Once he was able to sleep for a few hours, he found that he was hungry. Once he was able to keep some food down, he started feeling a little stronger. Once he was feeling a little stronger, he was able to spend some time in the gym using the punching bag. Once he was able to punch the bag until his knuckles bled, he began to feel like he might not swallow the razor blade that he had carefully hidden in the little bag with what he had left of Ethan.
The infirmary emptied out and the dead sent back to their families, but there was no getting back to normal aboard the Sleipnir. Normal was never coming back.
They debriefed until the battle played behind Cain's eyelids every time he closed them. They were forced to go over it so many times that it became simply a training exercise. The remaining starfighters expected to move on to the next phase of the war. Mother declared that the Colteron's forces had been severely damaged and for now, they had backed off to lick their wounds. Starfighter teams began to leave the Sleipnir returning to their own ships to regroup and mourn their dead. Commanders Bering and Cook had ordered their squadron to wait for the rendezvous of new Academy graduate's shipped to the Sleipnir so that those like Cain who had lost their navigator could be teamed up again. Cain wasn't sure he was up to another green ass virgin.
In the early morning before he had to report to duty Cain found himself sitting in the mess, chain smoking and drinking hot coffee that burned the roof of his mouth. He sat for a long time staring at the remaining crew, the food on his plate, and at nothing at all. He hadn't been able to go down to the bay and check on his ship, the Reliant. For weeks it waited for him, repaired and shiny clean, no sign that the only goodness he had ever had a chance at in his short miserable life had ended in it.
Finally, the day came when Cain found himself standing in the hangar doorway just looking at his ship, wondering if Abel was going to haunt him there too. He set his jaw, took a deep breath and walked the length of the deck. Other crews working nearby stopped to watch him with wary eyes. There was an uneasy hush over the bay until he reached his ship. Cain just stood at the nose of the Reliant for a moment and then reached out a hand to caress it with his fingertips.
He picked up a clipboard and started to circle the ship. Those nearby breathed again, hesitantly went back to their business, one eye on their work and one eye on Cain. Orders had come down to give Cain a wide berth. Commander Bering had made it quite clear that the Reliant fighter was to be handled with kid gloves. Tensions in the bay eased when Cain threw open the Reliant's hatch and eased himself down into the fighter's cockpit. Cain forced himself to run through his checklist, but couldn't wait to get away from the spaceship. He wanted to run all the way back to his quarters and finish the bottle he had left on the table but hadn't touched for a week or so. The Reliant had been cleaned of Ethan's remains but his smell was all over it. Cain wanted to shower until his skin came off.
Every day he did a little more, forcing himself to go through the paces, as if nothing had happened. Like he would just go on living his life. As if Ethan was just a sad dream that he had when he drank too much. Cain was in a hurry to forget the softness of Abel's hair on his shoulder when he had laid his head there, and the bony sharpness of his hip bones that Cain ground his own into when they fucked.
It was at dinner that Cain first noticed the Lead Navigator that used to belong to Encke. When there was an Encke. He remembered Abel chattering, happily smitten, with Lt. Keeler and the long blond braid hanging down his back. At the time, he just smirked at Abel's schoolgirl crush for his superior and taunted him by calling them lesbo's.
He got up from the table; leaving his food uneaten, stalked to the gym and pounded out the memory until his blood seeped out from under his gloves. Exhausted, when he got back in the room he pulled out his best bottle and drank himself into a fitful sleep, full of silences and frozen eyes.
The next morning, hung over, Cain tried to push past the protesting Admin who bravely stood between Commander Bering's office door and Cain. Cain glared down his nose with hostile intent at the smaller clerk, who thought better of it and stood aside to let Cain pass. Cain smirked at him, bumping him with his shoulder as he bullied his way into Bering's office. Without invitation, Cain dropped into one of the chairs in front of Bering's desk. Bering stood and waved his worried assistant away. Arrogantly, Cain leaned back in the chair, one leg slung over an arm. Bering sat and leaned back as well. His face remained blank as he studied Cain. While he wasn't concerned that Sasha would try to harm him, he was wary of the man sitting in front of him, unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Cain put on a good front but Bering knew it was all bravado. He thought he had seen the worst of Sasha when James who became Encke threw him away in Basic, but this behavior was something different. Cain had wrapped himself around the white-hot pain of grief, protecting it, nurturing it. Bering no longer knew what the broken dangerous man before him was capable of.
"What do you want Sasha?" he demanded, pulling out his lighter and leaning forward, offering it.
"Don't fucking call me that!" Cain snarled while he leaned his body forward, moving the cigarette to the middle of his lips. Bering snorted but sparked the lighter, leaning a little forward meeting Sasha in the middle of his desk, offering the flame. "Tch", muttered Cain as he grabbed Bering's hand and held it steady, lighting his cigarette and then collapsing back down into the chair.
"Alright, Cain then, what do you want?"
Cain drew heavily, breathed out the smoke in Bering's direction before he answered. "Get me a navie, someone with a strong set of lips and a sweet ass. Someone who already knows their fucking place."
Bering cocked his head and stared at Cain, who flicked the ash off his cigarette unto Bering's floor and stared back. "I'm not giving you someone to use as a punching bag, you do that in the gym."
Cain stood, leaned over Bering's desk and purposefully flicked more ash on its polished top. "Fuck you." Cain turned and stomped out of the room, glaring at the cowering desk jockey as he passed through the anteroom.
Bering brushed off the ash, his jaw set as he watched Sasha disappear from his sight. "Conroy, no disturbances for an hour!" he barked out and punched the panel to slide his door closed. Leaning forward with his head in his hands, he realized how weary he was. He didn't know how Cook stood it, all those dead young boys, and those left behind to pick up the pieces of their lives. Maybe he was just getting too old for this shit and retirement was a good idea. Sighing heavily he punched up the personnel screen and started searching for someone Cain wouldn't break into a thousand pieces.
When Cain came back to his quarters much later in the day after running specs on the Reliant, the navie was already moved in and waiting. There was nothing special about him; sour look on his face, all sharp bone and blond hair. Like they all were. "Get me a drink", Cain ordered as he pushed past him towards the head. "Pour one for yourself, bitch."
When he came out from his shower, towel around his middle, still drying his midnight black hair, the navie was sitting at the little table with a glass before him and one across from him. He had poured generously leaving the bottle on the table next to Cain's glass. He stared at Cain, who plopped himself down in the chair, picked up his glass and growled at him.
"You speak when you're spoken to; otherwise you shut the fuck up. You do what I tell you, when I tell you and how I tell you. You got that bitch?"
The navie studied him for a few seconds and then upended his glass, drinking the contents completely before he answered. He pushed his chair back from the table, leaned forward with his hands on his knees. Looking Cain straight in the eyes and speaking so quietly Cain had to strain to hear him, he said, "You understand that you don't scare me? I'll do whatever you want because I was ordered to. But don't get your dick all hard about that. The sooner we get off this piece of crap and I get back home to civilized human beings and wash the stink of you fucking colony bastards off of me, the sooner I can forget this shit ever happened."
Cain raised an eyebrow at the calm navigator leaning forward in front of him. It was then that he noticed a deadly coldness lying just under the surface of the navie's skin like a blade, sharp and dangerous, pointed at his gut. The navie had dead eyes, but they looked up at him expectantly. Cain threw back the Vodka, welcoming the burn deep down his throat. Leaning back in his chair he opened his towel and gestured towards his cock.
"Good then we understand each other. Get on your fucking knees and get that mouth busy, bitch."
It wasn't much of a life, but until his squad shipped off the Sheipnir, it fell into a routine Cain thought could live with. The navie and he ran the diagnostics on the Reliant until Cain could run them backwards with his eyes closed. The battle simulation was gone over until it was picked clean like a chicken bone. What they did right, what they did wrong. Why so many had died. The configurations that had underestimated the Colterons responses. All the ships had to be refigured using the new engine prototype. It was just a circle jerk of frustration and Cain didn't much care. Cain only cared about getting back to his base ship; getting back to the life he had before Abel. Before happiness. Before love. Before the very brief time that he meant something to another human being.
His new navie was a good fuck. He kept his word; there wasn't anything he wouldn't submit to. Even when Cain tied him down, greased his hand and slid the fingers past the tight ring of his anus, fisting him deep and slow. He was good with his mouth, could take Cain deep into his throat without struggling. Cain would have felt better if he struggled. The only sign of dissention was when the navie spit out Cain's cum. More than once Cain made him lick it from the floor, or suck it out of the sink. However, he had to be forced to swallow it, bitter distaste playing across his face every time. Cain knew it wasn't that it was cum, but that it was his cum. Cain fucked him whenever he saw him, and didn't care who was watching. He didn't bother with formality, just barked at him to get his pants down and get his ass up. Sometimes he just cut them off, leaving them in tatters on the floor around the navies' boots.
He only hit him once. The navie turned on Cain; grabbed him by the throat, making Cain dance a little as he held him off his toes. "Don't you ever fucking hit me, Cain. I'm not your girlfriend." He threatened softly, looking Cain straight in the face as he dropped him back to his feet. They faced off for a few moments, breathing hard.
"Blyat!" Cain had spit in his face, the navie not responding except to take out a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his face with it, and then dropped the filthy cloth on Cain's boots. He turned then and left their quarters. When he came back much later that night Cain made him bleed. The navie never said a word about it.
More than once, he found himself sucking down hot coffee in the mess, his eyes drawn to Encke's navie, the Lieutenant. Keeler. Cain watched him long enough that he was sure Keeler was growing thinner, if something that scrawny could be thinner. Much more and he would disappear completely. Maybe that's what he was going for. Cain watched him sit and stare at the food before him, even put a forkful to his mouth but then it would drop back into the plate. Keeler would move things around as a child does when trying to make it seem like they had eaten something they disliked. Most of the time Keeler just stared. Cain realized he was pretty, too pretty even with dead blue eyes and those sunken freckled cheeks. He knew exactly what James was attracted to because James liked clean and pretty. No matter how good a fuck Sasha was, he was never going to be clean and pretty.
Cain was bored most of the time as the crew slowly relaxed. With the battle over, and the Teron's on the run, there was only so much engine prep and simulator training that a person could do. His navie would suck his cock but wasn't interested in having a conversation. Cain didn't know a damn thing about him other than the feel of his ass and the warmth of his throat. When Cain finished using him, the navie went to his own bunk turning away from Cain. Whatever Cain might have had to offer, he wanted no part of it.
After a few weeks, when they both were dressing for report, Cain had tried to breach the icy wall between them and asked, "So did you lose your fighter?"
The navie stopped shaving and leaned against the sink, head cocked as if he was thinking about it.
"You think I'd be here if there was another choice?"
Cain snarled back, annoyed "I don't need you; you can fuck off any time."
The navie snorted and turned back to the mirror, continuing to pull his razor through the white cloud of his shaving cream.
"It's me or they throw your ass in the psych ward, Cain. You need me."
Cain wiped his face and threw the towel in the navie's direction, grabbed his jacket and stormed out towards the observation deck pushing and shoving people out of his way. A couple of times fighters angrily turned on him, but then someone would whisper in their ear and nod in Cain's direction, and they would move away from him like he was a rabid dog. There was truth to that but it didn't stop Cain from cursing at them "Fucking pussies, fucking bastard bunch of cowards." Everyone he passed got out of his way, averting their eyes, avoiding his seething anger not wanting to be caught in its combustion.
Then one day the navie wasn't there when Cain came back to the room. His closet was empty, his tack out of the head, his bunk stripped. Cain poured himself a drink and muttered, "Good riddance and fuck you," to the empty bunk. He was alone again.
That night he dreamt of Abel, for the first time since he had moved to these quarters. He woke up smelling Ethan all over him.