“Is this strange?” Alex asked one morning, peering down around the edge of her book.

Adelina let her head lull backwards, one eyebrow raised. It was a delicate operation, balanced as she was against the leg that Alex had dangled off of the opposite side of the hammock as a counterweight. It had taken them some figuring, and the better part of a week, to find an arrangement that didn’t send them both toppling out of the hammock with the slightest heeling of the ship, but they had managed it with only a few instances of bruised elbows and scraped chins. Now Adelina lay comfortably in the crook of Alex’s arm, head pillowed against her shoulder, pretending to read the book that she had cradled overhead for the both of them.

“Well, yes,“ Adelina said after a moment. "But I think most English stories are a little strange, so -”

Alex huffed and swatted gently at her with the spine of the book. “Not that. I mean this business of taking to bed at sunrise that you’ve begun suffering on my behalf. I’m used to frittering my life away into the wee hours of the morning, but I didn’t think you would be so keen to follow me into it.”

She nodded back towards the stern windows, where the sun was just starting to paint the sky a brilliant orange over the horizon. Adelina turned to follow the gesture, then sagged back into the crook of Alex’s arm with a sigh.

“Oh, yes,” she said, pressing a theatrical hand to her forehead. “I am suffering! To go from a working through the night among sailors in a tavern, to working through the night among sailors on a ship, is such a cruelty -”

Alex rolled her eyes, mouth quirking up at the corners. “Alright, alright…”

“But I will do it for you, my captain!” Adelina rolled over so she was sprawled across Alex’s chest, clutching dramatically at the front of her shirt. “All for you! Oh, I will take all of the misery just to spend time in your company!”

She sighed again, a high fluttering note that tumbled down as she collapsed back onto Alex’s chest in a heap. Beneath her, she could feel Alex trembling with the effort of stifling her laughter.

“Ah, yes,” she said, when she had swallowed the worst of it. “Yes, I imagine you must be in true agony. After all, Tahir loathes all of that late night work, and you’re just so much like him -”

The rest of her sentence disappeared as Adelina shot upright, nearly upending them both onto the floor.

“How dare you,” she sputtered, coaxing up real insult to join the exaggerated sort. “Who would say that sort of thing? Just for that, I should… I should -”

“Thank me?” Alex suggested, and then buckled into a peal of much less successfully concealed laughter as Adelina’s fingers dug mercilessly into her sides. It was dangerous business to conduct while dangling three feet up in the air - and especially when Alex was doing her marked best to kick her off - but some insults just weren’t worth taking lying down.