okteiviakom | The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Waaaaay Early Friday Morning

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The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Waaaaay Early Friday Morning

The bob and sway of the Cape Rouge was not the same as the engine thrum of the Ark. But it was similar enough that sometimes there could be something almost soothing about it to a space station baby, like Octavia.

But not tonight.

She feels the vibrations of the Ark through the walls around her. Up in the room, they're much less pronounced, they're just something under your feet, a casual sensation you can feel and dismiss at the same time. But she's not up in the room.

She's down in the hole.

She's under the floor.

She's in a box, and the room above her is nothing but footsteps and muffled voices. Everything else is darkness. She's in a box she can't see, under a room she can only hear, and so all she can do is listen. She can't hear Bellamy up there, but she can hear her mother, the sound of needles and the fabric of strangers' clothes -- but then, the thumping of boots, and it's an inspection, it's always an inspection, a man's voice barking about everything the inspectors always bark about until her mother soothes it over, hushed, quick, she sounds like she's smiling --

I don't have any money.

Her voice is like velvet and burrows into Octavia's ears.

But I can pay you another way.

It's a promise shaped like a body and it feels like sirens and Octavia screams but she can still hear them like they're speaking into her head, like they're in her head, like they're in the box with her.

What about the girl?

Her, too.

And Octavia screams again and kicks her foot out because she has to get away, now now now -- but instead of breaking, the walls of the box around her start sliding closer, the hole around her starts getting smaller, and it feels like she's sinking, right into the ground or space or whatever is underneath a hole underneath a room, and it doesn't matter where she's sinking to because she won't even make it there, because the walls are closing in on her, she's in the hole and the hole is going to crush her.

The hole is going to crush her, and she can't breathe.

She can't breathe.

SHE CAN'T BREATHE.

That was what Octavia woke up to, in the middle of the night, just -- gasping for breath, immediately scrambling up to sitting, trying to desperately force air into her lungs. Her wide eyes stared wildly into the darkness of the room, not really seeing it. Still half dreaming.

Still half back on the Ark.

... Sorry, Duke.

[ooc: For the jaka who has to deal with this mess now. Content warning for (nightmare) allusions to prostitution and child abuse, with general dark backstory stuff to likely follow in the comments.]

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It was enough to at least get him to put his arm on the back of the bench, though, giving her some light contact through the shoulders and more room to lean.

"But now I think about the good times
Down in the Caribbean sunshine
In my younger days I was so bad
Laughin' about all the fun we had

I've seen enough to feel the world spin
Mixin' different oceans meetin' cousins
Listen to the drummers and the night sounds
Listen to the singers make the world go 'round!"

He nudged her a little as he picked up the Tahitian chorus again, just to see if she wanted to sing -- or hum maybe -- along.

"Ia Ora Te Natura
E Mea Arofa Teie Ao Nei
Ia Ora Te Natura
E Mea Arofa Teie Ao Nei."

Octavia leaned further in, slowly. And tipped her head back once more to look up at the stars while she listened, finally making the effort to tug the blanket a little more tightly around herself.

There was no singing on her part, though she managed some vague humming. Yes, even despite her stuffy nose.

Duke had run out of verses that he could think of -- at least ones that didn't vaguely reference death, anyway -- so he stuck to that chorus a few more times, then threw out the last bit of Tahitian from the end:

"Ua Pau Te Maitai No Te Fenua
Re Zai Noa Ra Te Ora O Te Mitie."

He tilted his own head back. There were less stars here than many of the places he'd been, with Baltimore so close, but if it soothed her anyway, he wasn't going to complain.

"It means 'Nature lives, life to nature, have pity for the Earth, love the Earth.' Then, 'Bounty of the land is exhausted, but there's still abundance on the sea.'"

There were more stars here than there'd been deep in the windowless bowels of sector B-17 of the Ark.

When he translated the words, Octavia choked out a sound that probably started out as a (not particularly joyful) laugh, but ended up tapering out into a stray sob.

She wiped at one eye, and swallowed hard. "Of course."

"Sounds better in Tahitian, huh?" Duke said, lifting the hand along the bench to rub her shoulder.

"I guess."

That wasn't it, but she was fine pretending it was.

She sighed and pressed her eyes closed, hoping to pull her thoughts together -- then immediately opened them again, when all she saw against her eyelids was the same kind of darkness that made her feel like something was closing in on her.

Okay. Stars it was.

Duke tried very hard to be comfortable with the silence. And when that didn't work, he tried to just let himself be uncomfortable, for her sake.

That worked a little better, but it still wasn't sustainable. He really hoped he relearned how not to be a babbling idiot sometime soon.

"I'm going to get you a brandy," he said. "And then I'm going to talk. Or maybe sing some more. And when you're ready, you can tell me what you dreamed about, or we can go back to bed and pretend it didn't happen, or do anything else you need. Alright?"

Octavia's head straightened itself again, and she looked over at him, and she shook her head.

All in rather quick succession, actually. "No," she said. "Don't leave me alone."

The please was silent, but... definitely there.

"No brandy," Duke said, nodding, though he flicked his eyes over the crates around them, wondering if maybe he had something similar already out here. (He didn't. He only kept drinks out on deck when he was expecting to be drinking there.) "What should I talk about, then?"

Octavia didn't want brandy, anyway.

"I don't know," she said, sounding more agitated than she'd meant to. She didn't have a great handle on her... anything, right now. "I just -- I'm trying."

Okay. Deep breath.

But brandy was supposed to help with shock! Or -- Duke was pretty sure it was supposed to.

"It's okay," he told her, settling his arm a little more firmly over her shoulders. "You don't have to do anything. We've got all the time in the world." He looked up, past the top of her head, trying to think of something to tell her. Something silly and soothing.

"Do you know the story," he said finally, "of the King of the Sharks?"

Octavia wasn't so sure she wanted a story, either, but then she wasn't sure of much of anything apart from not wanting to be alone. So she was willing to give it a shot.

And so she shook her head again. "No." No, she didn't know it.

And though he'd been doing better with it, the part of Duke that had grown up trying to be entertaining at least when he couldn't be useful because that was how you got people to like you, was still too loud in his own head. (It had never entirely shut up; he'd always had to be loud and charismatic and interesting when he was around people. But before they'd run into his mom, he'd been doing better at not thinking of Octavia as "people".)

So she got a story. Because he didn't know how to be useful to her right now, so he was going to be entertaining. "A very long time ago, in Hawai'i," he said, "the King of Sharks saw a beautiful girl walking along the shore and fell in love."

It wasn't a very long story, and he skated around the bit about the villagers filling the shark prince's swimming hole with rocks. But he thought she might like it, and it filled the air in around them, at least for a little while.

Once she'd be less out of it, Octavia was going to realize just how much she hadn't been the only one trying way too hard in this situation.

As it was, she listened less to the story and more to the sound of his voice. And she found she wanted to be wrapped up in his arms, the same way his voice was wrapping up and coralling some of the insistent, panicky noise in her brain.

But even once the story finished, she didn't manage to say so. The words were just... stuck somewhere just beyond her throat.

All words, for the moment.

And Duke really wanted to wrap her up, had since the moment he realized what was going on, but was trying kind of desperately not to freak her out further, and so stuck to just his arm at her shoulders until she found a way to tell him otherwise.

His story ended, and she wasn’t talking, so Duke started another one, keeping his tone light and easy, this one about his own time in Hawaii. With Lucifer, he’d have played up the wild adventure side of the story, full of wacky characters and daring escapes. With her, he focused instead on the island itself, the sheer scale of the tropical mountainsides and all the various animals he’d seen there.

Octavia managed to listen to the actual content of this one a little better. Letting his words paint... not entire pictures, but at least some flashes of things, in her mind.

That was until she turned her head to look over at him - and stopped listening. It had just now hit her that they were outside in what should have been the middle of winter, and he was wearing barely anything.

(It was a good sign: reality was coming back to her bit by bit.)

"Aren't you cold?" she asked, probably right in the middle of his sentence.

She was already peeling the blanket off one shoulder.

Duke was very good at blocking out physical discomfort when he was focused on something. Like, say, comforting someone he cared about.

He laughed softly even as he winced, as drawing attention to it made him aware of the fact that, yes, he was actually very cold.

"Little bit," he admitted. And tried -- and failed -- to suppress a shiver.

Octavia was already shifting closer to him even before the shiver, trying to -- okay, she wasn't entirely sure what she was trying to do because her desire to solve this was far sharper than her muddled plan of action, but... Trying to share the blanket, probably? Somehow.

"Should we just go back inside?"

She didn't want to go back inside yet.

But notice how she managed to pull words out just fine when it was about him.

They had really very well matched dysfunctions, didn't they. Able to rally so long as the other one needed fixing. . . .

Duke took the offered blanket, figuring that was the best invitation he was going to get to actually wrap her up the way he wanted to -- though he was still braced to let go and give her space again if she seemed not to want him to. (He should probably make allowances for how his skin was going to be pretty cold to the touch there for a few minutes.)

"Do you want to go back inside?"

Yeah, no, Octavia practically crawled half onto his lap at the first sign of him trying to gather her close. She didn't care that his skin was cold, that was what the blanket was for.

"No," she admitted. Quietly.

"Then we won't."

Duke had told Lucifer he'd want to be an octopus in another life. He kind of felt like one now, wrapping all four limbs around her as best he could and drawing the blanket in tight as well. Both her and the blanket felt so wonderfully warm right now.

"Okay, shit," he said on a laugh. "I really was pretty freaking cold. Thanks."

Octavia hummed a vague noise in response. Settling in against him, surrounded by him. Trying to settle into safety of it.

And maybe it was working, because after a moment, she said, "There's something I didn't tell you about my mom." Her voice was just a low rasp again. "'Cause I've been... trying not to think about it."

He could probably see how well that had worked out for her. Not thinking about it didn't mean it hadn't still been there, biding its time.

"Yeah?"

Now that she was talking, Duke was careful to keep his own answers short and too the point. Giving her plenty of space to do it in.

He was kind of horrified that running into his mom had managed to fuck the both of them up quite this thoroughly.

Octavia's voice was a flat neutral.

"We'd get inspections," she said. "Guards coming to see everything was in order. They were supposed to be a surprise, but my mom... always knew when they were going to happen."

"She had an in," Duke said. One that Octavia was apparently not okay with. One that Duke's mother had maybe reminded her of a bit too sharply.

He hung on a little more firmly. He didn't like where this was going.

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