Chapter Text
Sheer exhaustion saves him from a night spent staring at the ceiling, wondering when his ship started floundering, and why he didn't notice. He wakes half-sprawled against a long, lithe body; he stares groggily for a moment at those faint, fading, silvered scars, the continent of green under her jaw. He swallows. If he looks at her face, he'll do something stupid. He wants to kiss her awake, to laugh with her; he wants to tell her…
I love you. I hope you don't mind. Or, more likely: We can't do this any more. The problem is, I'm an idiot, and I haven't felt like this since Duarte from the Sword-Fish told me to piss off and take my delusions with me. The problem is –
He's shifting out from under her arm as carefully as possible – he hasn't had to do this in years – when Marie fidgets restlessly, brow creasing, and mumbles, "Vasco?" At least she doesn't open her eyes.
He doesn't freeze. That'd be too conspicuous. Instead he reaches out, the pull of her inexorable, and brushes her hair from her face. He allows himself that, at least. "You should rest, de Sardet. I've an early meeting." He doesn't qualify; over-explanation always makes a lie obvious.
"Hm." She attempts a sleepy nod; it's more of a gentle push against the pillow. Her lashes are long and dark, her mouth soft and full. That graceful face is gentled by sleep and she is lovely, utterly lovely. She turns her face and kisses his palm, the base of his thumb. That's a stab deep in his chest. He doesn't yank his hand away, but it's a close thing. He pulls back, carefully, and tells himself to get used to that.
"I can show you out," she offers, half-audibly.
"No, there's no need for that. I'll see you at the docks." And if he sounds a little offhand, hopefully she's too asleep to notice. He grabs for his clothes.
No such luck. At the small silence, he looks over his shoulder. Her eyes are open now, dim green and assessing and… worried. "Vasco? Are you all right?"
You're royalty, with some match waiting in the wings. I'm a washed-up Naut without his ship. More than that, you're my friend, and I'm landlocked. I can't just make rank on another ship or ask for a run to Theleme. Even more than that… I don't think I want to.
He sits on the edge of the bed and gives her a brief, sitting-across-the fire smile. "Fine, de Sardet. Just considering how the harbourmaster will want to tan my hide."
She returns his smile, though she still looks a little uncertain. She reaches out, and just for a moment touches his arm; he looks at those long, elegant fingers and the scars left by fights and crafting, and tries not to think too much of how gentle they are. She says, "Last night, you were… you were wonderful. Thank you."
Damn her, she utterly means it. Her eyes are bright. He can't… he wants that. He wants it every week and possibly every day. He wants to have her look at him like this when he's not in her bed. He wants –
He nods, and says, "Thank you for –" Ah. No. The words in his head are so ill-advised that for a moment he slips back into their old rhythm. "I was going to say thank you for having me."
She huffs a laugh, then grins at him in delight, the clouds clearing from her eyes. "My pleasure. No, really."
He lets her have his laugh, too, under his breath. Then he stands before she can do something like kiss him goodbye (let her kiss him goodbye, let her take his face in her hands and look at him tenderly – ) and makes it into reaching for his coat. "Be seeing you, de Sardet."
She nods. "Captain." And she lounges, naked and beautiful like some painting on the nature of sin, and watches him go.
He just… he needs to think. To plot a course. To clear his head away from the warmth of her skin, her smile, and her trying to make him laugh and feel better. His head is full of her, as if she didn't just take his body but took the rest of him as well. He's never been one for drink, not to the extent of some of his fellow Nauts, but all at once he wishes that were different.
He's heading for the servants' entrance when he thinks of what she might say, if this weren't simply sex between friends. That she understands, but this shouldn't be necessary. That he should take the front door. He suspects with a warmed kind of dread that she'd say he's wonderful, she says that so often, and she wants to show him off to the world. She already does it half the time in their friendship. He raises a tired brow at that.
Her cousin spoke, once, of her delighted flattery; the way she excitedly recounted "for a good two weeks" simply taking her beau's hand. Of the way she would look at a court lady like she'd hung the moon and dance, shy and delighted, with the man she had a brief, fond time with. It doesn't surprise him, somehow. He's never seen her with a lover, but he can't imagine her as anything less than… joyous. He blinks away the image of her kissing his hand for reasons other than rope marks. Thinking of it feels almost like thinking of the sea, an ache somewhere under his breastbone. New wounds, scarring over on top of old ones. He only allows himself a moment, before it's too much self-indulgence. Cécile is looking at him, and he realises that he's lingered a moment too long in the hall, something of his stupidity probably showing in his face. He tips his hat to her, grits his teeth, and all but throws himself through the servants' door, into the blinding sun.
He's to the docks when he's decided that it doesn't have to be a problem. It isn't her fault that she fucked him, held him, stroked his hair out of his face and told him that he was beautiful, and his foolish heart made something of it. It isn't her fault that she's kind, and droll, and she's done nothing but help him since he was kicked off his ship, and sometimes he looks at her – the glint in her eyes when she smiles at him, the light falling on the sharpness of her cheekbone, a wisp of hair escaping from under her hat – and his chest aches. He'd thought that simple attraction, but now he knows better.
He's a Naut. He understands a contract. She didn't ask for more than a friend she could go to bed with. It's not the first time he's fallen too far, but he thought he'd grown out of it. There's an old poem in the back of his mind, one about how the sea and love both can drown the unwary, and he tries to shove that down, sharply. He thought he knew better.
But she took him to meet his brother. She tries to defend the defenceless. She treats her friends with such almost-reverent kindness, as if they're a luxury she's unused to having. She looked through his things and his small, ordered life with that careful fascination and he loves her, he loves – no.
Perhaps if he'd known, he could have done something, headed this off at the pass. But he didn't expect it. How could he have? Even the best sailor can be taken awry by a storm. Now, the best he can do is not to make an issue of it.
Marie isn't just a noble, she's royalty. She'll have a match waiting on the Continent soon enough, a mission. He has his ship, the fleet. And even ignoring that… there are already too many people asking things of her. To the rest of the world, she's the legate, or the prince's niece. Nowhere else is she the woman who laughs at how many belts a Naut wears, who sighs in delight after she comes, who likes to wrap herself around a partner like an enthusiastic octopode. She acts like, just for a moment, the world's been taken off her shoulders, and she isn't the exhausted legate trudging over hill and vale to avoid more violence. She deserves that. He's her friend, and he can give her that. It's not exactly selfless when sometimes he swears he wants to fuck her more than he wants to breathe. He's a Naut. He knows contracts. He knows a good contract, and when not to fuck it up.
That's confirmed when he's squinting out at the harbour, trying not to check his watch, and hears Aphra say, "It was only an hour."
"At least two, you'll find." De Sardet's voice is cheerful, the shine of sunlight on water.
He looks over as they arrive, and tips his hat.
She returns the gesture and beams at him. "So, I thought you two could keep me company on my way to Hikmet and talk about guns, while I pretended to know what any of the words mean."
Aphra says, wry, "And I repeat, it can't have been that long last time."
He half-smiles at the harbour, under the semi-privacy of his hat, knowing how this will go. Even with the turn of his thoughts, he can't help himself.
"Oh, no," Marie continues, "I liked your enthusiasm! I learned more about flintlocks than I would ever have thought to know."
Vasco falls into step with them. "There's much training to discuss. Unlike mages, we have to aim."
She laughs in delighted outrage. "So do we! Or your hair would long have been set on fire. Come to think of it…"
Her eyes crinkle at the corners, shining even under her hat-brim. She's another sun in the morning light, so happy she's bright with it. She's like that, sometimes, after a victory or Constantin having a good day or… after their nights together. This thing between them – it makes her like that. It makes her practically dance over to her robe and smile at him as she puts it on, hair wild and legs mesmerisingly bare. It makes her kiss him goodbye or burrow into his neck for just a little longer, or climb into his lap and grin at his jokes. It makes her beam at all of her companions with jests that aren't strained escapes from difficult conversations but things of genuine, contrary joy. She walks taller, with a sway in her hips you'd truly have to know her well to find. (Or to have spent a lot of time staring at her backside.) And for his part, he's found himself waxing his boots or checking his blades and Kurt stopping, squinting at him. ("What?" "Either that dagger's just told you a really good joke, or you're smiling at nothing. Put it away, you'll frighten the others.")
A Naut is matter-of-fact. He knows what he is, and what he isn't. What he can have, and what he can't. This will fade. In the meantime, he'll just have to suffer through one night a week of very good sex with a stunning woman, and her arms around him.
Time has run on. Marie is speaking to a trade minister about all the caravans they've found safely, and a parley with angry raiders that was miraculous even by her standards – she thought for sure she was about to end up dead in a ditch – but behind her back, her hands are steadily clenching and unclenching. She can hear, minutely, the leather of her gloves creaking. She tries to steady them.
She just – she’d hoped. It’s been two weeks, two weeks in a camp where there’s barely been a moment away from the others, with villages hanging in the balance and Derdre glaring at her. (Occasionally with her hand between her legs and her face in her pillow to stay silent, thinking of Vasco’s utter, glorious desperation on her cock. Light, the way he looked, dazed with pleasure: like this was everything he wanted, like she was everything he wanted.) She drags herself back to the matter at hand. She can follow what Minister Caron is saying, she’s researched these trading licences enough that she could do it in her sleep, but she tries to pay a little more attention. Marie loves her job, but getting wet in a trade disputes meeting might be too much even for her.
She carefully doesn’t look over her shoulder until Caron is deep in his papers.
Two steps back and one to the left, Vasco’s eyes are on her hands. Síora has noticed, too, her brow furrowed in concern; Marie sends her a swift, reassuring smile. But Vasco’s still looking at her hands. And then, carefully, without turning his head, his eyes drift to the clock. Back to hers, with a look of curiosity. Of understanding. Marie swallows.
He clears his expression swiftly, and she looks back to the minister, but… of course Vasco realised. Vasco, with all his damned precision and his rotas and his watches and his estimated journey lengths. And now she’s standing, thinking of Vasco spread out on her bed, and Vasco knows she’s thinking it, and he’s only an arm’s-length away. The world is a cruel and unfair place.
Caron says, with an adjustment of his glasses, "And of course, if Chief Ullan wishes to parley further, he'll have to send an emissary."
She replies, “Oh, of course. But I knew at least two good people for that job. I’ll see them when next I’m in Vignamrí. It should only be… say, two days?”
Nodding, Caron says, “Yes, that should do. Thank you, de Sardet.”
She nods and bids farewell to the minister as if the man is an old friend, and then they hasten out of the office before they're dragged back for more talk of potential markets and these savages.
The rain hits them like a sheet. Marie winces against it and pulls her hat down, though it does little to shield her. She’s sure it must be dripping down the bridge of her nose.
Síora is stony-faced, not even wincing at the wind; it’s truly impressive. Maybe her evident fury is warming her – now she doesn’t have to hide it for the sake of diplomacy, she mutters, "I thought I would have to strangle that man."
Marie smiles and says airily, "So it wasn't just me?" Letting the silence stretch a moment, she adds, "I really am sorry. He's a fool."
"I know," Síora sighs. And there's a hint of mischief, a twitch at the corner of her mouth, when she adds, "At least I don't have five more meetings with him this week."
Marie grimaces so hard that rain slips into her mouth and nearly up her nose. She sniffs. "Don't remind me. I'm going home for a decent bath. Possibly to drown myself in it." She looks up, blinking fast through the drops on her eyelashes. “Not that I’ll need any help, at this rate.”
"I will see you, carants."
Marie tries not to think of the sound of leather and the quiet footsteps a moment behind her. Or of being alone with Vasco. Possibly in an alley – “Do you need a lift? I’m sure I could talk to someone about a carriage…”
With a duck of her head, Síora says, “No. Thank you. After a day spent on stone, I wish to walk on the ground.”
“Then… beurd tír to mad, I suppose.” Marie tips her hat.
Síora smiles at her – brief, just a moment – and nods to them both, and Marie watches her walk away, a tall elegant shadow down the street, until she’s gone. To make sure she’s all right, and, yes, to hold off a conversation. Because Vasco is still here, and Marie can feel his gaze on the back of her neck. Here, with the late hour and the time he was unable to be away from her, with everything else… She remembers too well that odd moment last time they met, in the morning: the quiet sort-of-sharpness he gets when he’s distracted or worried. And then it was gone, and he was laughing with her again. Probably nothing, she thought, but now she’s aware she looks like a drowned rat and it must be eleven if it’s a moment, and –
Vasco sighs quietly behind her. The sound goes down her spine, prickles at the back of her neck like he’s just put his hand there.
Damn it. Marie pulls her timepiece from her pocket and checks it, smearing raindrops drops from the watchface. She hears Vasco shift, and then he’s next to her. She looks up from her watch – only to meet his eyes, already on her, dark and intent. She says, voice quiet, "Is there a matter you'd like to discuss with me? Or is it getting too late?"
He swallows. "Not too late," he says, in a voice like sandpaper.
Three steps. They make it three steps through her door before Marie's tossing aside her hat and kissing him furiously. He meets her there, stumbling backwards and fetching up against a wall so he can gather her closer – by her waist, her arse, anywhere he can reach. Light, he’s so warm, so strong, even wet as they both are from the rain. She’s plastering herself against him, her leg around his waist, but she doesn’t care. For a moment his hand tightens on her thigh, pulling her closer as if he can fuck her through two layers of trews and smalls – she thinks he might try – and then he lets her down with a gasp. His coat gets shrugged off one shoulder and carried upstairs as she all but drags him along behind her.
They barely make it into her room before she's kissing him again, nipping at his jaw and neck – over stubble and hot, damp skin, so hot after the freezing drizzle outside. His breathing is ragged against her, even moreso when she nips at his earlobe, unable to stop kissing him, touching him, something. "I thought I'd never be able to leave," she pants, tossing her shirt aside and then starting on his. "I was about to pass a new law just so I could get my hands on you."
He snorts and pulls her closer by her belt while she works on his trews, a commendable piece of teamwork. It's only when he has her own half-undone and is starting to pull them down her thighs that he pauses. His brows jump, and stay there.
She follows his gaze, and wonders what she’s done wrong. If she was too much, if… A pink bow. There's a pink bow under the plain leather. A pink, satin, obnoxiously large bow. Oh, by the Enlightened. Not this pair. Not this pair.
Marie’s not just a drowned rat – she’s a drowned rat in ruffled bloomers.
Vasco says, very carefully, steady in the way he gets responding to crisis, "What are… these?" A moment later, he’s already shifting her trews further down to check, with that face she recognises: that silent fascination, the sort that comes from watching a carriage crash. He explores further, inch by inch, revealing white fabric and… ruffles. So many ruffles. The sort worn under petticoats, probably by passengers who make his life a misery. The sort that go under the skirts she refuses to wear. She wonders if it’s possible to instantly dry up from mortification. She’s certainly trying.
Oh no, he’s – she knows his eyes, and he’s course-plotting, making reassessments. Her hands clamp down on top of his, stopping them in their tracks and hastily attempting to pull her trousers back up. She grimaces and tries to widen her eyes at the same time, apparently unable to decide which.
His eyes meet hers, and… his mouth twitches. She knows that look. She knows it from behind pompous officials and the few times she’s tried to use a gun in his presence.
She tries to point accusingly and keep her trousers up. "I rather thought I'd have time to change before… don't you dare."
That’s the end of it. She watches him reach for a captain's composure and clearly fail to find it, dropping in the ocean halfway there. And oh, the firelight does wonderful things to his face when he smiles, before he wrestles it back, mouth tight. The bastard. He says, "They're… very fetching, M – de Sardet."
Glaring at him as if she's made of (rapidly flushing) stone, she says, "Then why is your face doing that?" She sighs, and sags. "The tailors delivered them, and I couldn't protest, and they're comfortable." For a moment she glances away from him, uncertain. "Have I ruined tonight?"
His hands shift under hers, and then their palms meet like a kiss, his fingers lacing through hers. He tugs, just a little – gentle, coaxing. She lets him take her hands away, leaving her waistband vulnerable to attack. "They're… something," he manages, but he’s smiling. "Think I'll have to examine them more closely to have an opinion."
"What are you –?" she starts, but he's already dropping to his knees.
He works at her boots with swift, clever fingers; she raises each foot and lets him tug them off, her stockings and trews swiftly following. Then he sits back and surveys her, face unreadable but his eyes approving. (There. He always carries his smile in his eyes first.) She stands there, nipples pebbling in the cool air – she crosses her arms over her breasts – trying not to fidget, in by far the worst pair of underwear she took to Tír Fradí. She looks back at him incredulously.
He gently clasps his hand round her ankle, stroking his thumb over it, before shifting to examine the hems of each leg between thumb and finger. He frowns. "Hmm," he says, with utter thoughtful seriousness, and kisses her knee through the fabric.
Oh. She inhales, sharp and on the edge of a laugh. Damn him. And damn the fact that even next to these monstrosities, he looks good. His face is something to see in the firelight, intent and sharp and just a little unshaven, his mouth a moue of thought she wants to kiss. And at this angle, the span of his shoulders, the length of his eyelashes… No, the mortification evidently hasn’t worked. She licks her lips.
Vasco takes a particularly ugly bow between thumb and forefinger, pretending to examine it. He only winces slightly. "Silk. A very fashionable design in Serene, I'm told."
Her face is burning, but laughter is creeping up on her and she can feel his breath on her thigh, his hand sneaking upwards. She says, "For those who aren't six feet tall and lovers of trousers, yes." She shakes with hastily suppressed laughter, and at his brief hint of a pleased half-smile, he evidently feels it. She says, "What are you doing?"
He shifts to kiss her inner thigh – she hears him inhale through his nose, as if to catch the scent of her where she’s dampening the fabric. Well, that certainly doesn’t help. It seems like some sort of crime, the strength of her arousal even while she’s wearing these. Tracing a hand down the outside of her thigh, he muses, "They're a good thickness."
No. She refuses. "For the love of the Enlightened, Vasco, don't make me like these – "
He kisses her: just once, mouthing at her cunt soft and slow and deliberate before he nuzzles her.
“I – oh.” And her breath catches; she laughs with a high startled delight, girlish and the kind of thing she could never do at court. She lets it and the warmth of him suffuse her. "Damn you."
The bright flash of teeth at her feet: he grins, delighted.
The detestable, comfortable bloomers end up tossed over a bedpost. She does, in the end, declare that she's reluctantly fond of them, once her laughter subsides into delighted noises. And more laughter. And once, a squeak that they think might send the staff running. (She claps a hand over her mouth, eyes crinkling over the top of her fingers as she looks at him, and he smiles back helplessly. It looks beautiful on him. Rarely up for a laugh, she remembers one of his crew saying, and she wonders who they met. It certainly isn’t her friend, the man in her bed.)
"Promise me you'll wear them next time?" he pants as she rubs a hand along his cock, his hips bucking. He gives her a hasty, crooked grin between ragged breaths.
She snorts where she's lying half-underneath him. "Any more of that and I'm never tying you up again."
His cock twitches, to her amusement. He leans down on his elbows to huff a laugh into her shoulder and breathes, against her neck, "The problem is, de Sardet, I…" He sucks in a breath when she twists her wrist a little, then fucks into her grip in a filthy, hot slide. "I – ah – I'm not sure I'll be able to get hard without them."
She wheezes, and it’s terribly unerotic. Then she pulls him up to kiss his smugness off his face, because she's been deserted with The mood has left me, de Sardet, I'm sorry, or given contemptuous looks because they wanted a graceful powerful prince's niece, not a fumbling idiot, and she's had to call the whole thing off. She's been left in back rooms, cold and humiliated, and she wants this ridiculous man who warms her up instead; a man who walked past the finest shrines to the Light and made a jest under his breath about underwear, who mocks his friends with respect and wants to make her laugh because hard as he sometimes tries not to be, he is kind, so relentlessly kind. She wants his hot skin against hers, she wants him worried in her bed rubbing her arms to warm her, and she wants the heat of him inside her, because she can trust him there. She can trust him not to break her.
And maybe it's that – wanting to share in that warmth, to bask in it a little longer – that makes her return from the privy and collapse next to him afterwards, spread-eagled and half-aware of her leg over his thigh. Gravity makes the rest of her follow, she reasons, her head falling against his shoulder. She hears him sigh, and he relaxes under her. She noses into his neck. His hair tickles her face as he shifts closer, but she can't bring herself to mind. He pauses. Just for a moment she feels his hand brushing the all-but-faded scars from the ulg, so lightly she almost doesn't notice. (She idly wonders if he's unused to magical healing, how fast it can be; she doesn't see many of her kind on Naut ships.) Then his arm wraps round her waist, slow and tentative. He's so good to touch. She closes her eyes, thinking that just a moment can't hurt…
…And wakes up sprawled all over a Naut. This is beginning to feel like a bad habit, being held by him. She stretches a little, clenches and unclenches her hand against that lean inked chest – and just at the shift of her movement, he makes a soft sound and frowns, blinking awake and squinting at her.
“Good morning,” she says. His hair is in his face; she strokes it aside, tucks it behind his ear. No wonder it gets caught. His eyelashes are ridiculous; there needs to be some sort of law.
He smiles at her, giving her hip a gentle squeeze. “De Sardet,” he says, like a creaking ship.
She likes him like this: his rough voice, his stubbly face, his wandering hands. It feels like a private sort of gift, this side of her friend that no-one else gets to see.
This time, again, it’s him who has to leave. Harbourmasters to deal with, admirals to bargain with – if Cabral would just let him prove himself, she’s heard over drinks, and she’s nodded and clinked mugs with him and hoped on his behalf – and she has to assume her mantle. At least she’ll have him at her back during meetings and errands, even if normality has reasserted itself; his and Aphra’s wry comments will help get her through. Even if he’s close enough to touch, but she has to keep her hands to herself, fingers itching. Even if he won’t be able to put a hand on the small of her back to steady her, or cradle her hips in his hands and kiss her neck. Just her friend Vasco again.
She puts that thought aside as she watches him dress – enjoys having him here, in the moments before he puts back his careful captain’s severity. She leans an elbow on her knee, shifting to let him sit on the bed and pull on his stockings; just looking at his strong calves, the pull of the muscles in his abdomen, the ink on his wrists, these brief things she can have before they disappear. He’ll have popped back to his docks room and be spick and span before she sees him again. She wonders, briefly, if he took ship-shape a tad personally, when he was growing up.
She waits for him to reach for his hat and bid her farewell, but he sits on the edge of her bed instead. She raises a surprised brow, but he leans in, a hand soft under her chin, and brushes his mouth against hers. It’s a brief thing, the tremble of a butterfly’s wings – but she smiles into it, and just for a moment, her nose rubs against his. Quiet, fond – presumptuous. He freezes in surprise, and she tenses. But his thumb strokes over her jaw and he kisses her again, approving and soft and coaxing, until she relaxes. He draws back, and smiles at her.
She bites her lip and manages, “Captain.”
He nods. “De Sardet.” And then he’s putting on his hat and the weight of him is gone from the mattress, and the door’s closing quietly behind him.
She’s well aware her face is doing something utterly foolish in response and de Courcillon would be appalled, but it’s been too long since she’s had someone touch her like that, kiss her like that. She’s missed it.