Tokens for the upcoming sequel to Weddingquest: Patricidequest‼️ featuring @asharaks's spooky fey warlock Lathe, my annoying and obnoxious fighterboy Kin, @durgewyll's uptight and having-a-bad-time paladin Prudence, @arkadys's morose horsey cleric Mark, and @baronmpontmercy's musical automaton bard Carillon (we're going to kill his dad) (Kin is unreasonably excited about it)
And of course, the premarital divorcees of Weddingquest! @ikarons's Ophelia and Maxim! <3
for @arkadys (who is never on tumblr lol) from this ask game (which i reblogged Last Year and then never finished doing all my prompts for) for marsmikhael spirates (you all know about spirates!)
A very long time ago, Mars took him to Mary’s door.
It was Mars who found her, Mars who fixed him, even back then — not an act of care but self-preservation, tipping the scales in her favour, same as every other Lethe bottom-feeder. They didn’t know each-other then. He was not her captain. He was a man with a ship who’d convinced her to leave behind everyone who’d ever loved her for him, and she (who would one day be his lodestone), a deserter with the experience and the secondhand contacts to populate it. Quite a pair, the two of them, then: corpse and carrion-crow, feasting on his flesh. From another angle: the dead man and the scaffold holding him up.
Some things don’t change. Some things just are.
Still, it went like this: that first flight, and it was a flight — desperate, a skeleton crew hurled into the night on a stolen ship with rival scavengers on their heels and their once-engineer still stitching her AI back together— this one would not survive this journey. Not knowing where to aim but away, getting away, no navigator yet but the two of them throwing out estimates half-remembered with half an AI to assist, in what felt a lot like freefall, and halfway back to Lethe, it happened:
your body is not your body
your hands are not your hands
and the fractious, fragmentary world spun loose of its orbit
And Mars, scalpel, gunsight, Port Lethe opportunist who had followed him for the promise of his dreamed future, looked at him with her flint-dark eyes, penetrating so he could see the calculation behind them, and bet on him.
It’s hard on her, he knows. Holding up the world when his knees buckle. Biting her tongue and biding her time when he falters, lockstep with him in front of the crew, raising her voice only in the relative privacy of his quarters. Picking up his slack anyway.
Dragging him to Mary’s, running the ship in his absence. Meridian, Betsy, second love; even now, coming out of it, tongue thick in his mouth and watching the world lag around him as he struggles to sit, he sees her running the numbers, calculating. What can we afford to lose? How much can we ask the crew to endure? Braids hanging over her arm, hiding her bruise-dark exhaustion, what he puts her through. She doesn’t look up as he stands (weak as a newborn foal); she doesn’t have to. Like his own body, he feels her.
“Mars,” he says, soft — or, trying for soft, because his voice comes out rough, scraping his throat. He swallows. “Fuck. I’ll handle it.”
“You will not.” She looks up. Eyes sharp, the scar stark beneath. “You can’t.”
(I know you, I know you, I know you. It burns.)
“I’m fine,” he insists, coming up beside her, brushing her braids back behind her shoulders; she stiffens, then sinks, a minor, hard-won victory. “Mars.”
“Mikhael.”
There’s no day, out here, flung between the stars, no night. (And she got you through the launch, sailed you how far from Port, to the comfort of the dark, and you insensate through all of it?) They live in shifts, captain and quartermaster relieving each-other, giving each-other space to rest.
Except Captain is broken. And Quartermaster, she—
“I’m fine,” he says, again. Army-boy grin, charm from another life. Head spinning. She’s unconvinced — convince her. “I have it— fuck. It’s under control.”
She opens her mouth. Same old argument, running in circles, and all the while his limbs drag and his head pounds and (look at your hands) he’s split his knuckles again, and she’ll press her advantage as she always does, when it’s just the two of them— but she doesn’t. All she does is click her tongue and look away. Scalpel-sharp Mars, eschewing sentiment even in the dark.
“We can’t go on like this,” she says. Quiet but never soft. But her eyes are glassy (you live in shifts, and how many has she lived, back-to-back-to-back, to cover for you), and her tongue is heavy, flattens the syllables. Mikhael is a person held together by stitches tied poorly too flush to the skin. Mars has been fixing the damage for too long.
Here only, in the quiet of his own quarters with what fraction of the crew can be awake and working, ear cocked to the silence of the comms that promises no new catastrophe, no new need: he hitches himself onto the desk, legs across hers, and leans in as she looks up. Here only, he presses this corpse’s lips between her brows. She stares at him, uncomprehending.
“It’s under control,” he repeats, making up for confidence with vehemence. “Fuck, Mars. Sleep here if you want, but sleep.”
For a long moment, she doesn’t even blink. The black of her eyes, swallowing him. Then: she stands.
“Be in the med bay in an hour,” she says, hand on his shoulder, and stalks out of the room.
george r.r. martin, a storm of swords. frankenstein (2025). george r.r. martin, a clash of kings. george r.r. martin, a feast for crows. george r.r. martin, a dance with dragons.
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
2087
izzy806
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
