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Basil Hawkins is easier to capture than his reputation would suggest. Perhaps he thinks that his street magic will break through the toughest of Marine handcuffs (barring seastone). Perhaps, and Drake finds this possibility more likely, the Marine officers who have run into him before have felt the need to disguise their defeats as having been done in the hands of a foe far more competent than he is in reality. Perhaps with this capture, Drake will finally get promoted from Captain—he does not thirst for power; he does not wish for things he does not deserve. He knows the shadow his past throws on him, a drowning inky darkness, not enough light to let him sleep. He knows how much it slows him in the eyes of others, how little power they will trust him with because they know what these hands have done, hesitant or not.
At this moment, Drake’s hands hold the chain of the cuffs. Hawkins does not seem to mind being captured terribly, the look on his face as placid as when they’d crossed swords, as when he’d fumbled, as when Drake had nearly cut through his throat. That is striking; Hawkins is striking. He’s shorter than Drake (though not by as much as most people) but carries himself in a way that makes him loom. Perhaps it’s the hair that falls in waves as even as an amateur painting of the ocean. Perhaps it’s the eyes, slow to blink, almost like a cat’s. Perhaps it’s the feeling that begins to crawl under the soles of Drake’s feet, that if Hawkins is this calm, that if defeating him was this easy, then Drake had played right into his hands like a marked card.
Drake narrows his eyes, focusing his ears on any small, metallic sound, for a hairpin in the keyhole or a loosening of the links in the chain. He blocks out the sound of his coat snapping in his wake and of the soles of both sets of boots on the ground; he filters the sounds of his own subordinates following behind. He feels the move nearly before Hawkins makes it. Drake is ready when Hawkins raises his arms. He dodges the blow and sends his tail out in an iron ribbon to make Hawkins trip. Hawkins avoids it, then brings up his arms again as if to strike. He is bleeding his cards here; what is he doing? Drake swings his axe forward, waiting for Hawkins to duck or to counter, and then, at the last second, sliding it up so the handle hits Hawkins’s wrist, not sharp enough to slice it off but hard enough to hurt.
Hawkins takes the blow, and from his other side Drake hears a scream; he turns halfway to see one of his subordinates at the front of the procession, Inge, staggering back in something like horror or pain. Drake turns back to Hawkins. There is no mark across his pale forearm, no indication that an impact had been made. It’s strange, and so had the way he’d just taken it, but perhaps this is some sort of trick, an optical illusion, a body double. Perhaps Hawkins is attempting to distract Drake by horrifying his subordinates—but how, and why only one of them?
Drake again raises his axe, this time making his movement as obvious as Hawkins had made his own before. Hawkins rises to meet it. Again, the blow from the handle of the axe glances off Hawkins’s wrist, and again, Inge screams. Another shout joins him, this one in words.
“Stop! It’s hurting him!”
Drake steadies his hand. Hawkins’s placid mouth is curved slightly in a smile the shape of a shallow drinking vessel. Drake grabs the chain of the handcuffs, not pulling too hard, not releasing Hawkins from his attention. What is this, a transference of energy? A fruit power? Why isn’t this in the intel on Hawkins? Two large marks have bloomed across Inge’s forearm. They’re in the shape and size of the axe handle—shit, Inge is tiny; his arm might be broken. It’s Hawkins’s fault, Hawkins’s power, but Drake had been his instrument, played like a well-tuned piano. He’d struck again. It’s his fault, too, his fault more, as Inge’s superior.
“Go,” Drake barks. “Get him medical attention; get him out of range.”
Inge doesn’t need telling. A few of the others follow suit immediately, but Drake waves his arm and the rest clear out. They leave the alleyway empty but for Drake, Hawkins, and the pipes that cling to the outsides of the small buildings lining either side.
“I can see you’re unfamiliar with my powers,” says Hawkins. “You should know there is no range.”
Drake’s heart smashes against his rib cage the way he wants to smash his hand into Hawkins’s smug face, a sudden violent impulse into which he knows better than to give. He might be bluffing.
“Why tell me?”
“It was tempting not to,” says Hawkins. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to stay and play games.”
Drake clenches his jaw. Is that an insult? An invitation to attempt to delay him? Another distraction, sleight-of-hand, meant to take a look at the cards Drake hasn’t yet played? Does it matter if Hawkins has had a loaded deck the entire time?
“If you release me, I’ll let your subordinates go.”
Drake does not miss the plural. “What have you done to the others?”
“They’re next in line.”
He tosses his hair; it floats over his shoulder as if without carrying the weight of the way he’s bound Drake’s subordinates to him. The gesture reveals more of his ruffled shirt, unwrinkled and unmarked.
“You’re a pirate,” says Drake. “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“Because I’m giving it to you,” says Hawkins. “I thought the Marines were experts at belief.”
Drake won’t try to piece through what he’s getting at; it’s enough of a mental load to try and figure out how he’s going to face his subordinates after this, after letting Hawkins go, after having injured them himself. It's useless to ask the same questions he can't answer, but Drake finds himself circling back around the closed track to the earlier stations in his thought process. Damn it, why wasn’t any of this in the reports about Hawkins?
“Fine,” says Drake.
Drake twists the key in the cuffs and steps back. Hawkins had given his word that he’d let Drake’s subordinates go; he’d said nothing about not taking more hostages by proxy, or perhaps his own crew. (A pirate would do that; Drake banishes thoughts of a certain other pirate who absolutely would from his mind. Now is not the time.) He’d said nothing about not hurting Drake. The cuffs fall to the cobblestone street. The sound dies on the surface, not that there’s anyone in the narrow alley to hear it.
“Captain,” says Hawkins, not yet turning to leave. “I’ve calculated certain odds of the future.”
Drake holds his tongue. This—a reliance on mystical fortune-telling and certainty about odds that he’d probably pulled out of his ass—was in Hawkins’s file. This Drake had been prepared for.
“I’ve seen us working together, with high probability of success.”
“The Marines would never accept you,” says Drake.
“The situation would be quite the opposite, I think,” says Hawkins.
No. Drake won’t fall for it. Hawkins has probably found out about his past somehow; the dirt lies just below the surface if it’s really that. Drake’s not proud of it, but it’s no secret. If he thinks that’s going to tempt Drake to return to a life of piracy (as if there’s anything to miss), or that it will embarrass him to mention it, he’s miscalculated.
“I will never willingly leave the Marines,” says Drake.
He hadn’t willingly left the first time, after all.
“I wonder about that,” says Hawkins. “At any rate, I’ve held up my end of the deal.”
Hawkins raises his arm and turns to leave, and it’s as if the arm is made of straw, splintering like the strands of his hair but a hundred times thicker, and then he’s gone. Drake could play dirty and follow, delay Hawkins enough to make him wish he’d stayed. He considers it, his fingers tightening in his glove, around the hilt of his sword. He feels the leather creak, and waits.
There are more important things than defeating Hawkins now. What matters more are Drake’s own subordinates, whom he will never abandon.
The rattle of wooden doors in their frames is almost like the creaking and shifting of the sails on a vessel at sea. If Drake closes his eyes tightly and focuses on Hawkins’s even breathing beside him, he can almost imagine that he’s out on the water on a Marine vessel, five minutes from the start of the late-night watch and needs to pull on his boots and jacket before he’s late. As the image begins to seep into his skin like the edges of a wave slowing in its rush up the slope of the shoreline, Hawkins shifts beside him, rolling over, his hair brushing over Drake’s chest.
“I know you’re awake.”
Drake sighs. “Does it bother you?”
“No, I’m just making an observation.”
Drake opens one eye. The darkness is not absolute; both of them hate to sleep that way. It’s odd having something so deep and specific in common with Hawkins, but no odder than sleeping next to him out of more than necessity. Espionage does not, in this case, require quite literally sleeping with the enemy, and yet they are here, awake in the half-light. The wind shoves at the door again. Drake’s sight adjusts; Hawkins is leaning over him, bringing to mind the image of a merman on a rock, bent with tail curled behind him. It’s the hair, swaying and brushing still, and the flat line of Hawkins’s mouth.
“I seem to remember a conversation we had,” Hawkins says. “When you said you wouldn’t leave the Marines willingly.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” says Drake, true in exact words if not in the way he’s implying.
Hawkins leans lower, his hair draping over Drake’s chest in a crumpled blanket.
“I calculated the odds, and at the time, you were 96% likely to be telling the truth.”
“People change,” says Drake. “One in twenty-five isn’t nothing.”
The odds that had led their solar system to emerge in their galaxy, with a climate conducive to carbon-based life are slimmer. The odds for all of that, and for said carbon-based life to have survived for this long, particularly on land, particularly among the larger animals, dinosaurs and giants and the rest, are much slimmer. All of it had happened anyway, hadn’t it? Four percent is much more than that, a number so hefty that Drake wants to disagree, if only it wouldn’t give him up immediately. Drake holds his tongue.
“That’s true,” says Hawkins.
The concession is hollow as the sound of fresh bread tapped from the bottom. Drake squares his jaw, but opens his other eye. Hawkins is no siren drowning him in the shallows or dashing him on the rocks, though he would perhaps leave Drake’s bones to the vultures to pick clean. His face looks almost soft in this moment, his features arranged but left to sit and settle. Drake could imagine, on board his phantom boat, that Hawkins cares; he could believe it, but he won’t allow himself to do that.