[i]For the lifetime of every material need met to the fullest: For the nights of sleep free from fear and foe: For the knowledge of ages passed down through the generations: For the mouth of the Masters forbidding in specific, in person, in clearest detail: The lash! The lash!

For the weak link in a centuries-old chain of dinnertimes: For deeds done in darkness by the gifts of home and hearth: For the supplanting of love that must always be first: The scourge! The scourge!

For the reward of the faithless scoundrel: The whip. The whip!
[/i]

“The ship belongs to the Captain. The crew belongs to the Captain.” Slowly is the only way he can enter. To keep from cutting his hooves on shrapnel. To keep from coming undone.

"There is nothing here you could use to help her. I'm sorry." It slips out. He doesn't know if it's a mistake.

***********************************************************

Another time, perhaps even a week ago, the question would have earned Iskarot a free diversionary tactic with his choice of subtly scathing retort. But today, Vasilia held vigil over his sacred coleslaw, until the time it would be needed once again, and secrets did not belong between them. Or maybe she’d puttered around her quarters long enough that simple company was enough to loosen her guard. Or maybe she’d taken Hestia’s lessons to heart, and the first step to building a past was to acknowledge that it existed in the first place. Who can say? 

She hardly could.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Vasilia shrugged. “The concept is, [i]was[/i], a foreign one, until I took to spacefaring. Where I was born - you’d know the gravitational workings better than I - the planet was positioned such that every piece of drifting scrap in the entire system wound up there. Any castaways still breathing and any wrecks still populated found their home there. Keep going on for a few hundred years, and who even remembers what their great-great-great-great-great grandparents were ‘designed’ to do? If you could even tell. After all, when a bricklayer and a herald love each other very much, what are their children supposed to do? When the child of a bricklayer and a herald and the child of a scrap processor and a court entertainer love each other very much, what are [i]their[/i] children supposed to do? For me, I was born, and my family had taken the laurels before, so it was the natural thing for me to do.”

A pause. A thought. One so old, she’d forgotten she’d ever had it.

“Why do you ask? You don’t have a way to, you know, determine such a thing, do you?”