Chapter 8

Jack checked over his shoulder and looked down the hall to make sure no-one was around before tapping the captain’s key over the electronic lock to her quarters, then slipped inside. Lucinia’s quarters were almost three times the size of the standard crew allotment. It came complete with private bathroom, closeted laundry space, separated sleeping quarters and a common area where she did most of her day-to-day administration. Jack kicked his boots off at the entrance pad and set down a bag with a couple of gifts by the door. He then set the key down on her desk before turning towards her bedroom, getting a jump scare when he saw her standing in the doorway in her sleepwear. She was wearing under clothes beneath a loosely worn bathrobe, hair all askew and a large red mark on her cheek.

“Hello beautiful, did you fall asleep waiting for me?” Jack gave her a grin.

“Yes,” She shook her left arm as the feeling began to return. “I was laying on my side with my hand propping my head up, looking over a few things on the data pad. Woke up when you came in.” She gritted her teeth as the pins and needles of her awakening arm went full scale “Ohh, ahh.”

“I’ll wake it up quick.” He moved to smack at her arm.

“Not going to happen.” Lucinia stated as she put her hand on his face, partly covering his mouth, and held her awakening arm back so he couldn’t reach it.

“Mpsstph, iddffing.” He held his hands up and she backed away.

“So, how did everything go so far?” She sat on the end of her bed.

“Watch was watch,” Jack shrugged. “Same old rodeo. Managed to mostly catch up with the crew. Glad to see everyone’s mostly as they were when I left.” He pulled his shirt off and opened it up over a chair at a desk in the corner of her bedroom “Had to borrow a shirt from Pri, thankfully hers fit me well enough.”

Lucinia momentarily looked over his scarred torso, feeling a great deal of pity at his war injuries. He had two large marks across his lower abdomen left by shrapnel. Several marks on his back from a close-range incendiary stood out and a kinetic rifle impact scar sat beneath his right arm where it had struck a rib and fortunately ricocheted away, leaving a long laceration and a broken rib but no vital damage.

She quickly looked away and focused back on the present. “What happened?”

“Laundry incident.” Jack pulled off his utility belt and turned off his radio, setting them on her desk and sat in the chair to work on his socks “A certain deck cadet forgot a few pairs of rather colorful clothes in the wash. My deck whites fell victim to color damage.”

“Oh no.” Lucinia held back a smile. “You lost all your whites?” She bit her lips together to avoid laughing.

“Yeppers.” Jack threw his socks at her, and she recoiled in disgust.

“Wow, have you worn those same pair since you left here?” Lucinia rolled away from the one on the bed and let the other, hanging off her shoulder, fall to the bed. “They reek like rotten meat under the sun.”

“Mostly sweat from five minutes of dialogue with your brother on the bridge.”

“That bad?” Lucinia raised a brow.

“Yes mammers.” He grinned, then shook his head. “Proc-tite still pretty gungho, huh?”

“About?”

“Everything,” Jack leaned back and let out a sigh. “He spammed me with commands about not sitting in the captain’s chair.”

“It has significance, but it is just a chair,” Lucinia sighed. “Did you get along? No citations I need to worry about?” She looked at him expectantly.

“Doesn’t he call them chits?”

“He does. Red chit you got trouble; blue chit you did good.” She regarded him seriously. “You can fill out chits too you know. It lets people know when they are doing well and where they can improve. While it’s not always pleasant to hear when you need to improve, letting them know they did well can go a long way to improving motivation and performance.”

“You know me, not really good with the words on paper. I prefer to talk it out and have no interest in becoming a filefighter.”

“Filefighter?”

“Someone who wants to damage your permanent file with overzealous action. A fuckwit who creates bad paperwork that can block good people from advancing their career.”

“Do you think documenting everything is wrong?”

“No, it’s good when it’s done correctly and for the right reasons and when it’s done well. For instance, the way you do it, fairly and respectfully.”

“I wish we could get through to Proculus about doing things that way.”

“How do you get through to the Blockulus?” Jack laughed.

“You have more names for Proculus than Kaz has vid games.”

Jack laughed once, halfheartedly. “Well, enough about that. I don’t mean to tear him down because he does a lot of good. He’d have anyone’s back on the ship in a heartbeat. He doesn’t sit there and watch you struggle; he’ll get in there with the crew and get dirty. He has a strong authority stance, and he could be a good leader if he would quit trying to lead through intimidation and that sense of commanded respect. True respect is earned and never given to those that demand it.”

“He has always been like that.” Lucinia sat up, on the edge of the bed. “Dad was pretty hard on him growing up. I think he was meant to take over the captain’s chair of this ship. I feel that’s what dad had intended. Proculus just had a hard time focusing on some of the academics. He came in below me in several categories, deliberately, I think. Not entirely sure, but I have my suspicions.”

“He didn’t want to be in command?” Jack frowned at the thought.

“I think he prefers to have the rules and groundwork laid before him with someone else as the ultimate authority.”

“You think it’s because of the way your father raised him?”

Lucina nodded. “I think he was too overbearing in raising Proculus. I had to think more on my feet while Proco was guided and directed literally over the shoulder.”

“His critical thinking is mostly up to speed though.” Jack bit his lower lip a couple of times carelessly, then asked, “You really think he didn’t want it?”

“I really think he didn’t want it.”

“Too bad about him and your dad,” Jack looked at her seriously, “Parenting forcefully can be a slippery slope. I have seen it in friends when you don’t want to do something they want you to do because it’s a ‘part of the family.” He leaned back in the chair. “Really shitty.”

“It can be bad for the other kids too.” Lucinia replied quietly. “It can be really agitating when you get no recognition for trying and succeeding, when someone else is getting the spotlight for not trying and barely making it through but getting all the focus.”

“You don’t need a spotlight to stand out.” Jack gave her a kind smile. “To me, you’d stand out in any room you’re in.”

“That’s kind of sappy.” Lucinia smiled back. “But I like it, even if it is a bit of a cliché...”

“Oh, you thought I meant ‘pretty’?” Jack mocked playfully. “Ha, I meant your bearing, your stance...” He stood up and walked over to her, leaning in to kiss her. “ ... your presence. It’s what us soldier hound-dogs go after you know ... oomph” She lightly bumped him in the gut, not hard but enough to surprise him. “Stars fucking moons, the beatings have resumed.”

“Keeping you in line?”

“Someone’s gotta do it.” Jack gave her cutsie eyes.

“This is getting corny.”

“Probably.” Jack yawned “I’m gonna take a quick shower, haven’t had one since I left Artema.”

“That explains the socks.” Lucinia stood up and removed her bathrobe, revealing most of her unblemished, light brown skin.

Jack studied the faint traces of a large, old scar line that crossed her back above her rear, caused by a vehicle accident in her youth, the same accident that has left her with the large scar on her face. Yearly vitality treatments and gene refreshment had slowly faded what was once a deep scar from a wound that had cut nearly to the disks of her spine. She still had occasional back pain from nerve agitation, but the worst of it had been healed. Her scars were something he often played with in their more intimate moments, hoping their fondness and his caressing actions would make her less conscious about them in a negative light. Jack followed her into the private lavatory and waited for her start up the shower. When the water temperature was right, she turned and gave him a coy smile.

“Well then,” Jack grinned. “Make sure you get my backside good, would ya?”

“You first,” Lucinia tossed a scrubbie at him and he caught it, nodding in approval.

Afterwards, they lay quietly in bed, looking up at the ceiling in her quarters. Over her bed, the ceiling had been painted with luminescent paints that soaked in the light of her lamps and retained that illuminated quality, in a mass variety of colors, in total darkness. The art itself was impressive, being a collage of tropical landscape and various animals from her home world of Septimius Prime. It was set in the foreground, with a backdrop of a massive starfield and the odd spectacle of the ringed, Septimius star.

“Has Kaz ever seen your ceiling?” Jack asked, looking up at the beautiful artwork as he ran his hand softly over her shoulder.

“No, she’s never been inside my quarters.”

“Might be worth showing her and seeing if it’d be something she’d be interested in. I think her birthday is coming up.”

“Might be.” Lucinia looked over the art for a moment and spoke. “Vandeans don’t celebrate birthdays like us, however.”

“Hmm.” Jack frowned momentarily. “That’s true, she has expressed curiosity though. Besides, she always gets me something. I hate leaving her out on her day just because her race doesn’t celebrate it.”

“Talk to her. Ask her if she wants us to celebrate it.” Lucinia offered.

“Alright,” Jack rubbed her shoulder and closed his eyes. “I wonder what kind of things we’ve been missing in all the personal lives of the crew. It’s not our business per se, but it’s nice that if you celebrate something culturally, that others are there to celebrate it with you.”

“We could look into it.” Lucinia noted. “It could do well to help us develop an even closer bond with each other.”

“Wonder if it’d be worth somehow putting out a bulletin requesting anything akin to a birthday or some other similar celebration.”

“That can be done.” Lucinia said “I could post a notice to the crew boards with the request and list some guidelines as to what we can follow. It would have to be something doable on the ship, nothing that could cause damage or harm, given some events I’ve heard of.”

“The hunting traditions of Pri and the Sikar’Sezar?” Jack chuckled.

“Yes, exactly.”

“You know, she might be open to making it a different kind of hunt. Fucked up as it might sound, I thought of that when I was away, sort of. Rather than have a Sikar’Sezar hunt a predator to the death, we could have someone act as the ‘prey’ and she’d have to track them down.”

“You want to turn my ship into a giant ‘hide and seek’ event?” Lucinia joked.

“Yeah.” Jack said earnestly, then laughed and poked her right in the center of her back.

“Maybe, we’ll see.” Lucinia’s reply surprised him.

“You serious?” He looked at her intently.

“Depends on if Pri is open to it, and how you propose it and plan it out. I mean, she does not follow many of her cultural traditions.”

“Hmm.” He pressed his head into his pillow and scratched his chin “Alright then, I’ll dress up in some sort of costume and she can hunt me down.”

“You really need kids, you know.” Lucinia noted.

“Working on that.” He replied and suddenly felt a hand playfully tickle him up his side.

“We would need to be settled for that to work.” Lucinia replied.

“Something else to work on.” Jack leaned over to kiss her, paused for a moment, caught her suddenly suspicious look, and then tried to hit her with a small pillow.

She countered with a strike of her own and huffed. “Monkey man time huh?”

Jack sat up and started beating his fists on the bed. “Gorilla assert dominance.”

Before he could react, she had her arm around his head, trying to get him in a headlock. He kept his chin in and low, making it hard for her to do so.

“Who’s dominant?” She demanded.

Jack started moving into a position where he could get his legs under him, then wrapped his arms around her body. “Me dominant.” He grunted as he tried to lift her.

The bed was making it hard though. Anytime he put too much weight on a foot, he became unbalanced, and started stumbling round.

“Jack!” Lucinia spat as he let go, falling to the bed as he fell awkwardly across it.

His torso was hanging off the bed as he used his hands to keep himself from sliding, but his bare rear was exposed at the edge of the bed. Lucinia recovered and gave each cheek a quick smack before remarking. “Small audience in here for bare bottom showstopping.”

Jack slid to the floor, recovered, and looked at her in a sitting position, giving a huff.

“Clappin my cheeks, huh?”

Lucinia put one hand to her head in shock and spat. “Stars fucking moons...”

“You getting sleepy?” Jack shook Lucinia, who was resting with her head on his chest.