Tangled Apart

by Swiss

Title: Tangled Apart Author: Swiss (dragonswissarmyknife@hotmail.com) Characters: Iolaus, Nebula Challenge: #24 - Romantic Intent Summary: Hearts whose paths overlap repeatedly but never stay together...fate? or perhaps a divine sense of humor.

"Nothing gold can stay. Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay." - Robert Frost

~

When he'd shown up grinning outside of Methone - dragging his infamous, ragged bag and balancing his sword across a shoulder - she hadn't bothered to ask him how he knew to come to that particular port. Nebula had long since given up wondering how they could always find her. But this time he'd been alone, begging passage to Patrae, presumably to met the demi-god there.

Her first, purely selfish inclination had been to say no. But he'd looked so careless standing there in that easy pose, and she'd been distracted by the sun casting playful shadow on his deep, smooth tan under the faded, crisscross patches of his vest. So she'd agreed, begrudgingly, to allow him to join her crew - for the duration of his journey or however long he chose to stay with her. Though she knew well enough, even then, that nothing would keep him from leaving for long.

A week into their journey they were following an easy wind, and she'd left her men to mind the work of a well-founded ship's company in favor of the upper mast and the glory of the sailing sky. Here was her throne, all forward the horizon and everything below her kingdom. The sounds familiar to her lifestyle echoed faintly, all she'd ever wanted.

All she'd ever thought she wanted.

Looking through the complicated mass of cord and canvas, she spotted him easily among her admittedly filthy company. Iolaus. It amused her, just a little, that perhaps only here he stuck out as the cleanest and most self-possessed person within leagues. She was fond of her crew, but he was like a dinar in a bucket of more inferior metals - shiny. And bright.

Perhaps it was the humor of the metaphor that inspired her to call him to her. She enjoyed the vista as he made his way to sit beside her, true-colored against the more drab, tawny ship-work shades. He'd sloughed his ugly vest at her insistence soon after he had entered her ship, ostentatiously because such an open, ratty thing was bound to snag or catch on something - for his own safety. And not at all because she preferred the view without it.

Before them, the horizon was a mass of color - red burnt violet and brilliant gold - spilt wine and sun-stain over a heavy Mediterranean sea. The mix made the waves shimmer like a thousand reflective coins, and the gentle swell rocked them in a breeze that was like a breath - warm and cool at once. A blissful, unbroken calm at day's end. And here, in the periphery of her world of canvas, the heavy, sweet-smelling cord tangled around their ankles, and the smooth wood of the mast pressed firm as any hearth had ever been beneath her thighs - here, master of her own vessel, caught in the wind and day's dying, it was as if she and him were the only beings in the whole world.

Deep obsidian eyes flowed over his smooth lines, watched the failing sun set him alight, so that he burned burnished at the edges. It was twisted up in the wild wings of his hair, in the churned curls that were bound by no reason - a dazzling, dazzled cacophony that made her fingers tingle with a core desire to fist them tight, or tease them like wool around her own deep brown fingers, so that they would both be made more beautiful by the contrast.

Like her, he sat with a thoughtless ease amidst the sway of the rigging - a token, she knew, from many days and months at sea. Years, even. One of the few things she knew of his deep past was that he'd sailed with the Argonauts in his youth. The sea had swallowed up his earliest adulthood; his seat wouldn't have been surer in a cradle. She could lean into him, press hard into his side in search of that contrast - dark and light, night and day - thoughtless of safety. They were alone and unmoved in a mated canvas of sky and sea. Here in this moment - if only in this moment - his other obligations were moot. Here, he was hers.

Hers. She had watched him, perched there waiting patiently while his eyes followed the sea. He had waited for her to reach for him, allowed her to take the initiative and keep it. It was his way with women, she knew, and this particularly with her. He didn't need anything from her. Not validation, affirmation, or stroking. He had nothing to prove to her or anyone else, and so he could forfeit control. In the rare way of a very few men, he didn't need dominance to seem strong. He just was.

And she fiercely loved that part of him. She liked she could have him, without him becoming weak.

"You should be careful, you know," his voice sounded through the stillness, filtered through her thick, stirring hair - a warm breath on the back of her ear. He shifted so their skin brushed, a kind of kiss. "What will your crew think?"

She smiled, a determined kind of thing to return his cocky tease, and also to his veiled, probing question. Her men cared very little who she dallied with, and any who did could shut their cakeholes. She breathed deep of him - earth, vegetation, and freshwater rain still pressed into his skin, in the air around him. And then the deeper, more subtle warrior smells - the metallic sweetness of a well-cared for weapon, worn leather aged with sweat from where his bracers had been. She sighed. He mixed well with the smell of the sea.

And he was comfortable here, with her. She could see it in the way the margin of tension in his shoulders had eased. In the deep, calm breaths he took. In the way his face stretched toward the sun and his shoulder's braced against the welcome breeze. "You could get used to this," she smiled at him, a knowing look.

A soft chuckle, a long inhale, "Yeah, I love the sea," he said. His smile was free as a child's, though somewhat more wicked. "Thought...I didn't used to, you know."

"No?"

Again, that grin. "Nope," he answered. "I thought it was beautiful and everything, but I didn't learn to swim until I was almost twenty."

"You?" she asked. The man was a fish; she'd seen him over the side in a calm. But then, she knew almost nothing about him in the before times. Like he knew almost nothing about her. It was neater that way, less complicated. They had a relationship of moments - and each one was too precious to waste on the past.

He responded to her dramatized disbelief, "What? And you were born frolicking in the sea?"

"Maybe I was," she said. She wasn't. Water wasn't for swimming where she came from.

Unaware of her thoughts, the man continued his anecdote, "Well, Jason taught me. I think he felt bad for chucking me into a lake when we were kids. That or else he knew what Herc would do to him if I drowned while after that stupid fleece."

"Jason. As in Jason of the Argonauts."

"As in King Jason," he corrected. "Well, former king."

There was a shrug in his voice, a carelessness that spurred her words. "Don't take this the wrong way, curly," she teased him. "But I can't see you in a court, scrapping before royalty." Ironic, but true. Even the thought of him with his head bowed was comical.

"Yeah, well, I'm a versatile guy." The glint in his eye was serious enough that she could imagine - she understood such things perhaps better than he imagined. But at the next moment, the same moment, he was chuckling clear and uncomplicated, "The reality is that we were academy buddies. Or at least he and Herc were, and he warmed up to me."

Sounds on the deck interrupted him, a friendly, half-heard jeer shouted up at them that Iolaus frowned at, shaking his head demonstratively. He'd made quick friends with her boys. A strong, hard worker with a good set of seamanlike hands would never be unwelcome, especially one coupled by a streak of impious humor and enough solid workmanship to win respect. He fit here.

He fit. It was a dangerous thought to entertain. Dangerous.

"This...it wouldn't work," the soft words startled her, brought her attention all to him. A sadness reflected on his face that made a stony part of her ache. She hadn't ached for anyone is a long time. He repeated. "Nebula. It wouldn't work."

She marveled at his sensitivity, that he could so closely divine her thoughts. She wanted to be disappointed, but then, the words were only an echo of her own doubt. He was too pretty a rouge to keep for herself. And anyway, pirates weren't big on fidelity. But then, no one had ever made her want to try it before. She'd never wished for someone to stay. But...their fierce independence in spite of their circumstances - she a woman, and he an unusual, mortal companion to something like a god - it was part of the reason for their strong attraction.

She murmured to him, "It's asking too much...to keep you." A little surprise showed in a fair, slightly arched brows. Even his eye lashes were blond. He read her expression, `it's asking too much, not to have to share.'

For some reason, it settled him into a quiet, peaceful melancholy. "I...I was married once, you know." He smiled at her, a little wanly, "I've done that, I mean. Being bound to one person, staying in once place."

"She died," she said it like a statement, because suddenly she couldn't imagine him leaving for any other reason, in spite of her earlier consideration.

He heaved a slow sigh, and she watched the tension drain from the trapeze of tense muscle in his back. It was a having-come-to-terms motion. "Yeah," he grinned. "She did."

Sounds of the rustling sheets and taught cordage, the intimately familiar sound, smell, and motion of wood straining as it was intended. "You wouldn't have to stay in one place," she didn't think a little cheek could do much harm, and it was as close as she would come to outright asking him. She didn't know why she bothered. She already knew the answer.

It came in one word, "Herc."

And then, he added, "I'm sorry, Nebula." Part of him was, she knew. But he had chosen his duty a long time ago.

"I know, curly," she drew him close, resting in that contact, however mercurial. He smelled like sweet earth and soft leather, but he tasted like the layer of salt spray that would never have time to sink permanently into his skin. Not before he stepped off her ship into another random port, both of them wondering if maybe they'd see each other again...or not.

And like every time, she'd be just a little unsettled about just how much the transient hero made her care.

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