“That soup again? Some captain you are. Is there really nothing to eat on this ship?”
Luca said it sulkily, looking at the tray the captain had carried in. He lifted the spoon and swallowed some of the thin liquid in the bowl, but there was no culinary pleasure to be found in the taste.
Compared to the days when he refused food, threw it up every time, and lived with nothing but an IV in his arm, picking up a spoon on his own was encouraging. So the captain sat beside him, peeling with a small knife an apple he’d brought along with the tray, and answered.
“Obel tells me your stomach is more delicate than a kitten’s.”
“That’s... because I wasn’t eating properly. It’s been a while since I started, so give me what everyone else eats now.”
“Hm, shall I bring you the combat rations the other crew eat? It’ll feel like grains of sand rolling around your mouth.”
“I don’t want that... is there nothing besides combat rations?”
“You want whole food? Like this apple?”
Instead of answering, Luca glared at the apple in the captain’s hand. How did anyone grow an apple tree out here in space? Was it maybe a fake fruit cultured from combined genes?
His curiosity grew by the day, but he knew that showing that much interest would set those golden eyes sparkling with delight, so he couldn’t just ask. In the end, though, his pride bowed its head a little before the urge to eat.
“I’d rather have that. This has no taste at all.”
“Complaining like that, you must be feeling better. All right, try a piece.”
The captain brought a peeled slice to Luca’s lips. Pretending to give in, Luca bit down with an audible crunch. Fresh juice wet his mouth, and his eyes went round.
“It’s a real apple?”
“What else would it be, a fake?”
“We didn’t handle gene-cultured plants on my planet.”
“It’s off a real apple tree, so don’t worry.”
“How do you grow a tree on a ship?”
“If you’re curious, you can go out and ask the botanist later. There’s someone named Ceres.”
“...Every single time, it’s go ask them yourself later.”
Watching those lips grumble all through the chewing, the captain swallowed a soundless laugh. A little afterward, once the meal was over, he looked down at Luca with a more serious gaze than usual.
“Luca, the weather’s very good today.”
“...Since when does space have weather?”
“True enough, but the Eternos engine is resonating very quietly right now. If you’re up for it, I’d like to take you to a window for a while. Will you allow it?”
Luca faltered. There was a window near the bed, palm-sized. But what the captain meant seemed to be some enormous observation window out beyond the treatment room.
Leaving the bed meant entrusting his incomplete body entirely to someone else. For Luca that was one of the enormous fears he hadn’t yet overcome.
If anyone else had made the offer, Luca would have glared savagely and spat don’t talk nonsense at them. But it was the captain. The man who always looked at him with warm golden eyes and spoke to him kindly.
Say he hated the hospital gown, and clothes that fit arrived. The man came without fail at mealtimes to talk and spend the hour with him. Didn’t he pay careful attention to what Luca liked and what made him uncomfortable?
So Luca knew there was no lie in the golden eyes fixed on him. Only after admitting the man had no intention of deceiving or harming him did he give the smallest of nods.
“I should probably start practicing with a wheelchair anyway...”
“No need for that sort of practice. I’ll carry you there myself, even now.”
At a method he’d never once considered, Luca’s pale blue eyes shook.
“You’ll carry me...? What nonsense is that?”
“Borrowing a wheelchair means reporting it to Obel. Then Kai will say that since you’re out anyway, let’s re-measure you for the prosthetics. And Ivelinsia will have her say too.”
Imagining that much attention and that many eyes on him at once, Luca’s face flared hot.
“No...”
“You don’t want that, right? So let’s slip out quietly, just the two of us. I’ll carry you.”
“...”
Luca looked to be weighing it for a while. He could end the matter by simply saying he wouldn’t leave the treatment room. But he wanted to see space from somewhere with a wide-open view. More than anything, he wanted out of this bleak place, even briefly.
His lips worked, and then he glared fiercely at the captain and warned him,
“...Drop me and I’ll kill you.”
It was a rather violent way of accepting the offer. Even that pleased the captain enough to draw a small smile out of him.
“Now that’s frightening. I’ll escort you with my life on the line.”
He carefully slid his arms behind Luca’s back and beneath his thighs. He’d put on a little flesh since the days he wept to be killed, but the body was still light enough to fit neatly against his chest. So Luca wouldn’t feel ashamed, he lifted him very slowly.
“Nn...”
The sudden sensation of floating startled him on instinct. With his old, whole body this would have been about the same eye level as standing. But now, the simple fact that no feet touched the floor was terrifying.
Luca clamped his left arm tight around the captain’s neck. He felt broad shoulders and a steady heartbeat. The man’s chest was far firmer and warmer than he’d expected.
“Here we go.”
As the captain started walking, the treatment room’s automatic door opened. Beyond it stretched a corridor Luca was seeing for the first time.
A space sheathed in silver-grey metal, like the treatment room. The atmosphere was no different from inside, but the sheer length of the corridor gave an overwhelming sense of scale all on its own.
“It’s huge...”
“Hm, the medical section is actually the coziest part of the ship.”
“...This is the small one?”
“Mm. There are much wider spaces. Let’s tour them one by one later.”
Maybe because there were no wounded aboard, the treatment rooms lining the corridor stood empty and quiet. Only the captain’s footsteps echoed as he carried Luca along.
Luca dropped his head into the crook of the captain’s neck and shoulder, his face troubled.
I shouldn’t keep opening up to this man...
He’d brought Luca aboard for a reason, after all. Of course he’d be used for whatever that purpose was. To keep from feeling needlessly hurt and slighted when the time came, he ought to keep his distance. That wasn’t easy.
...It’s because his eyes are like the sun.
A man who seemed to own the warm sunlight he used to look up at back home. That was why he liked the yellow roses that resembled him, too. He couldn’t deny that this cozy tenderness and vitality was the only thing holding him up.
...Ugh, I hate this. I feel like I’m being led around by him.
He squeezed his eyes shut. He mustn’t depend on the man too much. It was a moment in which he failed to notice how contradictory it was to think that while hanging from the captain’s neck.
“We’re here, Luca.”
The captain said it as he stepped up to the largest observation window in the medical section. He sat down by it and settled Luca, carried so preciously, onto his lap.
“There. Look. This is the road the Nautilus you’re riding travels.”
The view swept his tangled head clean in an instant, and Luca couldn’t help but marvel.
“Whoa...”
Outside, the nebula’s red gas rolled like enormous silk. Threaded through it, the blue particles streaming from the ship’s engines were embroidered across the dark like meteors. It looked like a blue whale swimming through a red sea.
“The Aegis ships can’t see that light. It’s a privilege only the people aboard this ship enjoy.”
For the first time, the fact that he’d survived didn’t feel horrifying. If the universe was this vast and this beautiful, then drifting through it as a very small fragment might not be so bad. The thought passed through him, very briefly.
I think there might be a god.
He thought of a being he’d never once believed in. In a universe this wide, wouldn’t there be at least one such omnipotent thing? With so many life forms living side by side that defied explanation, how could there be no god?
Only, to have your voice reach that god, you’d have to pray far more fiercely.
Maybe it was only natural that his own prayer hadn’t reached, danced as it was with disbelief in his heart. Somewhere in this vast universe there had to be someone calling out to god in a voice far more desperate than his.
“It’s pretty... a lot prettier than the sky on my planet.”
At that low murmur, the arms holding him tightened.
“I’ll show you much more from now on.”
“There’s more than this?”
“Plenty. The universe is infinite, full of things neither you nor I know. When you walk again, you won’t be at this window. You’ll stand at the highest point of the bridge and look at the end of the universe. Because I’m going to make that happen.”
Rather than react to that, Luca just fiddled with a button on the captain’s uniform. The truth was, he still had plenty he wanted to ask.
What do you know about me? And why me, of all people, to save and bring here?
Even if he asked, the answer would probably be the same.
I can’t tell you now. When you’re healthy, I’ll tell you.
After going through that exchange several times over, he’d come to understand that the man treated Luca’s survival like a first principle. Why someone with a ship this magnificent would treasure someone as unremarkable as him was still a mystery.
