(no subject)
Title: When Things Stopped Making Sense
Requester: vani_nessa-- At the Beach Scourge
Prompt: At the Beach Scourge - Pirate AU (Can I pick a more obvious one?)
Author’s Note: A Piratecronian fic that is not in the format of Scourge telling a story so that Roddy will shut up and stop bothering him, for once.
When Things Stopped Making Sense
While it was hard for Scourge to deny that his home town had been, to put it mildly, a festering boil that no self-respecting man should tolerate as long as he had long enough legs to walk away from it (especially if the man and his legs were a bit too Oriental for the local population to tolerate), he was starting to wonder if running away from home had been the best of ideas. For one, he had no idea where he was. The next major city was off to the west and taking the fork to the west made perfect sense, but apparently the road hadn't seen it that way and he'd wound up at a beach in the middle of nowhere. The only thing he had vaguely resembling a landmark was a bit of mast and flag poking up over the top of the hills that he’d sighted half a mile ago.
"I'll have to get to the port sometime," Scourge reasoned to himself as he trotted across the sand with his rucksack slung over his shoulder. "I mean, it's a wonderful stretch of ocean and someone's bound to have done something with it and you don’t just tie up full size ships in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you could, but you’d have to be fairly daft to think it was a good idea.”
Then again, Scourge mused as he rounded the final curve, there were plenty of daft men in the world. The ship was tied up against the shore, swaying gently at the behest of the tides, and there didn’t seem to be a soul on it. It was a rather nice looking ship, too, maybe a merchant. It wasn't flying any colors and the Navy prigs always had their colors up and their ships well guarded.
Scourge cupped his hands around his mouth and hailed the ship. “Hello? I’m a bit lost, could you lend a hand? Hello!” When no one answered he tugged his knapsack around his shoulders and started climbing up the rope ladder. They might have some food lying around at the very least, and it might be a long time before he found someone else to steal from.
Scourge crept over the railing onto the deck, ready with an excuse in case someone caught him at it. Only looking for directions, cap'n, horribly sorry, don't blame a poor idiot Mongoloid for getting lost.
He couldn't help gawking at things as he went down into the hold. He'd never been inside a real ship before, although he'd been chased off several back home. Nobody'd take him on, obviously, and he wasn't keen on binding himself to some self-important idiot whose main concerns were pushing money from one place to another and then keeping most of it for himself. Light glinted off the lock of a chest pushed towards one of the back walls. Could be food supplies or maybe something valuable he could carry off and sell. Scourge fiddled with it for a moment and then popped the chest open.
His eyes widened. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…”
It was gold. Piles of the stuff, all in coins, more than he’d seen in the same place in his entire life. Scourge touched it almost worshipfully and then plunged his hands into the chest up to his wrists to revel in the feeling of the cold metal against his skin.
It was too risky. He wasn't on his home ground if he needed to run, and if he got caught at it he'd probably get lashed and stuffed in a cell at the very least. On the other hand...that was a lot of gold. Enough to get him set up fairly well once he got to the city, and besides that Scourge was sure that if he left it behind he'd be aching for the rest of his life.
"Bugger it," Scourge said, and started stuffing his knapsack and pockets, wedging a few coins into his boots when he finally ran out of room. He almost made it out of the hold when someone tackled him from behind.
"Hey!" Scourge tried to ram his way through, but the other man grappled him and held on, twisting him around until his face was pressed into the deck. “Didn’t do nothing!” he cried, squirming around and trying to buck his assailant off. “I was just looking around, get off!”
“But you were doing it on our ship.” The man sounded young, and surprisingly cool about the situation. Scourge wasn’t sure whether this was comforting. “And you’re clinking.”
“I’ve always been like that. Childhood bone disorder.” He cricked his neck around to look at his captor. Thin hands slipped under his clothing, emptying out his lootings. Scourge resignedly lay still until the man’s fingers slipped around his neck and tugged off his necklace.
“Hey, that’s mine!” He tried to get his arms free and was rewarded by having his head thumped against the deck.
“Looks a bit expensive to be yours.” His captor twined the cord and lacquered wooden beads around his fingertips, eying the carved green pendent. “Chinese jade? Not bad. Certainly too good for you.”
”It’s an heirloom! My father left it to me!” Which was true, in some sense of the term. Apparently he’d been in such a hurry to get dressed and leave the morning after Scourge’s conception that he’d forgotten to put it on again. Scourge had found it under the floorboards when he was seven.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s someone’s heirloom.” The other man put it over his head and stuffed the pendent down his shirt, out of sight. Scourge squirmed and scowled up at him. If he got out of this alive, he was going to come back and put a rock through the bastard’s head.
There were footsteps now, and harsh laughter. Scourge went from rage to sickened fear as he turned his head to see the rest of the crew climbing over the railing. They didn’t look like merchants. They didn’t look like anything legitimate, really.
“Oi! I thought we only left one rat on this ship.”
”Maybe they’ve been breeding?”
The man finally got off his back and hoisted Scourge to his feet. He straightened up proudly, with the sort of self-satisfied grin that made a man’s fists itch to make contact with his nose. “I found him trying to make off with our gold. The worm’s yours to punish, Captain Galvatron.”
Scourge quivered in fear as the single largest man he’d ever seen in his life stepped out of the crowd. He had the requisite large hat with feather that marked him as leadership figure, and a coat that was almost too small for him. Really, the ship itself seemed almost too small for him.
Galvatron…something about that name sounded very familiar, but Scourge couldn’t pluck out what. He shifted nervously, trying to look as innocent as possible. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of simply turning me over to the proper authorities, sir?” he whimpered endearingly.
The man smirked in a way that made Scourge’s blood run ice cold and grabbed Scourge by the hair, forcing him to raise up on his toes. “I am Galvatron. On this ship, I am the authority.”
Future versions of this tale would emphasize a quiet acceptance of his fate and leave out a lot of the undignified writhing and begging he did as they tore his shirt off and pinned him face-first to the mast.
“How many lashes, Captain?” someone behind him asked.
Galvatron chuckled. “Oh, just start going and I’ll tell you when to stop. If I feel like it.”
The first blow cracked across his bare flesh and sent him stumbling against the mast. He couldn’t even manage another pitiful plea for mercy as the lash descended on his back again and again, drawing a harsh cry each time.
Three. Four. Five. It took Scourge a few moments to realize that he’d heard the sixth blow and the accompanying scream, but hadn’t felt it.
“Bloody bastard, y’hit me in the face!”
“You shouldn’t have moved!”
“I di’n’t!”
“You did!”
“Enough!” The captain sounded as if he’d grown bored with the exercise. Scourge was pulled from the mast and thrown onto the ground again to curl up and whimper in agony. They were talking over his head, trying to discuss what nastiness to inflict upon him next.
“String him up,” the captain said. “By his feet, not his neck.”
His boots came off and a rope went around his ankles, tying them tightly to something that Scourge couldn’t see.There were people walking, laughing, noises he couldn’t pick out…
And then someone was dragging his raw back across the deck, then above the deck, and then Scourge was flying by the soles of his feet.
“Hey! Hey, let me down!” Scourge flailed wildly in the air as he was hoisted higher to even louder laughter. He hung helplessly by his feet with his blood running down his back, unable to see anything but the hard deck far below him. His heart was pounding so hard that his chest hurt and if he didn’t do something soon his last act on God’s green Earth would be throwing up on a pirate.
The wind nudged at him, making him rock gently back and forth as he tried to get his fearfully scrambled mind together. He swayed towards the mast, then back over the pale shore, and to the mast again. The rigging and secure fingerholds were close enough to be tantalizing.
This is never going to work, Scourge thought, and went for the idea anyway.
He began to swing, flailing his arms back and forth as he felt the ropes move against his bare ankles. One slip, one badly tied knot and he’d be decorating the deck below with his brains, but they were going to kill him anyway and he was at least going to make a try of this.
Another swing and his fingers grazed the ropes bound to the mast. Two more and he was clinging to them, resisting the tug on his feet from one of the crueler crewmen. His movements were achingly slow as he climbed and crawled, turning himself around like a worm and trying desperately not to look down. One hand over the other, and another hand, and another, and his fingers were nearly numb by the time his feet faced the ground.
Scourge kept mindlessly dragging himself upward, grabbing at any piece of stable rigging he could find and kicking at it with his bound feet. After a century of effort he reached the yard and sat on it, clinging desperately to the mast with what little strength he had left in his arms and pressing his face against the warm wood.
Of course, the question here was “now what?”. He was still on a brigand ship populated by sadists and the only way he was getting out of here was to jump and try to hit the water. From this height, he’d be lucky if he didn’t break both legs on the sand and they’d probably catch up with him anyway.
Scourge finally risked a peek downward. Everyone was staring up at him, a few were even cheering. That was nice, it was nice to have people enjoying your imminent death. The bastard rat who caught him looked more thoughtful than anything else and the captain…
“Enjoying the view?”
“Aagh!”
Was right behind him. Scourge tightened his grip on the mast and tried to squirm away from him at the same time. Galvatron was even bigger up close, although his face seemed to mark him as barely older than Scourge himself. He just…had a presence. Scourge couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
“That was quite impressive. I was honestly expecting the rope to break first.” He pointed down at Scourge’s feet, where they’d frayed the rope a few feet away from the knot. It didn’t look strong enough to support a goat. Scourge’s stomach did yet another backflip.
“Quite an achievement for a crass scavenger.”
“I’m good at improvising, sir,” Scourge muttered nervously. He wasn’t sure which was scarier, the abyss beneath his feet or Galvatron’s grin.
“Ever been on a ship before?” the captain asked casually. Scourge watched in horrified fascination as Galvatron pulled a knife from his belt and merrily began cutting the ropes from Scourge’s feet.
“Been near a few, sir,” Scourge replied shakily. “Never been this high above one.” This sounded suspiciously like a lead-up to a witty one-liner and a shove off the yard.
“Do you think you could improvise on a ship? My ship?”
Scourge wobbled on his perch. There was a distinct possibility that he was delirious and mishearing a joyful death sentence as something more favorable. “Are you offering me a job, sir?” he asked in bleary confusion.
“I am.” Galvatron was acting as if this was all perfectly normal, as if he’d simply walked up to Scourge on the street and decided he looked the part. ‘Weird’ did not begin to describe it.
“I think I’d like that, sir,” Scourge finally answered after a long, bemused pause. He blinked as the world started slanting a bit and his iron grip loosened. The fear-driven strength was starting to seep out of his body and barely winced as Galvatron put a hand around his back to steady him.
“Then welcome to the Dis,” the captain murmured in his ear.
Things got a bit blurry after that. He got down from the rigging somehow, probably tucked over Galvatron’s shoulder, and people had clapped him on the shoulder and made sure he sat down without hurting himself. He didn’t fully wake up until the bastard rat from earlier poured a bucket of seawater down his sore back.
“Did someone tell you to go out and make my life miserable or are you just doing it for fun?” Scourge asked after he ran out of curses.
“It’ll stop it from getting infected. Hold still.”
Scourge grumbled and clenched his fists as the man cleaned out the marks left by the lash. “I want my property back, by the way. It is mine.”
An arm draped itself around his shoulders and dropped the necklace in his lap. The hand at the end held itself out invitingly and he awkwardly shook it.
“Cyclonus.”
“Scourge. What just happened?”
“You just became a pirate.”
“I noticed that part. But I’ve never worked on a ship in my life, why’d he choose me?” He ran a thumb over the carved jade pendent. His father’d been a sailor and he’d always wanted to be one himself. And really, a pirate was just a thief on a larger scale with a bit of murder thrown in and he’d always been good at liberating other people’s goods. Perhaps this could actually work out for him, if he didn’t die first.
Cyclonus shrugged. “He does that. He sets his sights on something and then he takes it, he doesn’t pay heed to what anyone else thinks about it. Pulled me out of a stray longboat half a year ago and hired me before I’d gotten back enough strength to stand up again. You get used to his whims eventually, he knows what he’s doing.”
Good to hear that somebody did. “So at some point all of this is going to make sense?” Scourge asked as he put his necklace back on, tucking it carefully under his collar in case someone else tried to take it.
Cyclonus smiled. “Galvatron? Never.”
Requester: vani_nessa-- At the Beach Scourge
Prompt: At the Beach Scourge - Pirate AU (Can I pick a more obvious one?)
Author’s Note: A Piratecronian fic that is not in the format of Scourge telling a story so that Roddy will shut up and stop bothering him, for once.
When Things Stopped Making Sense
While it was hard for Scourge to deny that his home town had been, to put it mildly, a festering boil that no self-respecting man should tolerate as long as he had long enough legs to walk away from it (especially if the man and his legs were a bit too Oriental for the local population to tolerate), he was starting to wonder if running away from home had been the best of ideas. For one, he had no idea where he was. The next major city was off to the west and taking the fork to the west made perfect sense, but apparently the road hadn't seen it that way and he'd wound up at a beach in the middle of nowhere. The only thing he had vaguely resembling a landmark was a bit of mast and flag poking up over the top of the hills that he’d sighted half a mile ago.
"I'll have to get to the port sometime," Scourge reasoned to himself as he trotted across the sand with his rucksack slung over his shoulder. "I mean, it's a wonderful stretch of ocean and someone's bound to have done something with it and you don’t just tie up full size ships in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you could, but you’d have to be fairly daft to think it was a good idea.”
Then again, Scourge mused as he rounded the final curve, there were plenty of daft men in the world. The ship was tied up against the shore, swaying gently at the behest of the tides, and there didn’t seem to be a soul on it. It was a rather nice looking ship, too, maybe a merchant. It wasn't flying any colors and the Navy prigs always had their colors up and their ships well guarded.
Scourge cupped his hands around his mouth and hailed the ship. “Hello? I’m a bit lost, could you lend a hand? Hello!” When no one answered he tugged his knapsack around his shoulders and started climbing up the rope ladder. They might have some food lying around at the very least, and it might be a long time before he found someone else to steal from.
Scourge crept over the railing onto the deck, ready with an excuse in case someone caught him at it. Only looking for directions, cap'n, horribly sorry, don't blame a poor idiot Mongoloid for getting lost.
He couldn't help gawking at things as he went down into the hold. He'd never been inside a real ship before, although he'd been chased off several back home. Nobody'd take him on, obviously, and he wasn't keen on binding himself to some self-important idiot whose main concerns were pushing money from one place to another and then keeping most of it for himself. Light glinted off the lock of a chest pushed towards one of the back walls. Could be food supplies or maybe something valuable he could carry off and sell. Scourge fiddled with it for a moment and then popped the chest open.
His eyes widened. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…”
It was gold. Piles of the stuff, all in coins, more than he’d seen in the same place in his entire life. Scourge touched it almost worshipfully and then plunged his hands into the chest up to his wrists to revel in the feeling of the cold metal against his skin.
It was too risky. He wasn't on his home ground if he needed to run, and if he got caught at it he'd probably get lashed and stuffed in a cell at the very least. On the other hand...that was a lot of gold. Enough to get him set up fairly well once he got to the city, and besides that Scourge was sure that if he left it behind he'd be aching for the rest of his life.
"Bugger it," Scourge said, and started stuffing his knapsack and pockets, wedging a few coins into his boots when he finally ran out of room. He almost made it out of the hold when someone tackled him from behind.
"Hey!" Scourge tried to ram his way through, but the other man grappled him and held on, twisting him around until his face was pressed into the deck. “Didn’t do nothing!” he cried, squirming around and trying to buck his assailant off. “I was just looking around, get off!”
“But you were doing it on our ship.” The man sounded young, and surprisingly cool about the situation. Scourge wasn’t sure whether this was comforting. “And you’re clinking.”
“I’ve always been like that. Childhood bone disorder.” He cricked his neck around to look at his captor. Thin hands slipped under his clothing, emptying out his lootings. Scourge resignedly lay still until the man’s fingers slipped around his neck and tugged off his necklace.
“Hey, that’s mine!” He tried to get his arms free and was rewarded by having his head thumped against the deck.
“Looks a bit expensive to be yours.” His captor twined the cord and lacquered wooden beads around his fingertips, eying the carved green pendent. “Chinese jade? Not bad. Certainly too good for you.”
”It’s an heirloom! My father left it to me!” Which was true, in some sense of the term. Apparently he’d been in such a hurry to get dressed and leave the morning after Scourge’s conception that he’d forgotten to put it on again. Scourge had found it under the floorboards when he was seven.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s someone’s heirloom.” The other man put it over his head and stuffed the pendent down his shirt, out of sight. Scourge squirmed and scowled up at him. If he got out of this alive, he was going to come back and put a rock through the bastard’s head.
There were footsteps now, and harsh laughter. Scourge went from rage to sickened fear as he turned his head to see the rest of the crew climbing over the railing. They didn’t look like merchants. They didn’t look like anything legitimate, really.
“Oi! I thought we only left one rat on this ship.”
”Maybe they’ve been breeding?”
The man finally got off his back and hoisted Scourge to his feet. He straightened up proudly, with the sort of self-satisfied grin that made a man’s fists itch to make contact with his nose. “I found him trying to make off with our gold. The worm’s yours to punish, Captain Galvatron.”
Scourge quivered in fear as the single largest man he’d ever seen in his life stepped out of the crowd. He had the requisite large hat with feather that marked him as leadership figure, and a coat that was almost too small for him. Really, the ship itself seemed almost too small for him.
Galvatron…something about that name sounded very familiar, but Scourge couldn’t pluck out what. He shifted nervously, trying to look as innocent as possible. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of simply turning me over to the proper authorities, sir?” he whimpered endearingly.
The man smirked in a way that made Scourge’s blood run ice cold and grabbed Scourge by the hair, forcing him to raise up on his toes. “I am Galvatron. On this ship, I am the authority.”
Future versions of this tale would emphasize a quiet acceptance of his fate and leave out a lot of the undignified writhing and begging he did as they tore his shirt off and pinned him face-first to the mast.
“How many lashes, Captain?” someone behind him asked.
Galvatron chuckled. “Oh, just start going and I’ll tell you when to stop. If I feel like it.”
The first blow cracked across his bare flesh and sent him stumbling against the mast. He couldn’t even manage another pitiful plea for mercy as the lash descended on his back again and again, drawing a harsh cry each time.
Three. Four. Five. It took Scourge a few moments to realize that he’d heard the sixth blow and the accompanying scream, but hadn’t felt it.
“Bloody bastard, y’hit me in the face!”
“You shouldn’t have moved!”
“I di’n’t!”
“You did!”
“Enough!” The captain sounded as if he’d grown bored with the exercise. Scourge was pulled from the mast and thrown onto the ground again to curl up and whimper in agony. They were talking over his head, trying to discuss what nastiness to inflict upon him next.
“String him up,” the captain said. “By his feet, not his neck.”
His boots came off and a rope went around his ankles, tying them tightly to something that Scourge couldn’t see.There were people walking, laughing, noises he couldn’t pick out…
And then someone was dragging his raw back across the deck, then above the deck, and then Scourge was flying by the soles of his feet.
“Hey! Hey, let me down!” Scourge flailed wildly in the air as he was hoisted higher to even louder laughter. He hung helplessly by his feet with his blood running down his back, unable to see anything but the hard deck far below him. His heart was pounding so hard that his chest hurt and if he didn’t do something soon his last act on God’s green Earth would be throwing up on a pirate.
The wind nudged at him, making him rock gently back and forth as he tried to get his fearfully scrambled mind together. He swayed towards the mast, then back over the pale shore, and to the mast again. The rigging and secure fingerholds were close enough to be tantalizing.
This is never going to work, Scourge thought, and went for the idea anyway.
He began to swing, flailing his arms back and forth as he felt the ropes move against his bare ankles. One slip, one badly tied knot and he’d be decorating the deck below with his brains, but they were going to kill him anyway and he was at least going to make a try of this.
Another swing and his fingers grazed the ropes bound to the mast. Two more and he was clinging to them, resisting the tug on his feet from one of the crueler crewmen. His movements were achingly slow as he climbed and crawled, turning himself around like a worm and trying desperately not to look down. One hand over the other, and another hand, and another, and his fingers were nearly numb by the time his feet faced the ground.
Scourge kept mindlessly dragging himself upward, grabbing at any piece of stable rigging he could find and kicking at it with his bound feet. After a century of effort he reached the yard and sat on it, clinging desperately to the mast with what little strength he had left in his arms and pressing his face against the warm wood.
Of course, the question here was “now what?”. He was still on a brigand ship populated by sadists and the only way he was getting out of here was to jump and try to hit the water. From this height, he’d be lucky if he didn’t break both legs on the sand and they’d probably catch up with him anyway.
Scourge finally risked a peek downward. Everyone was staring up at him, a few were even cheering. That was nice, it was nice to have people enjoying your imminent death. The bastard rat who caught him looked more thoughtful than anything else and the captain…
“Enjoying the view?”
“Aagh!”
Was right behind him. Scourge tightened his grip on the mast and tried to squirm away from him at the same time. Galvatron was even bigger up close, although his face seemed to mark him as barely older than Scourge himself. He just…had a presence. Scourge couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
“That was quite impressive. I was honestly expecting the rope to break first.” He pointed down at Scourge’s feet, where they’d frayed the rope a few feet away from the knot. It didn’t look strong enough to support a goat. Scourge’s stomach did yet another backflip.
“Quite an achievement for a crass scavenger.”
“I’m good at improvising, sir,” Scourge muttered nervously. He wasn’t sure which was scarier, the abyss beneath his feet or Galvatron’s grin.
“Ever been on a ship before?” the captain asked casually. Scourge watched in horrified fascination as Galvatron pulled a knife from his belt and merrily began cutting the ropes from Scourge’s feet.
“Been near a few, sir,” Scourge replied shakily. “Never been this high above one.” This sounded suspiciously like a lead-up to a witty one-liner and a shove off the yard.
“Do you think you could improvise on a ship? My ship?”
Scourge wobbled on his perch. There was a distinct possibility that he was delirious and mishearing a joyful death sentence as something more favorable. “Are you offering me a job, sir?” he asked in bleary confusion.
“I am.” Galvatron was acting as if this was all perfectly normal, as if he’d simply walked up to Scourge on the street and decided he looked the part. ‘Weird’ did not begin to describe it.
“I think I’d like that, sir,” Scourge finally answered after a long, bemused pause. He blinked as the world started slanting a bit and his iron grip loosened. The fear-driven strength was starting to seep out of his body and barely winced as Galvatron put a hand around his back to steady him.
“Then welcome to the Dis,” the captain murmured in his ear.
Things got a bit blurry after that. He got down from the rigging somehow, probably tucked over Galvatron’s shoulder, and people had clapped him on the shoulder and made sure he sat down without hurting himself. He didn’t fully wake up until the bastard rat from earlier poured a bucket of seawater down his sore back.
“Did someone tell you to go out and make my life miserable or are you just doing it for fun?” Scourge asked after he ran out of curses.
“It’ll stop it from getting infected. Hold still.”
Scourge grumbled and clenched his fists as the man cleaned out the marks left by the lash. “I want my property back, by the way. It is mine.”
An arm draped itself around his shoulders and dropped the necklace in his lap. The hand at the end held itself out invitingly and he awkwardly shook it.
“Cyclonus.”
“Scourge. What just happened?”
“You just became a pirate.”
“I noticed that part. But I’ve never worked on a ship in my life, why’d he choose me?” He ran a thumb over the carved jade pendent. His father’d been a sailor and he’d always wanted to be one himself. And really, a pirate was just a thief on a larger scale with a bit of murder thrown in and he’d always been good at liberating other people’s goods. Perhaps this could actually work out for him, if he didn’t die first.
Cyclonus shrugged. “He does that. He sets his sights on something and then he takes it, he doesn’t pay heed to what anyone else thinks about it. Pulled me out of a stray longboat half a year ago and hired me before I’d gotten back enough strength to stand up again. You get used to his whims eventually, he knows what he’s doing.”
Good to hear that somebody did. “So at some point all of this is going to make sense?” Scourge asked as he put his necklace back on, tucking it carefully under his collar in case someone else tried to take it.
Cyclonus smiled. “Galvatron? Never.”