Chapter Text
Lip wakes up with her face in the sand, surf lapping at her sides.
She’s alive, which is a surprise. That was a really angry sea monster. A kraken, maybe – it didn’t introduce itself before it smashed her ship to pieces. Lip got her crew out safe on the lifeboats, but she didn’t expect to be around to feel anything at this point: the last thing she remembers a giant suction-cupped tentacle was wrapping around her neck.
There are bruises there now, purpling already. There’s also sand. So much sand, in her eyes, in her mouth, scratching at every inch of skin exposed by her now-ruined clothes. Maybe all I am is sand, she thinks, spitting some out.
(That happened to her once, thanks to some cursed treasure. It took forever to track down a witch who could restore her to flesh and blood, and in the meantime she left a grainy trail everywhere she went, to Jinsoul’s never-ending amusement. Choerry tried to be sympathetic but Lip would catch her laughing too, halfheartedly hiding it behind her hands. Lip hopes the two of them made it to land – her first mates are annoying, but she’s gotten used to their particular brand of annoying. She’d miss them, maybe, if she never saw them again.)
Lip staggers to her feet, squinting against the sun. She’s in a bay shaped like a half moon, and in the distance she can make out a rocky crag rising into the air. At its top, there’s a familiar flag: a white bird, wings outstretched against a field of green.
Lip’s stomach drops. Of course she’d land in Haseul’s territory. With no ship, no money, and clothing in tatters.
There are worse places to be, logically speaking. Haseul will give her clothes and shelter; if she washed ashore in Eden, Yves would leave her to sleep naked on the sand for a week just to see how badly she’d sunburn.
Haseul’s territory means seeing Haseul, though, and Lip might prefer the naked sunburn.
The sandpaper scratch in her throat reminds her that she needs water if she’s going to continue being alive. So, dread in each step, she starts up the path that leads to Haseul’s camp.
;;
It’s a long, slow walk, and Lip has an eternity to think about how much she doesn’t want to see Haseul.
For the record, the problem isn’t that Haseul is bad. There’s no love lost between pirate captains, but Haseul is so brave and so skilled that she transcends the usual factions. Everyone’s a little in awe of her, and Lip is. Well. A little more than that.
Years ago, when they were still making names for themselves, they joined forces to pull off a complicated, high-risk heist. The empire fleet showed up halfway through, and they should have ended up in jail (at best) or at the bottom of the sea (more likely). Somehow they escaped anyway and later that night, drunk off adrenaline and a barrel of rum, Lip found her way into Haseul’s bed.
Where she proceeded to pass out before anything could happen. And drool into Haseul’s pillow.
The next morning Haseul ruffled her hair, thanking her for an almost good time. Lip hasn’t been able to look her in the eye since.
They’ve only seen each other a few times in the intervening years, but everywhere Lip goes she hears tales of Haseul. How she banished a ring of slave traders to another dimension, how she got into a singing match with a siren and won. The stories are unbelievable but then so is Haseul – even reality might bend its shape around the force of her.
;;
After an hour of walking, Lip is nearing the end of her endurance. The world looks squigglier than usual, and the light feels too bright even in the shade in the way that means her body is about to shut down. When the trees clear and she catches sight of a watchtower, she’s far enough gone that relief outweighs her trepidation.
Haseul’s base is half shipyard, half town, everything surrounded by a menacing spike-tipped wall. It’s the most organized pirate camp Lip has ever encountered, but then that makes sense: Haseul started out like the rest of them, chasing after treasure and being chased by the empire, but now she has a hand in two thirds of the trade that moves by sea. Even the authorities look the other way for her – they want their coffee shipments to keep coming, and Haseul always delivers on time.
The lookout calls down to Lip as she reaches the gate.
“Who goes there?”
“Tell Haseul it’s Kim Lip.”
“Why should I bother? You don’t look important.”
“Just do it. She’ll want to talk to me.”
The lookout grumbles something about pushy women but goes, leaving Lip to lean against the wall. Standing is becoming difficult – there’s black encroaching at the edges of her vision, and her throat is so dry that she can’t swallow.
When the gate opens, Haseul is there.
She’s gotten fancy since the last time they met, her plain work shirt traded in for flowing white linen and a jeweled cutlass hanging at her hip.
Lip blames the dehydration for thinking: maybe I did die, because that is what an angel looks like.
“Lip,” Haseul says, looking her up and down.
“Hi, Haseul.”
“I see you’re trying out a new look. Shipwreck chic, I like it.”
Lip blinks at her, and then the blink goes on for too long, and Lip opens her eyes again just long enough to see Haseul lunge to catch her as she falls.
;;
Lip comes to in a bed with a cool, wet cloth draped over her forehead.
“You’re making a habit of passing out on me,” Haseul says. Lip keeps her eyes closed, feigning sleep, wishing the ocean had just taken her. “I can see you blushing, you know. Unconscious people don’t blush.”
Lip blinks her eyes open and there Haseul is, smiling with something between fondness and amusement. She's sitting beside Lip on the bed, holding a cup of water, and she leans in closer to tilt it to Lip’s mouth.
“Drink slow. Your body is only half working.”
Lip takes a swallow, then a second. And then it hits her that this bed is definitely Haseul’s bed and she flashes back to what happened the last time she was here. She chokes, spraying water over them both.
“You never listen to me,” Haseul sighs. “At least you woke up. I was going to be so mad at you if you showed up just to die.”
Lip sits up and takes the cup for herself, trying to regain some control of the situation. At Haseul’s glare she obediently drinks more, this time swallowing down small, careful sips.
“Yeah, well,” Lip says when her throat can make words. “I’m too stubborn to die.”
Haseul laughs, but there’s worry in the crease of her eyes.
“How did you get here?”
“Drifted, I guess. Lost my ship, and I’m not sure what happened after that. What day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“We got attacked on Monday.”
“That explains why you’re like this. Two days in the water is a long time.”
“It is.” Lip furrows her brows – her brain is starting to work again, and she matches that amount of time to the distance she’d have to have traveled. “But it’s not long enough. We were all the way at the Spires.”
Haseul frowns. She knows as well as Lip that a trip from the Spires takes four days. Three, maybe, with a fast ship and a strong tailwind. The fact that Lip drifted here in two doesn’t just stretch credulity – it’s outright impossible.
“Tell me what happened. All the details.”
Haseul’s voice goes low, and Lip shivers at the command in it. Reminds herself that this is not the time to be thinking I'd do anything you ask as long as you use that tone.
“We were on the way back from a pretty normal job," Lip starts. "A nobleman sent us to recover family heirlooms from the pirates that looted his ship. If you can even call them pirates, that is. They were complete pushovers. I didn’t even have to fire a cannon before they surrendered.”
Lip notices that Haseul is grinning at her, eyes soft with something. She looks down, self-conscious, and swallows before continuing:
“But anyway, we’d loaded the cargo and just started back when things got. Weird.”
“Weird how?”
Haseul is focused now, leaning forward to catch every word. Lip replays what happened in her mind, searching for a way to describe it that won’t sound insane. There’s magic in the world, but it has rules – it’s as predictable as anything else, once you understand it.
This, though. This was new.
“It’s like the whole world changed from one moment to the next. It was a clear day, and the ship was moving well. No sign of trouble at all – Choerry was even singing her ode to sunshine. And then there was a storm out of nowhere. The sky went black, and the water was the wrong color, and it felt, I don’t know. Angry. I’d never experienced anything like it before.”
“So the storm took your ship?”
“Oh, no. That was the kraken.”
Haseul stares for a second, then bursts out laughing. Lip frowns at her.
“I’m sorry, it’s not funny that you lost your ship. But come on, Lip, way to bury the lede.”
“I’m trying!” Lip whines. “See how well you narrate when you’re half dead.”
Haseul puts a hand on her shoulder, light and comforting, and something in Lip short-circuits.
Haseul is touching her. In a bed. They’re in a bed and Haseul is touching her.
After a few seconds of silence Haseul takes the hand back, looking at Lip expectantly.
Oh, right. She’s telling a story.
“So, um.” Lip runs a hand through her hair, trying to recover. “There was a kraken. It just appeared, too. With the storm and everything else. By the time we realized what was happening it was already wrapped around the ship.”
“Did anyone else survive?”
“I think so. Crew got off the ship, at least.”
“And you stayed even though it was getting destroyed.”
Lip shrugs one shoulder.
“I’m the captain. If anyone’s going down, it should be me.”
“So how did you get here?”
“I don’t know. The kraken had me, and then I woke up here.”
Lip is prepared for Haseul to be confused, disbelieving even. It sounds like a fever dream to her own ears. The last thing she expects is for Haseul to clap her hands together in excitement, beaming like Lip just handed her a map to the secret of immortality.
“Why do you look like that? What’s going on?”
“It’ll be easier to show you. Can you walk? If not, I can carry you.”
Lip shoots out of the bed so fast she makes herself dizzy.
“Nope, I’m good. Totally good. That’s me.”
Haseul leads her down a hall and into an office. It’s a giant mess: there’s paper everywhere, scrolls stacked three deep on a desk, maps tacked to every inch of wall, loose sheets spread over the floor. Lip takes a step and dislodges one pile, knocking over the skull weighing down its corner. Her hands itch to organize, to make the chaos manageable.
“This is how the great captain Haseul runs her operations? It’s a disaster in here.”
“Hey, I know where everything is. And thieves are less successful when they can't find things.”
“Sure. Tell yourself that.”
Haseul does a complicated hop-skip-jump to get to the other side of the room and rummages through a pile of things. Lip just waits, because there’s no way she can do that in her current state and the island of clear floor Haseul’s standing on is only big enough for one person anyway.
Haseul finds a set of papers, returns to Lip and spreads them out over a mostly clear table.
“Look at this.”
Lip peers over her shoulder at the papers. The one on top is an official-looking account of an encounter with a sea creature: it destroyed an empire ship but killed no one, and the lead officer describes experiencing ‘strange spatio-temporal phenomena.’ Which means, Lip realizes, that he too woke up somewhere he couldn’t possibly have gotten without shattering the rules of space and time.
“There are a dozen of these reports,” Haseul says. “And I thought that maybe this was an elaborate empire ruse, but you showing up here confirms it. There’s something important happening, and I’m going to find out what it is.”
Lip flips through the papers, noting that each one has the empire crest impressed in wax. Documents marked like that only come from the capitol, and even a pirate of Haseul's ability would have trouble breaking through their defenses.
“How do you even have these?”
“Oh, an officer showed up and offered me three chests of gold if I can figure out what’s happening.”
“You’re on the empire’s payroll now?”
“Well, unofficially. I can never tell anyone, they said."
"I see that’s going well."
“You know how I feel about empire rules. Besides, you need to know. You’re coming with me.”
She says that like it's a foregone conclusion, and Lip is nodding along with her until she processes the words.
“Wait, what now?”
“I get to recruit whoever I want, and who better than someone who’s seen this thing first hand.”
“But I need to find Jinsoul and Choerry, and-”
“And we’ll find them, on the way. How far were you going to get in searching on your own? With no ship?”
Lip rubs at her neck, embarassed.
“I hadn’t gotten that far.”
“Well, I have. I’ll help you if you help me. We make a good team, if I remember right.”
Haseul’s grin is bright, and whatever resolve Lip had crumbles in the face of it.
“Ok. For as long as you need me, I’m yours.”