Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Pirate who collects as many scars as they do tribute from you
"You look pleased," Zéla says, as the infamous Cap'n Skullface drops lightly into the chair opposite.
It's the nameless, best and only tavern on the lawless isle of Breasail, and the closest thing Skullface has to a home on dry land; one of the few places the bony mask is set aside for chestnut curls and dimples and, if you're brave and keep your voice down, occasionally even the name Marianne.
"Aye," Skullface says, beaming, and shuffles her tankard into one of the places on the small table not covered by Zéla's spread of divination coins. "Fair weather, gentle seas, and a return with heavy pockets; what's not to smile about?"
"Mm," Zéla says, listening for the manic sawtooth edge atop the pirate's good cheer. It might just be that it was a good voyage, but—
"Have ye the time today?" Skullface says, casual in tone. "In the shop?" and Zéla suppresses a sigh.
"I've the time," she says, half-wishing that she'd managed to read the coins wrong, this time. "If you've the coin for it."
Skullface smiles, bright and glorious and satisfied. "Always," she says, cocksure.
"What today, then," she says, a while after, once their drinks are drained and Zéla's coins are safe in their velvet pouch, and the two of them have walked the sandy street to Zéla's small workshop.
Skullface is already hauling her shirt over her head. "You know what," she says, bubbling with glee. "You always know what."
"You taunted your nemesis, again, and got clean away," Zéla says, and Skullface crows with laughter.
"I bested my nemesis, again," she says. "Left the Implacable wallowing in our wake, and Captain Oriole cursing my name."
Zéla watches her smile and unconsciously lick her lip, eyes hot and bright.
Rosewater Oriole is a hot iron, perpetually sizzling, waiting to sear flesh. She cuts down corsairs like grass before a scythe. Skullface defies her; and she obsessively hates the unaccustomed experience of defiance. And Marianne...sees something in it, something romantic, that Zéla thinks is not really there, a worming self-delusion that baits her to risk and flash that she can't get away with for ever.
Zéla looks at the back of scarified angel feathers, one for each caper where Skullface counts the Oriole as bested by her hand, swallows the weight in her throat, and waits for her lie on the bench, bare back gleaming in the sunlight. She allows herself a touch, just one, without her tools in hand; a light gentling, thumb brushing the knots of the Captain's spine.
"Whatever bond you think you share with her," she says, unable to hold her tongue, as sometimes she can't, "it won't stop her cannon-shot from sundering your body, Marianne."
"You fuss like a wet hen," the pirate says cheerily. "Aye, Mother, I'll be careful."
Zéla takes her hand off Skullface's back, balls it unseen into a fist that bites itself with crescent nail-marks. Throttles the impulse to say more, to touch more, to lay out her unmaternal sentiments, useless and mortifying, where Marianne could for once not fail, or pretend to fail, to see them.
She reaches instead for the fine knife.
"Bite on something," she says, trying not to sound weary or sad, as neutral as a doctor, and lays a long thumbprint in an empty space of skin. "Here, today," and readies herself to cut.