Hatigave - Tumblr Posts
Lock’s eyes narrow. “I own these woods.” He and Mother own these woods. “And I’m not a man. I’m a boy.” He doesn’t like the idea of being a man. His father is a man, and his father broke Mother’s heart. If that’s what men do, he doesn’t want to be a man. His eyes narrow even further as Honey continues to speak. They’re not making any sense. Lock doesn’t like it when things don’t make sense. Lock doesn’t like a lot of things, but he especially doesn’t like it when things don’t make sense.
“I don’t want to give you anything. I want you to leave.” He’ll kill them if he has to, but he’s feeling generous today. He’ll give them time to leave on their own before he kills them. He shouldn’t, but he will.
ONCE BROWN EYES ARE STAINED with yellow. The colour sprinkled through like stars. Soon, they would take another shape. Soon, they would no longer appear human to the eyes of the manboy before them. SOMETHING WITH A SNOUT, perhaps ? Something with teeth sharp enough to tear flesh, for certain. ❝ Man owns nothing. ❞ They snarl, certain of their words. ❝ Only that which they make, but even that is borrowed from the land. ❞
Who are they ? An excellent question. What do they want ? An even better one. Honey tilts their head, and squints their eyes. ❝ They call me Honey, or nothing at all. And what I want is unknown even to me, but I know it is not anything you can give. ❞
“Wait.” Art takes a step forward and sets a hand on Archie’s arm. “Don’t. I’ll walk you out.” They can go out the back entrance. They won’t be seen that way, and it’ll be a lot less of a hassle trying to navigate the dark corridors of the venue rather than trying to get through the crowds of people inside. He laughs softly. “I do.” Art hates these parties as much as Archie does. Or at least, as much as he assumes Archie does. “Come on.” He takes a step back from Archie and towards the door. “Let’s go, it’s not too far.”
ACTOR TAKES THE SHAPE OF YET another role. Wears the skin of another man as long as it helps him escape from the prying eyes of the people inside. The offered champagne is eagerly accepted ( a moment to simply hold it in his hand, he does not want to appear too eager to tip back the alcohol after all. ) Blue eyes glance once more to the world below. HE CONSIDERS IT FOR A MOMENT TOO LONG. To jump, to see if he is part cat and able to always land on his feet too.
❝ I'll go first if it will get me out of here. ❞ The itch of a panic attack is bubbling up inside his chest. The rhythmic pounding of his heart against his rib cage was a frantic reminder that he was meant to stay home under the safe covers of a heavy blanket. He should have listened to his therapist. ❝ No offence, of course. Lovely party, well organized. There are just too many people here. You know how it is. ❞
@hatigave gave me permission to be a menace
There’s been no shortage of bad luck in Anne’s life over the past almost-year. She’d managed to fall pregnant, be entrusted to the care of strangers interested only in what was in her belly, lose the baby, miss Jack’s last visit to port, and now she’s been found out mid-afternoon the day after she’d stowed aboard another ship. If she didn’t know any better, she might’ve started thinking she was cursed.
She isn’t surprised that the men who’ve found her only speak in Spanish. (She’d stowed aboard in fucking Havana, in the heart of Spanish Cuba: English is less common than wealth in these waters.) What surprised her was how quickly she was found. They had been less than a full day at sea and she in particular had been wedged behind an assortment of crates in the bowels of the hold. If that was a regular check, this is the tightest ship Anne’s ever been aboard, the fucking navy’s own included. If that wasn’t a regular check, though, there’s more to fear than well-trained sailors on this ship.
For the time being, the sailors—pirates or merchants to guess by their clothes—have made the halfway fatal error of leaving her alone. Tied to a chair in the locked captain’s quarters, perhaps, but alone. And halfway to making a break for it; as soon as she gets this coil around her thumb and down, she’ll have a free hand and then, oh!, then she’ll be dangerous. Able to get free and get armed, maybe even get into a position from which to surprise them. Anne presses through the screaming pain her body’s in—the birth hadn’t gone well for anyone, truth be told—by imagining the look on the louder one’s face when she gets her hands on him.
Attempts to escape and fantasies of revenge alike shrivel up and die in the sudden light flooding the doorway. Anne sets her face into a snarl and prepares to bark like the mad bitch she is at the best opportunity. Even sweating and pale, even with dark bags beneath her eyes and fever hues in her cheeks, Anne knows how she looks: striking. The one word she’s heard everyone use for her. Striking, with her long auburn hair and unnervingly pale green eyes. Striking, taller even than most men she met and twice as mean. Striking, with her hand balled into a fist and slamming into the first person within arm’s length. And that’s even without her signature hat and long coat, both of which sit in front of her on the desk, alongside her rapier and two of her four smaller blades. (Her pistols, alas, had been a casualty of escape from the Villa.)
Stripped of hat and pistol, there’s clearly truth to what Anne’s said since the first day she saw it: the woodcarving accompanying her wanted poster could be any redhead with a hat and pistol. How the artist had avoided any other identifying measure should be a complete mystery—but answers for itself an inch below the face, where an equally generic-looking bosom is presented naked to the viewer.
It was the plausibility of the woman before them being anybody but Anne Bonny that had sent her captors scrambling back to their captain, shouting about a redheaded stowaway armed to the teeth. It was the possibility of her being nobody but Anne Bonny that had lured their captain here. And it was the likelihood that none of these fuckers spoke a lick of English that kept Anne Bonny from loudly comparing them to disease-ridden ballsacks.
The shark starts a-circling with nary an introduction to be had. He must smell the metaphorical blood in the water; her time in the Villa had cut her up and left her bleeding out after all that had happened. The choice was to stay and drown in it all or flee and fight another day—meaning she had no choice. Waiting might’ve only dragged her back into the yawning maw of those terracotta arches. Stowaways aren’t dealt with kindly, but anything was better than the Hell she’d just escaped.
Still. She’d expected a bit of grandstanding. It’s the prerogative of the captain to monologue and gloat, isn’t it?, the same way it’s the quartermaster’s prerogative to administer discipline in whatever way he saw fit.
When the captain apparent finally does deign to speak, it’s…not at all what Anne expected. It’s in English for one, which certainly makes an arse of her for assuming a language barrier. (And to think, she could have called him a bloated whale scrotum this whole time!) For another, it’s quiet. Unsettlingly so. And these two things are only registered after a sentence that stopped her heart.
I knew you would come to me eventually.
Who in their right fucking mind says that to someone they’ve only just met?
He goes on, talks of shitholes and hypothetical anger; though she keeps the mask of her snarl on—her face can be read as easily as map when she leaves it naked—unease drops like an anchor into her belly. There are too many plausible roles he could be filling in this drama: a rival of Jack’s come looking for revenge who never noticed the stupid fuck had left her there to rot, a privateer looking to make English (or perhaps Spanish or French) coin off of her capture, an obsessed stalker, somebody else’s obsessed stalker who’d mistaken her for them, some fucking halfwit James had accused her of selling out back in the day, a psychopath, and on and on and on and on.
It’s the faint brush of his lips (breath?) upon the shell of her ear that drags Anne out of the pit her thoughts had opened. Is it better to be a rat or a bitch? She’s evidently been both, and so far, neither experience has lived up to her standards.
Anne swallows and licks the front of her teeth, bracing herself for what’s to come: on the next breath, she bashes her head back into him, aiming for approximately where he’d been whispering from, but slightly higher. If this strange shark wanted blood so badly, he could have a taste of his own! Her teeth knocked together in the collision, but her expression never shifted in the slightest, wrathful as a harpy. Forget beating, Anne bites at the hand that so much as touches.
This is no fly in the spider’s web: this is a bee. Equally helpless in a spider’s web, perhaps, but not half so useless in a fight, and twice as determined to break free.
“Do I know who the fuck you are,” she scoffs, “do you know who the fuck I AM?! I am Anne FUCKING Bonny,” she’s half-shouting it now, “and I will NOT be FUCKED WITH!”
Christ Almighty, but it felt good to unload that on someone who could understand what she was saying! She’d been seven, eight months ashore locked in her gilded cage if she’d been there a day, and not one of Jack’s fucking so-called friends knew a word in any language but their own. Much like Anne. Figures the first person she’d meet outside the Villa who spoke English would use it to fucking threaten her. Bad luck yet abounds. Had she broken a mirror?
Anne comes down panting and chastens herself, puts her other mask on: inscrutably. A distant, disinterested demeanor. Her voice is much more level, much quieter when she speaks again.
“Hate t’break yer heart, Captain, but I picked this heap based solely on its departure time. I don’t know the first thing about ye.”
@hatigave gave me permission to be a menace
There’s been no shortage of bad luck in Anne’s life over the past almost-year. She’d managed to fall pregnant, be entrusted to the care of strangers interested only in what was in her belly, lose the baby, miss Jack’s last visit to port, and now she’s been found out mid-afternoon the day after she’d stowed aboard another ship. If she didn’t know any better, she might’ve started thinking she was cursed.
She isn’t surprised that the men who’ve found her only speak in Spanish. (She’d stowed aboard in fucking Havana, in the heart of Spanish Cuba: English is less common than wealth in these waters.) What surprised her was how quickly she was found. They had been less than a full day at sea and she in particular had been wedged behind an assortment of crates in the bowels of the hold. If that was a regular check, this is the tightest ship Anne’s ever been aboard, the fucking navy’s included. If that wasn’t a regular check, though, there’s more to fear than well-trained sailors on this ship.
For the time being, the sailors—pirates or merchants to guess by their clothes—have made the halfway fatal error of leaving her alone. Tied to a chair in the locked captain’s quarters, perhaps, but alone. And halfway to making a break for it; as soon as she gets this coil around her thumb and down, she’ll have a free hand and then, oh!, then she’ll be dangerous. Able to get free and get armed, maybe even get into a position from which to surprise them. Anne presses through the screaming pain her body’s in—the birth hadn’t gone well for anyone, truth be told—by imagining the look on the louder one’s face when she gets her hands on him.
Attempts to escape and fantasies of revenge alike shrivel up and die in the sudden light flooding the doorway. Anne sets her face into a snarl and prepares to bark like the mad bitch she is at the best opportunity. Even sweating and pale, even with dark bags beneath her eyes and fever hues in her cheeks, Anne knows how she looks: striking. The one word she’s heard everyone use for her. Striking, with her long auburn hair and unnervingly pale green eyes. Striking, taller even than most men she met and twice as mean. Striking, with her hand balled into a fist and slamming into the first person within arm’s length. And that’s even without her signature hat and long coat, both of which sit in front of her on the desk, alongside her rapier, along with two of her four smaller blades. (Her pistols, alas, had been a casualty of escape from the Villa.)
Stripped of hat and pistol, there’s clearly truth to what Anne’s said since the first day she saw it: the woodcarving accompanying her wanted poster could be any redhead with a hat and pistol. How the artist had avoided any other identifying measure should be a complete mystery—but answers for itself an inch below the face, where an equally generic-looking bosom is presented naked to the viewer.
It was the plausibility of the woman before them being anybody but Anne Bonny that had sent her captors scrambling back to their captain, shouting about a redheaded stowaway armed to the teeth. It was the possibility of her being nobody but Anne Bonny that had lured their captain here. And it was the likelihood that none of them spoke a lick of English that kept Anne Bonny from loudly comparing them to disease-ridden ballsacks.
FMK Raoul Adelé and Jan mwah
FMK but this time with answers that are genuinely hard DAMN YOU
Christ Almighty. This game…is starting to feel less like a game and more like a trap. At the very least, it’s proving to be a game she really can’t win at.
“Fuck. Ah.” She should probably say she’d kill Jan, annoyingly chipper little shit that he is, but she might actually miss him. Adelè would sooner put her in the ground than the other way around. Raoul…might think it’s foreplay. She’s increasingly sure he can’t be killed, anyway: too many have tried, but not once has it taken.
It’s a safe bet of an answer; if nothing else, he at least won’t be offended. Which leaves a bit of a toss-up, but….
“S’pose I’d fuck Jan—it’d shut him up for a bit, leastways, and I wouldn’t be stuck wanting t’murder my spouse. Marry Adelè—always easy t’marry somebody ye admire, and it guarantees me a ship for life asides. Raoul’d be delighted t’hear he made kill, knowin what I do of him: take it as a compliment that he’s the only one I’d want out of three to possibly kill me.” The fact that the relationship between killed and killer lasts longer than any marriage Anne’s ever known of is another reason he’d no doubt find joy in the suggestion, but that’s hardly a thing to mention and look sane doing so.
“But God help ye if ye tell any of ‘em but Raoul about this! Last thing I need’s either of those others hearing about this.” Especially Jan, whom she’s done a fair job of pretending not to care a whit for.
“Can you stop yelling at me? I’m small, and sensitive, and only stabbed one dude!” from Jan 😭😭😭
Out of context things I’ve said while playing Skyrim
Anne heard him, alright; she just didn’t care.
“Yeah! I fucking know! I’M THE FUCKING ONE DUDE YE STABBED!”
More impressive than her hollering is the quick, sharp jerk with which Anne removes the knife pinning her to the mast. Her blood trails behind as it clatters on the deck; it wasn’t as bad as a stab made it sound, but it wasn’t exactly a paper cut, either. She quick to press her hand onto the wound, biting back a scream of pain at her own grip. Gotta stop the bleeding. Clean it, protect it from infection. Then she can yell at Jan until she feels better.
“—Oh, I swear to fuck I’m gonna make ye regret that!”
“So… you WANT to get robbed?” adelé 🙂↕️
Out of context things I’ve said while playing Skyrim
Perhaps she put too much faith in the other woman after all.
The plan’s not half so cockamamie as a question like that makes it sound; as a matter of fact, coming from someone who herself would admit to not being a tactician, it’s pretty damned good. Its only standing flaw, so far as Anne can tell, is that it requires the cooperation of everyone in this room.
“That’s the fuckin plan, en’t it?” Anne’s hands go to her hips, her head canting to one side. “En’t like I’ve got much t’be robbed of, anyway. May’s well use it t’line a trap. Don’t worry: ye only need t’get involved yerself if they come armed.” Can’t shoot in two directions simultaneously, after all.
“Are ye in, or are ye chickenshite?”
“Wow, it’s almost like you regret shooting at my head!” from Raoul <3
Out of context things I’ve said while playing Skyrim
There’s blood crusting on Anne’s upper lip and a welt raising on her right cheek. She’s been a feral cat from the moment they scruffed her—hissing, spitting, taking swipes and jabs indiscriminately, claws out and tongue lashing—and that’s only showed signs of stopping now. Anne jerks to a halt between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass at the words, throwing a sharp elbow into the gut of the one to her left. The blow works as intended, letting Anne rip free of one guard to swing in Silva’s direction. It doesn’t matter that the other one still has her. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t get more than a few steps closer. Nothing matters. She’s enraged, cheeks glowing almost as red as her hair in her ire.
“Oh, aye! I regret it, alright! I regret that I wasn’t shooting at your fucking dick instead! Don’t worry—next time, I won’t fucking miss!”
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.”
The shark starts a-circling with nary an introduction to be had. He must smell the metaphorical blood in the water; her time in the Villa had cut her up and left her bleeding out after all that had happened. The choice was to stay and drown in it all or flee and fight another day—meaning she had no choice. Waiting might’ve only dragged her back into the yawning maw of those terracotta arches. Stowaways aren’t dealt with kindly, but anything was better than the Hell she’d just escaped.
Still. She’d expected a bit of grandstanding. It’s the prerogative of the captain to monologue and gloat, isn’t it?, the same way it’s the quartermaster’s prerogative to administer discipline in whatever way he saw fit.
When the captain apparent finally does deign to speak, it’s…not at all what Anne expected. It’s in English for one, which certainly makes an arse of her for assuming a language barrier. (And to think, she could have called him a bloated whale scrotum this whole time!) For another, it’s quiet. Unsettlingly so. And these two things are only registered after a sentence that stopped her heart.
I knew you would come to me eventually.
Who in their right fucking mind says that to someone they’ve only just met?
He goes on, talks of shitholes and hypothetical anger; though she keeps the mask of her snarl on—her face can be read as easily as map when she leaves it naked—unease drops like an anchor into her belly. There are too many plausible roles he could be filling in this drama: a rival of Jack’s come looking for revenge who never noticed the stupid fuck had left her there to rot, a privateer looking to make English (or perhaps Spanish or French) coin off of her capture, an obsessed stalker, somebody else’s obsessed stalker who’d mistaken her for them, some fucking halfwit James had accused her of selling out back in the day, a psychopath, and on and on and on and on.
It’s the faint brush of his lips (breath?) upon the shell of her ear that drags Anne out of the pit her thoughts had opened. Is it better to be a rat or a bitch? She’s evidently been both, and so far, neither experience has lived up to her standards.
Anne swallows and licks the front of her teeth, bracing herself for what’s to come: on the next breath, she bashes her head back into him, aiming for approximately where he’d been whispering from, but slightly higher. If this strange shark wanted blood so badly, he could have a taste of his own! Her teeth knocked together in the collision, but her expression never shifted in the slightest, wrathful as a harpy. Forget beating, Anne bites at the hand that so much as touches.
This is no fly in the spider’s web: this is a bee. Equally helpless in a spider’s web, perhaps, but not half so useless in a fight, and twice as determined to break free.
“Do I know who the fuck you are,” she scoffs, “do you know who the fuck I AM?! I am Anne FUCKING Bonny,” she’s half-shouting it now, “and I will NOT be FUCKED WITH!”
Christ Almighty, but it felt good to unload that on someone who could understand what she was saying! She’d been seven, eight months ashore locked in her gilded cage if she’d been there a day, and not one of Jack’s fucking so-called friends knew a word in any language but their own. Much like Anne. Figures the first person she’d meet outside the Villa who spoke English would use it to fucking threaten her. Bad luck yet abounds. Had she broken a mirror?
Anne comes down panting and chastens herself, puts her other mask on: inscrutably. A distant, disinterested demeanor. Her voice is much more level, much quieter when she speaks again.
“Hate t’break yer heart, Captain, but I picked this heap based solely on its departure time. I don’t know the first thing about ye.”
Anne burns like a star burns, but not for the same reasons. There’s a fire set in the hole where a heart would go in a normal human being that keeps her running. She knows herself to have been a wildfire in her past, a past now razed by a fire she’d started years ago, and she knows she’s only ever a branch or two of kindling away from burning down her present and her future in much the same vein. Anne burns, always—and now physically, too. Confession has never come easy to her: even now, the words that come out are smoke and ash and not the fiery appeals locked in that hole in her chest. She’s never looked for kind company, or good company, or even basic and decent company; she’s drawn to legend, reputation, competence. She’s fallen on the sword for anyone who saw even a glimmer of those things in her in the past, even when it was a lie they told as they put the blade in her hand. He’s ripped blades out of her hand even while he’s insisted he’s seen those things.
It’s no wonder she burns for him.
She ought to argue against being treated like a fucking dog, but here’s the first man to own her without raising his fist or tying her down, and there’s no sense in arguing against what they both know. Loyal, aggressive, at his side, poised to strike on command—she’s a bitch still. His bitch. His guard dog, finally broken down enough to beg for the chance to sleep at his feet. Burning in ways that ought to embarrass her, that maybe distantly still do. But there’s no need for petty pride behind these closed doors.
She doesn’t stop watching his face until his hands move. Clear invitation. There should be fear in approaching the twisted, scarred remains of the man in front of her—scarred hands and sharp teeth are the least of the horrors he holds, between fractured jaw and cheek and eye socket, one eye staring but unseeing at all times—but there is none in her. The worst of him are the parts unseen, as deep and dark and terrifying as the ocean depths. Unmanned. Unmapped. Unplumbed. Hidden, but never quite out of view. They should twist the stomach into knots until it aches from the tension, but all these half-seen facts have done is further tangle Anne’s senses. They’re a snare and she’s fallen into them. They’ll twist until either she comes apart or twists with them.
COME AND TAKE IT. She doesn’t need to be told twice. Only actually needed to be told she wouldn’t be backhanded for trying to take the risk; she’s willing to bleed for him, break bones and promises at his word, so long as he keeps looking at her.
She wouldn’t know what to do from his lap, how to balance delicately on it and make love to his ego. She’s seen other women in bars and taverns do it, but she’s always felt she lacked their feminine charms, their confidence, their flirtatious quips. When she approaches him, it’s with all her usual lack of tact: she knocks his boots from the desk and settles on her knees between his thighs instead, head down, numb fingers fighting the fastening of his trousers. Anne isn’t sure there’s much she’s good at, but years of consistent feedback have revealed at least one talent she isn’t full-sure he would’ve heard of before.
Hard not to take the chance to ply what talents she has. So long as he keeps looking at her.
@neverhangd said ❝ Use me. Fuck me. Do whatever you want, but god, please touch me. ❞ to Raoul
HE ENVISIONS STARS TO BE HOT to the touch. Flames of burning houses dancing up towards the great sky above. He has seen the way they engulfed the house bearing her husband's body ⎯⎯⎯⎯ just as he has seen the way they burned down all traces of her past now only kept in their memory. SHE REMINDS HIM OF IT ; of the act of burning up leaving only ash once the fight has gone out. Defiant and wretched, pulled apart like a daughter's doll ripped at the seams until limbs were parted from the torso.
Hands do not reach out as he leans back in the chair behind his desk, feet resting on the sturdy oak ( he has placed a knife in it, rather than in a lesser man's eye socket. ) She is the dog begging for a touch, and wretched hands stained with blood still offer no kindness. HOLD A STRAP OF LEATHER and watch it break skin so he might lick up the blood. Dark eyes linger on the curve of her mouth for a moment too long when he watches her.
Scarred hand pats the flesh of his thigh. Invites her to sit. One must make the hound come to him, not the other way around. ❝ Whatever you desire you shall have — ❞ ( their burning bodies, a ship and a star to sail her by, a touch that does not hurt you ) ❝ — but you will have to come and TAKE IT YOURSELF. I am not in the business of handing out wishes unless they are fought for to be taken. ❞
Most people think it only means desire. Arousal. Wild abandon. But that’s not all. The word derives from the Latin. It means suffering. Submission. Pain and pleasure, Anne. Passion. - RAOUL
𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒.
There haven’t been many learned bodies in Anne’s circle since she left Charles Town. A Captain might know his numbers and his letters, but rarely did he know more than that. He knew the things Anne didn’t, how to read the clouds for wind and weather, how to win battles instead of just fights, how to lead without being crushed by the weight of his own leadership. Raoul Silva is the first person Anne’s met with both kinds of knowledge.
An unearned lecture is a fast way to win her annoyance, but an unprompted lesson is an equally fast way, apparently, to win her undivided attention. Where a smarter or at least more experienced woman would have heard past the words—would have known his tone for what it was, naked seduction, would have guessed the words were carefully chosen to craft the intimacy of the moment—Anne only hears the words themselves. Passion. Explains a lot about the Bible, really. About her own situation, a thing she thinks well enough hidden from view even when it’s not. (She gets tense when he’s nearby. Sharpens up, pays more attention, tries her damnedest to anticipate what’s going on in that opaque brain of his and act on it before it comes out. It might look like fear to the observant, but to any who knew her, it was the surest sign of a different heart-pounding emotion.)
“Passion,” she echoes, thoughtfully. Suffering, submission, pain and pleasure—it’s a lot of circular talk to say the word is nuanced. And perhaps pointedly chosen, though she yet holds to hope that this is all leading somewhere away from her little problem.
“…yer definition at least makes more sense than Jesus having the horn. You on the cusp of a passion, then?”
I love you. You’re mine. I’ll kill any bastard who tries to take you from me. (But the I love you is silent) Raoul!
𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒.
You’re mine. I’ll kill any bastard who tries to take you from me.
Clearly.
The depths of Raoul’s preoccupation with her aren’t a thing Anne has taken the time to sit down and think through. She fears what she may discover if she does—the third and final nail in the coffin, another man that loves her for the sake of something else, the thrice-proven principle of her own innate lack of worth—so she’s gone out of her way not to. He treats her better than the last two, and even if he didn’t, he says all the right things. She’d be a fool to look this gift horse in the mouth; she’s taken it, him, in already. It’s too late to turn it back out and avoid the bloodshed to come, so why spoil what remains of the unspoiled hours? Why rush the attack if it’s already in motion and offering her a respite from the battle first? If what is between them is really the Greek horse, let Cassandra fall with Troy. Let the prophecy come unspoken. Let her fall without the loathing her words are known to inspire.
But she isn’t falling. Troy is burning down behind her, but there’s no blade at her throat, no hand pushing her down. In fact, the only hand nearby holds her. She is nestled in the cup of his palm, spared from the flames only because he decided it should be so.
Anne blinks again, but the scene doesn’t change: Jack is still there, on his knees, panting and glaring up at her. Silva is still behind him, his favorite pistol still leveled at the stupid bastard. His dark, feverish eyes are still setting fire to Anne through his stare alone. Except to glance at Jack, she hasn’t broken his stare. It feels…important, to look him in the eyes while this happens. To show him she won’t be taken without a fight, that she’s his no matter what poison the bastard’s been drip-feeding Silva while at the other end of his pistol. She’ll kill him herself if she has to. Whatever it takes.
“I’ve no intention of being anyone else’s.” Not anymore. Not again. She’d already made that decision: Silva’s the end of the line. No more. He’ll the best or the worst of them, it won’t matter; he’ll be the last. And after him, she’ll be alone or dead, or maybe both. “Kill him, ‘less ye want me t’do it.”
🕯 I sleep but Raoul never does !
send me 🕯️to hear my character's inner thoughts about your character.
I don’t know what the fuck to think of him. By rights, I should be dead. Stowed aboard, challenged his authority—all while already halfway to death, mind—to say nothing of breaking his nose…anyone else would’ve told me to catch their bullet with my teeth, and there he is debating how long to wait before untying me. He knows enough about me to know my father, and worse, he knows Andy even existed. Even without the details, that’s pretty damming.
I’m impressed—gobsmacked, more like—but somehow I doubt he’d care much if that factors in. Sort of a given when you’re in his position, ain’t it?
…more. for the fun of it.
He’s going to goddamn ruin me if I’m not careful about this. You’d reaaaaallyyyyy think I would’ve learned by now that falling for pirates doesn’t end well, but here we are. It’s fine. I keep a lid on this, and it’s fine. It goes away. Eventually I can make eye contact and breathe at the same time. I lucked out his face is so messed up. Gives me a plausible reason to be caught staring. And…not even close to staring. Just don’t think about him. And don’t get caught alone with him. That way I don’t say anything stupid and I stay aboard in an officer’s position. Try not to imagine other positions to get caught in. Oooooh, this is going to be a problem.
…
The things I would do to get at that man’s cock….
He’s a handful, Jan, but somehow he’s proven to be a handful Anne doesn’t mind. He’s like the sea breeze: light, playful, whimsical. A breath of fresh air, he fills sails and lungs and joyful songs, flitting to and fro in his fancy. What is must be like to live so light of heart, Anne can’t even begin to guess.
Talk of chains and walls and worser fates bring to mind an spook story that she damned near tells—a rarity, especially away from the quiet of a sleeping ship—when he takes possession of her wrist and pulls her into the sea beside him as if she weren’t trying to keep her good boots dry, the prick! She lets out a disbelieving laugh (could’ve passed for a scoff if that ghost of a smile weren’t haunting her face) and shoves him to land arse-first in the water.
“Speak for yerself! The world could do with fewer menaces like you.” There’s no steel in her words, no venom, not even so much as a barb: the curse of her self-imposed contrarian streak rears its head most often as contradictions between word and fact. She would miss him if he were to go. More people could stand to follow in his way.
A world without Jan would be a poorer world indeed—but that’s a thing she can’t say. (It reeks of the exact sort of wanton fuckery she’s only just convinced the crew is outside of her nature. The kind of frivolous idiot shite steeped in sentimentality that they claim women are solely so prone to. A reason to cast Anne out of their company.) She settles for a smile and leans towards him, offering him a hand up. She has to hope it’s sufficient, being very nearly as rare as a compliment from her.
“I only meant—t’ain’t so bad, to go a-pirating again. Even if it is with some dick-shit gang of Dutchmen.” A frequent term of almost-endearment Anne liked to use. She’s hardly a woman famous for love of any flag that wasn’t black and boned, after all. “At least we’re none of us fucking English, hey?”
@neverhangd said : 'i know there are worse ways to stay alive.' to Jan
SHE IS THE FLAME WHICH DRAWS HIM IN time and time again akin to a moth fluttering around a candle. He can't help it, it is the red hair. Her words capture his attention as he spins around; his feet stuck in the wet sand of the beach nearly causing him to topple over as he does. ❝ Exactly ! You could be chained to a wall by a vengeful king for example ! ❞ JOY IS INFECTIOUS, even when Anne seems immune to it some days.
He reaches out to her and pulls her forward into the gentle waves of the water with him. Resistance is not an option. What is the going to do ? waste hollow threats and perfectly fine breath on him ? She couldn't kill him even if she tried. ❝ Or you could live in a world without music. That would mean you would live without me, I suppose. A horrible thought. ❞
Anne clocks the green and grins to see it. God less Adelé—she gets it. And Anne’ll get it, too, soon as these fuckers are gone.
She slaps a hand on the bar top and uses it to abruptly push out her barstool. The noise catches the attention of the lingering bar flies, turning their dull gazes onto the just-over-six-foot redhead in the leather jacket. They wouldn’t normally have cared…and if Anne hadn’t tossed a guy into the streets one-handed earlier, she doubts she would have, either. But she’s in a foul mood and most of the drunks watched her do it. They hurry to the bar to close out tabs while Anne stretches, drops Adelé a wink, and meanders to the bathroom to splash water on her face.
Getting high in the early morning hours sounds great; going back to crash in Read’s couch for another sleepless night does not. She barely even recognizes the woman in the spotty bathroom mirror, dark bags and the remains of yesterday’s eyeliner under her eyes. She looks rough. Feels rough. Is rough, but this of a different kind. Exhaustion.
The bar’s pretty well cleared by the time she renters it.
“Bum me a beer and I’ll help ye clean.”
@neverhangd said : i’d probably get high and crash or somethin’ stupid. to Adelé
IT IS A THREAT SHE HAS HEARD often enough for it to follow her into her dreams. Broken glass and suspicious white contents left in bathroom stalls mean little to her after all these years. Even when she would much rather prefer life without the cleanup. Loud music is the score on which she nearly dances behind the bar ; A BASEBALL BAT KEPT NEXT TO TOWELS DRENCHED IN BEER and a bag containing weed resting between the clean glasses. For later, she tells herself when she pulls it out to show Anne as an unspoken promise.
She likes the other woman, likes her even more when she gets to spend the early morning hours stoned out of her mind bitching at her after the daily cleanup. ❝ As long as you don't throw up like a fucking cunt, you're welcome to get high with me once these fucking losers leave. ❞
What if they kissed? 👀 wildcard for any of the kids!
I'll write a scene where our muses kiss, even if they aren't shipped together. it is it's own thing and doesn't have to lead to an official ship. a "what if scenario"
Picking’s for suckers. 😎
Adelé
The guitar sang out, sad and low, as Anne strummed it. The song is an old one, and not at all popular, but it grabbed Anne from the first moment she heard it, a sort of cowboy ballad without too many Western frills.
“There’s only six hours…left in the day. Time is so precious, and it’s slipping away.” Her voice is nothing remarkable, low and a little hoarse and really only just passable; there’s a reason she plays the bass instead. Still. This song speaks to her on some secret level, something she can’t seem to let go of. She gives up on trying to mask her natural accent, even when it butchers the sound of the lyrics. “Got no destination, got no place to go: being with ye, dear…is all that I know. Put yer head on my pillow, we’re finally alone. Wash the dust from yer hair now, I don’t care if ye never go home.” Bit ironic, given that it’s neither her pillow nor her home that she’s singing for now.
Adelé arrives with coffee just as the song slinks back into wailing guitar melancholia. Anne sets the instrument aside mid-strum, pulling Adelé between her legs one-handed for a kiss. It’s as strange and pensive as the song itself, touched with melancholy and dust in the exact same places. Adelé is warm and soft against her lips, as comforting as the coffee she’s still holding. Anne pulls away from slowly, and with some regret, so she can look the other woman in the eyes. She could live there in Adelé’s gaze.
“I think I might love ye.” And that. That might be a problem.
Raoul
It should matter that they’re out in public, but it definitely does not. Those who don’t know any better might have thought they’d gotten into a spat overnight: Anne sits across from rather than beside him, staring out the window, stiff and fighting back winces. Raoul looks relaxed, fiddling with something on his phone, looking up and chitchatting with anyone but Anne. Raoul taps something on his phone and Anne jerks in a sudden breath, tries to cover the moment with a cough, but she’s been caught. Raoul’s smile isn’t as hidden as perhaps it ought to be, but to his credit, he still keeps her only in his periphery. He adjusts his phone once more and Anne’s grip becomes a vice on the door handle until he takes pity—maybe—and brings the controls back down again as the car pulls in to its destination. Anne all but shoots out the door, holding it open for Raoul and company to exit. The change in position is doing her no favors, but at least standing she feels like less of a sitting duck.
She’s so distracted juggling not reacting and keeping her footing that she doesn’t realize he’s right behind her until he touches her hip. She jumps and hisses, much to his amusement, even as he draws her back against his chest, murmuring into her ear.
“You’re doing so well.”
“I feel fuckin stupid,” she hisses back, but there’s a dusting of red across her cheeks that lets him know it’s not wholly unwelcome. He laughs and kisses her cheek, surreptitiously increasing the speed of the toy inside of her. She makes a strangled sound and half-falls back against him. He pats her hip twice and moves away, thumbing the speed back down before switching it to a randomly generated mode. She’ll learn to appreciate what he’s doing for her, in time, and he’ll enjoy the fruits of his labor alone until she does.
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.”
❝ what did you think i was going to say? 'oh, come here, i'll kiss you better'? ❞ - sadly this is raoul (but he says it with a smile)
baldur's gate 3 starters (part 1)
Anne fixes Silva with an unamused glare, pausing in her work to give him the full weight of her attention. The bastard’s always angling for this, looking to dig under her skin and poke at the nerves he finds until he gets a raw one he can dig his claws into. She learned that at their first meeting. Times haven’t changed much, though: no matter how proactive she is everywhere else, Silva keeps her reactive, off-balance, unable to predict him…yet. Give her time, she will learn.
The wound is superficial, more of a cut than the deep stab it had been intended as, but she fears infection will set in if it’s not tended to. She doesn’t trust English dogs clean their weapons properly. Anne looks away again and continues to worry at the wound, pressing the blood-soaked rag that at one time served as a sleeve harder against her bleeding thigh.
“Ye’re the one with kissing on the brain,” she finally points out, wracking her brains for a response outside of fuck you and I THOUGHT you were going to point me to the medic, both of which are true sentiments but neither of which plays into his stupid word games, which she’s lately become determined to push back against. “If ye wanted to play doctor I wouldn’t be opposed, though I’d hope if ye were looking for that ye’d prefer I didn’t bleed out on yer bedsheets.”
Damn. So he really wasn’t preparing to burn the library down. Anne is starting to suspect that all magic looks the same until the spell is done, or at least all somatic magic. She’s actually suffered pride for a moment or two at the thought that the wizard would sooner raze this monument of ill-gotten gains to the ground than suffer it to stand a moment longer! (Then again…it’s distinctly better for her that Gale remains a touch amoral, lest he decide piracy is another crime he cannot stomach.)
Slightly disappointed, Anne stows the bottle of Alchemist’s Fire back where it belongs. Perhaps later. Put out enough to actually pout, Anne looks to Gale again.
“If ye’re not lighting the place up, the hells are ye doing?” She should’ve gone with the vampire. He wouldn’t have objected to a little bit of extracurricular mayhem! “I thought we agreed now’s the time for action.”
@neverhangd said : “My advice: when ye have nothing left to say, set something on fire.” to Gale
HE IS ONLY SLIGHTLY UNSETTLED at the spoken words. Just enough to have him halt his motions ; hands trapped in an awkward position halfway through a spell. Sparks of magic remain regardless. ❝ Well... now... what ? ❞ Sometimes it's a good thing to have an arson-eager companion at one's side, now, however, was not one of those moments. Valuable books as far as the eye could see stacked up high on top of one another lining the corners of the room. THIS IS NOT THE PLACE FOR A FIREBALL, ANNE ! ❝ Fire, my dear friend, is a welcome companion on most occasions, that is certain. But I would kindly request you to refrain from it in this particular instance. ❞
❝ Even though I have been told this would happen my entire life, I still can’t quite accept it. ❞ from gale and yes he's holding books the nerd
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ* ARRANGED MARRIAGE SENTENCE STARTERS 2.0
That makes two of them, then.
Everything about the morning’s preparations had been a lead anchor in Anne’s belly—rising to find Marial already in her chambers, having her private morning ritual cut off before it could even begin, her hair knotted into elaborate braids and her body shoved into a pale green dress that set fire to her hair, her feet pinched into heels and her stomach and breasts forced into prettier place by a corset—and yet everything about this afternoon has lightened the anchor. Dread and gnashing anger at being bartered off to a perfect stranger have been replaced by…surprise. And not always unpleasantly so.
In the stories, the men in Gale’s position were lecherous old twats with more wrinkles than sense and gnarled hands that ached to take advantage of a youth long since passed from them. They were mean and cruel and ugly, small men who had to make their wives smaller to feel tall. There’s time yet for Gale to prove mean and cruel and small, but he’s…quite a bit younger than she’d been expecting, though given his apparent humor he would likely disagree with being called young. He’s proven to be quite charming in his manner, a sort of distracted but genuine thing Anne’s not quite sure what to do with. And he’s far from ugly.
Besides, she quite likes his idea of courtship activities, though she won’t admit to such without some small degree of pressure. Reshelving the books in his personal library is more engaging than some decorous stroll through a garden. She doesn’t recognize a single title from the scant few books in her arms or the sizable stack in his, even as well-educated as she is. Some of the titles are in languages she doesn’t even recognize the script of! She pulls one such book from the top of her pile, examining the cover rather than staring at Gale (again).
“I don’t know how anyone does.” The choice of who you would spend the rest of your life with, ripped away because society demanded it be so. “Seems almost cruel, stickin people with a perfect stranger for life. F—terrifying.” Ladies aren’t supposed to curse, a bad habit Lady Cormac’s been insistent that Anne unlearn before her inevitable marriage. “What happens if ye hate the person ye’re stuck with, after all? Still gotta marry them.”