a very special spaceship holiday

[tactician]

Partaaay on the First!

Nowadays, it's mostly humans that celebrate the winter holidays this...festively, but luckily for all of you, the leader of Circle 7, the System's most notorious crime mega-conglomerate, is human. He insisted on the celebration on the First, too, said something about morale and good cheer and a shit ton of (most likely laced) alcohol. Something about holiday pranks, too, but that might've just been my imagination.

There's mistletoe hanging everywhere, the suspicious smell of Astorean Norther Fir in the air, jingling bells tied to every doorway, and is it just me, or does that big Santa have a glass eye?

It's gonna be a grand ol' time.

Comments

[aphelionix]

Bentley had grown worried in the wait, wondering if he should give up, when his communicator dinged again.

To say sorry.

[tactician]

At that, Viana stared at the screen, both brows creeping up her forehead. To be fair, Bentley spent a great deal of his existence apologizing for things so really, she shouldn't have been so surprised.

'for?'

[aphelionix]

"My insensitivity earlier," came the answer, Bentley now standing a couple feet from Viana's gloomy corner. He looked nervous, venturing this close (for good reason), rubbing his neck. "I-It was a, um... mean thing to say on Christmas Eve..."

[tactician]

Sticking her phone and her hands into her pockets, Viana turned her head away, drawing her knees up until the heels of her feet rested on the edge of the bench.

"Yeah?" she said coolly, which never was a good sign because Viana hardly was the cool type, and any hint of such was usually just a precursor to an explosion of some sort.

[aphelionix]

Bentley swallowed, growing even more worried. Was this just the calm before the storm..? "I-it was rude of me and I wasn't thinking, so I... just thought I'd say that I'm sorry. In person."

[tactician]

Viana turned to him and sneered. Despite the fact that she was sitting and her eye level was much lower than the doctor's, it had a very distinct sense of a person staring down another in it.

"Yeah?" she ground out, her body drawing inward, her knees and feet closer, her elbows pressing into her sides like she was a coil, winding up and ready to spring. "But you said it anyway 'cause it was me, huh? Who you don't really like 'cause I lash out sometimes, so it's all right to stay stuff like that?"

[aphelionix]

If anything, wouldn't that make it less all right to say something like that? Bentley didn't say that, though.

"That's not why," he said, sighing. "I wouldn't be here now, would I? If I didn't like you."

[tactician]

Viana narrowed her eyes, looking unconvinced. "Most people here don't like me, doc, and they're still here."

[aphelionix]

That was a little... sad, he thought.

"Well, I... can't say I enjoy the occasional beating," Bentley admitted, looking at the ground. "But I like to think we're friends."

[tactician]

Viana huffed, blowing a strand of bright green hair out of her eyes as she turned away. "You don't really think that."

[aphelionix]

Bentley was silent for a moment, glancing up. It felt a lot like talking to a steel, cold wall, but he still took a seat two chairs down from Viana, deciding to brave it.

"I have days where I wonder if you even like me," he said. "And I wonder if I'm wasting everybody's time, trying to be friendly, because I don't belong here, and I don't know if I truly know anyone I've met, and it's lonely, and..." His brow wrinkled. "A-and I'm rambling, but... in short, somedays, you and Evan make me feel better."

[tactician]

Viana watched him out of the corner of her eye as he spoke, expression torn somewhere halfway between incredulity and forced impassiveness. For a doctor, Bentley was one of the most unobservant people she knew. As the ship's doctor, he already enjoyed an elevated level of esteem among its crew. It was hard not to like the person who kept you alive and patched up all your scrapes and cuts, and Bentley's infamous sympathetic ear and mild-mannered disposition only helped that along.

Who did he think he was kidding?

"Lonely?" she hissed. "How are you possibly lonely? You're surrounded by people and friends all the time."

[aphelionix]

"It's not home, I'm surrounded by people I only know through medical records, and out of the hundreds, I only regularly talk to three of them," he said, even the mild-mannered doctor growing frustrated. Was her view of loneliness really so narrow, built on the idea that being surrounded by people made one happy? How many friends did she think he had? "And now someone is asking me how I'm lonely while constantly rejecting my attempt at being friends."

[tactician]

"I'm not rejecting anything!" she snapped, slapping a fist down on the surface of the bench hard enough to shake it against the ground and wall. Bentley was lucky! If he felt lonely, he had imposed that sort of isolation on himself. He already had everything he could possibly require; he only needed to so much as reach out, and he'd find someone's shoulder there.

"And I saw your home!" she reminded, jabbing a finger in his direction. "We were there, we watched you! And at home, you didn't talk to anybody."

[aphelionix]

Bentley jumped at the slam, staring at Viana. It was difficult, not feeding off anger that was thrown at you so blatantly, and so inaccurately. What could she possibly know by watching him at 'home' for a few days?

A frown slowly formed on his face, his eyes narrowed in confusion.

"That wasn't my home," he said. "I was in hiding there. It wasn't safe for me to talk to anyone."

[tactician]

Her eyes narrowed in confusion.

"That location had been the hub of your known coordinates for the past six months at least. If you had another home, we would have found it."

[aphelionix]

"I'm sure you can thank Gladsheim for the confusion," Bentley said. "They probably tried very hard to keep my previous location secret. I'm fairly sure you all arrived just moments before they would have."

[tactician]

"We did," Viana responded, looking back to the rest of the hall. "They were already en route. Normally we would have taken you somewhere outside, so there's no evidence of a struggle in the home, but we were on a short leash."

[aphelionix]

With their conversation becoming unexpectedly quieter, Bentley felt himself calm. He still remembered the events of that day clearly, despite it having been so long ago already.

"You probably saved me from a lot of trouble," he said, smiling just subtly. "Apart from taking away my medication."

[tactician]

"You were fine without it," she argued, huffing at his response. It seemed as though she was cooling down (Evan had the right idea), but it might have possibly just been the calm before the storm.

Who knew? It wasn't as if people really hung around long enough to find out.

[aphelionix]

"I was dying," he exaggerated purposely, hand to his heart as though wounded, sighing.

[tactician]

She merely raised a brow at that behavior, staring long, considering. It was familiar.

"You hang around with hermano a lot," she said, with a lift in tone near the end that might have suggested a question, if it weren't so obvious that she already knew the fact. "And you are still lonely?"

[aphelionix]

Bentley paused, the hand still on his chest.

"I do," he said, his hand lowering slowly. "There still... things that he doesn't talk about. Your brother's very good at changing subjects when he wants. But I guess I can't talk, I don't discuss some things either."

Evan's friendship was something that had sneaked up on him. He didn't understand it at first, why he continued to hang out with some doctor he kidnapped as part of a job. Before he knew it though, it was routine, and Evan had become someone he called a 'friend'.

"It's times like that, I think, that it's lonely." Bentley rubbed his mechanical wrist nervously, staring across at the opposite wall. "And knowing things will never be like they were before, and that I can't go home."

[tactician]

Viana crossed her arms over her stomach, still curled up into herself. She was well aware of how expertly her brother dodged certain topics of conversation. She had an inkling of things he didn't share, simply because she had been with him so long, but sometimes even Viana wondered too. Did maybe Evan resent the path he had chosen? Sometimes, when no one else was looking, even Evan looked sad.

"You want to leave that badly?" she asked shortly. "You could ask Boss after this deal with Gladsheim is over. People have left the Circle before."

[aphelionix]

Bentley quieted there, still mindlessly running his fingers over the grooves of his metal arm.

"...A-and lived, right?" he asked, looking over suspiciously.