You haven't left the infirmary for a whole day.
"Ahhhh!" You shriek into your pillow for the fiftieth-something time that day, burying your face in the soft down, fingers winding into the sheets. "Ahhh!"
There's an amused chuckle from somewhere in the room, and soft footsteps draw closer. The mattress of your bed sinks lightly from the added weight before a hand comes to rest on your head, gentle and comforting.
"What's going on with you?" San's light voice is full of amusement, and you peek out from under the covers to see your master sitting cross legged on your bed, teasing smile on his face. "You've been holed up in here for a whole day now. Don't you think that you should go explore the town a bit before the Treasure leaves Tortuga? Did something go wrong when you tried to give Hongjoong the jacket?"
Instantly, your mouth twists into a pout and you bury your face into the pillow once more with a tiny, muffled scream. Your cheeks burn, and the image of Hongjoong looking at you with such tenderness in his eyes resurfaces at your master's mention only serves to addle your mind further.
"Please shut up for a second, master." You groan into the pillow, refusing to look up. San snickers, but then in the next second he gasps. "Wait, didn't you mean to give him that handmade jacket? Did he reject it? I'll beat up the ungrateful little bastard, why he-"
"No, no, master!" You catch his arm before he can march out of the infirmary. "He didn't reject it, I did give it to him and he accepted it. It's just that..." you hesitate for a moment, the words rolling about in your mouth. "It's just that, well, captain... he..."
San stares back at you, unblinking. "He...?"
You bury your face in your hands. For some reason, the tips of your ears feel like they're on fire. You try to speak, and the words come out a mangled mess - almost as bad as Mingi's attempts at cooking.
"Words." San encourages. "You know, with consonants and vowels. Using the mouth might be helpful."
You make an unintelligible noise and launch your pillow in his direction. There's a satisfying "oompf", but the downside is that you've lost your only shield between the two of you.
San grins. "So?"
"Well," you pause, trying to find words more eloquent within your choices and resulting with none. "He... confessed."
Good job, Chin Hae! Your inner self cheers, full of pride. That's was a full sentence!
Your master stills for a moment, pulling the pillow off his head. The previously amused expression he was wearing on his face morphs into one of concern as he looks at you. "Oh. Oh."
You're stunned for a moment, staring at your master. "I would have expected you to be a little more surprised. Do you mean you actually knew about this?"
San's expression softens, eyes pained, before his fingers come up to poke you in the nose. "You'd be surprised how dense you can be sometimes, Chin Hae. That's not good for you, you know."
Your lips purse as you pick at the ends of the threads of your blanket. "What am I supposed to do, master? Wooyoung too, both of them... I rejected them both, but still... it hurts..."
There's a soft exhale that leaves your master, that lingers in the air, still in the silence before he speaks. "Only you can decide that for yourself, Chin Hae." When you look up at him, he puts his hand on your head with a painfully gentle smile. "I promised to do my best to help you find a cure, but I won't give either of us false hope - there is every possibility you might die. Since this concerns you and the two of them, you have to make the choice yourself."
You have to make the choice yourself.
You sigh and rub at your temples, trying to resolve the onset of a headache you can already feel coming. All this thinking hurts your head. "You know, I wish you weren't right all the time, master."
"We all want the impossible sometimes." San shrugs easily, his usual smirk tinged with a hint of cheekiness. You turn a glare at him, but there's no heat to it at all - how could you? Instead, San yanks you out of the bed and you follow, a tad unwillingly.
"What are you doing?"
"Let's go get some herbs from town," San suggests, pulling you along with him. "A good walk about time will clear your mind, and the Treasure will be leaving Tortuga soon."
You sigh, reluctant, but follow.
What could possibly go wrong?
>>>
The trip to town starts off fine enough.
Wooyoung whines about not being to go with the two of you - you remind him about his ban from the town due to his little hostage attempt ('it was only one teeny tiny hostage attempt," he protests) and the two of you set off hand in hand, chattering brightly about what you'll find in the marketplace.
And well, apparently the Fates had been listening, because they were determined to proved you wrong.
It's barely ten minutes into the market that you're completely lost.
You have no idea how you ended up in this situation - quite alone, separated from San in the middle of a bustling crowd in the marketplace. The sea of people surge around you like the push and pull of an unyielding tide, and the last thing you remember is San's hand separating from yours after a man bumped into the two of you.
You're not too worried, you've come here quite a few times, enough to be rather familiar with the place. As long as you find your way to the central town square, you'll definitely be able to navigate your way through the back alleys back to the harbour with the town square as a reference point.
That is, until you hear something.
"The Treasure is leaving the harbour soon. We should move as soon as possible." A low mutter reaches your ears as you step into a dark alley, and the second you hear those words, you flatten yourself against the wall in shock. That definitely doesn't sound like any of crew, you know most of their voices well enough.
"But the Pirate King is the captain of that ship." A nervous tremble in the voice of the man's conversation partner. He sounds reluctant, and for a moment pride wells up in your chest at the reputation your captain holds. "We can't just attack them! We'll die!"
What?
They're going to do what now?
"Listen, you coward," the man practically growls, his voice a low rumble. You shiver lightly at that, and peek around the corner. To your horror, you see a hulking, burly man with rippling muscles, tan skin decorated with swirling black lines that spiral down his chest and across his forearms. He could easily crush you under his foot. "The big bosses in the inn right now are discussing plans, big ones. The second the Treasure leaves the harbour of Tortuga, ten different ships are going to hit it all at once with everything they've got. There's no way they'll escape."
You clap a hand over your mouth and crouch behind the brick wall again. Heart racing in your chest and cold sweat sliding down your temples, you think carefully over what you've heard. All thoughts of escaping immediately flee your mind. Ten ships intending to attack the Treasure?
"Pirates don't band together, the loot split amongst them won't be big enough." The other man mutters, although he seems slightly more reassured. "You're intending on fighting one of the most terrifying ships to ever sail the waters of the Caribbean!"
"Are you an idiot, or do you just not know how much the Royal Navy is offering for this capture?" The man's voice is near maniacal with the delirium of his excitement. "They're offering enough wealth worth an entire Spanish treasure galleon as well as pardons signed by the Queen herself. We'll be free men, all of us. All we need to do is take down one ship."
"What? Sounds like a load of rotten shellfish to me." The other man snorts derisively, and your knees tremble at their words. Such a reward would surely make the Treasure the target of most ships, if not all, in the waters. "What exactly does the Royal Navy want with the Treasure? They've been causing less trouble than they used to ages ago."
You know what they want.
"Some woman with a wooden hand on board, called Chin Hae or something along those lines. There are drawings of her image circulating, so we know what she looks like." The man says roughly, and your legs nearly give out beneath you. You've got to run, run, but your legs won't move. Sucking in deep breaths, you urge strength into your legs as you clamber onto your knees.
Run, run, run!
"Hmm, I heard something over there." You immediately clamp your mouth shut, nails digging so hard into your palm you feel blood slide down your skin. Don't make a sound, you chant in your mind, don't even think about breathing. "Huh. Musta' just been a bird or a rat. These alleyways are filthy."
"Hmph. Go check anyway, it might be a street urchin or something. If anyone finds out that we were talkin' about the plans, we're good as dead in a ditch." The gruffer man mutters, and you hear grumbling and footsteps drawing closer to where you're crouched.
Your heart practically stops beating in your chest. Your hand slides into your healer's satchel, trembling. What do you do?
"See? Absolutely nothin', it must have been just a-"
The man rounds the corner, and in that single, desperate second, you strike.
Pulling the largest round bottomed flash that you'd just bought from the apothecary with San earlier, you smash it over the man's head with everything you've got.
The man lets out a tiny scream and shattered glass flies everywhere, your eyes lock. He stumbles back, bleeding from the forehead where you'd struck him, and grabs for you again.
"That's the girl! The woman with the wooden hand! Get her, you fool!"
At the sound of his partner's bellow, you gasp as you see him draw his sword. The size of it along could cleave you in half across the middle. When you whirl around to flee, the scrawnier man grabs you by the back of your tunic, terrifyingly strong. "I'm not letting you go!" He swears, and you react instantly, just as Jongho had taught you all those months ago.
You shove the remains of the broken glass bottle straight into one of his eyes with all your might, and the man screams in agony, curling up on the filthy ground as crimson blood gushes down his face. The same hot, sticky blood runs over your hand and between your fingers.
You don't have time to worry about him. You run.
"Stop right there!" You hear him pounding on a wooden door behind you as you stumble, cursing your legs. Move! "Oi, we found the girl! Get your asses out here and get her!"
You dash down the alleyways. People, people, get to where there are lots of people! Your lungs burn, and you hear angry shouting of 'where did she go' at your back, the voices drawing closer every second. You're not as used to the maze of alleyways as these people are, what do you do? What if you take a wrong turn and just end up running deeper into it?
You pause for a moment at a cross section, glancing about desperately as you heave for breath. Left, or right or-
Your eyes lock on something, up!
"Sorry, coming through," you apologise as you shove past a townsmen as you race up the stairs to the rooftops. The man shrieks at your invasion of his house, but you barely hear him. Yes! Up here, you can see the way to the harbour without the walls of the alleys in the way!
Luckily for you, the houses here are clustered and cramped together, and you leap across the roofs with relative ease - nothing compared to toeing the wildly swinging masts in the middle of a storm.
The harbour!
Your knees nearly buckle as you land hard, but you don't have the luxury to stop and think about the pain. Picking yourself up, you run with all your might, leaping across a gap between two alleys and hear some more shouting. "She's up there! Get onto the roofs before she gets out of the alleys!"
There's a whistle of something sharp slicing through the air, and instantly you throw up your hands to protect your face and your neck ('better your hands that your life,' Jongho had told you once grimly).
There's a heavy thunk and you stumble back at the sheer force of the blade, eyes screwed shut as you wait for the agonizing pain to come. But it doesn't.
To your surprise, when you pull your hands away from your face, you look down to see a blade embedded in your prosthetic hand, the wood nearly split in half. You make a little amused noise, unable to keep the laugh in, half crazed with adrenaline. That hand has really bad luck when it comes to knives, wooden or not, you think.
There's the rattle of loose stones behind you, and you whirl around to see one of your pursuers already clambering onto the roof and your heart drops into your belly. Yanking the knife from your wooden hand, you send it sailing at the man and it misses his head. Instead, it strikes his hand and the man screams in pain to clutch at it, before realising he's still climbing and falls to the cobbles below, taking his friends down with him.
"Don't let her get away! She's the key to us getting rich! She's our treasure!" One of the men from below roar, and you balk at the words, disgust pooling in the pit of your stomach. Courage surges up in you out of nowhere. "The only one who gets to call me that is Captain, you bastards!"
You don't have the patience to see if they've heard. You dive for the exit out of the alleyways and scramble along the shops at the docks, ducking and weaving around startled shopkeepers as you yank your hood over your head.
Can't let them recognise you, you think frantically as you continue sprinting down the docks, chest heaving. Behind, you hear your pursuers roughly shoving the townspeople aside in their rush to get to you before you reach the Treasure. "Oi, stop right there! Stop running!"
"Do they seriously think I'll listen to that?" You mutter under your breath, but for all your bravado, the voices are getting closer, and you're almost dizzy with exhaustion. You look about frantically for somewhere to hide, but before you can, a hand wraps around your wrist and pulls you into a narrow alleyway behind a makeshift tent selling an assortment of mirrors, shrouded in darkness.
Thrashing, you struggle to get out of the man's grip but it's as firm as iron, and strangely gentle. Gentle as it may be though, you're ready to bite your way out if need be until a mild, lilting voice touches your ears. "Hey, hey, you're alright now. Those men are gone."
You still, trembling. The man's voice is soothing, but there's something that grips your chest about it; it sounds familiar, but not quite. Unable to resist the urge, you look up to look at your saviour's face.
A slender, handsome face, sharp nose and delicate features. But your eyes lock onto his eyes, mismatched ones, one a familiar, kind green and the other a dark, murky colour, the shade of dirty, brackish water.
Your heart drops into your chest, and instantly, every survival instinct in you screams at you to run, so loudly that your head nearly splits.
He looks like... he looks like...
He looks like your captain.
Recognition flickers across his face, and the kindness in his eyes disappear almost in the a blink. Instead, that kindness is replaced by something that looks like depraved hunger, and you feel like a prey being stared down by a predator.
Your survival instinct screams at you.
Run!
"I found you." The man whispers, one hand coming up to touch your cheek and you recoil, heart beating unnaturally loudly in your chest. Your head feels like its about to split in half, strange, disembodied voices ringing in your skull, each louder than the other. "My treasure."
"S-stay away from me." You warn, one hand gripping your head as if you could physically prevent your mind from shattering. "Don't move another inch!"
The man doesn't seem able to hear you, taking a step closer. Power spills from him, so dark and thick it makes you gag, flinching backwards. Your back hits the wall. "I finally found you. With your power, I finally can-"
"I don't have any power!" You shriek, trying to stay on your feet but the pain that wrecks your head threatens to bring you to your knees. There's something growing there, too large for you to push back, as if you're trying to hold back a storm wave with your bare hands. "I'm a normal human, just like everyone else! I just want to live a normal life!"
You are still part of the Treasure, part of my crew, one of my family. Even if you are a woman, a clay one, instead of a man of flesh, neither of those things change for me.
"Normal? No, you're not." The man takes another step closer, and the pain resounds throughout your entire body, so badly till your fingers are trembling. "Human? Something like you could never be. No matter how much you try, you can't escape what you are."
He regards you with a smile that seems almost surgical, and your heart plummets.
"You're not even really alive."
There's the sound in the back of your head that sounds like tearing cloth, and your mind rents in half.
The last thing you see is a pair of vividly blue eyes in the gloom, rippling in almost liquid surface of a mirror, startlingly lifelike.
It takes a second for you to realise those are looking right back at you.
Thunder and lightning surges, wild tempests riding like wild horses bringing about the end of the word, and everything dissolves into chaos.The man from earlier seems to have vanished, of course he would, who would remain in this storm? The person in the mirror looks at you in the eye as the hurricane rages all about you. You stare, unable to move.
Who are you?
The howling of the wind and the icy blades of freezing rain don't affect you in the least, but your limbs are leaden. The reflection in the mirror opens its mouth to speak.
They will come bearing a gift. Kill the man, and return. There is no running from me. Free us both, ****.
The one-eyed green boy smiles at you, and holds out his pinky finger.
I am you.
The storm screams overhead. Kill him, kill him, kill him, it chants.
You are me.
You crumple to your knees, and everything goes black.
Kill him.