"Let us off the ship, or she dies."
The gun crew freezes from where they'd been about to move forward with their swords lifted. Iron digs into your skin hard enough for you to feel a bruise forming at your temple, and you wonder if it's broken skin. He has a musket to your head.
"One squeeze of the trigger and her pretty head will be in pieces. I don't think you want that to happen." The man holding you says, yanking you against his chest roughly by the neck. He's strong, far too strong for you to physically overpower, and for a second, you're terrified for your life.
"Chin Hae!" The crewmate who'd talked to you earlier tries to take a step forward, but the man taps the musket against your head and he stops dead in his tracks, teeth gritted. You can see the fear in his eyes, clashing in conflict with the want to save you and have to bite back tears.
"Bring your captain here, and tell him to cease the fighting. If another of my men falls, you'll pay for it with her life." The enemy pirate demands, voice as cold as the arctic seas. You know in that instant he would have no qualms at all putting a bullet through your head. The man hesitates, and the pirate points his musket at your other hand instead. "I might not kill her yet, but she has three limbs more I can take off before I end her suffering. I think you'll find that I'm not a man of much patience."
His eyes send you a clear message, please, hold out until I get captain here, and dashes off into the midst of the fighting. Swallowing, you mutter out lowly. "Do you really believe that the Royal Navy will let you go if you turn me in? They might simply-"
"Don't bother reasoning with me, little lady." The musket edges its way up to under your throat, and you shiver as the metal brushes the skin there. You can taste gunpowder in the back of your throat. "I'm afraid you'll find it harder to change my mind than stop me from blowing your brains out."
"Everyone, cease your fighting."
Your captain steps out through the midst of all the fighting, and like the eye of a hurricane, both sides lower their weapons, seemingly unable to refuse the sheer command that rolls off Kim Hongjoong. His one green eye burns silently, fixing on you before it lands on the man holding you captive. The crewmate trails behind him. "Speak."
"I'm the captain of the Great White, and I think that I've made my terms perfectly clear." The pirate states calmly, unflinching as he meets your captain's vicious gaze. Hongjoong looks like he's seconds from drawing his own cutlass and cutting down the man in fury. "Let us stop fighting, and I will not kill this woman right now. It will save both sides many lives."
"You're intending on handing her over to the Royal Navy." Hongjoong hisses out through a snarl. "You dare to ask me to accept such a thing?"
"If you don't, we'll continue fighting, and even more of your men will lose their lives in the battle." The pirate replies, bringing his musket back to your head again. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Wooyoung scaling the mainmast with a musket slung over his back. "Are you saying that the life of one woman is worth more than that of the rest of your crew?"
Hongjoong stills for a moment, a moment of raw uncertainty flashing in his eye as it meets yours. Seeing his moment of vulnerability, the pirate presses on, voice more harsh. "Can you really call yourself a captain if you're playing favorites that way? Shame on you." The crew of the Treasure look like they're about to surge into an uproar, but Hongjoong raises his hand, and they fall silent at once. "I once used to respect you as a captain who would do anything to protect his crew and ship, Pirate King," the man's voice darkens. "But it seems as if you've grown soft in the time that you vanished from the Royal Navy's sights."
When you look back at your captain face, it's pale, as if it's been drained of blood. "The matters of my crew aren't your concerns in the least." His voice has a hard edge to it.
The pirate captain shrugs, voice unwavering. "I don't really give two damns about your crew. But I hope you make up your mind fast." His eyes darken, and you can feel a chill slipping down your spine. "I can feel my finger slipping, and then we'll all be dead when the Royal Navy catches up with us."
Hongjoong bites his lower lip sharply. To your horror, he looks like he's really struggling, torn between his feelings for you and his duty as the captain to his crew.
It's the first time you've seen him so uncertain, so unsure of his decision. There's too much hinging on his choice, and while you know that choosing to send you off with them would be the best choice for your crew, you cannot help but tremble at the thought of what the Royal Navy will do once they get their hands on you.
The image of the man you'd met in the dark alleyways of Tortuga only scares you further. You don't know his intentions yet, but from the sheer intensity of his obsession with you, you know that you never want to stand in his presence again.
"Apprentice!"
Forcing his way to the front of the crowd, you spot your master, face twisted with horror, hands still clutching his medical satchel and stained with blood. In realisation, you look down at your own hands to find them caked with drying blood as well, before it hits you - you were supposed to be saving someone.
"Master, there's a man whose leg I had to amputate, please treat him!" You shout across the deck, and San's eyes widen. "He might bleed out soon!"
San's face looks painfully conflicted, torn between the need to stay with you and do his job as a healer on board. You shout again, to slap his out of his daze. "Master! You're the only other one who can save him! Go!"
Your master's look almost shiny with tears, before he turns around and dashes to the casualty you had been with, putting his hands over the gaping wound on the man's body as he looks over it. And you see the sinking expression on his face, and know what it means: he alone will not be enough to save him.
But your master still puts his hands over the man's leg, eyes fluttering shut. He's still going to try it anyway, and you're not going to be there to stop him.
You can't let that happen to San.
"Let me go! I need to treat someone!" You start struggling in his grasp. You remember the way the man's life pulse had been so weak and thready, like it had been about to snap at any moment. "He'll die without me!"
"Not my crew, not my concern." The pirate replies, voice measured and cold. "As a captain, you watch out for your men. I don't have the mercy to spare for another's."
He makes sense, you know in the back of your mind, as you continue to thrash about. All your efforts to free yourself prove futile, however, as the captain sighs upon the sight of this. "Your captain can't make a decision, but we're running out of time."
Suddenly, all you see is the arm holding the musket shifting, the silver of the firearm pointing somewhere else other than you. Although relief fills you for a second, it is immediately replaced by deathly cold dread when you see what he's lining up the gun with.
"No-" You gasp, but the second the sound pulls itself from your throat, there's the sound of a musket shot, far too loud in your ears.
The man's body jerks as the musket shot enters him, and you feel your scream more in your throat than you hear it, ears ringing painfully loud. Hongjoong draws his cutlass, lips pulled back in a furious snarl. "What do you think you're-"
San kneels next to the man, frozen in shock. There's blood splattered across his cheek, his mouth. His pupils are trembling.
He looks like he's going to be sick.
"Let us go, or her head is going to be next." The pirate captain announces. There isn't a single waver in his voice. "I'll have you make your choice right now."
The members of the gun crew that had been so willing to protect you earlier on rush to their friend, crying out his name in voices cracking in grief. You feel like you're frozen in time, watching the world through a lens.
Someone is screaming incoherently, limbs boneless and mind empty. Someone is desperate to do something, blood staining their hands. But all that isn't happening to just someone. That someone is you.
You had been doing everything you could to save that life of your crewmate. And this man had just snuffed it out like an insignificant candle with a single breath.
The most primal emotion burst out in you: raw, unparalleled fury.
You see red.
You grab the captain holding you with a single hand, and throw.
It's almost effortless, the action, and the man goes flying bodily across the deck to slam into the hardwood of the mainmast. There are screams of terror coming from somewhere, disembodied and drifting about in the air, but you don't register them. All you see is the man who had pulled that trigger.
You step towards him, barely keeping your body together. You're so furious that you feel like you might explode if you don't remove that man from the surface of this earth.
Go on, do it. You know you have the strength to do it.
"Protect Captain!" The enemy crew rush to defend their captain against you, but their near puny effort is so ridiculous to you that you can't help but laugh. You surge forward like a storm wave, unstoppable, and simply push them out of the way with your bare hands.
Nothing can stand in your way.
You approach the captain, keeled over on the ground. There's blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth, but his eyes burn with the same fury that matches yours. He struggles to pull himself to his feet. "What have you done to my crew-"
It was all their fault. They deserve what they're getting.
You punch him in the face, and he goes hurtling back once more, body crashing to the ground. Blood splatters on the ground in front of you.
"You dare?" Your voice is something you don't recognise, chillingly cold, immeasurable fury beneath the surface like the depths of an ocean. Your remaining hand draws back for another punch, and this time, you're going to end this man for good. "You insignificant speck, dare to cross me? You, a mere mortal?"
The captain's face is half covered in blood, although whether it's from your hands or the gash across his forehead, you don't know. It could be either, or both. His eyes are wide with terror as he looks up at you, and he trembles before you, like he should.
"Chin Hae, stop!"
All of a sudden, a pair of warm, trembling hands are holding your face, before a pair of green eyes meet yours. You can't seem to remember who it is. Who is it that looks at you with such a gentle, pained gaze?
"Chin Hae, snap out of it!" The voice is shaking now, spilling over with tears. The enemy captain is quivering visibly, like a leaf in the wind.
"M...monster!"
The word echoes emptily in your mind.
Monster.
"Chin Hae, please, this isn't you!" The voice begs again, dry sobs and a desperate cry in the white noise filling your mind. Chin Hae? Who is that? "All of us, we're alright, San is healing the man right now, he said the bullet didn't hit any vitals. So please stop this, Chin Hae, I'm begging you!"
You answer to no one.
His hand wraps around yours, and you feel your arm suddenly going limp. What were you doing? What's going on? His hand is warm. Yours feel as cold as the darkest depths of the ocean.
"Wooyoung." Your mouth forms the word, as if on instinct. His hands are shaking.
"Chin Hae." He repeats your name breathlessly, stroking a thumb over your knuckles. He lifts your hand tentatively, as if afraid you might fly apart in his hold, and places it in his pocket.
The familiarity of it is enough for you to look up into those green eyes again.
"Wooyoung." You can't seem to form words, mind a complete blank. "What... what happened..."
Something warm spills from your mouth, falls to the deck. Wooyoung's face twists in horror, as if in slow motion, lips parting to scream your name.
You look down at the deck, blinking. What is it that?
Blood, crimson and merlot, splatters across the wood. Did all that come from you?
Ahh, Seonghwa is going to have a hard time cleaning all that up.
That's the last thing you think before your vision turns black.