Sorry I'm late with this, haven't had that much time to write these past few months. Guess that happens when one tries to be a responsible student.
This chapter is kind of short, but I decided to cut it there and post it now instead of waiting until I have one or two more scenes written, because I have a lot to do before Christmas and don't know when I'll be able to write more.
Beta-read by Aerle :)
Chapter 29: Taking charge of one's life
Evelyne hated hangovers.
That was an easy deduction to make, of course, given her previous experiences with them. The lights bothered her eyes —and wasn't it annoying to have such a bright, sunny day when it could have been nicely cloudy?— her head pounded in an impressive imitation of a hammer, and everything around her was way too loud.
The only small consolation she had was that everybody else was suffering from a similar condition. Everybody but the asshole sitting next to her at the table. Evelyne was making a conscious effort not to look at him, because Marco looked far too calm and smugly amused at the state the crew was in. Besides, he was receiving enough murderous glares as it was, there was no need to add hers.
A sudden rise in the unusually low volume of the conversations around her drew her attention, and pirates all over the mess hall stood up and stampeded to the bar. There, she noticed, was a long row of coffee pots. Many of them, but in no way enough for all the people aiming for them.
Sighing, Evelyne crossed her arms on the table and resigned herself to the fact she would have to wait for at least a couple of rounds before she could get her hands on a cup of coffee.
She may not like the beverage, but she had no trouble admitting its advantages and this was a situation where the need for them outweighed her distaste for coffee's bitter taste.
Evelyne didn't want to see another plate in a very long time. Perhaps even her whole life.
That day, instead of letting them work on their normal tasks, the guy in charge —what was his name, again?— had lined them up and sent the ones who were in a worse state to do the dishes. She, unused as she was to hangovers and with an extremely low tolerance to alcohol in comparison to almost everybody else onboard, had been part of the dishes group. She really missed peeling, cutting, and chopping things, at least then she could sit down. And didn't feel murderous impulses, which was another plus side. Right now, she was staring at the plate in her hands and imagining it shattering into hundreds of small shards against a wall.
Evelyne was once again leaning on the ship's railing in one of the mostly deserted areas of the deck. And, again, Amanda came to stand next to her.
"You know, in my fantasies about living adventures I never thought of cramps or being so sore."
Evelyne chuckled.
"You thought you'd be strong and skilled out of nowhere?"
"Yeah, I guess I did. I always skipped that part." Amanda moved to sit on the floor and leaned her back against the railing. She grimaced as she lowered herself. "I feel as if someone put me in a dryer or something."
"A dryer, really? I expected a truck metaphor."
Amanda looked up at her.
"You can't tell me you're fine." She gave Evelyne a narrow eyed look.
"Nah. My dryer was on a rollercoaster."
They lapsed into silence for a while. Evelyne followed a bird with her eyes until it disappeared from sight.
"I get the feeling they're having fun with us, most of the time," Amanda commented, her attention drawn by a commotion not far from them.
"Don't doubt it. There's no TV here, they've got to entertain themselves somehow."
"Hey, Evelyne, do you know anything about the tech group?" Kira asked as they left the kitchen.
Evelyne, who had been busy sucking like a five year old on the index finger of her left hand —where she had very stupidly cut herself earlier— turned her head to look at her.
"Last I checked, the guys from my world weren't all that eager to continue it, but I'm not exactly on good terms with them now, so I don't know much. Why do you ask?"
Kira shrugged.
"A friend asked. He's on the group and told me they haven't met in days. Says it was fun."
Evelyne made a noncommittal sound. She didn't see anything fun about it, it would probably exasperate her to no end, but she admitted she really wanted to be able to at least look at the pictures in her phone.
"Give them some time, they'll come around. At least no one has bolted out during a training session—" She cut her sentence off and gave Kira a questioning look. "No one has, have they?"
Kira chuckled.
"You would've heard if they had. The crew are like a bunch of little kids."
"Yeah, I noticed."
"I hate you. I really, really hate you," was Evelyne's response to Marco's announcement that they should up the difficulty of some of the exercises she did. To add to the image of maturity, she crossed her arms, pouted, and half buried her face in the pillow.
Marco smiled amusedly at her reaction, and poked her in the ribs. She tensed.
"No, you don't."
"Yes, I do," she insisted, glaring at him out of the corner of her eye. "I just got rid of the cramps," she complained.
"And that's why now is a good moment." He poked her again, and this time Evelyne jumped minutely in place. Marco raised an eyebrow and repeated the action. She pulled away. "You're ticklish," he pointed out.
"'m not," she muttered.
"No?" He did it again, this time tickling her with two fingers, and she sat up,
"Stop that!" she demanded, hugging the pillow close to her chest.
Ignoring her, Marco tilted his head to one side and gave her a calculating look.
"Laughter is another way to exercise."
Evelyne stared at him uncomprehendingly for a few seconds before blanching.
"Don't you dare."
Marco smirked. Evelyne bolted out of the bed, but her reflexes didn't stand a chance against his.
Evelyne was convinced her ass was developing superhuman endurance, as there was no way it could take so many falls without suffering any serious damage otherwise.
On a brighter note, she was slowly getting used to dodging and now, though landing a blow still looked to be far in the future, she could proudly say she no longer received so many blows during an hour of training that she was unable to count them. Which, sincerely, was kind of depressing, but one had to count her victories where she could find them, and victories were almost nonexistent in regards to training. She was willing to count even the smallest of progress as one.
After the first day, and seeing that they were a small group to train, the rest of the crew had decided they could designate one teacher for each person in the group, and every day switched the person who trained someone. There was no doubt in Evelyne's mind that the main reason for this was that this way everybody had a chance to torture them.
At least they were democratic about it.
Evelyne dropped her cards in defeat, glaring morosely at the decidedly better hands lying on the ground before the other five people in the group she was in.
"You really are terrible," a boy that had to be a couple of years younger than her —she thought his name started either by 'ca' or 'ka'— whistled. He stretched forward and picked her discarded cards.
Evelyne glowered at him. She may have only received one poker lesson a couple of weeks ago, but it was impossible she had gotten the worst hand in the group nine times in a row. She was sure someone was messing with her.
"What were you studying?"
"What?" Evelyne raised her gaze from the page and looked at Marco. They had brought out a folding table and a couple of chairs from one of the storage rooms, and had settled in one of the shaded areas of the deck. Evelyne, as was one of her favorite activities, was reading —she had borrowed a book about first aid from Sarah— while Marco worked on what seemed like a scarily long list of supplies —someone, who still remained unidentified and therefore unharmed, had ruined most of the ship's fruit supplies on what they suspected to have been a fight.
"Before you came here. What were you studying?" he clarified.
"Ah. I was majoring in law."
Marco raised his head, eyebrows up in his forehead.
"Law?"
"Yes, law," she repeated and sighed.
"And now you're a pirate?" he asked, amused.
She shrugged.
"It's not like I really wanted to be a lawyer or anything."
"Then why were you doing it?"
"Dunno. It's always been there. Everybody used to say I'd make a good lawyer, my parents liked the idea, it's a job that pays well and it was sort of planned without really planning it that I'd study it."
Now that she thought about it, she had never looked to see if there was anything else she would have rather studied. Literature, maybe, but she had grown up listening to comments on how useless studying things like that or art was, and she had never considered it. She doubted she would have done it, either way; being a teacher was the most likely option after studying that and teaching was a profession she had always known she didn't want for herself. At all.
"You don't talk about them."
"My parents? No, I guess I don't. It's just..." she trailed off. She wasn't sure how to explain her relationship with them, it had been a complicated one. "When I was about thirteen I started with the teenage rebellion phase. Everybody said I'd get over it when I became an adult. My parents believed it, I believed it, but it didn't happen. Things just got worse once I passed eighteen and didn't 'calm down'." She was tempted to make air quotes, but refrained from it. "We argued about everything. I was annoyed that they wouldn't stop nagging at me, and half the time I couldn't even tell what exactly was bothering me. They were annoyed that I wouldn't make any effort to be responsible and try to direct my life as an adult."
She had spent a long time telling herself she hated them. She didn't, but part of her was relieved she didn't have to deal with them anymore. It still made her feel like a horrible person.
"The last time I talked with mom, we ended up arguing." A wry grin stretched her lips when she remembered what the argument had been about. It had been a very common fight these last few years. "Since I turned nineteen, mom's been kind of paranoid that I didn't have a boyfriend. She tried to pair me up with any guy around my age she liked, and we always ended up fighting over it."
Marco leaned forward, elbows on the table and chin on his right hand.
"I'm guessing she'd rather you were still single if she saw us." There was no denying the teasing in that sentence, but he was also being serious. It wasn't a question.
Evelyne scoffed.
"She'd have an aneurysm." Dad too, probably. They had always been against relationships with an age difference —the whole family was: she had a cousin who had hooked up with a man twelve years older and her parents had sent her off to study halfway across the country.
For a split second, Evelyne tried to imagine how her family would react to seeing her now, but discarded the thought. She could do without imagining that fight.
"My brother would find it funny, though."
"You have a brother?" The way Marco asked, Evelyne realized she probably hadn't mentioned him at all. Not surprising, considering she had been making a conscious effort not to think about her family. Now that she was talking, though, the words came out effortlessly. She might even say they were forcing their way out.
"Yeah, Jake. He's five years older than me. Ditched the family some years ago, too, and now we only see him for Christmas most years. Like the rest of the family, really. We're not close." And the family meals weren't an experience Evelyne had ever looked forward to. It was rare when no fight broke out.
"What's Christmas?"
Oh, right.
Of course there was no Christmas here. She wasn't sure whether she felt relieved or disappointed.
To be continued
This chapter is slow, and doesn't move much in the plot department, but I thought it was about time Evelyne said something about her family.
Reviews, please :D
