//------------------------------// // Push and Pull // Story: Washed Up // by ambion //------------------------------// It was early in the morning and Flotsam was doing pushups on the floor of the Captain’s cabin. Nauticaa hadn’t told him to, rather, he’d awoken from a dreamless sleep with energy to burn. He’d slid quietly from her bed and was none too surprised to find that if she hadn’t already been awake, he’d have woken her despite his relative stealthiness. Taking a page from Nauticaa’s book, he didn’t make a deal of it and simply went about his agenda. Activity helped him to think. He pressed. The Captain sat up and for a time simply watched him. He pressed. Her blankets draped her and her eyes remained half-lidded, so that the two of them watched one another like cats, she head on and he from the corner of his eye, feigning disinterest. He pressed. He couldn’t believe she was entirely disinterested in him, he just couldn’t. He had his pride, after all. Flotsam pressed. Nauticaa had given Flotsam his name and a golden earring. He pressed. She’d taken his autonomy and his magic. Perhaps somewhere in her ledger for the ship was a page concerning Flotsam with positives and negatives all tallied together, amounting to... something. Of course — and this thought required a jolly, aggressive upping of the ante, combining effort and breath into a fast, muscle-burning flurry of pumping motions — such a thing applied both ways. Flotsam had brought good and bad to the ship. Whatever Nauticaa had asked to take, he’d willingly given, she had afforded him that respect. As the old timers might have put it, he had blown both ways. Hopefully more to the good, if Nauticaa’s regard were taken into account. That was only a metaphor, though; He hadn’t blown, nobody had blown, of such thing a fact he was quite certain, as certain as a wastrel born seemingly out of the water could be of anything. It would be nice, he mused, if for once something other than the wind was blowing him. Flotsam at last dropped down and stayed down, chuckling and giddy with the slight high of exercise and, it had to be said, his own increasingly warped sense of humour. His heartbeat thumped strong in his chest, his legs already quivered, his blood flushed hot against his skin. He breathed hard, and eyed the grain of floor. He had meant to be counting, but all Flotsam could recall was the vague assurance that he’d passed by fifty at some point, after which his thoughts had taken their own course and had left his body simply to repeat its actions indefinititely. He huffed, forced his muscles to act through their own quivering strain and pried himself up. He held firm and tortured himself slowly down into another exaggerated pushup. Despite the shivers, he kept his form. Coming slowly, slowly up from it, he smiled. “You’re impressed.” “You're not bad. Tough, for a unicorn.” Flotsam received the words like a warm accolade, given to him from some high pony on her royal perch. “Do I get a kiss?” “I think not.” The Captain stepped from her bed, took a moment to stretch, then took to her desk, neatly sidestepping the prostrate figure on her floor. And that was that. Their relationship in a dozen words. The Captain was a perpetual cold shower; a bulwark of sobriety. In a choice few ways it was frustrating to no end, especially in the small hours of the night when, even asleep, Flotsam was on some level awake to the fact that she cuddled him, aggressively so. Outside of that purpose, she never touched him. Not restraint exactly, because that word suggested tension. Aloofness, maybe. Flotsam stood stiffly and stretched. He splashed water on his face and rubbed, first to address sweat and sleep, then for the simple pleasure of cool water spread on warm skin. Salt prickled him momentarily blind. “What happens to me now, anyway? Everybody believes I’m sleeping with you, which I actually am, not that they’d believe if I put it that way.” "Maybe it doesn't even matter." He hesitated. “Patches’d believe me. She’s innocent. I think. I’m wandering a little, what I mean is, that, well, no, let’s actually stick with Patches for a moment.” Changing no other manner or feature, Nauticaa raised one eyebrow. This is a rare and valuable skill in a pony. Raising hooves made Flotsam’s muscles twinge, but like with his workout, he felt full of motion and articulated himself with a surplus of gestures and a sort of side-to-side shimmy. He paced the floor and the Captain watched. “I guess what I’m asking is: are you going to keep me?” The gestures stopped. Flotsam listened to the echoes in his head. It was six words, but they somehow worked very hard at their job and asked more than their sum weight would suggest. Keep me as a lover. Keep me as worker. Keep me as a prisoner. What am I? The options hovered awkwardly, unspoken but understood. Flotsam scratched at the nullifier. As always it felt gritty to touch, like sand clinging to a pony who has been playing in the ocean, but even a forceful hoof couldn’t lift a single of the black grains from the material. He had made his attempts, in odd moments of privacy, when a sudden anxious urge to be reconnected with his magic would steal into him. “And what is this thing, anyway?” Captain Nauticaa flipped her book closed, perhaps in lieu of a sigh. She seemed, if anything, to relax slightly out of her usual stoicism, leaning and settling perhaps just a little more into her seat. She nodded. “That, I received as a gift from the previous Captain, my father. He called it sombre stone, and said it was very rare. Wherever that mineral came from, I’ve never seen, and it stopped coming from there a long time before anyone alive was born. I’m given to understand that there’s more utility in sombre stone regarding magic than locking it down, but that, as you’re well aware now, is the design of this piece. “As for your other question,” she spoke emphatically, “you are not a prisoner. Maybe to fate and circumstance, but I can't help that.” There was a knock at the door, polite and urgent. Nauticaa raised and pitched her voice to the interloper. “Wait!” “Flotsam,” she resumed, “I think I can trust you to understand by now that in anything I do, the decisions I make are for the ship, first, foremost and always. I am rather impersonal like this. That said, I haven’t been ignorant to your concerns. You have been an interesting addition to the journey. ‘Interesting’ does not equate with ‘good,’ although, I will admit in this case you have managed to be both, if more of the former than the latter. At times you have even proven quite useful. But we’re here now, and I and the Mother will continue on exactly as we will.” Flotsam knew he was none too devious or cunning. When he didn’t know, he didn’t know, and whatever cards another pony might have kept with which to bluff, Flotsam merely gave away, hoping and worrying. As a plus, he wasn’t very evasive either. He asked, “What are you saying?” “I’m saying that I’m prepared to offer you a choice. That's a thing, I think, you’ve been starved for recently.” Flotsam’s ears flicked about. He lowered his head. “You need to be simpler. I still don’t get it.” “You can stay on the ship or you can leave the ship. No, that’s not quite right. Either way, you will be leaving this ship. The real choice is, you can stay a little while more, while we’re in port. Your choice is, do you stay a while more, or a while less?” Flotsam met the Captain’s stern glare with one of his own. “You want me to leave the Mother?” “You will leave the Mother.” Nauticaa propped her hooves on her desk and leant forwards. She took a deep breath before she spoke, slow and forceful. “Do you think that I would have ever brought you onto my ship under any other circumstance? If it hadn’t been that or leave you to die in the water? “You’re a terrible sailor. You are. Willing to work, I grant you, but you know nothing. Children on the dockside know more about running a ship than you. You can fight, but you’re a distraction. And you have magic. Real magic. Not like Charming Boot, not like Sea Bed; lighting lamps and moving quills; real magic. Powerful magic. Could you kill her?” Flotsam stood tense. He refused to let his voice catch in his throat. “Kill who?” Nauticaa tapped the floor loudly. “The ship.” “I would never-” “And I believe that. That you wouldn’t intend to. But you could.” Resting her head in her hoof, Nauticaa rubbed at her temple, her eyes shut for a moment. “My crew knocked down the griffon sky-frigate. My crew, all working together. They’re good mares. They’re strong mares. Don’t tell me that you couldn’t have done the same by yourself if you’d really needed to. If you’d had the right incentive.” Legs straight, his eyes forward and expression fixed into stony nothingness, Flotsam kept his breath tight in his chest. The black smoke and grey stormcloud of the frigate bled across his mind’s eye. He drained his voice of emotion. “What’s the right incentive, sir?” The Captain clapped her hooves down then swept them aside. “The wrong words, a piece of your memory, a bad day, maybe nothing at all. I don’t know. Neither do you. Whatever happened to you... whatever lead you to drift on wreckage in the middle of the sea, it wasn’t kind and it wasn’t gentle. And it didn’t end there, not really. “You’re not a bad person, Flotsam, I know that. You have a good heart. A good heart... but it’s not your heart that worries me. Your mind isn’t right, Flotsam. You know it, I know it, let’s not have either of us insult the other by pretending otherwise.” The silence that fell was brittle. Flotsam wouldn’t speak yet, he sensed she wasn’t finished yet and besides, he did not trust himself to. There was a second knocking at the door, firm and urgent. Nauticaa sent it away with another stiff word. Then she slid a dusty bottle from her desk. Glass clinked and wine gurgled as she poured for two. She gestured Flotsam towards the second glass and took a deep swallow of her own. He hesitated, then took the glass in his hoof. He’d tried first with his magic. It was still his instinct to do so, despite the nullifier. He sipped. Heady and dark and quite thicker than water. Nauticaa stared into the red. “I’m not cruel. But truth is hard and hard decisions are necessary decisions.” Flotsam said nothing. “There is a ship, two masted, trimmed sails and lines of orange bunting. Did you see it?” “Yes, sir, I did.” Nauticaa hefted her bottle of wine. She sealed the cork and set it back again into her desk. “That ship is the Sea Skull. It’s fast, and small, and it’s held by Captain Lamprey. She sipped; he sipped. “We’re not friends, he and I. Now, imagine you were on my ship, out in the open. Not as...this, but a true member of the crew. We see her coming towards us, or we're going towards her, either way, within the hour it’s going to be a battle. One of us is going to loot the other, you understand. Ponies are going to get hurt, and ponies are going to hurt each other. You follow me so far?” “Yes, sir.” “If I then said, ‘Flotsam, split her open’, what do you do? Be honest.” If Nauticaa wanted to make Flotsam hurt, she’d succeeded. His heart — the actual, tangible, bloody muscle hidden under meat and bone inside him — ached as if it were bruised purple and black. Maybe he'd simply done too many pushups. That'd be nice to believe. “I don’t know.” “But you have to know. The pegasi don’t get to say ‘I don’t know’ when I need them to get us through a storm. Cook doesn’t get to say ‘I don’t know’ when I need her to keep this ship fed. What do you do, Flotsam? Don’t say ‘I don’t know’. ” Flotsam envisioned magic, and the great long planks that made up a ship breaking and buckling. Did ponies come spilling out, falling into the water and clutching for bits of driftwood as they may? His eyes were a lead-dull glare. He tried not to let his breath catch before he spoke. “I really don’t know, sir.” The Captain tilted her head back, perhaps to stretch, perhaps just to stare at the ceiling. “It’s alright. I’ll leave it there. You become very formal when you’re upset. You take orders, and I think you’ve been lucky not to get the wrong ones so far. I expect you were a soldier of some sort. A pony of some city watch, perhaps. But with your magic?” “Is splitting a ship open the wrong orders, sir?” Nauticaa chuckled, dark as the red. Another first, to Flotsam’s recollection. “It’s not an order I’ve ever given. You know what they say about power.” She swilled her glass and finished the wine. With it gone, something of her usual stoniness returned. Metal clinked loudly as a coin purse hit the table. “We’ll be here for a few days yet. You can stay aboard for that time, on condition that the nullifier stays on at all times and that you stay below deck at all times unless I specifically tell you otherwise. I probably won't. We’ll arrange for lodgings in the meantime and generally try to make your transition to the city easier. You know nothing,” she stated. “You’ll want the help navigating Rivaplút anyway you can. By the time we leave, you’ll have a place to stay and know a friendly name or two. Not every visitor who walks off a ship can say that." Flotsam eyed the purse. It was small, but hefty with its bellyful of coinage. What coins, worth what? He didn’t know. It was only on his experience of the Captain that he thought it would be fair but again, fair by what measure? “You’ll pay me to sit on my hooves?” “I’ll pay you for what you’ve earned and to stay out of trouble while we’re here. Or,” she said, the word rolling like a long wave onto a soft shore, “you can leave the ship today, and not come back. No sitting below decks, no orders-” “No nullifier.” Nauticaa nodded. “No nullifier. It belongs to me and this ship, for the service of this ship. I’m hardly going to send it away with you. It’ll come off, you’ll walk across my decks, onto land and that’ll be the end of it as far as I’m concerned. You’ll be on your own, and not an expense to me, so...” Nauticaa slung an extra, smaller purse onto the desktop, a little sister to its big brother. Flotsam set his wineglass down, unfinished. He stared into the drink, weighing his options. The more he tried to make sense of them, the more a single thought resolved itself into his mind. “So, it’s money or my life? This really is a pirate ship.” Nauticaa didn’t react. “It has been.” The words settled like a fog bank. Or they would have, if a third knocking at the door didn’t blow them away like a stiff breeze. Nauticaa rose. “Have a meal,” she suggested. “Think it over. We’re not chasing you with our swords just yet.” She shared a grimace with him, one that had a brief and ghostly hint of humour in it. This was Nauticaa, laughing, drinking wine, attempting humour. It was almost more daunting to Flotsam than the unknown city before him. Did she really think he was that battered? That on edge that she of all ponies needed to lighten the mood? Of course, she wasn’t actually wrong. The Captain's words cut deep, not least of all for ringing true. Flotsam had seen her aptitude with the swords. The Captain cut what she meant to cut, no more, no less. “I’m glad for that,” he murmured. He’d take her on her words, to go have a meal and consider his options, and the implications of each. His friend, the rusted tin of cookies painted with the little smiling foreigner, was always good for counsel. Just before he left the Captain’s cabin, Flotsam downed the last of the wine from his glass. ”What the hell,” he thought as the juicy red darkness poured inside him. What the hell.