Chapter 8: Clouds and Tales
The rest of the day passed mostly without incident. Natalya took another walk trying to orientate herself on the ship, so she wouldn't need Mikhail's help every single time she had to find somewhere to be. Evening came, and Patroka hadn't returned to their room yet, so Natalya decided, she would just try and get some sleep. Once Patroka returned from wherever she was, she'd most likely kick her out again anyway, given how much Natalya had started to shiver again. She curled up under her blanket, and closed her eyes, but she couldn't sleep a wink. She was so cold. Normally, that didn't bother her so much. Like she had explained to the others, she'd had decades to get used to it, but after last night, her thoughts kept drifting to the steering deck with its nice view of the Cloud Sea. It had been so nice and cosy up there. She wanted to go back there. Natalya sighed, got up, wrapped the blanket tightly around herself and left the room.
The steering deck wasn't quite as warm as she remembered. It also wasn't empty. Akhos was sitting on the floor, his back leaned against the wall, eyes staring out at the clouds. He turned his head when he heard her come in.
"Did my lovely little sister kick you out again?" he smiled at her, cocking his head to the side a little.
"No, I was just cold, I thought I'd see if I could find a warmer place to sleep. What about you?"
"The usual, I couldn't sleep."
"Oh." Natalya turned, if he was going to try and sleep here, she had better find a different room.
"Don't go." Something in his voice made her pause. "Could we just talk for a while?"
"I thought you wanted to sleep?" Natalya said, but she stepped towards him anyway.
"I do, I just can't. Would you mind keeping me company for a while? Please?"
She didn't mind, not really. Not that she was going to say that out loud.
"Fine." Natalya sat down next to him on the floor. "What's wrong? You slept fine last night.", she asked, immediately regretting bringing it up.
"I don't know. And like I said this morning, me sleeping last night was akin to a miracle, I can't really explain how that happened." Akhos straightened his back. "You're shivering again. You weren't shivering earlier."
"If you're about to suggest another training session, you can forget about it. I am not doing that again. And especially not now. Some of my muscles are still sore."
"I thought I'd healed your wound?"
"Oh, my wound is great, it's everything else that hurts."
"I'm sorry, I was trying to get you to use your arts, I was sure that if I pushed you at least something was going to burst out of you eventually. Sense of self-preservation and all that, I never thought you'd throw away your shield. Where did you even get such a stupid idea. What were you thinking?"
"To be honest, I don't think I was thinking a lot when I did that," Natalya admitted, "I just wanted you to stop shooting at me. Were you ever going to stop? Wasn't it already obvious after a couple of minutes that I was not going to just be able to use an art against you?" Natalya tilted her head. "You were enjoying it, weren't you?"
Akhos stared out the window. "Maybe a little. It's been a while since I practised my shooting. I'm sorry, I got carried away."
He studied her for a moment, then untucked his blanket and wrapped it around the both of them. Natalya tensed up a little.
"What are you doing?"
"You're still shivering. Last night, the second blanket obviously must have helped since you weren't shaking anymore when you woke up."
"Thank you."
Akhos grinned. "Take it as an apology for shooting you earlier."
"It wasn't your fault. You were going easy on me. If you had meant to shoot me, you might have hit me sooner than that." Natalya admitted. She stared out at the clouds whirling past, then turned to look up at Akhos. "I want to learn how to use them, but I don't think shooting at me is going to trigger anything."
"I know, which is why I think it would probably be best if you asked Mikhail to train with you. You and he are a lot more similar. He knows what it's like having to get used to fighting as a Blade. The rest of us, we were just born knowing how to fight with our abilities."
Natalya nodded. "Hmm. I'll ask him in the morning.", she mumbled.
"Good idea.", Akhos mumbled. "But I do find it hard to believe that a former member of a mercenary group has never learnt how to fight as a Driver, if I remember correctly, they recruit mostly people with aptitude.
"Well, I was ten, when I was sold off to them, so there wasn't really much use in as they put it, wasting a Blade on someone like me. I left when I was fourteen to go and find my brother, and then, everything happened, and I spent the next couple decades trying to not stay off Indol's radar. If I had become a Driver then, they would have started to keep tabs on me, and it would have been harder to sneak in and out of places smuggling core crystals to the bottom of the Cloud Sea."
"You did what?"
"Well, Indol is still collecting core crystals from all over the world. And they control who gets which crystal, but not all of the crystals that arrive in Indol ever make it back out again, so they must be using them for something. Given Indol's track record," Natalya gestured down to her own core crystal, "I really don't think that whatever they're doing to those crystals is good. And I doubt it is pleasant for the Blades involved. So I figured, they'd probably be safer at the bottom of the Cloud Sea than in the hands of Indol, so I started collecting them and sinking them."
"And you never thought of awakening any of them?"
"Why would I? Like I said, not being a Driver is what kept Indol so ignorant of me. They never considered someone without apparent aptitude to be a threat, so when the crystals started disappearing, they usually never looked at me twice."
"Hmm.", he paused for a while, staring out at the clouds. "You said you went looking for your brother; did you ever manage to find him?"
Natalya shook her head.
"He was six when I last saw him, we were separated when the bandits sold us off, I ended up tracking him down to Torna in the middle of the Aegis War, but the village he was supposed to be in had burnt to cinders, and, well, you probably heard about what happened shortly after that. Deep down, I kept hoping that he was still alive somewhere, but in all honesty, how could a ten-year-old have survived all that? And if he did, he's dead by now for certain.", she said, gloomily.
"I'm sorry.", Akhos said.
"Want to tell me another story? Preferably one that is less depressing than what happened to my little brother?", Natalya asked changing the subject. Akhos grimaced, but he obliged and soon he had managed to distract her enough that she could shut Misha's memory away behind the adamantine wall again, where it couldn't hurt her as much. The blanket was nice and warm. Sitting here, all bundled up, Natalya could feel the cold disappear from her bones, a comforting warm feeling seeping into her in its place, making her drowsy. Akhos told her a story of the four of them getting stranded in the middle of nowhere in Gormott, and how Xander had gotten himself into a hilariously sticky situation with a skeeter nest. Natalya did not remember much after that.
"I thought I'd find you here! You know, there really is no reason for the two of you to sneak around like this."
The two of you. Akhos. They'd fallen asleep again, hadn't they? Natalya slowly opened her eyes to find that she was indeed curled up against Akhos' chest like a snake on a sunlit rock. The metaphor was quite apt, she thought, sleepily, since he was so very warm. Warm enough that even the embarrassment of her having fallen asleep in his arms – again – and having been found by Mikhail – again – wasn't enough to make her want to move away from him.
Mikhail was leaning against the instrument panel. Behind him, the Cloud Sea had started shifting from greys and blues to the pale pinks and oranges of early dawn.
Akhos took off his glasses to rub his eyes with his left hand. His right arm remained draped around Natalya and did not move an inch. "Mik...", he sounded drowsy and exhausted, but annoyed enough that any sensible person would have immediately at least attempted to make a run for it. Mikhail, it seemed however, was not, in fact, a sensible person.
"And I am also pretty sure there are enough bedrooms on this ship that you don't need to sleep on the floor every night."
"It's not like that." Natalya mumbled. She realised that her argument was very weak, given how she had still barely moved an inch since she had woken up, but she was still not awake enough to care, or realise how much she was going to care once her brain had fully caught up to the situation. Though she had a nagging suspicion that she would be less embarrassed, if the person that had found her like this looked a bit less like a younger version of her father.
"Oh, so you have not been sleeping on the floor these past two nights?", Mikhail asked, smirking, "My bad, I must have remembered it wrong then. Did this room have a bed yesterday? Or does it still have one and it's invisible?" Given the look on Akhos' face, Mikhail was probably very lucky both of them were still sleepy and Akhos' getting up would have involved him moving Natalya, or he probably would have punched him.
"You're acting like we fell asleep on purpose." Natalya finally sat up, her entire body immediately protesting the decision.
Mikhail made a point of dramatically shifting his gaze from Akhos to her and back again. "Oh, really, is that not what you were trying to do?", he asked, his voice shaking with amusement.
Akhos stood up and leaned against the wall behind him. "What did you want, Mikhail?" He looked fully woken up and annoyed enough that Natalya was wondering whether he regretted falling asleep like this again. The thought somehow made her stomach sink a little.
"I was looking for you. Do you remember where you put that book on the Mechanics of Mor Ardanian Engineering, after you finished reading it?"
"I put it back in its place in the library. And you just had to wake me up for that, didn't you? It could certainly not have waited until after breakfast?"
Mikhail scratched the back of his head, trying – and failing – to look absolutely innocent. "No, it absolutely couldn't, I need it very urgently to fix the issue with the second steam pipe in the Marsanes' rear engine."
Mikhail grinned and turned to walk out of the room before halting in the doorframe with an expression of pure delighted mischief on his face. "You know, you should really consider moving your little cuddling sessions to a proper bedroom, Akhos.", he turned and winked at them. "Just think of poor Nat next time. She might not be shivering just now, but the cold floor is no place for a lady."
Akhos glared at him. "Get out."
"Akhos, if you want to kick people out of your sleeping place, you really shouldn't choose such a public place to fall asleep in.", Mikhail laughed, before wisely exiting the room before Akhos could actually find something to throw at him.
"Are you alright? Did you sleep well?" Akhos reached out a hand to pull Natalya to her feet. His voice was so soft, Natalya could barely believe he was the same person who was talking to Mikhail earlier.
"I did. Thank you."
"For what?"
"Asking." Natalya said, taking a step back, suddenly painfully aware how close to each other they were standing. Akhos opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again, having seemingly thought better of it. The air in the room felt charged. Natalya took another step towards the door, suddenly in a hurry. "Oh, I just remembered, I wanted to ask Mikhail if he was going to train with me today.", she said, and danced out the door before Akhos could even so much as react.