The Pirate King Ch. 20

The Captain did as I asked. Udo was spitting spells at me, at the Captain, at the very air around us but they were incomplete and so had no effect. I shrugged off the broken strands as they hit my shoulders, hearing the choked noises that came from his lips as he tried to tie me with the names he had once tucked away for the day he might need them.

Today was that day, and they were no help at all. My nameless form carefully opened his spell cabinet and took in the contents.

When I was content, I closed the door again. "You still work with Minnie."

The man looked like he was would be sobbing if only he could catch his breath. The Captain, holding his shoulders, shot me a look of concern which I ignored.

"Will you send her a message, please?"

There was no confirmation from the man in his panic. But he would do as I asked. He was a cook, and one of Minnie's. He knew his place in the order of fate.

"You're going to tell her," I began, making shapes from the ocean that had come to live in my throat, quiet and filled with restrained violence, "that I live." I thought for a moment and then amended the thought. "Or at least that I am back. I am coming, and I will not come alone." The Captain was staring at me with open concern now, but I continued. My words splashed down on this man and made him close his eyes in fear.

"Look at me," I told him. And he did. He had to.

When I was confident I had his attention, I began the message. "Remind her of the sea, and send it with comfrey." Protect those you care about, because I am unable to. "Tell her she will need her obsidian at hand." The attack will come from the north, and it will come from a family member. A family member of hers. I sent a silent apology to Alan; with so few members of her family left, she would at least suspect. "And red jasper."

Red jasper was for a lover. This, this might be less obvious to her. She might expect me to arrive with Cass, although part of me was sure Minnie was keeping tabs on her with her network and would know she had not left her cave. That she could not leave her cave.

The Captain was still staring at me, brows drawn down as he listened to me speak in code to a man who so obviously recognized my form and did not take comfort in it. I knew he would be concerned at the safety of this gesture. I was not. If this man did not do what I asked, he would lose his job. More than that. He would lose his references, his family. His community.

"Do you understand?" I asked him now. Udo nodded furiously, eyes locked with mine.

"Good." I looked up to the Captain. "You can let him up now."

"I'm sorry," Udo said immediately, "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry," I told him. "Do your job."

His head worked up and down at a rate that made me fear for his neck. Without another word, I stood and left the kitchen.

The Captain caught up with me in the hall leading up to Tobit's deck. "Was that smart?"

"He will do what was asked." My oceans, my seas, they were not receding. Every breath I took tasted like salt, like power, like the surety that I was going to become another thing I did not want to become. I closed my hand tight and tried in vain to tie down the whole of the planet's salted water.

"Sailor." His eyes searched my form. I did not want to look at him. I did not want to see his face, those eyes that made me more than I ever wanted to be. "You knew that man."

I continued looking over his shoulder at a past that would not leave me be.

His hand found my shoulder, then my wrist. He brought my arm to him, wrapped me around him. "He was terrified of you."

Most men are, I thought of saying. You should be, too. I am the sea and I am the sea god I killed and I am the monster that created that sea god and I am the King and I am dead and I am and I am and I am, and I don't know how to make me stop.

The weight of these words rested in my mouth until my head was so heavy it was borne down to his shoulder, and there it stayed until one of Tobit's men found us and ushered us back up into the light.

****

We did not stay on the deck to watch Tobit fade into the horizon, to witness his ship again become part of the ever-present shine on the rolling waves. The Captain paused only long enough to give instructions to Natch. I did not pause at all, instead rolling with the waves towards the dark of the cabin and the nearness of walls. It was the closest I could get to the dark of the sea, the depths I craved. The ways the pressure would slide against my skin until there was no more air in my lungs, until I turned to dust, then to stone, then to something more precious to those that cared about these things and yet I would be nothing for there were no eyes to witness my existence.

The Captain witnessed my existence. The Captain was the only eyes I needed. He moved into the room behind me with a grace that kept the waters around me still and I relished in it, settled in the stillness and then I settled further and settled and settled and then I found that I had sunk to the floor, my head on my knees, my breath pooling in the thick air between my legs.

"My love." The Captain was at my side. How he could move in this space and not disturb the things I had become baffled me, amazed me, made me love him so much I thought my heart might burst. "Are you alright?"

I leaned into him, feeling how his body could take my weight. He gathered me in his arms and let me take his warmth.

It was his heartbeat that finally brought me home. The rhythm beat so steady, so solid, and I felt his arms around me and knew that it was he that was those thing. Steady. Solid. His breathing warmed my scalp just above my ear as I matched my exhales with his and let him teach me what air could do.

"Love," he said softly. I sighed and melted into him further.

"I did not like what I had to do," I heard myself admit. It was true; I had not enjoyed what speaking to the cook had made me. Had not wanted to watch the man quake before me as he stared at the ghost of a man he had once sailed under. Had not wished to feel what my names felt like as they dripped, broken, down my spine.

"You would not have done it if it wasn't necessary." He smoothed back my hair and pressed a kiss to the skin he uncovered. "All is well, we're safe, you did what you needed to do." He paused for a moment as I nodded into his lips, feeling the way my hair brushed against the soft skin. I wondered if I roughened him. I wondered if he softened me. I wondered if we remained the same and yet were so changed and knew I would never take back the person I could have been, that I had been, for a life without this man. "Although I am not sure what exactly it is that you did."

My sigh this time was so large his arms moved in and then back out from my vision. The air around us swirled with the power of our breath, still made thick by the pressure I had brought to our existence early. I waited until everything settled before speaking; this was not information to bring into an room chaotic. "I needed to get in contact with someone."

"Minnie."

I nodded.

"You've spoken of her before."

"She is." Important. Powerful. An ally I can't afford to lose. I waited until those thoughts moved through my body and made way for the truth. "I miss her."

The Captain pressed his lips more firmly against me for a moment, then backed away.

"Tell me about her."

And so I did. I told him how she pulled me into her warm kitchen, shivering and wet from the ocean's cold. How she brushed the salt from my skin and bathed me for the first time in fresh water that didn't fall from the sky. How she dressed my wounds and taught me to cook, taught me patience and the care of weapons and where on animals the spots were that would make them dead and where the spots were that could heal them, all the things my father did not have the time to teach but wanted me to know, expected me to know when he sent me out to ghost my first ship when I was so young I couldn't reach men's throats and instead had to cut their legs like sheep. How she let me cry when my father would have beat me for it, when he did beat me, how she hid my pets from the men and tried to teach me spell work and wasn't upset when it didn't take. How she explained the world to me when what everyone else said sounded like gibberish, because their tongues were tuned to rocks and sand and trees and I was made of wetter, more towering things that crashed and turned their truths to shifting sand. How she kept me from getting lost.

"A tree might not be there," Minnie would tell me. "A river's not gonna move, but it might run dry. The winds? The currents? They'll always be there for ya, but only if ya know how to find them."

And I did. I always would, and she didn't have to teach me and she didn't ask anything of me but my arms to bake her bread in the morning.

"Where is she now?" the Captain asked when I finally wound down. It was dark in the cabin. I had been speaking for the better part of three hours.

"You should know," I told him. "You've sailed with her."

He took a moment to understand that. When he did, surprise cracked across his face. "She sails with Dreyfus?"

"She sails with the King." And she always would, until she passed her place down to the next in line. It was her destiny, her fate. "Who holds the crown is not of consequence to her."

"That doesn't bother you? That she chooses to be with a man who killed you?"

I shrugged and leaned my head back against him. "It is fate."

"That's not an excuse." There was an edge to his voice that surprised me. I turned back to see his eyes hardened, his gaze somewhere else entirely. "I mean, we have some control over our own destinies."

"Some," I agreed. "But fate is fate."

"That's bullshit. Fate doesn't control our whole lives. We make decisions. She chose to stay. I'm here because I decided to mutiny."

I was silent. I did not know what to say.

"I mean, come on. You don't believe in this completely either, right?" At my silence, the slight smile on his lips dropped. "Really?"

"You can't control your fate."

"Control -" His face twisted for a moment. "I have control over my own life. Not fate. Me. I make choices and I'm responsible for the consequences. You can't tell me that isn't true."

I did not know what to say. Things happened. You followed your path. It is what it is meant to be.

"Sailor." The Captain was sitting up straight now. His brows were drawn down tight. "I know you don't believe all this. You're the one who said the prophecy was bullshit."

"The prophecy is bullshit." I sat up, pulling away from him slightly. His words had landed on my skin and were making me itch with all the spikes he had hidden in his tone, and I was no longer sure I wanted to hold my body so close to his mouth. He frowned to lose my form but allowed me the space. "But that is not fate."

"Then what is it?"

"Obscurity. Intention." I shrugged, keeping a careful eye on the way his mouth shaped words. Wondering where this had come from and why. "Perhaps the prophecy's fate is to be false. It can both be fate and be untrue."

"It can't." He threw up his hands. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I didn't know what he wanted me to say. I sat in silence and watched his mouth gather points. "It can't be both true and untrue. Bullshitand fate. I don't want to be defined by something so fucking. So." He struggled with the words, shattered sentences sitting bloody and unwilling in his mouth. I saw the moment he gave up on his body, watched it pass from his mouth to his throat, his shoulders, saw it land in his chest and the downward press of his knees. Saw all the places those swallowed shards pressed against the inside of his skin. "Jesus. If that's true, then why bother with any of his? What was the fucking point?"

I knew suddenly with a clarity that hurt what he was asking, what struggles he had awoken. I, too, had lost my names. I had felt them ripped from my soul, unconsenting and nearly unconscious. Had become empty, had become lost, directionless. For fate. For a prophecy in which I did not believe. For the sea.

But I believed in fate, believed in the order of the world. Things happened because they had to. I met the Captain because it had to be; anything less than this would have been unthinkable. Why ponder on what might have been? This world existed; all others did not, and could never have been.

I had never stopped to consider that the Captain might not believe it was so.

Errant curls had fallen into his face as he had wrestled with his internal battle. I wanted to reach out and brush them back but I was afraid that I would cause punctures I did not intend, and so I merely lightly brushed a hand over his knee where his last words had fallen, bright and worked over so hard they must have tasted like dust. "Do you regret it?"

I would have never considered to ask this before this conversation; even saying the words felt wrong, my tongue struggling to shape the sounds. How could he regret this? Him, and I, here together? But it was also him nameless, and it was also him in pain at night, and it was also him not being able to sleep, and not having a standard for his first captainship, and, and, and. How much had he lost merely to gain me?

Of course I would do it all again for him. My world had not begun until the Captain had entered. But I did not believe I had that choice - it was fate. It simply was.

The Captain believed he had a choice, that he controlled his narrative. Then this was not a forgone conclusion. But then we were not a certainty - we could have never been.

That thought hurt to even consider, and I did not wish to think it and yet I had to because the Captain did. My fingers were light on his knee and my eyes did not come anywhere near his. I could not bear to look at him as I finished the question I had never thought to consider, let alone ask. "Knowing what you now know, would you have done things differently?"

The pause he took was so long I thought I would die. He will leave me, I thought. My fate, my destiny. My meaning. It is to be not enough for the man that is my everything.

But then; "No," he said. He reached up; his hand traced over my cheek. "Never. The things I did brought me here. They brought me to you." His fingers sent sparks down my spine; or perhaps it was his words, settling on my bones and working at become etchings, permanent marks for me to carry. "I couldn't risk changing anything, not if that might mean losing you."

I leaned forward until my forehead met his. I had to ask, had to know. "Even if that means losing your name?"

"My love." His hand took root at the base of my skull. I thought about warning him away for my spine was dangerous now, sizzling and electric, but he had made it that way and I did not have the words. "You are worth so much more to me than my name."

"Love," I breathed, my lungs his truth, his name, our reality. His free hand landed on my cheek and I turned into him, connected with him, sparks seeking purchase and turning back on themself, nowhere to go, nowhere to go...

He caught my chin and lifted my head up. I had a moment to look up into those endlessly dark eyes before his lips hit mine and I dissolved into nothing but electric blue flashes and relief.

He teased me, my Captain. He knew he had me falling apart beneath him, that I wanted to become nothing but his darkness and my glint of sunlight and the ways those things might interact forever and become something so much more but he held me back, kissed me so slow and never enough to let me fully dissolve. It was little by little that I became lost to him, first my eyes, then my limbs, and soon he was straddling me and all I could think about were his lips, his teeth, his fingers and how they danced so dangerously over the places I wanted them most of all and landed on the places I needed them, because that was where they were.

I could only breathe when he broke his lips away from me, so focused was I on the things he made me feel, and soon my lungs were empty but for him. He licked over my bottom lip and a rip of lightning green ran across my world making me gasp, and I heard him laugh as my hips bucked up against his without me having made allowance for them to do so. I wondered dizzily if he might not create a new star from all the sparks he made me give him. If he couldn't use me to create a new constellation, a galaxy. A universe, all for us.

And then there came a knock at the door.

We ignored it at first, so caught were we in each other and the passion we wove. But the sound came again and the Captain pulled away, his eyes flashing dark as he turned towards the noise.

"Shit," he said. I breathed into the space he left behind, wondering if I looked as desperate for air as I felt and hating the chance he'd given my body to breathe. I wanted to go breathless for him. I wanted to be nothing but pressure and darkness and commands I could not ignore. "It's probably Natch. I didn't leave him much instruction, he'll be wondering..." he trailed off as he ran his eyes over my still-frozen form.

"I really should get that," he told me. He did not sound convinced.

The knock came a third time, sounding hesitant. The Captain tilted his head, curls falling into his face as he looked down at me with a smile that cut to my stomach and made my heart begin to race.

"Be right there," he called towards the door. He leaned down and pressed his lips to my skin. "Don't. Move," he breathed into my ear, and I thought he'd go to the door, but instead he turned his body just a bit and called, "Come on in."

The door opened, showing Gret with his head buried in a set of maps. "The bearings you gave us don't make sense, the -" Gret froze, finding the Captain straddling my panting form.

"Ah," he said, backing up slightly. He held the door as if it could shield him physically from what was happening before him. "If this is a bad time -"

"Not at all," smiled the Captain. He slid his hand down my chest as he stood. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, counting to one hundred as I tried to control my body's reaction to his legs skimming my lap.

"Okay," Gret said weakly. I lost my place and had to begin again.

The Captain leaned over me again, wanted to show this man how it worked, and I stayed still as he put his lips next to my head. "Stay," he reminded me. He waited a beat. "Are you trying not to think about what's going on?"

I nodded, still trying to count.

"That's hardly fun." He paused. I felt the ends of his curls tickling at my neck. "No, no fun at all. Why don't you think about what I'll do to you when I get back instead."

There were no numbers that could save me from the places my mind went, tripping over itself.

The Captain lifted his lips, looking at my face. He smiled, then kissed me gently, and it was all to show this man how this worked, it was all to remind me who was in charge, and I loved it, my body sang, and when he left I stayed and tried not to think too hard about what I hoped would come next because I did not want to explode.

Some time later I heard the door open and then close, and then the Captain was back at my side. "Control," he told me quietly. He slid a finger down my chest, catching on the fabric of my shirt and causing me to gasp for breath. "Of fate, of my life." He reached my waistband and shifted his body so that his hand could slide within my pants. It brought his face against mine. "Of you." His breath was hot against my cheek, his hand hot against my skin, and I was his, his, his.

"That is what Ido." He whispered in my ear and I would have lost my breath at that but he chose that moment to grab my cock, firmly pulling it and I yelped, had to move up and his mouth was waiting for me, and he kissed me, one hand on my cock and one hand on my head and his mouth on mine and if someone was in control, it certainly wasn't me.