Chapter 2
Sweet Dreams Aren't Made of These
I had my bunk, although I didn't bother unpacking for the week and change it would take us to get to the Phine system, and I had an understanding with Araxis – and, more importantly, I had an understanding with myself.
Araxis and I were taking a break. We were pausing so that we could figure things out, so that I could figure things out.
A little bit of space would do us good, I thought; that's what I kept telling myself anyway, torn between wanting to be with him all of the time and wanting to see if I could understand myself without him, especially because I’d been feeling so…
confused after everything that had happened in the past month.
So I settled in each night in my own bed, layered up in sweaters and blankets and determined to get a good night's sleep.
I needed that. I needed to put myself back in order.
I needed space to remember who I was and where my edges were and to stop letting myself bleed into creche life, to stop being siphoned off into what Araxis needed and, more importantly, what I thought he needed.
So it was with a sense of purpose and a new dedication to my own self-sufficiency and growth as a person or whatever that I settled in on the creche ship intending to take care of myself, and to do a good job of it too.
And yet –
I didn't sleep. I couldn't. I tossed. I turned.
I shivered, alone in the dark and so cold.
And when I closed my eyes, the sounds I heard weren't just the sounds from a decade ago, back on Seraphim: it wasn't the coughing of other children, the grind of the air filtration system, the rustling of itchy blankets, the drone of the loudspeaker outside.
Now, I heard new sounds: the crunch of my nose, breaking; the low growl from Grigor Spade's throat; the rustling of a crest; the creaking of my larynx; the wheezing of my own chest.
If I did manage to fall asleep, it wasn't for long: inevitably, I woke up, my heart hammering so hard against my ribs that it felt like it might break free.
I'd shoot up from bed, vision spotting against the dim lights of the cabin, suddenly unable to breathe.
I would claw at my own throat and huddle in a pool of my blankets, shoved into a corner of the bunk while tears streaked down my face.
I made it through a few nights on my own before, after one particularly nasty episode in which I had sworn I could taste blood and had actually turned on all the lights to find where I was bleeding, I gave up and went next door.
"This doesn't mean anything," I'd told Araxis who had, despite the impossible hour, been awake.
The lights had been glowing softly in his room, its familiar panels of fabric warm and inviting, its lived-in softness like a gentle hand beckoning me inside.
"I just need to hear someone else breathing next to me or my mind fills in the silence with all sorts of shit I'd rather it didn't."
He had looked at me, his eyes black and endless, and then Araxis had nodded.
"Of course," he murmured. I'd noticed that the screen on his desk was glowing – he was working, although he'd told me that I wouldn't start, not really, until we reached Sozamia – and when I'd dropped on to his bed, Araxis had carefully gone back to his workstation to continue whatever it was I'd interrupted.
His bed had still been pulled down, double-wide, so I shoved myself to the back – my usual place – and arranged his pillows all around me.
I built a little nest and then I let myself fall away, drifting gently to the sound of his body's shifting weight, the haptic feedback of his digital keyboard, the quiet whisper of his breathing.
When I woke in the morning, I felt a bit more human again, a bit more whole. Less like I'd spent the night running from ghosts I could never escape.
Araxis had already been gone. The only evidence that he'd come to bed was the rumpled blanket beside me and the lingering warmth I could feel when I buried myself there, deep among sheets that still smelled like his skin.
I gave up the pretense of sleeping in my room after the next two nights followed suit.
And that was all well and good – fuck, if I had to sleep next to him in order to keep the nightmares at bay, I would, even if it posed a serious challenge to my resolve to keep things professional.
Given that behaving professionally in my previous line of work involved fucking people, trying to be professional by not fucking Araxis seemed particularly cruel.
We travelled to our temporary home in Verdant Ward after leaving the ship at Basilla, where it would be in space dock for at least two months to undergo repairs and alterations.
Because the suite we'd rented was intended for a creche, it was more like a floor of an apartment building with a maze of common spaces than a single residential unit.
So when Araxis had come back from making another trip to the ship, he'd found me in our bedroom, holding the plant he'd sent over from the ship in one hand and looking bewildered.
There was so much space. This bedroom was larger than his rooms had been at the Tournament.
The bed was massive: it was big enough that we'd never need to worry about touching accidentally, except that it sloped gently inwards, the softest possible nest for us to bed down in together.
The room had a sitting area and a small dining table, a closet bigger than his room on the ship, an entire hygiene suite with a full bath, plus windows that overlooked a park down below.
A meeting room was attached, the sliding door currently pulled back so that I could see that space too.
It was absurd. And Araxis had looked at me, standing wide-eyed in this ridiculous room fit for a space prince and his consort, and plucked the plant from my hand, setting it on a little shelf near one of the windows.
"I'm sorry you don't have your own room here," he said, peering out one of the windows and looking at the scene beyond.
"It is as I said – if we are to play the part, you will need to be here, with me.
I would suggest you could sleep elsewhere but… "
I'd looked at him then, although he couldn't meet my stare. "Yeah, it's not like I'm doing that anyway," I'd admitted, pretending I couldn't feel the heat of embarrassment prickling up my neck.
Araxis toyed with the trailing garlands of leaves, arranging them so that they draped artfully from the plant's new perch.
"It is not that, Sashen," he said. "It is important that you spend time here.
That we spend time here together. If you were to sleep elsewhere, the room would not smell like you.
The…" he paused, something tense flicking over his profile before he smoothed it away, "deception would be noticed. "
I'd glanced again at the sliding door to the meeting room, where I knew we’d be spending hours and hours; we’d pretend to be a couple, and then we’d come back in here and – what, try and figure everything out?
I’d let myself look back at him then, as he stood in a sliver of artificial sunlight that made the white of his skin glow, and my chest had ached with that familiar, awful pulse of tenderness.
I didn't want to feel that, not when I knew I couldn't trust it and I couldn't trust him yet either, so I swallowed it down and folded it up.
I made it into a crane that I could put somewhere safe.
"Makes sense," I'd said. "So we'll keep doing what we've been doing.
Just don't get any ideas if you wake up and I'm wrapped around you.
This bed is not designed for, uh, professional sleeping arrangements, that's for sure. "
He'd been quiet, still pretending to look at his plant.
"I understand, Sashen," he said finally.
"I will not have any ideas that are not outlined in our contract.
Only –" And he'd looked at me then, just a quick glance before his black stare flicked away again, "If you wish to reopen negotiations at any point, please tell me. I am amenable to adjusting our terms."
"Are you now?" I moved to poke my head into the closet. The floor of the entire room was carpeted, plush and soft and pale. Who was going to clean that? I hoped it wasn't me.
When I looked back, I could see the corner of his mouth twitch, just slightly – the memory of a smile that I hadn't seen in a week. More than. "You certainly have the upper hand. Any negotiations would surely go in your favour."
I wanted, very badly, to make a joke about what kind of hand I had and what I might do with it but –
But. I couldn't. So I didn't. Instead, I asked him if we could coordinate our schedules so that I knew when he needed me; I asked him if we needed to get anything before we headed to Xitera and the Hall of Records and if I could help by arranging any appointments with tailors, jewellers, ship provisioners.
In short, I got to work, and any of the lightness that had been creeping into to the edges of Araxis's expression drained away, and he got to work as well.
That night, the nightmares came back. I'd like to blame the bed: the more I tried to roll away, the more it wanted to tip me toward Araxis, and something about sliding like that, the relentlessness of gravity, seemed to trigger whatever awful thing it was that lurked inside my subconscious mind.
I could struggle, but I couldn't escape. Or maybe it was just the trauma.
It doesn't matter though. What matters is that the nightmares were back, and that Araxis got to see them.