bonaparte (part i)
bonaparte (part i)
22.7.09
For TDF's SOSS Challenge - Prompt: 'heatwave''
The numbers, when added and checked thrice, told them they had been travelling for what Captain reckoned was a very long time, but any fool could’ve told you that in more precise terms. As it was, they did not check the numbers that often anymore, nor did they care for absolute accuracy in any sense of the term. The stars changed every day, and surely that said more than enough.
Captain remembered most about where they’d wandered from, which is why Grey would find him up nights crying sometimes mumbling about some bad dream about a good place, somewhere he’d long since forgotten the name of. Space had done them good, Grey figured - were this a clean, scrupulously neat laboratory or a hospital instead of a small ship heading nowhere, they’d be diagnosed with the amnesia he’d seen in countless other poor grunt-work astronauts starved for something other than recycled oxygen for sure, but they weren’t in either of those places and he hadn’t the heart nor the motivation to discuss psychology with the other two. We don’t need a doctor here, Kit would scoff, where’ve you been, but Kit was overtly melodramatic and wouldn’t care if he died tomorrow and so Grey didn’t much mind what he said.
They turned off most of the ship’s power at night even though they were the only ones in a hundred million miles who cared about things like night and day. Grey could not quite recall a proper day, nor did the words Captain used like ‘sunrise’ and ‘morning’ mean a great deal anymore, but he was quite sure that he preferred day to night and always had, no question about it. Day was reassuring and meant getting things done - now, lost in the dark with the other two scattered in restless sleep on other parts of the ship, things felt as desolate as they were. The idea made Grey’s mouth tighten irritably as he crawled through the less-travelled maintenance passage towards the stern. He was beginning to sound like Kit even to himself.
Captain slept in a little room towards the stern, and Grey made a point of poking his head in to check on him on his way past. Being a doctor, or having been a proper one once, perhaps, he had a long-bred, honest instinct for looking after people despite gruff claims to the contrary, and Captain hadn’t been doing terribly grand lately. He wasn’t quite like Kit or Grey in that his limbs were long and frail and his heart made a different sound when it beat and his ash-blue eyes were a curious bent shape, making it hard to say what exactly was ailing him, but as far as Grey knew they were all from the same place and so it was frustrating, really, that he couldn’t place exactly what was wrong with him. Lately he’d been sleeping longer hours and moving slower than usual, but of course lately, like everything else, was no real and good indication of time. Grey listened for a bit, counting the deep, quiet breaths in the dark before moving on, reassured. He’d get better on his own, more likely than not. Captain knew more than him and Kit put together; he’d pull through.
There were some constants in the stars tonight, Grey found when he’d reached the window in the stern. Their ship was an ugly little thing with the name Bonaparte stamped on the engines and the battered few plates that survived in the kitchen, but if there was any good thing about her, it was this particular view. This was Grey’s particular little spot, and the faint, cold light that greeted him as he clambered awkwardly out of the shaft got a small grin out of him regardless of the cold and the cramped space. He settled down by the window with his knees tucked to his chest and his boots crossed one over the other, his brown gaze noting the constellations he’d seen just the night before. They’d hung around almost long enough to be acquaintances, then, and although Kit would probably grumble about an unexpected variation in speed or something equally mechanically obscure and similar, Grey found he didn’t mind something outside the ship being a familiar sight. He leaned close enough to the window to fog the surface, tracing a particularly bright cluster of stars with a finger before leaning back to study it. A damn fine sight, even considering the number of stars he’d seen since they’d left wherever it was they’d come from. White and blue and a few winks of red, here and there - and he’d used to know what that meant, even, certain colours denoting certain things about the gas make-ups of particular stars, but now it was just nice to look at and that was all right. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked softly, tilting his head and then snorting with laughter at himself. None of them had gone mad yet, but perhaps now he’d have to make an exception.
When he half-closed his eyes, Grey found, the outline he’d drawn on the clear surface looked a bit like a mouth - a few more dashes with a casual fingertip drew in crude eyes, although after taking a moment to look at them, he sketched over the lines again, adding eyebrows and pupils so there was more than a blank shape staring back. The resulting face seemed a bit too grotesque in a way he vaguely knew other people weren’t supposed to look, the mouth stretched open a little too wide, the eyes glaring stupidly in opposite directions. Never were much of an artist, were you, he thought wryly, but a small nagging compulsiveness made him shift his weight onto his coveralled knees and bend in close to fix the corners of the mouth.
“What’re you doing?” Kit asked close behind him, and although the sound in itself was unexpected, Grey and the other two as well, he reckoned, were far too used to one another to flinch or jump or even be particularly surprised. It saved a lot of bumped heads and dropped fragile things, but, Grey supposed, he wouldn’t mind a surprise once and a while. Kit was of the grim, unshakeable opinion that the ship was soul-crushingly dull, and while that wasn’t entirely true, things rarely changed, and he had some old long-held notion that the world was supposed to.
Kit peered over his shoulder, his lip curling sceptically at what was fading against the stars on the window. “Feeling a little lonely, are we?” he asked dryly, his tone turning Grey to face him. The space wasn’t big enough for the two of them, not really, but Kit didn’t care and really it didn’t matter very much anyway so they sat with their feet tangled together, Grey glaring with mild irritation at having being caught.
Kit with his narrow sharp face and copper hair and hard amber eyes might’ve been handsome if Grey could think of more than a few people to compare the word to - certainly he was young, young enough that him being on this ship still stood out as being unusual, although neither of them could quite remember why. Captain said it was because he was damned intelligent, smart enough to pilot and calculate his way out of anything, but most of the time Grey thought that was about as useful as having a doctor aboard. He shrugged at him. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He did not ask Kit why he wasn’t in bed because he’d never been one to keep usual hours, but this answer seemed to satisfy him for the moment. Grey followed his musing gaze over his own shoulder to the star cluster around which he’d been doodling. “Quite a night,” he remarked sardonically. “Is that a particularly large nebula I spy? How astoundingly unprecedented.”
“It’s just something to look at, Kit.”
Kit sneered bad-temperedly at this, stretching the pale thin fingers of his left hand out in front of him. He looked up after a brief pause, something he’d remembered flickering into his gaze. “We’ll be passing a planet soon.”
“How do you know?”
“I was messing about with the helm controls - there was something on a screen about it. ” He yawned, a slow, deliberate movement. “I hadn’t been up there in…a while.” They exchanged resigned glances at his lack of ability to come up with a frame of time - understandable, an bothersome fact of life - and then it was passed over and gone.
They talked for a bit about things the way they did - not real small talk, exactly, no how-was-your-day so much as what would we do were we anywhere else. This kind of talking was the only time Grey saw Kit enjoy pretending; he’d smile, sometimes, a rare genuine thing that tugged at the corners of his lips and made him duck his head with almost-embarrassment, and they’d make up little things about life on different ships or perhaps even different planets, although it was a struggle to properly remember one as it was. Most times, it was easier to make things up, and for a stretch of time back however long ago it’d been, Kit and Grey had bragged about memories that they were half-sure were theirs, nudging ribs and trying to outdo the other until Captain had gotten fed up with the noise and snapped in a rare show of temper that they’d invented most of it. Grey didn’t know how much exactly Captain remembered, but certainly it was more than either he or Kit, so they had shut up and gone about things a little put out and unwilling to guess anymore. Now it was only just a silly game, but, as it was, probably both of them would like to think otherwise, Grey reckoned.
Kit fell asleep at some point, and the constellations shifted just enough through the window to give Grey the vague suspicion that they were moving as he watched through half-closed eyes. Physically speaking, they were travelling at what he supposed was a fast rate, fast like when the lights snapped off at the end of the day or a bullet slammed out the barrel a gun, but space was a big place and so fast seemed to be a dreamy, unchanging drift conducted by the steady hum of the engine. Kit had shut the engine down last week to do some work and they’d really been drifting then - there’d been such a dull quiet that Grey’s ears had started to ring, like they, in some perverse psychosomatic way, had needed something to listen to in the place of the ship driving them steadily nowhere.
He was tuned in to that particular comforting cadence, one ear resting against the hull to hear the familiar engine pulse, when something caught and jumped just enough to sit him up straighter and wake Kit all by itself. His companion blinked a little, disoriented, before rising into a crouch and shuffling over with his dark eyes on the window. “The planet,” he said, nodding. “Any second now.”
The ship jumped again, a little hop-skip, and suddenly Grey realised he wasn’t as nearly as cold as he’d been when he’d sat down. The planet came into abrupt view below, a massive expanse of black mass that from their vantage point seemed for a dizzying moment to be the ground - the thought tore a strangled little laugh from Grey’s throat, ground, where’d he gotten that word, of all godforsaken things to think - and both of them drew back a bit as the almost-palpable heat from below touched their faces. Red heat-smudged lines sliced across the planet’s surface, intersecting to form raw gaping pools that smouldered even from where they sat in their cold metal orbit.
“Volcanoes,” Kit rasped belatedly. Grey glanced over to look at him - wide light eyes, an odd hard grip to the slight ledge at the base of the window.
“It’s uninhabited, then.”
It was a stupid question to ask, Grey knew as soon as he’d done it, and of course if it had been inhabited, a place where people lived, Kit would’ve known long before and would’ve woken the whole ship, turned on every light and sprinted giddy like neither Grey nor Captain had seen him to take them down, down, to land. But of course that wasn’t the case, of course, and of course Grey could barely even grasp at the imagining of such a thing in the first place. Kit turned his head abruptly to look at him, something between disappointment and hurt in his stare, and then the planet was past and shrinking at a speed that startled Grey and made him put a hand down to steady himself. The two watched, a little startled by their mutual dismay.
“Captain would’ve wanted to see it,” Grey acknowledged after a long moment. “He’ll be upset we didn’t wake him.”
Kit shrugged, his sort of mocking bitterness in his half-grimace. “Only something to look at, remember?”
22.7.09
For TDF's SOSS Challenge - Prompt: 'heatwave''
The numbers, when added and checked thrice, told them they had been travelling for what Captain reckoned was a very long time, but any fool could’ve told you that in more precise terms. As it was, they did not check the numbers that often anymore, nor did they care for absolute accuracy in any sense of the term. The stars changed every day, and surely that said more than enough.
Captain remembered most about where they’d wandered from, which is why Grey would find him up nights crying sometimes mumbling about some bad dream about a good place, somewhere he’d long since forgotten the name of. Space had done them good, Grey figured - were this a clean, scrupulously neat laboratory or a hospital instead of a small ship heading nowhere, they’d be diagnosed with the amnesia he’d seen in countless other poor grunt-work astronauts starved for something other than recycled oxygen for sure, but they weren’t in either of those places and he hadn’t the heart nor the motivation to discuss psychology with the other two. We don’t need a doctor here, Kit would scoff, where’ve you been, but Kit was overtly melodramatic and wouldn’t care if he died tomorrow and so Grey didn’t much mind what he said.
They turned off most of the ship’s power at night even though they were the only ones in a hundred million miles who cared about things like night and day. Grey could not quite recall a proper day, nor did the words Captain used like ‘sunrise’ and ‘morning’ mean a great deal anymore, but he was quite sure that he preferred day to night and always had, no question about it. Day was reassuring and meant getting things done - now, lost in the dark with the other two scattered in restless sleep on other parts of the ship, things felt as desolate as they were. The idea made Grey’s mouth tighten irritably as he crawled through the less-travelled maintenance passage towards the stern. He was beginning to sound like Kit even to himself.
Captain slept in a little room towards the stern, and Grey made a point of poking his head in to check on him on his way past. Being a doctor, or having been a proper one once, perhaps, he had a long-bred, honest instinct for looking after people despite gruff claims to the contrary, and Captain hadn’t been doing terribly grand lately. He wasn’t quite like Kit or Grey in that his limbs were long and frail and his heart made a different sound when it beat and his ash-blue eyes were a curious bent shape, making it hard to say what exactly was ailing him, but as far as Grey knew they were all from the same place and so it was frustrating, really, that he couldn’t place exactly what was wrong with him. Lately he’d been sleeping longer hours and moving slower than usual, but of course lately, like everything else, was no real and good indication of time. Grey listened for a bit, counting the deep, quiet breaths in the dark before moving on, reassured. He’d get better on his own, more likely than not. Captain knew more than him and Kit put together; he’d pull through.
There were some constants in the stars tonight, Grey found when he’d reached the window in the stern. Their ship was an ugly little thing with the name Bonaparte stamped on the engines and the battered few plates that survived in the kitchen, but if there was any good thing about her, it was this particular view. This was Grey’s particular little spot, and the faint, cold light that greeted him as he clambered awkwardly out of the shaft got a small grin out of him regardless of the cold and the cramped space. He settled down by the window with his knees tucked to his chest and his boots crossed one over the other, his brown gaze noting the constellations he’d seen just the night before. They’d hung around almost long enough to be acquaintances, then, and although Kit would probably grumble about an unexpected variation in speed or something equally mechanically obscure and similar, Grey found he didn’t mind something outside the ship being a familiar sight. He leaned close enough to the window to fog the surface, tracing a particularly bright cluster of stars with a finger before leaning back to study it. A damn fine sight, even considering the number of stars he’d seen since they’d left wherever it was they’d come from. White and blue and a few winks of red, here and there - and he’d used to know what that meant, even, certain colours denoting certain things about the gas make-ups of particular stars, but now it was just nice to look at and that was all right. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked softly, tilting his head and then snorting with laughter at himself. None of them had gone mad yet, but perhaps now he’d have to make an exception.
When he half-closed his eyes, Grey found, the outline he’d drawn on the clear surface looked a bit like a mouth - a few more dashes with a casual fingertip drew in crude eyes, although after taking a moment to look at them, he sketched over the lines again, adding eyebrows and pupils so there was more than a blank shape staring back. The resulting face seemed a bit too grotesque in a way he vaguely knew other people weren’t supposed to look, the mouth stretched open a little too wide, the eyes glaring stupidly in opposite directions. Never were much of an artist, were you, he thought wryly, but a small nagging compulsiveness made him shift his weight onto his coveralled knees and bend in close to fix the corners of the mouth.
“What’re you doing?” Kit asked close behind him, and although the sound in itself was unexpected, Grey and the other two as well, he reckoned, were far too used to one another to flinch or jump or even be particularly surprised. It saved a lot of bumped heads and dropped fragile things, but, Grey supposed, he wouldn’t mind a surprise once and a while. Kit was of the grim, unshakeable opinion that the ship was soul-crushingly dull, and while that wasn’t entirely true, things rarely changed, and he had some old long-held notion that the world was supposed to.
Kit peered over his shoulder, his lip curling sceptically at what was fading against the stars on the window. “Feeling a little lonely, are we?” he asked dryly, his tone turning Grey to face him. The space wasn’t big enough for the two of them, not really, but Kit didn’t care and really it didn’t matter very much anyway so they sat with their feet tangled together, Grey glaring with mild irritation at having being caught.
Kit with his narrow sharp face and copper hair and hard amber eyes might’ve been handsome if Grey could think of more than a few people to compare the word to - certainly he was young, young enough that him being on this ship still stood out as being unusual, although neither of them could quite remember why. Captain said it was because he was damned intelligent, smart enough to pilot and calculate his way out of anything, but most of the time Grey thought that was about as useful as having a doctor aboard. He shrugged at him. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He did not ask Kit why he wasn’t in bed because he’d never been one to keep usual hours, but this answer seemed to satisfy him for the moment. Grey followed his musing gaze over his own shoulder to the star cluster around which he’d been doodling. “Quite a night,” he remarked sardonically. “Is that a particularly large nebula I spy? How astoundingly unprecedented.”
“It’s just something to look at, Kit.”
Kit sneered bad-temperedly at this, stretching the pale thin fingers of his left hand out in front of him. He looked up after a brief pause, something he’d remembered flickering into his gaze. “We’ll be passing a planet soon.”
“How do you know?”
“I was messing about with the helm controls - there was something on a screen about it. ” He yawned, a slow, deliberate movement. “I hadn’t been up there in…a while.” They exchanged resigned glances at his lack of ability to come up with a frame of time - understandable, an bothersome fact of life - and then it was passed over and gone.
They talked for a bit about things the way they did - not real small talk, exactly, no how-was-your-day so much as what would we do were we anywhere else. This kind of talking was the only time Grey saw Kit enjoy pretending; he’d smile, sometimes, a rare genuine thing that tugged at the corners of his lips and made him duck his head with almost-embarrassment, and they’d make up little things about life on different ships or perhaps even different planets, although it was a struggle to properly remember one as it was. Most times, it was easier to make things up, and for a stretch of time back however long ago it’d been, Kit and Grey had bragged about memories that they were half-sure were theirs, nudging ribs and trying to outdo the other until Captain had gotten fed up with the noise and snapped in a rare show of temper that they’d invented most of it. Grey didn’t know how much exactly Captain remembered, but certainly it was more than either he or Kit, so they had shut up and gone about things a little put out and unwilling to guess anymore. Now it was only just a silly game, but, as it was, probably both of them would like to think otherwise, Grey reckoned.
Kit fell asleep at some point, and the constellations shifted just enough through the window to give Grey the vague suspicion that they were moving as he watched through half-closed eyes. Physically speaking, they were travelling at what he supposed was a fast rate, fast like when the lights snapped off at the end of the day or a bullet slammed out the barrel a gun, but space was a big place and so fast seemed to be a dreamy, unchanging drift conducted by the steady hum of the engine. Kit had shut the engine down last week to do some work and they’d really been drifting then - there’d been such a dull quiet that Grey’s ears had started to ring, like they, in some perverse psychosomatic way, had needed something to listen to in the place of the ship driving them steadily nowhere.
He was tuned in to that particular comforting cadence, one ear resting against the hull to hear the familiar engine pulse, when something caught and jumped just enough to sit him up straighter and wake Kit all by itself. His companion blinked a little, disoriented, before rising into a crouch and shuffling over with his dark eyes on the window. “The planet,” he said, nodding. “Any second now.”
The ship jumped again, a little hop-skip, and suddenly Grey realised he wasn’t as nearly as cold as he’d been when he’d sat down. The planet came into abrupt view below, a massive expanse of black mass that from their vantage point seemed for a dizzying moment to be the ground - the thought tore a strangled little laugh from Grey’s throat, ground, where’d he gotten that word, of all godforsaken things to think - and both of them drew back a bit as the almost-palpable heat from below touched their faces. Red heat-smudged lines sliced across the planet’s surface, intersecting to form raw gaping pools that smouldered even from where they sat in their cold metal orbit.
“Volcanoes,” Kit rasped belatedly. Grey glanced over to look at him - wide light eyes, an odd hard grip to the slight ledge at the base of the window.
“It’s uninhabited, then.”
It was a stupid question to ask, Grey knew as soon as he’d done it, and of course if it had been inhabited, a place where people lived, Kit would’ve known long before and would’ve woken the whole ship, turned on every light and sprinted giddy like neither Grey nor Captain had seen him to take them down, down, to land. But of course that wasn’t the case, of course, and of course Grey could barely even grasp at the imagining of such a thing in the first place. Kit turned his head abruptly to look at him, something between disappointment and hurt in his stare, and then the planet was past and shrinking at a speed that startled Grey and made him put a hand down to steady himself. The two watched, a little startled by their mutual dismay.
“Captain would’ve wanted to see it,” Grey acknowledged after a long moment. “He’ll be upset we didn’t wake him.”
Kit shrugged, his sort of mocking bitterness in his half-grimace. “Only something to look at, remember?”