Maledictus Aether (26 page)

It is late evening at this
point, and my sanctuary turns out to be my chambers on the fifth
level, where the majority of the sleeping quarters lie. There is a
section of this deck for the crew, another for the first families,
and as such I am given the privilege of my own private quarters.
The common room shared by the first families sits in the centre, a
large collection of aged books and desks, couches and liquor
cabinets.

You must never forget the
alcohol.

Sitting on the ground with my back to the leg of my bed, I
roll a coin over my knuckles as I watch the stars in the sky; I
told Angelo to set a course that will keep us at a relative
distance from Aeon, but constantly circling the Skyland. As a
result, being near the back of the ship, I can see the faint
residue of the thrusters as they push the exhaust from the Aether
into the sky. It is a light golden hue that shines like the sea of
stars around the ship, not a cloud in the sky to block the view of
the moon and the celestial map.

I am just a man. Only
human.

All this talk about me being
Aebra reborn – or something like that – is just giving me a
migraine. I know that the people in the sky hold this belief that
the deities can be reborn inside a person or an animal, and I do
not dismiss the notion, but I cannot believe it myself. It sounds a
little too far-fetched, in my opinion.

Sighing, I toss the coin in the
air and catch it, rolling it across my knuckles anew as I watch the
golden mist mix with the ebony of the sky, Aeon a small speck in
the distance.

It is bad enough that I get
some sort of special treatment because I am my father’s son and
that I have found his treasury and now Tier, but that is not enough
to constitute to the belief that I am some deity personified.
Laughing dryly, the kind of laugh one does to mock oneself, I tip
my head back against the mattress as I toss the coin and let it
fall onto the ground, sighing.

Most people would probably want to be in my position.
Everyone singing praises and congratulating you for something that
you only got because of the determination, the refusal and sheer
stubbornness of giving up. Keeping true to dreams that have always
been in your heart.

I would be happy right now living my life humbly on a
Skyland or, gods help me, landside. Married, perhaps with children,
working an honest job instead of piracy.

Perhaps…

No. That could never come to be
anyways. There is just so much in the way, and besides…

Orin slithers up beside my
head, as if sensing my pensive mood and wanting to chide me for it,
and I laugh lightly at the creature’s behaviour. It almost seems to
be scowling at me, and I lift a hand to scratch behind his shoulder
blade, where I have found he likes it the most next to his
throat.

“I know,” I sigh, the scaly
creature making a sound that is almost a purr. “I should not be
thinking so hard. I cannot help it, though; if things were not so
bloody confusing and complicated…”

Snapping his head up, Orin
disappears a moment before someone knocks on my door lightly, and I
turn my head towards the sound, making no move to stand. After a
moment, however, I pull myself to my feet and walk on over, opening
the door.

“Figured you might be in here,” my friend comments, blue
eyes regarding me idly. I shrug a
shoulder; stepping aside to let him in before I shut the
door once more, watching him sit down on the edge of my mattress –
as there is not really another place to sit, except perhaps the
chair at my desk to my immediate right. My left has a dresser and a
door leading to a closet, the wall to my right a window overlooking
the port half of the stern, and the wall in front of me is home to
the very bed my companion is sitting on.

I sit back down where I was,
finding my coin and rolling it on my knuckles once more. Lucian
shifts so that his legs are to my right, touching my head only
just.

“Moping again?” he questions,
and I click my tongue in response; this elicits a laugh from the
man, and he shakes his head in disbelief. “You will be prematurely
white, I swear.”

“Joke’s on you,” I start idly, hitting his thigh with my
head by rolling it only slightly, “my hair is already pale enough,
so no one would notice. Unlike your hair, which will probably start
greying in a few years,
old
man
.”

In retaliation, he childishly
puts his hands on my chin, thumbs beneath my ear lobes, and pulls
his hands up to mess up the mop of pale blond hair on my head. I
protest loudly, batting his hands away even though he’s already
retracted them, and try in vain to place it back in some semblance
of order. Then, I turn and give him a glare.

“Nice bed head,” he chuckles,
and I twist around so that I am on my knees, the coin forgotten on
the wooden floor, and I glare at the man. When he reaches to mess
it up further, I lunge at him and try to wrestle his hands
together, trapping them.

Unfortunately for me, he was expecting this, and we end up
wrestling for dominance for a few minutes, my irritation quickly
fading as we struggle for the advantage. I find myself laughing
alongside him in the midst of the battle, petty taunts tossed back
and forth as we roll over my bed. One moment I am victorious, his
hands pinned over his head, but then he bucks up only enough to
push me off balance, using that to flip me over.

This childish tussle lasts for
a few minutes, his grin mirrored on my own face until finally, out
of breath, I surrender and declare defeat silently, pressed into
the sheets by a pair of hips on my stomach and hands pinning my
wrists. Laughing just as airily, he keeps his forehead against my
left shoulder as he tries to catch his breath. I stare at the
ceiling above us, the lights off so that only the moon illuminates
the room – as I hadn’t bothered turning them on before I came in
the room – and strands of his long hair, pulled back in a horsetail
at the nape of his neck, fall just shy of my chin and tickle the
skin of my neck with every shift.

“Looks like you win,” I laugh
lightly, tipping my head back in an attempt to get a bit more air.
“You have me completely at your mercy.”

Lifting his head up slightly,
the Irishman looks at me curiously. His eyebrows are furrowed and
his lips are set in a confused line, and as he thinks his answer
through he shifts his grip slightly on my wrists – one metal, one
flesh. My heart is still pounding in my ears from the contest.

“You know,” he begins, “during my travels, I have met many
a people of all sorts of characters, but none quite like you. You
are quite unique.”

I frown at him. Where is he
going with this, and where the bloody hell does it come from?

“Thank you…?” I reply, sort of
unsure whether not I should be thanking him. He laughs lightly,
shaking his head; probably not, then. “Why are you saying this
now?”

“Humour me, why don’t you?” he
questions, and after a moment I nod. My friend smiles a lopsided
grin, still trapping me to the sheets and refusing me an ounce of
freedom. I simply watch him, my heart pounding a staccato in my
ears. “Do you remember when we met?”

“Of course,” I shoot back,
relaxing my posture as I let myself recall those days. The moments
before I became a captain. “You were the only one to ask me what
made me different from my father.”

“I did not want to work for a man who was only the shadow
of another, trying to be someone he is not,” he admits, and I nod.
Understandable. “However, what you said piqued my curiosity. You
did not bother with modesty, but told the truth as it was without
any flair to it; you struck me as an honest man, letting us know
from the beginning that your goals were crazy.”

I click my tongue.

“Thank you for that; I feel a
lot better,” I reply, rolling my eyes, and he ignores my sass.

“That is why people chose to
follow you,” he counters, shaking his head. “You were probably out
of your mind, but you promised an adventure like none other;
furthermore, your father has been painted into a legend, almost a
god, and you struck us all as the exact opposite. You spoke to us,
and we saw a man. Not a god, not an automechanoid, not a dog of the
state. A man.”

I look at him, his words
registering.

“One of the things I enjoy doing is going throughout the
crew and asking them what they think of this experience thus far.
Never once did I hear one word spoken about you to suggest you did
something unjust,” he continues, “and have always admitted to
following you because of the same reasons I have told you. We
pirates tend to follow leaders who honest and just, and perhaps
only a little insane.

“Who you are the son of means
nothing to your crew, at the very least. To us, you are Kennedy,
not Cephas Kennedy Watkins II; forget that mouthful,” he sighs,
shaking his head again before looking at me. “You are a man, a
mortal man, and to many you are the best damn Captain we have ever
served under. We would all gladly die for you.”

“As much fun as the prospect of
you all dying for my sake sounds, I would rather you did not inform
me of this bit,” I protest, and he nods, conceding. “Your lives are
not mine to dispose of, and should I be able I would rather never
have to discipline any of you the way I needed to be.”

This pulls back Lucian’s
curiosity, and I sigh, closing my eyes as I recount the tale; as if
in response to this, my scars start burning idly.

“You recall that stunt I did with the
Calypso
?”
I question, and I hear him shift slightly, probably nodding.
“Nineteen lashes, if memory serves me correctly, with a
cat-‘o-nine-tails, on my back. I blacked out from the
pain.”

When I open my eyes, I see his
wide ones. I never really told him much about the whipping; I
suppose you can call it my shame.

“You saved their lives,
though,” he breathes, and the scent of tea and leather washes over
me again. I nod, unable to help myself from taking a breath to try
and trap the scent in my nose for a little while. “Surely that
would constitute a pardon…?”

“Not in Captain Davis’ eyes,” I counter, smiling sadly. His
expression shifts to one similar to pain. “To be honest, I deserved
the punishment and insisted on it, despite his reluctance. I could
have easily persuaded him to do otherwise, but I did not. I suppose
I felt, somewhere inside me, that the punishment was just cause for
all the pain I have caused and the…
thing
I have become
as a result.”

I turn my head towards the
left, looking to my hand trapped beneath his grip.

“No one hates what I am more than I do,” I admit, and with
a shaking, tremulous breath I close my eyes again, screwing them as
tight as possible to bite back the self-hating tears. I have made
it a habit to never cry, and I do not plan on breaking it
now.

Yet… it is so easy to be myself
around him.

I feel the weight of his head
press down on my shoulder, his hair tickling my skin, and he
sighs.

“One day,” he begins, pulling
his head back up to meet my eyes, and I find myself trapped in that
bright blue gaze. My heart, which had stilled to a calm rhythm,
starts pounding once more and my mouth goes dry. “I will prove to
you that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

I laugh dryly, the
self-loathing thick in the sound.

“Good luck,” I scoff, shaking my head but unable to look
away from those eyes
they are
so blue
, “I am afraid you
will need it.”

“I do not need it,” he shoots
back, worrying his lower lip a moment. Then, taking a breath as if
mentally preparing himself, he continues, “I have
determination.”

Then, just when I think he is
releasing me at last, he does something completely unexpected.
Something that, should anyone see, would have a mob at my door
ready to burn me at the stake, my mother dragging me to church and
the entire congregate praying the demon away. Holy water thrown on
me, prayers to expel Satan from within me, and others out for my
blood.

I have seen it happen; it is a terrifying experience, and
no matter how much I tried looking away, I was always forced to
watch, to see the punishments for the sinners.

He presses his lips against my
own.

Naturally, growing up in a
hyper-Christian home, my driven reaction – the one drilled into me
by priests and teachers and peers and my mother – is to push the
man away. To fight him, shove him off, and drive him away.

However, this is not London. This is not her home sitting
by the church, those sets of walls keeping the truth away from the
world. This is not the Force and its strict rules, sleeping
quarters so small it was not uncommon to accidentally roll onto
another boy’s bed. This is not the Fleet, a hierarchical system
where the socially prestigious reign supreme, buying ranks from
superiors and lording over those who either can’t afford to do so
or prefer to work for that prestige.

This is the
Alitis,
twenty
thousand feet above the earth. This is the same room one of my
ancestors saw the nights in, however long they were. This is my
friend, my companion, who has seen me at my weakest and whom I see
and always think of
home
somewhere in my
mind.

This is my life, and I will do
with it what the bloody hell I want.

So I return the kiss. My hands are useless at my sides,
held down, but I still reciprocate. Clearly that startles him, but
not for long, and once my hands are released the first thing I do
is pull the leather thong holding his hair together free, so I can
hold his head and dig my fingers into the dark locks.