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Chapter Text

Veth has kind on the inside of her ear. It's written in neat, narrow letters, and the blue ink it's formed from in drips from the tip of her ear and onto whatever's underneath. Her clothes are speckled and stained in indigo, to the despair of her mother, who grows so tired of replacing shirts that she starts to sew only in the color of her daughter's mark by the time Veth turns five.

Chapter Text

Yasha's mark says brilliant, and it twines around her left fourth finger where a wedding ring should be. It's a nice thought, a pretty metaphor for love everlasting, but she knows nothing can ever come of it. The matches made by soulmarks are a luxury that doesn't lend itself to survival, so she lets the charcoal that it's written in smudge to cover the tiny letters, and she does her best to forget that it's there.

But just as she's about to come of age, to begin serving her tribe in full, to earn a warrior's name after long years of training, the Dolorov Tribe takes part in an unexpected battle.

It starts simply enough. Thurin and Ulara, a pair of hunters, stumble across a band of seventeen warriors while tracking a deer across the badlands. The Sky Spear would have resolved the situation diplomatically to avoid unnecessary loss of life, if it were not for the fact that Ulara was killed by their leader while attempting peaceful negotiations. Upon hearing of this, every member of the tribe is ordered into battle- even Yasha, who's never seen a real fight before. She's trained, and sparred, and hunted, but nothing prepares her for the real thing. It's bloody and awful, and she'll never forget the smell of death for as long as she lives, but she has a duty, and she does it well. Yasha makes her tribe proud in the only way that really matters: through rage and violence, with her blade and her body and her blood spilled upon the ground. She carves her path through the battlefield like an angel of death, bringing carnage and bloodshed wherever the battle takes her. At least, that's what they tell her when it's all over, though Yasha doesn't feel like an angel at all.

She kills six people that day, and two important things happen as a direct result.

The first is that Sky Spear Beregild names her Yasha Orphan-Maker. It's a name for a full-grown warrior, for someone who strikes terror into the hearts of anyone who dares stand against her. She weaves the braids and beads of a warrior into her stark-white hair, and she doesn't tell anyone that she feels a little like a liar.

The second is that she meets Zuala.

Zuala was taken from the battlefield. She almost bested the Sky Spear herself, and the old warrior was impressed enough to let her live. Before that, her name had been Zuala Shadow-Breaker, but the Sky Spear decides that she must re-earn her name before she uses it again. The logic behind her joining the Dolorov Tribe is simple. The tribe lost Ulara, a skilled hunter, and they need food. Zuala can track and chase and kill, and her usefulness is enough to keep her alive.

She needs a guard to keep an eye on her, however, and who better than the newly-named Yasha Orphan-Maker?

Zuala refuses to speak for the first five days that Yasha knows her. Yasha's been told to watch Zuala, however, so despite her growing frustration with the woman's stubbornness, she does. By the end of those few days, she knows Zuala's face so well that if she had a piece of paper she could draw her from memory- tangled brown hair braided and matted around a pair of twisted, goatlike horns, deep green skin flecked with white freckles, a square jawline and a high, arched nose. Her eyes are both eerie and beautiful, a bright golden color with horizontal pupils. She's of a height with Yasha, if not a little taller, with a similar build to her, and she moves with a grace and speed that seems impossible for someone of her size.

For the days that they spend travelling in search of new hunting grounds, Zuala is tense and silent, her face set into a mask of grim blankness. Eventually, though, the Sky Spear orders all hunters to go ranging and gather supplies. This includes Zuala, so, of course, Yasha goes with her.

As soon as they're out of sight of the camp, Zuala's entire demeanor shifts, as though a massive weight has been lifted off her shoulders. She walks more easily, a wide smile splashed across her face. (Yasha thinks, happiness suits her, and then pushes that thought to the bottom of her mind.)

The first thing Zuala says to her is "On your left," and Yasha is so surprised she almost thinks she imagined it.

"What?" she says, just to be sure, and Zuala says again, "Your left. There are tracks." Yasha looks, and sure enough, there are two sets of cloven hoofprints leading away from them, toward a distant cluster of rocks. She nods, and they fall in step together underneath the cold, grey sky.

These are the things that Yasha notice about her new hunting partner in the days that follow: She laughs loudly, and often, and her eyes light up whenever she sees a pretty stone, or a feather caught in the wind. She's fascinated by every tiny detail in every place they visit. If Yasha were to choose Zuala's title for her, she would name her Zuala Wild-Singer, for the fact that the woman's laughter draws the attention of every living creature for miles around. Yasha knows, knows, that these are dangerous thoughts, that they can only lead to pain, but somehow she can't stop herself from having them.

They go on like this for months, until Yasha's so used to her heart skipping a beat whenever Zuala smiles that she forgets to push it down and hide it away. They hunt and laugh and train and kill together, always by each others' sides.

And on the day that Zuala earns her name again, Yasha goes to hide her mark and finds that she can't— the charcoal dust that fell from it only yesterday is nowhere to be found.

Yasha knows what it means, and there's no denying it, but she has to be sure, so she sneaks a look into Zuala's notebook one night. It only confirms what she already knows: the handwriting matches the letters of her mark. Someone else might have taken this as a sign to finally stop pining and do something about their feelings, but not Yasha. If anything, it only makes her more determined that she'll never say anything. Because (and she lets herself admit it, just this once) she loves Zuala, and really, it's the best choice for both of them if they stay at a comfortable distance from each other.

Unluckily for this plan, Zuala is very good at noticing things, especially when it comes to Yasha.

They're on their fourteenth hunting trip together, and they've killed some kind of giant wolf with far too many teeth and too few eyes, and Yasha reaches out her hand. She expects Zuala to pass her the skinning knife so they can get to work on the carcass. What she doesn't expect is for Zuala to grab her hand. She realises a second too late that the hand she offered was her left one, and that her glove is currently somewhere in the giant tooth-wolf's stomach.

Zuala looks at Yasha. Yasha looks at Zuala. (And tries very hard not to think about how pretty her hair looks today.)

"When were you going to tell me?" Zuala asks.

"I wasn't," Yasha answers. "I don't want you to get hurt, and it's safer— "

She doesn't get to finish that thought, because that's about when Zuala rips a strip of fabric off her forearm (Yasha has time to see that the word on her arm says Vigilant, and she almost wants to laugh) and kisses her. It's nice, really nice, and Yasha almost forgets to worry about what's going to happen after.

_

Yasha's wedding is beautiful, and private, and definitely not to Thurin Blood-Burner, who the Sky Spear has been strongly hinting she'll be matched to within the next year or so. Yasha scavenges and hoards and hides things for a month beforehand, finding moments in between her duties to weave a crown out of dried flower petals and ribbon scraps. On their twenty-second trip together, Yasha twines that ribbon around Zuala's horns, and Zuala jokes that she'll eat it later so Yasha will stop worrying about whether or not it's perfect. They hold each others' hands and speak their vows in a bizarre mix of Celestial and Infernal, and they braid beads into each others' hair, and they dance even though the only music is the sound of their voices.

The sun is shining that day, real sunlight, not the faint beams that sometimes filter through the heavy cloud cover. It lasts exactly the duration of their wedding, down to a second, and then it starts to rain.

And for the next eight months, they're so, so happy.

_

They get careless, take a little too long out hunting, and the Sky Spear sends someone looking.They're woken in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps that come to a stop nearby, and a voice saying "I found them, alright. Get their weapons. Sky Spear'll want to hear about this." There's no time for them to try and fight back, or to protest their innocence— being caught in the same bedroll with their hands clasped together is enough evidence against them to drown out any other argument.

It's a four-day trip back to camp, and they're both watching their guards for any opportunity to run, and so when one comes, they're ready for it. One guard goes off to investigate a copse of trees nearby, and the other gets distracted by a noise off in the distance. Yasha grabs Zuala's hand, and they run, as fast as their legs can carry them. There's a shout from behind them, but they're focused on a cluster of boulders that might offer them some shelter, and they keep going. They stumble together, tripping on the uneven ground, but they're almost, almost there—

Zuala screams, and falls to her knees, and then onto her back, and Yasha can barely see the spear in her chest through the rage that's overtaking her—

"Love you," Zuala whispers, and her eyes go blank and dull—

and something

inside

her

snaps.

_

She only remembers flashes of what happens next. Blood. Battle. A thunderstorm. A field of corpses.

She wakes before a polished stone altar carved with lightning bolts, sword in hand, her once-white hair turned as black as a clouded sky. There's an aching pain in her shoulder blades, and her arms are so sickeningly empty.

And Yasha screams, and screams, until her voice is gone, and she beats her fists against the altar until her knuckles bleed, and then she stands up and she walks away.

Chapter Text

Fjord's mark says cunning, and it's written on his forearm in letters that look like a spider had a heart attack on his arm. The cheap ink that runs from it stains sheets, ruins clothes, and smells like a fish market in the height of summer, but it's his and only his , and he can't say that about many things.  

Fjord hates Sabien from the moment they lay eyes on each other, when they're both scrawny kids in too-small clothes, after Fjord's father stops coming home from the ocean and his mother gets herself arrested for stealing bread from the marketplace. Fjord is eleven, Sabien maybe a year older, and the matrons of Marmoreal's Home for Wayward Children are making them share a room. Sabien is a half-elf, fair-skinned, dark-haired, all elbows and angles and looking like he's never had a decent meal in his life, because he probably hasn't. (He likes to make up stories about his parents- how his father is a pirate lord and his mother is a queen, how  someday they'll come find him and then he'll be king of a distant kingdom across the sea. Fjord thinks Sabien's parents probably left him on a doorstep after they saw his stupid face for the first time.)

Their first conversation goes something like this:

"Uh, hi, I'm-"

"What's with the teeth?"

"What?"

"Your teeth. Didn't anyone ever tell you they go inside your mouth?"

"I don't-"

"Whatever. Don't touch my stuff and we won't have a problem."

"Right."

That last part turns out to be a lie, and by the end of his first week at Marmoreal's, he's decided that he hates everything about the place. He hates the way everything is grey and worn-down, from the walls to the clothes the matrons give him to the faces of the matrons themselves. He hates the lessons that they have to endure, taught by a short-tempered elderly dragonborn with a habit of sending little bolts of lightning at anyone not paying attention to his long-winded speeches. He hates the way the other kids won't even talk to him, how they refuse to look him in the eyes most of the time. Most of all, he hates hates hates Sabien and his friends, how they make fun of his tusks and leave dead fish in his bed, call him names and hide his books in trees, how the matrons don't even try to pretend they care.

-

When Fjord is thirteen, he has a really terrible day. He almost gets a contract on a ship that would've gotten him out of Port Damali, only to have someone else get the job instead, gets back to the home too late for dinner, goes upstairs to find that Sabien's locked him out of their room again, tries to fall asleep in the hallway and gets kicked awake by someone walking past. And he thinks,  if I looked different, maybe they wouldn't hate me so much.

It's not a new thought, but it's one that's been showing up in his head more and more often lately. And maybe it's because the floor is impossible to sleep on, or maybe it's because he can hear Sabien laughing on the other side of the door, or maybe it's just that he's so tired of all of this, but he gets up and goes looking for a metal file.

There's more blood than he was expecting, but the end result is still the same. No more tusks. Problem solved.

He gets called different names after that- less to do with his teeth and more to do with the fact that he's suddenly taller than everyone else and doesn't quite know how to carry himself. He gets kicked around less but teased more. He tries to run away a few times but never quite manages it, and he starts counting down the days until he won't have stay here anymore.  

--

He spends the next few years hanging around the docks and in the many taverns that Port Damali has to offer, looking for work whenever he can get it,  but never quite managing to sign on with a crew (even if he was a normal human, nobody wants to hire a teenager who's never been on the open ocean before.) By the time the Tide's Breath pulls into port, he's desperate enough to ignore the fact that it looks like something tried to take a bite out of the mast, and the way that none of the crew seem to have all their body parts. When he hears that they're hiring, he stands on the docks for an hour and a half until someone finally takes notice of him.  

The captain is busy, but the first mate, a silver-haired elf who introduces themself as Yisharr, looks him over and decides they need a new deckhand. He'll get paid, although not much, and they'll watch him on the crossing to Marquet to see  how fast he learns. If they're satisfied, he can stay with the crew, otherwise he'll still get paid and be far away from Port Damali.

All things considered, Fjord thinks he got a pretty good deal, until he makes his way down to the crew quarters and finds Sabien trying to hang a bag of clothes onto a hook (Fjord notes with some satisfaction that he's a little too short to reach.) They stare at each other, frozen, like a pair of startled cats, until  Sabien finally breaks the silence.

"What the fuck," he says, which sums up Fjord's feelings on the matter pretty well.  He weighs his options- ask Captain Vandren to let him off the ship and wait for another job (unappealing), push Sabien off the side when nobody's looking (promising, but likely to have unfortunate consequences) or keep his mouth shut and sign onto a different crew as soon as they dock in Marquet (the smart option.) Although the second idea could be very enjoyable, Fjord knows his only real option is to stay quiet, get as far from Port Damali as possible, and jump ship the next time there's an opportunity. After all, it's worked so far.

What he's not expecting is for Captain Vandren to care. The matrons of Marmoreal's Home never gave a damn whether or not the kids they were in charge of got along,  if they were speaking to each other or throwing each other out of windows. But for some reason that Fjord can't quite understand, Vandren does.

It happens like this: they've been out of port for three days when the weather turns rough, and every man is on deck trying to keep the ship afloat. Within half an hour, the sky goes from bright blue and clear to dark with looming cloud cover, and then the rain starts to pour down so heavily that nobody can see their own feet, and the deck rocks underneath them in a way that makes Fjord feel like his stomach is about to be left behind in the water. He can barely hear Vandren shouting orders  above the wind, and every time he opens his mouth he chokes on a mouthful of rain, and he feels more alive than he has in years. There's a strange kind of invincibility that comes when you're in danger, a feeling that you're already so close to the edge of death that you can't possibly get any closer.

At the same time, he's very glad he remembered to tie himself to the mast.

And no sooner does he have that thought than he hears someone else's tether rope snap, and the ship starts to tip sideways again, and in that moment Fjord knows two things. One, he's the only one who heard that rope break, and the only one close enough to do anything about it. Two, if he doesn't do anything, someone is definitely going to die. He looks around, half blind from the water in his eyes, barely manages to see the broken rope trailing away toward the edge of the boat, whoever's on the other end already over the side. He lunges for it, keeps his hold and drags it back, even though his hands are slipping and it's getting harder to breathe the closer he gets to the edge, and ties it back onto his own rope just as his grip give s and he has to let go.

He stands up, takes a few steps away from the edge, and finally looks up to see the person who was on the other end of the rope climbing back up the side.

It's Sabien, because of course it is, looking at him with an expression that's either confusion or disgust (the rain makes it difficult to tell.) Neither of them say anything, which has started to become a habit between them, and they both go back to work with only the vaguest idea of what just happened.

And Fjord thinks that'll be the end of it, until the weather clears and Vandren cals them both to his cabin, where he sits at his desk wth his hands clasped together, staring at them over the top of his fingertips. Fjord and Sabien take chairs on opposite sides of the room and try not to look at each other, and Vandren takes a minute to collect himself before he says anything.

"What is wrong with the two a'you?" he says. "No, don't open your mouth, I ain't finished. I've been to a lotta places in my time, and I've learned that it's usually considered good manners t'say 'thank you' when someone saves your damn life, Sabien. Don't think I didn't notice that. And Fjord, why the hell didn't you say anything about it? Stop trying to talk, I'm not done," he adds, noticing that both of them were about to start talking over each other.

"Whatever bad blood is between y'all, it needs to stay on the shore, where it won't get anybody killed. Crew not speakin' to each other is more dangerous than any storm or monster, you understand? If you two don't learn to get along, you'll both be out of a job as soon as we get to Marquet. Do I make myself clear?"

"But--"

"Sir, I--"

"Am. I. Clear?"

"Yeah."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Both of you will be on the same watch shifts until we arrive in Marquet."

"What?"

--

By the second day of this new arrangement, Fjord is seriously rethinking his decision not to push Sabien over the side of the ship. They haven't spoken a word to each other since the storm, but Sabien keeps giving Fjord glances when he thinks he's not paying attention, always looking like he's about to ask a question but never following through. They're on watch together. It's the middle of the night, and it'd be beautiful with all the stars reflected on the water if anybody else was here with him. Fjord has almost resigned himself to the fact that he's going to be stuck on shift with Sabien forever when he finally hears it-- "Why?" It's one word after days of silence, and so pitifully inadequate that Fjord wants to scream.

"Why what?" he says instead.

"Why'd you save me? After all the shit I put you through, nobody would've cared if you just let me drown. Why ?"

Fjord shrugs.

"Didn't know it was you," he says. "It was raining pretty hard out there."

Of all the ways to react, Sabien laughs. "Yeah," he says. "I'll give you that."

It's about then that Fjord decides he'd rather feed himself to a flock of seagulls than continue this conversation and starts looking for a convenient piece of rigging to climb, but after that things between them aren't quite the same. They still can't stand each other most of the time--one barely-a-conversation can't erase seven years of hating each other. But sometimes Fjord will make a joke and Sabien will laugh, or Sabien will sit next to him in the galley and Fjord won't immediately get up and move to another table. They're not friends, far from it, but they can't really call each other enemies anymore.

So when the Tide's Breath docks in Marquet, Fjord doesn't try very hard to find another job. When they stop in Nicodranas after that, he doesn't try at all. On the next three voyages the ship takes, the thought barely even crosses his mind, and by the time Fjord has sailed with the Tide's Breath for a year he's put aside all notions of leaving the ship, because it's home. He's happy, for the first time in a  long, long time. He learns how to fight, how to swim, how to sing shanties and tie knots and turn a ship toward to the land by nothing but the stars. He kills pirates and harpies and, on one very memorable occasion, helps take down a sea serpent that nearly rips Sabien in half. He sees places a younger him would never have dreamed of, hears stories too strange to be believable and lives through a few of them himself. He learns, in other words, to be a sailor.

_

The first time he sees Sabien's mark, he nearly chokes to death on a bowl of soup.

They've stopped on an island port somewhere to restock the ship, and most of the crew's gathered into the single tavern that the island has to offer.  The floor is sticky, and the whole place smells like a whole cask of ale got spilled in the attic and nobody cleaned it up, but they've pushed all the empty tables together, and it doesn't matter as much when the whole crew's eating and drinking and laughing together.

And then a man called Alard points out a tiefling with purple-blue skin, tiny horns, and hair that looks too pretty for someone  in a place like this, and he says "Bet I've got better scars than him."

This is the whose-is-better game, a time-honoured tradition among the crew of the Tide's Breath-- pick a stranger, pick a feature, compare if you think you can match them and the rest of the crew tries to one-up you.  (The winner gets a free round of drinks.) Alard has just issued a challenge, and now he's looking for anyone who thinks they can take him on. The first challenger is Orla, a dwarf with a nasty-looking acid burn up her leg, which even Alard admits beats out the sword-slash across the back of his neck. From there, it's a free-for-all-- arrow wound against shrapnel spray, harpy's talons against merfolk's trident. Fjord tries his luck, but his shark bite  can't compare against Rukhab's actual honest-to-gods dragonfire burn.

That one ends up being declared the winner on grounds of 'you should be dead, how are you not dead, ' but as the game ends and Rakhab goes to collect her prize, a probably-drunk Sabien climbs up onto the table. This normally wouldn't be surprising (it happens more often than you'd think.) No, the thing that shocks Fjord is that Sabien, proclaiming that he's "Got one that'll make Rukhab cry," proceeds to pull his shirt off and throw it away. The scar that he's showing off is a massive bite mark that spans from his stomach to his shoulder, a souvenir from that whole incident with the sea serpent. What Sabien is probably not trying to advertise is the word on his shoulder-- Earnest, in black ink, a narrow scrawl that looks more like a series of vertical lines than letters.

It's unmistakably Fjord's handwriting, and it's at that moment that he inhales a piece of carrot and spends the next few seconds coughing desperately and trying to fall off his chair.  

Absolutely the fuck not, is the first coherent thought he manages to put together. No way. We hate each other. It must be a mistake.

Except. Except that's not entirely true, is it? The last time they even disagreed on something was months ago, and as far as Fjord remembers it was over Sabien leaving his clothes in Fjord's hammock instead of putting them away, and it felt more like they were doing it for fun than really fighting. Come to think of it, they haven't had an incident like when they were kids since, well. Since that storm, now that Fjord really thinks about it.  Fjord knows that, objectively speaking, Sabien is an attractive guy. And yeah, okay, there have been a couple of times when he's caught himself staring and had to look away. Maybe more than a couple of times. But he's brushed it off as being tired or distracted or imagining it, or any number of things that definitely don't involve him actually  being into Sabien.

Fjord is suddenly very aware of how the air in the room is stifling, and that people are shouting over each other, and how his shoes are sticking to the floor. He shoves his chair back and stands up, ignores a drunk bar patron's leer of of "Hey, there, sailor boy, why don't you show me where your cabin is?" and goes upstairs as fast as he can without actually running. Upstairs is dark, cool and still, and Fjord has a moment of blessed silence before he hears footsteps follow him up the stairs.

"That's got to be the worst pickup line I've ever heard," Sabien says. He takes a couple of steps closer until he's leaning over Fjord's shoulder, and maybe he's drunker than he thought or maybe it's just a night for bad decisions, but it's the easiest thing in the world for Fjord to turn his head and kiss him.

It's not perfect. There's a lot of knocking teeth and breaking off to laugh or apologise, and at one point Sabien hits his head on a door handle and they have to stop for a good few minutes, and then Fjord starts teasing him about it. It devolves into mocking the drunk customer from downstairs and her shitty pick-up lines, and every time they stop laughing, Sabien calls Fjord 'sailor boy,' and it all starts again.

Eventually, they head downstairs, ignore the knowing looks from some of the crew, finish their meals and wonder, privately, if that really just happened.

But it did, and it does, and it keeps on happening, for years upon years.

It ends (because of course it ends) on a night full of fire and an explanation cut short by a fuse burning to its end, of water rushing into the ship and drowning, drowning, drowning.

Fjord washes ashore with sand in his mouth and a sword lying beside him, and his mark (his mark that's been sealed and clean for years) is running with salt water. It soaks into the sand, making a slowly-growing pool around him.

It doesn't say cunning anymore. It says WATCHING.

And unsure if he's even still alive, still real, Fjord drags himself to his feet and starts to make his way along the beach, toward a new unknown.