She Wants To Get To Know Him Better But Cant Bring Herself To Share Backstories - Tumblr Posts
“Ye think that’s nice, ye should see the wine.” She has no idea what’s she saying, going on nothing but the way Captain hides the bottles from the rest of the officers, too dim to realize she’d been watching from the door. He hid the wine and the brandy, so that had to mean something.
Anne pulls the Quartermaster’s misplaced keys from her coat pocket, preferring the ease and discretion they offered over, say…bashing the doorknob in. Up and out she climbs, through the doors and onto the deck. They weren’t locked below or anything, but pulled out in the gloom as they were, she hoped to mask some of their illicit nature. Tryck’s nice and all, but anyone reporting to the Captain’s cabin alone was someone to be kept at an arm’s length. This bit of mischief is something they can both agree on; pickpocketing a crew member while at sea? That’s a bit less…juvenile.
Without a telescope, the crew’s too far away on the beach to see what their outcasts are up to. The Captain finishes his speech, mug held high; the others cheer and toast him right back. Anne is at the cabin door before the ale hits their tongues.
As she so often did when a silence felt in need of bursting, but nothing of importance could come to mind, Anne asked a question over her shoulder that had dick all to do with anything. Just to fill the silence.
“Ye’re bein marooned on an island and the captain lets ye choose three things t’take, but no more than ye can manage t’carry alone. What’re ye taking?”
Anne almost immediately wants to argue—this crew isn’t near so rough a sort as her last, her usual, they take to him for plenty reasons other than his dumbassery—but there’s no point in raising an argument when better points come to life. He collapses into the seat across from her and she glances up again, sharpish, more reflex than anything else. She loses her place in the ledger and growls to herself, searching the page over for the last set of numbers she remembers working with.
She gives up instead, flipping the ledger shut and shoving it away. Fucking pointless. And why is she slaving over these numbers, anyway, while the dumbfucks have gone ashore and left her to look over the ship? Tryck is being punished; Anne is being pushed. Tryck they want, clearly, to keep morale high by whatever means—jokes, songs, stories, sex—and disinviting him from making camp was done to shame him for favoring anyone over Captain. Anne they want to be gone as swiftly as possible, kept on for competence and reputation but reviled for her sex and the lack of such she puts out.
“Come on,” Anne orders apropos of nothing but her own sour thoughts; they had flashed across Anne’s face naked as a baby newborn, the way they almost always do. She doesn’t give a rat’s arse for drink or dumbassery—that much is clear—but Tryck does, for whatever idiot fucking reason he does. She bashes her way through the door of the galley, sure Tryck’s hot on her heels without looking.
Fuck the Captain. “I know where Captain keeps his private stores. Sounds like ye’re drinking better’n rotgut tonight.”