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There's a war going on out there. But aside from a run back out to go bring the Exeter back to the ranch the crew hasn't really left the property much. You almost wouldn't know that there was a war going on, except that they're still getting progress reports here and there. Nika's been keeping busy -- there are always things that need doing on a working ranch. Especially one this size.
Nala caught Joshua in the kitchen. "She forgot a hat again. Would you mind taking it?" She grinned. "The woman needs a keeper," she told him of her sister.
The week has wrought a change in Nika that some perhaps despaired of seeing -- she smiled far more often and it reached her eyes. She took to leaving her braid hanging down, always an interesting quirk that lent itself as a barometer to her moods. She had taken to playing the piano in the evenings the past two days. And she had spent a monstrous amount of time on horseback. She was saddling one of the horses in the yard when Joshua spotted her this time, talking in soft, low tones to the beast as she worked. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was warm. Her face is showing the effects of being outdoors so much, sporting a pink tint from the times she'd forgotten the hat that he was carrying.
Joshua chuckled as he approached Nika. "It seems I'm your keeper. That's what a second-in-command is for, right?" He grinned at Nika, that almost goofy but contagious grin. His first instinct had been to toss her the hat, but he had learned some respect for horses. So instead, he walked up and stuck it on her head.
Glancing toward him as he approached, Nika offered him a smile even as he plunked the hat atop her head. "Yeah, yeah," she retorted lazily. "She's mother henning me to death. Want to ride? I'm heading up to the ridge to check on the north fence line."
"Sure," he said, even as he started getting another one of the horses prepped to ride. He would never be as in tune with a horse as Nika or her twin, but he had found his Reading helped him with the emotional state of the horse, which gave him a step up from most folks. A short time later, he got himself on the horse relatively gracefully and looked over to Nika. "Lead on, captain, my captain." And he managed to only have a slight smirk as he said it.
She swung up into the saddle as easily as she piloted, unconsciously graceful in her movements. Settling in, she checked to be sure he was ready to go and then kicked her horse into motion. Pushing the hat a little further back on her head, Nika asked him easily, "You enjoying the stay?"
"Yeah, Nika, I am. I always feel at peace here. I don't know if my skillset would be useful on a ranch, but I wouldn't mind settling down someplace like this someday." He fell into the rhythm of the horse's movement. It felt nice to be in touch with something outside the ship, he realized. "I know you're doing fine. It's evident. Your sister is good for you. That, and this turn of events."
"My sister is the other half of me," Nika said simply. "We shared our mother's belly. She is... everything." Her gaze turned toward the mountains as they rode, though she kept talking. "She's only a couple of minutes older, but sometimes it seems like years. We had our stepmother, and she was great. But... really it was just me and her for all of my life til I went to the Black." She smiled. "She's always been my best friend."
She paused. "I won't say war is good for anyone. Not even me, Joshua. But yes... having a clear-cut enemy? That does help me."
Joshua knew, that of the crew, that he was probably the most idealistic about the war. He had reason - he had first hand experience with what the Alliance and its allies could and would do to freedom of choice. But he also knew that because he had spent most of his life sheltered that people would consider him to be naive about war. And that too, was true in its own way. But he didn't want people to think he didn't understand that war would cause pain.
"I didn't mean the war, specifically, Nika. Just coming here and seeing your sister with a purpose seems to have completed whatever needed to happen to set yourself right. When you're focused, I feel more balanced myself." He rode alongside her as the trail widened a little. "You're my big sister, after all."
It brought a small grin to her lips. She couldn't help it. "You know... I always thought I kept a pretty decent arm's length between me and y'all. I'm starting to realize maybe I suck at that," Nika observed. "Everybody's been watchin' me like a kettle about to boil. Bein' here... I can escape. Get some time alone. It's helped."
"Dangers of everyone loving you...everyone worries about you." He smiled back at Nika. "We try and give you alone time on the bridge, but in the Black, not really much of a thing as alone time, is there?" And for Joshua, that was okay. For whatever reason, he didn't feel the need for aloneness that a lot of the crew did. He sometimes wondered if it had something to do with his Reading. But then again, he wondered how his Reading affected him in a lot of different ways.
Nika chuckled. "There's a ton of alone time on the bridge... and the Black is infinite. I used to find all of my solace there, wandering between the stars." She hesitated and admitted, "It's not as restful when it's endless, though." And in a lot of ways she still isn't over the endless darkness. She wondered some days if she ever would be. "I don't sleep as well as I used to. If it goes pitch dark suddenly, I freeze. Sometimes when I look out into the Black, I can almost feel the panic attack coming."
Joshua nodded. "We ask too much from ourselves, expect miracles. You'll get better, but in the scheme of things it hasn't been that long a recovery time. You've done really well." His voice was sincere, not patronizing. He meant it honestly, not as a meaningless sop. He understood the patience of wanting it all to happen right away. Sometimes Joshua thought he was lucky to be approaching normal human being, so soon after leaving Blue Sun.
"Is that the fence over that way?"
Nika pointed. There were few paths this far out on the pasture, but as the hills began rolling what appeared to be a dirt track did become more evident. "There," she said. "It's about 3 kliks up the path; we'll wind around that hill and up onto the rocks." She was quiet again as she led the way, casting occasional glances here and there. "I didn't expect miracles. I just also didn't expect the thing that had been my solace to become my torment, though that sounds far more melodramatic when said that way," she scoffed at herself.
"I know. You're the marathon runner with the broken leg. What would've been difficult for anyone has turned out to be excruciating for you." He let Nika take the lead on the trail. Joshua trusted her sense of direction, at least geographically, better than his own. After all, she was one hell of a navigator.
"And I'm only going on faith when I say it will get better. But I trust that faith pretty well." After looking for it in so many places, he had found it right at home with his crew...his family.
"I'm doing better, I guess. Arden's stuck me on medications and I'm all laid back and stuff now, I guess." Nika smirked. As if she's ever really laid back. "But being here right now.... watching them take Vandenburg -- HELPING them take Vandenburg. I feel like I have a solid footing again. A purpose I at least understand."
"We're doing good. Not without pain, but big change requires it, I guess. I like having a purpose." One of his own, that was. "It suits you well too," he said, agreeing with her last comment. "You going to stick with the Navy again when it's all done and the Independents have won?"
"Perhaps," Nika replied noncommittally. "I think it's too early in the game to be making plans for the end of the war. It's a long road." But just as she'd admitted to Rina after they landed, she confided to Joshua, "I could see myself coming home." It was the first time she ever admitted home might be someplace not the Black. That she might just be happy someday on the ground.
"Don't mind me playing optimist. I can't help it." They were getting close to the fence, he felt, their conversation winding like the trail they rode on. "And I could see you coming home too, Nika. You may be at your best flying the Black (and you're gorram good at it) but you've always seemed happiest here."
Nika chuckled. The ridge made talking a little harder but not so much harder that it was impossible. As they climbed the path and it turned rockier, the fence came into view. And some half a kilometer further on, a break in the fence appeared. The blonde reined in and swung down, pulling her gloves and a strand of wire along with wire cutters out of her saddle bags. "There's the trouble," she commented.
It wasn't until they were working together on restringing the broken section that she finally said, "I think for a long time I was happy out in the Black. Guess on some levels, I'm starting to see I want more out of life than flyin' aimlessly. It isn't enough anymore. I need a purpose -- and right now, flyin' for the Independent navy gives me one. Don't know what all else will come our way, but I'll see where it takes us."
The turn of conversation had gotten Joshua thinking down the line of thought that kept popping up every now and again. "Yeah, I'm trying to get better at thinking in the moment. I have a hard time imagining Rina ever wanting to settle down. Not that I'm anxious to do so myself." He had only really been living life for a few years. He wanted to burn bright for a while longer.
Nika laughed. "Well, I guess if'n you want to run footloose and fancy free, you picked the right lady, Joshua. And the right crew. Cuz at the moment, that's pretty much us in a nutshell."
"Yeah, people wonder sometimes why she and I are together but it's because she gives me that unpredictability I need." Life was never dull with her or with the crew, that was for sure. He watched Nika make some precise twists and cuts to repair the break in the fence. "You've got me for as long as you want to fly, Nika. But I think you're going to lose Kiera sooner rather than later. If Arden wasn't head over heels with you, you might have lost him too."
Her jaw clenched, and Nika gave the fence line a pull to be sure it was solid. "I am not blind, Joshua. Though I admit, I still do not believe I can be what he .... " needs? Deserves? Wants? Hell, she doesn't even know. "There are some things I can't let go of. I hesitate to appear too much like Rina by holding on to something that will never be, and I don't want you to misunderstand....." She trailed off and looked at Joshua.
"I didn't know what I had until it was gone. I loved Brian. I will probably always love him. And while I have no illusions about the idea that he'd ever come back my way again.... anything that comes to me now, there's a part of me that always compares what I feel for that person to how I felt back then. Not comparing the people, just my own emotions. And as much as I want to love Arden.... I don't. Not the way I want to love the person who could share my life. And there've been times I hated myself for that, too."
She sighed. "Kiera.... is gonna do what Kiera does best. Look out for herself. And that's okay too. She is who she is. And we knew that when we let her back aboard. I'll be sorry to lose her skills. I'll ... be more sorry if it means losing her friendship, cuz she has become that. But she'll do what she needs to."
"Didn't say you were blind. Not judging you, Nika." And he wasn't. People were too complex to think they could be boiled down to simple equations. "Arden does what he needs to do, you do what you need to do. Life will continue on. Just saying that I think the war is bothering him. You're what is keeping him around. Which is fine, that's his choice."
As far as Kiera, she twisted him sideways and Joshua was sure that she would keep doing that right up to the moment she walked off the ship forever. "Love, for all its amazingness, is a twisted ugly beast sometimes. Don't feel guilty that you feel one way or don't feel another way."
Nika shrugged a bit and offered a grin, stripping one leather glove off with her teeth and then removing the other. "I don't. It just is, Joshua. And for now, I'm okay with that." She gestured to their surroundings. "There's a lot of sayings about home.... it's where when you go there they have to take you in, it's where the heart is. Home is where you're happiest. Welcome to my home, didi." The affectionate appellation for little brother rolled easily from her tongue.
Joshua smiled back. "Thanks for sharing it with me, jie jie."
The mountains around them were stark against the blue sky, and Nika shoved her gloves and the twine into her saddlebags once again. Swinging up onto the horse, she said, "C'mon... we'll check another couple of kilometers, make sure the dumb critters ain't wanderin' around, and then head back." She kicked her horse into motion and laughed over her shoulder as she took off, "Race ya to the water hole!"
Joshua could feel the adrenaline start to rush through his system. She was better with horses than he was. But he went ahead and kicked his own horse into a gallop, urging her into top speed with his voice and his mind.