[Wild Roses] before the wars
Title: play the hand dealt
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Niamh, Aodh
Prompt: 89C "wealth"
Word Count: 691
Notes: Follows from stacking the deck. First time I've written her in first, sketchy, and I still don't know what on earth she's up to.
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Having my cousin aboard for navigator was stranger than I'd expected. I'd known it was going to be different than having any of the fleet's navigators aboard, but there was knowing that and then there was realising that I couldn't follow his calculations the way I always checked the navigators' work. I wasn't one, because I didn't need to be, let alone wanted to be a chart-captain, but any of us should be able to follow a route or lay out a chart, and I'm no exception to that rule.
But him--he'd go someplace else in his head, or close his eyes for really complex twists, then call out the changes. No paper, no chart, nothin' outside the confines of his head for me to look over or argue about. Because, came down to the line, my cousin wasn't a navigator; hadn't been trained as one, wasn't certified as one, and sure didn't chart his equations out on paper or in visible tangents in his head.
It'd drive me mad, if he were posted to me, because what happens when your walking map goes overboard or decides he likes someone else's ship better than yours? Bad things, that's what, and there's a reason all those stories are in the archives instead of current. But he was doing me a winter-kissed favour, on my asking, and for one run, I could give over.
Kept me on my toes, though, since he liked to go to sleep in bizarre places and if he got good and bored and left, I'd lose a bet to my brother and be lost somewhere in the blue besides. Not my idea of a good time, but I'd known that going in and hadn't bothered keying him the navigator's quarters when he came aboard, just gave him free run of my own cabin and however much of my bed he'd claim and defend for his own when we were both exhausted. That brilliant decision earned me charts and books I couldn't read scattered all over my cabin and surprisingly icy feet on my calves in the middle of the night. The once he'd tried to use my breasts as a heatpack for his hands had left me sitting up in bed, clutching my chest protectively as I glared, and him experimentally checking to see if his nose was actually broken or just bruised, laughing ruefully the while.
My crew thought--and not for bad reasons--that we were lovers, and sometimes we were, but it wasn't lovers' arguments that let my gunners find him asleep behind a stack of cannonballs, or any of the other places he fetched up. We still weren't sure whose coat he'd been wearing when they found him in the lookout's nest atop the mainmast. Hadn't been mine, and it'd disappeared between the yard-dancer waking him up and him fetching up in my bed and stealing all the covers, so all we had to judge by was memory. I smelled like the smoke from his cigarettes, even if I never found burned-down ends in my cabin, and I kept waking up with my hair in more complex braids than I'd gone to sleep in.
There was nothing to do about that--or any of the random things that cropped up that hadn't been on either of the manifests--but laugh, and I did, because I'd brought the mage aboard of my own volition, and Gideon still didn't remember what happened the last time me and my cousin ganged up together. Wasn't my fault he hadn't been around for that, and that he didn't like Gio enough to ask for stories about what happened when he was gone.
I'll take cat's-cradles in my bedclothes, and shirts I don't recognise in my laundry that are far too big for him, and nearly killing myself tripping over a set of boots abandoned between the door and the bed, if it means I've got my cousin for backup on any game I'm playing.
The trick is remembering that right after I've barked both my shins on the desk because he left what might as well be a booby trap on my floor.
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Niamh, Aodh
Prompt: 89C "wealth"
Word Count: 691
Notes: Follows from stacking the deck. First time I've written her in first, sketchy, and I still don't know what on earth she's up to.
---------
Having my cousin aboard for navigator was stranger than I'd expected. I'd known it was going to be different than having any of the fleet's navigators aboard, but there was knowing that and then there was realising that I couldn't follow his calculations the way I always checked the navigators' work. I wasn't one, because I didn't need to be, let alone wanted to be a chart-captain, but any of us should be able to follow a route or lay out a chart, and I'm no exception to that rule.
But him--he'd go someplace else in his head, or close his eyes for really complex twists, then call out the changes. No paper, no chart, nothin' outside the confines of his head for me to look over or argue about. Because, came down to the line, my cousin wasn't a navigator; hadn't been trained as one, wasn't certified as one, and sure didn't chart his equations out on paper or in visible tangents in his head.
It'd drive me mad, if he were posted to me, because what happens when your walking map goes overboard or decides he likes someone else's ship better than yours? Bad things, that's what, and there's a reason all those stories are in the archives instead of current. But he was doing me a winter-kissed favour, on my asking, and for one run, I could give over.
Kept me on my toes, though, since he liked to go to sleep in bizarre places and if he got good and bored and left, I'd lose a bet to my brother and be lost somewhere in the blue besides. Not my idea of a good time, but I'd known that going in and hadn't bothered keying him the navigator's quarters when he came aboard, just gave him free run of my own cabin and however much of my bed he'd claim and defend for his own when we were both exhausted. That brilliant decision earned me charts and books I couldn't read scattered all over my cabin and surprisingly icy feet on my calves in the middle of the night. The once he'd tried to use my breasts as a heatpack for his hands had left me sitting up in bed, clutching my chest protectively as I glared, and him experimentally checking to see if his nose was actually broken or just bruised, laughing ruefully the while.
My crew thought--and not for bad reasons--that we were lovers, and sometimes we were, but it wasn't lovers' arguments that let my gunners find him asleep behind a stack of cannonballs, or any of the other places he fetched up. We still weren't sure whose coat he'd been wearing when they found him in the lookout's nest atop the mainmast. Hadn't been mine, and it'd disappeared between the yard-dancer waking him up and him fetching up in my bed and stealing all the covers, so all we had to judge by was memory. I smelled like the smoke from his cigarettes, even if I never found burned-down ends in my cabin, and I kept waking up with my hair in more complex braids than I'd gone to sleep in.
There was nothing to do about that--or any of the random things that cropped up that hadn't been on either of the manifests--but laugh, and I did, because I'd brought the mage aboard of my own volition, and Gideon still didn't remember what happened the last time me and my cousin ganged up together. Wasn't my fault he hadn't been around for that, and that he didn't like Gio enough to ask for stories about what happened when he was gone.
I'll take cat's-cradles in my bedclothes, and shirts I don't recognise in my laundry that are far too big for him, and nearly killing myself tripping over a set of boots abandoned between the door and the bed, if it means I've got my cousin for backup on any game I'm playing.
The trick is remembering that right after I've barked both my shins on the desk because he left what might as well be a booby trap on my floor.