Having safely deposited the Quartermaster – plus coffee – in the Captain’s cabin, Flotsam was left to tend to his sole remaining task. Taking his familiar friend, the mop, he worked his way up towards the prow of the ship. Water splashed his hooves. The sunshine kept him warm, and a steady breeze lifted the sweat from his back. He ached all over, but at least the unrelenting exertion was keeping him limber. He wasn’t letting his body stiffen up despite how it wearied, especially around his throat and jaw.
When it was too much to clamp down with his teeth, he used his hooves, sweeping the sodden mop-head about in broad, sloshy strokes. The decking glittered wetly where Flotsam went. He tossed another bucket of water down, pausing only to loosen his neck and wiggle his jaw. He rolled his shoulder and it popped with that distinctly pleasant pain. Forcing it further, it popped again.
Flotsam yawned – he was fatigued and past fatigued – but he railed against it. The sunshine was nice, but more than that it felt good to suffer in full view of the crew. Some of the mares smiled and waved at him. Others didn’t.
The Captain hadn’t punished him for his magical lunacy and endangerment – or she had, but it was too reasonable, too practical and painless a solution – and a part of Flotsam, wakened to the fact, could not feel squared with himself until some kind of proper penance had been served.
Even if that meant he had to do it himself. Of course, working the bilge pumps was the truly self-depreciating option – a chore that nobody never ever ever volunteered for without some particularly obtuse angle, but that was not what Flotsam had been tasked to do this morning. It also didn’t help matters when one considered that job was in the damp, in the dark, in relative cold and by one’s lonesome.
He wanted the mares to see that he’d put his head down and sweat for them, more than ever.
As such, if mopping was the only task Flotsam was good enough for, then by blazes he was going to be great at it. He scoured the deck; he scourged it; every time in every way his body protested he fought through all the more viciously, ‘til his breath was a noisy heaving and the lone stallion of the MoM was at a brisk canter up and down her decks, working the mop to the within an inch of its lack-of-life. Eyes turned and mares side-stepped his swift, hard-breathing advance. He didnt' know any jaunty, raunchy songs, the sort made use of by work-gangs to keep timings together and morale up, but if he had, he would have done with one now. Lacking, he improvised a wordless, expressive substitute under his breath.
He huffed and hurried forwards, swinging side to side all the while. The nullifier felt hot and tight and heavy from its perch just above his peripheral vision. Flotsam ignored it, but the awareness of it kept itching its way back into his consciousness. Reaching the prow, he tried to fling a bucket of sea water forwards – settled for tipping it over determinedly, too weak was he to lift it – then set about gouging each and every loose scrap of detritus and gunk from the absolute tip of the deck.
Images crowded his thoughts. Sexy images. Scary images. Half-remembered pieces of his dreams, and less-than-half-remembered images that only might have been dreams.
The mop helped. He practically growled out his inchoate verse as he worked it.
It was only a matter of time before his body put its hoof down with him. It came when he was fishing for water – a deceptively easy task – and discovered to his shock he hadn’t the strength to lift the bucket from the ocean. He tried and the muscles simply would not, could not, meet his demands.
The drag on the bucket was powerful. The rope stretched taut, and the bucket slid across and scooped at the surface with jarring lack of pattern. Flotsam could imagine it ever so slightly beginning to pull the ship off course, through him. He ended up being pulled and pinned uncomfortably to the gunwale, holding to the ship more with his body weight than anything else, unwilling to let the rope go from his fiercely aching jaws.
He felt strangely giddy about the situation. A silly, epic, stupid struggle: passing without witness right under the eyes of seasoned mares.
Not, however, under the eyes of seasoned fillies. Patches’ little hooves were all sorts of cat’s-claws painful as she mountaineer’d his back, leaned out over the water (making convenient use of his head as a forward base) and wrapped a hoof around the rope. She threw her meagre weight into the effort and, once it popped clear of the drag, the bucket’s weight alone was manageable for her to haul up.
Flotsam helped her set it down, then slumped on jelly legs. He wasn’t sure he could stand.
He was grinning.
Patches was having none of that. She cuffed him between the eyes, struck him a pointed flick to the forehead as if to call him out. Bad sea dog, bad.
“Thtupid!” she growl-chirped – her voice could only go so low, after all – “thtupid!”
She thumped him again; his ears flicked back in shock and submission and, placated, she grappled with Flotsam’s head. She leant her weight backwards, trying to get him up on his hooves. He found a reserve of strength – possibly stolen – and, once upright, had not too much trouble staying so.
Patches, for her part, had not let go of his snout. “Come on,” she urged. It was hard to see anything past the insistent little pony, but Flotsam thought he saw a few crew mare’s look on with mixed expressions, mostly benign. He would have been pleased with that, if he’d had a chance to think about it, but just then his head was full of bewilderment and instinctive submission. A deep and primordial part of his brain, barely separate from the spinal cord itself, was insisting that this lanky, two-toned filly was obviously bigger and stronger than himself, despite him having to stoop his head just for her to reach him.
It was an attitude thing.
Patches marched Flotsam into the ship’s below-decks. He hesitated. “I’m supposed to mop the deck.”
Patches, unable to actually kick the door shut behind them, settled on turning about, pressing her forehead to it and shoving. “You did. Three timeth! You thhould be rethting.
Well, he was really tired. “I did?” He knew he did – of course he did, and his private reasonings therein – but it was another thing altogether to own up to that.
“Yeth!” Her angry tone cracked. She hugged his leg, burying her face in him. He hugged her and found she was trembling. “You have to be better.”
He said, “I’m sorry.” He patted her gently and she steadied on her hooves. Then he said, “Okay.”
Flotsam surrendered to the filly’s lead. She clearly had some idea of what to do and with nothing more to do himself, but wait and think, the hours of the day opened up ahead of him like a restless, anxious chasm. Better the filly’s ideas, then that.
Patches rounded a corner – there was a tumult of items – and before Flotsam could follow she was back again, pushing something into his mouth.
He blinked as the familiar, abstract, never-exepected taste of chocolate slowly warmed on his tongue. He turned the brick over slowly, testing around the geometries of it. Making sure it was really there.
Hop Scotch. He spoke around the block. “This is yours,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “She gave it to you.” He chewed gently and edges crumbled.
Patches didn’t refute the facts. She led him down another level, and was even something resembling patient with him as he carefully navigated the steep, cool steps, one heavy lurch at a time.
If her plan was to secretly mug him, this would actually be the perfect place for it.
It wasn’t, though, and she didn’t.
Taking another turn, then another, Flotsam lost his sense of direction. Following the filly, he sidled past some stacked barrels and was urged under a low, head-clipping support. The last leg of the odyssey – taking him behind a mountain of boxy crates, in the crevasse between them and the hull – he had to suck in his breath and really squeeze through. All the while, for all the cramped spaces, Patches had easily flitted and paraded her way through, though even she had had to duck a little bit for the beam.
It was very dark – too dark to see much distinction in anything – but a month’s life on the ship had made darkness something mundane.
It was the softness underhoof that really caught Flotsam’s flagging, bewildered attention. He heard a brief series of squeaks; a rusty creak; a sudden striking.
The lantern’s glow grew steadily. Not entirely lucid at this point, his first impression was of Natuicaa and he in her cabin – a scarce few hours ago – and the way the flickering light had called the shadows to attend it. Flotsam caught Patches’ pleased, interested expression and the impression still was not lost. Two lit-up places. Two piebald ponies.
The softness was a mattress, or a nest, or something that had been cobbled together to serve as both. An atrophied pillow found its way to him. Sitting and leaning on soft things, Flotsam was pleased to find himself so cozy, and fished delightful nuggets of molten chocolate from his teeth.
It was only the mildest of surprises he felt when the filly brandished a wicked little knife; one of a varied set that never seemed far from hoof nor tooth for the little pony.
Taking a tin from a lidless, lockless, less loved (probably luckless) lockbox, Patches promptly shanked, gutted and levered it open in a flat few seconds. She bent the raspy-edged lid back on itself and, giving it to Flotsam, he was mindful of the sharp edges.
“Eat,” she urged him.
With nothing for it, trusting by nature and doubly trusting of Patches, Flotsam nodded and tipped the can back, on the principle assumption that she probably hadn’t concocted anything tinned herself. He had not forgotten the pickles. Even so, it could be anything here.
It was diced fruit in a light syrup and it was the single sweetest thing Flotsam could remember ever having tasted.
Cubed pieces of apple, pear, peach, slices of strawberry, mango, tart pineapple, whole grapes – whole. grapes. – oranges, the gang were all there, swimming in gooey, sugary niceness. He mashed them, swilled the flavours like a connoisseur and swallowed.
He sipped a bit of syrup from the can, then offered it back. Patches declined, but he refused to let Patches not have any of this.
She considered, took a moment, then went spear-knife-fishing. Two quick and painless jabs yielded two bits of pineapple, dribbling syrup. Moving knife from mouth to hoof, she nipped at the yellow cubes, then – her eyes on Flotsam – absentmindedly nibbled at the syrup still on the blade.
Normally, that sort of thing is done knowingly and expressly as an intimidation tactic. It usually works. In this instance, however, it was nothing of the sort, no more than a pony digging at the last vestiges of ice cream in a bowl would think their spoon could be an explicit threat to anyone. It just was.
Besides: spoons are just less edgy knives with a figure. All know this.
Patches watched hawkishly, and, finsihed with her taster, the little knife vanished from sight again. It occurred to him that she was rather determined about him eating. Flotsam’s ears perked, and he thought he clued into what the filly was thinking. He made an exaggerated – but still quiet genuine – show of enjoying himself. “This is, mm, really good!”
After repeated attempts, he coaxed her into having some more. When the tin was at last empty, and its tantalizing last drizzle of sticky sweet syrup exhausted, Flotsam settled deeper onto the bedding, closed his eyes and listened to himself breath. “That was good. I can’t remember the last time I had fruit.”
He heard a rustle, then – surprise! – a rough woollen blanket was nudged over his shoulders. More rustles.
“Patches,” he said, and he heard her sudden stillness. “Thank you. And…I’m sorry.”
Patches pushed at him stubbornly. “Get thome thleep.” For a moment, her obvious youth seemed at odds with a strange depth. Then, like a wave retreating down the sand, it slipped away.
Flotsam simply let himself sink under her insistence. Sleep rose in him like a tide. He was quite aware of the little lights of his mind winking out, one after another.
His ear flicked as if swatting away bugs, he mumbled something about music, then nodded off.
Patches left him be.