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“Mind if I join you up here?”
“Not at all. It’s quite nice.” A little more space is made, the broom stashed aside. “What’s going on with the others?”
"Vax fell in the ocean.”
Percy taps his earring. “So I heard. Do we know why?”
“Some kind of weird game he’s playing with Grog, I think. No idea.”
“Ah.”
~
“...It is nice up here.”
“Mh-hm.”
~
Vex is still a little bit nauseous, even up on the high mast. There are only a handful of clouds in the sky, dusty and serene, and she tells herself it’s better if she can’t see the waterline at all. She lets her head fall back until it thumps, gently, against the wooden outer rim of the crow’s nest, and then slips sideways to where Percy’s shoulder provides a welcoming rest.
“You really don’t get seasick at all?” she wants to know. Percy is sitting with his knees drawn up and wedged shin-first against the mast poking up in the middle; making the best out of what little space the crow’s nest provides for an occupation of two. Occasionally he adds a line or a little scribble onto his sketchpad; the motion travels up his arm and shoulder and from there translates into the tiniest, irregular rucks and bumps against the side of Vex’s face, like some strange morse code, perceivable only by her.
“No,” says Percy, chipper as anything. "I love boats, boats are great.”
"I've noticed," Vex says drily, but doesn’t say any more, because thinking about Percy's well-documented obsession with at least the skyship variety of naval undertakings reminds her immediately also of Scanlan, and right at the moment that's nothing she wants to deal with. "So you've never spent an undignified morning hanging over the railing to feed the fishes, huh? Figures."
"Well," concedes Percy, "Not for a long time, no. The first week I ever spent on a boat was a different story, I should say, but then again, I wasn't..." His meticulous sketch is paused, the pencil lifted up just in time so that the slight tremor that runs through his fingers won’t mar the page. "...I wasn't in the best state. Overall."
His voice stays perfectly even, but there is a darker undertone, lurking like the sea monster Vex keeps expecting to jump them at any moment. Only: this particular monster she has caught glimpses of before; she knows its shape and outline, though not the shade of every horror that calcified its scales. She sees it rear its head just far enough to remind them of its everpresence beneath the surface, but subside again with Percy's next, perfectly even breath.
"You're holding up well, though," he says with a smile to her, small and crookedly sideways, but nothing like a smirk even for all that it should look like one. Percy finds his roundabout ways to gentleness.
"Hngh," says Vex, staring back up at the clouds as the ship gives a bit of a lurch, followed closely by her stomach deciding to do the same, and then settles again. "Don’t jinx it. We better talk about something else."
"All right.” Percy sets pencil to paper again. "What do you want to talk about?"
Vex points with her chin. "What's that you're drawing?"
"Oh," he waves the pencil-hand vaguely. "Just sketching ideas. Nothing really concrete, although I might want to talk to Tary about some of it later. He’s got some really excellent thoughts about connecting arcane-fuelled objects with good old-fashioned mechanics that I really hadn’t considered before.”
“Uh-huh.” Vex grins. “You’re really hitting it off with the new guy, aren’t you?”
Percy finds himself grinning back. “He’s good,” he says simply. “I didn’t want to believe it at first, but he really built that automaton himself and that’s - quite remarkable. And as fond as I am of all of you, it’s not as if I can talk physics or specialized metalwork with Grog over breakfast.”
“Now, don’t sell us short, darling.” Vex nudges him in the side, careful to avoid the arm holding the pencil. “I can totally tell you all about what a lever is. If it comes down to it, maybe even a pulley.”
Percy laughs and pauses his sketching again, this time to turn his head to the side and kiss the crown of her head. “I'd never doubt it for a moment.”
~
“...and I just honestly think waves are so overrated.”
“You know you can always get back on the broom to get rid of the nausea.”
“I know,” she says, and doesn't move an inch.
~
“Is that Grog yelling?”
Vex peers over the side, straight down to the foot of the mast where Grog is waving a piece of paper around. “Yep. I think my brother gave him something? But he seems happy about it.”
“Oh good. So nobody is being murdered.”
“Not yet.” She sits back down, leans back against him and crosses her hands over her stomach, face turned to catch the sunlight, which is just warm enough and just bright enough to make her feel almost decadent for getting to doze about in it. “Man, this is the laziest day we’ve ever had.”
“Don’t jinx it, dear.”
~
“Can I?” asks Vex, holding out her hand when Percy eventually drops the pencil in his lap and flexes his fingers. “You can keep watch for a while.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” quips Percy, so Vex demonstratively pushes herself up high enough so that she can see the completely empty horizon line and casts a glance around.
“Of course.”
“Well, all right,” Percy says, and surprisingly gamely drops his sketchpad and pencil into Vex’s lap, pulling himself up and around so that he can kneel up, cross his arms over the low railing and rest his chin on it.
Vex, a little nonplussed, just studies the sketchpad for a moment, almost hesitant to pick it up - the finely detailed, yet somehow messy sketches Percy has filled several pages with, connected by annotations and thin arrow lines, and scribbles she can’t even read, let alone make heads or tails of. With an upwards glance at his profile - a strangely endearing mix of dashingly windswept hair and nerdily sea-and-salt-speckled glasses, his attention out on the water - she picks up the pencil and picks a blank corner, and pokes her tongue between her teeth.
“I don’t know if I dare ask what you’re drawing,” remarks Percy after a short while of wind and creaking ropes and pencil scratches, but he sounds like he’s having some weird kind of fun with this and isn’t turning to look.
“I’m just completely messing up all of your sketches,” says Vex very seriously.
Even that doesn’t make Percy turn. Vex feels a little heady with that power as she carefully rounds out one ear, then the other.
When he finally lowers down next to her again and takes a look at the sketch pad, Percy starts to laugh. “Of course it’s a bear!”
“I hope you didn’t need that corner for anything.” The bear turned out a little bit larger than she’d planned. Also a little bit wonky. It’s not like Vex ever spent a lot of time practicing her drawing skills, and also this ship is moving. She points. “He’s even got some bear armor on, look.”
“I see it. It’s magnificent. I might have needed that corner though.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No, no, I think it’s much improved with a bear in it, actually. It sort of rounds it off in a nice way.”
Vex grins. “Careful, or I’ll have to come decorate every one of your sketches with a complimentary bear from now on.”
Percy just hums. “I wouldn’t actually mind.”
~
“Percy?”
“Mh?”
“Does that fog bank look kind of strange to you?”
“...Ah, shit.”