all_inclusive | Give the girl a shot of whiskey/Set the pirate lady free

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Give the girl a shot of whiskey/Set the pirate lady free

How it was that the wind, salt-sharp and quick as a whip as it swept around her did not tear the hat, broad-brimmed and worn, from her head, only philosophers and quantum physicists might be able to say.

Perhaps the rumors of her being a witch were true after all. Certainly she had never done anything to hush up the whispers of exactly that when she had heard them. (She had, in fact, laughed hard enough to nearly upset her glass when she'd first overheard someone informing their friend that the captain of the Thetis was some kind of sea witch). Rumors abounded around any woman who walked in the world of men, she had expected nothing less. Whether she was witch, fallen noblewoman, madwoman or whore, every man had his favorite story to tell of the woman who would dare to captain a pirate ship.

Phryne turned her head from the warmth of the sun to smile at her crew. "The wind is with us!" she called from her perch, standing as she was high up among the topmast sails. She took little note of the precariousness of her position, leaning far out from the safety of the solid wooden braces, kept safe only by the hand she kept wrapped around a rope nearby. "Prepare yourselves, we shall be on them by sunset!"

The Thetis was crewed by a mixture of sailors and strays, a strange combination of men and (shockingly) several women who came from all corners of the world. They were known for nothing more than for their captain's love of hunting slavers as they attempted to return to Europe newly heavy with profit, of the chaos they wreaked in taverns they frequented and the promise that all would share equally in the spoils they tore from merchants' hands before the goods could be traded for new stocks of slaves. What the crew made of their captain was up to each on their own, but were to Phryne more family than those she'd known by blood.

She all but danced down the rigging and masts until she stood on deck once more, eyes returning to the shape on the far horizon as she spoke to the figure nearest her, "Copper and cloth, you think?" Her lips curved, gaze turning to the one she spoke to, "Or might we hope for rum enough to refill our stock?"

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The world had proven its weight and the darkness it contained too often to see Phryne set aside all her pleasures, the fervency with which she embraced the life she lived, on more the rarest occasion. What rules they were or were not then ruled by in the world beyond the buccaneer's door, she allowed a moment of seriousness that had lived nowhere else in the (admittedly brief) time she had known the man. Perhaps it did not matter whether the ship they chased to the horizon was as real as either of them, or a sort of phantasm to distract or entertain them, the matter was too weighty to be made a joke of when his eyes held her own then.

What she had misunderstood of his question aside, something maybe of her experience having been cobbled together from the adventures had in the past decade supplemented by slim novels of english translations of Sun Tzu or Marcus Aurelius then shining through, she thought he might understand the desire to level the often unfair balance of the world.

There were no shades of grey in her ship's chosen prey. Whatever else might hold true beyond the buccaneers' door, that much was without question.

"Good," she said, pulling a touch of her usual lightness around herself with a lift of her chin. "It would be entirely too rude not to stop in and say hello."

The glint in Porthos's eyes would let her know that he appreciated that return to something closer to levity as much as he had appreciated the gravity, if she noticed it. He dipped his head slightly, in agreement, then looked over at the sun. They had a while yet before sunset.

"How can I make myself useful until then?" he rephrased the question he had meant to ask all along.

All her flirtations with the life of a pirate queen, the door one she had dabbled in for hours or a day at a time when in want of an adventure and the taste of the sea air, when added to novels on the golden age of piracy created the sum total of what she knew of how to attack a ship at sea. It was nothing to sneeze at, surely, as long as you were not yourself a pirate or sailor, but she understood she relied readily on the experience of the crew she had been given.

"The guns?" she supplied with a raise of her brows. "I believe there is some busy work yet in preparing the cannons for the fight, assuring the cannonballs are at hand, that the fuses are dry and ready, and all that. Could you help there?"

The truth was that she thought the crew could run it all readily with little interference or help, but he had that look in his eye of needing as much as wanting something other than idleness to pass the time until they made their attack. She lifted her head to check the colors that flew above them, then added for her own sake, "I will need to drag out the old skull and crossbones. Best we let them think we're Dutch a while longer, but won't that be a neat surprise when we are near enough."

There, at the falling sun, the cannons boomed their echoing greeting to the splintering of wood, the shouting of men. Chaos, punctured by her calls of orders here and there and the bursts of musket fire before guns were all but thrown aside for the clang of steel and the clash of men (and women) in the fight.

Phryne stood high on the scene, her golden gun flashing in the falling light as she leveled it at the kneecap of the nearest man and sent him heavily to the deck with the sharp crack of gunfire. It might not have been strictly fair to bring weaponry from her own time, but there were those who deserved fairness and those who did not, and their adversary was anything but her equals.

Edited 2015-04-07 20:49 (UTC)

Porthos, for his part, wasn't the sort to shoot first and then move on to his sword. He was the sort to jump into the fray, and keep his pistol for whatever need he might later have of it. One never knew when a shot might come in handy, after all. He was the first among the slaver ship, swinging a broadsword that might have seemed out of place in such a fight if it wasn't for the ease with which it cut through the enemy sailors. He used a swinging pulley to knock out a man aiming a pistol at him, then shifted out of its way as it returned, catching the next man trying to jump on him with a blow from his reinforced gauntlet, cracking his jaw.

This was when he felt most alive, and when he could forget all about his father and his lies. How he had doubted the man who had always seen worth in him, the very man who had always watched out for him. How close he had come to turning his back on everything he lived for. All of this faded away in the thick of the action, and his sword, his gauntlet and everything that he could get his hands on were all he needed to see him through this, cutting a path across the deck towards the captain's quarters, where he had seen well-dressed men barricade themselves.

The plan of attack had been one of relative simplicity. Having made certain that the ship they chased carried no human cargo, the Thetis slid gracefully alongside its quarry with a salute and a quick change of the flag that flew from its mast to fit the spirit of the thing. The curses they had earned in immediate reply had been salty enough to have even Phryne nearly raising her eyebrows, but for the depressing lack of creativity in their content as each and every member of the two ships dove into action (or just plain dove, if they were smart enough to remember to duck when under attack).

The play she had called had set her in neat defense of her ship's wheel. It was smart, careful, and most of all...cautious.

Needless to say, she soon left that duty to the stern-faced sailor she referred to as Mister Arrow and took off to follow the action across the ropes and ladders to the enemy ship. For the moment she moved in the wake of Porthos' path of destruction across the desk, slipping between struggling bodies and aiding the odd person here and there as she moved. Where he was a boulder tearing through all in his way, she was water. She watched him where she could without compromising her safety and was more than a little impressed to see the ease with which a man as large as himself moved, how he fought from all angles and with anything and everything at hand to take down his foes.

She caught up a small axe as she moved and brought it down with a thunk to bisect a nearby section of rope, then ducked as a loosed section of rigging snapped back to collide with a bow-legged sailor and send him flying over the railing and into the water.

It wasn't long before Porthos reached the captain's quarters. The hasty barricade the men had put together did not hold for very long, under repeated assaults when he threw his whole weight against the door, shoulder first. The doors ended up bursting open, and three men tried to jump him. The first one only narrowly avoided the swipe of his sword, and lost his balance in his haste to dodge it; the second was greeted by the guard of his sword knocking him on the head, and to the floor; and the third stopped short as Porthos leveled the muzzle of his pistol on him.

All three of them wore finer clothes than the sailors fighting out front, either the slavers themselves, or the officers of this blasted ship.

"Which one of you's the captain?" he asked, lowering his sword to threaten all three of them with his pistol.

He heard a creak of wood one second too late, and he could tell that it was another pistol now pressed at the back of his head. "I am," came the voice from behind him.

Using Porthos as a distraction had never been part of her plans. Roughly sketched though they might have been and ever-reliant on the competency of a crew that had been more or less cobbled together before she had ever stood shipboard and decided she would quite like to disrupt the triangle trade as a sort of hobby, she had set him in the center of things without thinking of how to use the...if not anger, then frustration he boiled over with.

That being said, she could not say he didn't make a wonderful distraction all the same.

There was nothing of skirmishes she was used to in the fight between the two crews, no back alleys or Turkish baths or even a jewel thief to lighten the mood. Neither was it war, exactly, as her crew fought doggedly (nearly literally in one case, which left her wincing in momentary sympathy after catching sight of the cook of her crew biting the hand of a member of the slave ship's) but in that scene of disorganized chaos she maneuvered around, ever ready to remove a prime target if they looked to be getting the upper hand.

She took care in following where Porthos (knowingly or unknowingly) led, shadowing him as much out of curiosity as for the direction he chose being exactly the target they needed to take if they wanted the battle over sooner rather than later. Cut the head off the snake and all that. Adrenaline sung too sharp in her veins for her not to enjoy the scene, as steady as her hands were in checking her gun and clicking its tumbler back into place when she'd assured herself she had shot enough for what might lie within the cabin ahead.

Phryne moved with quiet caution through its door, though she closed her eyes a second before entering to speed the adjustment of her vision. There she arrived in time to see the back of a man who had held command from what she'd seen in her borrowed telescope, his gun raised and held against Porthos' head. She did not pause then but ducked low enough to keep from alerting the men she had heard the Musketeer addressing and letting them give warning to their Captain. Rather than step in exactly behind him, she chose to move in from his right and raised her gun to point it directly at him.

"I would suggest," she began, her voice almost soft but for the steel that lay within it. "That you put the gun down, Captain."

If there was a time Porthos woudn't be glad to hear Phryne's voice, he hadn't yet lived through it. What was certain was that he was very, very glad this time. Of course he wouldn't have simply let himself be taken, and there were still avenues of action for him to explore, but having someone at his back was a luxury he had grown used to, in his time with the Musketeers.

When the pressure of the pistol against his head vanished, he turned around and punched the man in the jaw with the guard of his sword, immediately leveling his own pistol back at the other three men. "That's for sneaking up on a man from behind," he added, moving sideways so that he could keep watching the three, and have the captain, who was just picking himself up from the floor, and Phryne, standing tall and proud with that impossibly small pistol of hers, in his peripheral vision. "What do you want us to do with them?"

Lie though it would have been to suggest that there was little Phyrne liked so well as surprising a criminal (be it lawfully true or not in that moment) with a gun in her hand and the situation pulled under control, her love of hedonism too flagrant to make the list of things she enjoyed so short, it was an action she enjoyed immensely. That the man belonged to a time even more constrictive than her own in matters of womanhood and what they were and were not to be allowed made the victory all the more sweet.

She watched with narrowed eyes as the captain drew the gun away from Porthos' head, ready as ever for a movement that might suggest he was fool enough to think he'd catch her off her guard if he turned on her. When he crashed hard to the ground under the force of Porthos' attack, her lips could not help but quirk at that small measure of comeuppance before she used a foot to kick his gun away from where it had fallen. No sense in offering him a chance to use it again, after all.

When she turned her attention to Porthos (keeping ever an eye on the Captain before her as he struggled to his feet with one hand occupied in cradling his jaw, every movement a touch shaken and jerky as if his brains had been sufficiently rattled by the blow to make his thoughts sluggish), it was to smile.

"I have just the thing."

It had taken them a little while to unload the rum and the gold and jewels found on the slaver ship, but that time had allowed them to send the surviving crew members, including the officers and merchants, off to find their own fate in row boats. If you asked Porthos, the little water and few biscuits Phryne had afforded each boat was too nice for these kind of people.

At least she had taken their oars away.

They were sailing away now, Phryne and Porthos both standing on the forecastle, looking at the ship they were leaving behind. There was a loud boom, and it wasn't long before its sails caught fire.

"Here's to one fewer of those ships," Porthos toasted, and opened the bottle of rum in his hand, one of their prizes of the day, to drink to that.

There had been no little satisfaction in seeing that the ship's crew were sat to the side, their arms and legs bound as they awaited their fate on the ship's deck, while her crew transferred all of value they had wanted from the hold. All save for the several chests worth of beads she had been informed were meant to be traded directly for slaves on the next round of purchasing the ship had been scheduled to make. Those she had seen brought up only to be dumped overboard.

They were not pearls. They were not precious things. They were blood money and nothing she wanted on her hands, these 'slave beads.'

Once the crew of the slave ship had been summarily dealt with, the smallest mercy offered to them in not having their throats cut (as more than one of her crew had suggested) or being left wholly without supplies, Phryne walked the ropes easily enough to return to her ship. Let the crew they'd left behind watch from their little boats as their ship went up in flames. Let them take their chances with fate on whether they would be found and rescued, or drift endlessly without relief. Porthos was likely right on that score, it was better than they deserved but there she drew the line of what she found to be acceptable in her own actions.

All with a smile and a wave as the captain had been lowered down to the water.

She gave a nod in agreement, her eyes caught on the sight of the burning wreck of the ship. "Always satisfying," she told him, "Better still when there's someone to watch the show." In a move that might have had lesser men (which description needed more emphasis was up to the observer) losing a hand, she reached out to steal the bottle from him after he'd taken his drink, her smile impish once she'd taken a drink herself and held it out to him again.

Porthos was, as a rule, the sharing type, all the more so when the person he was doing the sharing with happened to be a beautiful woman, never mind a beautiful woman whose ship he was standing on. He didn't begrudge her the rum commandeering for one moment, and just took another drink from the bottle when she handed it back, as if to seal that state of fact. He'd turned away from the burning wreck of a ship to face her, now.

"It's a good thing you're doing here," he stated, and meant it in ways he couldn't properly articulate. Sinking slaver ships, putting together a crew that might not have been accepted on any other ship, and one that didn't mind the sinking of the slave beads to the bottom of the ocean. All of those good things.

The taste of rum on her tongue was a perfect complement to the smell of gunpowder and burning timber. Molasses and smoke, cut through with the cleansing scent of the sea on the breeze. The winds were strong enough to extinguish the flames, but rather whipped up the firestorm built of leftover weaponry and how very flammable those deathtraps were into a brilliant display before them. Even as her fingers were shiny with gun shot residue and her hair had become mussed somewhere in the stream of action, the moment felt too complete to worry about anything that could be taken care of with a hot bath upon her return to the hotel.

She let him pull her attention from the crackling fire in the near, but not too near distance. It did not take much, for all that the sight of something so ugly being wiped off the face of the planet, soon to be sunk and forgotten at the bottom of the sea for all time. Not with the rumbling sound of his voice and the sincere look in his eyes when he spoke, her immediate flippant answer fading away as she instead gave him a small smile. "I would love to tell you that it is wholly selfless-" her eyes slid a moment to the ship before returning to his face. "But there are times when I need this. When the world can be boiled down to right and wrong, and you can make a little justice in the middle of it all."

Her words were too somber in the face of the victory just passed, and so she smiled and added, "Other times I need a stiff drink, a roaring fire, and the company of a handsome man."

Edited 2015-04-14 09:28 (UTC)

The way Porthos saw it, just because you got something out of doing something right didn't make you selfish. Especially when, he was fairly certain, you needed to do that right thing because it was right - or because not doing it would leave too much wrong in the world. This was almost better than complete selflessness.

"Well," he stated, and held the bottle out to her in offer, his lips curved in a slight smile despite the still muted, solemn look in his eyes, "a roaring fire would be quite hazardous on a ship."

It would have been blissfully ease to live a life of nothing but leisure. She had spent the better part of a decade chasing one adventure after another without stopping to wonder if she might improve the situations she saw around herself, and where she had no regrets over those glorious years, she had found that there was thrill and satisfaction as well in finding justice where it was so very needed. There was no question that she enjoyed the rush of chasing down murderers and loved the feeling of having solved some complicated mystery and picked apart what had really happened beneath all the lies and deceptions.

It had proved to be more than a little addicting. So much so that when offered a timeless world of adventure and possibility, she still had needed to go searching for a place she could tip the scales of justice with a gun in her hand and the wind at her back.

She smiled broadly at his offer, reaching out to take the bottle from him and taking a drink of it, unrepentant. The hand not occupied with the cool glass and the weight of rum yet undrunk caught at his bicep, her gloved fingers curling against the muscle. "But we do have a roaring fire already," she reminded him, her smile cutting deeper into one cheek than the other as she tipped her head toward the burning wreckage of the ship they'd just attacked. "And doesn't it make quite the backdrop."

"Make the most of it while it lasts," Porthos advised her. Soon enough, it would all have sunk, the fire quenched in the ocean. The bottom of the sea was the only place this ship deserved to be, and part of him believed the same to be true of the men they had abandoned on rowboats. But cold-blooded murder was not in his nature.

There were no regrets over the fact that they would soon be able to watch that slave ship as it was swallowed up by the sea, all its records and the goods she hadn't had use of sinking to the forgotten depths. Best it was forgotten. That no one could ever remember what its name was, or who its captain was, save for the embarrassment on that man's record...should he ever be found.

"Well, then," she began, her eyes dropping to where her gloved fingers curled against his sleeve and the firmness of the flesh beneath. "I suppose I will just have to make do with the fireplace in my room at the Nexus."

She looked up at him through her lashes, taking a slow drink from her borrowed bottle. "If you would like to help me there, I don't think I've built a fire on my own for months at least."

Part of Athos wanted to stay here. He wasn't certain that he was ready to return to the Nexus, where there would be no such fighting as the Caribbean offered to exorcise his demons. But it would feel somewhat like hiding, and he wasn't the type to hide. Ever. Perhaps Phryne's offer was providential, and meant to show him the way back to himself, to his friends, to his life.

Besides, he was dirty, and he could use one of those wonderful showers to wash away the blood and grime. He could get used to those, and in fact probably already had.

So he met Phryne's gaze, his smile small but present, in the curve of his lips and the softening of his eyes, as he nodded. "Now, that won't do," he stated, and offered her his arm. If the door he had got here through was still there on the ship, then it was time to head back, yes. And he could imagine no better incentive than the look in Phryne's eyes.

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Give the girl a shot of whiskey/Set the pirate lady free

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