Before I was swallowed whole by Smallville fandom, I ran across a reference to an old show I used to watch and love, "The Adventures of Sinbad." The reference led to a link, which led to a very, very dead fandom. I joined three lists, and no one had said a thing on them for two years until I got there. I hadn't seen the show in at least five years and I knew I was just passing through the fandom, but I did feel inspired to write a little something. It doesn't pay much attention to canon, since I'd forgotten the canon, but I did get feedback when I posted it to one of the lists, and I was told I got the characters down pretty well. Really, all things considered, that's all I could ask.

Two months she has been with this crew, and two things she knows without question.

The Captain is beautiful. The Captain mourns.

They put into port and she leaves the ship almost immediately, the absence of another woman aboard its own kind of haunting. Maeve, they call that absence, and she knows that name from Before, but nothing else will come to her. The name is not hers, but sometimes they look at her as though they expect her to wear it. Sometimes she wishes she did not know better than to try.

She finds a place near the docks, a place she can watch until he leaves the ship at last, and then she can follow him into the perfumed dens of the city's houri. No one bothers her as she passes in his wake; she knows herself to be beautiful, but her manner is wrong for a pleasure worker, her searching too obvious. No one bothers her, and no one stops her as she slips into a pleasure house shortly after him, secreting herself in one of the curtained alcoves as he moves with languid grace to the central pit, the women gathered there watching him with soft and avid eyes.

He always finds a house run by a woman, and as far as she knows he has never had to pay to let these creatures use his body.

They push him down among the cushions and he lets them, taking the kisses and caresses they offer but returning the gestures only absently, distantly. This much of him, at least, she has. There is no distance in his eyes when he looks at her. Instead there is pain, and the single word echoing.

Maeve.

One of the women floats toward a drum set at the edge of the pit. It looks more substantial than she, but she strikes it strong and true with her palms, setting a rhythm somewhere between compelling and hypnotic. Another woman emerges from the shadows at the far end of the great room, a woman swathed in veils, and she begins to undulate to the music. The Captain does not really watch, though his eyes obediently follow the movements. The woman drops one veil, then another. Then she lifts the one covering her hair and the Captain's focus crackles like lightning in the room, painful and electric.

The dancer has red hair.

She makes herself watch as the dancer comes closer and he reaches out his hand, drawing her down. There is a small, soft sound, one she has heard before, and she knows he is crying, that he will make only that single sound but the tears will fall like liquid diamonds down his face and the women will suck at them, lightly, delicately. She would do that for him. She would drink his tears, taste his grief. Love his pain, if that is all he has to give her. It is more than she has to give him, now. Maybe Before...but he has his own Before, and sometimes she is certain he wants to forget as much as she wants to remember.

She has considered coming to him like this. She has fingered the veils in the bazaars where they put into port and thought of draping them around herself, of slipping into the next houri den he visits and offering herself as just another silent, perfumed woman. Would he recognize her? Would his reaction change, if he did? Would he touch her with that distance in his eyes, or would the pain come before he ordered her back to the ship? She is not certain which is more likely. She is not certain which she wants, and so she leaves the veils glittering in the stalls and goes to argue with Doubar over dates and figs and flasks of wine.

But Doubar is not here, and this woman's hair is red, but this woman is no more Maeve than she is.

She pushes aside the curtains and stands, striding out to the central pit. She could push these women gently aside, she knows they will not resist her, but that is not her way. Not now, with her own pain clawing at her like a mad thing and his name beating in her heart and what may or may not be her own name beating in her head. She shoves the women aside, grabs the dancer by her long red hair and drags her away from him, then stands and waits.

For him to open his eyes.

His shirt is open, smears of lip rouge decorating his chest. And his cheeks, where the tears are still falling. She has never seen him like this, this close. She has never dared come this far into his grief. He looks like a man who remembers too much and who does not expect the mercy of ever forgetting.

She has forgotten everything but her perhaps-name and the name of his ghost. It is commonly believed, and she usually agrees, that this forgetting is a burden. But she looks at him and she thinks she would take his memories, if she could, and leave him empty of everything but his own name. Empty of the weight of Before, and the haunting of the ghost who may not be dead.

She lowers herself to the cushions before him, leans forward, and breathes his name into his mouth. "Sinbad."

His hands come up to tangle in her dark hair, and he opens his eyes. For a moment she sees distance, for a moment pain. Then she sees nothing save herself and the red-headed specter. But it is her name alone he speaks before he draws her down. "Bryn."

She will take this, if it is all he has to give her. He is beautiful, and he mourns.

But he, at least, can name what he mourns.

~END~