Chapter Text
Not for the first time in the last few months, the shackles clamped round Vi’s wrists were really starting to piss her off. The ones round her ankles? Well, they were a new addition that she hadn’t quite warmed to, either.
The day had started like any other; first, she’d been woken from a fitful sleep by the icy kiss of last-nights piss, thrown over her head from one of the guards. This was then followed by the bucket, of course. Then, also not unusually, the bars to her communal straw-lined cell had been opened, and a new scurvy-ridden prisoner was introduced to their eclectic gathering of thieves, pirates, and generally good-for-nothing criminals, and her fist had been forced to make some characteristically quick introductions (an art which she had learned to finesse in cuffs over the years). But what had really set today apart, from the other god-knew how many other days and nights spent in gaol in the last half-decade, was that four guards had then joined the fray to bag her head, pull her from the cell, and cuff her ankles.
Thrilling, really.
Fast forward to present, and here she stood; shackled to high heaven and still damp from her morning wakeup call. Not wanting to allow her the illusion of any further modicum of freedom, a matching chain that connected her wrists to her ankles had been added by the guards to complete her look. The real cherry on the cake, you could say.
Not that she’d ever seen a cherry…or a cake, for that matter.
Either way, she didn’t have the time or inclination to think too hard on trivial things such as desert today. No, today was a pretty big day for Vi. The biggest in her social calendar, since, well, possibly ever. She was reminded of this fact starkly, as she felt another hard shove from the butt of a musket between her shoulder blades, pushing her to move further up in the line.
Vi knew she wasn’t the only one who had a date with destiny today. She turned her head slightly, as much as the ever-present crick in her next would allow, to look up and down the line of people that stretched out before and behind her. She estimated that maybe twenty or so other lucky individuals had been ripped from their equally comfy cells, to be paraded out in the midday sun in front of the Royal Navy’s finest.
The rattling sounds of trapdoors flopping open, followed by the sharp snap of a rope whiplashing, pulled Vi back to the moment once again. She would’ve looked up to catch the spectacle, if her chain hadn’t been pulled down upon sharply by a fairly stout guard stood off to her right.
“Open up”, he practically chirped, despite looking up at her with a hint of something resembling pity in his eyes. Vi noticed he was holding a small bag of coin between his grubby little fingers. She almost pitied him.
“There was me thinking you were gonna give me some grub before the show”, she grumbled back to him, out the side of her mouth that wasn’t recently scarred from a piss-bucket to the face.
“It’s to see you on your way…a last offering”, he encouraged, holding out a small gold coin towards Vi’s face, which she assumed he wanted her to take under her tongue as a peace offering for her journey. In the seconds she was graciously granted to think (a kindness she had not been extended for a long time), she noticed the shining golden glint of a crucifix poking out from between the buttons of his naval uniform.
“Mate, where I’m headed - it’s too hot for gold”, she smirked back, darkly, motioning down towards the depths of hell with her shackled hands.
He looked at her again with that uncomfortable, pitiful stare, as if she had just somehow made a bad situation worse by refusing his offering. Like that was even possible. She sighed under her breath and rolled her eyes, but did as she was told nevertheless. Ever the people pleaser, Vi bit her chapped lip before opening her mouth.
“Toss it to the ankle-biters would ye?”, she whispered conspiratorially, as she nodded over to the small gathering of children beside the wooden structure up ahead.
“Sure, t’will make the job go quicker, if I get some help from my mates”, she alluded, her inflection rising at the end in her bid to win the stout man over.
Looking off to the children in question, the guard, or priest, or whatever he was meant to be, seemed to catch on and nodded enthusiastically toward Vi.
“Well, all that’s left to say is a final blessing. Pray with me”, he began, before grasping his hands together in reverence.
Vi didn’t have it in her to fight him further. At this point, she figured it was futile, hell, she didn’t even know if she had any fight left in her. She allowed the man to pray for her in silence, despite her own beliefs that she had been ignored equally as hard by the Gods as she had the People on earth during her short lifespan.
Moments later, she was pushed on further in the line, past her new and all-at-once old friend, until she reached the bottom of the rain-warped wooden steps that would lead her to her final destination. She took a deep grounding breath before beginning her ascent with as much grace as she could muster; harder to do in shackles than it had been made to look by the cell-mates who had preceded her. In fairness to them, most of them had been children wearing adults chains. She supposed they were roomier, for comfort. How considerate.
As she reached the top step, and stood atop the wooden podium, only then did the enormity of her situation really begin to sink in.
The weight of her own mortality sank as fast as she could register the twitching, hung body of a criminal being cut down from a noose, their descent marked by the dull thud of flesh-covered bones against the rat-infested cobbles below, and the cries of delighted children who had been swinging on the now deceased-man’s bootstraps. Vi swallowed hard at the scene before her, her previously parched mouth suddenly slick with bile and disgust in equal measure. Shaking her head, she tried to rid the suddenly uncharacteristic sense of fear from her mind.
Least the kids were having a good day, and making a few hard-earned coin to boot, she thought grimly to herself. There, a positive.
She had been no stranger herself to gallows money as a child; being tossed a few coin to swing on the legs of the poor devils who were unlucky enough to find their necks in a noose, trying to ease their suffering by snapping their necks faster. The free clothes, and boots too, if you were lucky, were just another perk of the side hustle. Public executions had been a thing of the past, until the new Governor of the region, Ambessa, had reinstated them a few years back. What Vi wouldn't have given for a more private, intimate, demise. Such misfortune was to be expected in life, as equally as it was to be expected in death, she figured.
Before Vi could contemplate her upcoming lack of existence further, a figure dressed all in black approached her from the left, a burlap sack held loosely in his outstretched hand.
“First time?”, he asked jovially.
“Umm…?”, she started, unsure how one could possibly have found themselves in this position once, miraculously lived to tell the tale, and then found themselves slap-bang in the middle of it again.
“Only pulling your leg missus, just a spot o’ gallows humour to lift the spirits, aye?”, he added.
Vi was truly dumbstruck now.
“Ahem…you wanna bag yourself, or would ye like me to do ye the honours?”, he motioned towards the sack in his hand, with eyes barely visible beneath the cut-out holes of his own face-covering.
After a second to digest, Vi couldn’t stop the scoff that escaped her mouth. Despite the truly awful situation she found herself in, she realised she’d been treated with more respect in the last five minutes than she had been in the last five years. First by a priest, and then an executioner, of all people.
“Guess I’ll exercise me rights one final time, aye?”, she murmured, as she took the offered sack between the fingertips of her rough, calloused, shackled hands.
Taking a second to herself, Vi turned her back as best she could on the Naval audience, and instead cast her gaze out across the expanse of the Sea of Pilt. T’wasn’t the sea she had been raised on, nay t’was the sea she had been marooned in and captured upon. Yet as she inhaled one penultimate lungful of salty-sea air, she found she could only exhale gratitude, which she blew back out towards the white-crested waves that crashed against the foreign shoreline below. As she closed her eyes and dreamed, longed, that she could be somewhere other than perched precariously on the pinnacle of her own existence, she tried even harder to remember them. To remember the voices of the people she was leaving behind, and the voice of the people long-gone who she would be shortly reuniting with. It had just been so long…years, hell, even decades.
“Hurry it along, chaps!”, the voice of an upstart Jack Tar carried out over to her from the covered observation deck, many feet away to her left. God forbid some poor Naval officer got a sunburn in the heat whilst watching the show.
Ever one to please, and realising that despite the smell of home, home wasn’t a place worth running back to if you had nobody to return to it with, Vi heaved out a final sigh before slipping the burlap sack over her own head. No need to drag out the inevitable, she figured. As the material obscured her vision, turning all the vibrant colours around her into muted shades of brown, one colour briefly rippled through her field of vision, reminding her all at once of all her cumulative failures, all the reasons that she could never return to the one place she had ever called home.
The flash of powder blue through her mind, was almost as fleeting as the image of her mothers smile that followed through twice as quickly but only half as painfully. She was reminded that either way, she would be reunited with some, all bar-one, of her long-gone relations very soon.
Closing her eyes, she felt the soft leather gloves of the executioner on her skin as he slipped a short length of rope around her neck, the thick bulk of the knot resting against the overgrown nest of crimson hair that cascaded over the nape of her neck. Despite knowing that when the trapdoors below opened, she wasn’t going to be landing on her bare feet, she bent her knees slightly anyway, expecting the impact. Breathing in deeply through her nose, she held her breath, waiting. Waiting for the silent nod of some Naval prick which would signal the doors beneath her to open, and her short life to end. As she felt the noose knot tighten, and the trapdoors begin to rattle, she allowed herself one final indulgence.
“Bye Pow-Pow, until the next…”
Before she could finish her sentence, she was cut off…
“Stop the execution!”
…and not by the executioner.
As suddenly as the interruption had come, the tension of the rope around her neck slackened, and she lost her footing with the surprise of it, sending her to the floor in a crumpled heap.
Vi gasped in shock, releasing a breath that she didn’t think she would have been gifted the chance to heave. As she laid crumpled in a pile, shivering from the sudden surge of adrenaline and the cool breeze through her piss-sodden prison clothes, she registered the rush of boots approaching.
Before she could convince her fisted hands to stop shaking and start swinging, she was grabbed roughly about the elbows by two men, and heaved to her feet. Breathing heavier now, she desperately tried to fight off the desire to blindly lash-out at the guards restraining her. Quelling the ripples in her tensed biceps, she tried to strain her hearing over the pulsing of blood against her eardrums to listen. Holding her breath again, this time purposefully, she was sure that she could make out the sound of more footsteps approaching. This time there was just a single set - slower, methodical, and carrying the weight of authority with them. But something else was different too.
They sounded…heeled?
As the individual approached further, Vi realised that their pace was slowing, and she became suddenly aware of the sensation of being watched. Widening her stance slightly, Vi squared her shoulders and pulled her spine as tall as it would go, despite the guards previous attempts at breaking it over the years.
The footsteps stopped.
Squinting as hard as she could through the burlap sack over her eyes, Vi thought she could just about make out the shape of a cocked hat - a triangular-shaped hat, worn by the biggest of dicks in the Royal Navy.
Shit, this can’t be good, she cursed mentally.
After a second or two, her new friend disappeared out of her field of view, as they began to circle her. Unable to hold her breath further, Vi gasped softly as she felt the butt of a musket gently push the cuffs of her shackles further up her arms, holding them for a second before releasing them to rattle back down against her scarred wrists.
This really ain't good, she added.
Turning her head slightly at the noise, she caught the figure move back into her field of vision, approaching from the opposite side, having completed a full three-sixty. Unable to hold her inquisitive tongue any longer, Vi piped up, charming as always.
“Like what you see, Cap’n?”, she smirked beneath her burlap sack, hoping to elicit a response from the high-ranking stranger circling her like a vulture.
A brief silence followed, one that was almost long enough for Vi to regret opening her mouth.
“No, I do not”, a curiously deep, and heavily accented voice replied.
“You are a criminal. I am a decorated Naval officer, and Leader of House Kiramman…”, the voice continued, disgustingly English.
Punctuating the strangers introduction further, the burlap sack covering Vi’s head was unexpectedly ripped away, leaving her violently squinting against the light that aggressively flooded her vision. As she struggled against the midday sun, she lifted her head in an attempt to look in the direction of the person addressing her.
“…you will address me with respect, or keep your mouth shut”, the voice continued, low yet level, unperturbed by Vi’s wincing.
After another second or two of blinking away the onslaught of colours flashing across her vision, Vi finally managed to begin to register the general outline of the person standing before her, no, the person towering above her. As quickly as she could blink, her mouth started running.
“Damn, they let broads in now, do they?”, she chortled, making a show of licking her freshly scarred lip.
Caught off guard, but not surprised, Vi received a swift punch to her stomach by the man who had been previously holding her up. They left her enough slack at the elbows to allow her to double over in pain. Had she any ounce of fight left in her, she would have made a move to run, or swing back. She guessed she really was well and truly checked out.
Harking out a ball of blood-stained spit at the feet of the woman before her, she averted her gaze slowly upward through fronds of her wild crimson fridge, to take a proper look at the naval officer addressing her.
The woman wore well-polished black leather boots that stretched all the way up to her knee, where they were tucked into frankly ridiculously white breeches. Vi had to stop herself from chuckling at the absurdity of her own bloodied reflection in the well-polished gold buttons that climbed the sides of the woman’s thighs. As she looked up further, she clocked the hilt of a beautifully crafted rapier poking out from beneath the woman’s navy blue dress coat. It hung elegantly from a holster at her hip, no doubt polished daily despite likely never having been used to slice flesh. The customised musket that hung from the woman’s hand beside her other hip however, had seen its fair share of action - she could tell not only from the slight powder marks around the barrel end, but also from the commanding, yet respectful way, it was clasped between well-manicured fingers at the woman's shooting side. Now that weapon had seen death.
As Vi clenched her core and began to straighten out, she steeled her expression despite the wave of nausea that accompanied the action. Taking in the final details of the woman who would likely be the one to determine how much longer Vi would spend breathing in this cold cruel world, her stomach twisted even more with the realisation that this broad was dressed literally the whole nine yards. Navy blue dress coat over a white waistcoat, complete with gold striped cuffs, gold-laced button holes, and fucking epaulettes. Trust Vi to have accidentally picked a fight with a fucking Commander of the British Royal Navy. A bloody hot one too.
Fuck.
Always honest to a fault, and never one to back down from a fight, accidental or not, Vi ploughed on.
“Excuse my manners…”, Vi hissed, before spitting out another hard ball of blood-stained spit, this time finding a more satisfying mark, as it splattered harshly onto the cheek of the woman before her.
“What the hell do you want, Commander”, she finished with a snarl, more of a statement that a question.
Out the corner of her eye, she saw the guard beside her raise his arm wildly, no doubt to swing towards her face this time. Clenching her jaw to brace for impact, she began to reflexively duck, but not before she caught sight of the woman raising her hand towards her own guard, motioning for him to stop. Her guard dog obeyed his orders, albeit begrudgingly, and slowly lowered his hand.
As Vi straightened up fully, she raised her gaze, until her eyes were aimed up at the woman before her. Despite being engaged with her for the last few moments, Vi realised all too suddenly that she hadn’t yet looked into the face of the woman who could very well be her damnation as equally as she could be her salvation. The woman’s tall, slender figure was mirrored in the sculpturing of her face. The midday sun glinted off her unimaginably pale complexion, which was baffling so, considering she was a seafarer. The contour of her high cheekbones and sharp jawline looked as clean-cut as though they had been carved from a block of the purest marble. A single strand of cobalt blue hair hung down across her eye and sliced across her pale cheek, the hair having come loose from a meticulously tight dress-bun that protruded out from below her three-peaked hat. As if hearing Vi’s inner thoughts, the woman slowly raised one gloved hand to her cheek to brush away the strand of loose hair, before roughly smearing away the bloody-saliva on her cheek, all the while not breaking her level eye-contact with Vi. Those deep blue eyes were piercing. Vi tried not to dwell on just how deep they were cutting into her psyche.
The woman broke the silence this time, despite her voice sounding slightly quieter, yet somehow equally as authoritative, as it had before.
“According to the dossier I recently acquired, inmate 516 is this Gaol’s longest serving prisoner, and yet there is no record of you, or your crimes. You are a ghost, and yet here you stand. Which flag did you sail under?”, asked the Commander, piercing, blunt, and apparently characteristically monotone.
Vi wasn’t scared of much in life, hell, she had been seconds away from meeting her maker not even a full minute ago. Yet, as she stood tangled in her own mess of chains, and seized at the shoulders by two burly brutes, she had never quite felt as trapped as she did right now, captured in the steely cerulean gaze of Commander Kiramman.
“Can’t possibly begin to imagine what it is ye think yer on about, ma’am”, Vi snarled back, avoiding the question as graciously as a ship with no sails would navigate a minefield. After years of interrogation, she was no better at lying than she had been when she was seven.
The commander, emboldened by Vi’s rudeness, took a half step closer to Vi.
“Pirate”, she spoke plainly, yet assuredly, punctuating the pop of her ‘p’ as she did.
Leaning in even closer, the woman extended her head past Vi’s until the commander’s mouth was parallel to her own cheek.
Vi swallowed hard, audibly.
“You have been branded, as though cattle. You are, and forever will be known as, a pirate. That fate, you cannot escape”, she spoke directly into Vi’s ear, her disgustingly upper class assonance was really beginning to grate on Vi’s nerves, despite the otherwise cheery situation she found herself in.
Gritting her teeth, and biting her tongue, Vi begrudgingly allowed the woman to continue, even as she stepped forward to once again begin her circling of Vi’s position, as though a cat would encircle a mouse.
“In relation to your current predicament? Well, perchance fate has other machinations for you today, Pirate”, the commander continued, her voice barely above a whisper, as she gave the shackles on VI’s wrists another nudge with the butt of her musket.
Hmm, fucking typical, Vi scoffed internally.
The bitch came to make a deal.
Vi felt the rusted metal chaff against the puckered skin of the ‘P’ branded against the inside of her wrists, and was almost grateful for it, for it reminded her of just who plunged those searing metal rods into her flesh in the first place. Not that she could ever forget the day she smelled her own flesh burning under the hands of some Naval officer. As she lost herself in thought for another moment or so, weighing up her options, Vi didn’t event register that the she-devil had finished the second lap of her circling, until she came to rest once again square before her.
“Very pensive, Pirate. Perhaps, the time has allowed you to revisit old memories, such as those from before your incarceration. Perchance, you may remember the flag of the vessel upon which you sailed?”, the commander asked again, leaning closer and closer in to Vi as she continued probing.
That was her first mistake.
Vi had not only been able to smell the desperation leaking out of the woman, but now she could also see it, clear as day, glinting back at her in the streaks of cobalt blue running through the aquamarine of the Commander’s irises.
Her second mistake?
Getting so goddam close.
Her mind made up, and the brands on the inside of her wrists itching (as they usually did when she was about to make a life-altering decision), Vi shifted her eyes left to right sketchily, as though hesitant. The honourable commander took the bait, and leaned in even closer, until their cheeks were once again parallel and Vi’s mouth was now level with the woman’s ear.
“You see…”, she began at a whisper, “…you’re right”.
“Once upon a time, before my ‘incarceration’, I did have a reputation - for doing despicable things, unspeakable deeds, unholy acts!”, she raised her voice slightly, and was delighted at how far the fair commander leapt, before leaning back in eagerly to hear the rest of her admission.
“Enlighten me”, the commander whispered back, almost excitedly.
“That’s what she said”, Vi whispered back, her tone accusatory.
“That’s what who said? The captain whom you sailed under?”, Commander Kiramman gawped, sounding as though she couldn’t believe her own luck at convincing the pirate to spill her own guts before she ordered them to be dashed against the cobbles below.
Turning her head slightly towards the commander, Vi was delighted to see the woman mirror her action, their faces merely centimetres away.
“The captain whom I sailed under? Nay…it’s what your Mother said, while I did unholy things to her in your father’s bedchamber”, Vi half snarled, half laughed at the commander, before leaning in to plant a blood stained kiss on the Commander’s lips.
Pulling back wildly, the commander rapidly raised an arm to her face, as though she had been assaulted by a deviant. Well, Vi guessed she just had. The guards at either side of Vi, who had turned away slightly to offer their commander some space for bargaining prisoner testimonies, had returned to their posts at only a second notice, violently ripping Vi back and away from their leader as though she were a spark and their commander a barrel of gunpowder.
“Ya wee bastard!”, one of the brutes screamed as he whipped his head back before slamming it forward hard into Vi’s temple, instantly drawing blood and blackening her eye socket. The man grasping wildly at Vi’s other arm held fast, waiting for his colleague to finish his assault, before he too added to the fray, swinging a flailing steel-capped boot into Vi’s groin.
“Miller, Walker, stop!”, the commander balked, her gloved hand still raised to her face as though she had been the one to receive such blows, and not Vi, who now hung limply in the arms of her captors.
Pulling hard on either of her arms, the guards straightened, yanking her up with them. Despite her own best interests, Vi obliged with what little strength she had remaining. She pushed her feet hard into the floor, trying to revel in the sensation of being able to do ‘living’ things like standing and breathing for a few moments more. Her fate had just been sealed. At least she would go out with a kiss, rouged with her own blood, and fresh on her dying lips.
“This was a waste of my time”, the commander sighed out, as she lowered her hand from her face. VI noticed an imperceptible crack in the woman’s monotone delivery, and a slight drop of her shoulders. It gave Vi a fleeting sense of achievement, for what it was worth she didn't know.
After another second of staring, the Commander turned on her well-polished heels, and set off back along the wooden gangway, away from Vi, and back towards the life of silver-spoon service that she was obviously accustomed to.
Vi allowed herself to truly give in now, to laugh at the vile absurdity of it all, as she writhed against the arms of her captors.
“That’s it, just walk away!”, she screamed at the back of the retreating Commander, channelling half a decades worth of repressed emotions at the back of one insignificant strangers head.
“Torture and torment me, just like the hundreds of other women and children ye sent off skipping towards the gallows. I’ll curse ye all from the depths of hell, while ye and all yer bastard officers continue to rape and pillage and plunder our families - the ones that ye haven’t already murdered!”, she screamed, scalding hot blood trickling down her temple, and fingermarks bruising into her arms from the strength of her restraint.
As she carried on her barrage of abuse, the guard to her right yanked the chain connecting her limbs tighter, giving her no room for manoeuvre. Before she could register what was happening between her deep heaving breaths, a second hand came about her neck, holding her still whilst the executioner once again slipped the previously discarded burlap sack back over her head.
Taking a few more racking breaths to steady herself, Vi tried to reabsorb a modicum of her composure, as she figured that her last few insults could be the last she ever would speak.
“So walk away, run away for all we care! Oh and while you’re at it, give Silco a kiss on that winning eye of his won’t you?”, she snarled in the direction that she had last spotted the commander, and allowed herself to sag ever so slightly against her tight restraints, her fighting spirit now fading with every shallow breath she could manage.
With little warning, the previously loose length of rope looped around her neck tightened, causing her to gasp slightly. She hated how weak it made her sound. Hated how useless this pitiful existence had left her feeling. Hated that her last interaction on this planet would be bartering with some jumped up piece of Naval shit.
The trapdoor beneath her feet began to rattle. Many yards away, she could hear the beat of a drum, it’s rhythm counting down the seconds until she would cease to exist. This was really it. Her time on this planet expended.
Breathing faster and faster with each beat of the pigskin, she felt lightheaded, dizzy, as though she were already ascending, despite the knowledge that she would in fact be heading the other way, plunging feet first into hell-fire.
The drumming became louder, and louder, until suddenly it stopped…and so did everything else.
The trapdoor beneath her feet opened, the noose around her neck tightened…
…and a single musket shot was fired.
Then, the world as she knew it ceased to exist for Violet Vanderson.