Chapter Fifty-Four. A Bower in the Arascides
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOUR
A Bower in the Arascides
The weirdest thing about making the coffin for Q was the point where she started helping me.
There was no ceremony to it. On one of my growing-more-bearable visits to her bedside, I found her standing. She was still bandaged and, under the bandages, there were probably still nanosurgical drones doing whatever it was nanosurgical drones did. But she looked almost back to her old self.
“Done?” she asked.
“The coffin?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how to play this. Barring sudden complications, and honestly, sudden complications were common enough with medical treatment, especially if your bank balance started running low, she was clearly not in urgent need of a coffin. “Working on it,” I told her. Because it was true.
She didn’t reply verbally. She just nodded, took my hand, and led me down to the bay where I’d been working.
She undid most of it.
Well, not most of it, but she had a lot of opinions and made a lot of adjustments. She tweaked the engine, stabilized the fins, and hooked power to some of the Leviathan bone I’d worked into the structure at her insistence.
When she did, it luminesced like her tattoos.
I watched her work and, when I thought she was sufficiently occupied that I could speak without choking, I seized my moment. “So. We good?”
I might have seized the moment too well, because she was so occupied that for a good while she didn’t reply. Then finally she pulled her head out of the guts of the coffin and said, “No.”
Well, that sucked.
For a moment I just stood there. I’m not sure I even blinked. “What do you mean no?”
You probably don’t need me to tell you that her response was just “No.”
I glared, increasingly frustrated, at the coffin I’d spent too much time and energy on.
And okay, it wasn’t great, and okay, she seemed to want to change almost everything I’d done to it, and okay, as big gestures of reconciliation went Ohai, I maked you a coffin was fucking weird, but she’d literally asked for this.
“Do you have any idea,” I blustered, “how much work—”
“Non ex operibus ut ne quis glorietur.”
I still didn’t understand her.
Fuck. That was the whole point, wasn’t it.
I dropped to my knees beside her and told her I was sorry. Then I told her again. Then I cried. Proper, ugly, pride-is-a-sin cried.
To this day I don’t know if I was forgiven. But then I came from a world where forgiveness was for sale, so perhaps I was a bad judge. Or perhaps I was trying to judge the wrong things.
But she put her hand over mine, passed me a fusing iron. “Work with me.”
And we did. It became … peaceful, in the end. Familiar. Like we knew what we were doing and had always known. Like no more words needed to be said.
That wasn’t true. Not exactly. But that’s a story for later.
We worked on that coffin for weeks. Far longer than seemed remotely necessary.
When the modifications to the superstructure had all been made, she started work on the decoration.
We paneled the box all over with sheets of Leviathan bone, and then Q took her laser cutter and began to engrave the surface with beautiful, entwining patterns.
And on the lid, she carved the wide, spreading shape that I had still never seen in person but which I was learning to call a tree.
At last, after so much work and heartache and flat-out weirdness, it was done. And there was a kind of mortuary wonder to it. A solemn majesty.
“What now?” I asked Q, looking at the very large, very expensive boondoggle we’d spent so much of our time on.
Without words, Q replied by stepping into the coffin and lying down.
I gave her a seriously-stop-fucking-about look.
She didn’t stop fucking about. “Is this—are you still trying to make some kind of point? I’m sorry. I really am. I was scared of losing you. I didn’t want to confront it. I should have been less of a fuckup, but I am never going to be less of a fuckup.”
But Q remained silent and perfectly still.
So with a sigh I played along. I stood beside the open box and looked down at her.
She looked peaceful, lying there. And despite the bone-white walls of the coffin and its funereal motifs, she seemed as alive as she always did.
Even her stillness gave the impression of just being belayed motion.
Which meant I wasn’t entirely surprised when, only slightly less swiftly than she would have done at full health, she darted up, seized me by the arm, and pulled me in on top of her.
I was surprised when the coffin lid closed firmly on top of us, leaving us trapped, body to body, in the absolute black, the low hum of the oxygen diffuser the one thing reassuring me that she hadn’t just killed us both.
“What the actual fuck?” I asked her, my voice in an unnecessary whisper.
“Media vita in morte sumus,” she replied. And then she kissed me.
Looking back, one of the things that still messes with my head is that I knew Q so well in so many ways, and not at all in others. I couldn’t tell in the moment if this whole thing had been an elaborate sex game, a complicated joke at my expense, or something deeper and more complex.
I’d later realize it had been all those things and more, but at the time I was just an unhelpful mix of angry, frightened, and horny.
As it turns out, it’s incredibly hard to fuck in a coffin. Even a mechanized one with synthetically padded walls and a built-in air filter. But hard isn’t the same as impossible and sometimes a challenge is a turn-on, so I went with it.
We weren’t in absolute darkness, of course.
The blue-green light of Q’s tattoos provided just enough illumination that I could make out the lines of her face, the path of her hands.
And with my limited range of movement there wasn’t much I could do except kiss her and clutch at her and tell her that she was beautiful.
That she was remarkable. That for as long as that lid remained closed and the steel-and-bone box remained our whole world I would be always and only hers.
I think she liked that. We’d established very early on that she didn’t mind my having other lovers even if—like Locke and, for that matter, most other members of the crew—she had her concerns about the captain.
And since she didn’t always come back to her bunk every night, I’d kind of assumed she was fucking other people too.
But—and maybe I’m just flattering myself—for all she said her people didn’t do ownership, I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the idea of possessing me, at least while we were together.
One of the sneaky advantages of living the way I do, a little bit unstuck in time with the past always snatching and the future always beckoning, is that sometimes, just sometimes, I can play the same trick in reverse and make now feel like forever.
Until it doesn’t.