Training
The Terran service had been strange, completely different than the silent pyres and night long vigils Alwen was used too, but it was beautiful in its own way. Karega had opened the service with the gospel of a Terran saint named Coolio, Alwen didn’t quite know what a ‘gangsta’ was, but the words of the song ‘gangster paradise’ spoke to Alwen on a visceral level. She was now a killer, no longer someone who was blindly complacent in their work, she wasn’t just the doctor who worked her craft on whoever needed it, pirate or otherwise. She had killed, once in self-defense, once to save a friend, and many more times in the name of vengeance. Vengeance for Wraith, for Sean, and for her former innocence. Not once during their attack on the Coiled Strike did Alwen feel the terror and panic she knew she should have felt, she didn’t recoil from her rage and satisfaction at each dead alien. In fact she was shocked to see just how easy it was, easy to kill them, easy to pull the trigger and keep rushing forward, easy to watch them fall and move on.
What wasn’t easy, was getting over everything she had done. Over the last few days the twisted and terrified faces of her victims lurked in the back of her mind, coming to ambush her with anxiety and self-loathing whenever she let her guard down. She was strangely thankful for the never-ending work of treating the wounded, soothing the bereaved, and caring for the incapacitated sailors who had defended the ship. The endless bloody work allowed her to take her mind off of what she had done. But now she understood something. These people were all killers, and so was she, she had become a killer long ago when she had actually chosen to join the ship. This was never not going to happen, whether it was this or something else it was all bound to happen eventually. She had already broken her vows long ago; it was just more official now. But did that make it any better?
The service ended with everyone bowing their heads and offering prayer for the departed souls of those who had left, and then they all dispersed, and Alwen rushed back to her patients. Some were barely holding on to life and she hadn’t wanted to leave them, but Doctor Bachir had insisted she go and mourn with everyone. She was jogging back when a group of Station Security shoved her to the side and burst through the med bay door ahead of her. She pushed herself off the wall and stared in utter bewilderment as ten SS tore through drawers throwing gauze and IV tubes on the ground while others pawed through the medical beds as her patients groaned in pain from their brash search.
“HEY!” she snapped as she entered the room, her temper boiling over. She lifted her hand and pointed the seven largest SS who were currently stooped over in the low Terran ceiling “You, you, you, and you four, out, now!” she snapped.
The largest of them turned and glared at her “We are here to carry out a search warrant, do not interfere.”
Alwen shot him a glare of venom and rage “You are in my way, according to Union code #87-29 any search that inhibits the work of life saving treatment must be done in consent of the primary caregiver’s directives. You seven are too large for me to properly do my job and will have to harass someone else. Secondly you will not find illegal substances by prodding and jabbing at my patient’s bandages. Thirdly you are comprising stile medical equipment and are actively creating tripping hazards that will impede our work!” she growled. The night before Bachir had received word from the captain that a search warrant had been issued, so she had been briefed on any relevant laws that would cow the aggressive officers.
The seven she had pointed at left after a silent pause as they confirmed the legitimacy of her claim, the three remaining Icutoo officers were much more respectful in their search. Though they did attempt to seize their morphine and claim it as an illegal narcotic, but a rough paw on the shoulder from Bachir stopped the female officer before she ran off with the whole ships supply of painkillers. One gawked at the chemical analysis of the bottle labeled ‘tic tacs’, which was in fact acetaminophen, and apparently a commonly used poison by assassins. They of course had hundreds of release forms that permitted them to use these common Terran medicines, that were terrifyingly toxic to the rest of the galaxy.
At one point during the search those same seven SS carried off all of Adela’s spice’s and seasoning, much to the displeasure of the chef who berated them the whole time with improbable insults about their mothers and sisters. The captain had told everyone to expect the SS to be rough and callous in their search, but this was ridiculous, the damn morons tried to literally drag off their dirty laundry under the claim that they were potential a biological weapons in disguise. Alwen allowed herself a little satisfaction in the fact that they couldn’t find any of the actual illegal weapons and substances they had hidden throughout the ship. Nearly every room and corridor in this ship held illegal class five weapons and these idiots were trying to steal their laundry.
The three Icutoo SS left the med bay in a hurry when Alwen had found that one of the injured sailors had a blue puss like infection in her mangled arm, and needed to amputate another limb. They left as Alwen began the first incisions in her fourth amputation of the day, plasma and pulse weaponry ruined any body part they touched even if the person survived. They were the cybernetics fabricator was running on high for all the replacement limbs needed.
Alwen felt a momentary and near debilitating stab of grief as she thought about Sean. He had been her first human amputation and her first long term patient. And now he was dead, he died tried trying to rush to Alwen’s side, ignorant to the fact that Alwen was literally about to give him the hook, and had been sort of flirting with another guy. He didn’t want to be a pirate, and was only working aboard to have a better chance at joining one of Astarte’s weapon companies. Fresh out of college, and now fresh ash’s ready to be returned to his family.
And Wraith, he joined to help earn money and support for people that he didn’t even know, his own hometown didn’t need the aid, but he killed to help others in their missions. She still had his beloved blades, the knife he had lovingly sharpened and polished, two beautifully made swords, Makaze, evil wind, and the smaller unnamed wakizashi. She had tried to return them to Alice, but she refused to answer her door, Alwen heard sniffling and had decided to leave her alone. She had tried to give them to the twins, but they had refused to take them.
“Those are yours now, get them reshaped to better fit your size, and do Wraith a favor and learn how to use them. We’re going back into the inferno, and luck won’t save you the next time.” Gabe had said after staring at them for a long time.
“Yeah” his sister added “His family will have his ashes, you will keep the blades and wet them with his killers blood. Maybe when this is all done, and you leave the ship we will retire them back to Tutuila.”
She didn’t know why but she kept them strapped to her side, taking them off only when she entered the med bay, but nowhere else. Bachir had eyed them for a long second but didn’t comment on them. They were definitely too long for her, and she didn’t know the proper way to use them, during the fight she had nearly fallen twice after overextending herself.
Eventually the SS left, and Alwen buried herself in her work so deeply that twenty hours into her day Bachir had to force her to leave and get some rest. She had tried to sleep but too many ghosts had haunted her dreams. The phantom whisper of Wraiths lips, the almost too hot blood that soaked through his wound into her shirt, or the pop sound Sean’s head made as it burst. How easily the knife cut flesh. The little but satisfying recoil her gun made as she pulled the trigger.
It all haunted her senses now, she had felt, seen, heard, and smelt, what killing, and death was like, and if she tried to imagine it she could invent what it would have tasted like as well. She knew what Shell Shock, or PTSD as the Terrans called it, was in a medical sense, and she could blankly recall the ways to treat it off the top of her head. But Torwen had been a very peaceful world for far too long, some anti-piracy actions, some ethnic tensions that required interventions, and a few religious riots were all that plagued her modern conflict free world. She had never seen someone suffering from mental trauma like that, and didn’t have any experience treating it.
Restless, she left her bed, strapped the blades around her hips, and wandered the halls. For once the ship was very quiet, everyone was processing the last few days in their own ways, liquor, sex, tears. None of it sounded like something Alwen needed right now, she knew she needed something, she just didn’t know what it was. She wandered past the gym, one of the largest rooms on the ship besides the cargo bays, and heard a rhythmic thumping and pounding sound. She entered to find Gato pounding on a solid punching bag, these were specially made to handle the incredible strength of the crew, and even still there were three ruined bags lying next to him. He was shirtless and his fine short black fur was slicked down in sweat, his great muscles jolted before every strike.
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His ears twitched in her direction as he noticed her silent approach somehow, a sixth sense for danger the Terrans seemed to possess, though there was no medical explanation for its existence. She stood behind him and watched for a minute as he worked his fists into the bag.
“You once said that if you could, you would trade your life for your teammates. Is it especially hard to watch them die around you then?” she asked after a while. Each jab seemed to have a purpose to them, and she realized that this was how he worked through his own trauma.
He didn’t stop, not until the bag burst at the seams and he could no longer find satisfaction in beating on its empty leather. Only then did he stop and pant “is it hard for you to lose a patient in your arms? Is it hard for you to know that the only reason he wasn’t paying attention was because he was too busy staring at you? Is it hard to know that another man died trying to reach you, dead because he wanted to be chivalrous?” he growled back, each word stabbing into her heart.
“Yes” she croaked.
“Then I think you know the answer. I wasn’t strong enough to fight off all those little bastards who mobbed me and I wasn’t strong enough to save my friends, my brothers. But I was too strong to be killed.” he growled, not facing her.
“Do you blame me for that, for interrupting your training?” she asked softly. Earlier when she had done that she was more concerned with their health, she didn’t think about what consequences there would be if they weren’t at their peak. To her these men and women were Titans, God-like champions who couldn’t be brought down by anything in this galaxy. In her whole time here there hadn’t been any marine casualty, and she had taken that for granted. Now she knew that every battle could mean losing Alice, Limey, Gabriel, or Isabela.
“Did you bring those danm monsters down on our heads, did you orchestrate the ambush, did you purposely distract Wraith to get him killed?”
“No”
“Right, then it’s not your fault, it’s theirs. And the next time we meet I’ll make danm sure I’m strong enough to kill them all this time. We all will” he turned and looked her dead in the eyes, and only broke focus to glance down to her hips, at the oversized blades that hung there. “Do you know how to use those?” he snarled softly. Like their presence offended him.
“Not yet”
“Then take them off,” he ordered, Alwen wanted to protest but the jaguar man continued on. “Take them off and grab one of the wooden ones, your more liable to hurt yourself with a real sword right now.” he said as he jerked his head towards a barrel of heavy wooden blades.
Alwen dropped the belt at the side of the barrel and rummaged through the barrel until she found a training sword that corresponded to her height, referring to the nifty little chart at the side. She found one and walked over to where Gato stood. “We don’t have any fancy secret techniques, or signature styles, what we have is the basics and hours to hone them. That’s all you need. Two hands on the hilt, step forward on your lead foot and bring the blade down, then step back” he gesticulated towards the padded human shaped dummy with a crooked face drawn on with marker.
She glanced at him and wondered why he was doing this, why she was listening. She stepped forward and brought the training sword down, and nearly tripped over her own feet. She would have tumbled into the dummy but Gato’s hand, quick as lightning, grabbed her arm and pulled her back up.
“Again!” he barked.
And she obeyed, this time with a little more grace, the wood thudded into the dummy, and she felt the jolt in her elbows. She wanted to shudder but a barked “Again!” made her instinctively take one step back and then repeat the motion. She struck the dummy over and over, and eventually she found a rhythm, and when she found a rhythm Gato switched from bark “Again!” to barking corrections in her form and posture. If she ever relaxed her form he would bark “Straighten up”, if she slacked off in power he would roar “Harder!”.
As she brought the practice blade down over and over again she imagined they were the bodies of the pirates. Over and over she imagined cutting through them. Eventually Gato didn’t need to tell her to hit harder because every strike she made was with all her strength. Biting tears bloomed at the edge of her vision as she felt the panic and anxiety overwhelm her. She remembered her terror as they ran from the seemingly endless hordes of marauding monsters. She remembered her blind panic as she ran blind through the alleys of Parox. She felt the burbling well of hate and frustration at her sister for sidelining her out of jealousy. Her mother’s pushing and forceful attempts to marry her off. Her father’s callous and flat disinterest in her, his not caring about how hard she worked to earn a place at Torwen’s premier medical school, how hard she worked to become a both a medical and surgical professional, how often she had pushed herself to achieve the highest grade in her class. Instead he only took it all for granted and arranged for her to join her sister’s hospital, not caring that Alwen wanted to work in the central temple of Ashendra, far from her family.
She wondered if he even knew she had left the planet, she hadn’t bothered to tell him or mom, and they never called to check in on her. She would return after a year and half of running with a gang of pirates only to find out they hadn’t noticed her absence, just like her older brother Kalwen.
As she brought the crude and blunt practice blade down on the dummy over and over she realized something. She wasn’t upset about killing, not really. Those pirates were monsters, and she actually enjoyed ending them. She didn’t feel guilty over Wraith and Sean’s death, there was nothing she could have done to save Wraith. And Sean should have kept his head down instead of running into the open shouting her name.
No, she was mad, mad at how weak she was for so long. She never exercised more than what was necessary, only ever to stay thin. She never stood up to the people who pushed her around, not her mom, her sister, or her father. Leaving was the most daring thing she had ever done, and since then she had been hiding behind her stronger marine friends. She never learned self-defense because everyone around always warned her how learning to fight only led to more violence. She had been crippled by the soft words and disapproving stares of her family tutors when she said she wanted to be like her older brohters, she had been made weak and meek so that others could manage and control her better. And it had nearly gotten her killed thrice now.
She ran from the cloying soft cage of home and naively joined a pirate ship in her desperation to get away, and she was lucky the Terrans weren’t the ‘pillage and rape’ kind of pirates. Like Astarte said, they could have been a lot worser. On Parox she had been caught in the middle of mugging and the only thing she could do was run like a coward, now she afraid of getting drunk off ship. And yesterday she had found herself in the center of a battle between two pirate factions, and it was all she could manage to not trip over her feet.
She brought the practice sword down over and over again until it snapped in half and Alwen was left panting. Gato went silent for the first time in a while and put a hand on her back and rubbed up and down.
“Fear is universal” he said after a long while. “A fear of the dark, a fear of the unknown, a fear of being weak, those are shared by every thinking being in the universe, from the smartest Zxx’thi, to the dumbest rat. But the thing about fear is” he croaked the last part, some wave of emotion choking his voice. “The thing about fear, is that you can do something about it. You can light the darkness and push it back, little by little. You can learn and study the unknown, and find what at first seemed so scary was actually beautiful. And you can always push yourself past your limits until weakness is a thing of the past.” His low voice rumbled in chest.
Alwen let go of the broken handle and buried herself into Gato’s chest and heaved great ugly sobs, no longer able to hold it back anymore. “They- they’re gone, and it’s not fair” she cried. She didn’t feel guilty for their death’s, but she still felt awful that they were gone.
“It’s plenty fair Vi,” he said softly “brutally and cruelly fair. That’s life, you just have to make the best of the time you have before its gone.”
He stroked Alwens back, and Alwen didn’t try to hold back her grief anymore. She didn’t feel self-conscious about breaking down in front of another person. She just let it all out, and felt just a little bit better for it.
“Just remember, next time I won’t let your piss poor posture slide. If you’re going to carry Makaze then you’ll have to learn how to properly fight”
She chuckled through the tears.
~~~*~~~
Alice had cried for hours and hours alone in her room, losing Wraith hurt just as much as losing her sister had, maybe worse since she actually had to watch him die. This fresh wound in her heart tore at all the other scars that she had born through the years, her mother, Wendy, and all the other comrades she had lost. They had gotten to a point where they had stopped losing people, they had become so well trained and conditioned that death seemed a distant specter in their harsh line of work. The closest they had gotten within the last two years was when Gato was hurt, and that had made them vulnerable, cocky, arrogant, and life had come to bite them on the ass like it always did.
She choked out tears for hours alone until she eventually ran out of tears, when that happened old instincts took over and she went to find Gato. They hadn’t really consoled each other since Wendy died, not since Alice had screamed and cried at him for not being able to save her sister. Alice hadn’t been too confident in Wendy’s choice to bring in the solitary, scarred pit fighter, he was practically a wild animal when they brought him aboard, barely spoke even knew how to speak. But he shaped up, reformed, and became a pillar of the Sins, second in command to Wendy, and Alice’s first real romantic partner.
But a pirate ambush, much like yesterday’s, claimed her sister, and Gato had been there. He had been there and was too weak to save Wendy, not strong enough to shoulder her weight back to the ship without tiring, not fast enough to bring her in before she bled out, not brave enough to take the bullet for her. Alice saw his camera feed, he hesitated for a single second before trying to jump into harm’s way and save her sister, a second that cost Alice her twin. She had seen it and flew into a rage, she had said very awful things to the broken man, so awful that when she eventually came to her senses she felt so ashamed that she couldn’t properly face him.
That shame turned into a bitter hate that shielded her from really owning up to her actions, because for all the rage and vinegar she could muster towards Gato, she couldn’t escape the fact that she was in the wrong. She was wrong for wishing he had died instead of Wendy, wrong for cursing him for being weak, wrong for accusing him of wanting Wendy to die.
So when Alice prodded toward the gym, where she knew he would be brooding, she had resolved to finally apologize. Bare her heart out for him, and let him do what he willed. But when she snuck through the corridors to find him holding a crying and inconsolable Alwen she couldn’t suppress the hurt and jealously that began to pound in her chest.
Without a word, and without a sound she faded away into the shadows of the ship.