Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s been years since Marya has been aboard an airborne vessel. Years since she captained a crew. Years since she still felt light as a feather with a heart full of lust for exploration.

Years since she’d seen her.

Vanellope Chapman.

And oh, was it a sight to behold. Though older, Van’s back was as stiff and straight as ever, her legs sturdy and her face welcoming but hardened. Her hair, once a flaxen blonde, now a silver shimmering like woven stars, healthy and cared for, is pulled back into a simple knot on the back of her head. Her appearance is casual, but clearly she has been healthy during this time they spent apart. Not like Marya.

Marya, who had fallen ill with the disease of guilt. Marya, who has spent the last several years wasting away. Marya, whose frame is gaunt and fragile, whose eyes sink into hollow sockets and whose fingers tremble on the wheel of the Zephyr. No, Van was always stronger than her. And had the luxury of good fortune that was not likewise afforded to Marya herself.

Van hasn’t spotted them yet, still tending to the bar and chatting with her patrons, her boisterous voice carrying through the pub with ease. She’s beloved , Marya realizes, perhaps a beat later than she should have. But of course she’s beloved, after all Marya had experienced that rapturous adoration for the woman herself. Oh Van, she thinks, ever the charmer.

As if she heard those very words, Van cheerily whirled around, locking eyes with Marya. And, Lord above, Marya nearly crumpled on the spot. Her eyes, clear and blue and striking, stare right into Marya’s own muddy irises, and it’s like no time has passed at all. It’s like they’re all twenty years younger and bouncing with energy on the deck of the Zephyr. Van has a way of communicating with words that Marya never mastered, so she’d learned to speak with her eyes. And Van had always understood. Today is no different. Before Marya can even say a word, she’s swept into the air by Van’s strong arms—one flesh and one metal, Marya will have to take a look at that later—in a hug that would have crushed her fragile bones, had Van not held her as gently as a newly-hatched robin.

“I missed you,” Marya hears Van whisper. She doesn’t have the words to say it back, but Van hears it all the same. She always does. So when Olethra and Maxwell stumble over their plea for Van to join the crew, and Van chooses to look once more into Marya’s eyes, she agrees. Her blue pools wash away the chittering sounds in the back of Marya’s head, and for the first time since her ship went down, she breathes deeply and truly, and feels the muscles in her thin shoulders relax.

Van notices. Which means she notices how they tense again when Marya hears the voice of Van’s husband, Bert. Bert, who loves to cook and sing and dote on Van. Bert, who was just about the only thing Van loves as much as she loves the sky. Bert, who is the one whose presence made Van decide to tie down and take care of the Rusty Nut. The same decision that left Marya hollow for weeks. Without Van, she had no voice to shout, nor scream, nor cry nor speak. It wasn’t long after that when she opened her toy shop in Scrapsylvania. But she smiles and she laughs and she talks to Bert about his chipotle aioki and it is her, in the end, that invites him aboard the ship. He was happy to let Van leave to pursue adventure. But she couldn’t bear the torn look on Van’s face for even a moment longer.

So when they leave the Uplands, they have two more crew members. A boatswain, and a chef.

Van, and her husband. A wedding Marya did not attend. She never told Van why, and Van seemed to understand, at least on the surface level. What she didn’t say was that Marya herself didn’t know why she had been absent from the reception.

But that was years ago now, and what’s most important is the smell of the sea air and the sound of the deck creaking below her feet. Van’s silver hair gleams like cut crystal in the sunlight, and Marya can’t help but stare as she scolds the subpar deckhands for their shoddy workmanship. When she’s finished, Van turns around with a satisfied grin on her face and catches Marya’s eye, and oh, she is beautiful, and Marya’s heart is so fraught.

Fraught with pain and misery and loneliness and vengeful urges. With jealousy and envy and fear and loathing. With excitement and reverence and apprehension. With a great, blooming love in her shallow ribcage for her very old friends who she shares lifetimes of memories with. For a woman with sparkling silver hair and eyes like tide pools on a clear day.

Marya Junková is so, so fucked.

—

Monty is easy to convince now that they’ve got Van on board and soon enough, their sails are full with wind as they tear through the clouds around them. The deck is bustling with activity—Van seems to have done a number on the crew—and Marya hates that she feels lighter than she ever has before. They sail onward and upward, towards the sun in the sky before them. She doesn’t want to let go of the wheel. Daisuke asks her once to get some sleep, but relents when she refuses. She hasn’t slept well in a very long time, anyway. Maxwell is busy arguing with Monty about author integrity, and though she can see Olethra looking at her from below, the young Macleod never dares to speak to her. Perhaps she is too starstruck , Marya wonders fleetingly, but then a snort rips out of her and the thought is shoved aside. “Beautiful,” my ass.

Through the night her fists remain clenched on the wheel, the old wood digging into her tender flesh. She does not feel it, choosing instead to tuck the pain away into a neat box next to all the others she has cluttering up her head. It all used to be so simple. Before the Gotch boy’s grandfather died, before Comfrey disappeared, before Van got married, before Marya’s crew died at her responsibility. Before it all, when her tactical corset served to protect instead of keep her together, when her bullets didn’t have named carved in them, when her dreams weren’t haunted by—

“Marya? What’re you doing, eh?”

Van’s voice shoots through her like lightning through the scrap rods she tinkers with, snapping her quickly and violently out of her thoughts. The boat jostles slightly as her body flinches, and she sees Van take a step back, her hands in the air. No, she wants to plead. Don’t go farther away. Not again . But her voice stays silent, like it always has when she needs it most, and she bites down instead on the inside of her cheek, using the stinging taste of iron to calm her heartbeat. She studiously fixes her eyes on the horizon, not willing to let her eyes reveal what her heart is telling her as it pulses in her chest. Don’t slip up again. We can’t afford to lose any more time. For all we know, Olethra could already be—

“Your thoughts’r so loud you might as well be yellin’ ‘em, Junker.” Van does it again. Softer this time, like approaching a spooked animal. Marya realizes she must look so ragged, compared to last time Van saw her. The concern in the gray-haired woman’s voice is apparent, and her slow approach says even more. “Wanna let me know what’s goin’ on up in there?”

Marya shakes her head, her tongue heavy as lead and her throat choked by disuse.

Van hums. “Alright, then. Suit yourself.” She moves to leave, and Marya can’t stop herself from jerking her head in Van’s direction, halting the latter in her tracks. Please, she begs silently, stay with me .

And so Van sits on the deck beside her as she steers, watching as the watercolor rays of the sun break the horizon. “Missed this view, huh?” She murmurs, and Marya nods as her heart aches with longing. “You sleep yet?” Van asks her, and Marya’s stillness must be enough of a response in itself, because Van snorts and shakes her head. “Always were stubborn. Captain Junker, last to rest and first to rise,” she teases.

Marya does not smile, and Van relents.

“Yeah,” Van scratches her head and yawns. “Just woke up, meself. You…” she trails off, and Marya can feel her eyes boring through the back of her head. “You should really rest, Marya.”

Marya inhales sharply at the use of her first name. Van usually only calls her ‘Captain’ or ‘Junková’ or ‘Junker,’ relegating her real name for important purposes

Is this really that important?

She gets her answer when she feels Van’s calloused hand on her shoulder. “Please, Marya. You’re no use to anyone asleep on your feet.” She opens her mouth to protest, but the words die on her tongue when Van pries her fingers from the wheel.

Those hands. Her hands. Our fingers, twined, laying across tousled sheets and thin blankets. A two-fingered salute before she disembarks for a supply run. Slapping the table as she shouts playfully at Daisuke during a heated game of poker. Rope wrapping around her fingers and forearms as she pulls the sails with ease.

She remembers those hands like she remembers her own name, has memorized their calluses and their scars, remembers the way that the tendons and muscles would flex when she would work out, can feel the way her rough skin still felt so soft through Marya’s thin gloves, and, eventually, what it felt like without the gloves entirely. Even when the warm brass prosthetic replaced Van’s left arm, the pulse of the steam and cogs within it felt like the beat of Van’s heart.

In her stupor, Van fully relinquishes her grip on the wheel and Marya finds herself stumbling, falling backward without her support from the ship’s sturdy build. Her legs buckle like a worn out horse saddle, and she plummets like a bird shot from the sky. It’s terrifying; it’s exhilarating.

“Whoa!” Van startles, and Marya feels her hook her arms underneath Marya’s armpits, hoisting her up. “Looks like you really need that sleep, love.”

The nickname slaps her across the face like an angry widow.

“‘M fine,” she mumbles, and gathers what strength she has to push herself off of Van. She forces herself to stand, muscle weariness be damned, and walks away, her back to the other woman.

She can’t be trusted around Van right now. She’s angry, and she’s exhausted, and god , she just wants to get lost in the feeling of Van’s body against hers. But she can’t, and, more importantly, she won’t. She has a mission. And she cannot be distracted. She can faintly hear Van calling after her, but the noise dies

Marya passes out in a cabin below deck, blissfully unaware of the swirling emotion on Van’s face at Marya’s receding back, letting the warmth and comfort of the bed fall over her and wrap under and around her, swaddling her in the ignorance of sleep.

In her dreams, she is flying through the sky once again. Only, she is aboard not the deck of the Zephyr, but the Kingfisher once again, her crew surrounding her like a well-oiled machine of deckhands. The day is clear and bright, and the wind stings her full cheeks a shade of pink that might be considered garish, but Marya loves it. She loves the adventure, the feeling of the salt in the air and the sound of the revelry among the working hands of her crew. They’d almost be her family, if her heart didn’t already belong to a different group. But she loves them all the same.

Her dream-self is so lost in her emotions that she misses the darkening of the sky above her. But when her head snaps up to see what thick cloud was blocking the sun, her ship spins out of control, the sails already shredded and destroyed, and all she can hear are the screams of her crew as their flesh is torn asunder, as their lives are ended faster than Marya can understand what is happening. The woosh of enormous, mechanical wings and the clicking of a monstrous beak are the last things she hears before the deck beneath her splinters into millions of shards of wood, and she is falling. Once again, falling.

Only, this time, nobody is there to catch her.

Straka.

Marya wakes up screaming. 

—

Van sticks close to Marya the next day, for better or worse. It drives Marya crazy, but she can never tell if it’s out of anger or want. She can’t let herself entertain the question.

To her credit, Van doesn’t speak much to her outside of the necessities, and for that, Marya is thankful. Though Van has never been a quiet woman—boatswain duties requiring the exact opposite of a calm serenity—she knows how to carry herself with solemnity when the occasion calls. The silence, interrupted only by the ambient noises of a crew at work on a ship in the sky, is comforting.

After a few hours, Marya hears Van walk up behind her, her footsteps as sure as ever, but subtle, as if she wanted to give Marya advance notice of her approach without shaking her out of the flow state she settles into when she pilots. Just like before, she keeps her mouth shut, letting Marya ignore her for as long as she wants. Even when lunch is called, and then dinner, and the crew moves to eat together, Marya doesn’t move a muscle and Van follows suit. It’s not long before the sun starts to set, yet again, and neither woman has so much as twitched an eye. 

The silence is suffocating.

It’s broken by a sneeze, of all things. A loud, invasive, aggressive sneeze tears out of Van, and Marya yelps before devolving into a chuckle.

“Never quite got over those allergies, huh?” She quips to her boatswain, and she doesn’t need to look at Van to know that there’s a smile painted across her lips.

“Nah,” Van replies. “Everybody’s gotta have a flaw.”

Marya quirks an eyebrow, though she knows Van can’t see her. “And yours is… allergies?”

“Mhmm,” she hears Van affirm, and she snorts again before she can stop herself. She can hear Van drawing closer, though her muscles don’t tense like they had before.

“There she is,” Van whispers, and it’s so soft, so gentle, not like she had exclaimed when Marya fired her gun at Monty’s book signing, no, this time the words are just for her, and Marya feels her resolve break. She sighs, and melts backward into Van’s waiting arms, where the woman props her up, calls for a deckhand to pilot for the night, and, wrapping an arm around Marya’s shoulders, leads her down to the very bed that Marya had tumbled from this morning, sweaty-limbed with a racing mind screaming Straka, Straka, Straka .

“You need rest, Junková,” Van commands, and Marya doesn’t argue, this time. “Real rest,” she adds, after catching sight once again of the deep, dark sockets around Marya’s eyes. Marya just nods and begins to undress with trembling fingers.

It’s not long before she gets dizzy, and Van helps her get out of the rest of her outer clothes, her tactical corset, boots, and goggles sitting neatly on a chair beside her bed—“they cannot lie with the rest of the clothes,” Marya remembers telling her, “they are too special”—before grasping her hand firmly and leading her to a sitting position on the bed.

“How long has it been?” She asks, and Marya doesn’t need to wonder what she means by that.

“Years,” she rasps. “Years, Van.”

Van only nods, removing Marya’s hat and letting her thinning hair fall down, knotted and tangled as it is. She rakes her hands through the strands gently, trying not to pull any more of the hair out of Marya’s sensitive scalp. “You know,” she starts, her voice softer than velvet, “you’re no use to anyone like this.”

“I’m no use to anyone at all.”

A silence falls over them after the words leave Marya’s lips, but she doesn’t regret them. She’s never regretted telling Van the truth. And only once has she regretted telling the woman a lie.

“C’mon, Junker, you know that’s not true.”

Marya scoots away from Van to look her in the eyes. “Tell that to the Kingfisher. Tell that to my crew. Tell that to—to Comfrey.” The last word, the name of the woman that brought them all together, is a choked, mangled sound.

Van doesn’t try to touch her again, but instead stands, pulling back the covers of the bed and motioning for Marya to slip inside them, to which Marya obliges. When Van has her mind committed to something, it’s better to just go with it until she’s satisfied. Refusing her usually ends up a futile wish.

“Goodnight, Marya,” Van starts to say, and a word rips from Marya’s throat before she can stop it.

“Stay.” Her hand shoots out from the bed to find Van’s, and she can feel the woman stiffen with surprise under her touch.

“Are you sure?” Van’s voice is—what, hopeful? Confused? Marya can’t tell. She only nods, and feels Van squeeze her hand once, before undressing herself and joining Marya on the other side of the bed. They don’t touch, they don’t speak. But the dip in the mattress feels, to Marya, like the first deep breath in a hundred thousand days.

She tries to sleep. She really does. She controls her breath, she counts to seven hundred in her head, she retells herself classic Scrapsylvania bedtime stories, but nothing works. So she is left to listen to the rhythm of Van’s breathing, left to watch the rise and fall of her chest and the peaceful look on her face as she dreams.

Marya turns away before the bile rises further up her throat, and that’s when Van speaks.

“What’s on your mind, Junker?” Marya startles, her breath cutting short as Van’s voice shatters the silence of the room. She opens her mouth to respond, but Van gets there first. “And don’t you dare tell me that it’s nothin’, ‘cause we both know that’s bullshit. The Junker I knew was always wrestling a thousand thoughts a minute.”

She can’t help it. “The Junker you knew went down with the Kingfisher.” Van falls silent, but she can practically hear her thinking of a rebuttal to the statement.

“Nah, I don’t think that’s true. You’re still the Junker that came on this ship nineteen years ago.” Marya snorts derisively. “No, really,” Van protests. “You’ve still got those smile lines from laughin’ at Daisuke’s stupid ramblings, you still furrow your brows when you’re puzzlin’ over something.”

Marya flips back over to face Van, which she immediately knows to be a mistake, because the look in Van’s eyes is nothing short of adoring.

“Yeah,” Van breathes, reaching a finger up to flit lightly over the space just between her eyebrows. “Just like that. Told you, you’re still that Junker. My Junker.”

Her Junker . The thought is invasive, but not unwelcome, and a strange feeling stirs in Marya’s gut as she turns over the implications of her swirling emotions in her head.

“I’m really not,” she croaks out. “I’m—I’ve changed, Van.”

“I know, but not enough for me to not recognize you.” Van pauses, like she’s deciding if she should admit what’s in her head. “I’ll always recognize you.”

The tears fall before Marya realizes, and Van, incapable of standing (or, in this case, laying) beside without helping, moves her fingers from Marya’s brows to her cheeks, wiping away the salty liquid.

“I meant what I said, you know,” Van continues. “We missed you at the wedding. We— I would have loved to see you.”

“I’m sorry,” Marya says, and it’s true. It’ll never be a lie.

“I know.”

“But we are here now, eh?” Marya tries for a light tone, but it’s ruined by a bone-wracking cough splintering through her limbs.

Van wraps her arms around Marya not for the first time today. “Come here. You wake me if you have any nightmares, alright?”

Marya nods. “I missed you, Van.” The words she wants to say instead stay buried inside.

“Missed you too, Captain.”

They fall asleep like that, Marya’s thin frame tucked inside Van’s much broader and taller one, and Marya’s dreams are haunted not by the sound of wings and beaks and blood spatters, but instead by a bright smile and silver hair. The dreams are enticing enough that she stays, that she refuses to wake even when the fear spikes through her hard enough to send her heart fritzing out of control. It is worth it for just a few more moments in this world inside her head.

But when she wakes, she is alone again. Van’s clothes and prosthesis are gone, replaced only by a note with her familiar messy scrawl sitting innocently on the bedside table.

“Bert wanted me to help taste the new line of aiolis for the crew. See you soon.

xx, Van .

And Marya cries. Oh, she cries. The tears stain her pillows and sheets, they warp the paper of Van’s note beyond recognition. They slide down her cheeks and drip off her chin unceremoniously as she wipes her nose with the back of her hand, but she could not care less what she looks like. She gave up on her appearance long ago, and no matter what the Macleod kid says, she knows she’ll never go back to what she used to be.

She cries, and it is selfish and jealous and petty. Because who was she to think that things would change? She was the one who invited Bert’s husband on the ship, anyway. What did she think would happen? That her and Van would fall into their pattern from eight years ago, that all those years of baggage and separation would just, what? Disappear?

No, she knows they won’t. And she curses herself for ever letting herself forget that. Because Van doesn’t belong to her. She belongs to the sky, to the Zephyr, to the Rusty Nut, to her husband. She does not belong in Marya’s world, not anymore. The sun will always inevitably rise on the secrets of the night, and its rays will reach the deck of the ship, and it will find everything as it was meant to be—Bert in Van’s arms, Marya at the wheel. Everything as it is meant to be. Not, she reminds herself, whatever fantasy you have cooked up. There may be hope for Comfrey, for Zood, but not for us. Not for her, not for me. Some things don’t change. It was always going to be this way, because you are too much of a coward to tell her. A coward who has the blood of an entire crew on her hands, the clicking of a beak in her head, and the lead weight of longing wrapped around her rotting heart .

She screams, muffling the sound in her now-damp pillow, and punches the wall until her knuckles are raw and bleeding. Carefully, and breathing heavily with anger and want, she dresses herself, sliding her gloves on last and ignoring the sting of the worn fabric against the open wounds on her fingers. Opening the door, she steps out, face red and puffy but composed. She has a job to do. She’ll just have to… forget about Van

Easier said than done, but Marya has never been one to turn away from a challenge.

She’s only backed away once, and it cost her just as much as her reckless courage onboard the Kingfisher.

No, Marya will do no more and no less than what she is asked. That way, she never has to lose anyone else, ever again. Because having half of Van is better than having none of her at all. And she’d rather live the rest of her years with pains of longing than the pains of grief and regret.

She grips the wheel once she’s made it to the quarterdeck, relishing in the pain lancing through her hands. “Straka,” she whispers. “I am coming for you. Either you will kill me, or I will kill you. One of us will die. This is the story that has been told, and it is the one that will be told anew.”

I cannot live with her, nor can I live without her. I cannot have her, nor can I get rid of her.

And so I will stay.

Orbiting her.

Marya shuts her eyes.

“Straka. I will see you soon.”