Hes Exactly Like The Stories: Menacing, Smart, Dangerous. Fucking Embarrassing As It Is To Die Like This,

He’s exactly like the stories: menacing, smart, dangerous. Fucking embarrassing as it is to die like this, like a damned idiot, at least she won’t have lost to some half-witted fuck who won on a stroke of luck.

With one brow he makes it obvious her strategy’s fallen flat. So much for knocking him off-balance. Vague plans of pretending to know someone co-opting his legend to sic him on their tail and off of hers evaporates before they can even really get started. She can’t blame him for reveling in a reputation like his, annoying as it is that she’s failed to raise his ire the way she wants.

She damned near opens her mouth to start arguing—it isn’t quite the same thing, is it?, comparing an identity chosen in adulthood to one pushed in early adolescence—when he turns back around and snaps about lying. There’s no sense in arguing even after he’s done. It’s enough to set Anne back on edge, grinding her teeth together to keep herself from digging her proverbial grave any deeper. Anne swallows back bile and ire in equal measure. Besides, if Anne’s caught the pattern correctly (and she’s near certain she has) she needs to start bracing: he’ll be aiming again for the gut soon.

The gut punch arrives as predicted, and expecting it does make it an easier blow to handle. The Shark is no fool; he isn’t human enough to be one. He knows things only Anne, Jack, and a ghost should, damning things: her past aliases might be explained away by knowing her father, but the burning estate was a secret she’d meant to take to her grave. She feels neither shame nor regret in what she’d done—and why should she?—but there are reasons she’s never sifted through the ashes herself.

Her silence is damning. She knows it. The Shark’s gotten his fucking blood, and now he’s circling for more. Is this why they call him the Shark? Not because he’s a predator, not because of his fucked up teeth or because you won’t know he’s there until he strikes, not even because he follows the scent of blood, but because he’s always circling? Her hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat, her shirt sticks to her back with it, and the rope at her wrists growing swollen with it and tighter as a result. She doesn’t try to follow his circling until he says the thing that finally makes some damned sense of this whole encounter. You did get away from me that one time.

Fucking hell. The Shark had been on her trail at one time. At two times counting this latest, and neither time she’d been aware of it. What had she done to end up on the boogeyman’s hit list? She starts to wrack her brains for the answer—maybe she’s a means to an end still, maybe his interest is her father, or the stupid bitch she’d done for just after losing the privilege of being Andy—when he touches on another nerve, red and raw and angry. Sloppy? Sloppy?! She’d been a fucking sheltered-arse teenager when she’d done most of that shite! Sloppy! Hah! For a pair of fledgling kills those had both been surprisingly neat, especially spur of the moment as they’d been! He tuts in her ear but doesn’t make the mistake of lingering again, meaning she doesn’t have the chance to split his skull on hers.

When she speaks this time, it’s without a plan. (The plan’s gone to shit already. There’s no plan now outside of “draw more blood before dying.”)

“Ye’ve got the fucking wretch. I watched the whole damned house go up in flame afore I left: he died trapped and alone, same as he tried to do t’me.” Well. More literally than he’d tried to do to her, but that’s an unimportant detail in the grand scheme of things. “Now, if ye’re done jerking yerself off: free me or fucking kill me. Tired of this idiot game already.”

Anne’s spent her life being the growling underdog, the bitch, protective and snappish. She doesn’t bark when she can bite. The second he feels comfortable enough to touch her again, a spark lights in her eyes that hasn’t been there since she was a pup herself, the last dying embers of the firestorm she’d been in her youth. It hadn’t been beaten all the way out, and this is the first gasp of air it’s had in years.

There’s blood dripping over the bastard’s mouth as he speaks; she’d managed to break his nose, all right, but he hardly seemed to feel it. She’ll make him feel the next one. His wrist is well within range of her teeth, and she’s just figuring how she’ll jerk in towards him again to free her face some before trying to rip through his wrist with her teeth, when he manages a second gut punch, this one worse than the first. That had only been strange, perhaps a mite frightening: this actually knocks the wind from her—and worse, a spike of fear drives it way through all of the anger, cracking through her rage and onto her face.

She hasn’t been Anne Cormac since she was sixteen, nor Andy since a year or two before.

For a moment it feels like she’s going to make sick; she doesn’t, though her head is spinning and her stomach is somewhere near her boots. Shit. She is so fucked. She really must be cursed to have managed to sneak aboard a ship already looking for her. The ship of someone who knew a past she’d left buried in South Carolina. Worse, the ship of someone who knew her father—and not just his name, clearly. William Cormac, esquire, would not have approved of its delivery, but the message sent is a lesson he no doubt would have wanted imparted to her: open your eyes, girl! She hadn’t even realized she had them closed until the pressure disappeared from her jaw and he stepped away.

A third gut punch, but one much easier to handle than the first two. (She’s worn down. Dull. This is a really shit time for her to be playing mind games, drawing on energy resources already badly drained from the events of the days before.) Maybe she’s getting the hang of this, though, catching the pattern already: he throws out what it takes to fuck with her, then backs off to see what sticks. If she can pull herself back together, she could go on the offensive here—really get her feet under her and get going. If she can knock him off-balance, even once…. She needs to buy time back first, though.

She doesn’t doubt for one moment he’s the fucking Shark. Didn’t even need to say it, not after a peek into what he knows about her. If she wasn’t so damned hot right now, there’d be no color in her face at all. How do you stop a shark? You punch it in the nose

—Fuck, she’s done that already! What’s next? They…generally don’t survive the tales she’s heard, the people in Anne’s position. Their death is usually the call to action for the hero to take arms and avenge their death: Patroclus at the mercy of Hector, Mercutio on Tybalt’s sword, nevermind the hushed names attached to the Shark’s own legends.

She digs her nails into her palm in an age-old gesture to help ground herself. She’ll be the first to survive or the next to set their name ablaze.

“The Shark’s a fucking saltwater boogeyman: a tale sailors tell to spook one another. Smart to co-opt his legend, though. We almost crossed paths once, did ye know? Back when he set that fire near Nassau.” That’s another lie and she knows it—but maybe he doesn’t. Off-balance. She’d set that fire, and she’d started the rumor that pirates had done it, and somewhere down the line someone connected it to the Shark’s whereabouts and assumptions were made and never dispelled. “I’d been there that morning. Decided that night to elope. Lucky me, aye?, escaping a fiery death by a few hours.”

Anne’s brows shoot all the way to her hairline when Raphael has dick to say about being subtle. Subtle? This is subtlety? Anne actually scoffs aloud at the very idea, looking at the massacre around her. Subtlety? With a single, elegant match, Anne had lit fire to her past, using the smoke to fill her sails for the first time out to sea. She’d been a fucking teenager when she’s done that! And somehow this bloody, obnoxious, nauseating display of carnage is…subtle?

Gods above, let her never see what unsubtle devilry must look like!

Extremes and survival. A topic they could more or less agree on, at least, the lengths needed to go to survive. Rising from the ashes, a phoenix reborn—but to what end, nobody seemed to know.

Anne rolls her eyes but ultimately succumbs to the pressure to let him prattle on some at her. She hasn’t yet met a man who’s had a taste of power that didn’t love the sound of his own voice, and the spotlight in which to show it.

“…I fail t’see what any of…this has to do with survival. Unless ye’re telling me ye nearly died…?” Both tone and look express doubt in that, though. “By all means. Enlighten me.”

" . . . gross. "

Walls dripped with blood, bodies torn apart, and limbs strewn like broken dolls. A heart, still faintly pulsing, hung skewered on a spike, the air thick with the stench of death. At her odd remark, Raphael raised an eyebrow, his lips curving into a smirk. "Oh, darling," he purred, "if you think that’s gross, you clearly haven’t seen what I’m capable of on a bad day."

😲

Send a 😲 for your muse to walk in on mine masturbating!

The problem with this camp is that everybody’s got a tent except her. How these fuckers had the wherewithal to pack a fucking tent into their packs, and to grab their packs as they were being hunted out by semi-sentient tentacles, is beyond her. Anne’s lack of tent isn’t a problem nine nights out of ten, but on that tenth night, with her teeth on-edge and her skin not fitting right over her bones, it’s fucking insufferable.

After checking to make sure the resident walking skeleton was off on a wander elsewhere, Anne slips into the ruined chapel and shuts the door behind her. With a sigh she leans back against the wall near the door and slips off her trousers. She doesn’t do this often, but she feels compelled to. There’s a tingle between her legs that refuses to go away—one that grows and warms when she reaches a hand down towards it.

Slipping into fantasy while doing this has always seemed like such a silly thing to her, but then, she’s never had better than her own hand. Maybe fantasy’s more fun with better phantoms to conjure up with it. Right hand rolls up the bottom hem of her blouse before tucking it between her teeth: the cold air on her nipples raises a shudder that tears through her, but it’s far from unpleasant. With a makeshift gag in place to help keep things quiet, Anne turns to petting herself. An errant thought slips through just as she slips a finger between her lower lips, and before long, her ministrations turn from routine to…teasing.

Godsdammit! She’d sooner choke on her own tongue than admit it, but it seems Tryck’s endless parade of come-ons and innuendos have finally sufficiently twisted her up. She lets go of a shaky breath and lets her eyes slip shut. Fine. Fine! Maybe there’s something to all of his teasing, a point to it past just making her squirm for the fun of it. Anne slows herself down, resigned to this illicit self-love affair probably lasting more than the quick eight or so minutes she’d reckoned she would need. Her right hand comes up to cup her tit, pinching the nipple and rolling it between thumb and forefinger; she keens a little at the sound, immediately flushing and glad no one else was nearby to witness it. She pinches it harder and keens again, back arching off the cold stone as she does so—

Just in time for exactly the wrong fucking person to throw open the door and come sauntering in. There’s no making a scene like this less incriminating, leading Anne to freeze completely, locked up on what to do. She stares at Tryck with wide eyes and her heart in her throat, unable to think of anything to say even if she had the presence of mind to spit out her shirt.

Anne looks away with a tsk when the question’s batted back to her. Without Rakatak’s knowledge—or perhaps with it, but unannounced to her—Anne has tried to leave the Red Horse. More than once, even. She’s tried wheedling her way into other berths, but touched by the Horseman as she is, she’s been turned away at every opportunity. Those that don’t turn because of the Red Horse turn because of Jack and the Ranger. She’s well and truly committed to her watery grave now.

Irritable—as if she’s ever anything else—Anne flips her hand in an almost violent gesture, as if trying to wave the matter off altogether.

“Congratu-fuckin-lations, ye now know the disposition of yer fuckin crew. En’t my fuckin duty t’figure out the oughts; that’s a right of the captain.” Quartermasters, even unofficial ones like Anne had been, are not in charge of praise or reward among the crew. They keep the ship ready and primed, and mete out discipline on the captain’s behalf. Finding the missing pieces to a successful voyage has never been on her roster of duties, never mind within her skill set. It seems to her to be one of the few duties of a real captain, a successful captain.

Anne fixes Rakatak with a look that says what she won’t risk saying out loud: that the other woman must truly and well be an idiot. (And for once, the look isn’t full of the exasperation of being taken at offense when she meant none.)

“By choice?! Oh, aye—the choice to sail or grow roots, what abundance of choice is open t’me! Ye’re a stupid fuck if ye think I’m on this heap a’cause I have a fucking choice.” Anne is easily baited into anger and now is no exception; there’s a familiar curl of disgust in her lip and her voice as she rants. “Where in the fuck d’ye think women sail, precisely? Might be diff’rent in the waters ye come from, but here, it en’t a thing! I left the side of the only godforsaken idiot pirate left who’d let a woman sail on false promises, and now I sail in the fucking grave I dug myself when I left him! I don’t have a fucking choice. I sail with ye or I give up the sea and any semblance of relief she offered me!”

And that—that is a fate worse than death in Anne’s estimation.

I want to make this known; it’s OKAY to flirt with my muse, it’s okay to say flirty things to them, yes, they may not react to it, they may not respond to it positively, but know as a mun I’m 100% OKAY with it. Especially if my muse is clearly attractive appearance wise, go a head, flirt with them, if my muse is your muse’s type, it’s okay to flirt, we don’t have to be shipping, we don’t ever have to ship to have you flirt with my muse; I WONT think you’re pushing a ship on me either. But I just feel that some people are scared to have their muse be flirty to another because we a muns might take it the wrong way.

 I’m not saying this goes for everyone, but I’m letting you know that it doesn’t make me uncomfortable and I’m fine with it. 

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