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It took Yon-Rogg some time, after waking up, to peel himself off the bed. Everything hurt. He refused to beg for painkillers, so he pulled himself to a more or less vertical position, noticing in the process that all he was wearing was a pair of loose standard-issue coveralls that weren't what he had been wearing back on CX-19. His bruised and burned skin was patched with spray-on synskin. He knew he was on a ship by the vibration of the deck underneath, and he knew it was Vers—Carol—because, well ...
Because it had been her on the planet, he remembered that much, shining like a comet. And also, the cabin of the ship was open to the cockpit—it was really small—and that was her, bending over instruments that bathed her face in their glow.
There was a kind of gut-punch feeling to just seeing her like that, casual and ordinary. Her hair was pulled back in a tail. It might be a Starforce mission gone a little sideways.
But it wasn't, of course. There was no Starforce, not anymore. At least not one that he was part of.
She had seen to that.
He groped his way forward to the cockpit, using a hand on the bulkheads to keep from falling. He had no weapon, but what point was there? Weapons generally bounced off her, from what he'd seen.
"Oh," she said without looking around. "You're up."
He wobbled to a seat and sank down into it. When he touched the instruments, they failed to respond. He looked at Carol, who gave him a cheerful smile.
"I'm locked out," he said.
"Well, of course you are. You're an enemy combatant."
"Right," he said wearily, too tired and annoyed and hurting to even fight about it. He leaned his head back against the seat cushions. "Where are we?"
"Don't see any particular reason to tell you."
"Am I being rescued or kidnapped?"
"Little of both," Carol said brightly.
***
He was a prisoner on her ship, that much was clear. He was locked out of all the ship's major systems, which were keyed to her handprint. He was too fuzzy-headed and exhausted to manage to circumvent her locks. He knew tricks she didn't, he was sure of that, but he didn't recognize the ship's make and anyway, all he was capable of doing right now was sleeping, and waking to eat food he didn't particularly want, cleaning up in the tiny head, injecting himself with drugs from the ship's medkit, and sleeping some more.
V—Carol spent a lot of time off the ship, doing Supreme Intelligence only knew what. Annexing planets for the Skrull Empire? Saving people? Juggling asteroids?
The ship was tiny. There was really nowhere to go. There was a tiny lounge and kitchenette, a workout cubby with machines that could accommodate one person at a time, and a single bunk, which she had apparently let him have—or so he thought until Carol crawled into bed with him, startling him out of a light, uncomfortable doze.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, squirming around to face her. He was shoved up against the wall.
"What's it look like?" Her face was barely a handspan from his own, but the cabin lights were turned down, so all he could see was the light around her shadowed features, a halo on her pale hair. "I just got back from scouting and I'm not sleeping on the floor. Shove over."
"You've already shoved me over," he said, irritable and in pain.
"Good. Stay on your side." She rolled over, putting her back to him.
He was acutely aware of her, the entire muscular length of her. She wasn't exactly pressed up against him, but he could feel her body heat; it felt like the first time he'd been warm since she pulled him off that shithole planet where his own people had dumped him. There was nothing soft about her, but then, there never had been. The softness in Vers' eyes had been only an illusion.
She was wearing a loose sleeping shirt and underpants and nothing else. And she was between him and the outside, making him feel simultaneously imprisoned and weirdly protected.
"You're still awake," Carol said. Her voice sounded drowsy. "I can hear you thinking. You're keeping me up."
"Like that's my fault," he said, more or less on autopilot. "You being awake isn't exactly a new thing."
There was a pause before she said, "From what I remember, it actually was your fault, though."
Her voice was light and wry, as usual, which meant that it took a moment or two for it to actually sink in that she was right: it was the nightmares that had kept her up. Nightmares that were memories. He had always thought of Carol—of Vers—as someone who didn't sleep much, but that was what they'd made her, on Hala. He didn't know what she had been like back on C-53. And he didn't know what to say in response.
"Too bad there isn't room for sparring on this ship," he said at last.
Carol huffed out something like a laugh, her shoulders hitching. "Not without throwing you through the hull."
"Do you sleep better now?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"For fuck's sake, go to sleep," she said, and her breathing evened out. Either she had fallen asleep or she was faking it to escape the conversation.
There was a faint smell about her, something that he had never noticed back on Hala. It was different from her normal smell, which had always been skin and sweat and female, almost Kree but with a slight alien tang. But this smell was metallic and scorched, like burnt steel. Like the hull of a ship after a phase-cannon blast. He wondered if it was the smell of space. Or maybe the scent of the fire that burned inside her.
He found it strangely compelling, especially spiced with the natural smell of her skin, a little familiar, a little alien. He leaned into it and closed his eyes with the loose hair on the nape of her neck tickling his face.
***
She was no longer in the bed when he woke.
He rolled over and sat up, the blanket tangling around him. Carol, it turned out, had folded out a table in the ship's small cabin and was eating from the plastic tray of an automeal while reading something.
"Oh, you're awake," she said. "Want to eat?"
He lurched out of the bed and, after another application of painkillers and synskin rejection suppressants, found himself ever so slightly hungry. There was another automeal on the other side of the table, already heated, though cooled slightly now. He ate a little, and inspected whatever she was reading. It was a thick book with pages, not a normal book, and in no script he could read.
"What's that?"
"It is, regrettably, War and Peace, because the Skrull philosophy of literature on long space flights is the longer the better," Carol said. "On the other hand, you might learn a bit about humans if you read it." She turned it rightside-up for him, and then frowned. "Except you can't read it, can you?"
"No," he said.
"Hmm. All the entertainment on this ship is from Earth. There's a huge Skrull fad for Earth pop culture right now."
"It's a Skrull ship?" he said.
"Well, it is now."
With a thoughtful look, she got up, picked up her tray, and raised an eyebrow at him. He pushed the half-eaten meal tray at her. She put both into the recycler for cleaning.
"There really isn't anything on this ship for you to do," she said. "Other than clean the bathroom, I guess."
"I am not—"
"It was a joke." She reached up to a storage compartment overhead. He couldn't help noticing that it was an excellent view, especially in the sleeveless shirt she was wearing—the curve of her breasts, the flex of the muscles in her shoulders. She got down some flat boxes and set them on the table.
"What are those?"
"Earth board games." Carol sorted through them, and pulled one out. "You don't know Terran letters. This might be a way to learn."
She showed it to him. He shrugged.
"It's called Scrabble," she said.
"I have no idea what that is."
"It's a spelling game. Look, your vocabulary isn't the problem. The translator takes care of that. The problem is you have no idea what the letters are."
"And I need to know, why?" But the answer came immediately on the heels of that. "Oh, fuck. We're going to C-53, aren't we."
"Only for a little while," Carol said. She opened the box.
"Suppose I don't want to learn."
"Then you're going to be really bored for the rest of our—" She made a show of checking a chrono she wasn't wearing. "—two-month trip to Earth."
"Fine," Yon-Rogg said, exasperated beyond all bearing. "Isn't there some way other than playing a ridiculous game, though?"
"Hey!" Carol said. "It's a traditional game of my people. Have some respect."
He was not going to touch that one. "You are going to win."
"Of course I am. At first. But I thought you were supposed to be a fast study," Carol said, and shoved the Scrabble box at him. "So study."
***
Earth's written language was terrible. Not like the clean, logical spelling of Prime Kree script on Hala.
"Yes, because you guys revise the spelling every five years or so to keep up with linguistic drift," Carol said, swiping the tiles off the board. They had mainly been doing drills on the letter sounds to begin with. "I know because I was there. Some Earth languages do that too. It's just that the one I'm teaching you doesn't, so that's what you're stuck with."
"How many languages does C—does Earth have?" he asked. He hadn't realized there was more than one.
"A few thousand, I think? Not counting extinct ones."
"A few thousand?" Hala had a few dozen, after the purges and the culls and with the leveling effect of the translator implants. Everyone learned to speak Prime at a young age anyway. He couldn't fathom a world having that many different tongues. How would it even work? How did they handle government, commerce—anything? What kind of chaos would result from a planet like that? What kind of people?
"Ready for a real game?" Carol asked, dumping the tiles back into the silver bag.
"No," he said.
***
She won handily, of course. He was convinced by now that this was all a ploy to replace sparring with something else that she was clearly better at than he was.
"Look, I'm giving you credit for misspelled words, and that's more than I have to," Carol said. With a swipe of her thumb, she wiped their scores from the tablet she was using as a scorepad. "All you have to do is remember what a 'T' is. And come up with words in the first place. I know you have a better vocabulary than this."
"Shut up," Yon-Rogg said, and reached into the bag for a handful of tiles.
***
There were a mindboggling number of variables to have to remember, including the meaning of all the colored squares whose labels he couldn't read.
"This is some kind of lesson, isn't it," he said after losing the twelfth consecutive game. He was flopped on the bed, his brain felt like it was made of reconstituted freeze-dried rations, and Carol had gone off to check the instruments that he was still locked out of.
"It's only a board game," Carol called back from the cockpit. "Not like, oh, having to pick up an entire life you don't remember on a world you don't know anything about, but think you should."
"So you're just making a point by being an asshole," he said to the ceiling of the bed cubby.
"We have a saying on Earth," Carol said, in that infernally cheerful tone that he ought to hate but was actually getting weirdly attached to. "A taste of your own medicine."
Vers had rarely sounded like that. She had teased him, she was playful, she was open and friendly in a way that Carol wasn't—but Vers hadn't had that rock-solid, diamond-bright confidence, all the way down to the core of her. Vers was unsure. She had looked to him for support and guidance. He had liked it. Vers had thought he was smart and brilliant and brave. She was also smart and brilliant and brave, but just that slight shade less than he was, and that was invigorating, having her look up to him as a protégé should.
It occurred to him only now, when he'd lost it too, in a way he could never get back, that it was always cruel to have taken that confidence—that knowledge of herself, of her own power—away from her. Vers had never been Carol, only the edges of her.
The edge of the bed dipped. He rolled over. She was sitting with her hip bumped up against his.
"Are you sulking?" she said.
Yon-Rogg threw an arm across his eyes. "Go away."
"It's my ship, so no."
He didn't answer. She laid a hand on his forearm, her fingers warm and strong—strong, he knew, in a way that could rip his arm off, could tear him to pieces without breaking a sweat.
He had no power here. He never had.
Carol gave him a little shake. "I would have let you win one, if I'd known you were going to be like this about it."
"Shut up," he said between his teeth.
"You let me win sometimes back on Hala, didn't you?"
"I never let you win," he ground out.
"That's the first thing you've said that I believed," she said, and bent forward—with his arm over his eyes, he couldn't see her, he knew it by the rustling, by the heat of her and the scorched star-smell—and touched her lips to his forehead. She was half lying on him. A few days ago, it would have been horrifically painful. There was pain, but it was pleasant through the ache. He lay very still, not wanting her to move away, entirely unsure what was happening here.
"Move over," she said, and he did. She slid into bed behind him and laid an arm along his hip. Turning her head, she spoke softly to the ship, lowering the lights.
"So there it is," he muttered. "I always knew it. The thing that gets you sleepy is beating me in a fight."
Carol laughed softly, stirring the hair at the nape of his neck. "How long are you going to let me go on beating you?"
***
Three days into their marathon Scrabble sessions, he actually did beat her, or at least he ended up with the high score as per her tallies. He promptly accused her of cheating.
"You think I cheated to let you win," Carol said, one hand on the score tablet.
"At this point, I think you're making up numbers to get the desired reaction out of me," he snapped. "So you've decided you want me to win one for a change. Fine."
"How manipulative do you think I am?" She sat back in her seat, her lean muscular arms crossed over her chest. Some expression crossed her face, something soft and strange. "Or is that literally the only way you can imagine people might be with each other?"
Yon-Rogg struggled to his feet. He still ached, but he was moving easier. Not that he could physically defeat her in any case. "What's the point of doing this, otherwise?"
Carol scooped up a handful of Scrabble tiles and threw them at him. Startled, he caught a handful of them, although most of them clattered to the deck around him.
"The point is teaching you English, you absolute idiot."
"I thought the point was showing me that you're better at this than I am." He threw them back at her.
Carol snatched one out of the air and dropped it to the table. The rest clattered to the deckplates behind her. "Oh, I am. But I don't have to be. You realize this is a game for children where I come from?"
"Thanks for rubbing it in."
Carol heaved a sigh and stood up, brushing her hands down her thighs. She gave him a look. "Are you really this bad at being bad at things?"
Weirdly, he felt like he'd lost even after winning, more than he had on the numerous occasions when he had lost. And especially as she began to don her garish, modified Starforce suit, smoothing it down over her arms and legs. He refused to come over there, though he did concede enough to pick up the tiles.
"Are you leaving the ship?" he asked. "Really?"
"Yes," she said simply.
It wasn't until she was gone, dropping out of the ship into the blackness of space, that it occurred to him that she hadn't left it in days—three days, to be precise. Ever since he had recovered to the point where he was awake most of the time, playing that idiotic game with her.
"Fuck," he snapped, and threw the box at the wall. It burst into a shower of pieces everywhere, which at least gave him something to do, picking things up and sealing the box back around them.
***
He cleaned the ship, including the head.
He tried to break into the computer. It occurred to him that she might not be coming back. At least not for a good long while. He still couldn't get past her blocks, and it began to occur to him, with deep annoyance, that at some point along the way Carol had learned to be much better at computers than he ever knew she was. Or else the Skrulls had set something up for her.
He laid out the game and set himself to memorizing the parts: the squares, the tiles, the letters and the spellings—the latter of which he was able to glean at least partly from books he was starting to be able to read now. If defeating her at this game was some sort of ... of rite of passage, he didn't even know, something that might gain him more privileges on this ship or more, more—
More value, perhaps, in her eyes ...
It was something, at the very least, that he was determined not to be bad at.
***
Carol landed in the airlock five days, by the ship's reckoning, after she'd left. She walked in casually, unsealing the suit seals—her face, of course, was uncovered, because helmets were for losers in Carol's world.
"I need a shower," she said, and walked past him to the head.
When she got out, he had two automeals heated and on the table. He was eating his, with an elbow propped on the table and one of her books open beside him.
She sat down across from him with a narrow-eyed look.
"So I see one thing's the same between you and Vers," he said, passing an eating utensil across the table to her.
"We aren't separate people." She looked very tired, her hair a scrubbed, damp mop of dark honey-colored curls.
He let that go and took another bite of his ... whatever this was. It wasn't standard-issue Kree rations, but it at least seemed to be compatible with Kree physiology, since it hadn't killed him yet.
"What?" she said at last. "What's the same?"
"You both throw horrendous temper tantrums," he said, and reached for the game box.
Carol glared at him, scrubbed her hand through her hair, and propped her chin on her fist as she ate. She looked completely done in. He hadn't even known she got tired, and it was strangely reassuring to know that she did actually have limits, even if they were shockingly beyond normal Kree limits.
He laid out his tiles and turned the bag her way.
"Yes, fine, whatever," Carol said, and fished out a fistful. "I regret teaching you this game, for the record."
"Winning helps you sleep," he said. "So beat me."
She did, to his annoyance. He had been really looking forward to kicking her ass with his newly acquired Earth-script spelling skills.
But he actually did win the next one. Carol looked as surprised as he was.
For a minute they just looked at each other across the board, with his last word (ZPARYX, a bird indigenous to the eastern continent of Hala) marching proudly across a double word and triple letter score.
Carol huffed out a small breath.
"So is this where I yell at you and you throw a tantrum and stomp off the ship for a week?" he asked.
"You're such an asshole when you win," she said, but not with heat. She flipped over her tile screen. "I'm going to bed."
She crawled into the bed. He hesitated only briefly before crawling in after her, and she didn't instantly push him onto the floor, so—progress?
He laid a hand on her shoulder and was completely startled when she rolled over abruptly and flipped him onto his back and rolled on top of him.
His still-healing ribs gave a bit, and he reacted with a violent flinch and a gasp. She started to roll off him. "No," he said between his teeth, "don't," and hooked a leg through hers, pulling her back down.
"Say if you want this to stop," she said, and curled her hand behind his neck and kissed him.
He didn't want this to stop.
She could have punched his spine out of his back. He knew that. But she didn't; she was careful, and he wondered that he'd accused her of lacking control.
Maybe she had learned it.
Maybe she'd always had it, far more than he had ever known. Maybe what he had taken for lack of control was Vers trying to be Carol, rebounding off the walls of the box they had put around her, again and again and again.
***
He woke gradually, coming back to himself with a sense of disorientation that slowly washed away into the warmth of a body pressed to his, the tickling of loose blonde hair against his face.
He drew in a slow breath. She was asleep, curled up with her back to him, against the wall. He was the one on the outside this time.
Seeing her like this made him wonder—strange, he'd never thought of it before—how much control she had in her sleep. How much danger he was in of being crushed in his sleep if she woke in the grip of a nightmare.
He was too comfortable and relaxed to really worry about it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like this. It wasn't safety, not exactly; it was just a sort of comfort so deep he didn't want to move.
He leaned his face into her neck, breathed in the burnt-metal smell of her, the starstuff smell. And drifted back to sleep.