Chapter 13 #3
The crew finds my presence hilarious. A deckhand named Torren makes a habit of resting his elbow on my head while talking to other sailors.
A halfling with pointed ears and an unfortunate laugh keeps calling me "ground level.
" Gretta assigns me every task that requires climbing, reaching shelves, hanging pots, stringing drying lines, purely, I suspect, for her own entertainment.
Peeble, hidden in my collar, offers running commentary.
"You know," they whisper as I'm on my hands and knees scrubbing the deck, "maybe after this you'll be a bit more considerate of the little guys. Not everyone is blessed with your normal, freakish height and brooding jawline."
"Shut up, Peeble."
"I'm just saying. Perspective is a gift."
I catch glimpses of them throughout the day. The iteration's Kaelren and Elle.
He looks like me. The real me. Tall, dark-haired, the corruption marks visible at his collar and wrists.
But he moves differently than I do. Lighter, somehow.
Less burdened. He laughs at something one of the crew says, and the sound is so foreign to my own ears that it takes me a moment to recognize it.
This version of me knows what it is to be happy.
And Elle. She's on the quarterdeck, red hair loose in the wind, pointing at something on a map while two officers lean in to listen.
She's in her element, commanding, sharp, confident.
When she looks up and catches the iteration Kaelren watching her, she grins at him, and the warmth in it hits me like a blade between the ribs.
That is what we could be, and I will burn through every iteration in existence to make it real again.
As we clear the harbor and hit open water, the iteration Kaelren calls the crew to the main deck. He stands on the raised platform at the stern, Elle beside him, and addresses the ship.
"We sail for the Starblush Sea," he says, and his voice carries the way mine should, low, sure, built to command.
"Auradelle's supply fleet is running weapons to the coastal strongholds.
Every crate of steel and every barrel of rot-powder that reaches shore is another village that falls.
Another family scattered. Another piece of Wynmire that breaks. "
The crew is silent. Listening.
"We are not a navy. We are not an army. We are a crew of people who decided that watching wasn't enough.
That someone had to act." He pauses. Looks at Elle.
She nods. "We do this for Wynmire. For every person who can't fight back.
And we will take down Auradelle's hold on these waters once and for all. "
The crew erupts. Cheering, stomping, banging weapons against the rails. It's the sound of people who believe in something, and I'd forgotten how powerful that sounds.
Gretta shoves a mop back into my hands. "Inspiring, isn't it? Now get back to work, gnome."
Night falls, and I discover that bunk room six is where dignity goes to die.
The cabin is roughly the size of a generous closet. Four bunks are stacked along the walls, leaving a center aisle so narrow I have to turn sideways to walk through it. My bunkmates are already present.
There's a goblin with one ear and a permanent squint.
A scaled creature of indeterminate species sleeps with their mouth open, tail dangling off the top bunk.
Across from me, a man so large and hairy I initially mistake him for a bear stuffed into a hammock.
He fills the entire thing and spills over the edges, and the smell suggests personal hygiene is more rumor than practice.
The smell hits me when I cross the threshold. It's layered with salt, sweat, something fungal, and an undertone that I think might be rotting fish but could also just be the goblin.
I sit on my bunk, the bottom one, because of course it is, and stare at the ceiling six inches above my face.
"This," Peeble whispers from my collar, their voice vibrating with outrage, "is unacceptable."
"Go to sleep, Peeble."
"Sleep? In this? I have standards, Kaelren. I may be a beetle, but I am a beetle of refinement. The air quality alone is a violation of basic decency. Is that man composting? He smells like he's composting."
"Peeble."
"And the rocking. The constant rocking. Back and forth. Back and forth. My thorax is not designed for this. I'm going to be—oh no."
"Don't you dare."
Something warm and wet slides down the inside of my collar.
"Oh," Peeble says, in a voice of tremendous relief. "Oh, that's so much better."
I close my eyes. I count to ten. I remind myself that I need this beetle alive because they are the only creature in existence who remembers all seventeen iterations, and without them I will never find Elle.
The hairy man rolls over with a groan that shakes the bunk frame. "Hey, shorty. When we hit port next, you reckon they'll have a tavern with females? I haven't had company in four months. A male has needs."
"Six months for me," the goblin says. "The last port, the lady took one look at me and locked her door."
"Can't imagine why," Peeble mutters against my neck.
I lie back, and sleep eventually takes me.
I close my eyes in bunk room six, serenaded by the hairy man's snoring and the gentle slosh of Peeble's earlier contributions cooling against my skin. When I open them, I’m somewhere else.
I'm in a cabin. A large one that is spacious, well-furnished, with heavy curtains drawn across a row of windows that span the entire back wall.
Moonlight bleeds through the gaps in the fabric, painting silver lines across the wooden floor.
The bed I'm lying in is wide and soft, with sheets that actually smell clean.
A captain's hat hangs on a hook by the door.
Maps are pinned to the walls. A half-empty bottle of wine sits on the desk beside a pair of boots.
This is the captain's quarters.
I sit up, disoriented, trying to understand how I got here. I check my hands. Long fingers. Not stubby dwarf digits. I touch my face, the real one, with its actual bone structure and correct proportions.
I'm back in my own body.
Except, not quite. There's a doubling to my awareness, a layered quality to my thoughts, like two sets of consciousness occupying the same space.
I'm here, but so is he. This iteration's Kaelren.
I can feel his presence alongside mine, simply coexisting.
Like I've slipped into the passenger seat of a body that's already being driven.
I'm along for the ride, aware of everything. I can feel what he feels. Think alongside what he thinks. We've merged, and the seams between us are so thin I can't tell where I end and he begins.
The covers shift.
I look down. Something is moving beneath the sheets, sliding upward between my legs with slow, deliberate purpose. My body, his body, our body tenses.
I pull the covers back.
She's there. Naked, her skin gilded by the moonlight, red hair spilling across my thighs. She looks up at me with an expression that is equal parts mischief and hunger, her lips curved in a smile that has been the ruin of every version of me across every iteration that has ever existed.
Every thought from the past months, the plans, strategies, and cold calculations about portals and timelines, evaporates. Elle is here, warm and alive, looking at me like I'm the only thing that matters. I can't remember why I was supposed to be doing anything else.
I hear myself chuckle, low and rough with sleep. “What is my little gem doing down there?”
She doesn’t answer. Just holds my gaze, then slowly takes me into her mouth.
The sound I make is not dignified. It’s been months.
Months of empty beds, cold nights, and the phantom ache of her absence.
Now she’s here, warm and impossibly skilled, and I nearly finish right there like an untrained adolescent.
I feel both his reaction and mine overlapping, the sensation doubled and staggering.
She works me with deliberate patience, bringing me to the edge and holding me there, her eyes never leaving mine. Just when my vision starts to blur and every muscle tightens, she pulls back.
She hops off the bed.
"Where are you going?"
I try to move, to go after her, and discover that my wrists are bound to the headboard with vines. The iteration of Kaelren apparently didn’t realize what was happening while she distracted us, and I have never been more grateful to an alternate version of myself.
I chuckle again; his laugh, warm and amused, completely at ease with being restrained. "I see. My queen wants to play games."
She turns. Her body is a landscape I've memorized across lifetimes. The curve of her waist, the freckles across her shoulders, the way she carries herself with the confidence of someone who knows exactly the effect she has and enjoys every second.
She picks up the captain's hat from the hook by the door and places it on her head. It's too big, tilting slightly to one side, and she looks ridiculous and devastating in equal measure.
She walks back to the bed, climbs over me, and slowly lowers herself down.
"I thought maybe I could steer the ship this time," she says.
The world narrows to her. To this. To the rhythm she sets.
Slow at first, rolling her hips in long, dragging strokes that make me strain against the ropes.
She bends forward and captures my nipple between her teeth, biting down just hard enough to send a jolt through me that has nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the fact that this woman knows my body better than I do.
She rides me harder. Her breathing changes. I feel her tighten around me, feel the tremor that starts in her thighs and spreads through her whole body as the first climax takes her. She loses focus, her grip on the headboard slips, her rhythm falters, and it's enough.
I wrench free of the restraints.
Before she can react, she's in my arms. She twists, tries to break loose, laughing breathlessly, and the sound of it, that laugh, her laugh, the one I've been chasing across seventeen iterations, fills the cabin.
"Oh no," I growl against her neck. "You want to be captain? We have to get you to open waters."
I carry her to the balcony. The night air hits us both, salt and wind and the vast dark expanse of the Starblush Sea stretching to the horizon. I bend her over the rail, and she grips it with both hands, arching back against me.
I push into her in one long stroke, and she cries out loud enough that whoever's on night watch just got an earful, and I don't care. Not even slightly.
"Which way, Captain?" I press the words against her shoulder, teeth grazing her skin. "Where are we going? Because surely you have an entire realm that will follow you. But I am the only one who gets to ride in behind you."
She moans something that isn't a word, and I increase the pace. She's close. I can feel it in the way she pushes back against me, in the small desperate sounds she makes, in the tension building between us like a wave gathering height before it breaks.
I reach around her, find the bundle of nerves between her legs, and give it a light slap.
She shatters. The sound she makes is raw and open and perfect, and it pulls me over the edge with her. I bury myself as deep as I can and let it take me. The release, the connection, the unbearable rightness of being inside her, with her, part of her.
For a long moment, we just breathe. The ship rocks gently beneath us. The sea stretches out, endless and dark, and the sky above is thick with stars.
She turns in my arms. Her face is flushed, her eyes bright, the captain's hat somehow still on her head. She takes it off, places it back on mine, and winds her arms around my neck.
"That was quite the ride, Captain." She grins up at me. "I thought for a minute we were going to take a leap of faith into the water and be at the mercy of the depths of the ocean."
I freeze.
"What did you just say?"
She laughs and kisses me. It's a slow kiss, unhurried, the kind that people who have all the time in the world give each other.
"What? Haven't you ever heard that phrase before? A leap of faith?"
The words ring through me like a bell. Thalia's face in the alley. Her urgent eyes. Leap of faith.
This can't be it. Not now. Not after this. Not when I'm inside a body that knows what it is to hold her without grief, to love her without the shadow of loss darkening every touch.
But my body knows. That deeper part of me, it knows. This is the moment. This is the door.
I look at her one last time. I memorize her face in the moonlight. The freckles, the curve of her lips, the way her eyes hold mine like she can see every version of me at once and loves them all.
I kiss her. Slow, deep, with everything I have. I pour every iteration into it. Every failure, every loss, every time I held her and let go and vowed to find her again. When I pull back, I press my forehead to hers.
"I'm coming for you," I tell her.
Then I gently push her back from the rail's edge, turn, and dive toward the dark waters below.
Just before I break the surface, a small, shiny object comes flying out of a porthole and collides with my chest. Peeble.
I don't even have time to yell at them before the sea swallows us whole. The cold hits like a fist, and the darkness closes in, and somewhere above me I hear her call my name.
But I'm already gone, falling through the dark toward whatever comes next, because she is somewhere out there in the vast machinery of time, and I will find her.
I will always find her.