Shes Still Getting Used To This, In More Ways Than One. Its Due To More Of Those Things Tryck Doesnt

She’s still getting used to this, in more ways than one. It’s due to more of those things Tryck doesn’t know about, Anne’s sexual history—a dark shadow looming behind them, bound to come up one of these days if they keep at this. For now, however, it’s little more than an uncomfortable prick in Anne’s side, something she tries to ignore. This isn’t usually how it goes.

—Well. This is usually how it goes with Tryck, but as with Tryck is a recent addition to it, this simply isn’t normally how it goes. She’s usually the one face first in the other’s lap, putting her idiot tongue to the only thing it’s proven good at. (Blow and go—no entanglements, just fun.) She hadn’t ever had it done to her before Tryck, and was fast discovering just how devastating it could truly feel. No wonder it had been so easy to ply people with it. It’s even got Anne shoving her fist in her mouth, biting herself so she doesn’t scream from it.

It’s an obscene sight, the top of Tryck’s dark head of hair bobbing over her lap, one leg hooked over his shoulder. What’s she finally done right, getting this? Her eyes roll to the back of her head at one insistent look, a strained sound leaking out her throat as warmth coiled tighter in her belly, pebbling her nipples as the tension increased. God—! Fuck—! What is she meant to do?! She can only gasp and whine and, finally, reach for him. This feels lopsided, unfair to Tryck in a way she wouldn’t think of as unfair to herself in his same situation. But getting hard to think with the electric fire zapping through her body right now.

It’s funny, the things Tryck has and hasn’t managed to work out in their time temporarily marooned together. He’s learned of her reading habit, that she can play the spoons and doesn’t sing so much as crow, that she holds the thing nearest to her in her sleep even when that’s usually just her own self, that she could burn water left alone at the cookpot and that she’d had a reputation for bullying her tutors, but he somehow still hasn’t learned how to read her self-imposed contradictions.

He’s worked out she likes him, sure, even in the face of her groans and threats and protestations, but he doesn’t yet understand how to read those contradictions. Even now, he takes squirming and desperation for impatience where it’s more…enjoyment. And perhaps a little fighting of the old ego still, an attempt to keep it in check so she can feed the hole where her soul should be. The drive to be noticed, the fear of being seen, the desperate longing for someone to give a damn enough to help her push through: it’s a heady, awful thing.

When his hand slides around to her inner thigh, when he starts to rock against her, Anne curls her hand around to caress his inner thigh. Her head is still swimming and here’s this smug, articulate bastard having a fucking frolic while she struggles to string two words together! She almost manages a smart comeback about preferring full mouths when he skates over a thing she had long assumed other people simply had no idea existed. Her thoughts short out again instead, leaving a renewed flash of heat through her face. Insufferable bastard would most definitely notice, and would have done even if she hadn’t full-body spasmed over it.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! This has become ridiculously embarrassing, especially—she assumes—compared to past liaisons.

“Nnnnn—.” Shit! Anne slams her eyes shut, chastens herself to pull it together, and tries again. That sad attempt at a lie was probably best left stuttered out and surrendered. New tactic: change course.

She massages his inner thigh for a moment, watches herself do it, then lifts her eyes to his. Her hand moves when her eyes do, sliding from thigh to crotch and tracing the outline of what she finds there.

“…hard enough to breathe when ye’re like this,” she says, shaky voice growing firmer with each word, “and now ye want me to talk, too? Didn’t take ye for cruel.”

Me earlier today: I just…don’t think Anne could or would have superpowers. It just feels so OP and antithetical to the sort of “everywoman” stereotype I came in here to build.

Me after D&W: Functional immortality and an accelerated healing factor makes a lotta damn sense out of her escaping execution though…

“If you’re sneaky enough, you can stab someone and they won’t notice.”

Out of context things I’ve said while playing Skyrim

“Don’t recommend testing that theory here,” Anne replied dryly. Rough and tough sorts of all sorts gather in the tavern, equally as likely to break heads as to break bread of an evening. The Republic of Pirates isn’t a place for the faint of heart or the devoid of brains. “Ye’re better served forgetting that idiot lesson. En’t true—not in these waters, even if it is elsewhere.”

I hate how I get handed horny shit and Anne decides to make it unhorny.

Dammit woman let me enjoy something in my life…!

Sigyn: a name that rings a bell, somehow. It’s called as if from the pages of a childhood book—for in fact, it is. (World literature at father’s insistence. She’d been upset to be leaving the warm, bloodsoaked isles of Greece for the frigid Norse north, and had consequently pouted her way all throughout Ragarnok, at which point her tutor had relented and returned them to more familiar waters to bear witness to Aeneas.) Anne had never bothered to return to the text out of pure spite, even when she’d grown older.

“…Anne,” she replies eventually, nodding in Sigyn’s direction. Is this death, or only a nightmare? Whichever one it is, it prompts an odd confession out of her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known love without pain. Sometimes just emotional. Sometimes mental.” She laughs, but it’s humorless. “Hell, sometimes physical. But never painless.”

On a strange, grey beach overlooking a strange, grey sea, a goddess and a pirate discuss their loves. It feels like the set up to some strange, off-putting ballad about giving oneself to the sea, but it’s Anne’s reality, unsettling as it is.

From beneath the sage blouse—the hell?, she never wears this damned thing!—Anne clutches at the rings hovering in the shallow valley of her chest. Two plain gold bands and a heavy signet ring strung through a leather cord, always present thought seldom seen. She grips the cord tightly, afraid of this place and aware that some magic as strange and grey as the beach and the sea are keeping that dear at arm’s length from her. It is an unsettling thing to witness one’s panic from the outside.

“I’ve never had to wait long,” Anne replies, having never lived a lover’s tale that stayed happy past ten months. She knows, somehow, that she’ll never get to live a lover’s tale lasting longer than that now. She knows it the same way she knows the woman next to her is a goddess, the same way she knows she isn’t supposed to be here. Anne’s coat is gone. Why is her fucking coat gone? She looks over at the goddess, still unable to do more than reach for her panic. “Have you?”

Headcanon Dump Because I Am Obsessed

Anne’s middle name is Grace. This means different things to her in a few different verses, including

A sense of closeness with her own pirate idol, Gráinne Ní Mháille, anglicized as Grace O’Malley. This really shaped Anne’s early perceptions of herself and piracy, and really shaped her life’s goal as well: she wants her name to go down in history, just like O’Malley.

It came from her father. Her mother had chosen her first name, her father her middle: that had been their agreement on learning Mary was pregnant. Grace was the name of an aunt William had been particularly fond of; Anne the name of a beloved sister-in-law.

In modern verses, her birth certificate was originally filed incorrectly under Grace Anne Cormac, a mistake that I sometimes leave legally unchanged for the fun of it. For example, in spy verses like the kinds I’ve been dreaming up behind the scenes, none of her legal documentation ends up following her into her profession, making her harder to properly trace. Grace Cormac is alive on paper and living on a small farm near a small town in South Carolina. Her shoddy teenaged wedding to James Bonny is the birth of her paper trail as Anne Bonny, with no legally recognized Anne Cormac having existed before that moment either.

Now for some unrelated shenanigans.

Anne wants to get her J tattooed over with an anchor. It’s fair to say both of those J’s weighed her down; maybe symbolizing it can help her drop it, now. Like an anchor to a ship, it’s an important part of her. Also like an anchor to a ship, it doesn’t define her. This is one of about four tattoos Anne’s ever seriously considered in any verse.

In most verses, especially pirate ones, Anne also wants a swallow tattoo as well. Swallows among historic sailors were symbols of the owner having sailed 5000 miles. You can see where earning that would be appealing to someone who feels like they’re only ever alive when at sea.

Anne would also consider getting a constellation tattooed on her right shoulder, to match the anchor. Probably Ursa Major, her preferred way to find the North Star.

For similar reasons, she’s considered a compass as a simplified design for the same motif: the pull of exploration, the surety of the path.

TW for dv and da.

Just before the end of their marriage, James got the idea to brand Anne with his initials. He only managed the J before she knocked him off of her and broke free. Later, when Jack met her, he insisted it was a sign of fate: his name starts with a J, too! Anne was less certain that was a good thing, and it turned out to be a good thing she was.