The Pirate King Ch. 11

"You make me an idiot," he repeated.

I shrugged, unsure what he meant.

"A complacent, foolish, unsafe idiot."

I didn't like what I was hearing him say. "You're always safe with me," I reminded him, feeling his arm give to my incessant entreaties. I smiled up at him, and he began to smile back.

Suddenly, that smile turned into a scowl. "See!" He threw his hands up, dislodging my hand and causing me to raise my brow. "See," he repeated, a little quieter, much less emphatic, "you say shit like that, and I don't have any choice but to believe you because you're just so. So."

"Love." I reached up, and this time he let me pull him towards my body. I held his face in my hands and kissed the lines between his eyebrows. "What it is that has you so afraid?"

His scowl deepened.

"Talk to me," I murmured.

I felt him sigh, muscles that had bunched in worry slowly melting in my arms. "Fuck," he whispered. I gave him another moment, running my fingers up and down his back.

Then; "Have you heard of a man they call the Worm?"

He said it so hesitantly, so quietly, that my fingers paused, as if I needed to still my body to better listen. This was something dangerous to him, something careful, and I wasn't sure in what ways yet but I knew that I should handle it with care.

"I haven't," I told him, which was the truth. It was also the truth that I didn't believe that any man could harm me, that any being could cause me even the slightest semblance of danger. Or rather, that only three could, and I knew where all of them were. One, on a island far in the north. One, on his grand ship also in the north. And one probably still back at the brothel where I had left him, frustrated and worried, when I had run to be with the Captain. And none of them had the bad sense to be called the Worm.

"He's. I was told you were spotted with him. And." I felt him draw in a breath against my chest. My fingers were light on his back, drawing gentle designs against his skin. "He is an evil man, my love."

I couldn't help myself. "I have no fear of evil men." Even as the words left my mouth, I winced. His fear was something I shouldn't minimize.

But he was simply shaking his head. "I know this. But he is not like other men. The things he does, the power he holds." He looked up at me for the first time in the conversation, and I blinked at all the things he held in his eyes. There was more to this than just hearsay. He was seeing things, his eyes trapping sights long ago encountered and I watched him struggle with it, watched him try so hard not to pour out onto me like grease, like hot tar, sticky and impossible to escape and he struggled in it, drowned in it, and my chest was tight just watching him and I don't know how he breathed.

"You can't imagine the things he has done," he told me, and I hated that his eyes told me that he could.

I pulled him close to me, letting him feel my arms wrapping around him. I had him; he was here with me. It was me, and only me. I wanted to tell him that I would never let this man near him, that I would never suffer the presence of this man, that all it would take was his command and I would hunt him down and strike him from this earth but I didn't have the time because Val decided to chose that moment to show up.

"So," he said. "Are you going to introduce us?"

I felt the Captain tense in my arms. He was pressed up against me, his face to the door, and it hurt that I knew he would see this stranger, that I couldn't keep him protected in this moment of vulnerability. Without looking back to Val I shifted my body to act as a shield, covering as much of the Captain's form as I could, trying to give him a space to be safe.

"Fuck off," I told Val, amused by neither his presence nor his timing.

"No." I heard him moving into the room. "I was worried about you."

That was a lie, and we both knew it. "You should have knocked."

"You broke the door," Val responded drily.

I winced into the Captain's neck.

"Love," the Captain whispered, and I pushed a hand into his hair. He sounded worried, stressed. I apologized internally for my infernal brother. "We need to go."

I shook my head. "We don't need to go anywhere. Val was just going." I said the last part loud enough for Val to hear.

Val snorted. "Val isn't going anywhere until he gets some answers."

"Val," I said dangerously, feeling the way the Captain was so tense in my arms. Something was wrong here. I didn't like it, didn't like the way his breathing was quick and shallow, like he was on the cusp of going for his knife.

"Don't try," I said to both the Captain to Val. I lifted my head and watched my brightly adorned brother settle on a chair across the room. "Just go."

"You can't force me -"

The Captain lunged up and went for his knife, still attached to the breeches off the side of his bed. I grabbed him before he got there, capturing his wrists and bringing his body tight against mine, but our weights carried us off the edge of the bed anyway and we slid to the floor together, a tangle of skin and stress and breath. I whispered apologies and assurances into my love's ear as gravity took hold of us, my concern making my heart beat fast, my stomach sinking past the cold wood of the floor. Why was he reacting like this?

I remembered, suddenly, the bottle in his hand back at the brothel. Was he still drunk?

He was very still against me, but I didn't let him go. I wasn't sure what he would do, and we were now closer to his blade. "Be calm," I whispered to him. "He'll be gone soon, I'm here -"

"Run," he interrupted me.

I frowned. "What?"

"Run." He looked up at me, eyes frantic. "I'll hold him off, I can handle it again, I can't. If he takes you, please." He looked like he might cry, and I felt something like panic well up within me. "I can't lose you to him, I couldn't live knowing he had you."

"Who? Val?" I looked up to find Val staring at him, a darker cousin of understanding pulling heavy at his face. I decided I did not like looking at Val and looked back at the Captain.

His expression wasn't much better.

"Please," he whispered, and my stomach churned. He was falling apart before me, he was in so much pain and I didn't know how to make it go away. I wanted to do what he asked of me - gods, when was the last time he had asked me to do anything? He commanded, he was a force, why would he be sitting here, broken in my arms, begging me?

Begging me to run from my brother.

I turned on Val. "What is this?"

Val turned away, a twist on his lips that I hadn't wanted to see. He didn't respond.

"Val," I snapped. "The fuck is he talking about?"

"It would seem," Val said, his voice that careful tone that he took when he was holding back the things that were real, "that I have a reputation."

"A reputation?" In my arms, the Captain shook. Val didn't elaborate. I was angry, I was confused, I was hurt; by my brother, by all the gaps that had suddenly appeared in my life, by all the ways that things always seemed to switch to different when I needed them to stay at same. "You've always had a reputation, Val. You've never had one like this."

Val's business depended on his reputation. It depended on the trust that he built up among the working men and women, the promises they knew he would keep. He needed them to know that when he said 'safe working conditions', that was what he meant. They believed it. I believed it. When I had died, it was what he was known for. Safe working conditions in the brothels he ran, and buying out debts for those who didn't want to work for his competitors. If you needed to get out, you went to Val. Val was safety; Val was a refuge.

So what the hell was this?

"Things have changed," he said softly.

They certainly fucking had. I waited for his explanation.

None came.

I sighed and looked down to the Captain. He hadn't moved in some time. "Love," I addressed him, and I felt him stir. "If I let you go, will you promise not to attack him?"

"No." His answer was immediate and without emotion, although he still shook. Val shifted and turned his head further away.

"Please," I asked him softly. "He won't hurt you."

"Hurt me?" The Captain twisted in my arms to look up at me. "I'm not fucking scared of him hurting me. I'm scared of. Fuck, do you even know who this is?"

I looked over at Val. "I thought I did," I said softly. Val crossed his arms and didn't look at me.

"He's. He buys and sells men, sailor." The Captain was animated, his eyes frantic and panicked. "He forces them to pleasure him, to pleasure others, to. And they don't have a choice, and the things he does. I've." He took a deep breath, his eyes flicking everywhere, never landing anywhere long. "I know people he's taken, okay? He breaks people. He kills people, kills your soul and owns you, you'll never be free of him again, you'll never -"

A sudden noise drew my attention back to Val. I watched him, stunned, as he tore himself from his seat and pushed past us towards the door.

The Captain hissed a curse in his direction, but Val didn't pause in his outward trajectory.

As soon as he was gone, the man in my arms all but collapsed. Then, in an instant, he was pulling for release again.

"We need to go, we need to go now."

But I was not to be moved, at least not yet. "No."

"Are you fucking listening to me? We need to get away from him, before he comes -"

"That isn't Val."

"What?"

I twisted his body so that he was sitting facing me. "Those things you said. It isn't Val."

His face clouded. "It happened, it fucking happened exactly like that -"

I cut him off gently with a light squeeze on his wrists. "I'm not saying it didn't happen. I believe you, and trust you." I searched his face until I believed that he knew that what I said was true. "But Val would never own another human being."

He frowned up at me, but I knew this to be true. Val was against all forms of ownership, so radically we often came to odds. "Love has to be free to be truly given," he used to say. It was one of the reasons his relationships were always open. I would respond that a monogamous relationship could be free, that two people deciding not to see others is not a form of ownership, but he would wave his hand and call me 'fodgy' and 'afraid of the commitment of true freedom'.

And so it made no sense that Val would own people. Val was not a good person, by any stretch of the imagination. Val had done unspeakable things to men, but all of those men had been fighters, and some of them had even deserved it. And he had wanted to leave that behind; it was one the reasons he had left the sea.

No, this did not add up.

"I'm going to let you go," I told the Captain. "Because I have to go find Val and talk to him. But I'd appreciate it if you didn't try and kill him while I did that."

He thought about that for a moment, then nodded. I kissed his head in thanks and released his wrists.

"You know what he's done," he told me, arms crossed. "You still want to talk to him?"

I nodded. I needed to know the truth. I met his eyes for a moment. "I trust him."

That seemed to take him by surprise. He was still for a long moment, searching my face for something, I'm not sure what. In the end he uncrossed his arms and nodded.

"How will you find him?" he asked me as I moved through the room, gathering clothes and trying to not be distracted by the naked man standing beside me.

"He is with the sea." I had forgotten about the ripped shirt - I spared a glance at Val's pile of clothing and decided it was better to be shirtless.

"How do you know?" He frowned at me as I moved towards the door. "You need a shirt."

I waved him away. "Val's won't fit me."

He looked at the pile in the corner that I had waved at, then at the door that Val had just run from, his eyes stopping for a moment on the chair in the corner. "Wait."

I followed his gaze to the door, remembering Val's glistening face as he'd made his exit. The expression he'd tried to hide from me. The way he'd held his shoulders as he'd run. I knew that run, knew the way Val gathered himself when he was trying not to fall apart. And men of the sea mustn't cry on land. "He is at the sea," I repeated, knowing the words to be true, feeling it deep within my soul.

The Captain looked at me, his dark eyes hard, brows trying their best to become one above them. "The Worm is your brother?"

I kissed him quickly. "Stay here. I'll be right back."

He pulled away, not to get away from me so much as just to be in motion, to free his mouth to speak. "What the fuck?"

I set off to find Val.

****

I had only been walking along the beach for a few minutes when I found my brother.

I watched him for a moment. His silk clothes caught the gentle waves where he stood waist deep in the salty water, his braid falling forward as he leaned over, hands scooping up the water to splash at his face, the tip of his hair dipping in and out of the sea as the swell moved up and down.

He looked at home.

When he turned around and began to wade back to shore, I caught his eye. Immediately he turned away, his scowl returning, but he made no effort to avoid me.

"Have you come to disown me?" he asked caustically, dropping to sit on the sand at the water's edge.

"No." I joined him, letting the occasional wave wet my feet. This was my favorite part of land, the border parts. The sea was the strongest here.

"Then you will lose your lover." Val stated it plainly, as if it was fact. The words dropped like stones from his lips.

I watched another wave wash over our feet. I had no use for stones. "No."

Val put his head down on his knees. His braid slithered past his shoulder, the tip of it just grazing the sand. When he spoke again, he sounded more like I wanted him to; like ocean breezes, rough, but recognizable. I knew how to use the currents of his voice to guide me. "He hates me."

I didn't have anything to say to that. He did; I just wasn't sure why.

"Val," I finally ventured after the silence stretched long. "What changed?"

A sigh sounded beside me, heavy and long. At it's end, I was surprised that Val hadn't deflated. "Don't hate me," he started.

"I won't."

He looked up at me. "Don't hate yourself, either."

I frowned at him. There was a lot of talk of hate passing across my brother's lips, and I didn't understand why any of it was there.

He searched my face for a moment before continuing. "You left, brother. My protections, all the threats I could give. They were gone."

"You've always been a threat."

"I've never wanted to be!" He pressed a hand to his face and I left him, let him breathe in the salt air until it pressed all the things he didn't want from his lungs. All this talk of hate, I thought, and he still won't talk about how he feels about himself. How he used to be.

How he still saw himself, deep inside his silk-shrouded soul.

It hurt, to see him there. It always hurt. I don't think I will ever not ache for him, my brother, running from the things we were made to be. Never finding a way to exist in the shape we were molded to, trying so hard to forge his own path.

He could be more than he was. He knew it, too. He had been. He had been infinite. But he saw the way we were pointed at our own horizons, understood the intersections of infinity and never-changing, I think, much better than I ever have. And so he is here, tucked away, all the gravity that should be spread over his never-ending expanses pressed down on those small, bowed shoulders.

I have never met a man so strong as him.

"I lost my threats," he repeated, bringing me back to him, now, in the sand. "And then Drey." His face twisted in the same way it had in our room, when I had asked him what the Captain was talking about. "Drey has never liked my work."

That was an understatement. Dreyfus had preferences that were better serviced by men who could not say no. Val took away that option, systematically, intentionally, by giving sex workers a choice. Work safely, work because you want to, or don't work at all. Val would pay the debts of those who had thought that choices were things for those with better luck or, in many cases, parents. Drey, then, was left with less and less places to turn to for sex, and he hadn't been happy.

"I thought we'd taken care of that." There were people who specialized in taking care of the needs of men like Dreyfus. Consensually. He'd seemed satisfied enough, even if the workers he could pick from were few and far between.

"You had. I think he found that option a bit." Val looked disgusted. "Expensive." He took a moment to take a breath; it hissed through his clenched jaw. "Given the options that cropped up after you left."

"Which were?"

Val didn't answer.

"Are there more brothels operating?"

Val made a face. "You could say that."

I frowned. Brothels that weren't brothels... "Has slavery come back to the isles?"

He wouldn't look at me.

"Val." I was upset; this had been one of the things I had worked so hard to eradicate. "Why didn't you tell me this?"

"It isn't slavery, per say." His fingers dug into the sand at his sides; his eyes were on the sea. We were facing north. We both knew it; we would never not know it. I wondered if he was looking for white sails to come over the horizon, carrying Dreyfus, carrying our home. Our childhood. "But it might as well be."

I pulled the seas around in my chest for a bit. I was already going to kill him; this was just another thing. Another reason to make him suffer, to watch the light dim from his eyes as he realized who had come for him, what he had done. To throw him into the sea with no gold, no silver, only a single copper penny so that he would walk his way to Davey Jones just like the rest of the mortals did, go through all the trials, burn himself through the fire -

Three and a half years, a small voice in me interrupted. None of this would have happened if you had not been gone for three and a half years. You can shorten it with your brother - for these people, be truthful.

Six months in cells, on the sea in transit, nameless and lost. Three years of hell in the mines, on land, away from this. I had not thought it would be so.

Different, I thought sourly. I knew it would be different, I knew things would have changed, but I hadn't expected this.

Gods, why had the sea not called me back earlier? How many had suffered while I had been left, alone, in that place?

A wave lapped at my feet and I immediately felt chagrined. It was not the seas fault. The sea had not killed me. Salt water may have stripped me of my name, my past, but it had given me another chance; it was my lack of vision that had tied me to that board and sent me beneath the hull. It was another's hands who had tied the knots.

Hands that, apparently, were running my islands into ruin.

I shook myself from my reverie and looked over at the brother I had with me. The one that had, so wisely, asked me not to hate myself before he had begun to even speak. I watched him now. If this was hard for me, returning, how hard must it have been for him to have lived it these three years?

Here, alone, with Dreyfus.

"Drey never tried to..."

Val snorted. "What? Kill me?" He shook his head, then turned his gaze to me. "Why would he? He'd already killed you."

I frowned. That didn't make sense. "You're the eldest."

He rolled his eyes away. "Please, just." There was another sigh. "And you know that when I left the sea I was dead to him anyway."

That was true; he'd been quite vocal about it at the time. And yet, here he still was. Alive. I never ceased to be amazed by this man.

There was something else. "The Worm?" I asked carefully.