AT NIGHT, IN BED, MY LIES EMERGE AS PEARLS
The first, in midwinter, Tahitian gray and silver, cold against my throat, was born a foreign object, perilous inside my chest. I slept all night to ease the pain, and while I did, I made it round, lustrous.
Sometimes, though not often, Locust thinks of her father, the bastard. She hates Morgan, now, but she hadn’t hated him in the earliest moments of her girlhood, but, even in her hatred, she had to admit that she’d learned from him. Her weaknesses, primarily – her fondness for alcohol came from him, as did her sharp temper and her cutting tongue, as did her abject carelessness, the way that she would hurt without meaning it, as did her restless wandering, as did the way that she could not seem to love in the ways that other people did, as did the way that she threw away every chance she’d had at love for fickle, meaningless affairs, as did the violent, spastic way that she hurt, the way that she would draw blood for every wound dragged across the fragile surface of her heart. But there were a few good things, and one was the fact that she was unshakable, even when she was met with loathing, or something like it. Before he tried to marry her off to a son of a friend, to be a broodmare, she did not love her father, but she did trust him, in the way that you had to trust anyone who was in charge of a vessel that you were on; any mistakes, and it went down.
When her father struck her flanks with a broken bottle, she didn’t even flinch. She watched him the entire time, right in the eyes, and she hoped that he felt it.
The red-eyed woman does not back down from her stare, and she does not back down from hers, so they continue to watch each other, like snakes, waiting to see who would bite first. “An interesting reputation you keep, Silver Captain.” She is not sure that she cares for her term of address, much less that she cannot discern what it means; her voice drips not emotion but apathy, and Locust knows that apathy is far more dangerous than emotion. Apathy is a clean cut. Apathy can kill. An emotional man makes mistakes, but one who does not care does not stumble.
She doesn’t stumble, either. Nothing shakes that thin, angry veneer of a smile. “In my line of work,” Locust drawls, sweetly – succinctly, “an interesting reputation is a necessity.” And she means it. Locust is many things, but she’s never been much of a liar. Near the haunts of the Nzarah, pirates were notoriously sexist; further out, it varied. Sometimes, they even favored women. Neither mattered to her. She’d learned, early on, that if one wanted to be respected (or, better yet, feared) in her particular occupation, they needed to cultivate a reputation.
Often, it wasn’t a pretty one.
Her eyes, finally, flicker from Locust’s to the knife that hangs in the air between them. They all but crackle with tension, though there is the meticulous, strategic emptiness of a soldier in their depths as they watch the blade, prepared for her to use it. She doesn’t intend to, though she knows that she could – she didn’t come looking for a fight tonight. She is silent, unafraid. And Locust is waiting, with a thick coil of tension spiraling the length of her spine.
The silence drags on. She watches her, unmoving, all but unblinking. She holds the knife steady, though it begins to strain at her telekinesis; she curses the weakness of her telekinetic magic in these lands all over again.
Finally, she speaks, but her answer comes out vague. “I don’t want anything.”
It strikes her that something in her tone is possessive. She doesn’t know why, can’t understand why - why, why, why. Her gaze isn’t hateful; it burns with something that is closer to disgust, but she can almost mistake it for jealousy.
Disgust, at least, she can understand.
“I think there are better ways to show a myth, or a story, or a killing. That’s all.” The lightness of her tone prepares her for the hit, even before it comes. “There is no tact.” Locust tilts her head at her, gaze darkening, and that too-sharp smile pulls a little bit harder at the edges of her lips. Hadn’t she told her that it was a warning?
Perhaps she thought it a sailor’s warning, given to enemy ships – not the warning of a hunter to prey who thought that they were the ones with teeth, from the rabbit to the wolf she’d skin.
“Not a myth,” she says, her voice all but a hum, “or a story.” The third option is the closest, for she has killed water horses before, and that is certainly what the figurehead implies, but it isn’t quite true, either. She doesn’t need them to know that she has killed, and it was not glorious enough to be memorialized anyways. (No – for all that she is doing, Locust knows that it is not glorious work. It is painful, ugly, disgusting. Even evil. Nothing worth a monument on the front of her ship.) She just needs them to know that she will kill them, if they give her a reason, and she’s very good at finding reasons. “Not a killing, either – just a warning, but not to sailors.” She wonders how the woman will react to that, the gleam in her eyes neither gleeful nor particularly angry; if anything, it is curious. A sharp, bitter laugh escapes Locust’s throat, then. “And I’m a pirate. I don’t care much for tact.”
And she still watches her, like a tiger watches something that she has not yet decided whether or not to eat. Locust regards her, perfectly calm, still smiling. “And what is it you captain, Captain? Where do you sail, on your pirate ship?” There is something different in her tone, at the end of her inquiries, but it is such a subtle transition that she barely notices – more obvious is the way that she stands somewhat less tense, as though something has sucked away some fragment of that anger, or something like it, but Locust pays that little mind.
She doesn’t mind to indulge her that. “The Dark Strider. Once, The Sea Star, before my…” Her voice wavers, almost imperceptibly, and, for a moment, that smile falters; what lies beneath is visible, in flickers. Something gleams in Locust’s eyes, and it is ugly, but not in the way that her crocodile smile and feigned pleasantry is ugly; for a moment, there is a flash of grief in her eyes. It is not a kind grief. It is a grief that has festered, year after year, and gangrened, a grief that should have been amputated and left behind long ago. But she couldn’t cut it off. She couldn’t let it go, so it followed, phantom-limb, and consumed, until nothing was left untouched. But she has never told the truth before, not to people who deserved it far more (not to August, or his mother, or the innumerable others that her dead left behind), and she certainly won’t tell it to her. “…before she went down in a storm, with the rest of my crew.” The rest of her sentence is short. Flat. Even dismissive. She does not let herself linger on it, and, as soon as the words have passed her lip, that cold-eyed crocodile smile returns in its entirety, as though it had never left. “I sail wherever the winds and interesting rumors take me – we rarely follow set routes, and we seek what we can find.”
She pauses. “I simply harbor a certain fondness for Denocte, so I visit Novus more often than most lands...and stay longer when I do.” And how couldn’t she? This was where she’d given birth to her daughter, where she’d raised her in the precious months that they’d had together. This was where August was, the last little scrap of Golden that existed, one of the few things she had left to protect. But she doesn’t speak of her daughter, or of August, or of Golden. There is no part of her heart that she would bare willingly, least of all to a stranger, no precious thing that she is willing to mention enough to risk. Instead, her tone remains light, and shifts to an inquiry of her own. “Do you seek something? Passage, perhaps? Rumors?”
She knows that the other woman isn’t looking for any of those things from her, but with that strange, indiscernible emotion passed, she doesn’t know what to think.
@Boudika || locust continues to be awful dot jpeg || "mother-of-pearl," callie siskel
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