Since Luka’s interest in the story didn’t seem like a bad sign, the Captain spoke a little more warmly.
“Right now we’re passing through a nebula called Nebula Delta. It’s filled entirely with violet dust — if you look through the ship’s windows, it’ll look just like the flower fields from your home planet that you loved.”
Luka glared at him through a face still twisted with pain.
“Our planet… didn’t have anything like flower fields. It was nothing but rock and sand.”
The low voice was threatening in a way that didn’t match his delicate, sensitive appearance. Even at the growling retort, the Captain smiled pleasantly.
All this time, the boy who had said nothing but kill me had given him a proper answer for the first time. It made him so glad, so relieved.
The Captain said, his voice lifting slightly.
“Is that so? Then I was wrong. Next time I’ll look for a nebula that looks like sand dunes. Somewhere you’d want to see.”
“……”
“Or would you like me to find something else?”
“……”
At that question, Luka almost said I want to see a tree. The planet he’d lived on was barren and harsh, but there was nothing as beautiful as the vitality of the trees that had grown steadfast even through that blowing sand.
He started to say he missed that resilience — then stopped himself. He didn’t want to reveal his will to live to the Captain like that.
Honestly, I’m a little worn out now…
Worn out from screaming to be killed every day. No matter how desperately he begged, this man didn’t seem like he would ever grant his request. It irritated him, too — the way he kept coming every single day without fail to look after him, staying silent as though he couldn’t hear, as though deliberately ignoring him. There was nothing more exhausting than having to deal with a persistent person who wouldn’t leave you alone.
I don’t even know what kind of person he is, to look after me like this…
Luka glanced down, eyes drifting to the Captain’s hand holding his. The tips of his fingers, briefly freed from their bandages, had nails broken and jagged in every direction. The sharp edges scratched and cut the back of the Captain’s hand — yet he didn’t pull away. If anything, he interlaced their fingers and shared his warmth.
That touch resembled the nature the Captain had always shown. No matter how much Luka pushed him away and refused him, he held steady in the same place and waited for Luka to come around on his own.
He feels like someone who would grant any request of mine — except the one to kill me.
Luka lifted his gaze and studied the Captain quietly. He’d had no attention to spare for anything outside himself, pouring every ounce of his strength and mental endurance into his own situation — so he simply hadn’t noticed before.
Looking now, the Captain’s features weren’t so different from the people of the planet Luka had grown up on. No — if anything, he was incomparably more attractive than any of them. Though it might be that warm smile making him look more handsome.
…What planet is he from, I wonder.
The galaxy was vast. Subspecies who had evolved and adapted to each of their unique environments were everywhere.
For instance, the subspecies of the planet Egir-V — where gravity was three times that of their home planet — had grotesquely thick, dense skeletal structures, and their skin held a smooth, gray sheen like a water-shield. They found stability only under the pressure of extreme gravity.
Or there were the subspecies of Kyros-Beta, a planet with two suns, where it was perpetually daytime across all four seasons. They carried self-luminescent cells within their bodies, so a soft phosphorescent glow drifted beneath their skin according to their emotions. Warm gold when joyful; cold blue when sorrowful. Their beauty lay in the delicacy of that light.
There were even the alien beings of the planet Silis — composed entirely of transparent silica crystal — who could only survive in extreme cold of negative one hundred degrees. When struck by light, their entire bodies decomposed like a prism and shone brilliantly. But they were beings with the sorrowful fate of never being able to make physical contact with any other species that held body heat.
The Captain before him was none of these.
If he had to categorize, the Captain belonged to a species remarkably close to his own. His skin held the same texture as Luka’s, a healthy warm tan. His build was solid but not grotesque. Warmth radiated from where their hands were joined. And above all, those golden eyes held a depth within them vast enough to gather even the smallest, most insignificant things in the universe.
There was a singular atmosphere about him that went beyond simple physical beauty. It overflowed with a loftiness and grace built up over long years of wandering the cosmos.
“…You.”
Luka’s lips parted slowly, and his characteristically low voice slipped out. The Captain’s gaze lingered for a long time on those lips — cracked and crusted with dried blood, in poor shape. Luka paid no mind to that gaze and continued.
“…What kind of person are you? Tell me — which planet you came from, who you are. How you found me. Why you saved me… What kind of ship is the Nautilus? Where is it headed…?”
The questions that poured out all at once were incoherent. Each one alone would take hours — perhaps days — to answer properly, so the Captain couldn’t readily open his mouth.
And so instead of answering, the Captain chose silence for a moment. An emotion difficult to read passed across his profile as he gazed out at the infinite darkness beyond the window. At last he opened his mouth quietly and spoke. An answer to just one of the many questions.
“This ship — the Nautilus — is a ghost ship that doesn’t exist in the Empire’s records.”
Was the matter of the ship more important than any other question? Was that why he was telling him about it first?
Luka watched the unfamiliar man before him — of similar appearance and yet whose thoughts he couldn’t read at all — and opened his mouth again.
“A ghost ship…? Are you a criminal? Running around on the run with a bounty on your head or something. So then why did you bring someone like me on board and save me?”
Once his mouth opened, the doubts he’d been holding in poured out unfiltered. The jumbled, tangled questions showed plainly how far past his limits Luka’s mind had been pushed. The Captain, as if to calm him, laid his large hand gently over the back of Luka’s trembling hand.
“If I explain, it’ll turn into a very long story.”
“I don’t care. I want to know all of it.”
“Hmm — I’ll tell you once I get Obel’s permission that it’s alright to have a story that long.”
“…What is that even.”
“Your health comes first right now. But I’ll promise you this one thing. Aegis won’t easily find my ship. Even they — the ones who can wipe an entire planet off the map without breaking a sweat — touching my ship is an entirely different matter.”
“……”
Luka looked at the Captain with an unconvinced expression. Aegis was known as the most dangerous and powerful force within the Imperial coalition. He’d learned in his modern cosmology classes that they achieved what they wanted by any means necessary. So no matter how excellent the Nautilus was, he’d wanted to say — escaping their radar wouldn’t be easy.
Luka realized that pointing out reality with such cynicism wouldn’t do any good. So he settled for exhaling a quiet sigh. In truth, he was more curious about why the Captain had saved him than any of that.
What could he possibly gain from saving me…
That question bred wariness, and made the gaze he fixed on the Captain something less than gentle. The Captain, watching Luka stare at him with those sharp eyes, smiled faintly. He seemed to decide that easing Luka’s wariness was the first priority.
“Shall I tell you about the crew?”
No, I’m not interested. He was about to say that — then Luka closed his mouth. He just wanted to hear any kind of story. Anything that could give his ravaged, nightmare-haunted mind even a moment’s relief was welcome.
This wasn’t exactly a place where dying was easy, either. If he could get help dying from one of the other crew members rather than the man in front of him — learning information about them wasn’t a bad idea.
“Vice Captain Ivelynsia was once the most promising commander in the Galactic Alliance. Now she’s recorded as dead. She’s a strict principlist — very rigid. If you ever end up coming to the bridge, she’ll be the first person you meet.”
Luka listened quietly to the Captain’s words. Not knowing why Luka was focusing on the story like this, the Captain’s eyes grew warm. It was only natural that this — Luka watching him with calm, steady eyes — was more endearing than the sight of him crying and begging to be killed.
“Doctor Obel, who you might feel tortures you every day — he’s a pioneer of quantum medicine, which Aegis has declared forbidden. He’s not obsessed with healing people; he’s obsessed with reconstructing them.”
He should be looking for someone to help him die. Luka, who had somewhere along the way forgotten that goal, let the tension ease from his eyes and let himself be absorbed in the story. The fact that outside this hellish treatment room, the world and the people in it were still breathing — that fact reached out and touched Luka’s senses.
“And Engineer Kai, who’s busy carving out prosthetics fitted to your body — is probably right now, in the storage room, debating whether to engrave his favorite logo on your new arms and legs. That one talks to machines.”
“……”
“There are plenty of other crew members too. Whenever you want, you can talk to any of them. So get your strength back quickly and hear their stories for yourself.”
The most important part was missing from his telling.
“Why haven’t you said anything about yourself? I asked what kind of person you are.”
