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Yuri wakes up angry. I can hear it in the way he's rifling through his side of the room, steps too heavy to be sleep walking.
I stretch my hand out in slow increments over the rumpled sheets. The space he left is still warm.
When I lift my head, his eyes cut through the distance between us. Distance is new, or it was our old normal and I've just adapted. Adaptation is one of Yuri's skills, bleeding into me.
There isn't much distance now, especially during sleepshifts. Some nights he sleeps easy against me, others he's more restless. Other nights, newer, with his mouth over my skin.
I want to lean against the bulkhead, away from his cold stare and into the residual warmth of last night's mistakes.
I can't turn away from that look of his. Like he's angry and he blames me.
Yuri knocks on the hatch. A jetguard wrenches it open, leads him out. Away from me. I can still taste his cigrets on my tongue and feel his iron gaze.
Work in Engineering pulls me out of my bunk eventually. Unlike Yuri, there's no set schedule for me. Piotr and I are unnecessary add-ons to his bargain with Azarcon, to be used at Macedon's convenience. I'm used to more of a routine, regimented time, but Yuri blows a hole in anything remotely like normalcy.
Life Systems work requires some finesse, experience over the hurried training they give jets with an aptitude for Engineering. Out of practice, but the heft of the tools in my hands is as familiar as an old face. I missed long, mindless work. How the shipyard was before they started taking pieces of me as prizes. But these engineering jets don't bend you over with a hand at your neck after hours. Mostly they just tell me what valve to maintain.
"There's opportunity here," Piotr tells me, like the opportunities this ship affords us are why we followed Yuri in the first place.
Piotr must be the kind of person that looks for the silver lining in every shit situation. I don't get how someone like that would've survived with pirates. Yuri survived by expecting the worst. Maybe they're two sides of the same coin, coping with working alongside criminals, murderers, and thieves.
Oil under my fingernails, my hands skim the grates and test for weak spots. I can feel the jets watching us. Piotr was with the pirates, was a pirate, but I suppose I'm not much better. Yuri pulled me from a prison after all.
Musey collects me halfway through the workshift, wearing the kind of face that only comes with bad news. I shoot Piotr a grim look while I pass. His silver lining argument is wrong; the only opportunity here is Azarcon's.
We're not halfway down the decks before another person joins us, some kid in civilian clothing. I glance to Musey; he seems to attract more hanger-on's that any other escort of ours. How's a brat like him manage to make so many friends?
Whoever the new guy is, he's all bones, slouching along beside us. "Hi." His lips are a dark smear in the paleness of his face.
"No," Musey says through a clenched jaw.
"What, I can't say hi?" Irritation ekes through the kid's loose stance. He jerks his head towards me. "I know you told Ryan this guy's off limits, but—"
"'Off limits?'"
Musey bristles at the humor in my voice. "He's a pirate." There's a weight behind the words that I don't understand.
"No, I'm not," I argue, although it's clear nobody feels the need to include me in the conversation.
The stranger slakes his eyes on me. They remind me of Yuri's; the needles to his knives. Pointed and painful. Used.
I never wore that look. Killed before it settled over my face.
Like recognizes like. I look away.
"Don't take it personal, mano," he says. "Jos has a lousy history tellin' us from the real pirates."
An expression I don't recognize flickers over Musey's face, but the new kid walks away too fast for Musey to hold it for long.
"'Off limits?'" I repeat. That parting comment sapped the amusement from my voice this time.
We're walking again.
"The Captain told Ryan to stay away from Kirov." Makes sense, Yuri blinded the kid. "That extends to you."
"Azarcon thinks I'm dangerous?"
"You follow a pirate's orders." Musey snaps, dismissive.
"Didn't you?"
"Didn't I what?"
"Follow a pirate's orders."
Musey stops fast.
At Hephaestus there was an alarm set for when the piping of a project reached an operational velocity limit below fifty percent. Below that, the erosion of the material's density risked leaking into the airstream. It happened every few months, more if the parts were older. The alarm would sound, the area would be evacuated, and the affected branch was cordoned until the leak could be contained.
Can't help feeling like the line over Musey's shoulders is that alarm.
"Don't compare us."
"All right." My hands are in my pockets. "But Yuri doesn't give me orders."
That kid shows up again a ways down the hall. He didn't get far. His body's an apostrophe mark along some jet's, his hand in her hair. The look he still wears reminds me of Yuri again. It's the face he wore on Pax Terra. Working. The kind of face Yuri wore last night, body over mine.
Now I'm angry for some reason, targetless and floating dead in space.
We walk the rest of the way in uneasy silence, in some shared frustration over what we saw.
When we reach the room for interrogations, Yuri's already there, rising from the table. The tired lines around his mouth deepen. Either because he's surprised to see me, or he's still pissed from last night. They could've picked a better shift to question us. But Macedon hasn't exactly taken our comfort into account.
Corporal Dorr appears out of my blindspot, turned towards Musey. "Thanks for handlin' the prisoner exchange."
When he talks, I think of fights at the pub and the sound of teeth clattering across the deck. I could take him, looking at that stupid grin. Maybe. But I've thought that about guys before and ended up bloody for it. Guess I don't learn.
"No detours," Musey warns.
Dorr mock salutes and takes Yuri to the hatch. When Musey passes him, Yuri mutters something too low for me to hear. Musey doesn't react. Then they leave, and Musey too, and I'm left with jets and another round of questions.
They're looking for the spy that blew Archangel, but I know even less than Yuri. With so many sessions like this, the weight of what I don't know presses hard over me. So I think about what I do know; to what degree welding causes a pressure pipe to burst. The crease of Yuri's forehead when he's upset. Yuri's skin, warm and urgent against my own. How I messed up last night.
"Are you aware Black Ops put you in Kirov's cell on purpose?"
I shrug. Lukcas said as much on Pax Terra, he plays his lousy head games out in the open.
"Do you know why?"
My stomach clenches. I can feel Taja's breath on my neck, the heaviness of her arms over my shoulders. "Yuri seems pretty attached to you," she'd said after the pirates dragged me out, after they slipped Yuri something that knocked him out cold. "You must be a good fuck."
Back in today's interrogation. "I don't think about it."
When they bring me back to our room, Yuri's sitting at the edge of his bunk, unbruised. Good, but I don't regret wanting to bloody Dorr's nose.
The blankets over my bunk are still a mess. I think about last night, Yuri's palm braced against the mattress beside my face. How it'd be different to do this looking at each other. The sudden surge of anxiety under my ribs.
"You have fun?" His voice is barbed wire, dragging me back to the present. "Jets draining your skull."
I walk by him, close but he doesn't reach for me. Not like last night.
"It's not so bad. Got loads of practice from talking to you." When I come back from washing my face, he's watching me. "What?"
"What kind of person do you think the spy is?" The long look in Yuri's eyes means he's serious.
"I don't know." I take a slow seat on my bunk, considering. "They must hate the peace treaty. Maybe someone with a grudge against strits." Again, don't know anything for sure. With jets I can linger in ignorance since they never really planned on keeping me around. Yuri isn't so lucky. They need answers from him, answers he can't have. So I'll give him as many theories as I can come up with. He listens to me for some reason, even when the most listening I did for him was when he was asleep.
He's worrying at his lip.
"They blew their home," he says softly, and it ruptures something inside me.
I'm leaning towards him before I think not to.
"And they killed thousands of people doing it. You didn't. That's not you."
He gives me a smile so deceptively gentle that I feel lonely looking at it.
"Yuri." His fake look slams shut, maybe suspecting where I'm steering us. The apologies I'm going to make.
"I'm taking a shower." He has a trained grace to his movements, even when he's running away.
I lie back against my bunk, feet scraping the cold floor. My eyes feel heavy, like I only slept for a frantic moment before waking with our regrets.
Last night.
His tongue in my mouth, his hands under my clothes, mine under his. Yuri had knelt between my legs.
"Wait," I'd breathed, and he stopped with pinpoint precision. His lips looked inviting, overly red and used. "Wait," I said again, even though Yuri hadn't moved. He blinked very fast. He could've moved his body a fraction of an inch closer and there would've been no turning back. It was a stupid milestone to try to keep, considering what we'd already done in prison. Then it was protection. Now it was need. We were thick with it, bodies tangled.
But I'd stopped him because using him again turned my stomach. We moved with base instinct, and Yuri was sweetly accommodating me the only way he knows how.
The sound of running water from the bathroom pulls me from the memory. I roll away from it, facing the bulkhead. Scrape my fingernail against the divots in the metal. No accommodations now.
That sleepshift he doesn't come to my bunk.
Instead, Yuri walks as soon as he hits the pillow. Heavy pacing in the dark.
The first few times he walked in prison I tried not to listen. Didn't ask to hear these things about Yuri, but eventually it was too hard not to. He's an entertainer, even in sleep, and he told a story too compelling with its tragedy. Shouldn't have listened to something so private. Maybe if I hadn't, we'd still hate each other. Or he'd wind up hating me for the things I learned from those walks. Things he never meant to tell anyone.
Yuri's words are compressed detonations that erupt when he breathes oxygen into them. His pain had existed in the vacuum of space, on the dark side of some distant station. Hidden, guarded. Until he found me.
He walks tonight, but he doesn't say anything. His eyes look through me, windows on a dead ship. I reach for him even if I don't know what I'll do when I have him in my arms.
He folds against me, weighted like a corpse.
When I wake up, Yuri's looking at me.
For a moment it's like we're both too embarrassed to say anything or move apart, numb with shame.
"You walked." I say it before I lose my nerve. He hasn't done it since we arrived on Macedon. Even when we aren't screwing, I'm pulling him down into old habits.
Yuri's face crumbles, buries itself against my chest. I run my hand through his hair. In this half dark, its color lighter than the sheets.
"You didn't say anything, you just walked." His shoulders shake. Once. "I'm sorry."
"Guess there's nothing else to say," he says, muffled. My hand continues to move along the back of his neck, the top of his spine. His breathing is uneven.
We lie there long enough sleep edges at the corners of my vision, trying to tug my eyes closed.
An admission of guilt hangs at the edge of my lips, threatening articulation. I don't know what I'm scared of; either Yuri agreeing with me or punishing me for it. Maybe I should've stopped this when he kissed me. Or back in the prison, before my genius idea for protection started all this. I'd still be there and maybe he'd still be with the pirates. Or maybe we'd both be dead. I hate hypotheticals.
Shame builds in my chest.
"We don't have to," I stop, swallow the end of that sentence. Instead, "If it'll make you walk." My voice trails off in uncertainty. Not my most convincing argument.
Yuri lifts his head. Tension drains into anger. His eyelids narrow, a razor thin stare of accusation.
"You weren't exactly gagging for it last time." Even with all the things about him I should know, this brand of sharp cruelty still knocks me off my guard.
I suddenly feel more awake.
"You have me all figured out, don't you?" I say.
"Just stating the truth." His face is all hard lines and guards.
"This isn't the prison." I've been saying this for almost as long as we've been out. My life has been made up of different prisons and the only real change is now I don't mind when it's Yuri I'm locked in with.
Yuri moves to get up, I grab his wrist. Light grip, easy to break away from. Or maybe it's not easy, not to Yuri. My touch could burn him to the white of his bones.
I try and make my hand gentler.
"You weren't too excited about what we did either." I add, "Back then."
Before he let me press my mouth to the juncture of his neck, making soft noises against me. Now he'll touch me and fight me in the same breath.
Yuri's hair falls forward, shielding his face from me. My thumb rubs the pulsepoint of his wrist.
He hasn't said a word, so I keep going, "I don't know what you're trying to prove, bringing up ancient history."
"Because I'm using you again."
The room fills with a cacophonous silence.
"You're not." The words are rough in my throat.
My thoughts try and catch up to the situation. Yuri hadn't been angry at me. He felt guilty. Angry with himself. We crashed together and orbited each other, raging against ourselves for taking advantage of the other person. It's annoying, this kid thinking he could use me. Like I give up that easy.
"You're not, Yuri," I say again, softer.
Treacherously vulnerable, he tilts his face towards mine.
A fist hits the door with enough force to startle Yuri to his feet, reaching for weapons he hasn't had in weeks. I stand after him, hands steady against his arms, before checking the door.
"Hope we're not interruptin'," says Corporal Dorr. I wonder what my face gives away. Yuri always says it's too open, too honest for poker. He never lets anyone win. Not with cards anyway.
It feels like a betrayal when I make room for Yuri to move through the hatch.
When I lie back down, I imagine— miss— Yuri's weight against me and don't sleep. It's euphoric and miserable all at once.
Musey arrives. No questioning today. Med work.
Musey's getting to be a more familiar face that anybody else. Maybe Azarcon's having trouble with those dedicated jets he promised. Maybe he's got some plan between Musey and me.
I eye the kid carefully as we make our way. Being set up; I don't swallow that from anybody, not even Macedon's captain. Yuri sets me up for all kinds of things, but that's different. I know too much about Yuri not to trust him.
"Why're you guarding us anyway?" Musey glances back at my question. Disinterested. "You're not a jet."
"What does that have to do anything?"
"Are you not a jet like I'm not a pirate?" No reason to be in a good mood after what happened. But it's hard, staying pissed when I remember the way Yuri moved in close.
Musey's stance is tense, but we haven't reached density alarm levels yet.
"Because those were the Captain's orders. If you don't like it, you shouldn't have come aboard."
"I'm here for Yuri." I argue without thinking about it. Yuri says I argue without talking, that I wear it on my skin. He can see those kinds of things. Musey probably can too. "Why are you on this ship? How'd you land a job like this after leaving the pirates?"
He turns fast. My heartbeat feels too loud.
Even if the alarm's ringing, I keep going. Containing a breach takes too long, there's work to be done.
"Why do you hate Yuri so much? You were a protégé too."
Something in Musey shuts down. He and Yuri are so similar, down to the violence in their bodies when I say something they don't like.
"You should be—"
"Friends?"
The anger coming off him is stifling.
"No," I reply, unconvincingly. "But there should be something."
Yuri is all I've got. I've never had anyone, not really, not since my parents died. I'm made up of self sustaining parts and Yuri's a kid who grew up too fast, so desperate for affection he took it from the hands of monsters.
Maybe Musey did too.
"Don't talk to me as if I owe him anything." His mouth twists. "Yuri and I aren't the same."
I've been wrong plenty times. "You could tell me about it." Like Yuri's told me, only Musey would be awake.
"I don't owe you anything either." Musey hasn't moved but the wall is at my back. "You think because Yuri confided in you that means anything."
More things I don't know. Because he can share secrets with me while he sleeps, but I don't know anything beyond Yuri's faded, tired remembering.
Musey would probably be useful filling in those gaps.
"Kirov would have have killed you without a thought if Falcone ordered it."
It's blinding, my memory of the patchwork retelling of Yuri's friend and the bullet Yuri put in his head. That might've been me in some other life. But Yuri pulled me out of our cell. He might've done that for Bo-Sheng if he'd been given the chance. He took me from prison, moved me between other cells, and I brought him into this one.
"Fine." I pass a hand over my face. "But there are only three people on this ship who understand what happened with that monster. I don't get why you'd wanna shut one of them out."
"Yes. Three people," Musey repeats, to remind me I'm not one of them.
Walking again.
"I didn't answer your question before."
"I don't care." Musey sounds like he's one comment away from breaking my bones. I don't learn.
"You asked why I was with Yuri."
His gaze is hard. It's not like Dorr, where I see a face I could fight. Where I don't win brawls but try anyway. Overestimating my abilities. It's always been my own fault what happened to me, getting held down by all sorts. Even Yuri.
A fight with Jos Musey isn't one I'd win. So I don't throw the punch that will lay me flat. Instead my hands are open. It's like reaching for Yuri when he walks.
"Because I want to help."
Help with what I don't know yet. Help stop the pirates, help Macedon, help save the soul Yuri's convinced he sold decades ago. I just want to be a part of it, this fight for Yuri, a fight I might actually win for once.
Musey was a spy, so I'm not expecting to see his face shift as much as it does. I'm still figuring out what it means, the flickers and changes in Yuri's face, but I doubt I'll ever understand Musey's.
"Help yourself," he says, but it's less prickly than usual. He turns to continue walking. "Tell the Captain what he wants to know."
I think Musey will cut me loose early, but he has his orders. The kid is rigid when it comes to orders he respects. As soon as I'm through the medbay hatch, he's gone, quick footsteps down the deck.
Yuri's there, mid conversation with an Archangel jet. For all the similarities between protégés, every line of Yuri's person is soft in that instant. He's a gentle, consoling presence while his guilt tears him apart.
It's his training. That thought snakes through my mind, in Musey's voice.
But I know it's more than that from the smile when Yuri spots me.
It's been blueshift for ages but Yuri won't sleep. He paces, awake. There was a time I would've let it happen, curled towards the prison walls with a shiv clutched in my fist. Now I'm aching from confrontation and work, and Yuri's afraid.
He might have heard I've been talking to Musey again. Who tells him these things? Or maybe it's all over my face when the symp delivers me somewhere.
"You don't know that." I slip back into bargaining habits. "If you walk, I'll wake you up. Last time—"
"Don't," he warns. He doesn't want to hear about last time, when he folded into my arms, stone-faced like Musey. "Don't wake me. I've killed in my sleep." He's hung up on comparing me to the violence in his past.
A smile creeps onto my face. "Yeah, you've mentioned that." I lift a pillow from the bed. "But there's no knife here." I know what he'd do with one if there was.
Yuri's icy look hits me right in the gut.
"I don't need a knife to kill you. Stop making jokes."
He can be exhausting. I hold a hand out to him.
"Come here. We don't have to sleep." It comes out more suggestive than I meant it. If Yuri minds, it doesn't stop him. He curls into the bunk beside me, our shoulders touching. He crosses his arms over his chest, staring resolutely at the ceiling. Dexter stirs in his sleep from a corner of our shared space.
Yuri's body hums with what he wants to say, but he's the kind of kid that will withhold until it's painful.
I reach out and brush my knuckles along his cheek.
"Careful," he warns. It sounds more sad than threatening. I turn on my side to face him, brush his hair behind an ear. Move all the way close.
"Whatever you're thinking, that's not what this is." There's something in my voice I haven't heard in awhile, a feeling pooling low in my gut. My skin burns hot under my clothes.
"But that's what it was." Yuri always argues like a spoiled kid. "In prison."
He won't meet my gaze.
I swallow hard. "I want this. Back then, I didn't— you didn't."
He turns over. I look to him for an answer, and his expression is awful.
"Oh, so you know what I want?"
I remember the other night, the rush of blood between my legs and the sensation of Yuri hard against my thigh. My worry seems like a distant memory. "Yes."
From the look on his face, Yuri wasn't expecting that. Or maybe it was the thickness in my voice that surprised him. Either way, it's gone in an instant, an old look clouding it and filling me with bad memories.
"It won't work, Yuri." Trying to scare me. His bare legs graze my sleep clothes. "I know enough."
"You don't know shit about me." His smooth voice is like a knife between my ribs. I probably know too much. More than he was willing to give me. "Maybe I want to go slow. For once."
"I can go slow," I say and it's barely audible over his breathing. "I can go very slow." Yuri pushes me to the bulkhead, boxing me in. This is familiar.
"Not too slow," he says quietly and kisses me. Less familiar.
I take his face in my hands when I kiss back, my tongue along the seam of his worried lips. He opens for me with a soft whine he didn't allow himself the other sleepshift, in prison. This kid.
"Finch," he gasps and stumbles. Trust seizes my heart in a vice grip. We're at the edge of urgency and tension coils inside me.
"I want this," I repeat, and it makes me dizzy to hear it aloud, so close to Yuri's mouth. Between kisses, our bodies shifting together. "Do you?"
His palms skim down my chest, then lower.
I've had girlfriends before. I've had Yuri and I've had worse. I know the different ways bodies fit together, willing or not. That's not what this is. He isn't resigned to pinning me to the mattress with force, in a bargain between us. It's something new. His every movement is laid out, insufferably slow when he has hands on me. He wants to do this to my comfort. It's been awhile since anyone wanted to do that.
His touch on me is a burnt fuse, a shorted wire you grab by mistake. It pulses through me, terrifyingly tender.
He drops his head below my waist.
Something like panic rises in my chest.
"Yuri." My voice sounds thin. His mouth works over me.
I plunge my hand in his hair while he looks up at me. Bright-eyed, he's so far from sleepwalking, from only doing this because I asked him to. He laps slowly against me and I feel myself jump in his mouth. Warmth throbs low in my stomach when he swallows, hums around me. This kid.
By the time I find air to beg, I crest, and that warmth carries me through it. When I've finished, Yuri licks me clean.
He pulls himself up to lay alongside me, settling on his side, heart still slamming against his chest, against mine. It's hard to piece the world back together. I try and let Yuri's wide eyes ground me with their sharpness, his searching look. He's trying to piece things together too. If this was a mistake.
I take him in my fist and move until his back arches off the mattress. He thinks too much.
His nails dig into my wrist, either hanging on or coaching my movements, but not to stop me. Yuri's got the quiet poise of a killer most of the time, but now he's just a man, shaping his body to another person's touch. My touch.
My thumb circles him and he jerks in response, breath wild and his hair a halo behind his head. I've never wanted to control Yuri until this moment, with his body responding desperately to the motion of my hand. He's made up of submissive lines and I thought I'd hate seeing him laid low like this, like he's had me.
But I don't hate it, I couldn't. He's all I have.
I lean in to press a kiss to the column of his throat. At the gesture he comes with a whine, grip tight against my skin.
He's still shaking with aftershocks when our eyes meet. Shameless in his smug satisfaction.
"You bastard," I mutter, aching with affection when I pull his body against mine, his mouth to mine. Tasting myself.
"I didn't answer your question before," he murmurs, dropping his head to my chest. Heady, I forgot I asked anything. The question reminds me of the one Musey asked, of the tense walk we had earlier. I watch Yuri, careful. Maybe he's been spying on me. I'm not as averse to that as I thought I would be once.
"What question?" I sweep his hair back. Still-pink skin peeks out at me from the collar of his shirt.
"If I want this." Yuri's eyelashes are low. "I do. I didn't before, but now," he trails off, curled into my side.
"But now?" I smile.
"I want you."
It slices through the room's quiet.
His arm drapes over my side, touch nervous. Slow, tired breathing but he's still afraid to sleep. Afraid of walking or afraid of me? I'm not sure.
Yuri's breathing fans out over my collarbone.
"You have me."