The Pirate King Ch. 18

"Because I kinda want to talk about that. I kinda wanna talk about how you made me feel powerful for the first time in years, how you made me feel like I could take him on. Like he didn't control parts of me that I'd long since given up. Was that all part of your fucking plan, too? Get me to trust you, build me up real good, make me your fucking puppet? Did he tell you how to do that, Sailor? Teach you how to make me dance? Tell you how to fuck with my head, how to really get in there and make me break? Or is that just something everyone in your family is just naturally talented at."

"Captain." His name came out of me like breath after a punch. I had no breath but his name. I had nothing. I was nothing. My legs were shaking and I didn't know how to make any of this stop, couldn't. Couldn't.

"Do you know what he did to me, Sailor? Do you know the shit he used to do to me, that he made me do?" There was a pause; I heard a gurgle and a clink as the Captain drank more from his bottle. "Oh, ho, I forgot. You must know, right? You saw him do that shit to others. Watched this shit go down on your own fucking ships. Fucking watched." Another swish. Another clink. My body swished with him; my body was nothing without him. "Fucking watched. Did you stop at watching? Is that where it ends, Sailor? Or did you use to join in too?"

"Please." I couldn't stop my voice. My traitor hands, my knowledgeable hands, they had taken up homes on my face and I could not find a way to peel them from my skin. "Please, stop."

"Stop? Stop what? You're the one who wanted totalk."

"I didn't." I didn't want this. What you're saying is wrong, your words are climbing into my soul and ripping me to pieces, please stop, I love you please stop. But the words got stuck even before they reached my hands and I stood there, shaking, palms pressed to my lips catching every useless, empty breath.

"I'm just trying to understand, Sailor." I felt my body sink down to the floor in a slow submission, my legs unable to hold the weight of all the anxiety my palms were gathering just in front of my lips. "Because I've been thinking, been doing a lot of fucking thinking. About you, and the way you are. And who you are. And who you're related to." I tried to shove the breaths back in so that they would come back out with words, with explanations, anything, but my lungs refused to take air and I was left kneeling there, held down by the gravity of my own uselessness. "Mostly, how you came to be here. Cuz that just seems odd to me, you know? That you would walk onto my ship. Me, of all fucking people. Of all fucking shared histories."

It was fate. It was chance. It was you, it was always only and ever you, I tried to say, because you found me. Of all the ships in the sea, you chose my ship, you raided my merchant, boring, useless transport. You found me and made me something more than I was ever supposed to be. I wanted to tell him, wanted to remind him, but my breath was in my hands and my lungs were lead.

"So I just want to know, Sailor. Because remember, and I do, I fucking remember how you walked onto my ship and came onto me. Do you remember that, Sailor? How you came onto me. How you seemed to know how to get me all riled up, every single fucking thing that would turn me on."

As if I could forget. As if I wanted to. On my knees on the floor, I quietly began to cry.

"Did he tell you that? Did Val -" I heard him pat the chest he sat on, " - tell you about that? About the things he used to do to me, how he would find the things my body loved and do them just to watch me squirm, how I hated it but my body would react, how my brain is so fucking fucked up and I can't make it fucking stop -"

"Please," I asked him, begged him, but he was gone, angry, the cold press of stars' eternity relentless against my soul, burning, burning.

"-even though I didn't want to do the things he was making me do, how he made me fucking hate myself, Sailor. How he made me his because he told me I was, how I didn't have a choice. And then you come along, and you're everything I want and nothing I hate like you fucking knew, like someone told you. Like you had a fucking list, Sailor. And you rile me up with what you do, and all the things the are and how you let me touch you. With the parts of me, the shit I've always wanted but managed to keep hidden from even him, that I can't even, couldn't ever fucking touch after him because it was too fucking close, the shit he fucking ruined and there you are, slamming against all those limits and just." He took a long, shaking breath. "Fuck, Sailor, because you made it okay, because you made it not like it could have been. And I let myself think that maybe, maybe I'd finally found someone who makes me feel happy. Who I could be okay with, safe with. I felt safe with you, Sailor. I fucking let you into my fucking life, risked my life, my sailor's lives for you. I gave up my ship. I gave up my fucking heart. I fucking love you, Sailor, I trusted you and I love you so much and I find out, I fucking find out." He paused; the only sound in the room was my ragged breaths, spilling out over my fingers and splashing onto the floor with my tears. We sat there a long time; me, a pile of ash and embers, moments away from scattered indelibly; him, a thousand distant suns separated by incomprehensible blackness.

"Fuck," I heard him say after a stretch of time so long I thought it eternity. Then again, angrily, so angrily, "Fuck."

It was only seconds after this second exclamation that the bottle shattered; I flinched, an automatic reaction after having so many of such tosses aimed at my body in my youth, but the splashing of rum was centered in the corner opposite me. I raised my eyes to see him glowering at the spreading puddle, thick curls obscuring much of his face, dark brows nearly fused together over dark, swirling eyes.

"Fuck," he repeated. "I didn't mean. I just." He took a deep breath as he pushed back his thick curls; it whistled through his nose. "Fuck."

I tried to get my breathing back under control, my tears. My thoughts. It didn't matter; he wasn't looking at me. Instead he stared, for a long time, at the slowly spreading stain in the far corner of the room. The smell of rum was everywhere, the sound of breaking slipping into the air like blood in water. When he finally turned to me my breath caught in my lungs, in my fingers, in the palms of my knowledgeable, errant hands, because the thing that was breaking was him and I had never, ever seen his eyes look like that. I made a small noise and saw the Captain pull back in surprise, or perhaps simply to take in more of me.

He watched me for a long time, perhaps waiting to see if I had anything to say. I did, I had so much I wanted to express, but I didn't know how to say it or perhaps I was a coward. Either way, I stayed silent as he watched me, then as he shook his head, then as he walked past where I knelt on the ground and left the room, closing the door behind him.

***

I expected the next person to come through the door to be Finn, reprimanding me for letting the Captain get into the drink, or Natch, reprimanding me for hurting the Captain, or Sneg, reprimanding me for gods all knows what but it would hurt because they would be right about the subject and right to do so and so I turned my back to the door. I did not want to see any of them. I did not want to see anyone.

I was the nobody. I was not worth any of their time. I busied myself with straightening the room and tried to not think about the passing of the day.

When the door finally opened, midway through my organization of maps, I did not turn at first. I did not want to see who had come to remind me of my place and my mistakes. It was only when the maps were stacked well that I turned and took in the man who stood in the door.

And I froze. Because standing in the door was the Captain.

From the way he stood there, frozen, I do not think he had expected me either.

I ran my eyes over his body, trying to parse the drink from the man. His eyes were wary but seemed clear, his hand on the door merely an extension of the movement my presence had arrested him in rather than a steadying force. I watched him notice the way I searched him for signs of intoxication and his eyes went from wary to dark to something I did not recognize because I had stopped looking.

The Captain did not move forward. I did not move forward. The distance between us grew with every second.

Finally, he spoke. "I didn't. I mean." He took the smallest step in, closing the door behind him. "I thought you'd be in the kitchen."

I shifted, my arms coming up to cross over my chest, but that felt restrictive and wrong and so I lowered them again.

"Are you. I mean." I did not dare raise my eyes to see how the Captain was standing. Hearing him was hard enough. "I just came back to clean up the."

There was a pause as the Captain took in the fact that the mess of rum and shattered glass was no longer in the corner where he had left it.

"You didn't have to do that," he said, his voice soft.

"It was nothing." I was used to it. How many times had I cleaned up such messes before?

"It wasn't -" I heard the Captain sigh. "None of it. What I said, how I acted."

"You were in your right," I let him know.

"Never." His voice was firm. "I'm never in my right to throw things in anger, and. Or. Losing control like that." As he took a step into the room, my heart began to beat faster. Something like hope warred against anxiety withing my soul; I willed them each to be silent, to drown in the sea and to leave me with my eternity, but they persisted and my heart sped up again as the Captain moved towards me.

He did not come close, but instead moved past me to inspect the corner that had once held the remnants of his escape, his anger. "You truly did not have to do this."

I shrugged. "I'm used to it."

The look he gave me caused my knees to nearly give, simply because it was the Captain and he was looking at me, because his eyes did not hold anger, because his eyes, because him. Because. I steadied myself with a hand on the desk beside me.

"I don't know anything about you," he said into the silence his gaze has conjured up. "I don't know about your past, or who you are. I don't know what you've been through or what it means that you're here now."

I met his gaze carefully, my head bowed slightly. My heart beating a rhythm I did not understand.

"What it means that you are royalty."

I looked away at the way he said the word. "I am not the King."

"I didn't say that you were." I lifted a shoulder in quiet acknowledgment. "But your brother is King now. And." He paused, considering. Perhaps remembering stories distant, told in bars by men who journeyed into the terror of that world as an escape from their own. Perhaps remembering stories more personal, told by a man who's world was that terror, who could not escape because it was his life. "Your father before you?"

My arms crossed on their own accord at the mention of his form. "And my sister in between."

The Captain took a moment to consider this. "Your sister?"

"She lives in the North." I offered no more explanation that that. I knew what the tales said of her. I hated that I had allowed such stories to be created, that men held her name on their tongues and their breath did not immediately burn their bodies to ash with the pressure of the concentrated untruths. But would it have not been worse to have killed her? Would it have not been at least the same, and her dead as well?

"He never mentioned a sister," the Captain muttered.

"And he did mention me?" I asked, my voice sharper than I had intended.

There was a moment of silence as my words settled. "I don't know," the Captain said carefully. "I'd like to think he didn't."

I waited in the silence that followed, my arms tight against my chest. My heart knowing what was coming, my body hoping it would not be true.

"He used to talk about killing a King," the Captain finally said. I couldn't look at him, instead studying the grain of the wood beneath my feet. "How he beat a sea god. How that god had been vengeful. Violent." The Captain paused; the wood floor stared up at me, impassive. "How he killed children for fun."

I scoffed, shifting my weight.

"So it wasn't you," the Captain said slowly. Hope and caution at war at the edges of his words.

"It was me." I could feel the way this made him stiffen without having to look, felt it in the air. I readjusted my arms, settled them tighter against my chest, my racing heart. My empty lungs. I needed no lungs to make these words; the rush of blood carried them as surely as ocean currents, made it so that I had only to open my mouth and listen as they came churning forth like seafoam. "I made children fight to the death, and I made them kill my enemies for me. I took them into my home, stole them from the sea and turned them into an army. Entertainment. And then I took those children under my wing when I killed the man who had been making them fight, that god. The man who used to tell us he was a god to control us, the children of the sea." I killed a sea god and drank his blood, I thought. It made me immortal. I slept with a thousand sea witches, or sirens, or gods, searched for my hundred sons that would make me all powerful. I killed my sons, I bore no children, I had one hundred daughters and sold them all. I was the sea and eternal and when I had been the King, I had been even more eternal still. "And then I did many other things and those things I may have actually done with these two hands, but now I have done none of those things because I am not the King. Now Dreyfus is the one who killed children and saved them and even though it was this body who killed that man, that monster, it is Dreyfus who now is the one who has the victory of it as well as the victory of my death. Because it was not this body that did it, it was the King. I am no longer the King. The King is dead, long live the King, and it does not matter to anyone who the King is besides the King."

I looked up and found the Captain staring at me, his eyes fixed on my form, his brows drawn together. My heart found new rhythm in the unreadable expression of his face.

"The King is not a person," he tried.

"The King is a person," I corrected. "It is just every person who has ever held the crown, and every person who ever will."

He took that in silently, my Captain, my eternal sky. Took that in and I do not know what it meant to him, but I knew what it meant to me and so I told him.

"I was always going to be the King. I always knew it, was born to it." That's what I was told. That's what my father told all of us, why he made us fight. "It was destiny, and it nearly killed me."

The Captain took in a breath at that; I waited for him to release it, but he seemed frozen. Waiting.

"To be free of all that," I continued quietly. My heart pulsed words directly to my mouth, the press of them harsh in my eardrum, my throat. "To no longer be tied to my father's shadow. To not be what he was by nature of a name, of a position. To be able to walk into a room and not have a thousand tales weighing down on me, to know that my actions are mine, mine, my love, not fates, not the Kings, I can do something and it will be attributed to me and they will know of it as mine and that is so new, such a novelty, or to have something so simple as when I walked onto your ship and you looked at me and did not fear. To have you look at me, to have that chance. When you to look at me and you don't judge my soul against the actions of my father, or his father, or my sister or a being that never existed but was instead some creation of a drunk man wishing the world was a more frightening, magical place and invoking my name to make it so. To be me, instead of the King. To be me and to be here, somehow, with you." The Captain watched me steadily. My heart beat on. "I just wanted to stay here with you."

My words sat in the room long and pulsing, a sea all of their own. I did not watch them as they slowly listed with the pull of the ocean - I watched the Captain.

"You should have told me," he finally said.

"I should have," I agreed.

"You deliberately hid this from me. You lied."

I said nothing. He was right; I had done more than not tell him. I had taken great care to keep this truth from his world.

"Why?"

"I did not think it was important." I saw from the look on his face that this answer was not enough, and so I said the next words that came to my lips, "And I was scared."

He froze, eyes locked in mine. My heart pulsed in time with my fear. My voice came out quiet, cracking.

"I don't want to lose you."

"Fuck." His hands came up; one covered his face while the other sunk deep into his hair, pushing it back halfway where it gathered in a mass of curls and anxiety. I looked down, unwilling to see the sudden rift this man was no longer able to contain, his composure slipping beneath the waves of my monologue. "Fuck, Sailor. I don't. It isn't fucking fair."

I stared at the ground, covered in words I was no longer sure were right, or correct, or warranted.

"Everything you say makes sense, but I'm still so fuckingmad at you," he continued. "I love you so fucking much and I'm so fucking, fuckingmad."

I slowly raised my eyes to find him staring me down. "You should have stopped him. When he sailed under you, and I don't mean because you were the King, fuck being the King. You were still you. You, with all your power, and the things that you know. You should have stopped him."

I nodded, slowly.

"Why didn't you?"

There were so few left in the end. So few, so few left when we killed my father, so few that survived... There can only be one, my father used to tell us. When the strongest remains, that one will have a seat at my table. And then he would bring home more children he had found floating in the sea, take them from the ocean's protection into his hell of a ship so that there was never an end to the fights. And I survived that. My siblings, we survived that. Us four and no one else. We were alone in our survival, in our shared experience, and no one else could ever understand because everyone else who could we had already killed.

No, I couldn't leave my brother, any more than I could leave Val even after he abandoned the sea. Anymore than I could leave Miranda after she tried to kill me. Val had warned me, had warned me of over-empathy and that my siblings would not extend the same sentimentality towards me, but.

He was all I had left.

"I didn't want to be alone," I told the Captain, and wondered if he could possibly understand, and wondered if I even wanted him to.

The Captain took a long time to hear this, his eyes searching my face, his hand still tight in his hair. Curls cascading every which way from his gripping fingers. Finally, he shook his head. "Fuck." Another head shake, those curls catching the light of the lamp in the now-dark room. When had the sun gone down? How had I missed the sunset? "I think I need some time to think about this."

"I understand." He looked so beautiful, standing there. He looked so lost. He was my entire map, my stars, and I needed him to find myself and watching him stand there as if he did not know which way to turn hurt me in a way I did not know I could feel somewhere deeper than my bones.

"Maybe it would be best," he said slowly, eyes roving the room, "if you did not sleep in the same bed as me tonight."

His words were like hot coals dropping to my stomach. "Whatever you need," my racing heart told him. My lungs struggled for breath. My trembling hands hid themselves within the crook of my arms as my eyes tracked to the chair that sat between us, a reminder of how we used to spend our nights, he on the bed and me, tied, perceived as dangerous. My body, my entire body, reduced to it's parts so that I did not have to face the truth of it. The possibility of this. Were we back to those days? Did he see me as a threat, had I become a thing to tie up at night for safety rather than fun?