Chapter Text
Two years is not a long space of time in the grand scheme of things, but it feels longer, decades longer. And in the same breath, not long enough. Two years spent on the sea, spent sailing, spent exploring the towns along its shores. A dream . The happiest they’ve ever been, time filled with piercing laughter, soft morning sunlight, contented grins, but there is always a weight in his pocket, a polished gem he keeps with him no matter how much melancholy it brings him. Harry finds himself too warm. Marauding bones ache for an icy touch. He finds himself dreaming of things he can’t remember when he wakes. All that is left is the memory of a wisp of silken hair beneath his fingers that in the morning sun feels more like smoke evading his grasp. Sometimes he worries she’s fading in his memory, that if he tried too fiercely to picture her features they would be lost to him.
Harry Hook is characterized so easily by his confidence. A roguish smirk. The barest hint of madness in stormy eyes. Fear, nerves, uncertainty seem silly to pair with him, but as the sailor continues his journey with aboard the Revenge he can do naught but doubt. The lasses at the pubs they visit along the coast don’t even prick his interest as they used to. For as much as he has grown and healed of his heartsickness since they left that wee Scottish hamlet, emptiness catches him as he watches his companions. He sees the adoration in Gil’s lovesick eyes and the casual ease with which Uma curls into him, his once solitary captain slipping so simply into unconscious affection by their brawny boy.
Especially now, as they stroll through crumbling alleyways languidly, approaching their last week in the bordering village of LaMarr, along the Rhine. The towers of a meticulously upkept castle loom above them even from this distance, and he cannot help but imagine a certain princess calling such a place home in her youth. Behind him, Uma’s fingers are swallowed in Gil’s as they walk side by side, and for not the first time jealousy curdles in his stomach, forcing him just ahead of them, just ahead of whatever sweet words they’re sharing.
“ Broken heart ,” comes an ancient voice from just inside the shop whose window Uma had been perusing. Harry looks up first, light eyes squinting, ever wary. An old crone smiles from the doorway, lips tight and something all too knowing in her own eyes.
“Don’nae have one tae begin with,” he replies easily, the organ squeezing in his chest as nothing but cruel reminder that somehow it still beats on despite the abuse it’s taken. The old woman remains unconvinced, and a wrinkled finger beckons him into the shop. He doesn’t know why he follows, what fool thing drags him from his friends’ side and into the dark stall, lit only by candles and hazy with the smog of burnt incense.The crone shifts behind an abused counter, waves him closer, and warily he approaches.
“You’re a lost boy, aren’t you?” Old eyes search his face, clouded with age but an eerie keenness there nonetheless. He bristles. (He also shrinks under her appraisal.) Never a lost boy, too similar to those his father had called enemies, the upstart sailors who had bullied him from his own ship. Harry Hook was not a lost boy. And yet---
“One reading. Free of charge.”
He should balk. He should balk and say
no
and leave this eerie little cove of mystical things that make the hair on the back of his neck raise. He sees ghosts. He doesn’t believe in magic. These are his two absolutes. It’s as if his hand inches, lurches over the counter on its own accord. He watches it turn, palm side up in her outstretched one, as if watching someone else.
The old woman, witch, probably, traces a finger along the lines of his palm and------
Slender fingers grasping at his bed rails. Almond-shaped nails raking against his chest. Soft fingertips tracing patterns on his forearms. A hand, like ice, in his. A crown of midnight curls nestled in the crook of his neck, her back against his chest, moonlight peeking through the curtains and languid ease in every muscle of their bodies curled together. He remembers tracing the lines of her hand, his eyes drawn to each groove and crease, memorizing it like the constellations his father taught him as a lad. A map he made of her hands. A map he finds now blurred in his sight. He can’t remember each wrinkle .
Before he has long enough to stew on this thought and lavish in the sweet memory of his ghostie, clucking draws him back to the present, to the crone’s yellowed eyes as she tsks at him. Her irises seem lighter than he remembered and there’s something rotten in them that he doesn’t like at all.
“A boy like you should know better,” she says, a cackle punctuating her words, and he really doesn’t like her condescending tone. “A mediator should never give his heart to a phantom. It only leads to unholy things. You’re lucky I found you, boy.”
“I doubt ye can help me, granny,” Harry quips, but her grip on his hand tightens like a vice before he can tug it away as he had planned. It’s strength beyond what an old woman should have.
“Careful, mediator. I don’t offer aid to many of your kind, but I can see your heart’s near as black as mine. It’s only right to help another villain when I can.”
His eyes narrow, but something in his gut drops. She’s right. His heart is black.
“He’s not a villain, Gothel.”
Uma . And she looks almost as pissed as she does suspicious. Before he can even say a word she’s striding towards them, the dim of the shop making her look only more imposing as Gil follows, his usually bright face surprisingly somber as honey eyes find each figure in the room with that assessing way that Harry knows means he is processing just what he would need to get them out of the room with the least amount of bloodshed.
“Ma told me all about you. I’d recognize your stench anywhere. And you’re not selling your curses to my first mate disguised as a gift.”
“Ursula’s whelp. Just as high and mighty as your mother. Mind you watch your tongue in my shop,” the crone hisses, her grip on his hand still disconcertingly tight. She sneers revealing broken and rotting teeth in a wicked grimace. “And I’m not offering a gift, I’m offering salvation.”
“For him and his ghostly love.”