The Mirk and Midnight Hour

Pairing: Maeve/Sinbad
Rating: M
Setting: Just after Season 1
All standard disclaimers apply

She's having nightmares again.

What triggered them this time, Maeve doesn't know. It's often like this. Perhaps a passing word from a member of Sinbad's crew dredged something up from the cobwebbed recesses of her mind. Maybe it was a flash of emotion, lightning-quick but so familiar that her body remembers what her mind chooses not to. Possibly it's simply the heavy burden of guilt she always wears, made deeper, weightier, as she feels herself falling more and more for her sailor captain.

This must not happen. She has a job to do.

And so she fights. It should be so simple, she thinks, to tell her heart no. Sinbad is forbidden; all men are. She can't afford the distraction. It creates more guilt and she honestly doesn't know how much more her shoulders can bear. It roils her stomach, makes food impossible. And on the nights she's actually able to sleep, it plagues her rest with dreams—memories she cannot forget, can't bear to remember.

And so she's here, awake, on deck in the deepest hours of night. The wind blows off and on, sails flapping halfheartedly each time the breeze dies. The creaks and pops of the wooden ship, its slow, gentle rocking, are so familiar to her by now that they should be comforting. Should be, but nothing ever is.

Her brother is asleep somewhere up in the rigging. She can feel him, but is grateful for the respite. He's not happy with her, hasn't been since their last encounter with Rumina several weeks ago. Her failure to kill the dark sorceress isn't what's angered him, though. It's her inability to keep Sinbad at arm's length, the way the captain keeps finding excuses to touch her, to be close to her, and her apparent acceptance of his interest.

Were she honest with herself, Maeve would be forced to admit how much she cares for the blue-eyed rogue. As it is she lies, and tells herself the deception is necessary because Dermott is so often inside her head. What she knows, he knows, and letting herself feel this truth is just too dangerous. Dermott deserves better from her. He deserves the whole of her concentration, her devotion. She owes him this much.

Far aft, the crewmember manning the tiller coughs. The sound reaches Maeve in a still pocket of the night. They are the only two people awake, the only two people, it feels like, in the whole world. She knows he can see her, even with the waning moon; her skin is so pale that she's unmistakable. The crew know better than to disturb her, though, and this one is probably dozing as the still night passes. There have been no surprises, thankfully, since they left Skull Mountain a ruin—no harpies or water beasts, no unnatural storms, no dark magic that she can sense.

Just her dreams.

She has magic but not enough control; if she sleeps and the nightmares come, they spill over and affect other members of the crew. This is unacceptable, and so she remains on deck, awake, lost in dark thoughts instead of dark dreams.

Shifting her body and shaking the leg that has fallen asleep while she broods, Maeve stretches out full length on the deck. It's not comfortable and she won't sleep. Instead, she stares up at the stars, dim through a slightly hazy sky. They're not the same stars, nor in the same positions, she remembers from childhood. Looking at these southern stars makes her miss her island home so much that it hurts. It's not a fresh wound—she's been gone too long for that—but the ache is deep and hollow. She feels it when they enter a new city or town, the stares from everyone, the way they hold back a little further than with the men who look local, their skin ruddy or tan or coffee-colored, their hair and eyes uniformly dark. She's exotic, tall as a man and pale as a lily, with hair the color of flame. In the smaller towns and villages, probably no one has ever seen red hair before. Certainly they've never seen a woman like her.

In Maeve's experience, that means one of two things: people either get acquisitive or fearful. Many, many men have wanted to possess her. Others, often women and children, shy away. It isn't just the culture of the south, where women are meant to be neither seen nor heard, but a genuine fear of what she might represent. She is an outsider, and a warrior. This means she will never truly belong in this hot, dry, strange southern world.

Except with Sinbad.

His blue eyes show that, somewhere in his family's past, they had some truck with northerners. Maybe that makes it easier for him to accept what she is, or maybe it's just Sinbad. He didn't like her at first—nor she him—but even in the beginning he wasn't afraid of her. Nor did he demand sex, as so many men do, as if it were his right. For a long time he didn't touch her at all—not until mutual respect and friendship had solidified. It's one of the things she appreciates the most about him. Sure, he's beautiful and charismatic, but it's his humanity she holds most dear.

Slowly Maeve's eyes close. She won't sleep, she knows better, but she forces her body to loosen though she's anything but relaxed. She rocks with the motion of the ship, cajoling her body into the rhythm of the ocean, the incessant push and pull, ebb and flow, that the others seem to adapt to so easily. They all walk with it, sleep with it, breathe with it. With the men, it's unconscious and instinctual. Maeve can ape it, but she can't let go enough to feel it.

What she does feel is Sinbad awaken below. He falls back asleep after a few minutes; she wonders if he knows where she is, just as she knows where he is. This, at least, is instinct, deeper than magic, deeper than book-learning. She can't turn it off, this knowledge, which is a little disturbing but also somehow…comforting. He's part of her in a way no one else knows, maybe not even Dermott. It makes the way women throw themselves at him easier to stomach, because she shares a bond with him that none of them ever will. She's sure about so little in her life, but about this, at least, she's positive.

"Rashid tells me she was up all night again." Doubar's voice is low, meant to stay between himself and his younger brother. Maeve is too far away to hear anything but a shout, her head buried in a large, cumbersome book as the wind whips the flames of her hair around her head. Every so often she lifts a delicate hand to run through the riot of red-gold curls, absently pulling them out of her line of sight.

Sinbad watches, at once caught by her beauty and worried for her health. Something is troubling his sorceress-in-training, though she takes great care not to let it show. During the day even he's hard-pressed to find anything suspicious about her behavior, but after more than a week without sleep she's starting to slip. That's how long it's been since the night he stood the graveyard watch and couldn't help but notice Maeve's silent presence above deck. He's been keeping track, unobtrusive, trying to stay out of her business. She's not his the way the rest of the crew are, after all. She's signed no contract. Technically Dim-Dim is still her master and thus Sinbad's command over her is limited to what she will allow. It's…an awkward situation. Thankfully she accepts his authority most of the time now—unlike when they first met—but her fierce temper and independent streak return when she feels he's overstepping boundaries as captain of the ship. Taking her to task for not sleeping falls into the category of "overstepping," he's sure, so he's been hesitant to broach the topic.

"That's ten nights now." He runs the pad of his thumb over his lips, chapped by the constant salt wind, as he thinks.

"How does she manage it, I want to know." Doubar leans into the tiller, correcting their course against a sudden cross-breeze.

"She must be using magic somehow." Sinbad shrugs off the question. Maeve is strong and resourceful. How she's managed to go ten nights without sleep doesn't matter to him; he cares only about the reason for it, and the possible danger if she continues.

Doubar hems, spits over the edge of the ship, and rests against the railing. He's a big man—tall and big-boned as well as fat, with blunt, cheerful features. He wears a heavy beard and his hair has gone prematurely grey. Nobody would guess from looking at them that they're brothers, and full brothers at that. Sinbad is much younger, a surprise late addition to the family, and is their mother's child from his sharply defined, beautiful features, to his smaller, harder build. Both brothers share their mother's blue eyes—Doubar's almost grey, like an overcast sky, Sinbad's the color of the ocean. People fawned over their unusual eyes when they were young, and women still fall for Sinbad's bright blues. He knows he's attractive—fairer-skinned than many, thanks to a grandmother from Gaul, and his smile has rescued him from trouble both as a child and an adult. His pretty face seems to make no difference to Maeve, though. If anything, he thinks she likes him in spite of his looks, not because of them.

"Do you think it's time to talk to her about it?" Doubar's worried about their sorceress, it's clear, but he also knows butting into her business like this will create trouble. He's not a deep thinker like Firouz, their resident scientist, but they've all been together long enough to know this much.

Sinbad doesn't have a good answer to that question. He looks at the sky. They've been asea about three weeks, with only two short stops of less than a day to onboard fresh supplies. Five more days will finally bring them home to Baghdad, where they plan to take extended leave before setting sail again. He's looking forward to spending some time at home, except he's not sure it's safe for Maeve to go five more nights without sleep. And what if shore leave doesn't fix whatever's wrong?

"Firouz," he calls finally, and gestures to the scientist, who has been scribbling equations on a bit of parchment with a sharpened piece of charcoal. "I have a question for you."

Obliging as always, Firouz absent-mindedly sticks the charcoal in his pocket and walks over. "I've been observing changes in water depth," he begins, but Sinbad waves him to silence. He doesn't have the patience for one of Firouz's rambling explanations right now. Firouz is used to this and hushes.

"How long can a person go without sleep?" Sinbad asks, careful how he phrases his questions. Firouz doesn't know about Maeve's sleeplessness yet, and Sinbad prefers to keep it that way as long as possible. He trusts the scientist without question, but Maeve is an intensely private person and the fewer people who know, the better. "Can staying awake…do anything, you know, to you?"

Firouz tilts his head to the side, curly hair waving like froth across his forehead. "That's a good question," he says, eyes distant as he rakes through his stores of knowledge for anything helpful. "I don't know that anyone has experimented with the concept and come up with a definitive number."

"Some help science is," Doubar grumbles, but it's not a personal attack on Firouz and the inventor takes no offense.

"I can say definitively that missing sleep causes confusion, delayed reaction times, poor decision-making, dizziness…" He trails off, then barks a short laugh. "Not unlike the symptoms of too much wine."

Doubar joins in the laughter, but Sinbad's eyes flick to Maeve's figure bent over her book. As far as he knows, she hasn't shown any similar signs. As he told Doubar before, she must be using magic somehow to mitigate the effects of not sleeping.

"So, like getting drunk, not sleeping makes doing anything a little more dangerous," he says, making sure he understands the physician's explanation, "but it isn't dangerous on its own?"

"Not that I know of," Firouz agrees. "Why the sudden interest in insomnia?"

"Insomnia?" Doubar mimics the word.

"The technical term for an inability to sleep."

"Maeve was telling me about a curse that causes it." Sinbad lies easily, the words flowing from his mouth as calm as truth. "I just wondered how bad it would really be."

"It would be a torment, certainly." Firouz nods. "A constant desire for sleep, worsening with every night, with no ability to relieve it. But as far as I know it wouldn't kill you on its own. You'd die eventually from making a stupid mistake."

"From all that bad decision making." Sinbad frowns. "Does it get worse the longer it continues?"

"Of course. Just consider when you've had to spend a night or two awake."

"Yeah, I hear you." Sinbad slaps Firouz on the shoulder, thanking him, and the inventor wanders off with his parchment again.

"What do you think now?"

Sinbad turns to look at Maeve once more. She raises her head, and for an instant he wonders whether she can sense his attention. Instead of turning to him, though, she lifts one delicate, long-fingered hand to shield her eyes as she watches her hawk arc overhead. As always, it's the bird she turns to first, thinks and worries about—more than any human member of the crew, more even than herself. Her bond with Dermott is as mysterious as everything else about her.

"I think a ship is no place for confusion and delayed reactions." It's completely true, as far as it goes. "She could get hurt, or hurt someone else."

Doubar sighs. "I'll make sure we have plenty of buckets in case she sets the ship on fire again."

She's awake again—still. It's a soft night once more, warm as all nights here are, even on the open sea. Maeve sits near the bow of the ship, leaning against the railing, listening to the wind, the rush of water as they draw ever nearer to Baghdad. She hopes the distraction of the city will stop these dreams, make her able to sleep again, but she isn't sure.

Part of her wishes they were headed to Basra instead, that she might beg help from the sorceress Cairpra. She doesn't like asking for help, hates feeling beholden to anyone, but she doesn't know how much longer she can keep this farce going. Using magic to replenish her energy is a self-defeating ruse; she's managed to stay awake, yes, but she's so depleted that she can't conjure so much as a spark, let alone a fireball. She hopes they don't run into any trouble before this spate of nightmares ends.

Maybe she should leave the Nomad for a time when they reach Baghdad. Find a ship headed to Basra, go see Cairpra on her own. It's something she's contemplated many times during these dark, solitary nights. She has coin enough to buy passage, so that isn't a problem. Dermott would probably approve, too. But she just can't bring herself to commit to leaving Sinbad, even temporarily. Everything inside her balks. She tries to tell herself that he needs her—he gets in trouble so often, and has come to rely on her magic more and more as their trust and her skills have grown. In truth she knows that, in her state, she's a liability to the crew and not an asset, but still she struggles. The Nomad has become her home, the permanent members of the crew as close to family as she's ever had. The thought of leaving Sinbad, too, is…terrifying. What will happen to this bond between them, if he's so far away? Will she still know where he is, what he's doing?

Will he forget her?

She scowls and pitches a splinter of wood overboard. She shouldn't fear that, it's beneath her. But she does. There's so much fear in her, mostly fear of failure, but also of things she can't even name. This one, though, she can. She wants to be special to Sinbad, to mean something to him. Is that so wrong?

Maybe not for an ordinary girl, she thinks, but she hasn't been a girl like that for a very long time. Dermott needs her. She glances up, where her brother roosts in the darkness. She owes him so much, loves him so much. For him, she's sacrificed half her life. For him, she knows, she must be willing to give more.

Behind her, Sinbad scuffs his foot on the deck on purpose. She doesn't flinch; she knew he was awake and approaching. Her spine stiffens. She's been waiting for this discussion for a while.

"Nice night." He sits beside her without asking, but he's the captain and this is his ship. He's not too close, keeping enough distance to be polite. Maeve wishes he wouldn't.

She doesn't respond to his attempt at smalltalk, waiting instead for the real reason he's approached her. She knows perfectly well that she's not fooling him; he knows she's not sleeping. This bond works both ways, though she doubts Sinbad realizes it.

"Maeve," he says finally, "I'm worried about you."

"I'm fine." The rebuttal is automatic, and also a complete lie. She's falling apart and desperately trying to hold the pieces together. Her past, her desires, her brother's needs…all the secrets she holds, the fear of what might happen were they to leak.

"I'm sorry, Maeve, but you're not. When people are fine, they sleep. They eat."

"I eat," she protests.

"Less than Dermott, and that's not the point." He pauses, puts his hands behind him and leans back on his arms. It's an exaggerated pose meant to put her at ease, which she knows perfectly well. "Are you ill? Should we get Firouz to examine you?"

She favors him with a dark look, which he counters with a cheeky grin. "I didn't think so, but I had to ask."

They're silent for a while. Maeve thinks hard, but she can't come up with a good excuse that will alleviate Sinbad's concern. If she tries to tell him it's a magical experiment he'll respond, rightly, that it's not worth risking her health. Anything else he likely won't believe. She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. She's not cold, she's never cold here, but it's comforting all the same.

After a beat, Sinbad shifts closer, hip to hip. His arm curls around her waist and he draws her close.

Unable to resist when he touches her like this—something Dermott hates—Maeve relents. Her body relaxes against his and she drops her head to his shoulder. She feels him press a gentle kiss to her hair and it warms her inside. "I liked it much better when you were afraid of me," she mutters, staring out into the darkness.

His chuckle vibrates against her cheek. "I was never afraid of you. In awe, maybe. Still am, if I'm being honest." His free hand rises, callused fingertips drawing a gentle line along her arm, her white sleeve bright in the dim starlight. "But even you can't keep this up forever. Maeve." The way he says her name, it's like she's lost somewhere and he's calling for her. Searching. She yearns to answer but she can't. She can't. "We're friends, aren't we? You can tell me anything."

She wants to tell him, give him everything he wants from her, but she's too afraid of the repercussions. "Your first point doesn't automatically prove the second," she says instead.

"Now you sound like Firouz."

"So go hold Firouz."

He laughs. "Thanks, but no. He doesn't smell as good as you." He kisses her head again, an oddly tender gesture.

They're quiet for a while. Maeve closes her eyes, drinks in how this feels, being held by hard, gentle arms, his body warm against hers. She's been more or less alone with Dermott for so long, and her body craves the contact of another person, another human body. Sinbad smells like the open sea and clean sweat, salt-fresh, male. For a moment, just a moment, her mind stills. The constant, gnawing fear calms. Peace isn't something she's used to, but she knows it when she feels it. Her self-control wavers and her eyelids grow heavy.

Just before she falls asleep, Maeve catches herself. Her body stiffens and she drags it, protesting, upright again. She can't look at Sinbad. Even in the dark his eyes are too dangerous. They make her think he knows things he shouldn't. "I was thinking I might head to Basra," she forces herself to say, staring out over the dark water.

"To see Cairpra?" He's watching her. She can feel it. "Okay. We'll need to resupply in Baghdad first, but—"

"No, Sinbad." It guts her to say it, to give weight and meaning to what was previously just a hated thought. "I didn't say we. I said I. There's nothing for you in Basra."

"There is if you're there." He's being deliberately obtuse. She flashes him her best irritated look, wonders if he buys it.

"I said no."

"And I'm the captain. You're a member of my crew, aren't you?"

It's a very dangerous question. She desperately wants to be—maybe even needs to be. But technically the answer is no, she's not. She belongs to Dim-Dim. She and Sinbad are united by the common cause of her master's rescue, but she's signed no contract. She is not a member of his crew, owes him no allegiance.

But she can't bring herself to say it.

His question goes unanswered and the night wind drifts between them. Silence swallows the Nomad as the night wanes.

"You can't go alone," he says finally, intractable, his own stubborn streak showing. He's serious.

"Then I'm not going."

"Can you sleep without her help?"

The challenge is too much for Maeve to bear. She stands abruptly, ending the conversation. "Good night, captain." Knowing she's retreating but unable to do anything else, she heads for her tiny cabin and firmly closes the door behind her. Above, she hears Sinbad curse.