Tatehan tried really hard to hold in another bout of laughter, but it just wasn't possible.

When Riven responded with, "The Ocean is in the sky," it felt like someone had told him a joke so perfect it could win the highest comedy award on Earth. In his mind, he was already wheezing: What the fuck?

"Lol!" he said out loud, expecting to see some amusement in Riven's eyes. But he saw none of that.

The first time he'd laughed at something she'd said, she had smiled— something faint, like a tolerant curve of the lips. Now, her face was stone-serious, her gray eyes fixed on him with an unsettling calmness. The afternoon sun caught the silver stud in her ear, but nothing in her expression glittered.

Tatehan's chuckles died awkwardly in his throat. He looked up at the sky, as if it might offer an explanation. He squinted, trying to imagine it as an ocean, a vast, inverted sea. He searched for waves in the wisps of cloud, for depth in the endless blue. But the sky was just… the goddamn sky!

It was limitless, empty, and nothing like water.

He scratched the back of his head and turned back to her. "What do you mean, the ocean is the sky?"

Riven didn't answer immediately. She leaned back against her chair, the wind teasing strands of dark hair from her braid. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer and further away.

"When I was younger," she began, "I engrossed myself in pirate works. Movies, novels, anything related to them. I was obsessed. I built model ships, memorized sailing terms, even tried to knot a proper bowline with my bedsheets." A ghost of that old excitement touched her face, then faded. "I always wanted to be a pirate. From the films I watched, they felt so… free. Unbound. It didn't matter if they were men or women, they commanded the horizon."

She paused, her gaze turning toward the distant sprawl of the Red crest clan below them. Her expression gentled, bathed in a nostalgia so palpable…

"But when I did my research," she continued, the practical reality settling over her words like dust, "I discovered that being a pirate isn't exactly possible. Not the way I dreamed. Sure, there are oceans on Mars now since it was terraformed, but…" She shook her head. "I won't call them real oceans. They're kinda engineered basins, beautiful, maybe, but contained. They don't have the… the wildness of the ones on Earth. And Earth's oceans are so heavily monitored, so regulated, that the idea of a pirate ship slipping through the net is a fantasy. A child's story."

Tatehan listened, his earlier amusement completely gone. He'd never seen Riven like this.

She spoke with a dreamy tone in her voice.

"I gave up on it," she admitted, her voice

dropping. "Filed it away with other impossible things. Until one day, I found a children's picture book. It was old and kinda faded, it looked like a hundred years old. It was called Starlight Raiders."

She turned to him now, her eyes alight with a different kind of intensity.

"It was about space pirates," she said, as if revealing a big juicy secret. "They had massive, patchwork ships, not of wood, but of salvaged hulls and solar sails. They didn't sail seas; they flew the stellar currents between worlds. They'd drift through asteroid belts like archipelagos, board corporate freighters near Luna, hide in the radio shadows of gas giants." Her hands moved as she spoke, sketching shapes in the air: ships, orbits, trajectories. "They did what pirates do. They stole cargo from unsuspecting haulers. They took over automated mining rigs. They lived by their own code, out where Coalition law signals grow thin and static-filled."

Tatehan's mind began to stretch around the concept. Pirates?

Not on water, but in the vacuum… in space!

Not with cutlasses, but with plasma cutters and hacking rigs. He pictured it: the dark silence of space, the sudden flare of engine burns, a ship grappling another, airlocks hissing open and people fighting in the sky!

Damn!

"They weren't just villains in the book," Riven added, perhaps seeing his thoughts play across his face. "Some were protectors. They'd chase off slaver ships preying on colony transports. They'd smuggle medicine to embargoed settlements. The book made them… romantic, but also necessary. A counterbalance." She met his gaze squarely. "That's what I intend to be. Not a raider. A renegade. A good one, if such a thing exists out there."

The wind picked up, carrying some softness with it.

Tatehan looked from Riven's earnest face back up to the sky. It was no longer just empty blue. Now, he saw it for what it was: another world of different possibilities. Imagine what he would do in it with his spaceship.

With his spaceship he would explore different civilizations and meet new worlds. Even be on new planets.

His thoughts spun, world-building on the fly. He imagined the logistics—the fuel, the navigation, the hiding places. The sheer, terrifying freedom of it. No ports or nations like Earth, instead it would be the endless black and the pinprick lights of distant stars. To call the sky an ocean suddenly didn't seem like a joke.

Maybe the sky was an ocean?

Maybe it was instead a place of endless possibilities where spaceships can roam free. One can explore and meet new worlds: planets actually.

A place to see what remained of Earth.

A long moment passed, filled only by the sigh of the wind. Tatehan swallowed, all traces of laughter gone, replaced by a dawning, humbled awe.

He looked at Riven, her silhouette framed against the vastness she hoped to conquer, and said the only word that felt both utterly inadequate and completely true:

"That's crazy."

A small, real smile finally touched her lips and she nodded slowly.

It was crazy how a normal casual conversation had led and carried this much importance and emotion.

"Yeah," she said softly, turning her eyes back to the sky ( an ocean to her). "It is."

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