In the engine room, there were no faces. Well, other than the ones she’d gotten to know during their mad three-hour dash to save a sinking-
No. Not a sinking ship, but the people who’d jumped from it, who’d gotten into its boats, who’d found purchase on chests and doors and a piano lid.
She heard the stories; she didn’t want to, but even down here, in the perpetual dark and heat among the Carpathia’s tortured engines, she couldn’t help but hear them, in snatches and pieces whenever she didn’t scarper fast enough or had to stay because repairing the engines was her job now.
And then the rumor reached her - not through Steve, the engine room’s second mate and only person she willingly spoke to; not through Pete, the stoker who spoke to everybody willing or not, but through the boss himself, Master Engineer Caturanga, who told her to investigate it.
“I’m not good with people,” she protested. “Ask someone else. Anybody else. Why would you send me?”
“You know when an engine is off from the way it sounds,” he said. “You are able to hear the groan of metal stressed to its limit.”
“Yes,” she replied, secure in her knowledge, all of three days old now, that Caturanga didn’t appreciate false modesty. He wouldn’t have let her near his engines if he didn’t think her talents had merit - and she had helped him wrestle out of those engines two and a half more knots than the ship’s nominal top speed. It was a feat, even if no one would ever know it had been her feat. It wasn’t that she needed the patent for the sensor she’d rigged up; in fact Caturanga was welcome to it. It was the fact that no one would believe that she had more claim to it than he. And that, perhaps, was an explanation for her surliness when she said, “So?”
He gave her one of his serene smiles. “Rumor of hauntings are, in my experience, the sound of people stressed to their limit. If you want to get anywhere in your endeavors, you need to listen for those sounds too, not just engines.”
She barely refrained from rolling her eyes. “I’m just the daughter,” she said, almost without rancor. “The girl. My endeavors won’t get off the ground in the first place; why should I start listening for people noises?”
“Trust me.” His smile grew impish; truly an odd sight, but no longer an unfamiliar one. “Trust me, and I promise you in ten years you will have a company, patents, inventions all your own, despite your sex.”
She took a deep, aggravated breath - it was no use arguing with him when he made grand statements like that. “Alright,” she groused. “People noises.”
She did roll her eyes when she left the tiny little enclosure he called his ‘office’.
In the engine room, there were no faces. No little girls with black hair and white skin and hazel eyes and oh so rosy cheeks, happy to have been saved from the cold, cold water and bouncing back with the nonchalance inherent in children who hadn’t yet learned the difference between everyday calamity (no cookies left in the jar) and utterly unprecedented catastrophy (unsinkable ships running into icebergs).
No little girls with black hair and a soot-blackened dress and fire and flames and-
No little girls, period.
The upper decks were full of them, and that’s why Helena didn’t go there anymore. She took her meals in the engine room, she slept in the engine room, she used the engine room’s head. Lord knew what her parents thought where she’d gotten to - she refused to take a step out of her new realm, because everywhere past its borders were little girls, or little boys, or older girls and boys, or mothers and fathers or lovers and spouses, and she couldn’t handle their stories. Not the ones with the sad endings, not the ones with the happy endings. Even Pete had given up trying to tell her about ‘miraculous saves’ and ‘happy reunions’ and ‘heartwarming’ anything.
And now she, apparently, needed to listen for ‘people noises’. Which meant talking to people - why Caturanga thought that she was a good candidate was beyond her, but the man had let her near his engines, so she probably owed him. And so she tried.
A rumor of a ghost. The engine room was haunted. Things were going missing - tools, clothes, food, a full bar of soap, miss!
Helena tried very hard not to scoff. That wasn’t a ghost, she wanted to say, that was a goddamn stowaway. But sailors were a superstitious lot, weren’t they? A ghost, indeed.
Half an hour in, and Helena had heard all she had the fortitude to hear other people say on a good day. She thanked the non-Pete stoker she’d been talking to and took herself elsewhere, ambulating through this space of steam and fire and grease and sweat, keeping out of the way of people doing their jobs, taking in details such as dead angles, gaps of activity in the various engine room routines, and places that no one went to.
She found her ‘ghost’ an hour later.
“Please don’t make me leave,” the ghost gasped upon discovery.
It was not a little girl. Granted. It was, in fact, a young woman, but she had white skin and cheeks flushed pink and eyes that were glossy and hazel, and any one of these would have been too much, but all three? It didn’t matter her age, or that her hair was - what Helena could see among the grease and dirt - some color that was not black. She was not a ghost, she was a story with either a happy ending or a sad ending, and Helena couldn’t bear to listen to either.
This entire backstory concept of three generations of a rule-bending merchant family backing three generations of pirates/smugglers/privateers amuses me so much that a tiny voice in my head is whispering, “make them the super gay couple this story needs, ‘tis fate.”
Ah, gotta love it when my plot bunnies none-too-subtly point out the parallels between things that I’m writing and things that have happened in my past - and then go on to add that what I’m writing now is nothing more than wish-fulfillment of what things could have been like if my brother hadn’t died. Ughhhh.
OK, so here's that Renner One Shot i hammered out in about an hour on Saturday.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jeremy Renner - Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Jeremy Renner/Original Female Character
Characters: Jeremy Renner, Sonni Pacheco, Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: i had a random Renner dream, this is basically fluff and angst, Fluff and Angst, deffo NO Sonni bashing here, I actually think shes rather lovely, i should be finishing my other fics, Shame on me, grautious abuse of Bad Company lyrics, Unrequited Love
Summary:
Add a socially awkward millionaire Londoner to next door neighbour Jeremy Renner, add a dash of pathetic unrequited love and you have the recipe for some serious Friend Zone pining.
