-Chapter Seventeen-

Her first full night aboard the airship went the same as the the previous morning. Since she was crashing in what she now knew, explicitly, was someone else’s cabin, she didn’t even think about taking the bed. She pulled the overstuffed duvet and a few pillows down to the floor by portside porthole, curled up with her cache of books, and easily put herself to sleep after only a few more pages of nonsensical symbols and graphs.

She didn’t hear when Axion came in, didn’t hear him get into bed and fall asleep, but she heard when the nightmares woke him.

He didn’t scream. He whimpered.

More than the confusing awakening, the noise wrecked Karlene’s sense of reality as she struggled to remember where she was and what was going on. She wouldn’t have thought of Axion as someone who whimpered...except maybe if…

Oh, no, Karlene thought, and scrambled to her feet. A foot caught in a fold of duvet, and she fell over her own tangled limbs before rightening herself and stumbling to the side of the bed.

“Hey,” she said, voice hoarse with sleep. She grabbed the arm closest to her, while keeping her body as far from the bed as she could. She’d woken enough friends during nightmares to know to keep out of arm-flailing distance unless she wanted awkward-to-explain bruises.

Another whimper followed her first shake.

“Hey, Axion,” she tried again. She shook harder. Still nothing, except for a flop of his head from one side to the other, blue-black hair falling in sweaty clumps across his forehead. His bare chest shone with nightmare sweat, and his feet kicked fitfully beneath the sole sheet.

“Damnit,” Karlene said to herself. She reached over him to grab a spare pillow, thinking to thwak him with it.

Axion seemed to sense the sudden proximity of another body, and given the likely features of his nightmare, it was no surprise that his hands came up and seized her upper arms in twin bruising grips.

Karlene cried out, her own hands going to his chest to brace herself as his hands tightened around her biceps and hauled her off balance.

“Axion!” She shouted, and managed to balance on one hand while raising the other to swipe at him. “Let me go!”

The swipe across his face had done nothing. In his sleep, still wrapped in the nightmare, his biceps bulged and he lifted her up and over him, rolling to pin her down amid the pillows that had been shoved out of his way.

“Axion!” She tried again. This time she used both hands, now fisted, to pummel his chest. She switched tactics almost immediately; in his befuddled state, hitting a large muscle group was going to be even less effective than normal. She reached instead for one of the hands still crushing her arms, and dug her thumbnail into the meat between his own thumb and forefinger. She felt blood well, and twisted her thumbnail viciously.

“Axion! I will claw you bloody if you don’t let me go!”

Above her, Axion jerked. He blinked, and some of the nightmare-film cleared from his eyes. He removed his hands from her arms and instead planted them on either side of her, breathing hard.

“K-Karlene?”

“Yeah, idiot,” she snapped, heart pounding with nerves. Her temper was fighting her attempts to calm it. She’d known people who had horrible, violent nightmares, but after her week, being manhandled and bruised by someone she had come to begin to trust, who had gone through something nightmarish with her…

Recalling that particular something nightmarish reminded Karlene what, exactly, Axion had probably been dreaming about, and she softened.

A spike of concern for Axion, that he hadn’t escaped reliving that misery, made her raise her hands to his face. He’d hung his head, had his hands fisted in the sheet at her sides. His arms trembled. She pushed sweat-sodden strands of blue hair out of his face.

“You good?” She asked. Without his sounds of distress and Karlene’s shouting, the room had gone quiet in a way that felt oppressive.

He nodded, and sighed heavily before pushing up and away from her. He sat back on his heels and let one hand fall to one linen-clad thigh, while his other went to rub at his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Karlene sat up, slowly, and rubbed at one sore bicep. That was going to hurt, tomorrow. She tried to remember where she’d stashed the crystal bottle of bruise ointment Dox had given her.

She saw Axion’s eyes follow the path of her fingers over her arm, but he said nothing. No apology. He looked away from her, brow furrowed.

Not sure what to say, Karlene resorted to copying him, and what he’d done the last time the shadow of Unmaking had hung over them. She reached out, and awkwardly patted him on the shoulder before scooting closer and, when his raised eyebrow didn’t indicate he’d shove her off the bed, she put one arm around his shoulders.

“What...are you doing?” He asked.

Karlene pulled back as if burned.

“Nothing useful, apparently,” she said, and shuffled off the bed. “Go back to sleep, if you-”

Without warning, the hatch bounced off the bulkhead, and the hatchway to the cabin was full of looming Enochian. And it really was full. Overfull, even. Hatches on ships were never big, and Leontis was nowhere near being a small man.

“Leo,” Axion grunted, and pulled himself upright out of the hunched-over position he’d sunk into. “What’s wrong?”

Leontis’s eyes, practically glowing with an ice-blue sheen, shot to Karlene. He addressed Axion, though, when he spoke.

“Olien fetched me. He reported sounds of...distress.”

Doing a quick mental calculation, she narrowed her eyes at Leontis.

“Sounds of distress? When? Because there have been no sounds for a few minutes now, and it doesn’t take that long to run from one end of this ship to the other.”

Leontis quirked one corner of his mouth. “Olien was uncertain of the nature of the sounds, at first.”

Karlene gave a slow blink of incredulity.

“Your Olien needs to get laid if he seriously thought I was making those kind of noises. I was just trying to wake Axion.”

Now Leontis did look to Axion, who raised his hands and shoulders in an attempt at a nonchalant shrug.

“What can I say? The food was that bad. Giant pots of rotten pea and potato mush...” He gave an exaggerated shudder that seemed to turn into a legitimate shudder.

“I was told the dropling was to be given her own berth.”

“The dropling didn’t feel like sleeping with one eye open,” Karlene said testily. She sank back down to her nest of pillows and duvet, and dug out the crystal bottle of salve from one of the book satchel’s pockets.

Leontis frowned at her.

“You are safe aboard my vessel.” He seemed offended she’d doubted it.

“Tell that to your crew,” she said. She turned on her rump on the floor, and yanked down the strap of her top to point at her new tattoo. “Apparently this isn’t as foolproof as you both led me to believe.”

Thoroughly grumpy now, Karlene unstoppered the bottle, poured some out into her hands, and began to massage the salve into her arms. She caught Axion’s eyes tracking her slicked fingers for a moment, but once again he said nothing.

“It was nothing, Leo,” Axion said gently, moreso than Karlene had ever heard from him. “Olien shouldn’t have disturbed you.”

“I was not disturbed.”

“You were asleep.”

“I was reading.”

“Shirtless?” Axion raised an eyebrow.

Something about their exchange made Karlene look up from restoppering the bottle. Axion had moved to sit at the edge of the bed, while Leontis still stood in the doorway, unmoving. No, that was wrong, his eyes were definitely moving, tracing Axion’s slightest movement. Axion looked up and caught Leontis’s intent gaze and held it with his own.

Oh, she thought to herself, realization dawning.

Oh.

“For the love of… I am not trying to steal your boyfriend, Leontis.” Karlene groaned, flopping backwards into the cushions. “Promise. He’s not my type.”

Liar, her definitely on-fire pants taunted. Later, when she wasn’t feeling the grumpiness of being woken and the awkwardness of Axion’s hug-rejection, she’d probably be recalling the sight and feel of Axion hovering above her, sweaty and gasping, in a whole new light.

But fantasies were one thing- cockblocking was another.

When neither male responded to her statement, she lifted her head up from where she’d let it fall against a pillow. Both Leontis and Axion were staring at her with wide, stunned eyes.

“What?” She asked. “Don’t tell me you two aren’t-”

“Silence,” Leontis hissed, and took a half step back, looked left and right, then entered the room and shut the hatch behind him. He turned his suddenly murderous glare on Axion, who had stood abruptly.

“Leo, she doesn’t-”

“I am rather through caring what she does and doesn’t,” the winged-man snapped. The mild demeanor he’d shown around her had vanished like vapor. This man in front of her was a stranger, even more so than the overly polite Leontis had been. This one stalked across the room, loomed over her like the nightmare she’d thought she’d escaped, and reached down for her.

With the memory of Diom’s shadow still fresh in the room, Karlene scuttled back, got tangled in the duvet again, and slammed her back against the bulkhead beneath the porthole.

Leontis didn’t slow down. He changed the angle of his reach to accommodate her mad scramble, grasped her by one arm -right over the imprint of Axion’s fingers- and pulled her up.

And up.

And up…

In her mild state of panic, it took Karlene half a heartbeat to notice that she wasn’t the only one moving; the whole room, and Leontis and Axion in it, had been flung sideways. The momentum of Leontis pulling her up had merged with the sudden, violent tilting of the room, resulting in her back smacking painfully against the overhead. She gasped as she fell, as the room corrected itself… Overcorrected, apparently, as the walls suddenly shifted the complete opposite direction.

“If that old fool is drinking at my helm again-” Leontis swore from his sprawled place on the ground. Despite everything going on, Karlene took a mental snapshot of the sight of the prince on the ground, limbs all akimbo.

“It’s not Palades,” Axion cut him off, snatching a shirt from where it had been tossed across the room. He yanked it on, and then helped Leontis to his feet. “We’re under attack.”