Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who seems to make a new enemy every time they open their mouth
Maya splashes a little water on her face in the hotel bathroom. It's a marble-clad room as big as a spaceport arrivals lounge. She is a little scared that if she got turned around, it would take all evening to find her way back out to the function.
Zither-of-Heaven had mentioned it casually, a week ago. "Oh, my awful family—"
It's always my awful family. The rich and convolutedly connected relatives who took her in when her parents' ship had an O2 scrubber failure, out on an asteroid dig. Whenever they come up in conversation, Zither-of-Heaven flattens into two dimensions, speaks in habitual, defensive blandities. My awful family, because it lampshades the fact that they took a sudden orphan and submerged her in routine cruelties, as the despised poor relative, the obligation; the phrase laughs off what they did to her, preemptively routes onlookers away from drawing their own conclusions and pitying. The expectation management of a well-rehearsed light laugh.
"—my awful family have a thing. An event. I have an invitation, so since they've had to invite me, so that nobody can notice they didn't, I have to go so I don't show them up. I need — do you think you could tolerate a bad party, for free drinks?"
"You need to show up with a plus one," Maya had pieced together, in her measured pace.
"Yeah, I — yeah. If you— no, I understand, it'll be dreadful. I'll find someone off Orbitr—"
"Not necessary," Maya had said placidly, and Zither-of-Heaven had held herself in cautious staring tension for long seconds, then sagged.
"Thank you," she'd said, as if she'd just run a marathon. "You— thank you."
She had not mentioned the hired hotel ballroom, or that everyone would be wearing visible fortunes in understated designer clothes and probably-heirloom jewellery. Perhaps these things go so simply without saying, in these peoples' lives.
These people hate her. She thought she might have had an ally here in Zither-of-Heaven's favourite not-sister, but an early searing glare from across the room warned her off from even approaching.
Zither-of-Heaven wanders into the bathroom, thin-lipped and hunched.
"Maya, Maya," she mutters. "Sorry. Another hour maybe? For the break-even point of too ingrate to stay and too disappointment if you do?"
"Whatever you need," Maya says, heavy with astonished resentment at these people, at how much Zither-of-Heaven cares about their feelings.
Zither-of-Heaven sidles up to the sinks, and won't quite look at her. "So," she says, in a subdued little way. "I panicked? On the way in?" and Maya turns a look on her that makes her squirm. "I'm sorry! I— one of the aunts asked who you are and I— said you're in itinerant spacer I picked up in the spaceport bar on the way over because you lent me a coin for the jukebox?"
...Ah, that probably explains the reception she'd met when attempting to make polite conversation about the classical string musicians hired to play in the background.
"Zither-of-Heaven," she says dryly.
"I didn't," Zither-of-Heaven says, in a terrible, quiet voice, "want your name in their awful mouths."
"I am indescribably tough," Maya says, and flexes her biceps to make Zither-of-Heaven laugh — which she does, even if it's strained and a litle shaky.
She's never mentioned to Zither-of-Heaven that she once took ballroom dancing classes; her sudden new plan for the evening is to entice her into a surprise dance, and then manage, before they leave, to cheerily find some natural chink in a murderously stilted conversation to club someone — Zither-of-Heaven's vicious adoptive mother, for preference — over the head with the fact they've been spectacularly rude to Zither-of-Heaven's 50-50 business partner and ship pilot.
"Thank you for coming with me," Zither-of-Heaven tells her, with the brittle cheeriness of managing tears away, and Maya reaches out to neaten the flower pinned in her hair, with careful, callused fingers.
"Not necessary," Maya says.