Random No Rest tat fic + poem using the last line of Rhapsody on a Windy Night

[annwfyn]

Six o'clock.

And a current in the Void shifts

The savage tides are rolling in,

Fat with discarded memory

Bleeding in through bolts and rivets

Dissolving all clarity,

Devouring divisions and precisions,

And in the hungry eddies

Dreams twist and spin like flotsam

Then in the spaces of the dark

The past grips the present

As a drowning man grips the living.


Octavia Viria Lupus woke with a rush of adrenaline. For a moment she did not know where she was – did not know who she was. Her nostrils were filled with blood and salt and her body felt as if it was not her own. The sheets wrapped around her body felt like chains and the warmth of the man in bed beside her burned too hot for comfort. Something inside her, something from the dream, craved the cold of the void.

Quick…aimless…she twisted and turned and made a strangled noise. Enough to wake the other, a little. He slung an arm over her to pull her closer.

“Is OK,” he muttered drowsily. “Just a dream. Nothing to fight. Just a dream.”

For another second – one – two seconds – Octavia still felt that screaming sick rage and terror and then it passed. The blood-salt-death scent left her nostrils and the bedsheets were just sheets again. Still, the memory lingered.

The old void winds throw up many things

A horde of twisted men;

A warrior upon the bridge

Eaten smooth in battle

Swallowed and spat back out

The declaration of his living time,

Carved in bone.

A broken promise on a fresh forked tongue,

Barnacles clinging to the forgotten form.

Hard hewn and then chaos snapped.


“Fuck you, Septimus,” Octavia whispered, and pulled her companion’s arms tightly around her, breathing in the warmth of the living. Here – now – she was alive. The ghost pirate was nothing but a dream. The moment in the vision – the reoccurring dream – the fucking infuriating truth of her family, her bloodline, her chaos tainted brother – that could all be banished.

She had this moment, where the only thing that was real was the faint taste of sweat and gin on her tongue, and the cold of the Black was far away. For a little while, it felt as if Octavia could drift back asleep, but still, the dream lingered and after a while it seemed to crawl back across back of her neck, like a stranger’s breath.

The ghost pirate….the vision…the man on the ship’s bridge with the gun in his hand…

“We are…” a voice whispered “only such stuff as we were made of. And neither you nor I were ever made for more than this,”

Septimus Virius Lupus. He had been her other self once. The two of them sharp and ambitious and too restless for a world of marble walls and cultivated cherry blossom.


Half-past six,

The kronosphere turns,

The kronosphere burns,

A dead lamp man says, ‘Remember the oath

That you made when you crossed the line and turned traitor too’

Memory opens like a grin.

‘Thieves on a bridge together

Hands stained with engine oil,

And you made a pact as sharp

As a pilot’s ambition.'

“I am,” Octavia whispered to herself, “no better and no worse than Septimus,” and she sighed because she sometimes wished she was. But now, with the adrenaline rush fading, she felt no great pain at this thought and that meant it was almost certainly true.

She would not have been willing to die for a heroic cause either. And she would not have kept any oath in order to support the honour of a fool.

Seven o’clock.

And the Lander is waiting.

The lines re-assert themselves

Cut with your own razor

A bloody certainty in the fluorescent hall light.

Home hangs in the endless Black

And all the ghosts quiescent.

Mount.

The endless steel stairs to the captain’s cabin.

Scrub away the sweat and sleep – self certain.

The last twist of the knife.