SPACE PIRATE

The cycle goes a lot like this: family lost, enemy found. Enemy lost, family found.

And repeat.  

Kit had always been a social creature, a bee taking flight from pretty flower to pretty flower, giving himself to whatever entertained or drew his attention in that moment. Isolation had never been his favorite companion--much as he had spent the past years enjoying the sound his his own voice in the air, it just wasn’t the same where there was no voice to play with his, no wit to match his (or at least try). Even when he sought his own thoughts, when he wanted to bury himself in his own head and just think he did so better aloud, with someone at his side. Kit had walked away from his family when he was still only a boy, already more ready to take on the darkness of his parents would than they would ever be. He had lost a family, and found enemies left and right. Rising in the ranks of Wrotham’s dark criminal underbelly, young Kit Beisel had made more people angry than he had made happy, but he chose his allies carefully and padded all the right pockets until he’d contented himself to let enemy and family mean the same thing for the time being. 

Then--he found Conejita. All of his enemies were left behind, and he was flying. The next phase of the cycle didn’t come until later, when Eretreia had waltzed into his home and given him his first kind of partner in life, given him someone worthy of bing called family. 

If only it had stayed that way. If only he had been anyone other than so completely himself. 

Family lost, enemy found.

And the cycle goes. 

When he’s transferred to a new cell on Alpha Level, woken in the dead of night from a fitful sleep on a hard floor, he’s at an odd stage of the cycle. Somehow, along the way, being at the center of an explosion with the crew of the Concord had made Kit start to remember them all like his family. It should have gone family lost, enemy found. By all accounts of his past, if he were to understand anything about how his life had gone thus far, he should have walked into his new cell and looked out through the glass door and seen someone he’d nearly killed ten years ago. He had spent all of the last nights alone, the days with electrical nodes stuck to his temples and pain a friendlier companion than the prison guards that took him to and from his cell--there wasn’t a positive bone left in his tired body. He expected to look out and see an enemy, someone that would bring an end to the pain he’d been feeling nonstop for the last weeks.

Instead he sees her. 

Instead he sees family. 

The cycle had always been the same way between the two of them, a cycling between kinship and the kind of unadulterated anger that can only come when you truly, incandescently know and understand someone for exactly who they are. Maybe this was one of the moments where he was supposed to find an enemy, where he was supposed to see across the darkness and see it mirrored in her gaze, but Kit was blind to all of it. 

In that moment, he’s blind to anything but Eretreia. 

So he sees her, and with tears in his eyes, there’s nothing he can do but smile.

He recognizes her immediately. 

Looking at the curve of her shoulder, the dark hair that falls down over them and follows the lines of her back, he knows who she is just by the back of her, even hidden underneath of the bright orange jumpsuit she wears, the same one that all of Kit’s new peers wear, there was no denying who it was. Kallia Wexler was not the kind of person easily forgotten, even if someone wanted to forget her.

And Kit most certainly had no such intention.

He can’t imagine anyone with such an inclination.

He sees her before she can see him, her gaze facing away from him. There was something odd and exciting about seeing her just sitting there--they had been friends, if you could call sharp-edged banter friendly conversation, but this was different. They weren’t old friends running into each other; this was a reunion. Here she was a salvation, a promise that the rest of the crew had survived. He’s surprised by how happy that makes him. What had the darkness done to him? 

“Cariño,” he half-croons, a smile in his voice. No matter the circumstances that brought their reunion, no matter how much he could still feel the effects of months in the dark, no matter how void of a spine he felt at that moment in time, he cannot help the light that seeps into his voice.

He’d always had a knack for turning the abyss into something golden. 

“Here I was half-expecting you to be running the place by now.” 

Kit had never had a family to hold onto.

No legacy to call his own, no family name to live up to. Even when he’d technically had one, two elder sisters to call his own and and a mother and father that, much as they loved their children, were never around to provide the warmth and comfort that young souls need. They bled themselves dry at the feet of the Corporations, bringing home just enough food to feed their three children so that there would be more then just skin on their bones, so that there would be food on the table and roof over their children’s heads.

But a house is not a home, and having anyone but himself own his heart had never suited Kit. 

It happened a long time ago, somewhere between when he’d turned rage into his father and determination into his mother, the moment when he turned his back on the love that they might have given him, turned his back on a world that would paint his life in drab shades of grey. It happened before he left home, before he turned his back on the people that had spent so long trying to provide for him--he’d called it a mercy, when he left. He’d smiled at his mother in that way only children kissed by darkness can. Now you can work a little less, he’d said, as if he was doing what he was doing for her and not because the taste of power on his tongue gave him more life than anything else she’d ever put on their kitchen table. She hadn’t even been able to process what he’d said fast enough to cry before he was out the door, never to be seen again. Gone, they said, in search of a life that would give his world technicolor, that would make up for all of the years he had spent with ash in his lungs and flashing neon lights blinding him. 

That’s why, when he walks through the doorway to his cell and he sees none other than Dallas Costa spread comfortably across the bottom bunk of his cell, Kit nearly screams. A man who had been born into his name, a man whose family had made sure that Beisel was the kind of name that would never make it in their world. A man who had profited from the soot caked beneath Kit parents nails.

A Corporation Boy. 

Worse, a Costa. 

Doing business with him had been one thing.

It was entirely another to have Dallas in his bed. 

“And what,” he says, anger seething from behind a tight-lipped smile, blood on the edge of boiling, “the fuck do you think you’re doing in my bed?” 

He shouldn’t pause, but it is not in the nature of a snake to not consider his options. 

But he had always liked to believe that he was better than others, that despite being a boy of less than noble birth, he had always been meant for the pomp and circumstance of brighter lives, for the grandeur and wealth that came with being born a son of the Confederations. Growing up on Wrotham, Kit had manipulated Crest into his own version of a kingdom, walking the streets like some come again Lucifer, destined to rule the darkness–it never matter that he didn’t live in the light. His world was coated in soot and ash, so he lived his life in shades of grey, taking whatever option left his pockets most padded. He’d fashioned a crown out of discarded and rusted over nails and made the world see it as shining gold. 

But this wasn’t anyone they were asking about. 

This was Cairo. 

This was everything. 

Cairo, who could take care of herself. Cairo, who had always taken care of him, ever when he hadn’t asked her to, even when he had sworn that he didn’t need her help, even when he had demanded she leave him alone–she was always there. Holding him up, giving him wings. The mere thought of her name makes him smile, the crack in his exterior a direct reflection of the crack in hi heart where he had let the light of her seep in, where he had made a new home for her in the space between his ribs. 

Even if he sacrificed her, that hole would live on. 

That would be worse than any prison cell the confederations threw his way. 

So he pauses, enough for a heartbeat to pass–it’s not enough time for him to convince himself to hold his tongue. Of course, he should say. Hide your weak spots. Hide your heart, don’t let the beasts see that it beats. 

But–he had always liked to believe that he was better than others.

That’s when it hits him. 

“Don’t need to,” he says, letting his smile grow and grow and grow until it becomes the kind of grin only devil’s can wear. “I don’t need anyone to hand me anything.”

Another pause and his head cocks to the side, eyebrows raised as if to say do you really think so little of me?

“I’ll take it all for myself, Cairo at my side.”

BOLD what applies to your muse.

PLACE IN SOCIETY

financial: wealthy / moderate / poor / in poverty.

medical: fit / moderate / sickly / disabled / disadvantaged.

class or caste: upper / middle / working / slave / unsure.

education: qualified / unqualified / studying.

criminal record: yes, for major crimes / yes, for minor crimes / no.

FAMILY

married - happily / married - unhappily / engaged or betrothed / partnered / single / divorced / separated.

has a child or children / has no children / wants children.  

close with sibling(s) / not close with sibling(s) / has no siblings / sibling(s) is deceased.

orphaned / adopted / disowned / raised by birth parent(s).

TRAITS + TENDENCIES

extroverted / introverted / in between.

disorganized / organized / in between.

close minded / open-minded  / in between.

calm / anxious / in between.

disagreeable / agreeable / in between.

cautious / reckless / in between.

patient / impatient / in between.

outspoken / reserved / in between.

leader / follower / in between.

empathetic / unemphatic / in between.

optimistic / pessimistic / in between.

traditional / modern / in between.

hard-working / lazy / in between.

cultured / un-cultured / in between 

loyal / disloyal / in between.

faithful / unfaithful / unknown.

BELIEFS:

monotheist / polytheist / atheist / agnostic.

belief in ghosts or spirits: yes / no / don’t know / don’t care.

belief in an afterlife: yes / no / don’t know / don’t care.

belief in reincarnation: yes / no / don’t know / don’t care.

belief in aliens: yes  / no / don’t know / don’t care.

religious: orthodox / liberal / in between / not religious.

philosophical: yes / no.

SEXUALITY + ROMANTIC INCLINATION

heterosexual / homosexual / bisexual / asexual / pansexual.

sex repulsed / sex neutral / sex favourable.

romance repulsed / romance neutral / romance favourable. uninterested, but...

sexually: adventurous / experienced / naive / inexperienced / curious.

potential sexual partners: male / female / agender / other / none / all.

potential romantic partners: male / female / agender / other / none / all.

ABILITIES

combat skills: excellent / good / moderate / poor / none.

literacy skills: excellent / good / moderate / poor / none

artistic skills: excellent / good / moderate / poor / none

technical skills: excellent / good / moderate / poor / none.

HABITS

drinking alcohol: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess.

smoking: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. 

other narcotics: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess.

medicinal drugs: never / sometimes  / frequently / to excess. 

indulgent food: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. 

splurge spending: never / sometimes / frequently / to excess.

KIT GLADIUS BEISEL, THE VERY VERY TIRED BOY. ( matrix universe )

They ripped out your wings before you had the chance to ever fly.

The Bible of older times never spoke of how the Devil was once an angel, of how he once worshipped at the altar of sanctity and praised all that was holy the same way his fellow soldiers did. No one remembers that Satan had once been called Lucifer

No one ever remembers that the Devil was not born, but made.

The same way you were not born for bloodshed, it found you all the same. 

The first thing you remember about childhood is your mother’s eyes, the ones that looked down on you, the ones who saw with horror what happened to restless, reckless hearts when they are left alone, the one who saw how having a heart forged from oil and metal turned you into a machine, a weapon, a legend. It never mattered that your kingdom was comprised of dirty streets or that the altar you worshipped at was at the end of a deserted alley way--you turned Hell into your own kingdom, turned trembling fists into something lethal, no longer a boy but a weapon walking. The chains poverty had wrapped around your ankles bound you to the desolation of a forgotten neighborhood, but what does it matter that the consequences of your birth are such when you have no need to leave? When you’re eighteen, barely on the cusp of adulthood, and already a breathing legend because of what you do with your fists under the dark of the moon? When you’ve spent your life toeing the line between saint and sinner, the shackles of an undeserved punishment barely register. 

They recruit you first in the dead of night. The Rebellion, they call themselves when the shadow finds you after the ring has emptied and all have gone, leaving you alone with the taste of blood in your mouth and holiness weighed between your shoulders. They ripped out your wings, but all that is holy cannot stay. 

You’re still just a boy, and it’s easy enough to remember every time you had to go hungry, every time you clenched your jaw because your mother came home with a bruise on her cheek (courtesy of her Corporate Boss). You’re still just a boy, eighteen and barely on the cusp of adulthood, but the shadow doesn’t treat you like a child. Your life has been a never-ending series of being regulated and relegated, of being made smaller than you know you deserve to be, and being called a “beneficial addition” is the first taste of freedom you’ve ever encountered, the first taste of a life beyond the shackles the corporations had chained you with, the shackles you’d almost forgotten about.   

You’re eighteen, barely on the cusp of adulthood, but it’s that boyishness that allows you to convince yourself of one very important idea: you were born for this. 

After all, you remember God, but more importantly you remember the angel that turned his back to him. You remember God, but it is not the Almighty that you spent your life drawn to. An untainted halo, gold and glowing, was never what you wanted. In this world, if the corporations were supposed to be your God, you destined yourself to be the one who brought Him to his knees, the one strong enough to challenge the unchallengeable. With the Rebellion painting wings on your shoulder blades, you could be the one who would teach the world what it meant to be both monster and saint. 

You’re a man now, and somewhere you lost your fire.

You think maybe that you lost it somewhere between the flames and forgeries, as though the bullets burned it out of you and every time you pretended to be anyone other than yourself (you do this all the time) you forgot what it tasted like to feel passion. 

As though a life dedicated to The Cause had stripped you of yourself. 

They gave you a starship to replace your wings, but all that glitters is not gold. 

Your loyalty to the cause knew no bounds, but for all your charms, even among the people who are meant to be deemed “yours,” you are a creature too filled with darkness to truly belong, a very tired boy turned into a very tired man. Too much sinner to be welcomed among the ranks of the revolution, too much a saint to ever be welcomed back into a life under the corporations, you crafted your own bloodied halo and turned the inferno in your heart towards your palms.

A weapon is a man, a man is a weapon.

Consider this: is it better to live a sinner or die a saint?

The truth is, you’re far too much a glutton to retrain yourself to one, too eager to make people taste the same ash and soot staining your throat and too eager to make yourself the legend the legend your rulers have become. You make people forget, more often than not, that the same hands tracing constellations into the skin of their back have also had the opportunity to play out Mozart Requiem on men’s vocal cords, that the mouth whispering sweet Spanish nothings has also crushed men’s spirits with a single turn of phrase. 

You make them forget, but you remember everything.

And sometimes the taste of that violence enchants, sings your name like larks in the cold dew of an early morning.

Cairo should have loved this. Any self-respecting Synthetic would — all the glitter and gold, extravagant gowns, and Cabernet. She fit in well enough. Effortlessly, in fact. Despite her years of absence, she reentered Harbor with the same composure she’d been taught growing up:  shoulders back, lowered eyes, dainty head perched on a graceful neck. 

The other guests of the Providentia Ball welcomed her wordlessly in their body language. They nodded at her or smiled, or moved out of her way with a considerate bow. She was nearly charmed. Still, it wasn’t a fluke that Cairo joined Kit all those years ago. Harbor was her home, but it was also her penitentiary. It was also her purgatory. It stood as a reminder that for as long as she lived, she would never be re-welcomed with the same breed of affection as before. But not because the world had changed, no. Because she did. 

For the first time, Cairo found herself missing the metal halls of the Concord.

Then, she thought to herself: Poor Kit. He didn’t deserve her malaise. He didn’t deserve watching her dig her heels into the ground like a petulant child. Cairo’s hands came together while she watched his face morph into a grin, all teeth— he seemed so content to be here. Who was she to spoil his fun? 

Cairo took his arm easily. The weight of it felt familiar against the curve of her own. She shook her head, “I don’t need to drink when I’m with you.” She leaned close to his ear and said, “Just one, querido. I’m very tired. Then you should go and steal someone’s heart, I know how you love to show off.” 

Kit had long ago made a habit of pocketing anything that caught his eye, anything that glittered. And if this room was sparkling, it all dimmed when he cast his gaze over the woman glowing next to him.

It was uncanny, the way all of his harsh lines smoothed beside her, the way she could utter a single word of his first language and automatically he is tamed. He isn’t sure exactly when it happened, when they flowed from comrades into counterparts, when they realized that they were two sides of a single coin, two halves of a whole, but there is little in his life he values quite as much as the feeling of her arm wrapped through his now. 

Truly, it was not an easily accomplished feat, stealing a thief’s heart, but still she had done it. Time and time again, every time he stood in her presence, he felt that surging of warmth that can only come from family, that can only come with someone who knows you as intimately as you know yourself.

Sometimes, she even know him better. 

Gentle. Tamed. 

This is the man she brings out of him, the boy she allows him to be. Easy. Happy. Smoothed into perfection. It’s a stark contrast to the careful charm, the rigidly secured ease that he usually paints across his features; this is so much more natural, so much more real. Slipping his other hand from where it had been tucked into his trousers, he removes himself from her personal space for just a moment. He’d soon have her back again, but for now he uses his freed hand as an invitation, extending it towards Cairo while he bend at the waist.

“I’ve always been something of a glutton for affection, haven’t I?”  

A man at half-mast with a dangerous smile and a silver tongue, he’d bring the world to its knees. Little did they know he was already before her on his.      

LOCATION: The Balcony DATE & TIME: October 31st, 2178; 9:23pm WITH: @kittybeisel

Raven stood out on the balcony and looked at out the Harbor view. It had always been beautiful, and she had always hated it. She had been raised without a sky, and so much of it made her uncomfortable. It felt too open, it felt too exposed. 

So she decided to focus on the bottle of champagne in her hand and the way the bubbles made her nose tingle, the way it tasted bitter and sweet on her tongue – the way she dangled the bottle dangerously over the balcony. She imagined the glass breaking against the concrete below. She imagined the spray of champagne, she imagined the sound; like a shot in the night. But instead of dropping it, she turned her back to Wrotham and leaned against the railing.

How many nights like this had she avoided? Lena had been a social animal, desperate to mingle and laugh and connect. Raven had never been so inclined. She was more fragile then, she didn’t want to be outed as the outsider. The interloper. 

But Raven was not the same woman as before, she didn’t care about the people. She only wanted to escape the noise and the hot panic that was creeping up in her throat. Foolishly, she had imagined that the masks would make things easier. But no mask would hide them from the hounds, they would be sniffed out and torn to shreds. At least she would make a handsome corpse.

The door to the balcony opened, and the breeze gave her chills. Instinctively, she tucked the bottle of drink behind her, but relaxed when she recognized the mask. Raven eyed the man from behind her mask and took long drink of champagne. She hadn’t taken much time to learn anything about the new crew members, except for what their medical records said. And she certainly wasn’t feeling much inclined to take the opportunity to get to know him now.

God, but at least he wasn’t one of them. And at least he was alone. And at least he would make a handsome corpse too.

“Nice horns, definitely don’t make you look like a prick.”

The ball had started hours before, but Kitty almost felt like he’d spent his life among the crowd.

There was something about the pomp of it all, of the way he knew that the majority of the people in that room were covered in as much blood as they were in gold, in glamour. Standing on the edge of the room, he’d looked upon the people and seen the darkness hiding behind their porcelain veneers, the sharpened canines hidden behind demure words and the twist of pink lips. There was something purposeful about the dreamlike haze cast about the ballroom, an inconsequentiality to the conversations he overheard. It was fake, so purely false. 

It wasn’t this thought that sent him away from the crowds though, but the memory of a girl who saw through his own veneer. A memory of the scavenger girl who had picked at the cracks in his armor when he wasn’t paying attention, the girl who had welcomed him onto the strange ship he now called home. A memory of the girl seeing the mortal hiding in a gods skin. In an instant, he  suddenly remembers this moment of unwanted exposure and suddenly he’s suffocated by the fact that this room is Kitty, that somehow, the smuggler had found himself surrounded by a room that mirrored everything about himself. Something dark and violent hidden behind shining armour and a sultry voice learned in childhood.

Kitty had never done well with mirror images, had always found them too honest. Too intimate.

So, he runs. 

Or, at least, he wanders, an attempt to escape the looming inconsequentiality, the suffocating falsity, and finds himself stepping out onto the balcony so steal a breath of cigarette smoke. He wanders, seeking peace, and instead he finds the very opposite: Raven Ayres. But she’s heard him, and his mask makes him more recognizable than he ought to have been, and despite her efforts to hide the bottle slung between careful hands, he recognizes it immediately and makes the decision to stay.

Prick, she quips, and the wit intrigues him. 

All work and no play makes Kit a hungry boy.   

He steps forward, licking his lips as he lifts his hands to the back of his head and removes the mask from his cheeks. Gently, almost mindlessly he toys with the black ribbons that held the thing to his face. 

(Kit, of course, does next to nothing mindlessly) 

“I must admit, I expected a better insult out of you, Doc.” He almost tuts, his fingers still wrapping the ribbon around his left hand as he leans his arms against the balcony railing, gaze overlooking the city that had chewed him up and spit him back out so many years ago.  Deftly, he slips his right hand into the jacket’s breast pocket and holds between steady fingers a lighter and a cigarette -- not an electric pipe, but a real honest to God cigarette. Usually he saved them for special occasions, but tonight he feels off-kilter.

Tonight he feels too much himself.  

“Care for a drag?” he says as he brings the thing to his lips.

There had been a time in Kit’s life where he’d been almost as well known for his bacchanalian indulgences as he was for his smuggling abilities, and no matter how far he got from that point in his life, he would always be capable of slipping back into that retired skin.

Like watercolor paint dancing across a blank canvas, Kit wove his way through the crowds, painting the entire room with gold and charm. His heart really ought to have been beating more erratically, some shiver of fear should have kept a degree of ice in his veins, but he was too close to the life he’d spent years dreaming about, too close to a life where currency was cheap and pleasure ran high. He is just slipping from the grasp of a woman with too many bubbles in her veins when he spots them from across the room, Orion Thayer. 

He pauses, considering, pushing his tongue against his teeth as he fights to urge to approach them. Their relationship was on the edge of some kind of precipice, teetering on top of something sharp. One wrong move, and Kitty would fall onto the blade, Orion simply watching as he bleeds out.

“I must commend you, estrella,” he says when he finds his feet have carried him within their ear short, the curve of his mouth divine in the way only a wicked gods can be. “You almost look as though you don’t belong.”

He had thought perhaps time would be his beneficiary. He should have known better.

Time bows to no one, and neither does Orion.

Yet still, he sits at their table like there’s nowhere else he belongs.

There’s a heaviness on his shoulders, but an unbearable lightness as well. 

As he slips away from a girl whom he’d once loved (perhaps--after all, can that which knows sin so intimately ever truly know what it is to be at Aphrodite’s mercy?), music croons from the speakers as Eretreia’s voice holds his thoughts. Running his fingers along the bar’s countertop now, he smirks thinking about the feel of so much skin beneath his palm. 

“Cognac, if you’ve got it,” he says to the bartender, his smile broad. When the drink is placed in front of him, he winks at the young soul and leans forward, putting his weight onto his elbows and takes a small sip. It wasn’t the best that he’d ever had. It burned when it touched the back of his throat, and the sweet note he should have felt on the tip of his tongue never came. Running his hand around the rim of the glass, he buries his gaze momentarily in the color sitting there, all copper and oak. Cheap bastards, he thinks for a moment. If you’re going to throw this kind of party, after all, they at least ought to put out for some better liquor. 

But he swallowed nonetheless, and dragged his eyes from the glass. He was in far too pleasant of a mood to really mind, and refused to allow himself the unholy indulgence of complaining.     

He’d expected nothing less from the evening, and the taste of strawberry champagne on his tongue is making him feel downright indulgent. But more than indulgent, he was greedy, and when he sees Eretreia from the corner of his eyes?

He doesn’t just indulge, he drowns. 

Any other person would have been astounded by the girl, a vision in forest green to match the wilderness Kitty known lies in her heart, but Kitty couldn’t help the way the sight of her bare shoulders dragged him in. How he wished to relive the softness he’d once shown her, push away the dark hair cascading down around her and lay his mouth there. Hungry wolf, he knows he must be tame. But the same way he admires the stars from afar, he goes to her and keeps a safe distance.  

“Dance with me, princessa.” He’s not quite invaded her personal space yet, but his extended hand says how badly he wants to, the smile on his face come by grace of an angel despite the devil he’d donned. 

Looking at her now, he hopes that all that has happened will one day cease to matter, hopes that they might somehow find their way back to the affection they’d once felt for each other. Today wouldn’t be that day. Perhaps this year wouldn’t be that time. 

But he’d made something of a profession out of pretending.       

“For old times sake.”