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CHAPTER 2 BACK TO NEXUS The Engineer was among the first of the crew members to barter their way onto a visiting zubmarine and away from Aigul. It left the engine room an isolated, burnt-out cave run through with a single spine. Took some squeezing and ducking to make it to the room, which dissuaded disturbances. The First Mate could spend an entire day in there without catching a single sign of life beyond their own. The engine room was deep enough into the Fortas Kettle that echoes, further cut and muffled by the fluke-spines jutting through hallways, could not reach. (We make it so.) Sitting on the floor, still swept from the last day that the Engineer had been present and desperate to maintain some lordship over his ruined kingdom, the First Mate could very easily imagine that they were the only person in existence. The only one to ever do so, if not for the regrets they harvested. Those had to come from somewhere, and thus they were not truly alone. The spines shimmered in the dull light. Pretty in a way that little else was. The First Mate cried, more often than not, after each spine harvested. They were overwhelming. So much pain caught in the feeder-filters of the fluke-rocks, so many regrets drifting, listless and airborne, on the currents of the unter-unterzee. How many had gone unknown to all but the host? (Most.) Host, the First Mate thought on one particular day, the still-swept floor hard under their knees, was the most fitting term they could think of. Like the regrets were a malignancy, a tumor which festered in the meat of the brain with no direct avenue for treatment or excisement. A visitor who’d unpacked their bags and painted the walls of the guest bedroom to their own tastes. A welcome overstayed until they died and Aigul dutifully swept up the rot which lingered. (We want to share it.) Nobody beyond the First Mate would know it ever again. (We want them to feel it.) Journals paged through, letters of confession, conversations puzzled over until the true meaning realized years after- those were not true understandings of the regrets. Only the needles were. The Admiralty had abandoned them. Station III, new keepers of the Kettle, was distant. The only supplies were the ones which were traded for. Trading that first crate of fuel for three tubes of the sealant which kept the zee from breaking through the same open wounds the spines found entrance with, had felt like a quiet acceptance. Okay. No more crawling across the basement floor of reality, carefully plotted courses and observances jotted down into neat little reports for the Admiralty. The Fortas Kettle was married to Aigul. Locked in a twilight embrace, the crew barely straddling the line between life and sudden, depressurized death. Nothing about that which they could change. (They wish they could.) Nothing to be done. (They heard our song.) The engine room was the one place they would not catch sight of their dwindling crew. It was an easy place to retreat to, very defensible. The spines across the hallway a moat, the single entrance perfect for a death-d__n-us last stand. All the First Mate needed was a flag for their sad little nation and they’d be just like any other king, the sort history books were written about, whiling away the days among miseries of their own making. Half of those kings- as it always went- were killed by other men, and half by themselves. Any pain was better borne with another to share it with. The First Mate liked to think they were good at it- an easy air about them, a warm hand on a shoulder and all the time in the world for whatever needed to be said. They liked it, being useful like that. Even when they could not offer a solution for the woes- either through their own uncertainty at just what would help or the inescapability of the situation as a whole- they could give a moment of unconditional company. (They would not tell the crew about us.) There was nobody to offer that to in the engine room. (They grow more familiar with us already.) Nothing but the cool, shimmering purples of Aigul. Regrets of people dead and gone. They couldn’t do anything for those people. (They had heard the song of Aigul in the brain of the Fortas Kettle, and it had brooked no quarter. Listen to us. Come to us. Touch us. Feel us. Drink of us.) But the engine room was their castle. The Engineer had forfeited it when he left upon a zubmarine bound for Hideaway. The First Mate, two passages in a textbook on the troubles of a burgeoning nation in the era of feudalism, could not simply abandon it. They’d nearly killed every single person upon the Fortas Kettle to end up there. (They wish they had refused work upon the Kettle.) Had actually killed crew members- one with her skull cracked neat in the initial impact, another to wounds sustained by the same three days after. (Stayed upon shore, apprenticed in Wolfstack-candlemaking.) They’d impaled the Captain upon a spine, a straight through-and-through upon his thigh, and they’d jailed him to a confined existence- a single bed in a single room with a single, thick smell suffused throughout everything. (Let themself get dragged out with the tide as a child, a life short enough to bear no significance at all.) People above them that they could not help, the clatter of their boots muffled to nothing, and needles surrounding them that they could. Observance of the regrets had to mean something. The First Mate could not substantially help a single person, living or dead, but they could make sure that the dead were just a little less lonely. Press a hand to the face of Aigul, shudder and shake throughout another person’s sad little life, and then step back into their own body with tears already burning their eyes. Sometimes, it took time for the lines to become solid once more. Feeling the soft sadness of a widow and thinking of the Captain. Holding the hand of somebody else’s dear daughter and thinking, an absurdity which they noted even when so hazed away, of the Steadfast Cook. They had to be dragged from the bridge after the crash into Aigul, and they’d been hauled past the mess that her brains had made on the ground. It was not easy to take the regrets of Aigul. The rituals, Rubbery and taxing, were not fully familiar to them. (Yet.) The sensation and creation of the spine, an echo made of calcification and the need to have some mark of each experience, a nauseating affair. Each one snapped off a bright flash of pain, every round mark left after they’d sanded it down a thing to be stared at by those who remained. But the First Mate wanted it to be easy. (We want it too.) They needed to bear witness, so that there was reason to the ruin of the Fortas Kettle. Aigul, they thought on another day of peeking over their castle’s crumbling parapets at the entirety of reality beyond that room, had been alone with the regrets for too long. (We are still singing.) They couldn’t leave, not with the engine stabbed through upon a spine and all the supplies they could trade for passage instead intended to be traded for survival, but they shouldn’t either. It would render it all pointless. Nothing but another nothing in their life. The Captain’s condition was not improving. When they were not in the Engine room and they were not attempting, with a halfhearted air hanging about them, to broker peace and order among the remaining crew members, they were sat beside his bed. More often than not, they would cry as they sat there, one of his hands held in both of theirs and a forehead with skin already beginning a slow and soft slough pressed close as well. The First Mate did not know what else they could do when they laid eyes upon the mess of bandages, when they tried for a fortifying breath and choked upon the stench of blood. The d__n wound kept opening up. It hadn’t done that after the initial fallout of the collision- it’d behaved, like any wound should. But now it was. The First Mate would tuck themself away in the engine room, do their best to pretend to be anywhere else in the universe than where they really were, and then be greeted by more little looks whenever they resurfaced. None of the crew knew how to approach them when the Captain bled anew. They all knew their First Mate to be sensitive. It was a nice enough trait, especially when they were willing to sit down with any one of them and listen to any sort of woe with a hand upon their backs, but it didn’t have much place in the Kettle as it was then. (The crew regrets saying it, every single time. A period of time would exist where their First Mate was present, standing among them and some echo of who they were, and then it would not.) The First Mate spent more time than not, they thought with a little humor, crying. It was an easy response to overwhelment. Not so much a sad-response as the knob of a sink being turned. It didn’t do anything but give them a headache. No easy catharsis there. When they were not crying and the Captain was not trying to comfort them, the First Mate still sat beside his bed and held his hand in both of their own. He was still warm in a way that Aigul was not, and their feet were still planted enough in the miseries of lives still ongoing that they took a desperate comfort in it. They did not know how to tell the Captain about the engine room, nor the face of Aigul, but they would. (Would they?) |