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"It's okay. It's just life."
Life, or death, does it really matter?
Maybe I've become evil, Archie thought, scrubbing blood off her hands after yet another raid, unconsciously filtering off the noise from the captain's quarters.
It wouldn't be surprising, becoming evil. On the contrary, it would only be natural at this point of her life.
She glanced at herself in a mirror – a poor reminder of what once was a glamorous piece of furniture. She liked the soot across her face. It made her look badass, i.e. not soft, which was exactly the point. Its only disadvantage would be traces easily formed by tears, but she never cried.
Some would say evil people don't cry, but their monster of a captain (with all due respect) cried all the time, so it wasn't an argument towards any side.
It was about time to go to bed (yes, a weird thing for a pirate to say, doesn't really fit the chaos piracy is synonymous with), which she was always in dread of. She never knew what to do with herself in idle state: with her arms and legs when she was sitting or standing for more than two seconds, with her mind when she was lying with her eyes closed, always fidgeting and trying to shut the thoughts up. But she needed sleep, unfortunately.
Earlier in her life, she would find more comfort sleeping on the ground, only a thin travelling blanket between her and wet soil, or cold stone, or hot sand. Now to think about it, it felt like punishment she somehow deserved for no particular reason.
The next morning, she sliced and sliced away the innocent people on another ship – though they looked rich enough to assume at least some of them weren't that innocent – finding some sort of pleasure in hearing humans screaming like gulls they might someday reincarnate as.
It was fun.
The cake was tasty, too, until she felt blood on her tongue where it shouldn't have been. Or, well. Conscience tasted this iron-tingy too.
She didn't have boxes in her head. If there were a need to visualise it, it would be a hole in the ground, a dark pit, just like those they used in the cult to dispose of trash.
She shrugged at herself and carried on with the cake, ignoring the bitterness.
She would cringe at her own words – you have hope, it's cute – because they were hilariously theatrical, if she weren't too busy savouring the kiss and the emotions, reminiscing the overheard fairytale.
No one had ever told her fairytales, especially not such silly ones, and certainly not to make her feel better. If there could ever be bedtime stories, they would be of hell and fire, of snakes coiling and recoiling, writhing around the dying mortal world. She had nightmares about it.
But she wasn't thinking of it now.
Until Blackbeard stormed in and kicked her fears back into her heart.
She couldn't stay still for the rest of the day, avoiding Jim, only looking them in their eyes with a we shouldn't glance. She felt that way – anxious, not enamoured – before, and she always turned out to be right. Something bad was going to happen, and she needed to reduce the possibilities.
A memory flashed before her inner eye when a real flash of lightning blinded her physical ones. She would guess that it was exactly the thing that made her evil, and she did her best to forget it, and even better to push it into that fucking pit, and stop it from getting out again after the moment Izzy’s infected blood sprayed over her skin mere hours ago.
Kat – that's why you always forget their names – beautiful, beautiful Kat, who drove a dagger into her own lacerated chest, using her begging eyes and Archie's hands, since hers didn't have enough strength for it. Just because she didn't want to live in pain.
Maybe, it's the best way to go – by the hand of someone you love, or like, or trust.
So she said to Jim, It's okay. It's just life, ready to die by their hand on this rough wood.
And then she didn't die.
The pit was covered for now. So many things to take back out, some to burn or bury for good, but at this moment рук mind was instead occupied by an unexpected and complicated question: what life really was.