02. this is my life now

[bullhorned]

Who: Gendry
Broadcast: NEVER
Action: On the Iskaulit and the Golden
When: August

The Golden

He'd went to sleep in his nice comfortable bed on the planet, completely oblivious to the notion that the fleet would be leaving that very same night. It was simply one of those things for which he'd had no intention of worrying about it. He woke with a start later because his augment was designed for one thing, which was to tend to the ship's engines. So when the ship began to sound just a bit ragged, he instinctively rolled off the floor the Atroma had unceremoniously dumped him in.

So they were right. He muttered some curses, then pulled himself up to his feet and went to work. After an hour making careful calibrations and monitoring the sensor readings (thank gods he'd learned to read!), he was finally able to return things to what he thought was comfortable. He would afterwards reflect that he really had absolutely no idea what he'd been doing, but the important thing was that the ship hadn't blown up and that this was about the best anyone could hope for. Though as he looked at the contents of what he had to work with, an idea had begun to come to mind.

Some days later, his crew would find him having already removed many of the panels off the stove as he tried to find a way to increase the heat. This was only his preliminary efforts, but he was fully convinced that he could cobble up the components he would need to make a workable forge up here in space. He had the experience, the knowledge, and absolutely none of the permission required to make it a reality.

(tl;dr: find gendry tearing up the kitchen, working on the ship, or paying a little too close of attention to what the exercise equipment is made of.)

The Iskaulit

At some point, someone had the decency to tell Gendry that he wouldn't have to live the rest of his life confined to one tiny ship trying to take things apart in order to stay busy. Instead he was able to live his life confined to several ships, one of which was large enough to be its own sort of marketplace. So one shuttle ride later and he was there!

There was absolutely nothing that interested him. The purpose of the gym eluded him, he didn't want to meditate, he barely could read so books were right out, he wasn't feeling particularly devout, and he hadn't been long enough away from the planet to feel particularly sentimental about seeing plants being grown. So that only left the space bar. With the well practiced ease of a man who spent an awful lot of time on a medieval world, he ordered an ale. What he received wasn't quite as frothy or watery or dirty as what he was used to drinking, but it was certainly a beverage. Eventually a few drinks later and he finds himself sitting on a bench in the public art display, staring at the mural of an artificial sunset.

(tl;dr: gendry can be found at the bar, checking out the art exhibit, or otherwise just wandering the iskaulit taking in the sights for the first time..)

Comments

[ishere]

It's at the art exhibit when Tadashi comes across him, and - in typical Tadashi fashion - he'll greet even a total stranger with a friendly little wave as he seats himself on the other end of the bench.

"Nice to have some sort of sunset between planet stays, right?"

[throwsdown]

hey buddy guess what you're safe to do whatever you want—

PSYCH.

Takeshi is taking note of Gendry's shenanigans because Takeshi is hideously nosy about the Golden; as far as he's concerned, he needs to be pretty much eyeballing any random thing that happens on the ship. A captain needs to know what everyone is up to! When he returns from the gym to find Gendry tinkering with the equipment in the kitchen, he gives a frown of disapproval.

"Stop breaking our oven!"

Or he'll throw you down, buddy.

He can do that now.

So.

Stop it.

iskaulit »

[ladybro]

-- So, Kate spent a lot of her time at one of the bars on the Iskaulit. Just not the one Gendry spent his time visiting. And yet, sure enough, their paths managed to cross all the same. Kate was leaving Malum after one of her regularly scheduled shifts, long dark hair piled into a messy bun. Despite the fact that they were indoors, and in space, she still wore her sunglasses. But these she handily removed when she witnessed a familiar face passing by in the hallway.

Somewhere between point A and point B, her steps slowed and she hailed him. "Gendry! You're...here." Sympathetic disappointment suffused her voice. "Sorry about that."

She remembered how he wanted to stay down below. So much for that plan.

[bullhorned]

Friendly is another word for uncomfortably forward. Gendry raised his eyebrows to give off an implicit expression that he wasn't particularly looking for company, but that he was going to just somehow live through this anyway.

"It's not bad," he commented in what he thought was generous commentary. "It's sad we need it at all."

[bullhorned]

"It ain't broke," Gendry answered with such sudden authority that for a moment he almost didn't seem like his normal self. He yanked two of the hotplates out of the top and set them to the side, only then to stare down at Takeshi.

"You're not still around, are you?"

He clearly was, Gendry just didn't know why he had to be around now. Or ever.

[bullhorned]

He shrugged in that sort of way that people do when they wish to act as though nothing in the world could actually bother them, but are actually very bothered by quite a lot. It took him a moment to recognize Kate because in their first meeting, it hadn't always been easy to maintain eye contact. But she'd been a bit too memorable to forget.

"It makes no matter," he said dismissively. "It ended as everyone said it would. I expected as much."

The power of his stubbornness wasn't as potent as he might have hoped.

[ladybro]

Expected as much. Now, that? She didn't believe. He'd seemed so determined. They'd talked about that determination, even -- and how it could be a virtue. She still thought so, even to see it proven wrong in the interim. Kate hitched the strap of her handbag a little higher on her shoulder and made herself comfortable in this particular spot in this particular hallway.

"Hey, at least you're surrounded by people who know what it's like. We're all passengers, here. We'd all rather be down below somewhere."

Not home, necessarily. Eve if Kate wanted to be back there, she knew there were others less inclined towards homesickness. Still, plenty of planets were an improvement over the ships.

[bullhorned]

It was receiving friendly reassurances that everything was going to be okay that inspired Gendry to try and insist everything was just fine in the first place, all to avoid this sort of thing entirely. Still, he managed to affect a weak smile to indicate that her words were helping (they weren't) so they could muddle through that.

"Aye, true." He frowned, looked away, then back at her. "So what do people do in between?"

iskaulit »

[steeledskin]

-- On days like today, she liked to make herself at home near the mural. Sansa would shuttle in early with Lady Ahsoka and attend meditations with her. At first, the practice had seemed foolish. But now, a moon-or-so into the habit, she always felt most at peace in the hours immediately following those efforts. But as she was unwilling to take a shuttle back all alone, she sometimes had to wait on another trusted soul -- Ahsoka, once again perhaps, or a brother -- to collect her from the Iskaulit. In the meantime, she would sit on a bench before the mural and...

Seven hells. Someone was already there. It was stupid, mayhaps, to think of any bench as her bench. But it was so often deserted as this time of day. Slowly -- with a rustle of silk -- she paced by the interloper and stole a glance only to see that it was him. Gendry, the royal bastard, and the young man who'd claimed some knowledge of her. Her family. The muscles along her cheek tightened and they met eyes for only a moment before she demurely glanced away.

Pulse thundering with uncertainty, she didn't know what else to do but to retire to a different bench. They remained within each other's lines of sight, but Sansa did her best to pretend as though he wasn't there. And she wondered if he was cross that he wasn't still on the planet -- she took a vicious, unkind pleasure in seeing how the fleet's magic had raked him back as it had raked in the rest of them. You are no different from the rest of us, she thought with venom. Unfortunate souls.

With a soft sigh, Sansa pulled a supple-backed book out from a woven bag. She didn't like the way the cover bended and warped in her hands, unlike the hard-covered tomes with which she was familiar. But she did like the fantastical stories found within. This particular book was about a young hero on a mortally dangerous quest -- and by the looks of it, she was already some three-quarters of the way through its plot.

And as fascinating as that plot was, it didn't stop her from sneaking glances from time to time at the young man inhabiting her bench.

[ladybro]

"They drink. They dance. They better themselves, I guess. If they want to."

She didn't want to burst his bubble and come out swinging with it's unbearably boring.

"They talk. There's a lot of talking that gets done -- for better or worse."

[bullhorned]

"Aye, all that." These were things he knew about. There had been people he'd known who only thought of that, which he could never wrap his mind around. "What about work? Besides on my ship. It doesn't need more than an hour's care each day."

His hand craved a hammer and a forge, but his efforts to make one on his ship hadn't got him too far.

[ladybro]

"I work. Sure." She nodded her head back down the hall towards the dimly blue-and-sultry lit entrance to Malum. "I bartend -- but that kinda work takes a certain constitution and although I'm guessing a guy like you has constitution coming out every pore...I do mean a certain constitution."

And sometimes that 'certain constitution' meant suffering through your Westerosi manager suggesting you're getting tips almost purely on your good looks.

[bullhorned]

He was not so subtle as to steal glances. The very moment she had turned a corner into this personal space he had allocated himself, she was the subject of immediate scrutiny. It was uncomfortable for him to say nothing, because he had remembered a time when meeting her unexpectedly would have elicited a far different reaction than the one she had given him. So he watched her, using the time to try to unfold those layers of the person he had known to whoever this was that was left. The woman that was left seemed disappointing.

It was still her, though. That was the trouble of it right there. She had taught him to read out of a book not so different than the one she held right now and he found himself wondering it it might contain the same stories they had read together. There was a nostalgia in that, because he hadn't touched that book or any other since he left the Cothromach. So he spent as much time watching her as he did trying to see if there were any words on the book's spine that he could make out, though ultimately he couldn't. But every attempt at a stolen glance she made was captured by his rapt attention. If someone was to ask him what mural was in front of him, he would likely have to look at it first to be able to tell them.

[bullhorned]

Of all the things he might have imagined her as, a tavern wench was not one of them. Despite her modern eccentricities, she came off as highborn and important. Working behind a counter seemed beneath her.

"What sort of certain constitution?"

[steeledskin]

By now, the words on the page merely danced. The swam, jumbling together -- she could not pay any attention to them at all, so consumed was she by a fluttering mixture of alarm and vexation that he should be so bold. When she wasn't sneaking glances, she would swear she could feel his stare battering into her. Like a stiff breeze. Like a tall wave. Uncomfortable, she cleared her throat and adjusted her posture as she sat. Sansa raised the book so it covered her face nearly to the bridge of her nose. The spine was now in plain view: The Cavalier's Quest.

But even still, she couldn't concentrate. Miffed, and after another three minutes of this feeling left stewing, she set aside the book altogether and fetched out her needlework from the same woven bag where the book had lived. This, she hoped, would absorb more of her own attention.

The act felt hollow. After a moment, she raised her head and met his eye and -- uncommonly brave, for her -- she simply sat and stared back. As though daring him to break contact first.

[ladybro]

"You hafta smile. And be nice. And listen to everyone else's sorrows with a sympathetic ear." A beat. "Something tells me you don't do sympathy all that well -- and I'm not throwing shade. That's not always a bad thing. But being someone's therapist for a good tip kinda comes with the bartending territory."

[vagabond_code]

"An ale? Really?"

Clint had been sitting on a stool at the bar, facing toward the seats and tables. He hadn't heard this guy's order, of course. He read his lips -- but what were the other possibilities here? That he'd asked for 'a nail'? Or someone called Neil? Given the context, it was a fairly safe bet.

It was worth confirming, too, because the only people Clint knew who talked like that were Asguardians, people from medieval times, and the servers from Medieval Times.

[bullhorned]

He could make out the first and last word, but it had been too long since he'd done any serious reading to make out the middle word. It hardly mattered, since she didn't even read it anyway. There had been some prickles of guilt when she had set the book down and it slowly dawned on him that perhaps he was being a little too unkind in his quiet accusations of her incompleteness. So by the time she had given up the stitches, he finally decided he should say something.

"Sorry," was the word he chose. Only then did he look away to glare at the mural.

[steeledskin]

"Why do you apologize?"

This part of the Iskaulit was mostly empty, apart from them and the art. And she hated the way that allowed her voice to bounce off the walls and amplify. Sansa didn't want to be loud. Sansa also knew exactly why he apologized -- she'd shamed him into it with a chilly stare of her own, but some part of her wanted to hear it forced from his lips. A full, pretty apology.

Despite all this, a flicker of apprehension still lived in her eyes. Like she knew she was treading a dangerous line.

[bullhorned]

Gendry wrinkled his nose in evident distaste at this description. He was by his very nature the sort of person who would unload all of his problems angrily on such a person, rather than have to listen to someone else's problems. "Sounds awful. Isn't there better work around?"

[bullhorned]

It hadn't occurred to him that he would be at all judged for choosing the peasant's number one choice for beverage for the last twenty centuries running. Gendry gave the other man an unhappy glare.

"What's wrong with ale?"

[bullhorned]

He was not going to be so easily conned into this game. The last thing he was going to do was indulge her in this petty admission. "You know why."

Only she didn't and that was the problem entirely.

[ladybro]

"I don't mind it. In fact, I actually like it."

And she was pretty good at it. But that wasn't hard -- Kate generally excelled at just about anything that involved good motor skills and and a passing reliance of socializing. It was all the other stuff she sucked at.

"This Lannister dude is not the worst manager I've ever seen. And I like the people who come in to drink. And we have a jukebox, so there's dancing."

[vagabond_code]

Clint shrugged. He actually had a pint of beer sitting right in front of him, so...

"'s kinda knights-and-dragons, that's all."

[steeledskin]

"You were staring," she tried to sound sharpish. But, mostly, she sounded watered down. Emptied and hollow and on the verge of a tremble. "It's unkind. I didn't care for it."

Needle in one hand, needlepoint frame in the other. But she wasn't doing anything. She was just...sitting. Watching, wary, like an animal uncertain of another animal.