SeaQuest - Coda 30.07.19 Baine & Sunday

“Sunday?” Baine asks, drawing back the curtain that Sunday had erected to form her private, open-air cabin in the prow of the ship. Devoid of all armour and armaments, the tiefling is sitting on the ship’s rails, feet dangling above the waves, and staring out to sea while eLk wheels lazily above her head. Receiving no response, Baine walks up and joins Sunday at the railing, gently knocking his shoulder into hers. Looking out across the horizon, not trying to pressure her but still trying to check in.

“You alright, love?”

Without looking round, Sunday reaches out a hand and rests it on Baine’s shoulder, companionably. “Want me to braid your hair again?” She asks. “I thought I’d done it pretty tight last time.”

Baine is quiet for a moment before speaking softly, almost whispering. “Sunday. Look at me.”
His voice is kind but firm. His hand reaches up to grasp hers, his thumb sweeping back and forth across the back of her hand.

Sunday tears her gaze away from the roiling waves and building storm to face him. Her eyes are a calm golden-green and a half-way serene smile plays about her lips. She returns Baine’s grasp with a small squeeze. Baine smiles back, his eyes searching her face. Seemingly satisfied, he turns back to look at eLk in the air.

“That was a pretty intense dude in that well. What were you two talking about?”

”Ha! Yes, Fiends can be pretty intense at times, I guess. I was trying to find out who his master is. I thought I recognised him - or at least his kind. And I tried to give him a couple of chances to surrender. Didn’t work, though.” Sunday sighs and looks back out at the storm.

“Some people can’t be reasoned with. What would you have done if he did surrender?” Baine seems genuinely curious, turning to look at her again. “Taken him prisoner? Interrogated him? What?”

“Yes. Basically. It’s better than killing. Especially when you know you can kill someone. I know his kind are anathema to life and joy, and everything we’re trying to do and build, but I can’t help but recognise in him what I could have been. What I have been. And he did have a master - or mistress, in this case; he was being driven by something beyond just his own nature.” Her eyes meet Baine’s and she asks, not unkindly, “What do you think we should have done with him?”

He looks clearly taken aback by her question and flounders for a moment.

“What? I- me? What would I have done? I-” He trails off, looking confused and uncomfortable, even. “I don’t- I don’t know.” He huffs out a small panicked breath.
“I would have done what you’d have told me to do. I don’t- I’m not the one who… makes those decisions.” He lets go of her hand to pick at his nails, fidgeting nervously. “I’m not smart enough for that. That’s other people’s job.”

In response, Baine hears a derisive snort behind him as eLk lands on the wooden deck and shakes rainwater off his mossy wings, showering the half-orc.

“Do you really think so poorly of yourself?” Sunday asks. “Do you really believe others think so little of you?”

Blinking against the sudden spray of water, Baine sighs. “I don’t-” he starts, before trailing off again, seemingly working hard to get the correct words out in the right order.

“Sunday, I’m not smart. I know that. And like, there’s different kinds of smart but I’m not great with most of them. I know what I’m good at - things, most types of people, fighting. Drinking. You want something big lifted or something dangerous dealt with, I’m your guy! But when it comes to thinking about the big things and- and- making the important decisions? There’s people who’s better for that.”

He turns back to look at her, his face a little sad but also reassuring and filled with a kind of acceptance. “And that’s okay, Sunday. It really is.”

Sunday raises a cynical, blonde eyebrow at him. “Fair enough, Baine. But you might want to think about what could come back to bite you if you don’t start taking responsibility for your actions.”

She jumps down from the railings and leans back with her elbows resting against the metalwork. ”Have you sailed on a ship before? I’ve never even seen the sea let alone driven a ship! What was that thing we fought last night - that thing that came out of the sea?”

Baine looks relieved at the change of topic and heartily throws himself at the new one.
“I have, yeah. Couple of times. I fought ghosts on one and went to Za’Suul on another. Good times.” He leans over to her and stage whispers, “And it’s called sailing, not driving.” and throws her a wink. “And do you mean the thing last night that I killed very majestically and expertly?”

“No,” Sunday cuts in with a wry smile, “the thing that had you in its clutches and was on the point of devouring you before I severed its limb.”

Baine looks mock-offended at that, clutching at his chest. “You wound me, Sunday. Almost as much as that tentacly thing did.” He puts on an air of importance and heroism, looks out over the horizon and nods to himself. “That foul beast is slain, by mine own hand.” He makes it almost through the whole sentence before cracking himself up. He grins at Sunday and shrugs.

“Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck it was.”

“Well, whatever is was, you were stupidly brave to jump off the ship into the water with it.”

Baine tries to hide how pleased he is by that.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she continues, ”I’ve heard about Krakens and that’s the only creature I know of that comes close. But this was way too small to be one of those from what I’ve been told. That Minotaur we picked up - did we find out how she ended up alone in the ocean? Did she get attacked by it too?”

“Oh, Strong Zephyr? She was on a Grey Zephyr armada ship that got wrecked. That’s why she was asking about allegiances and shit, they’d trained her to do that. Dunno what happened to her ship though.” He shrugs. “She’s in with the cook still if you wanna go have a chat with her?”

“Nah, I don’t know anything about Grey Zephyr; don’t want to get involved in a new mess unless it comes to Kantas’ shore. Do you know anything about it? Do we need to worry about it?” Sunday asks, looking over at Baine with a curious look on her face.

Baine snorts. “I know fuck all, love. But if Kantas’ shores need protecting I’ll be first in the fray.” He turns to look up at eLk towering over his shoulder and holds up a hand, questioning.

eLk peers down at the half-orc’s hand before taking a pace back and cocking his head to stare hard into Baine’s eyes for a long moment. Baine slowly lowers his hand back down. After a few seconds, eLk whinnies contemptuously, shakes out his mossy wings, and takes off into the storm-lashed sky.

“Okay. Yup. No scritching. Got it. Bye.” Baine looks at Sunday. “Guess he’s not into that?”

“He’s not into you saying over and over again that you know fuck all and can’t think for youself. He said he’s bored of your self-pity. The only reason he didn’t kick you overboard just then is because Frankie loves you, and eLk likes Frankie. He and I think a lot alike.”

Baine stares at her deadpan for a moment before relenting under the weight of her gaze. “Bloody hell, Sunday. Go easy on a fella.”

Sunday spreads her arms and looks innocently up at her friend. “I’m just repeating what he said to me.”

Baine sits down on the deck, knees drawn up to his chest, arms resting on top of them. He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes downcast.

“It’s not that I don’t want to take responsibility or anything.” He says it slowly, haltingly, letting the words out as he makes sense of the thoughts in his head. “It’s just that… Okay, so when I was younger yeah? I would make so many bad decisions, all the bloody time, and my dad would be all disappointed in me. And then I started letting Thea do the thinking and I would do the doing and things got… better. ”

His voice gets smaller and smaller the longer he speaks. He hunches in on himself like he’s trying to make his giant frame smaller as well.

“The one time I did something without asking her first, I had to leave home ‘cause I cocked it up so badly. And now I’m in Kantas and she’s still back in Aschenwald and I’m just- I keep fucking up, Sunday.” Baine looks up at her and his eyes are suspiciously wet.

“I’m worried that one day I’m going to do something really bad that I won’t be able to fix. And I don’t wanna run anymore. So. I’d rather let someone else do the thinking.”

Sunday walks over to sit down beside Baine. She leans back and rests her head against the ship’s rail and says nothing. After a few minutes, it’s clear that Baine isn’t going to say anything further. Sunday slips her hand into one of his and asks calmly: “Who’s Thea?”

Baine grips her hand tightly and doesn’t let go.

“Thea is my best friend in the whole wide world,” he answers, looking ahead. “Ever since we was kids.” There’s a smile in his voice, even through the obvious tears. “She was always the brains of the operation. She could make it all make sense when I couldn’t.”

“She sounds lovely. I wish I’d had a Thea growing up. At least I had Kyleria here.” With the hand that isn’t holding Baine’s, Sunday reaches into her robe and brings out a small horse figurine carved from black basalt. “We left home together after I did a bad thing. What did you do that you thought meant you had to leave?”

Baine gives a shuddering sigh, shaking his head. He squeezes Sunday’s hand a little bit tighter and whispers, almost too quietly to be heard over the wind and the sea.

“I killed someone. I didn’t mean to but I did.”

Sunday puts the figurine in Baine’s lap and closes his other hand over it. She reaches up with her free hand and gently pulls his head down onto her shoulder. Her tail wraps around both of them; the budding flower of its tip resting on the deck before them.

“How did it happen?” Sunday asks.

It takes Baine a moment and a few sobbing breaths before he can reply.

“We were starving. The whole village. Couple of lean years and we had to borrow from this estate a couple of miles away. There was this man sent to collect the interest. Mr Maier. Except he was a right old prick. Kept driving up the interest we owed so he could line his own pockets. We were starving, Sunday. People died. They tried to reason with him, tried everything. He just laughed at us and threatened us with making it worse, whatever that would have meant.”

He seems to have run out of tears at this point, speaking quietly into Sunday’s neck.

“So I did what the one thing I’ve always been good at. I waited until he was proper drunk and then I took him out to the back fields and I beat him senseless. That’s all I meant to do, I swear, but I couldn’t even do that right. They found him at dawn, dead. Facedown in the mud.”

Sunday starts to slowly stroke Baine’s cheek. “And Thea? Did you speak to her before you left?”

Baine lets out a humourless huff of a laugh. “She’s the one who told me to leave. ‘They’ll come for you and I’m worried you’ll get hurt.’ she said. Told me to write her. Told me to go, to find my mum. To settle down somewhere. Always the smart one, she was.”

He sniffs. “So you see,” he concludes quietly, “I’m not sure I should be making the decisions.”

Sunday sighs. “Well, I can’t do anything for the guilt you feel over killing Maier. No-one can. That’s yours to carry. But deciding to protect others is a decision that always needs making. I guess we have to learn how to do that in the right ways.”

On Sunday’s shoulder, Baine pouts a little. “Yeah well, it’s fucking hard, innit.”

Sunday laughs loudly. “It truly is, my friend. Never a truer word spoken. But that makes the struggle to preserve life and light and joy even more important.”

Baine picks up the figurine from his lap and holds it up for the two of them to look at. “Kyleria looks like a good friend.”

Sunday smiles a crooked half-smile. “She can be. She wasn’t always so good. But she’s always been there for me; and whatever she does, she does to protect me. I realise that now. That,” she points to the carving, “is a reminder to me to keep faith in myself and who I am. You can hold onto it for a while if you like?”

Baine lets out a laugh again, this one with slightly more sincerity. “Yeah, I’m still trying to figure that part out.” He hands the figurine back to Sunday. “How about she reminds you, and you remind me?”

“Deal! But only if you promise to not be so solemn all the time. You’re spending too much time with Varis.” Baine lifts his head from her shoulder, throws it back and laughs loudly this time, his usual booming, full-belly laughter. An echoing, disembodied call sounds from the night air above them as eLk joins in.

“Much better” Sunday smiles. “Yeah, bad shit happens to us, but so does good shit; and I need your help in spreading more joy and light in Kantas. I’m not saying leave the Order - you’ll learn a lot from them and it’s a good place for you skill - but bring a bit more happiness into their ranks.”

“You’re not wrong there. Gods, but they can be a grumpy lot sometimes.” He rolls his eyes with a fond smile. “I think I’m rubbing off on them though. Saw Varis smile just the other day.”

He looks at her quietly for a moment before leaning over and kissing the top of her head.
“Thank you,” he whispers into her hair, “you’re a good friend.”

From Baine’s other side, there’s the sound of hooves touching down on wooden decking, as eLk lands and walks forward to lay down beside them - his soft wings unfolding to embrace them both and his head resting on Baine’s shoulder.

“eLk says you’re a good friend, too. He and I think a lot alike...” Sunday trails off as she closes her eyes and leans back against the ship’s rail with the figurine still clasped in her hand. Before too long, the sound of rasping snores drift across the ship.

Baine looks at her fondly before turning to eLk. “She’s a good egg. I’m glad she has you to take care of her.” He hesitates for a moment before holding his hand out to eLk again, eyebrows raised. “Everyone loves scritches, mate. Come here...”