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Once upon a time, Kazuha had a friend. He kept Kazuha company as they sat in the rain, listening to the wet sound that droplets made when they plopped against tree leaves before sliding down and dripping onto Kazuha’s nose. Tendrils of cold gripped them by the bones, and his friend’s even smaller friend made her opinion on the situation very clear with loud, plaintive mewling.
At the time, Kazuha wished that he could shed the remains of his self respect and join her in the whining. The storm was loud, and the gelid trickle of water down the back of his neck kept him too chilled to fall asleep, anyways.
But then his friend laughed over the kitten’s crying and leaned against Kazuha’s side, propping his elbow up on Kazuha’s shoulder. It was a disrespectful way of reminding Kazuha how much taller he was, but it also helped keep the rain off his nose.
“Talk about an attitude, huh?” asked his friend, leaning his weight more heavily onto Kazuha, until Kazuha’s shoulder gave out and he tumbled against his friend’s side, joining the kitten in being wrapped in a warm, dry scarf.
“She’s not crying anymore,” Kazuha pointed out.
There was a hum and a brush of something soft against his hair, light as a breeze, and Kazuha felt himself flush with realization as his friend leaned back from the kiss and smiled.
“Not who I was talking about.”
Once upon a time, Kazuha had someone who might have been more than a friend. Now, he has nobody. He clings to the shattered, smoking remnants of a raft as wet soot smears into his hands and packs under his nails, and he does his best not to drown under a torrent of rain. There is nobody to keep the water off his head, and nobody to hear the silent, miserable tension that builds in his throat.
“Wow,” says Beidou when they first meet. Kazuha is soaked, and shivering so hard that no amount of self-control can put a stop to it as he clutches the remnants of a raft that has just been dashed to pieces against her ship. He can barely remember what he just said, but he imagines it was either completely unintelligible, or too intelligible to be considered respectable by sailors. “I can’t wait to see what a few weeks at sea is going to do to that vocabulary of yours.”
Kazuha simply smiles at her. He knows of sailors and how they talk, and he isn’t unfamiliar in the least with the coarser aspects of language. After all, choosing one’s words is most meaningful when one knows the full range of what one is choosing from. Also, he’s out of breath from almost drowning.
Still, Beidou reaches down to grab him by the back of his clothes and drags him out of the water. He feels less like a refugee she’s graciously letting onto her ship and more like a rain-soaked kitten being rescued from the storm. Unlike a rain-soaked kitten, he drips brine and sea onto her deck.
“My apologies for the mess,” he says, throat sore and hoarse with salt.
“Hah!” she barks. “You may as well apologize for every sea breeze that sends splashes up to the deck. This is a ship, boy, it’s seen plenty of seawater.”
Kazuha shifts his shoulder, where his Vision is hiding under his scarf. She has a Vision, too—electro, hanging in proud display from a strap attached to her underbust. Nobody in Inazuma dares to wear their Visions so proudly except those working at the beck and call of the shogunate.
But this woman does not hail from Inazuma.
Kazuha flips his scarf back to how he usually wears it, revealing the anemo Vision and dripping even more water onto the ship as it slaps wetly against his back.
“I suppose apologizing for the winds would only be fair,” he says, voice dry enough to make up for his soaked state. Despite the joke, he watches her eyes as he speaks, and listens carefully to the beat of her heart.
It’s all drowned out as she laughs, raucously, and slaps him on the back.
“You’ll do fine, kid. Welcome to the Alcor.”
They sail through a storm to escape Inazuma. It’s no coincidence—the tempest is as eternal as the electro archon herself, and it is a rare captain indeed that knows how to navigate its perilous vigil over the islands. Beidou stands as tall and thunderous as the roiling storm clouds. Her control over her Vision is nothing short of cataclysmic—and absolutely integral to their survival as she uses the electro archon's very blessing to defy her.
She redirects the lightning’s path with a practiced hand and serious face, and something inside Kazuha twists as he watches her do it—again, and again, and again. Easy as breathing, and timed between the beats of her heart.
Most of the crew makes their way under deck for the worst of it, leaving only the bare-bones skeleton crew up top. He has spent his time aboard the ship like a ghost, wafting between rooms and staring quietly into the horizon, and thus hardly recognizes them. All he knows is that they’re all experienced sailors, and fulfil their orders almost before Beidou barks them out over the sound of raging seas.
Kazuha, too, stays above deck. He sits on the prow as the waves rock them, and stares at each lightning strike as it streaks across the sky. The world smells like ozone and salt, and the sky is like so much pitch swirling through the waters. It’s impossible to see where it meets the horizon and turns to churning seawater. Still, each bolt of lightning sets the clouds glowing with radioactive, fluorescent power, and Kazuha can’t tear his wide eyes away.
Each multi-tongued fork of lightning strikes closer and closer as they approach the center of the storm, absolutely hypnotizing. Kazuha imagines that this is how a rabbit must feel watching a hawk approach, wings pinned and talons outstretched. He felt this way once previously, right before he found himself turning away like a man possessed and ran, and ran, and ran. He’s still running even now—but there is a beauty to the swift, inevitable doom, in the last moments before it reaches out and sets him ablaze with the promise of rest.
His hands are damply cold, unfeeling, and white-knuckled around the prow as he desperately tries to keep balance. He raises them anyways, uncurling his fingers to press his palms to his own face. He wants to know what his expression looks like. He wants to know what his friend had looked like, when his back was turned to Kazuha.
The sky flashes once more, blinding—and something grabs the back of his haori and yanks him backwards. Lightning strikes the outstretched prow, and the entire jutting part of it explodes with a crackle that splinters wood into the length of his arm as he uses it to guard his face. The force at his back jerks him again, spinning him around, and Kazuha comes face-to-face with Captain Beidou.
“If you have a death wish,” she tells him, quietly grim but perfectly audible even in the chaos of the storm—like the thunder backs away, and makes room for her to speak, “then you’d better go and fulfil it on your own time. Get below deck, kid. I don’t have time to watch out for someone so reckless when I’m defending my ship.”
Kazuha’s hands shake with the cold, and he wipes salt and singed splinters of wood from his face. Warm blood smears across his cheek, but not a lot.
He goes below deck.
Kazuha doesn’t change the bandages on his hand until Beidou catches him picking at the edge of one and points out that they’re peeling off one day. It’s fairly uncharacteristic of him—he usually values taking care of his body, as that is his first and foremost of tools, and he should no sooner let it fall into disrepair than his blade.
Still, he’s been… disregarding his sword hand. He wrapped it once, weeks ago, and the gauze is stuck to his palm with salt and sweat more than the original ties that bound it.
Beidou shoos him into a warm room below decks, which is supplied with a cot, a very well-protected area where a small fire can be tended to boil water, and extremely stocked medicine cabinets. There is a woman, there, that has a kitten tucked into her arms in a familiar way that makes Kazuha’s heart ache.
Though he recognizes her as the ship’s doctor, Kazuha does not know her name yet. He recalls her treating him after his rescue from the ocean waters, but he had been hit with an inexplicable wave of exhaustion once he’d made it below decks and to a warm cabin. He had practically passed out for more than a day, only waking up to desperately gulp down the water that had been left for him by the same unnamed woman. He resolves to memorize her name once Beidou mentions it.
To his luck, the only thing she says is the woman’s name—Yinxing—and the ship’s doctor leaves without question, though her eyes trail over Kazuha on the way out. The kitten in her arms gives a tiny mewl, and she hushes it, bundling it closer as she leaves.
“I got this,” Beidou mumbles to Kazuha, and pushes him gently towards the cot. He sits as she bangs open the cabinet doors, and winces at the way she pushes aside jars and paper packages haphazardly. “Soak your hand in some warm water and see if you can pick the bandaging off or if it’s fused to your skin.”
Kazuha blinks in alarm, unsure if her statement is serious or joking, and does as she bids him. The boiled water doesn’t take long to cool to a bearable temperature, though he lets his Vision glow as he blows gently over it to speed it along. His mouth twists and he resists the urge to hiss a breath through his teeth when he lowers his hand into the bowl. He sustained this injury weeks ago, but it still stings—likely due to his improper care for it.
Beidou finds what she is looking for, and dumps it all on a side table that stands adjacent to the cot. She pulls up the sole stool in the room, and scoots in until one of her knees is between his and she can tug the bowl of water and his hand into her lap.
She unwinds the old strips of bandaging very, very carefully. Her hands are calloused, like a sailor’s. His have the appropriate callouses of a swordsman, but in addition to her claymore, the ropes of her ship have left a mark on her as well. He has started learning the craft of sailing slowly, and while his hands and muscles ache from the work, Kazuha has yet to earn his own wind-weathered palms.
When she finishes unwrapping his hand, she reveals an uneven crescent of dead-pale flesh burned into his palm, and accompanying indents along his fingers between the second and third knuckles. The damaged skin is whitened and papery, simultaneously painful and lacking the sensation for fine touch, and the skin around it is reddened and sensitive, though there is no longer any bleeding.
“That’s going to scar,” Beidou tells him seriously. “The marks are permanent.”
“Often,” Kazuha says, “the profound experiences we go through also leave profound marks. Sometimes I feel like there is a wound upon my spirit. It seems only fitting that it becomes manifest in some way.”
“And sometimes,” Beidou says back to him, swiping a small patch of cotton gauze soaked with something that smells violently alcoholic across his hand, “we take care of our wounds so that they don’t fester, kid.”
Kazuha pauses, mulling over her blunt response.
“I think the wound in my spirit is festering as well,” Kazuha admits to his stinging palm.
“There are ways to care for that, too, you know.”
Kazuha drags his eyes up to Beidou’s face. During his time on the Alcor, he’s learned that she’s a tough woman, but a kind and fair one. Now, she has a faint tilt to her lips, almost a smile.
He looks back down to his palm. “Yes. I… I suppose that I neglected that injury as well.”
“Join us for music night,” Beidou suggests. “The crew likes you well enough, the ones that know you. Spend some time around everyone. For better or for worse, we’re your family, now.”
Kazuha stares up at her, speechless as she thumbs a medicinal salve that smells of mist flowers and other herbs across his fingers.
“Family?” he asks.
“Crew,” she confirms, as if the two are entirely equivalent. Maybe they are. His hand aches, but the accompanying sting of disinfectant feels like healing. To the injury in his heart, her consideration feels exactly the same.
“I’m only here temporarily,” he reminds her gently.
Beidou shrugs. “Once crew, always crew. We don’t abandon our own, Kazuha, so you’re stuck with us now. If you didn’t want that, should’ve wrecked yourself against another ship.”
“No, I…” Kazuha chews on his cheek, picking over his words. He must choose them as carefully as he does those for his poems. As happens with his poetry sometimes, the inspiration has absolutely left him.
“I’m sorry,” he settles on. “I didn’t mean it that way. I simply didn’t expect you to go so far out of your way merely for a wandering stranger. I already owe you my life.”
“We’re all wandering strangers, here,” Beidou tells him. “May as well be strange together.”
Kazuha’s lips quirk into a smile. “That was almost poetic, captain.”
“Ah, so you’re contagious.”
Though it takes a while, Kazuha eventually gives up on hanging his head out the porthole of the captain’s cabin where he had previously been advising Beidou on the port politics of Inazuma. He steels himself against the clamor that has taken over the vessel, and makes his way up to the open sky.
When he finally steps above deck, he winces.
Unlike the porthole, the air is clear of salt spray this high up—but the sheer noise of what Beidou called “music night” is… “Deafening” would be a melodramatic term. Still, he can’t stop his mouth from flattening, nor his eyes from squinting as he turns his head away slightly, as if it will help.
The clamor is as discordant as it is loud. Half the sailors have appropriated instruments (or in some cases are simply keeping a beat on the nearest barrel or bannister), while the other half are singing, arguing, laughing, debating. It’s the sound of life and joy, and it is drilling a pick into Kazuha’s skull.
“Kazuha!”
He winces, and tries to smooth out his expression. Judging by the way Beidou slows from a cheerful jog to a frowning meander as she approaches him, he is not entirely successful. Kazuha has often been called difficult to read, but it is not because he hides his emotions—he prefers being candid above all, and simply finds himself internally at peace most of the time, leading to what others interpret as a neutral expression.
Now… is not like most of the time. He smiles at Beidou, and feels his mouth take the shape of a grimace.
“You okay, kid?” she asks, dropping a hand into his hair. It’s as cool as the ocean breeze, and he sighs in some small amount of relief. “You look like you’re going to be seasick.”
“I don’t think I can participate in music night,” he admits.
“What?” she cries, and takes back her hand to prop it up on her hip. “Why not? I don’t want to pressure you, but Juzong went and told everyone that we were making you socialize, so…”
Kazuha isn’t entirely sure what expression his face makes, but it puts a stop to Beidou’s line of thought.
“Sorry,” she says, letting her hands down as her whole posture softens. “I really shouldn’t pressure you like that. But—here.”
She wraps an arm around his shoulder just as someone finds a particularly torturous way to mangle their recorder playing, and Kazuha stutter-steps as he follows her along. She draws him to the other side of the ship, where the mast hides them from the rest of the crew and the sails muffle some of the noise.
Beidou leans in, speaking more quietly. “What’s wrong, Kazuha? Are you shy, or what? You seem like you could be the type, but you haven’t really seemed anxious before now…”
He shakes his head, drawing a hand up to not-quite-cover his ear. “I’m not shy. I simply… am developing a headache. As you have learned in the past weeks, I may hear a coming storm in the wind, or a lie in the beat of someone’s heart. I enjoy treading through nature because, much of the time, it sings together in harmony. Your sailors, however…”
“Yeah,” Beidou chuckles. “‘Harmonious’ wouldn’t be the word to describe what we’re hearing right now.”
Kazuha smiles back, wan. It is a strain to pick apart her words through the static in his ears even now, and he intuits most of what she says through context. “Not really.”
“Tell you what,” Beidou offers, squeezing his shoulder. Her arm is warm and all-encompassing against the evening chill, and he wishes that it weren’t inappropriately familiar of him to take the liberty to lean in under her cloak. “You go back below deck and nap that headache off, and if you feel back up to coming up later, I’ll make sure everyone’s actually playing in tune. We’ll even sing you a lullaby.”
“That’s not necessary, Captain Beidou.”
“Ah,” she says, “but wouldn’t it be hilarious?”
Finally, a genuine smile cracks through, and Kazuha laughs quietly.
“There’s that secretly cheeky sense of humor,” Beidou jibes. “Come on, get back below. Grab a mistflower to cool your head if you need. I’ll save you some of the last rice wine we picked up in Ritou for later and whip these sea dogs into singing shape.”
“Thanks, captain,” Kazuha murmurs, unable to stifle his smile. He takes a moment to lean back into her quasi-embrace, and then slips out from her hold to find the stairs back below deck.
Kazuha wakes to a whisper of his name on the wind. He laid down for a nap in his ill-used hammock—he usually sleeps somewhere less occupied and more quiet, so long as Yinxing doesn’t mind him occupying her infirmary—and the last rays of the setting sun are still filtering into the crew cabin through the porthole. If the sun hasn’t quite set, it can’t have been more than an hour since he’s laid his head down.
He opens his eyes and stills his body, breathing slowly and deeply as he strains to listen for what woke him.
It comes again: a quiet susurration in the evening breeze, but definitely one that resolves into his name. It’s suspicious. Moreso is the fact that there are no other, more obnoxious noises permeating the silence. Only Beidou’s voice in the distance, louder now, and more agitated.
He slides from the hammock and lands as quietly as he can, foregoing donning footwear so as to make as little noise as possible. He does not doubt Beidou’s skill as a captain of a great crew, but it would take more than a skilled captain to get so many people this quiet. Something has happened.
And Beidou whispered his name.
He creeps out of the porthole instead of taking the stairs, and holds his breath as he jumps upwards from the edge of it. The Vision at his shoulder glows, and the natural eddies of ocean wind soften the sound of him grabbing the ship's bannister. Thus clinging to the side of the ship, he peers over the edge.
Beidou stands facing Kazuha, the rest of her crew frozen and orderly behind her. Between her and Kazuha, a stranger stands, colt-legged and trembling and small... but with a knife gripped in her hands that she presses to the belly of Yinxing’s cat.
“—seriously going to threaten a cat?” Beidou finishes asking, hands on her hips.
“It’s a cat that you clearly care about,” comes the tremulous reply, “or you wouldn’t all be standing so still over there, so—so it’s worth more to you than a little bit of stupid wine.”
“It’s more than a little bit,” Beidou mutters, eyes moving over Kazuha smoothly and giving no indication that she sees him, “since you’ve managed to fit your entire self into the barrel for the week we’ve been at sea.”
The cat mewls pathetically, tail curling under her back legs as the hand holding her scruff trembles. Kazuha hops the railing and steps forward carefully, familiar enough with this part of the ship to avoid anything that is likely to creak or shift.
“I just wanted to get out of Inazuma!” the stowaway cries. “I didn’t realize you were such drunkards that you’d finish all the wine! Aren’t you supposed to be a trading ship?!”
Beidou blinks slowly, and Kazuha raises his blade.
“Actually,” Beidou says, “we’re pirates.”
Kazuha flips his sword blunt-end first, and knocks the girl out.
As careful as he is, the hilt of his sword makes a nasty sound against the stowaway’s skull, and he catches her as she keels over to the side. His socks don’t make for the best purchase against the ship deck now that he’s got a living, breathing, and very limp person slumped against him, and he staggers backwards until Beidou leaps over Yinxing’s escaping cat and catches him by the scarf right before he tips overboard.
“Careful,” she tells him with a grin. “I wouldn’t wanna have to fish you out of the drink a second time.”
“As I heard it,” Kazuha replies dryly, “there is no drink left.”
Beidou guffaws, before crouching to pick up the unconscious girl in her arms. The motion makes the stowaway groan, and when her head tips to the side, there’s a trickle of blood where Kazuha hit her. He frowns.
“She’s going to need medical attention,” he informs Beidou neutrally.
“Yeah, yeah,” Beidou admits. “Better let me do it, though. I don’t think Yinxing is feeling very kindly about this one right now.”
Kazuha nods, and follows Beidou as she heads downstairs. Before he disappears downwards, he catches sight of Yinxing. She’s clutching her cat, and smiles tearfully at Kazuha in thanks. He smiles back, off-balance, and ducks his head.
He’s never been the type to do much saving, preferring mostly to avoid causing any distress but otherwise staying out of people’s ways, but there’s something painfully familiar about the love she shows for a simple stray she found.
Kazuha retrieves his shoes, and heads to the infirmary. Beidou has laid the injured stowaway onto Kazuha’s usual cot (the only cot in the infirmary, actually), and has the same antiseptic she used for Kazuha’s hand out, dabbing at the girl’s head.
Kazuha hovers in the doorway, something alien and anxious writhing in the pit of his stomach. The stowaway looks very small, like this, and underfed. He can see the knobs of her knees and ankles.
“You are being very kind to someone who threatened your crew,” he finally says.
“You’re very quick to call that cat crew when you didn’t even think of yourself that way until recently,” Beidou shoots back, “but you’re right. She was just scared. I bet she didn’t realize we fished you out of the ocean, or she’d have come out of hiding sooner.”
“You’re letting her stay?”
“What, are you suggesting I dump her for the sharks?” Beidou asks. Kazuha shakes his head, feeling chastised, and sits at the foot of the bed.
“I’m simply trying to wrap my head around things,” he says, fiddling with the edge of a clean bandage on his wrist.
Beidou pauses in her work to eyeball him for a moment. Kazuha isn’t sure what she finds, but there is clearly something, because she drops the antiseptic bottle onto the table and reaches out to pull him against her side.
“Wrap your head around this, kid,” she tells him. “I counted on you up there just now, and you did great. I didn’t explain anything to you, didn’t let you know if you were getting into a cat rescue mission or a fight to the death, and you still went. I bet you didn’t even think about it.”
Kazuha blinks into her shoulder. He hadn’t thought about it at all.
“There are bonds that are made through shared suffering and shared hard work,” Beidou continues. “And once you’ve made enough, it’s easy to recognize someone in need. This girl here’s running, probably for reasons that are pretty similar to why you’re running. Look, she’s got lightning-scarring on her hands.”
Kazuha looks. His eyes burn, and so does the cold metal of the dead Vision tucked against his breast.
“So yes,” Beidou says, “I’m letting her stay. And if you ever need me to reassure you about that—or anything else—you just come and let me know, okay? I’m the captain of the Alcor. It’s my job to take care of my crew, and that includes the kind of care that your spirit needs after whatever happened to you in Inazuma.”
Kazuha doesn’t know what to say. His words run dry. His eyes, embarrassingly, don’t, and he tucks his wrist against his face to scrub away at the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
Beidou doesn’t laugh at him. She just ruffles a hand through his hair, and lets him lean against her shoulder as she goes back to tending to the stowaway’s head wound.
Once upon a time, Kazuha had a friend. He lost him, but grief is a curious thing. In following it, he realizes he has found a family.