My time on the ship passed quickly as I studied, worked, and trained all under the watchful eye of Alexander, Repun and eventually even Kirill. The first mate took several weeks to finally talk to me with anything but grunts but eventually, my lack of incidents and my improving Russian won him over. He never was a sparkling conversationalist but he did say hello and would insult me like another crew member and not a potential threat to the safety of the ship. Repun kept his distance from Alexander and I which I understood when it was explained to me that the crew didn't know of their connection. It was very clear to me that both Alexander and Repun didn't want the crew to think that Alexander hadn't earned his position. Even so, I noticed the older man keeping a watchful eye on me and Alexander the few times we were around him. I also often felt like I could feel his gaze when we trained out on the deck of the ship and I imagined he was watching from the bridge. The ease with which my brain devoured new information never ceased to stun me as I quickly became fluent in every language spoken aboard the ship. I also devoured any of the skills the other crewmembers were willing to teach me whether it be small machine repair from some of the engineers or crocheting from Alexander. There were definitely areas in which my improvement was markedly less impressive to Alexander's increasing frustration. The two areas in which I failed to really advance were math which annoyed Alexander but I honestly expected, the other though was any actual magic. While I was able to quickly become adept at stopping my cores from running wild I was never able to consciously activate them. After two weeks with no movement on that front, Alexander started trying more and more elaborate ways to try and get me to access my cores intentionally without emotion. It started with moving from silent meditation to the use of mantras but this failed just as greatly as regular meditation. By the end of my first month aboard the ship, Alexander and I were physically sparring in some sort of martial arts in hopes the physical movement and discipline would help. The air had warmed as we moved further and further away from the arctic circle and we often practised out on the deck of the ship with jumpsuits tied at the waist. As I moved cleanly out of the way of one of Alexander's takedowns I slipped behind him grabbing him. I swiftly but gently brought him to the ground where my bulky frame kept him pinned beneath me. He tapped out and we separated sitting across from each other breathing heavily as we tried to catch our breaths.

“Anything?”

Alexander asked but without any real hope and I looked at him shaking my head in response to his question. He cursed in Russian and ran his hand over his bald head, he had kept to his word and kept it shaved, unlike mine. My hair had grown out into an awkward-looking buzz cut which I kept hidden under the orange cap that I now knew Alexander had crocheted. His hand dropped from his head down to his face where he wore a beard that seemed to fit his face well. It had grown in completely black which I noticed his eyebrows were black as well. I wondered why he had been dying his hair blonde but chalked it up to fashion. For my own part, I had also grown a beard although I kept it close not being able to stand it if it got too long. I had also changed a lot physically in the last month as the food on the ship and the work I had been doing shaped my body. I had lost a little of the fat I had come here with but more than that I had gained a surprising amount of muscle and I found myself beating Alexander in sparring often now.

“What about your project, anything working on it?”

Alexander pointed his chin to wear our things were piled on the deck and specifically the melted wrench from what felt like years ago. I shook my head mirroring his frustration at my lack of progress in my abilities with magic. I had taken to carrying the wrench around with me ostensibly to try and fix it in my few free moments. In reality, it was somewhat of a talisman to remind me of the consequences if I ever lost control of my powers again. The spot in the hallway where I had lost control was also a consistent reminder of my sheer destructive capability. The metal on the walls and ceilings had been heated to a dusky blue and the ground held imprints of my hands and knees. The wrench was actually in worse shape than when I had first melted my grip into it and this only served to remind me further. I had been trying to fix it, sitting in my small cabin on the floor trying to meditate and access my cores with absolutely no results. In my desperation to both do something and also admittedly to impress Alexander I had taken a shortcut. I had reached out to my frustration with my lack of progress, latched onto it and felt my stomach heat as my core woke up. I had reached out to the wrench with shaking hands and tried to push and pull the metal back into shape. As I continued to fail to shape the metal my frustration grew until I felt the heat rising in my chest and I heard a metallic buckling sound. Looking behind me I saw the metal of the bunkbed bending as it heated faster than the metal around it. I immediately clamped down on my frustration, looking for its source to try and cut off the ever growing emotion. I gripped the wrench tightly as I frantically looked in myself for why I was so frustrated with not being able to do this. I was frustrated I couldn't use my magic, I was angry at myself for not being able to learn something Alexander had been working so hard on. I was so disappointed in myself for not being able to do what he had been trying so hard to teach me. I was afraid that Alexander felt the same way. I felt the heat run out of me as I stumbled through my thoughts and I looked down to where I had held the wrench. It was nothing more than a melted pool of scrap in my hand. Pushing my thoughts from my mind I had looked behind me to see I hadn't done much damage to the bunk besides making it droop slightly. The blanket was also lightly singed but I could just sleep in the top bunk instead of the bottom. I learned my lesson from that incident and since then I had kept tight control of my emotions and their link to my cores. If Alexander noticed the change both in the wrench or in myself he didn't comment on it although I did notice he didn't talk as much about control anymore. Instead, we had focused on the act of actually accessing my cores in a clear and unemotional way and so far we had continued to fail. I was consistently upset with myself for my lack of progress although Alexander never chided me for it. In fact, he often spoke about how this was a better problem to have than the other way around, better than losing control. Even though he was kind about it I could tell he was growing more and more frustrated with himself as he took it as a failure of his teaching. I wanted to say something to him about how emotions and having too much or too little control over them was a problem I had always had. It wasn't something I could ever figure out how to say though so I often sat there angry at myself. I knew logically I should say something to him about it but I was too afraid of confronting him with both my own feelings and his. So instead I sunk myself into my other studies and duties around the ship, excelled at his martial arts and meditated often in my free moments.

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It was about five weeks into our journey that Alexander told me that were getting close to their destination and he seemed actively diminished when giving me the news. Instead of his snarky and smiling attitude, he seemed much more like the man I had met upon waking up. He was anxious and couldn't meet my eye as he spoke to me and I honestly could understand why. I had never been good at making friends and while Alexander seemed like the kind of person that would be it was clear that living with his family he hadn't really had any chance to. Me and him had become fast friends and any moments we could have together we took advantage of. We often had spent evenings talking in his room or just sitting silently as I read and he crocheted. As he spoke I felt a lump rising in my throat as I went to ask the obvious question,

“So when do we dock, and what happens when we do?”

Alexander couldn't meet my eye as he responded to me,

“Tomorrow, Repun and Kirill decided to radio ahead with the island authorities, you'll be repatriated back to America.”

I sat down hard next to Alexander on his bed unable to respond with the shock of what he had just said as his words rattled around in my head. I could feel Alexander's tense body next to me as if he was expecting me to lose my temper with him, to scream at him. Instead, I felt the lump in my throat continue to rise and I couldn't stop my voice from breaking as I spoke.

“How long have you known?”

I didn't look at him, just down at the metal floor between my feet as I spoke softly.

“I knew when we’d be back for a little over a week,”

The deception hit me like a blow, I had never been good at telling when people close to me were lying, it wasn't the first time it’d hurt me.

I could feel Alexander shaking slightly next to me, he was crying and I turned to look at him.

“I thought we’d arrive and maybe you'd decide to stay with us or at least have some time at port.”

Tears were running down his face as he spoke,

“They didn't tell me, about radioing ahead” I could see anger cover his face, rage was a more accurate term.

“They knew I'd tell you and that maybe you'd try and escape or do something drastic, they knew I would disagree, fight them on it.”

Alexander clenched his fists white knuckled at his sides as he spoke and he continued to cry even as his face was consumed with more anger than I'd ever seen from the young man.

I watched him as he lost his composure, he was normally happy, snarky, quick to smile and never to anger, so in control of his emotions. Sitting there though beside me his whole body shook with barely contained emotion and I felt the temperature of the room dropping. Looking around I saw frost climbing up the walls in long fractal patterns like tapestries made of crystal. I watched enraptured by their beauty for a moment as the fine patterns wove their way up the walls and across the ceiling. The pattern of the frost was complex and sharp, interconnecting needles of frozen water working their way across the room. My own breath frosted in front of my face as I felt the tears that unbeknownst to me had started to fall from my eyes freeze. I was filled with fury as I looked at Alexander through the mist of my breath. Instead of the man I’d come to learn as a jovial prankster there was a boy. A boy that had been raised in a family that didn't want him, a family that hadn't loved him, that had seen him as a broken tool. A boy who had been maybe more alone than I had ever been in my life before I had woken up here. A boy that had seen in me what I had seen in him and now his family, was taking it away from him. I wouldn't let them hurt this boy, I wouldn't let anyone turn the man I'd come to know into that scared lonely boy ever again. I felt my anger deepen and something crack in me my stomach filling with heat, my chest burning, my mind blazing. I would not watch someone I loved cry.

I reached out my hand and rested it against Alexander's cheek, cupping his ice cold face in my warm hand. He looked up at me, frost had formed on his eyelashes, I had never realized how long they were until he looked up at me like that. I felt the fire in my body and I willed it forward through my hand I watched as Alexander's pale face flushed with a rosy heat. His tears melted and ran down his face as he continued to cry. I slipped my hand from his cheek to cradle the back of his head and slipped my other around his side and I pulled him forward. He pressed himself against my chest and I could feel him shaking and crying as I held him.