Sodalite and Aventurine (Larry Stylinson au)

CHAPTER I

So this man knew the stitches of French finery. And here Louis was thinking they'd all be too thick, too lowly, to recognise a Bourguignon et Fils jacket.

He rolled his eyes and sighed again. He had no other option, really. Louis tipped his hat back, so that at least this man could see what it was to look in the eye of the fiercest pirate alive. He let him see the jagged scar below his ear, the circled S that always gave him away.

Then he dropped a pouch of coins onto the man's book and sauntered right past him.

Louis didn't bother looking back to see the shadowed look on the dockmaster's face. He already knew what it would have looked like, the hanging mouth and the furrowed brow. The shock of white that always pulsated through their skin.

It was the same look that Liam always gave him when Louis decided to lambast some bloke with his scar.

"You've got to stop doing that, Sir," Liam chided him quietly once they'd gotten far enough away, pushing his spectacles up his nose. "Soon you'll have posters of your face in every tavern."

"It's too dark for him to remember what my face looks like. He'll only know the scar. Everyone only sees the scar."

Liam twisted his lip and walked on in silence, because it was true and they both knew it. The S stood for sodomiser and it had been cut into him ten years earlier, when he was nothing more than a landsman in the Royal Navy, bloodied up and left for dead on the shores of Plymouth.

Still, Louis wore it defiantly. Proudly.

It was a mark that said he'd survived, and he'd lived a bigger life than any of these half-wit men who thought that Louis' proclivities meant he was somehow lesser.

His scar had lived on to become a thing of infamy, of nightmares, for naval ships.

The irony.

Louis and Liam walked calmly to the end of the dock, where it met the brush of palm trees and the smell of rum. Their eyes were set on the Spanish ship on the other side of the docks, but they could still feel the eyes of the dockmaster on their backs, so they jumped down onto the sand and in towards the glowing taverns.

Louis wondered if Captain Styles was in one of them, but maybe not. For a captain so ostentatious, so well known for his locks and tattoos and affinity for gold-laced jackets, Louis had never actually seen him in the flesh. Their paths had crossed many times, but Louis preferred to do deals in the dark and keep all his operations as stealthy as possible. Which meant that their paths crossing had only ever meant ships sharing harbours and the occasional cannon fire. There had been the one night off the coast of Bermuda where that cannon fire had almost been deadly, and it stuck in Louis' mind often, made Captain Styles stick in his mind too.

Louis mulled over the thought of Captain Styles as they walked. His boat was so close, was right there . Even in this light, Louis could make out the missing tail of the mermaid that headed his ship. Louis had been the one to take it off - the only thing he'd been able to take from Styles in Bermuda. It would be easy to sneak over there, jump aboard, take something else. Though Louis wasn't stupid; that would be a death trap. He could see men scouting the perimeter of the ship. He wouldn't make it past the first rung.

What he wouldn't do to just get one glance at the only pirate who'd come close to killing him.

Louis shook Styles from his mind; there was no need for him to think about rivalries and death wishes when he was here on a specific mission.

Rob the Spaniards.

They made their way along the path towards the taverns, so that the smell of alcohol became overwhelming and just a touch alluring, before skirting off the sandy track into the shadows of surrounding brush. They hid at the very corner of the first tavern, ducking below the window so that light didn't catch their faces. And so that rum wouldn't catch their tongues. It gave them a chance to look back and check that the dockmaster had moved on from the astonishment of meeting Captain Louis William Tomlinson. Clearly he had; he'd pocketed his coins and was sitting back amongst the crates from earlier.