THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

You grin, blushing a little with pride. "Well, it's not hard, you just have to imagine that everyone around you is doing everything wrong and you are personally aggrieved by it, and you're off to the races."

You pull out a copy of your little sketching notebook and duplicate one for Jethro, complete with a cheap, slightly-chewed ballpoint marking device, the sort lowbloods order up by the dozen. He looks at it curiously.

"Fancy things are a distraction," you say, gesturing at the corner with all the oils and chalks and whatnot. "The most important part of learning things is just to fail as fast as you can, at as much as you can, and get being terrible at things out of the way right away, instead of dawdling around trying to avoid it. That's why you see so many stupid highbloods, you know, they'll throw any amount of money at a problem to get it to go away and stop nipping them in the ego. Don't look like that, I'm not going to pull your head off just for having a laugh at us splendiferous examples of genetic superiority.

"Anyway, pencils make you think you can get things right, because you have an eraser, so you'll spend ages trying to correct just the one drawing, but pens make you start all over and do a little better the next time. Does that make sense?"

 

"Huh, yeah, I guess it does. I kinda wanted to use the big paper and colored chalk stuff and make big, colorful mistakes, but we could do that later, right? You're the teacher!" You make a little spiral in the corner of the page to get used to the pen. After a moment's thought, you give it a little blob head and eyestalks. "Snail," you show him.

 

"Well, there you go, you're already an artist." As for the chalks, you just shrug, scratch the back of a fin, and smile sheepishly. "Well, for all my fancy rhetoric, I don't actually know how to use chalk, you know, so I suppose we can figure it out together."

You point at the cube of tidepool. "So, you pick out something you want to draw. Then you look at the shapes it's made out of— sort of get them down lightly..."

As carefully as you can, you explain to him your process. You'd looked up a few video tutorials, back when you were new on the ship, and Lainey had told you that every troll had to have something to do just for themselves, or they would go crazy. Her particular hobby is photochopping celebrity heads onto hypermuscular fitness-monster bodies, then 'leaking' them to gossip blogs and seeing who's fooled enough to run an article on it.

 

After a few abortive attempts to draw things that move around way too much, like crabs and shrimps, you manage a more realistic drawing of a snail, thanks in part to Aspera's help with the shading.



"His name is Colonel MacGregor," you announce. "He talks like his lips are made of hard rubber, you know how some folks do, and he grumps at his housekeeper if his algae isn't cut up just so."

((that drawing is probably a little too good for him, but i couldn't find any other sincere attempt at being realistic that wasn't professional-looking. just pretend it's a little more wobbly.))

 

"His moirail's a scallop," you put in, "who's away at the front lines, and writes home every week. MacGregor only grumps at his housekeeper because he's tremendously worried: he's stuck drawing up battle strategies safe as houses and his poor love's out there getting shot at. Every night when he unrolls all the charts and reports and whatnot he hopes that this next engagement will be the one that wins the war and brings his moirail back home to him."

Of course, then you have to draw the scallop. You make sure to include a lot of artillery nicks on the shell. "She's a brave idiot and always leads the charge," you explain. "Have you seen scallops go? They sort of—" you wave a hand, and obligingly a scallop in the biome cube jets off, as absurd a sight as ever.

 

You let out a peal of surprised laughter. You've never seen that before. "Aww, lil' chargin' hero clam, come on home to poor MacGregor, he's fussin'." You draw the snail with his neck stretched out flat and a little sigh puff. Just to make sure, you add a stormcloud hovering over his head.

 

"Aww. Perhaps she's crippled and discharged, and returns to her moirail as a failure— or so she thinks— and he's just delighted to have her back alive, but she can't stand it, so she drives him and his housekeeper to distraction trying to find something worthwhile to do with herself. She takes up landscaping but is terrible at it."

You draw the scallop, shell severely cracked, perched on rock. 'Roks are an importent element of desine' you write in a little word bubble above her.

"Actually she discovers a new talent for counterintelligence, and protects her moirail from enemy agents," you decide, because things had gotten kind of dark.

Oh, hell, you are really starting to feel terrible— you're aware you are leaning all over Jethro, but you're shakey and dizzy and terrifically sick and he doesn't seem to find you offensive. So leaning it is.

"What about the housekeeper?" you ask. "Do you think she's an enemy agent?"

 

You put an arm around him and pat his back, sympathy for the nausea without drawing more attention to it. "Yeah, but not a very good one. She's... a jellyfish, how do I draw a jellyfish? Kinda... and like that... oh yeah, their tentacles are all squiggly... so she's like, super paranoid conspiracy theorist guy. She thinks everything's top secret. She keeps handing in their shopping lists cuz she thinks they're coded messages." You put a piece of lined paper in one of the jelly's tentacles, with 'milk' 'eggs' and 'chicken drummies' on it, and the last item circled and 'air units??' in the margin.

 

"After awhile the moirail starts adding suspicious things to the shopping list, just for a laugh," You contribute, then draw your legs up to rest your head on your kneecaps. The fancy uniform bunches and prickles for a moment, before relaxing into your usual working t-shirt and shorts.

"Can I... is there somewhere to go and..." you're not sure. Be alone? Be unconscious? Not be Captain Aspera for awhile? "I don't mean to be rude, you know, and, and give you the boot, if you'd get in trouble for leaving me or anything, it's just that I'm not sure how, er. How. I can be fit for company, that's it. I don't think I am fit to entertain company at the moment, Mr Jethro. I do not feel quite up to proper shape."

 

Well, ain't that a little stab of pity between your ribs.

"Captain Aspera," you begin, then shake your head. "Boss." Nope. "Erskin." This is the one seadweller who'd prefer his first name, you think, and his response doesn't seem angry, so you go on. "You ain't supposed to be entertaining me. Nor putting up a front, neither. I ain't your guest, brother, I'm your physical therapist. I'm here to support you through the pain and discomfort, and try and make it less. Not to be entertained." Your hand on his back rubs slow circles while you talk, trying to get him to relax a little. "If you hurl, I'll clean it up. Won't be the first time I cleaned up puke, ain't no thing. If you snap at me, I won't take it personal. I -- look -- I know you ain't in the proper shape, that's why I'm here."

 

You huff into your kneecaps. So it is his job to stick with you the whole time, you can't just excuse him.

Damn.

"Well... is there... music, or a show?" you venture. "Can we put that sort of thing on to play?" If he's not allowed to leave you alone, perhaps you can at least distract him for awhile.

 

"Sure, all kinds. There's live concerts and plays, too, if you like that. Real ones that actually happened, they had some telepresence recording doodads at real shows so you can be there how it really happened, kinda thing." You make your text panel bigger and bring up the simulations menu, 'arts and entertainment' submenu, so you can go through it together. Anything to keep him engaged and focused. You have a feeling he's going to fight you harder and harder over this as the chemo goes on, wanting to crawl into a hole and hide from the feelings, but that way lies a fried nervous system, so you can't let him. You find yourself hoping he doesn't end up hating you for it.

 

You poke around at the menu, feigning thoughtfulness to cover for how excruciatingly long it takes you to make horns or tails of the letters. They keep trying to crawl off the page... Finally you pick a spy comedy rated for juveniles. It's self-indulgent, because you know a death-metal opera or a war drama would be more in keeping with your stature, but damned if you could actually follow either of those. It's hard enough to parse sung dialogue at the best of times and this is distinctly not a best time.

(erskin's enjoyment of spy movies leans more towards austin powers than james bond. he is the classiest.)

 

"I've seen that one, it's funny!" you smile as you select it. The menu asks if you want the 'theater' or 'hive' viewing; rather than make Erskin choose, you pick 'hive', thinking he'd prefer the cozier, more private experience, even if the screen's not as big.

The studio fades away, replaced by the lounge block of a comfortable midblood hive. The artsy patchwork poufs you were sitting on become a squashy couch, and the racks of fabric and yarn turn into a shelf filled with movie grub cases. At a comfortable distance from you is a large -- but not overwhelmingly so -- tv screen, the movie's opening credits paused on it, and the remote appears in your hand.

Your text pane offers you movie snacks, but you don't think those would go over well with Erskin's stomach. You summon up a little bowl of crystallized ginger jelly larvae instead, and offer it to him. "These might settle your stomach."

 

Your fins flatten. "It's pretend, though," you say, disturbed. "It's just pretend food."

 

"Yeah, it'd be placebo effect, mostly. But the fact that you're feeling that nausea in here at all kind of blurs the line between real and virtual, don't it? This body right here," you pat his shoulder, "doesn't have to be going through chemo. But it's tricky to convince yourself it ain't. So I figure ginger nibbles might help."

 

"Hmm," you go, skeptically. Seeing and hearing and even touching illusions is one thing, but the notion of eating something that isn't food is a little too much for you. It makes you think of being desperate enough to try slices of needleplant: even though pretend food can't make you sick— sicker— you can't quite feel comfortable about having a go.

"Can I lick them and put them back in the bowl?" you suggest as a compromise.

 

That gets a laugh out of you. "Hell, brother, you can lick 'em and stick 'em to your forehead if you want."

 

Putting on your best I Am Actually Royal How Dare You face, you haughtily lick one, and stick it to your forehead. Then you stick your tongue out at him.

"Well, that's done with, let's see the show," you say.

 

Laughing even harder, you bump his shoulder with yours as a sort of encouragement, and start the movie.

It's a good thing you've seen this once before, because you can't afford to get immersed in it. You have to watch for signs that Erskin is getting lost in the noise from the bioware; it'll be starting to send distress signals around now. But it's nice to have something to lighten the mood while you do.