class, a multi-layered defense of PDGs and defensive missile turrets (capable of firing anti-missile missiles as well as chaff/dazzlers) allowed the destroyer to capitalize on its speed for both aggressive as well as defensive maneuvering. The forward section of the class was also heavily reinforced for ramming, and was painted to evoke the grinning maw of an apex predator like aircraft nose art of old.

The F16A Marathon class heavy cruiser on the other hand was a dramatic scaling up of the venerable Hunter class, albeit with a much different mission in mind. This heavy cruiser was intended for extended solo operations such as deep space exploration, strategically hidden emergency reinforcements, or advanced system scouting; as such it needed the legs to operate on its own, carrying enough bullets, beans, fuel, and propellant to maintain happy and fully operational battle stations. Its massive armored bulk was supported by no less than eight engines, the primary four of which were over engineered for safety's safe; a catastrophic failure when the ship was millions or billions of miles from the nearest safe harbor or ally was a serious concern. Its primary weapons were two 3-barrel cannon launch missile turrets with exceptional firing arcs, that offered an impressive range of initial firing arcs. By forgoing traditional VLS cells or launch tubes, the Hunter class sacrificed volley mass and refire rate for exceptional accuracy and engagement ranges. The Marathon also mounted the same model PDGs and defensive missile turrets the Hunter class did, though with double the number of both included (later 'B' and 'C' variants instead tripled the number of missile turrets as instability throughout human and Ijad space began leading to large scale space fleet combat).

A Marathon could also easily have served as a flagship for a military or megacorp fleet, although the newer 'B' (improved C&C facilities and outsized comms arrays) and 'C' (mobile frame hangar and catapult) hulls were better suited for modern mobile frame centric combat. Despite its age, the original Marathons were still powerful forces to be reckon with, should an organization have had the resources and manning to support one. Unfortunately, as space combat transitioned from one-sided curb stomp beatdowns between well funded militaries and upstart colonists with more bravado than brains (not to mention the occasional megacorp skirmish over resources) to full on interspecies warfare between the human goverments and the Ijad forces with Free Colony Cells not only popping up more frequently every day, but also increasingly better trained and better geared, the heavy cruiser saw the end of its heyday. While the purpose built combat ship was ton for ton superior to most converted civilian vessels used by free colonists, as well as the oddly alien designs the Ijad introduced, the increase of space based mobile frame companies closed the gap enough that many militaries decided that the class just wasn't worth the manning and logistics to field any longer, in favor of smaller, more modern light cruisers, battle cruisers, and carriers that came to dominate The Second Great Expansion.

[scriberat]

tagging @thydungeongal since you're the one who got me thinking on it.

the post regarding severity of HP and hits and depth of damage on the body in ttrpgs has got me thinking about airships again (what doesnt)

SO

on a watership, there are a few layers of differing severity for an attack to land on: below the waterline, above the waterline, the masts, and the powder room. here, ive outlined how immediately fucked you are based on what gets hit. - mast, whatever, steering is screwed (also goes for the rudder, youre not done for but your steering is.) the bottom part specifically is highlighted because thats the part most likely to hit the deck and deal additional damage when it does - above the waterline, way worse as that is a hole in the ship itself. structural integrity is down but overall, it's not the end of the world and you can limp without really limping until you get to port to fix it, and things might collapse from above but youre still in good shape - below the waterline is... obvious. while it can be patched, someone has to be there to do so within a few minutes or youre going to sink where you are, and the larger the hole, the less time you have. a badly wounded ship means fewer fighters as you need to dedicate the bodies to fix the issue before everyone goes under - powder room. if you've got cannons you have a powder room which means an entire central spot full of explosives <3 one hit here and you're looking at a catastrophic event. best case scenario, you lose half the ship in a kaboom.

now, of course, not a lot of people are going to be aiming for the powder room, as a captured ship is a solid 40k in your pocket, 20k after repairs, and since most crews dont even number a hundred, thats a hefty sum in your pocket post-sale, or you can increase your own sea strength for higher payloads along the way. worth it to box the crew and save the boat.

airships, on the other hand, seem to have that in reverse, in which the hull itself is mostly expendable as long as you have the mode of locomotion and standing room. the integrity of an airship comes down to how it floats and how it propels. traditionally on that front, there are balloon types and sail types with engines. - with balloons, popping that balloon will result in the entire airship sinking. the balloon is "below the waterline." - with a sail-and-engine, the engine is akin to the powder room, a OHKO spot

THEREFORE

to roll this well, the dice master in question would need to roll a die per cannon. if the ship being attacked takes up 10 squares and you have 5 cannons, each cannon would have a chance of dealing damage. the cannonballs should be able to pierce about 50 feet, so the closer you are the further the cannonball can go. then you have to consider if the cannons are on the gunwhales or gundeck for the elevation, and the further they are away, the more likely theyll hit the next layer down, though the power is also reduced.

rambly

nat 20 roll on the cannon that's facing the powder room will cause an explosion. anything less won't as it's difficult to ignite powder with a lump of iron.

so basically: roll for each cannon involved, calculate based on map distance, account for any armor that the ship may have (plate the sides), and you can make the ships themselves into players in a battle, and each table player can handle a part of it, from steering to loading and firing, etc.

grappling and boarding are also a part of this, but i havent gotten to that yet. itd shrink the focus lens from the ships (environmental) to the decks (stage) though

[wolven91]

Rats in Hats - Chapter 1

Bruno slid down the polished ladder with a squeak against his palms into the escape pod which sealed automatically above him. As soon as his boots hit the metal floor, lights flickered to light and illuminated the smooth and 'calming' white walls of the pod. Another bone jarring shudder and a muted roar shook the man from his feet and thrust him into the lone padded seat's backrest with a 'wuff' of air being driven from him.

With a grunt he clambered around to the seat's front where the pod's lone console sat as a 'cockpit' and dropped into the bucket seat. He rapidly snatched the 3-point harness straps and clicked them into place across his body. Bruno was running on autopilot. If he stopped to consider anything that was happening, he may have to curl up into a ball in blubbering fear.

The aliens had drilled this procedure into him, time and time again. Hear the siren, get to the pod. Hear the siren, get to the pod. Every four days while they prepped the man for living life amongst the stars. He had been forced to abandon meals, leave his warm bed in the dead of night, time and time again, just so he'd get *this* bit right, the bit that they drilled into him until he began to dream about it.

Humanity had *barely* made to the stars at this point, in more ways than one. In a short time, they as a species had enjoyed one mishap after the other and the rest of The Galactic Community, feeling guilty for their role in those mishaps, had thought it perhaps prudent to teach these, seemingly, 'unlucky' humans what the correct procedure was should the call for 'Abandon Ship' to *actually* be announced. Every single human that left a planet or was old enough to understand was drilled for months on end how to best increase their chances for survival in space if something went wrong. After all, when stuff goes wrong in space, it's usually way more dangerous.

"Oh, it'll never happen!" Bruno exclaimed sarcastically as he slapped the big blue switch to prep the life pod's systems, an audible hum around him began as all the systems were checked without input from the human occupant, the artificial intelligence within waking to life with new purpose and a new ward to protect.

"Oh, it's just a formality!" He shouted in anger as he opened the clear cover on the other side of the console and turned a key that it had protected. Explosive bolts, holding the pod in place, primed and began to whine at the energy running through them. The AI ran through their checklist, they had done this trillions of times since its manufacture, but the first 'actual'. They were giddy.

"Space is bullshit!" The man spat as he hit the great big 'Eject' button that he'd never *actually* been allowed to press before. He barely enjoyed it and later would struggle to even remember the event even though it had been something he'd dreamt of doing ever since the instructor told him not to press it. A big red illuminated button, that one must never press, and Bruno didn't even recall the moment thanks to the explosion that slammed him into his seat rattling the memory from existence with a stutter of his heart.

The second the button depressed into the console, the angled bolts behind the pod exploded, the force beginning the single person life pod's escape from the doomed mothercraft. Milliseconds later, the pod's single booster burped to life flawlessly and rapidly increased the pod's velocity. From the outside it could have been a bullet fired from the underside of the colossal ship. Inside, a suite of inertia dampeners flickered to life and whilst Bruno felt the sheer power of the engine blasting him clear of certain death and pressed him deep into the seat, he only felt a miniscule amount of the actual deadly Gs that were buffeting the small craft.

The Transport Carrier was inevitably going to be destroyed, the catastrophic damage to the engines thanks to the small crystals travelling just below the speed of light that had punched through the hull, had unfortunately set off a series of events that left it building more and more energy that it would release in a bloom of heat on par with a Supernova. The cosmic event wasn't dissimilar to what was happening in the remnants of the engine room either; the creation and subsequent collapse of a small star, localised within a mile from where Bruno's own quarters on board were. He had been shadowing the engineering crew, he hadn't minded his proximity to the calming 'thrum' of the engine that could be always felt, but it had turned into an unhealthy wheeze through the superstructure after the fateful collision.

Fortunately, the Situation Awareness Module on the little pod could understand the signals and readings they were receiving from the larger ship and knew that the engine they had access to in the pod was not going to put enough distance between them and the resulting explosion that was about to vaporise this part of space.

"Prepare for an emergency jump." Was all the warning Bruno got from the pod before he briefly felt what it was like to step through one part of space to another. SAM, the AI, had chosen a 'safe-ish' vector and had dumped every available ounce of power into the engine at once for the jump. 'Jumping' was not the standard method of travel in the universe, mainly because it taxed engines far beyond what was safe or recommended at the most extreme estimations, but it allowed instant travel from one location in the universe to another. SAM's whole reason for being was to keep their ward alive, it was worth the risk as the alternative was certain atomisation.

Bruno was left gasping, his eyes rolling but not seeing anything at the sudden and unexpected wash of energy. He tasted copper and felt as if his limbs weren't responding properly to him, they flailed haplessly as he ran his tongue against the back of his teeth without thought. SAM watched him carefully, these were all expected reactions with the relatively light shielding of the pod rather than the usual bulky, thick shielding of the larger ships to protect against the reality-staining forces of jumping.

Still... it *was* a human. Knowing their luck, SAM was pleasantly surprised that he hadn't spontaneously combusted. So SAM did everything that they were supposed to do while he came back around.

For Bruno, the first thing to come back was hearing; the high-pitched ringing wasn't coming from his battered mind or ears but an alert from the pod's systems themselves.

The next sense was sight, the previously calming light white walls were flashing red as the alert that was trying to get the pilot's attention was going unnoticed. Rolling his head forwards Bruno got his first glimpse at the planet, which was surprisingly large in the viewfinder until the penny dropped that he was heading directly for this particularly grim looking rock.

The planet looked to be a mixture of greens and blues, illuminated from a distant sun, but it was the dark, rolling storm systems that peppered the surface that looked particularly threatening. If he didn't miss his guess, these were storms that covered entire continents and he was heading right for it.

Bruno grabbed at the control stick, and pulled it roughly towards himself and to the right. He expected to fight gravity, to feel the pod's engines obey his command and pull him free from the planet's hold just like every fighter jet movie he'd ever gotten his hands on.

The SAM, if they had eyes, would have rolled them.

The human's best chance was on that planet, records naming it 7FR-RAHB. It had life, it had water and if the human utilised the ship's Situation Awareness Module, he should be able to enjoy his best chance for survival for the duration of his stay until rescue found him. The SAM mentally shrugged when it granted him that the storms wouldn't help matters at finding his signal, but the satellite buoys the pod had released before approaching would at the very least point rescue in his direction. Plus, the pod was specifically designed to be broken down and crafted into anything he needed during his stay, up to and including an orbital capable ship for rescue.

So, when Bruno yanked on the stick, nothing happened. He opened his eyes from leaning back in the seat while holding the stick towards himself and wiggled the stick forward and back, left and right, to find no change to his approach to the planet, the stick merely rattled as if it wasn't connected to anything.

"You're kidding me." He bemoaned again, there was a moment of fear until the heads up display lit up with a planned route of descent, gently curving into the planet's gravity and seemingly skimming the swirling storm. The planet filled the screen and the clouds got closer.

Somewhere down on the planet's surface it would appear as if a star began to fall from the sky, but nobody was looking up at that moment.

What was happening at that moment was Keest was busy quietly slitting the throat of the fik that had the unfortunate luck to be on guard duty that evening. His entire snout fit within the giant hand that silenced him. His gods must have been displeased with him, she thought grimly as she gently lowered the shivering, but quickly going limp meat to the ground. The mud and foliage would hide him and this time tomorrow the jungle would have claimed most of him. By the time she came this way again, she'd be hard pressed to find the bones.

The night was thick and oppressive, the storm was at their back and sucked the air into itself, the pelt on her arms stood on end with the static in the air. However, thanks to this, they were downwind from their target.

Keest kept low, her bulk was not so easy to hide, but that didn't mean she couldn't be quiet when she wanted to be. She kept her eyes on the guards in the distance, back lit by the fires and ensured that thick trees were between her and them. She stomped forwards, her weight pushing her bare feet down into the sucking mud, but her strength tearing them free as she pushed forwards. She looked to her left and sought her companion. There was a flash of lightning in the distance which allowed her to see a silhouette of another fik letting their guard down and gaining a new opening in their neck as a reward. Like a spirit, Krahl appeared from the darkness shortly after, wiping the wet blade off against her hip without a word. Her pure white fur did nothing to help her in the twilight, but she was wrapped in her signature grubby bandages, covering her arms and legs, finished with a shawl to mute her colouration. All this hid her from watchful eyes. But this was not to mention that she had advantages that those eyes did not in avoiding detection.

Krahl’s white fur and red eyes were merely the outward appearance of an ermin, a fik that had access to certain powers. Their hidden 'gifts' could range from bringing a curse to one's enemies to a blessing of good fortune amongst other things.

Krahl's specific gift was the very rare; Sight, with only the Chief’s seer being the only other ermin known to have it, at least in their clan.

Her eyes may not 'see', and in fact were completely blind, but she moved through the foliage as if she lived there, day to day. She had explained to Keest that the closer the events were to her, the 'clearer' they were to her. Stepping over branches that would snap was far easier than knowing which enemy would call out first before reaching for their weapon, but it was more than enough that she too could assist Keest this evening.

Earlier, their leader, the Clan Chief, had demanded a fik known as the Baron to be killed and the first point of order to do that was to open a passage to his lair from his flank. The Baron had distanced himself from the clan Chief recently, taking a sizable portion of the warren with him. This cult of personality with those with the charisma to lead, had a way with fiks that often-caused a schism as two parties drew from the same population.

The Baron had chosen a good section of the tunnels to create his new clan, it had several bottlenecks that made assault from below and the sides near impossible without catastrophic losses. Tight bridges over chasms, narrow tunnels, redug or collapsed tunnels. Push come shove; he could simply flood the lower levels without ever placing his own in danger, whilst being plenty capable of handling any sized force that the Chief could send. 

Which left the above-ground path.

The surface was not a barren hellscape but was lush and verdant with a coast to coast forest or jungle depending on how far one travelled up or down the land. However, the storms that lashed the surface could tear even the deepest roots from the ground. Fiks caught by the storms would be ripped from the earth and tossed into the sky without a second's hesitation if they were taken by surprise. The ermin used to talk about how it was a god that was the cause for the storms... a child that had been given everything it ever wanted until finally it demanded godhood, but when even that did not satisfy the child and there was nothing left to give, it began a tantrum that millennia later, was still being felt by the fiks.

The underground world was wholly different, but just as vibrant and one could travel from one coast to the other without ever seeing daylight if one wanted to. There were rumours of tunnels that even travelled beneath the endless seas above, but that was not for Keest to concern herself about, let Tahr and Krahl debate if that were possible for hours on end.

Keest frowned when she noted that Tahr was nowhere to be seen. This was standard for Tahr, to move unseen but this was not part of their plan, she was meant to be waiting for them. Keest wasn’t worried that Tahr had abandoned her; she had found Tahr's handiwork earlier, a fik that was still dying, gurgling away but unable to shout an alarm. Keest had put it out of its misery with a single stomp. She was merely worried that the longer they waited, the sooner that storm would render the upper world untraversable and if they were trapped on the Baron’s side, it would not end well for the three of them.

The fires ahead burnt brightly in the dark of the night. Fiks had no trouble with the dark, but overground, the allure of light and warmth was strong. Especially when relentlessly being buffeted by the howling winds of the spirits that could no longer find their way underground. Even the hardiest fiks would eventually crowd around in the safety of the fire, the spirits were not something to trifle with. The storms drew the spirits to them, one often saw the unseen spectres whistling through the unending woodland. Fires and smoke helped keep the spirits at bay.

Their inherent fear worked in Keest's favour. She grinned a savage smile at the sight that awaited her; they were all huddled around the fire, nice and distracted. She gently slid the two axes from their belt loops and kept them low. She felt Krahl join her behind a knot of tree roots.

"No noises... Some slumber...." She mumbled, barely audible over the wind.

There were too many shadows and lumps to gauge the correct amount of the more numerous smaller fiks that made up the majority of the camp. The two hulking bodies of leaders, or guards were unmissable as they stomped about the fire. They were the same size as Keest and they would be her problem. Neither Tahr nor Krahl were brawlers, Tahr preferred to keep her enemies away from her, or asleep, she loved it when the enemy was asleep. Krahl could hold her own against a single enemy, if not killing it, able to prevent it from killing her with alarming success. It was when she was outnumbered that she would falter. Keest on the other hand, was a fighter, brawler or berserker, depending on who one spoke to. She favoured the twin axes that she had sheathed on each hip. 

The confusion of what ‘type’ of fighter she was was not helped by the crude strip of metal spikes that lined her knuckles, strapped into place with yet more strips of cloth. Keest never labelled herself anything, it was pointless as she simply used whatever method was needed, but she could understand why the other fiks wondered what she specialised in.

"Shall we tear out their jaw?" Keest asked the quiet ermin, pondering the best way to utilise a half asleep foe and suggesting killing the leader to panic the others. Krahl closed her eyes and muttered to herself, her nose and whiskers twitching to and fro at unseen scents and sounds. She spoke quietly before opening her ‘useless’ eyes. 

"Sah.. Something is coming…. Something good, yes... but … fragile? Attack when it happens." Krahl stated with a nod, seemingly becoming sure of herself as she spoke more. The future became solidified to her, where it remained unknown to the towering Keest. 

Keest would never disregard her advice, her Sight was incredibly rare and not what Krahl told others was her gift to protect her.

"Something? When 'it' happens?" Keest asked, giving the albino the side eye. The ermin simply grinned and shrugged, palming a blade. Krahl had to know her vagueness was annoying at times and Keest suspected Krahl was deliberately vague when she wanted to wind Keest and Tahr up. But even so, Keest would never doubt her. Time and time again, her predictions, regardless of whether Keest successfully capitalised on them, came true. Sometimes Keest was in the right place at the right time, others their interpretation was wrong and the prediction came and went while Keest watched from the sidelines. 

But what was 'it' supposed to be? They were outnumbered without doubt. Failing here would be death for all of them. When were they to attack? How would they do it? Sneak in and slit throats? Or charge in roaring, hoping for a confused rout?

Rain began to patter through the thick canopy.

Keest didn't move but raised her eyes to the heavens. She couldn't see the souls that glittered and twinkled far above, however wondered if the rain was 'it'. A deep rumble made her reconsider, perhaps the storm?

The storm was almost on top of them now, and the wind changed direction, which was when Keest and Krahl, both smelt Tahr on the air, as did the guards who turned away from where the duo were squatting in the mud. Most remained asleep, but the two larger fiks, most likely bruisers or warriors from the denser muscles and larger, two handed weapons they carried, took a step away from the fire pit.

Keest was already moving by the time Krahl took a breath to suggest that *this* might be the moment. Krahl had always liked how Keest would use her Sight, but never relied on it. 

Keest’s footsteps were quiet, despite her size, but they still thudded. The bracken she waded through, snapped and cracked, but it didn't slow her. One of the smaller guards roused, sensing something, but he was too far for her to silence. The small blade that flew in a straight line from the canopy above, sank into the base of his skull from behind, he collapsed back down into the dirt with a sigh, as if merely rolling over in his sleep.

The blade did not go unnoticed however. The burly guards may not have seen what had happened, but they were alert enough to know that something was afoot. 

"Oi! Awake!" Bellowed one of the larger guards, still with its back to Keest who was upon the campsite now. Her first axe found a still prone fik, it cleaved the fik's skull from cheek to cheek before they could react and, other than a twitch, they made no further movement. Her second axe she launched in an overhead throw, it rotated twice before sinking deeply into the flesh of one of the warrior's back, sending him face first into the mud, where he roared and flailed at the weapon, but not quite being able to reach it.

Keest didn’t break stride as she stomped on the leg of another of the small guard fiks, snapping the bone within like a dry twig, its owner screaming and aiming to scratch at her calf uselessly before she was out of reach once more. The second warrior fik had his weapon drawn and bellowed a threat that Keest didn't bother listening to. The trio of thrown knives from an unseen assailant above embedded themselves into the neck and shoulder muscle of the warrior. They distracted him enough to stop his threat, but rather than fell him, instead, they enraged him. Keest swang her axe, slicing the curved blade through the arm and into the torso of one of the last few of the fodder fiks, that were supposed to support their larger guardians. The fik, limp, travelled with the curved blade for a step, before its torso tore free and was forgotten. 

"Die!" Bellowed the injured warrior bluntly, just as a shadow disconnected from the trees above, and slipped a metal wire around his neck as the shadow landed on his shoulders.

The garrote pulled taut and began to cut into the brute's flesh with some resistance as he reached up in an attempt to stop it. Holding the wire was Tahr. She began straightening her legs against the brute's shoulder blades, pulling the wire as tight as possible using every muscle she could leverage against him. He groped at the wire to try and pull it clear, he even gave an attempt to grab her or her legs, but the loss of resistance by both of his hands was all she needed for the wire to begin to separate the meat of his neck.

His eyes bulged and became bloodshot. 

Keest finished him off with a downward, overhead swing that cleaved his skull, the guard's arms going limp and his legs collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut. Keest turned to retrieve her second axe; the first brute that she had hit with the thrown axe was clawing at the dirt. It seemed his legs no longer worked. She gave him a clean death, unlike the axe in his back, she didn’t think he even felt the second blow. 

Krahl had done work during this encounter as well, several of the small fiks had new wounds to either the backs of their skulls or gashes across their necks. She confidently walked through the camp now, joining Keest’s side once more with her slightly hunched gait. 

Keest nodded once to her, a motion she had no idea if the blind ermin could detect and turned to Tahr. 

Tahr was retrieving her knives and after giving a quick wipe across her bracer, replacing them gently into their sheaths. The last of Keest's 'team', Tahr could be the more ruthless of the three. Her fur was jet black, but punctuated by scars from various moments where she hadn't been quite quick enough where the fur now no longer grew. She, like Krahl, was shorter and smaller than Keest, but that put them in line with an average fik.

Whereas Keest could be called brutal, she would happily fight her opponent on even grounds if a duel were to be called. Tahr would much rather slit the throat of any foe while they slept, and would often choose this path first before considering any other. She certainly had zero interest in talking a disagreement out. 

"Now what...?" Asked Tahr as she approached the other two, her steps made no noise and her eyes flicked from one direction to the other, constantly observing their surroundings.

"Now we let the runner, back the way we came, know that the entrance is open. The Chief has already roused enough bodies to fill these tunnels." Keest said calmly, recounting the initial plan, pointing towards the trapdoor which hid the entrance to the Baron’s section of tunnels.

As they spoke, the ermin seemed to be mumbling. She often did this. It didn't worry the other two, until one sentence rang cold through Keest; ‘that wasn't it?’. Keest turned to ask her what she meant, aware of her prophecy only minutes ago, when the trapdoor exploded open as a fik far taller and broader than even Keest, charged out from the depths bellowing in rage. 

The trio dived out of his way as he stormed past them, trying to catch or trample them in his feral charge.  He gave an animalistic roar as Keest, Krahl and Tahr rolled to their feet weapons in hand. The Baron glared at each of the fiks in turn; he had come to them and intended on pulling them limb from limb. 

He held in his hands a thick pipe that ended with a chunk of metal grafted onto the end, a maul that in sheer weight could tear the head off any fik that wasn't quick enough.

He, himself was an immense slab of muscle and rage. The various pelts that decorated him were grafted together as no one animal it seemed could cover him. Keest doubted that even the Chief was as large as this monstrosity. The head that adorned the Baron’s shoulders was scarred and nicked, but his bellowing roar shook their rib cages. He swung the two handed maul over his head before slamming it into the ground beside him with a shower of dirt and pebbles in a display meant to put fear into his opponents. Keest released an animalistic hiss. His intimidation worked although none of them would admit it later. 

"Saah! It's coming!" Krahl warned, all of a sudden glancing around herself as if demons themselves were coming for her, milky eyes rolling and flicking from shadow to shadow. She was almost ignoring the Baron who took his first world ending step forward and into the path of fate.

Keest and Tahr had their weapons ready, but had no plan or opening that they might use to turn the tide in their favour. The tunnel was to their back and the Baron would not let his prey escape, not when they came to his-

"Hai! Down!" Krahl shouted, flinging herself away from the Baron and into the muck.

If Keest had ever doubted Krahl in the past, she might have hesitated, but instead she turned and flung herself at Tahr, whom she knew would absolutely question not either fleeing or fighting the immediate danger. All three hit the dirt at the same time, Keest driving the wind from Tahr. 

The Baron took another step forward with mild confusion this time, only to hear a responding 'boom' from above.

Turning to its source the Baron glanced upwards towards the tree canopy as it exploded in fire and light. The next moment, his vision was filled with the underside of a giant, flaming, egg. 

He gave no thought to the egg, or rather had no time to think as his top half was liquidated as a superheated metal egg moved *through* him. His legs tumbled after the orb from the resulting forces but aside from those, there was not much that remained of the Baron. The egg itself continued for a time, bouncing, obliterating trees and any other unfortunate animal that was in its way before grinding into the ground with an earth shaking explosion of dirt and foliage.

The resulting silence was deafening. 

In unison, the three fiks raised their heads and looked back to where their imminent demise had stood moments ago, then to each other before rolling over and looking at the resulting, burning, tunnel that now existed where one wasn't before. Keest grabbed Tahr’s outstretched wrist and pulled her effortlessly to her feet. To a normal fik they may have stumbled, but Tahr merely flowed with the force. 

"*What in Tarquinn's dark dreams was that?!*" Demanded Tahr, her voice cutting through the unnatural and eerie silence of the jungle around them, the only real noise was the rain that continued to patter down, unfussed by the events that had unfolded moments ago.

Keest didn't have an answer so remained silent. The Baron had been a danger far greater than they had been aware of. The Chief, their chieftain, was big, larger than Keest, but Keest had often toyed with the idea that she could perhaps take him in favourable conditions. There was no way that even the Chief could have fought the Baron in a fair fight and he had suggested they kill him if they saw him?!

And yet… he was dead? The gods had seemingly smote him right in front of them. Was it The Petulant Child? Or as Tahr had said; Tarquinn reaching past the veil to strike at those that were not quiet in the dark as punishment?

To the trio, all they knew was that they had thrown themselves into the dirt, an explosion had happened inches away from them and a fik that easily rivalled and very probably surpassed their own clan chieftain was winked out of existence. The tall grey leader hefted her axes and peered around the edges of the clearing. 

Keest stepped over to Krahl who was looking down the path of destruction one side of the clearing, to the other, where an identical path quietly burned.

"Was that 'it'?" The grey fik asked the ermin plainly, neither accusing nor demanding an answer. 

Something serious had just happened. This hadn’t been something small. It wasn’t a curse to cause a foe's food to spoil, nor was it a warning to avoid the pickpocket in the market. This was an overt act by the gods far beyond any ability by any ermin in their oral history. The fiks were happy to receive what gifts fell from the god's tables, but what had just happened was akin to the gods themselves removing the Baron for them. Keest wasn't pious, but she was not foolish enough to ignore this event without consulting Krahl with reverence.

"Yes... Yes yes, this was what I saw; the guards were never the danger..." She uttered to someone other than Keest, holding her fingers lightly to her head while she concentrated, squinting down the path.

"We." She stopped, correcting herself, opening her eyes again. "You have a choice." She turned on Keest with a serious expression. Her eyes were sightless yet locked onto Keest's own with an intensity that Keest hadn't seen before.

"Follow the burning path or walk the familiar one home. This is your choice, no others matter." She declared, swiping her hand through the air, as if she were brushing aside all other matters.

Keest looked down the burning path, then back the way it had apparently come from. The glittering souls that floated high above were visible, ringed in the fire of the jungle, no longer blocked by the plants. One of the souls, however, didn't glitter, it flashed. Visible one moment, then not, it repeated steadily. No other soul in the veil did that. Keest stared at it, missed by the others. 

This night was one of great significance and the gods were watching, now, in this moment.

“What if we follow the fire?” Keest asked calmly, blinking from the sign and turning to her ermin. 

“Sah, danger. Something unknown but a boon to you and yours that you hold dear, far and wide. Now and far to the future. You would walk on naught but a hair over an abyss.” Krahl warned, not pulling her punches with her warning. 

“What if we go home?” Keest asked again. 

“Less danger for you and nothing will change. You will grow old.” Krahl promised with a calmer tone and a nod of confidence. 

The grey warrior sneered. The promise of old age was a bitter taste to Keest. She had no desire to die, but unlike the ermin, age would make her useless and rob her of her strength. Time was no different than an enemy to her and was as insidious as the invisible poison air that crept from the darkest depths of the warrens. 

"Saaah... Gods or no, we follow the fire." She stated firmly, choosing what felt right to her gut. Without waiting for confirmation from either of the other two, she immediately began to walk, trudging with purpose, splashing through the mud. 

Krahl nodded and went quiet, falling in behind Keest as she began her march. Tahr, who had stood to one side with her arms crossed, rolled her eyes and followed the other two with an exasperated shrug, letting her hands slap against the sides of her thighs after a shrug.

Tahr never believed in the gods, but there was now an odd niggling little voice at the back of her skull that wouldn't let her settle into her usual comfortable certainty of the gods being naught but a fantasy.

Her tail lashed in frustration as she jogged to catch up with the other two.

[todays-problematic-ship]

Today's problematic ships are Minsk and Rostov na Donu (B-237)

Minsk and Rostov na Donu (B-237) were a Ropucha-class landing ship and an Improved Kilo-class diesel-electric attack submarine, respectively, of the Russian Navy. Both were used in the Russian war in Ukraine (2022--present). The Rostov-na-Donu was capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles, which Russia has used on numerous occasions to strike civilian targets in Ukraine.

In early September 2023 both the Minsk and the Rostov na Donu were in dry docks at a naval facility near Sevastopol, Crimea. Around 2 am local time on September 13, the armed forces of Ukraine helped both Russian warships go fuck themselves. A strike was carried out with underwater drones and UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles.

Satellite and ground photos taken later show catastrophic damage to both the Minsk and the Rostov na Donu. The latter has likely had its pressure hull breached in multiple places. They are the most significant losses taken by the Black Sea Fleet since the April 2022 sinking of its flagship, the Moskva.

In addition, having to repair any damage to the dry docks and remove the wrecks from them will impair the support and maintenance capabilities of the Black Sea Fleet.

[wheeljack-boom]

I'm not really a blogger, but I figured I would dump some writing here. Also can be found on AO3 here for previous chapters.

This is a mixed alternate AU, where I'm kind of just pulling things from G1, TF: Prime, maybe Earthspark, other fandom headcanons.

Wheeljack x Human AFAB OC, fully platonic and SFW. Just a sappy, fluffy sweet relationship.

Chapter after the cut.

//

Evenings on this planet were the hours that the Autobot’s resident medical officer had come to appreciate the most. There was a darkened stillness in the atmosphere that wasn’t present on Cybertron, even before the war. Their homeworld had always been overdeveloped and loud, cities and infrastructure covering large swaths of the planet, leaving little room for growth. What Cybertron had left in the way of “frontier” wasn’t much more peaceful, especially after the chaos had begun. The magnetic winds were only background noise compared to the constant roar of battle in the air and on the ground. It had been a very long time since Ratchet had experienced peace and quiet. Every nanosecond was spent running from one end of an infirmary to another, constantly on the edge of collapse while having to focus on saving the lives of the catastrophically damaged and maimed; victims of a war that disgusted him. 

This planet, while not home by any means, had finally offered a desperately needed respite from all the horrors that they had fled. Their circumstances were not ideal; their situation was quite dire actually, but at least the evenings in their environment were quiet. 

Humanity, for all its faults, had at least managed not to destroy everything yet, though they were hurtling towards their own ruin at a breakneck pace. It just so happened that the Autobot’s fleeing ship had crashed in the middle of land their institutions were still making an effort to protect, so that meant it was wild and unpopulated—by humans at least. They were too deep in the dense growth of forest, buried nearly all the way into the base of a dormant volcano, for any human to really come near. Apparently Cybertronian construction was more resilient than the Earth’s geological constructs. There was local wildlife, but their presence tended to keep them out of the area.

That meant everything stayed quiet and, perhaps somewhat guiltily, Ratchet preferred this to what they had left behind. He missed home of course; was desperate to return to it because he knew what was at stake. Not everyone on board the Ark shared his feelings, which was understandable. This was not home. The only exception might have been Bumblebee who was more adaptive, but Ratchet knew he would get over it once he got older. Ratchet was far too old to harbor misguided notions of sentimentality about their temporary habitat, especially when there were still so many left on Cybertron that were dying and suffering. But, he had already sacrificed so much, so for the time being, the Autobot medic savored the opportunity to rest. 

It was why he tended to prefer watching the monitors in the evenings, having volunteered to do it when they were first abruptly woken from stasis by Teletraan-1 decades prior. The ship’s AI had detected increased geological activity in the area which had triggered the emergency systems. Core personnel had been woken first, with the rest of the Autobots still in stasis in the depths of the ship. Amazingly, they crashed with no casualties, though the ship suffered significant systems and hull damage. Repair was not an option, at least at the moment. Their resources were limited enough, which tended to happen when you were literally chased off your planet with no time to prepare.

So for now, Ratchet watched the perimeter at night. Teletraan-1’s security sensors and cameras were still functioning, and the AI was usually the only thing that kept him company. Thankfully, the algorithm was not very talkative. With Optimus Prime and Prowl offsite, he was technically the only authority around, and that meant the others spent time goofing off somewhere else in the parts of the ship that were still habitable.

That was except for Wheeljack, who along with Ratchet was one of the older Autobots in the primary squad of derelict ship custodians. The Autobot engineer was usually more focused on his scientific pursuits with the aim of keeping them alive, while also alternating smaller repair projects around the ship. He was generally in Ratchet’s vicinity more, considering his technical lab and personal quarters were right next to the infirmary, which also meant there was more opportunity for their engineer to get on his nerves. That said nothing about his ability to somehow land himself in the infirmary through sheer negligence alone, quite often. Wheeljack called it experimentation, while Ratchet called it stupidity. 

To his credit, Wheeljack had been taking less risks lately, considering how much energon it would require to put him back together after one of his projects went wrong. He could at least be responsible with his wonton damage when he needed to.  

Despite how much of a profound pain in the aft Wheeljack was, he was invaluable, and also a deeply close friend. Because they were practically attached at the hip during the war, Ratchet knew how Wheeljack’s processor worked better than anyone else. That was why when he found out where their meager supply of an energon equivalent was coming from, he hadn’t been quite as upset with Wheeljack as he probably should have been. Wheeljack thought he was doing the right thing, and truthfully, Ratchet had needed the energon—synthesized or not—more than he needed to take a moral stand against petty theft. 

Optimus Prime would not agree, but Optimus Prime didn’t need to know. Ratchet certainly wasn’t going to tell him. It would take a massive slip-up for him to find out.

There was a silent understanding between them, where he would let Wheeljack know that it was time. He wouldn’t need to be terribly specific, because the engineer seemed to always know what he meant anyway. So far, they had been lucky and hadn’t been caught by the humans, and none of the other Autobots really wondered specifically how Wheeljack was able to keep them supplied. They just trusted that he knew what he was doing, and he did, just not in the way that they thought when it came to their energon stores.

So when Ratchet saw Wheeljack’s signature returning on their monitors that night, he wasn’t surprised. He had been expecting it, because he had told Wheeljack himself—nonverbally—that they needed more energon, and he didn’t ask questions. Sideswipe had needed extensive repairs on a dislocated shoulder and pectoral plate rupture after finding out that rock slides generally didn’t appreciate an audience. It used up everything they had. 

However, as he watched Wheeljack’s approach, it suddenly became apparent that something was wrong. The Autobot was moving faster than normal—certainly faster than any normal human vehicle would be able to move, especially without drawing unwanted attention from authorities. Since the forest roads were secluded, and were largely defunct from Ratchet’s understanding of the area’s history, there weren't any humans patrolling it anyway. That didn’t make it any less suspicious however, and Ratchet’s anxiety immediately started to prickle at the back of his neck.

“Wheeljack, what are you doing!? Are you being chased?” Opening a com link, Ratchet was immediately met with a startled wall of emotion, almost as if the occupant on the other end wasn’t expecting to be contacted.

“No.” The reply was immediate, and abrupt. It was obvious something was wrong, but Wheeljack was hesitating. The tension apparent on their communication channel made Ratchet’s proverbial hackles raise. “But we have a problem.”

“Who’s we in this scenario?” Ratchet fired back, feeling the heat of his temper flare from just this simple back-and-forth. Wheeljack was being frustratingly cagey about why he was traveling at speeds he wasn’t even sure a Cybertronian would deem safe outside the race tracks. 

“I need your help,” Wheeljack clarified, and it was at this point Ratchet knew something was really wrong. His tone of voice, usually much more… manic, sounded wrong. So much for his quiet evening.

“What did you do? Are you hurt?” Ratchet wasn’t sure if he should be angry just yet, because it was entirely possible that Wheeljack was gravely injured and he just couldn’t tell on the scanners yet. He said he wasn’t being chased, so what could possibly have Wheeljack so rattled—wait— ”Wheeljack why is there an organic signature on you?!” It was hard to detect initially with Teletraan-1’s scanners, but it was there; faint, beneath Wheeljack’s own personalized spark trace, but now unmistakable. 

“Just wait—” Wheeljack was finally off the road, and had arrived through the Ark’s broken loading bay. Ratchet immediately left the monitors to meet him, and at first he wasn’t sure what to think as Wheeljack looked fine, except for the way he frantically transformed to his feet in a stunted, awkward manner that he had never seen before. The medic’s first assumption was that he was injured, possibly by a human, and the traces of an organic reading on him meant that the hapless creature had picked a fight they wouldn’t win. It was a short-lived thought as soon as he saw why Wheeljack had been so delicate in his transformation. Now he was just livid.

Livid, and for the first time completely out of his depth as he stared with cold fear at the human that Wheeljack currently held in his hands. From what he could tell with cursory scans, the human was alive, just unconscious, but there was something else that had Ratchet alarmed.

It was the active energon he could sense on it.

“What happened?” Ratchet quickly recovered from his disbelief and wasted no time motioning for Wheeljack to follow him to the infirmary. One of the perks of all the other Autobots tending to avoid being in his company meant that the infirmary would be empty. One didn’t tend to hang out with the medic, because that typically meant you were with him for a reason. They wouldn’t be bothered, and absolutely no one else could know about this. 

“I.. I don’t know…” Wheeljack faltered, and already Ratchet could hear the guilt in his words. “The energon cube…” He trailed off distantly as he followed closely behind Ratchet nearly at his heels. Wheeljack not knowing something wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary, but it had never instilled such an oddly distant emotional response in him. He was usually excited about the prospect of finding some new obscure knowledge to fill his processor. This was different, and Ratchet had to know exactly what had happened to cause this. 

“Put the human here,” Ratchet said curtly in an attempt to redirect what he knew to be Wheeljack’s racing thoughts, rounding around a medical berth once they made it into the infirmary and motioning for him to put it down.

It was not unnoticed by Ratchet how carefully and delicately Wheeljack figured out how to lay the unresponsive human down on a surface generally reserved for much larger Cybertronians. The Autobot was practically wilting right before Ratchet’s optics, and for a microsecond the medic wondered if he was going to have to treat him too. He had never seen Wheeljack so completely slumped in defeat, armor panels hanging slack off his body as if he was going to fall apart right in front of him. While they had been able to keep petty theft from the humans a secret from Prime for this long… bringing an actual human into their midst—an injured human to be exact—posed a whole new set of problems that were going to be very hard to avoid.

Ratchet would have to think about that part later, because first there was the issue of the human’s injuries needing his attention. He had no idea where to begin, seeing as this was his first time even encountering a human in this type of setting. There was never a need to know how to treat a human, so he was pretty uncomfortably blind. When it became apparent that he was hesitating, Wheeljack said without even looking up.

“Internet.” He was staring down at the human with a concerning level of grief, arms hanging limp at his sides. “She hit her head when she went down.” What the Pit happened?!  

Right. That question remained on Ratchet’s thoughts as he quickly tapped into the planet’s Internet database through Teletraan-1’s remote connection, mining it for whatever he could on human anatomy and physiology.  The entire process took mere seconds, and he now had a basic grasp of what it meant to treat a human; something he had hoped it would never come to. Ratchet wished for a lot of things that he couldn’t have, but he wasn’t going to dwell on it. He wasted no time with initial scans to see what he was dealing with: Blunt force trauma to the head, which matched Wheeljack’s very vague retelling of what happened. Superficial bleeding at the site of impact where there was a large laceration that would need manual mending. There were no other signs of internalized cranial trauma above or below the skull, but the inflammation pattern and tissue damage suggested an impact at a fairly high velocity. That meant—

“Wheeljack, this human should be dead.” That significant of an impact to the skull, itself a meager protection for the squishy, organic brain beneath, should have meant instant termination. It was all so fragile and almost pointless from an evolutionary standpoint that it almost made Ratchet mad thinking about how inefficient it all was.

Wheeljack jolted at Ratchet’s analysis and immediately his optics snapped up to meet his. He looked nervous, now rubbing his hands together as if he desperately wanted to do something with them to keep his processor distracted from what was currently going on. 

“I didn’t...” The engineer started to say, and Ratchet frowned, realizing that Wheeljack probably thought it looked like he had intentionally caused this. That idea never even occurred to Ratchet, because it was unthinkable. Nevertheless, something happened and Wheeljack knew. 

“I know you didn’t, but you need to tell me what happened.” Ratchet said, reverting his attention back down to the human who was deteriorating. Its breathing was more rapid than he knew it should be, and its blood pressure kept dipping; it was an odd physiological combination that had no other explanation other than the energon. The energon would need to be dealt with somehow, but the injury was more urgent. Trying to lift the human’s comparatively small head was an exercise in restraint, but it was immediately apparent that Wheeljack, and his scans had been right. The back of its head was soaked with the red fluid that was human blood, matted and congealed within the organic hair fiber creating a mess. At first Ratchet considered shearing it all off to get it out of the way, but something told him that would be a mistake. This human’s hair was... long and unnatural to the extent that he had to assume it was intentional, which meant it was probably something of great significance. The last thing he needed was a human yelling at him; assuming it survived at all.

“She found me. Knew where I was somehow. I got careless and lingered too long and she confronted me and—” Wheeljack started to explain, and it was incredibly distracting.

“—Are you telling me that this human confronted you? It wasn’t terrified?” Ratchet clarified without looking up.

“She.” Wheeljack corrected. “Her name is Allison.” Ratchet winced in annoyance, wondering why the identity of the human was so important. How did he even know the human’s name? Wheeljack didn’t elaborate further and turned his back, appearing to want to change the subject. Ratchet could see him surveying the supply shelves in the periphery of his vision as if he was trying to formulate his own potential treatment solution for an organic creature that shared no physiological similarities to their own kind. “The energon…” Wheeljack trailed off, lost somewhere out in the cosmos and Ratchet knew he wasn’t going to get any more answers out of him right then and there. That wasn’t his priority anyways.

“This wound needs to be cleaned,” Ratchet muttered to himself, faintly realizing that he wasn’t sure if he had the right chemicals and materials to clean and close the wound. With delicate fingers, and an incredible amount of practiced precision, he was able to pull apart the clumps of fiber to reveal the chaotic damage pattern of a blunt-force wound through the human’s skin. It was still slowly oozing fluids, but there wasn't significant enough blood loss to be a threat. The skin was swelling around the tear, but any major bleeding had stopped. Concussion was still a likely possibility, but the human was already unconscious. Infection was a major risk, so it would need to be sanitized properly.

This was the moment that all of Wheeljack’s pent up terror finally exploded in a manic energy, directed at none other than Ratchet’s dwindling medical repair supplies. He was tearing things off the shelves, looking for what he assumed to be anything they could use as an antiseptic chemical. Finding this highly alarming and counterproductive, Ratchet stopped what he was doing and intervened.

“Wheeljack, stop tearing apart the infirmary! You aren’t going to find what you need by throwing everything around!” He was just fast enough to stop him from potentially destroying a very large containment vessel by dropping it in his haste—something which Ratchet very much needed.

“Hydrogen Peroxide!” Wheeljack blurted as he spun around. His optics had gone wide and he froze, waiting for Ratchet’s judgment. He sounded incredibly stressed, more so than usual. 

Hand still grasped firmly around the engineer’s wrist, hovering between them where Ratchet had stopped him as he was turning around—he could not trust Wheeljack wouldn’t impulsively throw said item in an effort to expedite the process—the medic finally understood what his outburst had meant. Hydrogen Peroxide, a disinfecting agent, and Wheeljack was holding it aloft between them.

“That’ll have to do,” Ratchet grunted, letting go of Wheeljack’s arm so that he could hand it over properly. It was possible that Ratchet ripped it out of his grasp a bit more forcefully than he should have. “You still haven’t answered my question,” the medic called over his shoulder as Wheeljack followed him back to the table, his prior outburst fizzled out and depleted. In the interim Ratchet subspaced an anti-static cloth, typically used to stem energon loss on wounded Cybertronians, and began to clean the human’s head. “What happened? ”

“...I told you. She found me.” Ratchet couldn’t tell if Wheeljack was now being intentionally obtuse, or he was really that oblivious under present circumstances. 

“Let me ask a better question then, who is this human, and how did this happen?” 

Wheeljack looked to the side, clearly avoiding Ratchet’s gaze. “Technically that’s two questions…” “Wheeljack.”

There was a very prolonged pause where the light behind Wheeljack’s optics dimmed, before shifting as the engineer looked at everything but Ratchet in the room. He was stalling, but rather than press him in that moment the medic was more concerned with the actual job he needed to do. 

Eventually Wheeljack faltered, air cycling through him as he formulated a response. 

“Eh—well—remember that time some cycles ago when you caught me stealing?” Wheeljack was still looking sideways, avoiding Ratchet’s withering glare as he looked up from his task. “The first time I mean.”

Ratchet leaned forward over the prone, unconscious human, hands braced against the berth as he looked at the other Autobot square in the optics. There was no way. “Wheeljack. You’re not telling me this is—” Of course Ratchet remembered what Wheeljack was referring to: the first of many times the irresponsible fool had snuck out behind everyone’s afts to steal energy from the humans. Something else had made that particular time different from the others.

“Yeah… it is.” Wheeljack practically caved in on himself, guilt and shame making him nearly fold over into a posture of submission and despite his utter annoyance, Ratchet hated to see him this way.

“This is the human that saw you.” Ratchet didn’t know how it was possible, so many years later that Wheeljack would just happen to blunder into the same human twice. And of course, it would be Wheeljack to do something so monumentally careless. What were the odds? Unless—

“She found me.” Wheeljack finally said, looking down at the floor in defeat. “I think… she figured out what I was up to because she… remembered; came looking for me.”

—Unless the human had the sense and knowledge to be able to find him on their own… but how?

Ratchet also distinctly remembered telling Wheeljack to deal with it when he’d revealed that a human had seen him. He hadn’t meant for him to terminate it of course, but Wheeljack had never shared exactly what went on that night. When he’d returned to the Ark, he’d certainly noticed that Wheeljack had been… bothered by something, and it was so out-of-character for the Autobot that Ratchet had actually asked him what he’d done. All he’d said was that he’d handled it—and it wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe, Ratchet should have pried a bit more, to ask him what exactly had transpired, but he’d trusted that Wheeljack would resolve the issue without compromising their safety, and his morals.

He’d certainly done one of those. Whether or not there was any reason to be concerned for their safety now was up for debate.

“What happened that night?” Now though, to get a better sense of why he was trying to figure out how he was going to stitch a human’s head wound—the very same human that had run into Wheeljack decades prior—Ratchet needed some answers. Specific answers.

It was suddenly as if a dam broke. Wheeljack unfolded from his slumped position and went completely stiff as he stood straight, armor panels flared in distress.  “She was just a child Ratchet. I wasn’t—I couldn’t just leave her there alone—” Wheeljack’s explosive defensiveness seemingly out of nowhere hinted at some repressed guilt the engineer had been hiding for some time. All Ratchet could do was raise a brow plate at him, silently allowing him to get out whatever it was he needed to. “—She… she wasn’t afraid of me… she was actually excited to talk to me, and Primus I just stayed and… talked to her for a little while and she was so happy, until I had to go because—” His voice had gotten incrementally quieter as he continued, the memories that it seemed he’d been holding in for some time quite literally taking him back to something that had clearly had a great deal of an effect.

“—That’s enough, Wheeljack.” If Ratchet hadn’t cut in, he ran the risk of sitting there listening to Wheeljack explain himself for an eternity. 

“Her father eventually came to retrieve her. Didn’t see me. But I didn’t talk to her again after that. Kept my distance.” He stopped, as if collecting himself for the moment, and as he continued to speak the words were slower and much more deliberate. “Eventually, stopped checking in on her to… make sure and figured I’d never see her again. I guess I underestimated human memory…” Wheeljack didn’t need to finish that thought, because it was clear what had happened.

A lot of things were starting to make sense now: Wheeljack���s withdrawal when he’d returned, lasting for some time where now something Ratchet had suspected was confirmed. He had been checking on the human, presumably to make sure she hadn’t put them all at risk and that it was safe to not escalate the situation. Eventually, satisfied or otherwise, Wheeljack had stopped disappearing for prolonged periods of time. 

Wheeljack hadn’t wanted to, because he had been lonely and wanted to feel like he had a connection, even if it remained from a distance and unseen. The short time he had talked with the human child had been meaningful enough to make him linger, and that confirmed a number of Ratchet’s fears all at once. 

“Until she found you.” All Ratchet could do was vent air, wincing as he realized he’d done so directly onto the human in front of him. The human… her body didn’t react, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t inadvertently do damage without really trying. For the first time Ratchet… hesitated, an uncomfortable pulse in his spark making him interpret some foreign code impulses that he knew he shouldn’t be feeling. He was annoyed; so annoyed, but also… scared.

“I was careless and the humans got a photo of me,” Wheeljack started, raising his hands to stave off the almost immediate expletives as it sunk in for Ratchet what that meant. “It was my alt-mode, no need to blow a gasket. But, I think she saw it and figured out where to find me. Smart.” Ratchet thought he detected a hint of admiration in that statement, but he was more upset with the fact that Wheeljack could have compromised their entire existence. If he had been caught in bipedal form instead…

That status quo hadn’t just been changed, it had been completely overthrown into disarray.

“So let me get this straight. The same human from all those years ago found you, and the energon cube caused this?” Ratchet evened his tone, now more focused on productive results rather than dwelling on things he couldn’t change.

Wheeljack shrugged before crossing his arms across his chassis, his optics scanning the ceiling as if to recall what had happened. “I got distracted and the cube overloaded. Couldn’t stop it in time and it fell. It bounced, and when it got close to her it reacted like it was reaching out. Never seen that before. The amount of energy it discharged was—”

“—More than enough to kill her. Or should have anyway.” Ratchet added, putting the final piece together himself. The implications were troubling but they would have to investigate that later.  

The statement hung between them in silence while Ratchet worked. Wheeljack’s silence meant that he was deep in contemplative thought, perhaps already trying to piece together the technicalities of what had happened and why. That wasn’t Ratchet’s area of expertise, though he was not completely ignorant to the physics behind energon storage and production. What Wheeljack was explaining should not have been possible, unless they’d simply never encountered the right conditions to actually test such a reaction. 

Ratchet didn’t really have the presence of mind to scold the Autobot, who was skillfully avoiding looking at him, intentionally or not. Wheeljack had put them all in so much danger, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to really blame him for what had happened. It seemed like he was doing enough of that himself already, because they both knew something like this was inevitably going to happen anyway. Ratchet supposed they were at least lucky in this case it had been the same human, as statistically improbable as that was. 

Wheeljack, unique as he was, was not an anomaly. Prime had noticed it too, and had spoken to Ratchet about it in passing out of concern. The other Autobots were… restless. Isolation and seclusion was not agreeing with any of them, and the younger amongst them in particular were showing the most severe signs of loneliness. They were growing curious, fascinated by the humans and yearning for some type of contact if only to satiate their increasing desire to know more. By nature, they were social creatures, so the escalating carelessness and diminishing fear of the planet’s native inhabitants meant that eventually… the fortified, secure bubble that had been carefully cultivated around them for decades was going to explode in a spectacular fashion. Someone was going to make contact first, intentional or not, and somehow, it was not all that surprising that it was the Autobot standing in front of him.

“I don’t have suture material,” Ratchet mumbled, and he sensed Wheeljack relax near him, perhaps with the possibility of setting on something more productive. “Might want to start stealing that too.” His sarcasm was not lost on Wheeljack who finally smiled then, the action quick but nonetheless obvious as his optical lids narrowed in companionable amusement. 

“I knew you’d thank me eventually.”

“Well right now we need to stop wasting time. Hand me the…” Ratchet’s processor cycled through hundreds of possibilities at once. He had a collection of different monofilament materials typically used to repair delicate energon tubing within a Cybertronian’s endoskeleton. “... Polypropylene-sterite thread spool over there,” he gestured in the general direction of a partially broken cabinet against the wall, knowing Wheeljack would know what to look for. It was a material that could be absorbed by a Cybertronian’s physiology and simply be cycled out as waste. For a human, while it was a material similar to something they would use for their own medical sutures, it was not something they could absorb. That meant eventually they would need to be removed, which also meant…

“The human will need to stay here.”

“Eh—what?”

“At least until I can remove the sutures—”

“—Pretty sure a human doctor can do that…”

“If this human walks into an infirmary with expertly applied sutures and no prior documentation to explain them, that is bound to raise questions. We can’t risk it, and furthermore we have no idea what the immediate effect of the energon exposure will be.” Ratchet could tell that Wheeljack had nothing to argue with, because he loved to argue with him. That meant one of two possibilities was happening: Wheeljack was far more interested in the data that could be collected regarding human exposure to energon to be worried about his blunder being exposed, or he wanted the human to stay. There was nothing stopping both from being true.

“About that energon…”

“Right. Do you have the energon cube that reacted to her, or did you leave that behind for all of humanity to find?” Ratchet had finished closing the wound with great care, having a number of needle options at his disposal and one just small enough to be useful. They were generally used for delicate internal Cybertronian physiology and electrical stimuli for therapeutic reasons, but he was able to manipulate one thin enough so as not to damage the skin further.  

“There’s no need to be rude, I got it right here.” Wheeljack subspaced the glowing energon cube and held it aloft. Ratchet could tell it wasn’t completely full, probably because it had expelled some of its stores when it… exploded. 

“I think we can use it to get the energon out of her. Hand me that EM absorption array, will you?” Pointing once again to a long, hand-held de-ionization module that was typically used to reverse electro-magnetic build-up. It was a long shot, but he thought that it might be able to pick up the energon—itself a highly charged energy—from the human’s body and convert it directly into the cube as something usable.

“You think—” Wheeljack started, the lights behind his optics glimmering as an idea began to fully form. Ratchet was admittedly surprised that Wheeljack hadn’t thought of it sooner. “I can modify the cube to interface with your little medical thingy—”

Ratchet scoffed. “—It’s not a thingy, it’s a very critical piece of equipment that I’ve had to use on you multiple times when—never mind, we need to move fast because the human’s blood pressure is dropping again.”

Without needing to be asked twice, Wheeljack placed two fingers on the facing edge of the cube and swiped sideways, revealing the command module where lines of glyphs rapidly filtered across the interface. He typed in several lines of code, the cube making a rather unpleasant squawk twice when he made mistakes, until finally he nodded at Ratchet to indicate that he was finished.  

“Is that thing going to work on a human?”

“Unclear,” Ratchet said, holding the module aloft by the handle and placing it over the human’s body. He sensed a spike in energy when the warm glow of the leading edge spread out over the small organic form, and taking that as a good sign he passed it down the length of her. It was working—slowly, but as he initiated a stabilized scan he could detect a release of sorts, not unlike a valve loosening pressure as the energon slowly siphoned out of her.

The operating word being slowly, Ratchet knew this was going to take a while. Wheeljack had been watching the cube itself, a manic glee passing over him as he shifted his stance excitedly. “It’s working… oh, this is going to take forever…”

“No kidding.” Ratchet grunted, noting that his joints were probably going to get sore after all this. “I hope you have nothing better to do, because you aren’t leaving my sight right now.”

There was the matter of what to do when the human actually woke up, so Ratchet supposed they had plenty of time to think about that.

///

[i-prefer-base-twelve]

AI-Less Whumptober - Isolation

This is one continuous story. Intro | Drugging (Tendi)

BOIMLER

Boimler unfolded himself very carefully, waiting for stabs of pain to tell him where he'd been cruelly impaled by random debris. But somehow no stabs came, and eventually he found himself standing, wobbly and with pounding heart, but upright. He ached all over, and was covered in sweat and dust. But if that was the worst of it? He was a lucky, lucky man.

He squinted into the flickering dimness--they were down to emergency lighting--at the remnants of the conference room. The chairs had been reduced to rubble, but the big table stood stalwart and undefeated. It deserved a commendation. If he hadn't been under there, he'd probably be--

"Aaah!""

The hull was gone.

Where before there had been a wall of beautiful floor to ceiling viewports, there was now… nothing. A ragged ring of exposed wires and struts, framing the endless starry abyss. The only thing keeping Boimler's bodily fluids on the right side of his body was an emergency forcefield. He stared at it, frozen, open-mouthed, watching pieces of debris establish their own little orbits around the Cerritos. Oh sure, he'd been out in space dozens of times before, but that had always been from the safety of an EV suit. Who knows if the ship had power to sustain that forefield.

A piece of decking flew straight towards him. He shrieked and threw up his hands, but it bounced off the forcefield and went careening away. Boimler slowly lowered his hands, turned away from the breach, and tapped his badge to start recording a mission log. Mission logs were a great way to calm and order one's thoughts.

"Ensign's log, stardate… I don't remember. I'll look at the timestamp later. We were en route to Calagai V when the Cerritos collided with-- or was attacked by-- I don't know what happened. One minute, we were warping along, everyone just doing their jobs, and then Cap'n Freeman shouted to brace for impact. We're damaged, but life support is at least minimally functional. At least, it is here in the conference room. We've suffered a hull breach… at least this one, here in the conference room…"

What WAS the ship's status?

"Oh god." His stomach dropped. "Is the bridge crew ok? Computer!"

No response.

"Ok, that's not necessarily a sign of catastrophic failure," he mumbled to himself, "The comms are probably just… completely overloaded right now. Everyone is probably trying to make a status report at once." He shouldn't call the bridge, they needed all the bandwidth they could get. But he really needed the status OF the bridge…

"Boimler to Rutherford."

Silence. Either comms were down… or Rutherford was. Boimler swallowed and slapped his badge again, harder.

"BOIMLER TO RUTHERFORD. Boimler to Mariner. Boimler to Tendi! Boimler to anyone! Can anybody hear me?!"

Silence.

He had to get out of here.

Starfleet emergency training had taught him that before attempting to open a door, one should always ascertain if the next room is on fire or exposed to the vaccuum of space. Since his badge was useless, he hurried to the terminal on the wall and thumbed it on. Or, tried to. The screen stayed dark, no matter how hard he tapped it.

Boimler fought the growing pit of dread in his stomach. This damage could be localized. He could walk out of the conference room and back into a fully lit, fully connected, normal temperature hallway.

Oh, hey. It was cold in here. Was it getting colder?

He HAD to get out of here. Even if he had no idea what was on the other side of that door. He'd just have to pull the manual release and hope for the best.

Crouching down, he popped the little panel and pulled the lever. The doors parted slowly, jerkily, making unsettling crunching noises as they went. They opened about a foot before giving up.

"No sudden deadly outrush of air, so, that's good." But the hallway beyond the doors was just as dark as the conference room. Dark… and silent. Not even the red alert klaxon. The realization hit him like one of Mariner's suckerpunches.

A LOT of systems have to go down before the alert klaxons fail.

Boimler noted this all this in his log. Then he took a deep, deep breath, let it all the way out, and started trying to squeeze through the doors.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

There was a question awhile ago where someone wanted skyscrapers very high up that but wasn't a great idea since it would cause issues if systems failed and you couldn't remove the top floors to repair them on the ground. Wouldn't spaceships have that same problem way worse when they are smack dab in the middle of space and nowhere near any place to land?

Tex: Ideally, spaceships have fulfilled the energy requirements to exist, because they would need to either break orbit or be built in dry docks in orbit to a planet, which is the majority of the issue with skyscrapers. Additionally, spaceships will probably have by default the benefit of altering their internal gravity, and if the engineers are good at what they do, a modularity to shut down specific areas for repairs without potentially breaking the entire system.

Feral: Unless I’m not referencing the correct previous asks, we really weren’t saying that the problem with maintenance on the top floors of 7km tall skyscrapers is that you couldn’t remove them to repair them on the ground - if there are skyscrapers that are 7km tall, there are going to have to be cranes that are taller to have built them. This actually puts spaceships in a better position to have repairs done because there’s no gravity to contend with.

The problem is that the people inside those top floors would be exposed to the environmental factors of being 7km above sea level, and yes, that would obviously also be catastrophic to the people inside a spaceship with a hull breach. Spaceships, however, could have a much easier time being compartmentalized with air locks and such so that people could be protected in one area while there’s damage in another. I brought this up as difficult to achieve in a skyscraper due to the varying conditions different floors of the same building would be subject to - in a spaceship, all external conditions are equal.

[goddesstrolls]

Rupture.

Zarias trudged through the thin layer of slush towards a wreck of ruined metal and burning fuel.

He’d watched it come streaking down from the heavens like a falling angel, burning parts breaking away in a glittering trail, the damaged hull shrieking an unholy chorus as it all came to earth.

Plenty of other trolls had to have seen it, and he wanted choice pickings of the salvage. Most would wait- Or they couldn’t get to it- Until the flames died out, at least.

He’d expected it to be an Alternian ship. Some poor sap who tried to escape the Fleet. A space pirate, maybe. Or just an idiot highblood who could afford a spaceworthy ship and didn’t know how to handle re-entry. But as he drew close, he realized just how alien it was.

That, and the alien corpses lying around were a literal dead giveaway. Any that he could see were burned beyond saving, and he wagered many others were trapped under the burning wreckage. One made a bit of sound as he approached, reached out towards him.

Zarias jammed his bayonet into the skull as a mercy, and moved on.

He searched among the wreck for things of clear value. Intact technology. The former crew’s belongings.

Something crackled, and then an electronic sound blared from somewhere. A distorted and mechanical sound that, if he stopped and listened closely, almost sounded like words. Not in any language he knew, of course.

What he wagered to be a sentence repeated. And then again. And again. A distress signal, perhaps.

“Give up,” Zarias called into the smoke filled air, knowing damn well that if he were talking to anything it surely couldn’t understand him. “No one will help you here.”

The sound continued uninterrupted. Yeah, just some kind of automated distress signal--

-A brilliant blue-white jet of flame flared thirty feet up from somewhere among the wreck. There was a brief moment where Zarias could feel something, some kind of energy, building so intense that it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and a shudder run down his back.

And then all that energy ruptured, a catastrophic explosion with a radius the size of the wreck’s crater, with Zarias caught in the thick of it.

Augment.

[razieltwelve]

Sacrifice (Final Effect)

"We’re going to die,” Jasper murmured. “I can’t believe it. We’re going to die out here.”

His ship had suffered catastrophic levels of damage after an encounter with Grimm. The hull had more than a dozen major breaches, the air supply was basically non-existent, and the ship no longer had the ability move under its own power. He’d managed to get a distress signal out, but there was no guarantee it had been received before his comms had been destroyed. And even if it had been... he was in the middle of nowhere. He’d be dead long before anyone arrived to rescue him.

And he wouldn’t be the only one either.

His son was with him. His wife had passed away a few months ago during a Grimm attack on the mining colony where they lived. That was why he was in space to begin with. He’d finally managed to secure citizenship in the Empire. He and his son were going to start again somewhere safer. But the Grimm had caught his ship on its way to the nearest Hyperspace Gateway. And now they were both going to die here.

A quiet voice in the back of his mind cut through the growing panic.

“Jasper, I can keep you alive for forty-eight hours.” The words came from Steel-Shadow-Beneath-the-Waves, a member of the Company. 

Years ago, Jasper’s parents had agreed to let members of the Company bond to them. The symbiotic energy beings had made them stronger, faster, and more durable. Jasper had agreed too, and Steel had been chosen for him. Steel had become his best friend, a constant companion who had never left him and had always given him good advice. In exchange, all Steel wanted was to feed off his Aura, a slow, consistent drain that had never been harmful.

“There’s nothing you can do for the ship?” Jasper asked.

“No.” Steel’s voice was calm. “Even if I knew how to fix the ship, we wouldn’t have all the parts required to fix it.” The Company sighed. “We’re missing more than half the ship, Jasper. It’s a miracle we’re not already dead.”

“Forty-eight hours...” Jasper bit his lip, a mad, desperate plan coming to mind. “The lack of air won’t be a problem?”

“Using the Aura I’ve saved up, I can substitute Aura for air once the ship’s air has run out. However, forty-eight hours is the most I can manage. I have no idea if that will be long enough.”

“And what happens after that?” Jasper asked.

“You die. And then I die, having expended all of my energy to keep you alive.” Steel paused. “I could abandon you and seek to prolong my existence, but that was not the agreement we made.”

Jasper’s lips twitched. “No. We made a promise, didn’t we? You and me, together to the end, no matter what.”

“Correct. Besides, I doubt I’d live long after you passed. I’ve grown used to being bonded. Members of my species who have bonded rarely survive more than a day or two without bonding again.” Steel radiated sad amusement. “It seems I’ll be keeping our promise.”

Jasper took a deep breath. “What if... what if you didn’t?”

“What?”

“If I asked you to bond with my son... to... to bond with Onyx... how long would you be able to keep him alive?”

Steel paused. It was a long, long pause. “Infants require less Aura to survive and consume less air than adults. Based on the amount of Aura I have saved up, I could keep him alive for roughly ninety-six hours.”

“Four days, huh?” Jasper took a deep breath... one of the last he would ever take. “I want you do to it. Break our bond and bond with my son.”

Steel paused again. “Jasper, if I do that, you will die. We will run out air in approximately an hour, and you will be lucky to survive fifteen minutes once that occurs. You are asking me to kill you.”

“So that my son can live.”

“That wasn’t our agreement, Jasper. I would be breaking my promise.”

Jasper reached out through the bond between them. Members of the Company were highly logical, their every action geared toward helping their host - and therefore themselves - survive and thrive. Steel had argued against Jasper becoming a miner, but he had eventually conceded the issue after seeing how much Jasper loved it. He needed Steel to understand. He needed him to see.

“Sometimes, we have to break our promises,” Jasper said. “So I’m asking you... I’m begging you. Please, if we’ve ever been friends, save my son.”

“There is no guarantee this would even save him. We are in a remote part of space, and we have no way of knowing if our distress signal even got out before our comms were destroyed. Even if it was heard, it might take longer than four days for help to arrive. You would be sentencing yourself to death for no reason.”

“I know the odds aren’t good,” Jasper replied. “But if I can make them even a little bit better for my son... please. Steel, I need you to do this for me.”

There was another pause, the longest yet.

Finally, Steel spoke again. “Jasper, I’m going to miss you very much.”

There was a sudden, sharp stab of agony, like a limb being cut off. Jasper screamed without realising it and slumped down beside the cot his son was in. An amorphous shape drifted away from him and over his son. It was Steel’s energy form, and this was the first time he’d seen it since they’d bonded.

Slowly, tenuously, arms formed and reached out toward him. For a moment, just one, Steel hugged him, and then Steel was flowing through the air toward Onyx. His son’s cries stopped as the bond began to form, and a look of wonder formed on the infant’s face as the member of the Company began to join himself to him in earnest.

“Thanks,” Jasper murmured. “For everything.”

He stayed by Onyx’s cot as the air grew thinner and thinner. As he took his last real breath, he reached out for something, anything to help him through the agony of his final moments. His hands tightened around the cot’s frame, and his son’s eyes - Steel’s eyes - met his.

Through the last, broken remnants of the link between them, Steel filled his dying mind with memories.

They were back on the beach with his parents, and the sun was so warm. Waves lapped against the shore, and the sand between his toes was wet and grainy. He ran into the water, laughing, as Steel warned him to stay within easy reach of his parents.

Overhead, a seagull let loose a cry, and Jasper dipped beneath the waves, a school of fish parting as he dove...

Jasper died with a smile on his lips.

X     X     X

The Imperial trooper stepped into the battered ship. The marks of battle were all over it, and more than half of it was just gone. From the looks of it, the ship must have run into Grimm. It had taken them four days to reach the ship. He doubted anything could have survived. Their corvette’s scanners had already noted the lack of life support systems and the absence of any air inside the ship.

Yet to his disbelief, his sensors were picking up a very, very, very faint Aura signature. He gestured to his squamates.

“We’ve got Aura. Cover me.”

He moved swiftly through the ship, his companions sweeping the wreck for any signs of Grimm. They found none. The trooper activated his emergency life support pack and broke open the door to the bridge.

There, in a cot, was a baby.

“How in the...” He swiftly activated the life support pack, and a forcefield wrapped around the child as fresh air was supplied. His gaze shifted to the body beside the cot. The father? Probably. But how had the baby survived?

“He asked me to.” The voice was a sibilant hiss. “He told me to save his son.”

“Who are you?” The trooper activated his advanced sensors. Information flowed through him. “You’re... one of the Company?”

A hazy, indistinct shape, visible only through his advanced Aura sensors appeared. The voice came again, barely audible, and his power armour isolated the channel and amplified it, so he could hear.

“Yes. Jasper was my partner. When it became clear what would happen, he asked me to bond with his son, Onyx. There was no guarantee it would let him live long enough for help to come - we didn’t even know if help would come - but he wanted me to do it. Even if it meant he would die, he wanted his son to live.”

“Shit.” The trooper’s jaw clenched. “Fuck.” A man like that? He should still be alive, not dead. He took a deep breath. “All right then. We’ll get... we’ll get Jasper out of here and give him a proper burial. And you and Onyx, we’ll get you out of here and looked after. Did Jasper have any kin?”

X     X     X

Onyx ran along the beach. His grandparents shouted for him to be careful, so he slowed down a bit, content to watch the crabs scuttle along the sand and into the water.

“Hey...” he murmured. “Steel, you knew my dad, right?”

His grandparents had always told Onyx that his dad died a hero, but he saw how sad it made them to talk about him. He loved them, so he didn’t want them to be sad. But he wanted to know more about his dad.

“I did,” Steel replied, his voice as calm as ever in the back of Onyx’s mind. “I knew him very well.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

“Gladly.”

[nightbrcther]

　　　The job. She knows every minute detail about it; who her asset is, their destination planet, the cargo, the identity of the pirate they'll be doing business with, and how long the transaction should reasonably last. Sahana doesn't skimp on research. But the only variable she couldn't confidently predict was the raider ship that would intercept them the moment hyperspace spat their two ships out. Straight into conflict -- she knew her client's luxury yacht would pose a risk. A glossy, extravagant beacon of wealth, destined to draw eyes in an Outer Rim system teeming with avaricious criminals.

　　　In her own starfighter separate from her client, Sahana performs a defensive split to position herself at the bandit's flank. He barrel rolls, she follows. It takes just moments of concentrated fire for her phase beams to sear through his deflector shield, at which point a volley of missiles does enough catastrophic damage to the bandit's unprotected hull to ensure her client will be sailing away unscathed.

　　　Or so she thought.

　　　"We have to make an emergency landing," the Nightsister speaks through their linked comms when she notices the left half of the sleek staryacht spitting trails of black smoke out into space. "What is the damage report?" // @prvtocol

[hasufin]

Under Pressure

There’s talk of recovering the “remains” of the five people who were in the Titan and... um, I don’t think they’ve really thought this through.

If they’d suffered a power failure or something and there was an intact pressure vessel down there, it would be a technically challenging, but possible endeavor: figure out a way to grab the vessel and haul it up without compromising the pressure vessel.

But, I’m sorry, that’s not what happened. Okay, I’m not sorry, because slowly suffocating or freezing in the dark on the ocean floor (they were relying on fucking glowsticks!) over the course of several days sounds like one of the most awful ways to die.

What actually happened was a better way to die, but will emphatically not leave behind a corpse. Or, um... anything, really.

See, this was a catastrophic implosion. Somehow, the pressure vessel was compromised. We kind of have this image of seawater pouring in and the people drowning, but I assure you that’s not what happened. For one, with a carbon fiber hull any hole would immediately be ripped open - you wouldn’t have this pinprick oozing or gushing water, you’d have an instantaneous rip as the entire vessel fails.

Second, it’s hard to really grasp the sheer amount of pressure. The number at that depth is about 5800 PSI. Which is pretty close to 400 atmospheres, or 40,000 kilopascals. Call it 40 megapascals, because I don’t have many opportunities to use that unit.

What will that do? The closest I can find is the famed Byford Dolphin incident. That happened when a diving bell where deep sea divers were undergoing decompression was compromised. The result then was immediate death, mostly due to internal organ failure which was... grisly. However, one diver was literally sucked through the breach, pulverizing him.

But.

The Byford Dolphin diving bell was only at 9atm. The pressure where the Titan was, that’s 400 atmospheres. And, again, it wasn’t a resilient metal diving bell, it was a carbon fiber hull. Those five people were sitting at one atmosphere of air in one instant, and then at 400 atm of seawater the next. This presusre change would have happened in milliseconds. Possibly less than a full millisecond.

I would describe it as being in a cocktail shaker, being shaken at mach 1, with ice cubes which weigh as much as an office building. They were crushed before they had a chance to register a problem. They were not simply crushed, though. That doesn’t even come close to the level of damage. They were turned, instantly, into a paste.

At those pressures, physics does weird things. While they didn’t have time to register it, their last vision probably wasn’t one of the darkness of the ocean, but rather a blinding flash of light. At that point - and, again, before the comparatively slow nerve signals could reach their brains much less process it - their bodies would have been utterly destroyed by that chaotic inrush of water at a pressure beyond anything humans can experience. Any gases infused into their body (and there are a lot) would be compressed to nearly nothing, all would be torn apart. What remains will not be recognizable as... well, anything. And will be readily available for the ever-hungry organic life in those depths.

This may feel morbid or macabre, but I want to be clear: it’s possible to recover debris; the bodies are quite, quite gone.

[team-ombrulla]

Benefits of AI Visual Inspection in the Marine Industry

The marine industry is one of the most vital sectors in global trade and transportation, with thousands of vessels travelling across oceans daily. However, maintaining the safety, quality, and efficiency of these vessels is a complex and challenging task. AI-powered visual inspection is revolutionising how the marine industry approaches maintenance, safety, and operational efficiency.

1. Improved Safety and Accident Prevention Safety is a top priority in the marine industry, where even small defects or failures can lead to catastrophic outcomes. AI visual inspection helps ensure the safety of vessels by continuously monitoring critical areas for potential issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Hull and Structural Integrity: AI systems can inspect the hull of a ship for corrosion, cracks, or damage that may affect the vessel’s structural integrity. Early detection of these issues helps prevent accidents, oil spills, or hull breaches.

Real-Time Monitoring: AI-based systems can monitor multiple parts of the vessel in real-time, enabling proactive intervention before minor problems escalate into safety hazards. This includes monitoring the condition of the ship’s deck, machinery, and safety equipment.

2. Enhanced Maintenance and Reduced Downtime Maintaining vessels on time and avoiding unexpected breakdowns are essential for minimising downtime and ensuring smooth operations. AI-powered visual inspection systems assist in predictive and preventive maintenance strategies.

Predictive Maintenance: AI algorithms analyse visual data to identify potential wear and tear in critical ship components, such as engines, propellers, and turbines. By detecting these issues early, companies can schedule maintenance before failures occur, reducing unplanned downtime and costly repairs.

Faster Inspections: AI systems can quickly analyse large volumes of visual data, enabling faster and more frequent inspections compared to manual processes. This helps keep maintenance schedules on track and reduces the risk of costly delays.

3. Cost Savings and Operational Efficiency AI visual inspection systems can significantly reduce operational costs by minimising the need for manual inspections, reducing human error, and improving overall process efficiency.

Labour Cost Reduction: Traditional inspections require specialised personnel, often taking hours or days to complete. With AI, inspections can be performed more frequently and at a lower cost, freeing up human resources for more critical tasks.

Reduced Repair Costs: Early detection of defects through AI visual inspection prevents small issues from turning into expensive repairs. Identifying problems in their early stages helps avoid costly downtime and ensures vessels are operating at their full potential.