Untitled - original fic
So now with something NOT fandom related.
This story - well, it'll eventually become a story - is not yet titled, and hasn't been written out in proper story form... it's more like a collection of drabbles and such to flesh out the main character and her backstory, before the main plot when she becomes a PIRATE. xD
In any case, they're among my favorite pieces that I've written, so I'll be posting them here occassionally. :) Hope you enjoy.
Quick summary of the protagonist so you know a bit about her before plunging into a scene:
Name: Renuka
Age: varies through the stories, but they take place in her childhood
Eyes: green
Hair: black
Nationality: Egyptian/Indian
Companion: Heru, a golden eagle
Family: father- fisherman, used to be a merchant but got sucked into debts; mother - egyptian, very softspoken
Lives: Kochi, India
The time period is during the Maritime Empire age... but it's not completely historically correct. I did try, though! I think this first one is the most accurate anyway...
Aaaand the rest will be made clear. Here's the first drabble!
If Renuka had to choose her favorite thing about Kochi, it would definitely be the spice market.
Kochi was the jewel of the Arabian Sea, India’s eclectic seaport capital of precious goods and strange people. The spice market was where everything came together; it was the life of the Kochi islands and the heart of the entire west coast of India.
Renuka and her father passed the spice market every day on their way to work, and every day Renuka wished to lose herself in the twisting streets, so that she may never have to haul in another load of smelly fish again.
She almost managed it, once.
Sacks overflowing with brilliant colors lined the entire market, and to seven-year-old Renuka the turmeric looked like crushed topaz and the chili powder seemed a mountain of ruby dust. She stood, transfixed for but a moment, and that was all it took. The crowd filled in around her, and it was only when a burly foreigner pushed her aside that she realized she was alone.
She didn’t think it strange at the time that the first emotion to well up inside her was not a sense of fear or worry, but a wave of happiness that she was finally free. Her elation was short lived, as her father’s calloused hand grabbed her wrist through the mass of people and tugged her out of the world she so longed to exist in.
“What are you doing, getting lost like that,” her father scolded, “what if you had been stolen away? Eh? Who would help me pull the fish in? What would we eat?”
“There would be one less mouth to feed,” Renuka had replied, and received a rap on the knuckles for it.
“Brazen child. You are not allowed to stop in the market ever again.”
“Yes, father.”
- - -
If the spice market was her favorite place, the place Renuka detested would be the fishing district. Each time the rows of boats and the stench of dirty harbor water entered her senses, her stomach would protest with a wave of disgust and nausea.
They were in Kochi’s poorest fishing area, where the slime of the entire city it seemed accumulated. Their boat was hardly a boat, any smaller and it would be called a canoe.
Day after day, Renuka and her father would climb into the boat, head out the entire morning to fish and then sell whatever little they pulled in at the lower class fish market. Renuka’s life revolved around the very boat she hated; go in the boat in the morning, clean the boat in the afternoon, dock the boat at night. The boat was their livelihood, her father reiterated daily, they should take pride in it and care for it like a child.
If only it were a child, Renuka thought, at least then she could bash its head in and be done with it.
- - -
They had not always been a poor fishing family.
Once, they had been middle class merchants, travelling around Egypt, Arabia and the northern parts of India. Her father sold spices and cloth. Her mother was Egyptian by birth, the most delicate of three sisters, a demure and fragile creature whose fingers ached at the slightest work. She was once beautiful, which was why her father married her mother, but she had long fallen into the disrepair of old age and lost ambition.
Her father had been the oldest of seven, and it could be said that his siblings were the reason they had all fallen so hard from grace. When younger, her father had been shrewd, calculating and passably intelligent. The same could not be said for his siblings; they spent themselves in useless pursuits and when they had no more money to spend, they turned to their brother. Her father had been raised to never disobey the word of his own father, even if his father had become a drunkard. Renuka always wondered why, for all his intelligence, her father did not refuse his father’s insane requests for more money. She wondered how he could let his own family suffer for others mistakes.
So now, for his mistake, Renuka piled another fish onto the cart, cursing him for every ounce of grime that slowly poisoned her.
- - -
Foreigners always intrigued her. They were so strange, with their light hair and pale skin; Renuka found it funny when they turned red in the heat of the Indian sun.
Their languages were strange too; they flowed like a distant, skewed relative of the Sanskirt she studied once. She had always been talented with languages (to date she could speak with the Egyptians, Arabs, North Indians and a few strings of Chinese), and picked the foreign ones up from the snippets of conversation she heard daily in the market.
Portuguese, she thought, flowed like a lilting song.
Was the country anything like its language?
- - -
Renuka hated the way fish smelled.
It was starting to become part of her skin:
No matter how she scrubbed at night, until her hands turned red, the smell was there. It was in her veins, in her blood, and it drove her mad.
She heard it beating through her heart, polluting everything and she could smell it every time she breathed in, but it wasn’t like she could stop breathing (not for lack of trying), stop living like this-
- - -
Renuka was born on the Arabian Sea. She never considered the house they lived in a home; it was too dirty, too unclean, too cold to be a home. If there was a place she was ever comfortable in to call a home, it was St. Francis Church.
The Church stood out like a snowy mountain from the backdrop of palm trees and thick greenery. The front door was painted bright red, and it was this door that first caught Renuka’s eye.
She had always loved the color red.
The building arched out like some Hindu temples, but it was much less beautiful and shockingly simplistic.
What a boring place of worship, Renuka had thought, but the door is nice.