Captain Artemisia & Dragon Selene
This is old but I just realized I forgot to post it. So if you're the type to enjoy crossovers ... here you go!
Artemisia remembers falling.
(The sky in pieces around her, cannon fire booming, rifles firing, dragon fire and acid tearing up the sky. The sound of wingbeats, of screams and hoarse-voiced orders shouted above the roar of dragons and clashing of claws and teeth and scales.)
(A Flamme-de-Gloire launched an entire breath of fire at an attacking Anglewing. The smaller dragon tucked its wings and dove down; the flames caught the lowest reaches of clouds and up they went in a flurry of orange quickly swallowed by black.)
She remembers falling, stomach lurching, Selene screaming above her. The carabiners snapped, damn them, a sudden twist knocked her over and off and then the wind, rushing and roaring and tearing at her cheeks. So heavy, so hard, she’d struggled with her belt and gear but nothing slowed her down. Above Selene tore her way through an enemy dragon but too far, too far.
Artemisia wakes with a jolt that turns into a bitten-off scream as the wound in her gut protests the sudden movement.
“Easy,” says a voice, strange and unfamiliar in a way that Artemisia’s muddled brain can’t quite process. “You’ll make it worse.”
Final images still dance behind her eyes - the motley underbelly of dragons as they darted above her, silhouetted against the bright blue sky - and Artemisia lies back down with a hiss. She sucks in a breath, then another, forcing herself to ignore the pain and swirling nausea. “Selene,” she says. What happened? She fell from her dragon, how is she not dead? “Where’s Selene? Is she all right”
No answer comes, and finally Artemisia’s brain recovers enough to realize why the words had sounded strange: they had come to her not in English, but in French.
Artemisia shouts and sits up again, pushing away the hand that tries to steady her. It’s growing dark, too dark to see any heraldry or colours, but she focuses on the field surgeon next to her, at his uniform, and hisses. “What happened?” Artemisia says, still in English, her mind already snapping together. Let them think she doesn’t understand the language; maybe someone will have a loose tongue. “Where’s my dragon?”
The man concentrates on packing away his tools. “You fell from your dragon,” he says, matching her with English and no doubt patting himself on the back for being more intelligent. “You landed on the back of a Petit Chevalier. You are very fortunate not to die. As it is you cracked your - how you say, côtes.”
He gestures, not that Artemisia needs the help with the agony stabbing through her side. “Ribs,” she says, translating without thinking.
He nods. “Quite so.”
Artemisia gropes at her ribs and sure enough there’s a field bandage. The air slices through her chest like knives. “Where,” she says again, fingers curling around the handle of an invisible knife, “is my dragon?”
The man sits back and regards her calmly, expression the kind of neutral that only comes with tremendous effort. “We know who you are, you know,” he says, and Artemisia blinks. “You and your little dragon.” The next phrase comes in French, the kind of army slang that Artemisia tosses around at her own comrades in English but has no hope of translating here. Her confusion shows, and he gives her a thin, humourless smile. “You are, as best I can put it in your language, the Fearless Bitch and her Grey Devil.”
Artemisia breaks out in a bark of startled, incredulous laughter. It’s not funny - here she is in French territory, a wounded prisoner, Selene without her captain and likely frantic and tearing apart the entire sky looking for her - but the part of her that got young Artemisia into trouble with her betters time and again can’t help it.
“I’m flattered,” Artemisia says. Now she definitely has to get back alive, because everyone needs to hear this. Lyme would laugh, too, were she here, and they’d never get Selene to stop puffing her chest for at least a week.
“I would not be,” the man snaps. “We have lost many dragons to you and your demon. There are many who would gladly give up a month’s pay for five minutes alone with you.”
Just like that, the humour vanishes like morning mist under a hot sun. “Let them try,” Artemisia snarls, and somewhere Lyme will have a headache. No one ever said she was smart. “Why are you healing me?”
He folds his hands. “We are not barbarians. We do not hang those who cannot walk the steps to the gallows. Rest well, bitch. There will be no transfer for you.”
He walks away - Artemisia lurches to her feet, swaying and cursing under her breath, but three men step from the shadows, rifles raised. Artemisia has taken on more men in brawls before, but none with guns and not with cracked ribs. She staggers back down to her knees, closes her eyes in defiance and starts to think.
The smart move would be to take her time with healing; the problem is that Artemisia is no better at malingering in enemy territory than she is at home. After the end of the first day Artemisia is itching to get up and move, and only the thought of her dragon keeps her from doing something foolish.
It’s a captain’s fear, that Artemisia worries more about what will happen to Selene than herself. Even the French can’t botch a hanging that badly, surely, and Artemisia stopped fearing death the first time Duilius drove himself up into the sky with a few strokes of his powerful wings. But Selene -
Selene will not take a new captain. Artemisia is the only reason Selene flies under the king’s banner now, and even her captain only manages to control her half the time, if that. Selene will not be Celeritas, either, experienced and knowledgeable enough to take up a post and rebuff any human who protested, which leaves the breeding grounds.
The thought of Selene, locked away in the hills and surrounded by fat, complacent dragons, sends a sick shudder through her, far worse than even the sharpest pain from her injury. How long before Selene accepts that her captain is dead - how long before they tell her it’s a certainty - and how long will she fight? Selene will not take the news and go quietly. She will fight, she will scream, she will tear the head from the first person who tries to tell her that Captain Misha is a lost cause.
Even now Selene will be demanding to search, threatening to burn down the entire camp if she doesn’t get her way. Odds are they will humour her for a little while, send out couriers to scout the area, but they won’t let her out on her own and who knows how long the little dragon’s sanity will last without her captain there to bring her back.
No, Artemisia thinks, looking out over the camp and feeling the ice settle in the hollows of her spine. No, she cannot let them kill her. Not when it will kill Selene too.
Artemisia spends the next day listening to the others discuss what to do with her. They don’t bother to make much secret of it; either they think she can’t understand them or they don’t care and want her to hear. Most of the captains taken down by Selene and Artemisia went down with their dragons; those who remain are friends or those under their command, burning with vengeance for a fallen comrade.
They stand near the clearing where Artemisia is sequestered, shooting her darkly poisonous looks that are twice as frightening for being exaggerated not a whit. In any other circumstance Artemisia would call them out and be done with it, better to fight on her own terms and try to get a bit of control, but this is different. These are men who lost their dragons, whether they captained them or no, and they might be French but Artemisia can’t just treat them like she would a bunch of noisy brutes deep in their cups.
Not that she’ll sit and let them abuse her, if it comes to that, but for once Artemisia is not spoiling for a brawl.
From what Artemisia can gather from the snatches of conversation that drift her way, they’re waiting to hear back from the authorities on what to do with her. The options appear to be kill her here or kill her elsewhere, and it almost is a shame that no one else is here with her because no one back home would believe this. The last aviator who caught the French’s attention by name like this had been Lyme herself, and young Artemisia had dreamt about one day capturing that honour for herself.
Artemisia will tell the story until the entire company groans to hear it, if only she can escape.
The attack comes the following night.
Artemisia springs awake, her mind muddled and rattled with dreams of darkness and Selene’s wild, wordless cries, to find the camp in an uproar. There’s too much noise and confusion for her to make out anything substantial, but Artemisia catches words here and there: scouts, and dragons and - finally - the phrase Artemisia now recognizes as the one the surgeon used for Selene.
Hands grab her arms, haul her roughly to her feet, and Artemisia gasps with pain but refuses to give them the satisfaction. “It’s here,” says one of the guards. “We should kill her now, before it comes for her!”
“No, are you mad!” retorts the other. “If we kill her, what do you think will stop her dragon from tearing us all apart! Get her up and in the clearing, let it see that we have her -“
A wild scream above them cuts off the rest of the conversation, and all of them look up in reflex. Artemisia tilts her head back, squinting in the darkness, just in time to see a familiar flash of silver, gleaming in the moonlight. “Misha!” Selene calls, her voice cracking with blood frenzy. “Misha, stay where you are, I’m coming!”
Artemisia turns to her handlers, grinning toothily as they drag her to the centre of camp and cock a pistol to her temple. “You’ve done it now,” she says in French, and the crack she takes across the face, snapping her head back and splitting open her lip, is well worth the fear widening their eyes.
The air hisses with the sputtering spray of acid, and a moment later a pillar of fire tears through the camp. Three tents catch fire and the rest of the flames drip and sizzle to the ground, pooling and eating away at the grass. Artemisia blinks away the spots in her vision as her brain tries to process jets of flame acting like liquid, except then Voluntas drops down from the clouds.
Oh, Artemisia’s brain thinks to itself, slipping that piece of information away for a later reaction. Apparently Voluntas’ acid has come in.
“I see her!” the dragon cries in triumph. “Of course I did, I told you I’m the best - she’s in the middle! Shall I fetch her?”
Artemisia’s captors start shouting far too fast for her to make it out, but it hardly matters now. With the pistol still pointed firmly at her head, Artemisia twists and relieves her nearest guard of the short knife at his belt - the one she’d spotted days ago and kept an eye on ever since. A few quick slashes - the men drop, grunting and yelping in pain - a few well-placed strikes with her fists and boots - and Artemisia breaks free and runs as the fire shoots through her side.
Selene lands, and wonder of wonders that’s Lyme on her back, reaching down with one strong hand and pulling Artemisia up into place. They took all her gear before she ever woke up that first day, and she has no harness or carabiners to attach herself, but Lyme wraps an arm around her waist, locking her in. “Go!” Artemisia orders, and Selene throws herself back on her rear legs and launches herself into the sky.
They fly up, up, up, and Artemisia’s head spins. She leans back against Lyme a little, and her former captain holds her steady. “You’re not on Duilius,” Artemisia says intelligently.
“No,” Lyme says, and with her other arm she runs a hand over Artemisia’s side, finding the bandage in moments. “This isn’t an official mission. It’s not a mission at all, unless you count me waking up in the middle of the night to find our two youngest dragons trying to sneak away while Claudius argued himself blue in the face.”
Artemisia attempts to imagine either Voluntas or Selene managing anything close to sneaking, and utterly fails.
“I wasn’t going to let them talk and talk until you got hurt!” Selene says, turning her head back as she heads back toward camp. “They told me we couldn’t risk it! They said you were only one captain! It’s like they didn’t know you’re my captain!”
“I know,” Artemisia says, leaning forward as much as she can risk it to stroke one hand across Selene’s neck. “But I’m here now. I’m safe.”
“My captain,” Selene says again with helpless desperation, her command of English slipping under the force of her emotion. “Not theirs. Mine!”
“Yours,” Artemisia agrees. “Yours always.”
Selene stops growling with every breath, and Artemisia lets herself sink back against Lyme’s chest, closing her eyes and trusting her dragon to bring her home.
Artemisia remembers falling.
(The sky in pieces around her, cannon fire booming, rifles firing, dragon fire and acid tearing up the sky. The sound of wingbeats, of screams and hoarse-voiced orders shouted above the roar of dragons and clashing of claws and teeth and scales.)
(A Flamme-de-Gloire launched an entire breath of fire at an attacking Anglewing. The smaller dragon tucked its wings and dove down; the flames caught the lowest reaches of clouds and up they went in a flurry of orange quickly swallowed by black.)
She remembers falling, stomach lurching, Selene screaming above her. The carabiners snapped, damn them, a sudden twist knocked her over and off and then the wind, rushing and roaring and tearing at her cheeks. So heavy, so hard, she’d struggled with her belt and gear but nothing slowed her down. Above Selene tore her way through an enemy dragon but too far, too far.
Artemisia wakes with a jolt that turns into a bitten-off scream as the wound in her gut protests the sudden movement.
“Easy,” says a voice, strange and unfamiliar in a way that Artemisia’s muddled brain can’t quite process. “You’ll make it worse.”
Final images still dance behind her eyes - the motley underbelly of dragons as they darted above her, silhouetted against the bright blue sky - and Artemisia lies back down with a hiss. She sucks in a breath, then another, forcing herself to ignore the pain and swirling nausea. “Selene,” she says. What happened? She fell from her dragon, how is she not dead? “Where’s Selene? Is she all right”
No answer comes, and finally Artemisia’s brain recovers enough to realize why the words had sounded strange: they had come to her not in English, but in French.
Artemisia shouts and sits up again, pushing away the hand that tries to steady her. It’s growing dark, too dark to see any heraldry or colours, but she focuses on the field surgeon next to her, at his uniform, and hisses. “What happened?” Artemisia says, still in English, her mind already snapping together. Let them think she doesn’t understand the language; maybe someone will have a loose tongue. “Where’s my dragon?”
The man concentrates on packing away his tools. “You fell from your dragon,” he says, matching her with English and no doubt patting himself on the back for being more intelligent. “You landed on the back of a Petit Chevalier. You are very fortunate not to die. As it is you cracked your - how you say, côtes.”
He gestures, not that Artemisia needs the help with the agony stabbing through her side. “Ribs,” she says, translating without thinking.
He nods. “Quite so.”
Artemisia gropes at her ribs and sure enough there’s a field bandage. The air slices through her chest like knives. “Where,” she says again, fingers curling around the handle of an invisible knife, “is my dragon?”
The man sits back and regards her calmly, expression the kind of neutral that only comes with tremendous effort. “We know who you are, you know,” he says, and Artemisia blinks. “You and your little dragon.” The next phrase comes in French, the kind of army slang that Artemisia tosses around at her own comrades in English but has no hope of translating here. Her confusion shows, and he gives her a thin, humourless smile. “You are, as best I can put it in your language, the Fearless Bitch and her Grey Devil.”
Artemisia breaks out in a bark of startled, incredulous laughter. It’s not funny - here she is in French territory, a wounded prisoner, Selene without her captain and likely frantic and tearing apart the entire sky looking for her - but the part of her that got young Artemisia into trouble with her betters time and again can’t help it.
“I’m flattered,” Artemisia says. Now she definitely has to get back alive, because everyone needs to hear this. Lyme would laugh, too, were she here, and they’d never get Selene to stop puffing her chest for at least a week.
“I would not be,” the man snaps. “We have lost many dragons to you and your demon. There are many who would gladly give up a month’s pay for five minutes alone with you.”
Just like that, the humour vanishes like morning mist under a hot sun. “Let them try,” Artemisia snarls, and somewhere Lyme will have a headache. No one ever said she was smart. “Why are you healing me?”
He folds his hands. “We are not barbarians. We do not hang those who cannot walk the steps to the gallows. Rest well, bitch. There will be no transfer for you.”
He walks away - Artemisia lurches to her feet, swaying and cursing under her breath, but three men step from the shadows, rifles raised. Artemisia has taken on more men in brawls before, but none with guns and not with cracked ribs. She staggers back down to her knees, closes her eyes in defiance and starts to think.
The smart move would be to take her time with healing; the problem is that Artemisia is no better at malingering in enemy territory than she is at home. After the end of the first day Artemisia is itching to get up and move, and only the thought of her dragon keeps her from doing something foolish.
It’s a captain’s fear, that Artemisia worries more about what will happen to Selene than herself. Even the French can’t botch a hanging that badly, surely, and Artemisia stopped fearing death the first time Duilius drove himself up into the sky with a few strokes of his powerful wings. But Selene -
Selene will not take a new captain. Artemisia is the only reason Selene flies under the king’s banner now, and even her captain only manages to control her half the time, if that. Selene will not be Celeritas, either, experienced and knowledgeable enough to take up a post and rebuff any human who protested, which leaves the breeding grounds.
The thought of Selene, locked away in the hills and surrounded by fat, complacent dragons, sends a sick shudder through her, far worse than even the sharpest pain from her injury. How long before Selene accepts that her captain is dead - how long before they tell her it’s a certainty - and how long will she fight? Selene will not take the news and go quietly. She will fight, she will scream, she will tear the head from the first person who tries to tell her that Captain Misha is a lost cause.
Even now Selene will be demanding to search, threatening to burn down the entire camp if she doesn’t get her way. Odds are they will humour her for a little while, send out couriers to scout the area, but they won’t let her out on her own and who knows how long the little dragon’s sanity will last without her captain there to bring her back.
No, Artemisia thinks, looking out over the camp and feeling the ice settle in the hollows of her spine. No, she cannot let them kill her. Not when it will kill Selene too.
Artemisia spends the next day listening to the others discuss what to do with her. They don’t bother to make much secret of it; either they think she can’t understand them or they don’t care and want her to hear. Most of the captains taken down by Selene and Artemisia went down with their dragons; those who remain are friends or those under their command, burning with vengeance for a fallen comrade.
They stand near the clearing where Artemisia is sequestered, shooting her darkly poisonous looks that are twice as frightening for being exaggerated not a whit. In any other circumstance Artemisia would call them out and be done with it, better to fight on her own terms and try to get a bit of control, but this is different. These are men who lost their dragons, whether they captained them or no, and they might be French but Artemisia can’t just treat them like she would a bunch of noisy brutes deep in their cups.
Not that she’ll sit and let them abuse her, if it comes to that, but for once Artemisia is not spoiling for a brawl.
From what Artemisia can gather from the snatches of conversation that drift her way, they’re waiting to hear back from the authorities on what to do with her. The options appear to be kill her here or kill her elsewhere, and it almost is a shame that no one else is here with her because no one back home would believe this. The last aviator who caught the French’s attention by name like this had been Lyme herself, and young Artemisia had dreamt about one day capturing that honour for herself.
Artemisia will tell the story until the entire company groans to hear it, if only she can escape.
The attack comes the following night.
Artemisia springs awake, her mind muddled and rattled with dreams of darkness and Selene’s wild, wordless cries, to find the camp in an uproar. There’s too much noise and confusion for her to make out anything substantial, but Artemisia catches words here and there: scouts, and dragons and - finally - the phrase Artemisia now recognizes as the one the surgeon used for Selene.
Hands grab her arms, haul her roughly to her feet, and Artemisia gasps with pain but refuses to give them the satisfaction. “It’s here,” says one of the guards. “We should kill her now, before it comes for her!”
“No, are you mad!” retorts the other. “If we kill her, what do you think will stop her dragon from tearing us all apart! Get her up and in the clearing, let it see that we have her -“
A wild scream above them cuts off the rest of the conversation, and all of them look up in reflex. Artemisia tilts her head back, squinting in the darkness, just in time to see a familiar flash of silver, gleaming in the moonlight. “Misha!” Selene calls, her voice cracking with blood frenzy. “Misha, stay where you are, I’m coming!”
Artemisia turns to her handlers, grinning toothily as they drag her to the centre of camp and cock a pistol to her temple. “You’ve done it now,” she says in French, and the crack she takes across the face, snapping her head back and splitting open her lip, is well worth the fear widening their eyes.
The air hisses with the sputtering spray of acid, and a moment later a pillar of fire tears through the camp. Three tents catch fire and the rest of the flames drip and sizzle to the ground, pooling and eating away at the grass. Artemisia blinks away the spots in her vision as her brain tries to process jets of flame acting like liquid, except then Voluntas drops down from the clouds.
Oh, Artemisia’s brain thinks to itself, slipping that piece of information away for a later reaction. Apparently Voluntas’ acid has come in.
“I see her!” the dragon cries in triumph. “Of course I did, I told you I’m the best - she’s in the middle! Shall I fetch her?”
Artemisia’s captors start shouting far too fast for her to make it out, but it hardly matters now. With the pistol still pointed firmly at her head, Artemisia twists and relieves her nearest guard of the short knife at his belt - the one she’d spotted days ago and kept an eye on ever since. A few quick slashes - the men drop, grunting and yelping in pain - a few well-placed strikes with her fists and boots - and Artemisia breaks free and runs as the fire shoots through her side.
Selene lands, and wonder of wonders that’s Lyme on her back, reaching down with one strong hand and pulling Artemisia up into place. They took all her gear before she ever woke up that first day, and she has no harness or carabiners to attach herself, but Lyme wraps an arm around her waist, locking her in. “Go!” Artemisia orders, and Selene throws herself back on her rear legs and launches herself into the sky.
They fly up, up, up, and Artemisia’s head spins. She leans back against Lyme a little, and her former captain holds her steady. “You’re not on Duilius,” Artemisia says intelligently.
“No,” Lyme says, and with her other arm she runs a hand over Artemisia’s side, finding the bandage in moments. “This isn’t an official mission. It’s not a mission at all, unless you count me waking up in the middle of the night to find our two youngest dragons trying to sneak away while Claudius argued himself blue in the face.”
Artemisia attempts to imagine either Voluntas or Selene managing anything close to sneaking, and utterly fails.
“I wasn’t going to let them talk and talk until you got hurt!” Selene says, turning her head back as she heads back toward camp. “They told me we couldn’t risk it! They said you were only one captain! It’s like they didn’t know you’re my captain!”
“I know,” Artemisia says, leaning forward as much as she can risk it to stroke one hand across Selene’s neck. “But I’m here now. I’m safe.”
“My captain,” Selene says again with helpless desperation, her command of English slipping under the force of her emotion. “Not theirs. Mine!”
“Yours,” Artemisia agrees. “Yours always.”
Selene stops growling with every breath, and Artemisia lets herself sink back against Lyme’s chest, closing her eyes and trusting her dragon to bring her home.