Work Text:
The sea shows you that which whom you love most dearly.
—
Water crashed onto his face with a rumble like that of a matron shaking you to get up. The young man shot up with a splutter, hands and feet scrabbling for purchase beneath him and finding nothing but the chill of the sea.
Water was in his eyes. The overwhelming taste of sea salt in his mouth made him want to vomit and he spent several moments coughing it up. His cotton shirt and trousers clung to him, threatening to pull him back down to where tendrils of seaweed gently wrapped around his ankle.
Wiping his face he looked around wildly to find he was bobbing alone in the void. As far as the eye could see there was only a vast stretch of teal that shimmered under the beating sun. Close by, waves rose like the Ravkan kings only to fall harder and then disappear like they’d never existed. But their ripples stained the sand of the beach, leaving their marks nonetheless.
The current pushed Sturmhond - famed privateer - towards the shore, carrying him over the distance with ease and ushering him to safety. He didn’t like being carried, not unless it was by something he’d built himself in a brilliant way, but this time he accepted it. Finally his hands caught onto the sand beneath him and he pulled, only to find himself weaker than he’d expected. His limbs felt as stable Ravka itself, like a cup of kvas on the edge of a table in a ship sailing through a storm. Or an old man incapable of picking up that cup.
Half dragging himself and half swimming, aided by the swell of the waves, he was finally able to stop floating and touch the sea floor with his knees. He pushed up, managing to balance himself upright after staggering a few steps. The beach was there, dust coloured and empty but for the driftwood that was left of his ship.
They’d been hit by a storm off the coast of Ketterdam. He vaguely remembered flashes of lightning through the bellowing thunderclouds, the shouts of his crew as they tried to tame the bucking ship into weathering the increasingly perilous slopes of the sea. In the dark and mayhem, the lookout had failed to see the outcrop of rocks they were being pushed towards. Not even the fabricator work on the hull had saved the ship from splitting in two. Sturmhond shuddered as the screams of his crew washed through his ears before they were swept away by the sea.
He prayed to the saints for mercy for their lives and souls - that some at least would live.
Blinking himself out of his stupor he stumbled over the dips in the shifting sands, ever closer to land. Sturmhond’s red hair was plastered over his face, long enough to cover his eyes now. It needed to be cut soon. Glancing down into the shimmering water he caught sight of his reflection. He should be used to how he looked now; the crooked nose and bright red hair so unlike the youngest prince of Ravka. No longer did those optimistic, boyish features play across his face. He was youthful still, and of course rakishly handsome even while sopping wet, but those green eyes - in contrast to his real hazel - held a maturity that came from experiences the young prince could have never dreamed of. As Sturmhond he was someone, someone who could help Ravka the way a bastard prince never could. The things he’d done…
A distant, faint sound interrupted his never-still thoughts. It wasn’t the usual tumble of the sea, or even a bird. Glancing back over his shoulder he squinted between water droplets and the sea parted itself, revealing a glimpse of a woman in white sinking from view. She was far out where the sea floor would have disappeared from under her feet and appeared as if the sea had already taken her. She was like a ghost, one the underworld had sent back to haunt him in life.
He froze. He knew her but couldn’t quite recall from where….
Red was spilling across the water’s surface in streams before drawing themselves back in around the tanned face of someone-too-familiar-yet-too-strange when she broke out of the water again. No, not red - auburn.
Even from this distance he could see her eyes were wide yet she did not call for him. Only stared.
She was someone he loved. He was sure of it. Someone dear to him.
Without a thought he turned and began to wade back towards her.
“I’m coming!”
It was all he could say before a wave knocked him down. They came in twos now, one to knock him further back and the other to keep him there until the next one. They were small, too small for him to be struggling. A grown man, feared across the seas yet floundering blindly in the shallows unable to push through and reach the woman. All sounds, except the laboured heaving of his lungs and the water circling him like a shark, became muffled.
What hope could he have at saving her? But he tried. He was Sturmhond for saints’ sake! He tried, dragging himself beneath the waves out to sea yet all his strength had been wasted on himself only moments earlier. Like always.
The woman didn’t scream. Was she too proud? Too scared to call for the only one who could help? Who was she? She had only made a noise once, faint and hesitant. But he had heard her! And he wouldn’t- he couldn’t let her down. Not…again. Not the unforgettable girl with a sharp tongue and love for strawberries. Not….not….Genya. Genya!
“Genya!!”
He screamed.
The realisation plunged his heart into ice and his body into the oncoming waves, arms outstretched, to plough through the water. Suddenly he wasn’t a privateer anymore. Suddenly he was 14 and running after her while she closed her door on him. Suddenly he was Nikolai nothing, the foolhardy prince who tried to save everyone but always ended up alone. Arms strained, burning even, and his legs kicked like a horse trying to beat the sea into submission. It refused. He was barely even swimming; more like snatching at water hoping for silk, a drowning man unable to save one girl. Always the drowning man. What hope did he have to pull Ravka up to the sun if he couldn’t even pull himself together enough to save her? To not let her go?
His determination never wavered, thrumming like the rhythm of his heart - maybe even boiling into desperation - but his energy was quickly sapped by the waves.
“Genya!”
Again, he shouted for her. Or was it a plea for forgiveness? It sounded almost pathetic to his ears; the meaningless splashes he made trying to get to her, the trembling of his voice. But only the sea answered - a towering wave that flung him back to the shallows, undoing all his meagre progress.
“No!”
He spat the traitorous water, gagging on the taste, clawing through the foam and only coming up with sand in his calloused hands. The grains slipped through his fingers, all of them Genya and all of them him - neither of whom he could hold onto. Within seconds, there was nothing left in his hand. And when he looked up through the buffering of the waves that pushed him further and further away, he couldn’t see her anymore. Those same waves that he’d used to push himself to safety had swallowed her whole.
Helplessly staring across the never-ending expanse of water, the void between him and Genya, he finally remembered that she hadn’t been real. She hadn’t been on his ship. She was in Os Alta. Away from him. As safe there as she would’ve been here drowning.
And so it was a sickening thought that followed; Genya was not that which whom he had loved dearest. It was the sea. The sea which tumbled and roared with ancient knowledge and danger. It was him and his endless, reckless desire for adventure.
He’d chosen himself and left her behind in Os Alta. The only one who could have helped her but didn’t. He was the Puppy Prince - all bark and no bite. And because of that, because of him, she was gone.
He’d failed to see her in time, failed to save her. From what he still did not know.
And as he staggered onto the beach, brushing away the wetness from his eyes, he thought of her; not the cold polite woman she’d become, but the little firebird from Caryeva he’d failed to protect. Now lost to sea.
—
It was with numb movements that Sturmhond built himself a small shelter out of driftwood for that chilly night. Too exhausted to try and look for help or figure out where he was. All he could think of was red hair being swallowed by the waves and the haunting knowledge that he’d forgotten her. Had it been so long?
He stayed in that shelter for two more days before Tamar and Tolya found him. Nikolai did not speak of what he saw, for it was Nikolai that thought of Genya, not Sturmhond. And he was Sturmhond. Whatever the twins may have noticed about him in private moments when none of the restablished crew was around, how he no longer looked at the sea with longing or how he avoided his own reflection for a time, they said nothing of it.
The glass of kvas was still on the edge in his mind, Ravka still in reach beneath the waves. But kotichka had fallen into the shadows where light did not reach. Someday, he vowed, he would dive to the depths of the ocean for her. He would push that glass away from the edge, something none of his recent forefathers had been able to do.
But not as Sturmhond. It would be 2 more years before he would even get the chance to make anything right.