suit of cups

contents

i

"You have pretty hair."

It was the first kind thing Basil Hawkins heard from another child since he and his mother moved to her home village in the North Blue. At ten years old, he was quite used to unsolicited commentary about his appearance, so he braced himself to fight, though he didn't hear the snickering of a bully's audience. Instead, he looked up to see you.

Though you stood while he sat, he could tell you were a few inches shorter than him and likely younger. You didn't look at his face or his brow, but truly, honestly, at the ends of his hair hanging past his chin.

"Go away."

Hawkins recalled the straw effigies he'd sprouted from his hands as he made to leave, but to his annoyance, you followed.

"I said go away."

"I'm going home."

"You're lying." He lengthened his steps the little bit his height allowed him.

"Am not. I live in the stone house with the outside kitchen."

That was generous. Smoke and steam wafted downwind to the wooded area where he lived smelling like fish and starches, from what had to be a pot over a fire pit at most. He liked being outside during this island's brief warm season, so he didn't relish when the air smelled like burnt food.

You shuffled quickly to catch up to him. "I heard there was a boy with powers. Is it you?"

"No."

"You're lying. I saw you grow pancit from nothing."

"Pancit?" he repeated.

"Noodles."

Hawkins looked at you sidelong as he slowed his pace slightly. If he was a misfit for the eyebrows he was told were his father's contribution, you stood apart from the villagers with your pitch-black waves while everyone else resembled his mother in coloring, straight, fair hair and fairer skin.

He stopped and held up his palm, conjuring a small scarecrow. You watched in fascination, and bizarrely sniffed the air before frowning.

"That's not pancit."

Other children would call him a monster or a witch and run away, shrieking, but you were unimpressed.

"No, it isn't."

You poked the scarecrow lightly with your finger, and he felt the foreign heat of your hand near his. Was it already that cold outside, or were you that warm? Then you grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward.

"Come on!"

You lived so close by but a world apart from him, with three generations of family who seemed to be mostly fishermen and homemakers. You barely introduced him to the old woman bent over a wok in the small, fenced yard with more gravel than grass before you pointed at the colorful woven mat under her feet.

"Lola, is that straw?"

She hummed affirmatively, and you grinned at him, though he wasn't sure what reaction you were looking for, then or throughout that evening of boisterous adults speaking half a different language while you piled his plate high with food, fragrant with garlic and vinegar and peppercorn. He'd always been left to his own devices, free to come and go as he pleased with his mother's unpredictable hours, so he was unsettled to the very end when you tried your best to walk him home. In practice, you lagged behind him, hobbling with a bundle of leftovers your mother foisted on you that had to be a third your size until Hawkins held out his hand with a put-upon sigh.

"Give it to me."

"No. You're a guest."

"We're going to my house."

"Just for a second!"

"And we're never getting there at the speed you're walking."

You grumbled as he pried it from your fingers, hooking the veritable tower of containers into his own. It really was one of the biggest meals he'd had in recent memory. Neighbors had been curious about the two of them before and made token offers to look after him out of pity for his young, hardworking mother, but that usually ended once they realized how off-putting and somber he was besides his Devil Fruit.

Hawkins was sure your own interest would wane soon and your family was surely gossiping about him at this moment, but he'd at least savor the dishes you brought along before his familiar solitude. You'd probably turn tail now that he relieved you of your burden. You'd probably pretend not to know him once other children got wind of his powers, and he'd resent you for it more than he did anyone else so far, because there was something sadder than usual about a little kid like you discarding him.

But you kept coming back.

The next day, Hawkins stepped out of his house to find you sitting on the fence post with a book that looked much too mature for either of you. Even he scarcely read anything but the comics in the World Economic Journal, so he doubted you were far beyond picture books yourself. You didn't acknowledge him as he approached, but the tension was evident in your neck, like you were waiting for him to speak first. He took advantage of his height and long arms to pluck it from your grasp.

"Hey!"

"On the Heavenly Spheres," Hawkins read out loud. The page you were on had diagrams, not so much illustrations, and he kept his thumb there as he flipped through to see more of the same. "Did you steal this?"

"Borrowed," you corrected. You'd hopped down from the fence to try and take it back, swiping futilely at his shoulders before he handed it back to you.

"From who?" Your family didn't seem terribly bookish.

"This neighbor lady," you said with a sniff. "She smells weird but she has a lot of stuff like this. See?" You held it out, pantomiming for him to take a whiff, and he recoiled.

"No, thank you."

But he didn't mind laying in the grass a few feet away from you with his backlog of Sora, Warrior of the Sea clippings while you hummed and doodled on your left arm in fountain pen, the odd symbols he'd glimpsed in your book, until the sun rose past noon and you asked him for soap in a panic before you both were due for lunch at your house. He could tell your mother restrained herself from striking you for the faint smear of ink left behind, and the next day he gave you the rest of the newspaper to write in the margins of instead.

His own mother was surprised to see you the evening after that, and looked between the two of you curiously as you chatted to her about the trove of food their family of two had been reheating diligently for days.

"I'm glad you're making friends, Hawkins," she said softly when he returned from walking you home.

"We're not friends," Hawkins said. "I'm babysitting."

His mother smiled at that, a little sadly, and he winced. He'd never had one, but understood the concept. It'd always been the two of them.

Summer turned to fall. You tried to teach him go, which the elders of your family played, though he wasn't convinced you understood it, either, with how a pruned man whose exact relation to you was inconclusive scowled every time you clacked a stone down loudly. Hawkins finally unearthed the pack of cards misplaced in their move here, and you played what few games the pair of you could think of for two players, mostly slapjack that left both of you smarting and teary-eyed, except for the times he covered his hand with a thick layer of straw. He made you truly cry, once, and he'd never felt worse. His mother came home and laughed at the scene the two of you made, and you betrayed him by ignoring him that evening to learn knitting at her side.

"We've been here for ever," you said, "but everyone still thinks they're back home, so no one knows how to dress for winter."

Back home, someplace you'd never been but you and now Hawkins heard plenty about. A summer island in the Grand Line. All the straw baskets and mats in your home was waste from white rice, unlike the barley and wheat around here. Hawkins wondered if it was warmer than a Northern summer, or warm like the life you invited him to without hesitation, or warm like your hands.

ii

It was your birthday deep in winter when Hawkins finally met the smelly old woman who supplied you with books.

"You can take a bath right away," you hissed. He was more annoyed that for the next six months you were only two years younger than him instead of three, but now dread filled him along with the memory of patchouli and mothballs from times you'd stuck a book on his sleeping face.

The old woman lived at the edge of town, still closer than either of you, and it was one of the few times you saw other children your age, including a few who he'd punched and been punched by for comments about his mother and about you, so Hawkins took your mittened hand in his, your stitches much neater than his own despite you only learning a few months ago. He didn't let go until you passed the iron gate of a row house and you skipped ahead of him to knock.

Besides loud makeup—dark lipstick, no mascara—the old woman looked much like any other on this island, and you hugged her around her waist like you were used to it, though Hawkins could tell you held your breath. He bit back his smirk at that before you introduced him, and he managed to keep his distance with a polite bow of the head. You kicked him in the shin under the table while your hostess rifled around for something, and he tutted you for almost disturbing the tea.

She left you in a sort of drawing room, whose one complete wall was lined with tall bookshelves, including a few spines he recognized from your voracious intake. Incense puffed off a brass holder shaped like a sea king, and Hawkins couldn't excise it from the cocktail of other scents that was surely embedding itself in his hair and clothes.

"Now, darling," the woman said on return, sitting across from the pair of you at the round table. "How old are you this year?"

"Nine," you answered guilelessly.

"Mm. And you?"

He tried to hide that he was startled at being involved. "Eleven, now."

"Hawkins is a Virgo," you explained.

"Ah. I see." She nodded like you'd exchanged a larger volume of information than he could hear. "Birds of a feather."

With that, she held out a tall deck of cards toward you, and pressed your palm on the top before she shuffled them overhand like any of the men on the docks Hawkins had seen playing cards to pass the time. After a good long while, she set them in front of her counter-clockwise in a large wheel. There were twelve of them, and you made a noise of recognition.

The old woman grinned. "Sharp one, you are. Like him." She tapped the card that was at 9 o'clock from your shared point of view, one manicured fingernail on the crown of an enthroned old man, under which read "King of Swords."

You wrinkled your nose. "How is that my first house?"

"Where is your helmsman, dear?"

"Aquarius... oh."

Hawkins had no hope of following what seemed like an entirely disparate topic, the astronomy you read religiously, so he nursed his tea and inspected the rest of the spread. The deck was more colorful than the playing cards his mother had, with thick swathes of blue, red, green, and yellow and more proper illustrations than theirs. He counted two different kings on the table, and realized he'd never looked too closely before, taking for granted that every suit had two monarchs and a jack. But now that he looked, he wondered if his mother's deck wasn't a version of this with the more mystical cards missing. Why, though?

"Swords on three of your four angles," the woman tutted. "You're going to get yourself into many conflicts, and become known for it."

"By who?"

"Only another diviner would argue this much."

"I don't think I like tarot," you said sullenly. "It's not specific."

"Swords, dear."

Privately, Hawkins was impressed. He often found himself dragging you away from your family or other children by the scruff of your neck, how you challenged them as boldly as you did this woman who clearly found you amusing instead of abrasive.

The woman pointed at the third card, counter-clockwise. "Justice. Maybe you can use that tongue of yours to help the Marine."

"As my third house? I'm supposed to make propaganda?"

"Oi," Hawkins said, only half-offended. It was a familiar point.

"And I'm delighted to meet this young man of yours," the woman continued, and you audibly opened your mouth to contradict her, "but I think you should try to make some girl friends." The fifth card looked like three women clinking chalices together in the air.

"He's like a girl."

Hawkins had heard that before, but none of those who said it were you. If there was something girlish about him, whatever that meant, there was as much boyish in you, and you were each something closer to each other than anyone else.

For the next hour of your asking questions and picking the answers apart, Hawkins itched to take notes like when you read your astronomy books, or ask for the rest of the deck to flick through, and eventually he started speaking up himself, trying his hand at interpretation.

"It feels right for you to have The Star," he said carefully.

"It does. I like you, kid," your mentor—because that's what she was—said with a satisfied nod. You stuck your tongue out at him. "The Star as your eighth house suggests you'll be involved in political upheaval of some kind." Hawkins read headlines, at least, about the Revolutionary Army, and the thought of you dying for such a vague cause was laughable. "Or you will have close contact with someone who disrupts the status quo, violently."

You frowned. "I don't see how. I have Mars there, and it's undignified."

"The Six of Cups for your ninth house..." She looked at Hawkins then. "You two will travel together. I'm sure of it."

iii

Hawkins drew six cards every morning. The first three were his personal reading, and the next three were for you. With your permission. You rolled your eyes as you gave it, but listened to his interpretation, and you in turn reminded him which of his houses had planets transiting through them. You said it was easy because your rising signs formed a trine to one another, his Cancer to your Pisces—only possible with signs of the same element. To him, those were The Chariot and The Moon, and your eyebrow visibly twitched when he said so.

He was fourteen and you were twelve when your grandfather taught the two of you and some of your cousins how to sail in a small double outrigger boat, an old but still-sturdy fishing rig retired from the family business but deemed safe enough for children on calm waters. You were only allowed to sail within a small bay separate from the commercial port at the island's northeast, and for the first time in your families' friendship, Hawkins felt guilty about accepting so much good will. Before this he had some pride and felt offended on his mother's behalf, that any help offered in his upkeep judged her as inadequate. His powers also meant your family would bear responsibility if he drowned, but they accepted the risk and kept sharing things with him like food and a sailboat and their roof, kept sharing you.

The two of you monopolized the paraw. Your older cousins already worked on larger fishing boats while this was functionally a sailed canoe, so the novelty was gone. The ones closer to your age gave you (and him) wide berth, so all summer the two of you sailed circles around the bay, taking turns reading your respective crafts while the other rigged.

"I don't know, Hawkins, it's a little cloudy," you hedged as you used a ruler to keep your place on your ephemeris table. You laid on your stomach on the floor of his room, knocking your shins into him as he sat with his back against his bed, his cards on the floor. He'd been fashioning some sort of stand for them out of straw, mostly to keep them off dirty surfaces, but the mutability of layouts he used made it difficult.

"All the more reason to practice. Do you think pirates get a choice in what the weather is like?"

You kicked his thigh with purpose. "Fine. But if we capsize or get rained on..."

"I didn't draw any Cups," Hawkins said.

"Really." You didn't sound impressed. "There's wet majors though. Did you get any of them?"

Just The Moon, but if he said that you'd be reminded of your sign correspondence rant. "We both got the Six of Swords."

It took you a minute to visualize it: two figures in a boat disembarking, a ferryman and their passenger. "Isn't that bad?"

After a year or so of using his mother's cards, Hawkins saved up enough money doing readings at the farmer's market to order an entirely pictorial deck, quicker for his personal recall than pips. You really preferred words and patterns over images, and responded to the pip deck like he didn't, but you gamely learned the pictures anyway.

You whined the whole time you followed him to the dock. It was cloudy, but the clouds were fluffy and white, not at all heavy with rain, and soon you were out on the water again, where Hawkins was starting to feel at home.

He wanted to see the world. He always had, as he and his mother moved incrementally throughout the North Blue and he noticed the slightest of differences from island to island. Then he met you, and the thought of the Grand Line struck him like lightning. That, and Devil Fruits being more commonplace there. He must have eaten his before he could talk, since he didn't remember it and never could swim to begin with. Your family had been fishermen for centuries, but your own mother neither swam nor feared the water. When the mentor you now shared said you would travel together, he knew that meant he would go to sea.

It was to those happy thoughts that Hawkins reclined across from you in the long outrigger and dozed off. Until...

"Hawkins!"

You shook him awake far more violently than he thought he deserved, and the first thing he noticed was the air was cool, cooler than it should be for a summer afternoon. He blinked one eye open and saw it was nighttime, sunset or just past sunset.

"Shit." You gasped, scandalized. "Don't be a baby," he grumbled as he started sitting up, but you smacked him in the shoulder so hard he went straight back down.

"I knew today wasn't a good sailing day!"

"It didn't rain."

"We're lost. Do you see the coastline?"

Hawkins squinted vaguely where he thought he horizon should be. "...No."

"Fuck!" you hissed.

"Fuck," he repeated.

"We're fine, actually. Okay. We're good." He didn't know if he believed you, but you nearly snapped your neck with how quickly you grabbed the compass that hung from it. "Okay. The new moon was four days ago, so she's waxing. Does that look like a quarter to you?" Hawkins knew better than to answer. "Either way, we can't have moved too far. Good thing the sails were furled."

You chewed your lip and looked up at the sky. He followed your gaze and saw only a field of stars, those clouds you worried about long gone. He stared long enough that his eyes started to water.

"Are you crying?"

"No." He wiped at his face with the back of his hand.

"We need to shunt. I think we've been going southeast."

"You think? How certain are you?"

"I'm not a navigator!" you snapped. "I don't know. I don't have like, a percentage for you, but I'm reasonably sure. Look. There's Polaris."

You pointed, and he supposed some of them looked brighter than the others, but he couldn't be certain. It amazed him that you read the sky like a map written just for you, and he wished his cards were half as useful to your shared survival.

"I'm putting my life in your hands."

You huffed. "It's already there." Hawkins stared, and wondered if you understood, without his saying it, everything you meant to him and how lost he would be without you, that the depth of it all would embarrass both of you, and—"You can't swim."

iv

Of course you'd grow apart. You spent more time on your family's fishing rigs, sailing without him, and Hawkins found a friend in a tan cat Mink. Faust was sixteen, like him, and Hawkins took the role of newcomers' guide that you once did. When you joined them, you and Faust pored over books the cat's parents collected while living in one of the North Blue's larger, more developed cities. Faust called them grimoires and good-naturedly defended against your questions about their origins and methods. Hawkins couldn't tell if you liked each other at all, but together you made an odd trio of teenagers with no choice for company but each other.

Or so he thought.

You stayed ashore more often as salmon season turned to halibut. As soon as Faust came over one especially foggy morning, the pair of boys started uphill to fetch you for a day of spellcasting and divination only to hear the familiar shriek of your laughter float up behind them—something they knew not to expect if you were only with your family. Hawkins followed Faust's gaze to the sight of you joined at the elbow with a girl.

That didn't make any sense. You didn't get along with girls just like Hawkins didn't get along with boys. Except for Faust. You were too rough and smelled too much like fish and no one had the patience for your stargazing and lectures that he did. Yet here you were.

He recognized the girl and the particular dirty blond of her hair from around the docks, so she must also come from seafaring stock. She noticed Hawkins and Faust before you did, and stopped in her tracks. You looked up, surprised. "Oh! I didn't know you were coming."

"I didn't know you needed warning," Hawkins said stiffly.

"Um." You seemed to hesitate, then unlinked your arm. "I can go from here. Thank you for inviting me."

The girl looked between him and Faust. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

To your credit, or in Hawkins' hopes, you said it coolly, with a knife's edge. You were fourteen and vibrant and tolerated offense no less than he did. As soon as the girl disappeared over the horizon, you smacked Hawkins in the funny bone. "Ow!"

"Sorry. I thought that was lower." You didn't sound sorry at all. "Can't you be a little friendly?"

"I barely said anything."

"Exactly. People think that's rude."

"Since when do you care what people think?"

"This is why my family doesn't like you."

"But you don't like your family."

You huffed, arms crossed. "Hi, Faust."

"Hi…" the Mink returned awkwardly. That's when Hawkins noticed, in your hand opposite the one you'd hooked into that girl's, the handles of a large straw basket out of which peeked the edge of the quilt he recognized from your room.

"Did you spend the night?"

"Yes, it's called a sleepover."

"What's so special about that?"

"I've never been before."

"Yes, you have."

"That's not a sleepover. That's… we're too tired to move."

"So you slept over." Why call it something? You used to do so all the time, but something changed in the last year or two. Your parents went to church in town now while your grandparents refrained. They'd always been warmer toward him, anyway, and even as their memory and vision went Hawkins remembered their fantastical tales from the Grand Line of crocodilian sea kings and Devil Fruit users with great fondness.

"This is a planned thing, for girls. I've never braided another girl's hair before."

"What's wrong with braiding mine? That's how you learned, anyway." It was past his shoulders now. He liked that it kept his neck warm and how you played with it, or used to.

"You don't notice anything different about me?" you said dangerously.

Hawkins blinked, and inspected your face, tilted up toward his. He was almost a head taller than you now. Apparently, his father stood over two meters in height and towered far above his mother. All he saw when he looked at you was the familiar flush of anger in your cheeks and neck, your brows drawn downward and your teeth biting into your lower lip the way they did when you tested him, usually over planetary rulerships.

"You look tired," he offered. "Not much of a sleepover."

You tossed your hair over your shoulder with such force it whipped him in the face. "Girls want to hear their hair is pretty, Hawkins. It's in Dutch braids, you moron."

So that's why it landed like a two-inch rope, and flew behind your head like two hissing snakes as you ran uphill away from him.

Faust amused himself with the knitting basket in Hawkins' living room while Hawkins stared, annoyed, at the spread in front of him. It was full of court cards, but most glaringly what he'd come to think of as one of your cards, The Star.

Hawkins didn't think he needed to say your hair was the prettiest thing in the world to him. Black like a crow's wing, he thought when he saw it lately, and the scarecrows he made seemed more of an omen than any card. Black like the night sky, and on and near the full moon he could see the stars reflected in your eyes when you told him about constellations and named stars and their legends, Algorab in Corvus representing a sun god. Your hair curled like ocean currents with humidity and stayed straight in the winter, and as much as he liked Faust, he missed being younger and alone with you.

He thought saying so would embarrass you like you blushed after telling him his hair was pretty, like you always had. But the Ace of Swords at the top of the Celtic cross's tree told him what was missing between you two was words.

That, and Faust saying, "Instead of the cards, you could talk to her."

So Hawkins leaned against the stone fence surrounding your family's yard, keeping one eye on your bedroom window for light and another on refining his current iteration of straw dolls. He read in one of Faust's books about figural proxies for enemies made out of clay, and the dolls he'd idly made his whole life took on new purpose. They needed to be simple but still recognizably humanoid, and small enough to hide in his arm, though he could make any part of his body into straw. He knew his powers unsettled your mother and father, but there was precious little else he could do since they hated tarot more.

"Natulog siya," one of the many elders milling in and out said to him, and he understood despite not being able to respond.

Eventually, the shutters on your window opened and you called down to him, "Stay there." It was almost twilight then, and he was getting hungry. You emerged with your hair damp and loose from a bath, a steamer basket, and two spoons. "Well?"

"I'm sorry," Hawkins said quickly.

"For?"

Damn it. "I don't know, but your feelings are hurt, and I don't want to be the reason." The Queen and King of Cups were both in the spread, more sage and articulate in this realm than either of you.

You set the bamboo basket down on the fence, and the smell of sticky rice and sweet sausage wafted into his face as you took off the lid and stabbed a spoon into it like a knife for him to grab. "You're so full of yourself," you chided. He stuck a spoonful of rice in his mouth and waited for you to elaborate. You met his eye and relented. "It's not only you."

He swallowed. "Did she do something?"

You shook your head. "It's the others. And you didn't help."

Others. Come to think of it, he didn't ask you any more about the night you had or whether you had any fun at all, who was there besides the girl who accompanied you home, why you didn't tell him beforehand, why you even went.

"Tell me."

Ultimately, the townspeople treated you and Faust the same, nevermind your family's not insignificant history on the island. Your mother had a new obsession with correcting this, likely prompted by your friendship with the Mink, and pushed for you to befriend churchgoing children even as you stayed home or avoided the ordeal at sea or at his house. It only made sense for you to attach to the only other girl from a fishing family.

"They suck, Hawkins, and they kept asking about you and—" Your face went red, and he couldn't imagine why. He knew he had a reputation as a heretic and something of a brawler, how he fared in fights now since his growth spurt. "I didn't like them braiding my hair."

Now he was really confused. You were so prissy and proud of those braids, but even with the fragrant spices of the meal you shared, he smelled your shampoo, stronger than usual, like you'd scrubbed your scalp raw.

Despite his uncertainty, he braced his hands on the stone fence and swung himself over.

"What—"

Hawkins pulled you into his arms, awkwardly, still unused to the size of the hand that nearly dwarfed the back of your head, and your spoon fell onto the gravel.

"Is this okay?" he asked quietly.

After a moment, you nodded against his collar.

"No one's going to touch you without you wanting it ever again," he said firmly.

"…You don't know that." It was a mumble, but he understood.

"Let me try."

You uncurled your arms from against his shirt and slid them under his elbows, holding him in turn. "Okay."

v

Hawkins and Faust were nineteen by the time they'd saved (robbed) enough funds to fix up an old cutter to get them started on their travel. You had your hands full with your family's business and were frankly too buried in books on cartography and geography to actually set sail. He kept it to himself, but Hawkins was relieved, not yet confident that he could protect you at sea like he did on land. Half the point of this journey around his home sea was testing his straw combat against more than hometown bullies.

His mother wasn't pleased, not with Hawkins' decision—she'd had something of an wild youth herself that resulted in his birth and her returning home in disgrace—but yours. "I don't know how you'll survive without her," she tutted. She stayed out of the house as he packed to spare him her fretting, and instead you sat on his bed berating him even more than she would.

"That's not enough sweaters for the 60^th parallel," you were saying.

"I have thicker skin than you."

You chucked his pillow at him, and he caught it easily in one hand.

"I know you're proud of your tattoo, but it's not worth hypothermia."

You said your like you didn't have a matching one high on your back, easily hidden while Hawkins resorted to wearing turtlenecks and scarves anytime he went into town. (You dutifully shaved a cross-shaped bald spot onto Faust's hip that the Mink quickly decided wasn't worth it.)

"And what if we never go that far north?" Hawkins challenged.

"Aren't you supposed to be practicing for the Grand Line?"

He started stuffing more knitwear into his sea bag before you noticed you'd won the argument.

The way you came together was incremental, like the course of Saturn.

Nothing obvious changed after that fall day, but sometimes Faust excused himself like he was intruding when as far as Hawkins could tell you were exactly as annoying as before and he only responded in kind. For your fifteenth birthday you asked for your first kiss, and he didn't need to say it was his, too, chapped and awkward in February, and again nothing changed in the aftermath, like it was transactional as reading each other's cards or charts. He was eighteen when the old neighbor witch slid him a book on synastry with dogeared pages he recognized as aspects between your horoscopes, and he passed it along like a courier, pretending not to see your pretty blush as you realized the same thing.

Hawkins knew, empirically, that young men like him were supposed to be hotblooded and greedy, but that wasn't his nature, and no one else, girl or boy, held his interest like you. He tripped over himself and tied his own tongue in knots when your eyes sparkled with excitement or your mouth ran a mile a minute with some new theory or connection you'd made. He wasn't so obtuse to pretend either of you were kids anymore, and if he thought too long about how soft you were when you leaned against him in a sailboat or as you animatedly disagreed with his interpretations, he felt warm and itchy like he never did.

You used his bed like it was your own, and even though you were both grown now—he was turning twenty soon, damn it—you still fell sleep there guilelessly, using him as a pillow as he grew too large to share. It also meant you got crumbs on his quilt and left books on his nightstand, like Seas of the World, bent at the spine at the chapter on the North Blue. It comforted him that you'd keep his mother company, if only because the woman would chase you in here to clean up after yourself.

Once he was satisfied with his luggage, Hawkins moved to escort you home one last time since he and Faust planned to leave at twilight the next morning, but you stopped him with an odd, fragile-sounding "Wait."

"What is it now?"

You closed his door and leaned against it, fidgeting your hands on the doorknob behind you.

"Can I ask you a favor?"

It was the same thing you said when you tiptoed up to kiss him three years ago.

"Speak."

You bit your lip, the color leaving it as your white teeth sank into the thin skin.

"Would you be my first?"

His breath caught.

"First mate? I thought you didn't want to be captain."

Your neck was almost bright red, and the color lurked up your jaw. "Don't make me say it." You were seventeen now and the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and he was a pirate. Couldn't he be selfish? "You can't be a pirate and a virgin, Hawkins."

"Watch me."

"It's not just for me, is what I'm saying," you said.

"Generous."

"There's no one else."

You were dangerously close to pleading, and he was unsettled by the high it gave him as he sat on the edge of his mattress.

"So your asking me for… lack of choice?"

"No, Hawkins, I—" You were looking over his shoulder instead of at his face, too embarrassed, until you weren't. "It was going to be us, wasn't it?"

The tense of it was strange, and melancholy.

He watched your chest rise and fall with heavy breaths, the sheen of nervous sweat that gathered on your brow, your bare thighs and socked calves that drove him to distraction all afternoon as you flopped about his bed without a care.

"Come here."

You moved slowly, like an animal stalking him, shy steps across his rug until he reached for your wrist and pulled you into his lap.

"Oh…!"

Oh was right. Hawkins was surprised at himself, but your eyes were dark and molten as you stared more at his neck, your hands curled on his chest, and his frequent observation that you were so small next to him was never more apparent than now. He could position you like a doll, and the thought that you'd let him made him dizzy as he cupped your jaw and tugged your lip away from your teeth. "Stop that," he said softly.

You nodded, obedient, like you never were.

He slanted his mouth over yours and sucked that lip between his own, and your surprised squeak was nearly as loud in his ears as his moan at the taste of you, at doing this right instead of the chance he'd wasted before. You tasted like the fruit juice you'd had with lunch and saliva, the first time he'd ever considered it had a taste, so sweet and bright and familiar and right for the girl who changed his gloomy young life.

Your hands bunched in his shirt and tugged, and he had the bizarre realization that you must like looking at him, too, how you reverently slid it over his head and arms and let your warm hands wander over his skin.

"You're staring," he said, confused.

"Mm."

You pressed a kiss to his collarbone, your fingers combing through a few locks of long, cornsilk hair that partially hid his body from view.

"I'll be gentle," you promised, and he chuckled.

"That's for me to say."

You pouted, and one of your fingertips ghosted across his nipple, earning a sharp hiss. "Is that okay?" you asked, worried.

"We're not making it far if you keep at it."

Your eyes widened, and you took him in as if for the first time. "When did you get so big?" You were only looking at the breadth of his shoulders and the size of his arms, and he wondered if times he'd caught you zoning out were all days his sleeves were rolled up.

"Are you scared?"

You shook your head. "I trust you."

"I don't know what I'm doing, either," he warned.

"It's you," you said, and there was something resolute and heavy in it.

"Can I?" He fingered the hem of your dress, bunched up by your hips, practically baring you against him, hot and real, and his blood rushed to meet you there.

"Please."

And Hawkins couldn't help his awe at how you held your shoulders back and your chin up against your impulse to do the opposite. His hand first searched out the black cross between your shoulder blades, not visible to him while he held you like this, but the slight difference in your skin's texture from the still-healing scar under his palm soothed some animal part of him that you'd marked yourself his. He was yours, too, lost to you since you pulled him into your world.

He kissed you again, this time holding either side of your face and stroking his thumbs over your cheeks. "It's us," he murmured against your lips.

vi

The Hawkins Pirates were effectively on hiatus after barely making out of the arctic circle with their captain's modest bounty of 40 million berries. Their shipwright, helmsman, and Faust were docked at a North Blue shipyard with their sloop for repairs and renovations. Since the cat Mink's family moved south, Hawkins made his homecoming after three years away alone and under cover. It was difficult enough to stay in touch without some Navy captain tapping his communications, but the last he heard from you was a vague "studying!"

Now Hawkins knew why you withheld so much detail.

"What the hell are you wearing?" you said, nodding at his pauldron.

"That's what I was going to say." He ripped the Marine cap off your head, sending your hair flying. "Are you in debt?"

"Hey!" You stood on your tiptoes and hopped up and down to try and get it back, to no avail. Hawkins finally stopped growing and now stood half a meter taller than you. You huffed. "I can explain."

You hadn't lost your mind and joined the Navy, but allowed a cadet to think he was recruiting you so you could steal his maps and course texts.

"So why does that entail dressing like a Marine?" Hawkins grumbled.

"It's his," you said with a shrug, and he froze. You didn't notice, or pretended not to. "He hardly has anything. It's his CO who knows more 'cause he's trying to transfer to the G-1, and—"

Hawkins threw the cap into the harbor like a boomerang.

He expected you to smack him in the arm like you used to, but instead you crossed yours and looked at him with one raised eyebrow.

"Sorry," he deadpanned.

"I'm sure."

You said it with a laugh in your voice, not upset at all, and grabbed his hand in yours, interlacing your slim fingers with his.

You were still so warm, like sunrise in winter.

It was past sunset. Hawkins wore a cloak to hide his distinctive hair and brow, but his presence at your side did plenty to identify him anyway. The nearest Navy outpost, where he assumed your mark was stationed, was a few islands away. On the walk to your home you murmured to Hawkins that they inconsistently watched his mother's house since he got his bounty, thought nothing more than a pair of Marines visiting town with an obvious detour to its outskirts.

If your immediate family's tolerance for him waned through the years, it was never worse than now with a bounty to his name. Their elders, on the other hand, welcomed Hawkins back like a son, a foolish, presumptuous part of him whispered as the pair of you helped them set up a low dining table in the yard. His mother joined after her shift was over to eat her fill and went home ahead of him for additional caution.

"You're ready?" he asked quietly as you hugged him good night.

You nodded. "All packed."

There was no way of knowing precisely when, but the plan was for Faust and the others to sail by without dropping anchor some night around the new moon, which gave you a few days to say your goodbyes—more bitter than sweet, with your mentor dead—and Hawkins a few days' rest, and time with his mother.

A more ostentatious sort of pirate would have returned with jewels for the women he loved. Instead he was as awkward and practical as he'd always been, still a boy at twenty-three. The one time Hawkins went to the trouble of sending berries home was for the funeral of the first tarot reader he saw; otherwise, he buried exchanged gold in a location known only to him and his mother.

For you, he only had the world.

🜄

After meeting the skeleton crew of Hawkins Pirates who'd returned so far, Hawkins showed you to your cabin like he wasn't quietly floored by the changes made to the ship that had carried him for the better part of three years. One of them was a cramped office stuffed to the gills with a twin-sized bed and built-in bookshelves.

"Not fair, captain!" Faust had crowed.

"She's not bunking with you brutes," Hawkins said, feeling color rise up the back of his neck at his own hypothetical, you in a cold dorm full of men. Yes, he trusted his crew, but—

"How proper," you teased. "But you couldn't have recruited another girl?"

You unpacked a trunk full of ephemerides and other references, celestial and terrestrial, while Hawkins leaned against the door frame. There was so little space that he would only hinder, and really he should leave you alone and explore the newly-christened Grudge Dolph for himself, even though he was self-conscious at its styling by their enthusiastic shipwright. He preferred to examine you.

You knew your legs were pretty, didn't you, with how you stuck to short skirts, and the one you wore now hiked up as you tiptoed to reach the high shelves. You wore a bit of makeup, now, just lightly lining your already huge eyes so they looked massive. And you wore heeled boots that boosted you a mere few inches, not enough to make a difference if he wanted to kiss you—he did, desperately—but enough to draw a gloriously long silhouette for such a short woman. His favorite thing of all, your hair, was wavier than ever before, dark as the arctic sea.

"You're staring," you said without turning around.

For some reason, he didn't feel ashamed. "Can't I?"

"Just you," you said cheekily. "Captain."

Despite your tone, he frowned. "You don't have to come. I know things change—"

"Oh, don't act like you're giving me an out," you said. "It's us, isn't it?"

Those words were the strongest binding spell Hawkins could think of.

"Besides, my grandparents think we eloped."

Hawkins truly thought he misheard. "Excuse me?"

"That was functionally a wedding dinner. They're already confused I didn't go with you right away. We can't turn around now."

While he was lured by the thought, he shook his head. "I drew The High Priestess for you."

"Mm. And you're taking it to mean I'm doomed to spinsterdom?"

He was a little caught out, not used to hearing such talk from you. "You're meant for greater things. The Grand Line."

The pirate king's right hand.

Hawkins didn't verbalize such ambitions, but his crew and onlookers whispered their opinions as he conquered his home sea.

"And did you have any such reminders? Warnings?"

You didn't react to the confession that he never stopped drawing three cards for himself and three for you, every day, for three years. Sometimes he made a cross, as if your paths could meet while he sailed further and further from you. Like you were still conjoined, you gripping him like you didn't want him to leave, and he almost took you with him anyway.

The more accurate his personal readings seemed, the more leeway he had to worry about you when the Five of Coins proved to mean a dry spell for his growing crew, or the Nine of Swords mocked him after a sleepless night. Justice glared up at him for you one day, and he hoped it worked in your favor; he couldn't help wondering what could possibly be meant by the Two of Cups without him there.

The day he saw you again, he drew the Two of Swords and the Two of Wands—two different crossroads. For him, a difficult, contradictory choice; for you, the precipice of a journey.

"The Devil."

"Because you're known for your excesses."

Hawkins chuckled, to put you at ease more than anything, because he saw stranger and stranger characters as he approached the Red Line. He wouldn't be surprised to see a gargantuan, horned beast peering down at him with a torch or bat in hand.

"I have one last thing for you," he said.

"This is already so much, Hawkins, really—"

"The left desk drawer."

You slid it open and Hawkins heard the clatter of its contents sliding across the wood. You gasped as you held it up to the light, a silver dagger with an amethyst at its hilt, sheathed in a black leather scabbard.

"It will be dangerous," he said seriously. "You need to hold your own to be a pirate, but I'll protect you when I can."

When you were both younger, he might have promised more—he did. But now he knew the sea had its price.

You nodded. "Is there someone who can teach me to use it? Faust—"

"Me," Hawkins said. "You can cut me. I won't bleed."

"Um," you started, "how?"

He left your door cracked as he went to tour his new-old ship.

vii

Those first three years, Hawkins and Faust split navigational duties based on what they learned from you, Hawkins from learning to sail with you and Faust from a two-week intensive that threatened to unravel your friendship. They made do with functioning compasses and reliable sea charts, but with you aboard, it was truly smooth sailing.

You were popular with the crew. Why wouldn't you be? Intelligent and beautiful and brimming with humor that Hawkins lacked. The Grudge Dolph had never been so full of laughter. On more than one occasion, Hawkins felt taken back to to those alchemical debates between you and Faust, on the margins of something he understood but couldn't get his hands around. That was when he brooded in his room, staring at his cards, bewildered.

Because there were also the nights where you pawed at his door like a cat, then stretched coyly across the width of his bed asking to see what he read that day, and the two of you argued past midnight between his methods and yours, and sometimes it ended with you straddling his waist on the mattress and kissing him dumb before you flounced down the hall again in a frustrated huff.

"Do you actually dislike reversals," Hawkins would say, "or are you just repeating what we were taught?"

"Yes, I think they're limiting and unrealistic for divination, which isn't fortunetelling, anyway, it's confirmation bias and—"

Rinse and repeat.

It was so very juvenile and so very intoxicating. Being in the galley kitchen with you the next morning made him hot in the face, the pair of you waking up later than anyone else like you weren't critical to determining the ship's course. Faust eyed the two of you like you were making kittens, which Hawkins would very much prefer, but you simply had too much to say. His complement, the sun shining on his moon, articulate and infuriating.

The night he turned the tables, he hovered over you, his hair a curtain around your face as he braced his hands on his headboard, your knees splaying open to hold him.

"Finally," you'd said with a contented hum, licking your way into his mouth.

You still had your opinions and complaints after that, but he found you lost your train of thought if he sat you on his lap and kissed you again and again, sweeter and briefer than what you sought from him, because you really seemed ready to eat him alive.

"Captain" was a cloying, evil word on your clever tongue to the point he considered ordering you to stop saying it. When it came to navigation, you only ever called him his name or "you," but "captain"...

You said it when you left dinner early, pressing your tits against his arm. You said it when you scolded him for his thin shirts, licking your lips like a carnivore. And you squealed it behind his hand as he folded your legs up on his bed, murmuring by your ear to please move into the captain's quarters if only for its thicker walls.

But in daylight, you treated Hawkins the same as ever, serenely ignoring the few of the crew's crude jokes. You poked at his warabide as curiously as you studied his straw dolls and followed his instructions as he taught you basic knife combat. For lack of a proxy, he simply layered his vulnerable areas in straw, and your blade harmlessly slipped between the fibers once you were satisfied you wouldn't hurt him.

One afternoon of sparring, you landed your would-be deadliest blow to his gut after palming his crotch with a wicked grin on your lips.

"You better not try that again," he said weakly, panting as he laid on his back on the deck where they trained.

"On you, or anyone?"

Instead of taking the bait, he let himself ask what haunted him. "Where did you learn to be such a menace?"

You held out your hand to help him up, and he grasped along your forearm. "I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do." He didn't step back, instead bringing your hand back to where it was, half-tented from your teasing.

Your eyes darkened with mischief. "Here?"

"You started it."

To his shock, you sank to your knees, unbuckling his belt as you went. "Oh—"

You giggled. "You're kind of innocent, captain."

"Aren't you?"

"Hmm." You breathed him through his underwear, and he thought he'd die. "Three years is a long time. You haven't been busy?"

He grunted what he thought was a clear negative. You were all he thought of when the rare urge took him, your sighs and choked little noises before he left you in his childhood bed, how you quivered as you took him and cooed encouragement and thank you's.

"You mean this is all mine?" You kissed the side of his length as it sprang free, looking up at him through your dark lashes.

"Yes," he hissed.

"Interesting," you said conversationally as you started pumping his cock in your hand. "I have a lot to show you then," before slurping his tip into your mouth.

It didn't last long.

Your mouth was hot and inviting, your lips too soft, and you hadn't even taken him to your throat when he spurt and splattered against your tongue. You were so surprised you released him, letting him cum all over your pretty face and neck.

"Fuck," you whispered.

"I'm," Hawkins started, "so sorry, I—"

You licked your lips and moaned quietly as you swept globs of fluid from your skin with your fingertips and sucked them clean, and the sound was somehow more indecent than any full throated cry he drew from you at night.

Hawkins all but dragged you to the bath like an errant beast while you protested you only needed to wash your face, that you didn't mind, that you liked it, which was so beyond his understanding he avoided you the rest of the day, even taking dinner in his room while he, again, conversed with his cards instead of you, like Faust so damningly observed all those years ago. In lieu of the Mink, Temperance advised him against the extreme course of never looking at or touching you again, so he knocked on your door.

"What are we doing?" Hawkins blurted as it swung open.

"Hi, Hawkins," you said smoothly. "Would you like to come in?"

Sex was usually reserved for his room and larger bed, so he had no expectations for what tonight would bring, even as you wore a short bathrobe this late that confirmed you'd walked around with traces of him on your skin until now. You wore silver glasses at this hour that glinted more like jewelry, and the ink on the side of your palm told him you were in the middle of some work.

"I can come back later."

You stepped close and snaked your foot around his calf, like a shepherd's crook. "Come in."

Even though he came here with a bone to pick with you, he got a sense of being in trouble that you sometimes instilled in him. It usually had to do with him sulking like this or some technical imprecision on his part, celestial or nautical. Hawkins sat on the edge of your bed with his hands fisted on his knees while you leaned against your desk, arms crossed, which unfairly pushed your breasts up and nearly out of your robe. He swallowed.

"Are we in a relationship?"

You tilted your head thoughtfully, like a crow considering a morsel. "Of course. It's all relationships."

That was one of your stock phrases when you tried to teach Faust astrology, that planets' positions relative to one another were more interesting than their individual placements.

"Don't give me that. What am I to you?"

"Too many things." Hawkins was glad you didn't let such a melancholy, ominous phrase hang in the air when you continued, "You're my captain. My partner in everything. Learning. Sailing. Bed. All of it."

"But..."

"'But?'"

Hawkins exhaled and massaged his brow with his fingertips. "If someone else, like Faust or your cadet or one of the men approached you..."

You guffawed a laugh. "Faust?"

"If another man. Or woman—"

"Not that there's many around here," you said pointedly.

"Would you sleep with someone else?"

You looked at him seriously. "No."

He sighed in relief. "And would you have any feelings if I..."

"You wouldn't. You haven't."

"You're right."

"Does it bother you that I have?"

It was his turn to consider you. You were so vibrant and curious, a star walking on earth, abandoned by her counterpart that he couldn't fairly be upset. Besides, "One of us has to know what we're doing."

"That's another thing." You actually seemed to hesitate, which he didn't think you ever would around this topic. "Your bathing."

"My bathing," he repeated. He didn't expect that.

"I know you've always been like this," you said, "and do I think it's compulsive? Maybe, but I'm biased because I have dry skin and think too much is bad for you. But!" You physically shook yourself from your tangent. "How do you suppose your partner feels when as soon as you're done you need to scrub yourself clean?"

"Well, it's..." He stopped.

"Sex is gross," you conceded. "Of course it is. It's sweaty and if it's any good there better be some body fluids. But it's also natural. And I worry about you being... I don't know, repulsed?" You winced at yourself. "If you want to stop, we can. It's okay not to like sex when you feel like you should. I know I'm pushy. I kind of—"

"No," Hawkins said forcefully, standing up. "I like it. I love it. With you."

You sighed in relief. "Show me."

He closed the distance in your small room with just two strides, and you preemptively tilted your head up to meet his gaze, spreading your legs so he could stand close. You squeaked when he smoothed his hands up your thighs to grab your ass and carry you, pinning you to your nearby bookshelves.

"Holy shit—" you breathed. You made no contact with the floor at all, completely at his mercy, and you hooked one ankle around his waist for stability. He groaned feeling how wet and hot you were, your short robe no barrier at all.

"I can't believe you let me have you like this," he murmured as you undid his pants, a repeat of this afternoon, but more frenzied, more desperate. You pumped his cock a few times before guiding it to your entrance, spreading your lips with your other hand and hissing at the stretch of his thick head. "Careful—"

"Don't wanna. Need you."

Need you.

"I don't want to hurt you—"

"No, I'm ready, I—" You whimpered. "I've been so wet all day. Because of you. I k-kept touching myself."

He held back, controlling the pace, and you whined and thrashed your head against the spines of your books. "You're so spoiled."

"And whose fault is that?" you said hotly. "It's not fair. I missed you so much—"

"Missed me?" he said through his teeth as he buried himself deep. You moaned loudly. "Or missed my cock?"

"You. Both. Both, captain, fuck—"

"And you've had enough to compare?"

"You said it didn't bother you!" you shot back, and Hawkins rolled his eyes.

"I think this is called dirty talk, isn't it?"

"Oh—!" You gasped as he rolled his hips, a slow and sinful grind. "Yes—!"

"I asked you a question." He was confident enough in his core strength and his thighs to take one hand and lightly slap your cheek as he held it. "Hmm?"

"No one—no one's like you," you sputtered as you threw your arms around his neck, your hands wandering along his back, and you looked at him like he was someone new. He felt like someone new. Your partner, your only one.

"What? No one's as big?"

You bit your lip, and he thumbed it out of harm's way like he did back then, holding the digit there as you spoke in a pout. "Fuck. No, I've had—thicker—" The thought of some faceless other man stretching you even more almost made him lose composure. "Like that, captain—slow—deep—"

All the while, because you drew his attention to it, he was more conscious than ever of the sweat on both your chests as you clung together, the slickness between your legs that almost made him slip out, how your walls hugged him and pulsed deliberately based on your smug little grimace when he choked at the feeling, the drool pooling in your mouth and on your tongue as you panted like an animal, and he kissed you meaning to drink it in. And it wasn't dirty; it was all you, all the two of you, mixed together, like you were supposed to be.

Your fingers found their way to his scalp and wove into his hair, and he moaned against your mouth at the slight tug to his roots, and you smirked audibly in his ear as you sucked at the skin behind it. "That's it, captain—good boy—" At that, Hawkins took on a new pace, and you squealed as he somehow drove you higher against the shelves, his arms hooking under your knees as he opened you like a book. "Captain—!"

"Cum," he growled against your skin. You moved your fingers from his crown to your clit, rubbing vigorously, sloppily.

"Yes, captain—"

"You test me. Every day—"

"I know, I know—oh—oh!"

His own release came first, again, and he didn't feel ashamed with how you tumbled on after, clamping down like you savored every last drop of him. You hummed lewdly, scratching at his scalp again like he was a dog, and as he softened inside you he thought he wouldn't mind being yours when you took such good care of him.

As Hawkins smoothed lotion on your skin after your first shared bath, you grumbling about its redundancy, he kissed your ankle reverently. "Thank you," he said, running his thumb over the top of your foot.

"For?"

"Guiding me."

It was open-ended, endless, like he hoped your life together was.

viii

You left the ship again.

You weren't unique in this, and Hawkins didn't expect everyone to stay put when they docked for the sake of his anxiety. But until a few months ago, you bounced on the heels of your boots waiting for him to accompany you as you checked out the port town's bookstores or farmer's markets ever since the Grudge Dolph's cook allowed you kitchen privileges. This usually ended with you using your captain as a pack mule, not because you were weak but because you were so short your shopping bags nearly dragged along the ground and he couldn't stand it.

Lately you disappeared in the bustle of men going down the gangplank, and on questioning none of them knew what you were up to, not even Faust, who Hawkins hoped kept your confidence even if the space between you two seemed to grow. You had been at sea with him for nearly two years now. It was ironic your family thought of you two as newlyweds, because he'd call those first few months a honeymoon. Cracks appeared soon afterward. If he lived in total denial, he'd say the reason he didn't notice them was your refusal to move into his room.

But he noticed, as did the rest of the crew.

🜄

You pursed your lips in the way you did when you disagreed with him. Hawkins was used to it in conversation, but not now, not when—

"Behind you!"

You ducked, and he thanked fate for your instincts, like a panther as you avoided a glaive by a wide margin. You were distracted your first time being caught in combat, and he was a nervous wreck over it until you got onto the Grudge Dolph safely. He only found you after they pulled up the anchor to make their escape, in the narrow companionway between your rooms.

"Hawkins—" you started, cut off by a near-bruising kiss. You made a little "mmph!" of annoyance before reciprocating, like you couldn't help it.

"Be more careful," he rasped, holding your face and studying you for damage or fear, but you looked... angry.

"I've never seen you do that before," you countered. You circled his wrists with your long fingers to gently pry him off, settling for holding both his hands.

"Do what?"

"'Life, minus one,'" you quoted.

He blinked. "Yes, you have." He first tried it when he was a teenager.

"And it scared me back then. But on people..." You bit your lower lip, your habit, and stared unseeingly at his sternum.

Hawkins knew explaining the logistics of it, the evolution of this technique wouldn't appease you. His first tests used shellfish because you were so disturbed at boiling crabs alive but didn't want to knock them out, either, so he attached one crustacean's life to a straw doll and knocked his head into the mast of your paraw. You'd screamed, but you were barely more than a girl then. Now, you were a pirate. What moral qualms could you possibly have?

"They were enemies."

You thumped him in the chest with the flat of your palm. "I don't like seeing you decapitated. You be more careful."

Hawkins exhaled something like a laugh.

"It isn't funny," you said hotly, tilting your head up to glare at him.

He cupped your jaw and kissed you again, softly. "You don't have to watch. You shouldn't. Look after yourself."

You sighed. "Yes, captain."

🜄

Hawkins was an old hand at ignoring the faces you made, but for some reason he was sensitive that day. Maybe because you managed to be too busy for him lately, between calculating latitudes and writing your log and tutoring some of the crew in astrology.

"What is it, navigator?"

You looked surprised that he'd say something, surprised that your sass was going checked here and not in private. "Nothing that can't wait."

"No, speak."

It was the domineering tone he sometimes used if you goaded him into it, and he saw your breathing change in response.

"I don't think it's very responsible to dispense percentages when as far as I can tell no one here knows your methodology. I can't even guess it."

The Grudge Dolph was sailing toward a North Blue Marine base previously occupied with monitoring the Donquixote Pirates until a few years ago, when Vice Admiral Tsuru transferred to the Grand Line with much of their original force. But their numbers were up again as rookies like Hawkins and the Surgeon of Death became notorious in this sea, so Hawkins shared his prediction with the gathered crew for their chances of passing without detection.

"You drew, what, Strength Reversed? How does that translate to an integer? Especially given deck numberings? But beyond that—" You didn't let him respond. "How do we get around them? Isn't that my job?"

Hawkins bristled, but kept outwardly cool. He hoped. "Navigate, then."

It was a sound plan: drop anchor until sundown since the moon was just waxing, a silver sickle dim in the sky behind cloud cover anyway, and sail west on the opposite side of a small, uninhabited strait bracketed by melting ice. It was circuitous and added a day and a night to their route, but your recommendations usually let them avoid engaging the Navy. Some of the men found it cowardly, but Hawkins and the rest knew it saved their lives on more than one occasion. Having a captain with a bounty was bad enough; the longer they could avoid identification of other Hawkins Pirates, the better. The Navy already knew they had a Mink among their numbers, though they seemed to disagree about the color of Faust's coat.

It was the sort of plan Hawkins would have heard before. In the quiet of the morning when you finished shooting your sights, despite trying not to wake him up. You'd return to his room with tea for him and coffee for you, and listen to his interpretation of that morning's spread, and offer your thoughts on the ship's coming course.

But he couldn't remember the last time you woke up in his bed.

"Right," Hawkins said as their helmsman agreed more effusively. "You don't consider you're the reason the odds are generally favorable?"

It would've been a flirtation if he had any kind of grace, and you just cocked one eyebrow.

"You have too much faith in me."

Later, Hawkins tells you, knowing he hasn't a leg to stand on, that he wishes you wouldn't argue in front of the crew. You tilted your head as you half-listened. Instead of apologizing, you bent over your desk and said in your lowest purr, "Fix my attitude."

He did, to his shame and pleasure.

It started a cycle of arguments and discipline, increasingly urgent sex he barely dared dream of, but these days you seemed to provoke him in public, from morn to midnight. If you wanted him to be rough with you, he thought you could simply ask, but instead you picked at wounds only you knew about, and no matter how good the sex was, you still left sharp words hanging in the air. He wasn't sure he was much better, kissing your neck in the bath and murmuring thank you's and sorry's against your skin like you couldn't make yourself.

Hawkins was a proud man; you were prouder, and tenfold more stubborn. What would you say it was? Your Aquarius stellium, a fixed sign giving the bull a run for its money, complemented by the Scorpio in his own chart. To him, that was The Star and Death. So of course you were so convinced of your rightness. You blinded him with your brilliance, and he was the end that gave rise to you. He couldn't resent you.

He only wanted you to stay.

🜄

Your last argument was about Strawman Cards. You questioned why it was a game with turns taken, why ever give the enemy an opening, and why he didn't stack his deck since he was making up the rules anyway.

That was weeks ago.

Hawkins stopped you before you went below deck. You were polishing off what looked like some sort of wrap, the sort of street food dinner you would normally share and swap bites of if yours didn't have too much meat for his palate.

"Can I help you, captain?"

You said it more plainly, no innuendo at all. Like you didn't want to say his name.

"What have you been doing these last four days?"

It was a long time for them to dock, but they were about to sail the edge of the upper calm belt, so this was a welcome rest before more difficult southern waters.

"Do you monitor all your men like this?" you asked.

"Only my woman."

It was crass, but what he felt, and it seemed to crack something in you. You looked around the deck to confirm your privacy before you stepped close to him, closer than you'd been in Hawkins didn't know how long, and he noticed you were wearing new boots, taller than any of the ones you had already.

"I'm reading tarot," you said finally.

"You're... what?"

Hawkins didn't know what he expected.

"It's faster than astrology," you rushed out. "And I don't want to—I won't stay in the captain's quarters or rely on you for an allowance."

"It's not my money," Hawkins protested. "We're crewmates."

"That doesn't matter. Everyone else is a man with seniority over me, nevermind there's first-time sailors among them. Maybe I should've been here from the start."

He stilled. "Did someone say something?" He loved his crew, truly. But you took priority. Or was that the problem: that even he set you apart?

"They don't have to, Hawkins. It's not just them. I don't want to be known as your girlfriend."

"You're... embarrassed?"

"Not because it's you, just—" You took a breath. "If I ever get a bounty, it better be mine, is all I'm saying."

"So this is envy, actually, you want a bit of infamy—"

"Of course not! But I wanted to stop fighting. Didn't you notice?" You sounded so frantic, so unlike the wild woman he loved. "I thought if I read on my own, actually practiced, I wouldn't be so annoyed by Strawman Cards. I thought—"

"We stopped fighting," he conceded. "We stopped talking."

Despite your decidedly grown-up activities and statures, there were times Hawkins felt like he was playing pretend, that the grand sloop under his command was still the fishing rig on loan from your family somehow inflated all around you two, and the pair of you were just as inarticulate and childish as you'd ever been. Two kids playing pirates, unable to handle friction.

He exhaled.

"It makes you feel better?"

You nodded, meeting his eye seriously. "I needed to cool off. I know you're not—I know it's different. It's how you fight, it's how you protect us, it's—I shouldn't have been so critical."

He let you squirm until your gaze shifted somewhere lower, his neck and chest, and you fidgeted with the bottom hem of your skirt.

"Look at me."

Your eyes were wet, not quite tearful, though he caught one on his index finger before he rested his hands on your shoulders. "You're being safe? They don't know you're a pirate?"

You smiled ironically. "People are slower to assume that about women. And it helps to be... exotic."

The more of his home sea he saw, the more evident it became to Hawkins just how distinctive your family was, how much you stuck out.

"They might connect us," Hawkins warned. "Cartomancy isn't common."

"Then I'll stop," you said simply. "It might do us good, in a way. If we're like a circus act."

That bothered Hawkins, a little. You called tarot a "party trick" in contrast to the science of astronomy and astrology, though he supposed there was a showmanship to both the divination and his Devil Fruit techniques.

"I got you something a few ports ago, by the way. Help me?"

You had arms full of shopping bags, and Hawkins transferred them to his longer limbs with practiced ease.

That night, Hawkins flicked through and shuffled the smaller tarot deck you bought him and wondered if you were still bitter. It was a pip deck like he first learned and struggled with, closer to playing cards with its dearth of illustrations. The kind you used.

ix

You came back to him in the worst of circumstances.

By the time you entered the Grand Line, Hawkins hadn't kissed you in months. You'd been on the Grudge Dolph for five years, soon to be six. The crew changed enough that you were now one of the veterans. Newer additions you picked up in this sea were surprised to learn you grew up together, much less that you were ever lovers. Their captain was stoic and sage; their navigator was no-nonsense, hardly mystical at all.

But there were still glimmers. Hawkins touched you easily, moving you by your hips to get around you in the narrow spaces of the ship. The two of you sparred, him shortening his Straw Sword to a dagger, and some of the crew watched, spellbound. You never called him "captain," only his name. And he ate your rare cooking religiously, like it made him homesick.

It was near the Devil's Sea that the Hawkins Pirates faced an ambush. They passed too closely to what they thought was a ghost ship, full of hungry, desperate men screaming incoherently about their shadows and the sunlight. Hawkins was occupied with keeping them from sinking his ship, summoning an enormous Straw Man that drove many of the pirates overboard, but what cut through the air more chillingly than anything was something he hadn't heard since you were a girl: your scream, deep and guttural, a howl of terror from somewhere in the upper decks.

There were too many enemies, and he cut through them indiscriminately. Faust leapt there gracefully, that Mink agility coming out to play, and Hawkins calmed himself enough to continue his defense.

Nothing could have prepared him for the sight you made.

Faust had one of your arms slung over his shoulder as he helped you up the ladder, and the men—all more devoted to you than you knew, how in-your-head you were—tripped over themselves to either give you space or come closer, unsure what to do. Hawkins barreled through them until he saw the bright spray of blood along your front—not yours. You clutched the blade he gave you all those years ago in a vice grip, glistening red, staining the purple quartz at its hilt.

"You did good, navigator," Faust was murmuring. "You're safe. He'll be dead soon."

Hawkins hurried below deck to make sure of it, and lord, you did a number. You must have sliced into his thigh and hit a major artery, how dark, nearly black the blood looked in the low light of the decks. The man was in shock, the lost volume enough to kill, and inanely Hawkins thought it'd be better to rip out the floorboards than try to scrub it. It wasn't about keeping his ship pristine, but how were you ever supposed to pass by here again?

He stepped closer. The would-be assailant's eyes were screwed shut from the pain as he shouted and swore, called you a bitch and slurs Hawkins knew were more specific, the kind leveled at Boa Hancock and women of Kano in the West Blue. He ground his boot into the man's leg with prejudice. Underneath his screams, Hawkins noted the wound yawned open under the man's sliced, tattered trousers. You hadn't only stabbed him, but dragged your knife nearly to his knee.

Good girl.

Hawkins didn't think of the hot blood seeping into the leather above his soles as he stepped on the man's other leg, the crunch of his kneecap almost making him flinch.

"I'd bring you back to kill you again," he said softly.

🜄

You knew him and Faust the longest, and there was something innocent about the two men you met as boys standing guard outside the bathroom as you cleaned yourself. You didn't cry, hadn't made a sound since you screamed, until you croaked out, "Hawkins?"

He stood at attention like you were his master. "Yes?"

"Can you help me?"

To his relief, you only wanted carrying out of the tub after your shower, and you pressed your face into his bicep in a kind of nuzzle of thanks. It was easy for him to look only at your face and your hair. Bizarrely, you'd never felt more like family than in these last few years. You could be both the only person he'd ever loved in this way, and a crewman he'd care for like any other.

Only a third of the Hawkins Pirates had kills under their belts, and now you were one of them.

Hawkins and Faust sat on the floor by your bed until you fell into a sleep more fitful than Hawkins knew you were used to. You clapped them in the backs of their skulls in the morning to let you out for your dawn sights. He watched you tread gamely over the still-darkened wood where the man died, bleeding faster than they could throw him overboard. On another day, you'd go straight to the kitchen for breakfast, but instead you returned to the sleeping area of the upper decks and went straight to the captain's quarters.

"It's quieter," you explained, before helping yourself to his bed just like you did back home.

You stayed there until twilight. Hawkins had the cook keep a dinner warm for you, and you brought it back to his room, eating at his desk away from the crew's prying eyes. At night, he turned his back to you to make his intentions clear—that you were roommates and nothing more—but you huddled into his warmth, spooning him so your forehead landed between his shoulder blades. "Thank you, captain," you mumbled sleepily.

The two of you continued this strange, nostalgic, chaste intimacy, like you were kids again, until you didn't. Hawkins woke in the night a week or so after the attack to your familiar grip on his hard cock, and your sly smile in the low lamplight.

"Someone woke me," you teased, and he groaned.

"You don't have to…"

"I'm offended it took this long," you said. "Sharing a bed with your ex."

"Why do you think I face this way?"

It was different, sweeter than the sex you had when your relationship was crashing apart, and slower than the rare hookups since. It was dangerously close to lovemaking, how slowly you took what you needed from him, how careful he was with you. You even said the words that were rare back when you were so closely entwined you disappeared into each other: "I love you. You know that, right?"

Hawkins wasn't happy, per se, because you were so different, but how couldn't you be? He'd returned to you changed, with blood on his hands, and you'd reacted in contradictions, pushing him away and pulling him back, like tides.

He found himself less self-conscious about keeping close to you in mixed company, and you leaned into him, too, quickly squeezing his hand to communicate a surprising range of feelings. You were never this quiet, which more spoke to how much you used to run your mouth, how many of the kisses he stole from you were to give your poor voice a break. The crew didn't notice the difference, but Hawkins did. Because he knew your every mannerism entirely, and he meant to learn you again.

At Sabaody, you hooked your arm into Faust's to go shopping, thankfully keeping away from the rougher crowds at Grove 24. Hawkins was weary of the rest of the so-called Worst Generation, less so the known quantities from the North Blue and more the others. He worried about you landing in the sights of a Celestial Dragon. He worried about your bleeding heart, the kindness you clung to despite everything.

When Kizaru blinded him, Hawkins thought of starlight.

🜄

"Hawkins."

The Hawkins Pirates finally put their coated ship to use after witnessing the end of the Summit War. You were having trouble falling asleep, in the bubble of the Ryugu Kingdom, and Hawkins laid awake listening to your breathing.

"Hmm?"

Your head was tucked under his chin, your pajama-clad back warm and right against his front.

"I don't want to be here anymore."

His mind runs through what that could mean: Fishman Island? On Earth, alive? Or with him, like this?

"I want to stay with you, but I can't be a pirate."

Hawkins recalled a spread he pulled just before the Grudge Dolph reached the Red Line, which he didn't know what to make of, which filled him with dread on the mangroves.

"I know," he said. "I saw it."

You were the High Priestess in all the ways she countered the Magician, cerebral and hungry, a vessel of knowledge while he was the capable Fool. The others were the Eight of Cups and The Chariot: two kinds of departure. He feared you being taken away by something faster and stronger than he could chase after, never you walking.

"I'm sorry," you said quietly.

"No, you're not." And he kissed the crown of your head, breathing your clean hair.

"Don't be nice."

"No one's accused me of that."

You laughed, and it turned to a sob. "Can you do something for me? When we surface?"

To the crew's confusion, you spent the ascent packing, and Hawkins suspected your less-used books already lined your trunk, how quickly you went. He would've noticed your emptier shelves if you hadn't moved into his rooms like he'd asked, at last.

You part ways in front of a Vivre Card shop, your sheet full and alive in his hand—all that he couldn't give you.

x

The Devil.

That's what Hawkins thought when Kaidou stood in the crater he left on Kid's base.

"And did you have any such reminders? Warnings?"

Curious how he drew so many cards every day, but one pull from years ago shot to the surface of his memory.

It wasn't very fair, now that Hawkins had seen Kaidou's son and appreciated the horns were ogre, not infernal, but tarot was a book of archetypes embedded in his mind from adolescence. You embodied pages and queens, Strength and the Sun depending on the day, while he was a knight or a king, often the Fool or now, the Hermit.

You'd say something rational, historical. That the Devil in his deck had some literary forebear, that he wasn't anything to fear. But Hawkins was always a bit more literal than you. He saw Kaidou doublefisting gourds of sake, and the card's traditional definition of hedonism and indulgence walked before him, roaring about Eustass Kid and Straw Hat.

"Because you're known for your excesses."

Hawkins doesn't mind the Land of Wano. He hasn't had so much rice since he left home, left your family's hearth. That curious bleeding heart of yours wouldn't stand for it, though, at whose expense Hawkins and the Beasts Pirates ate so well. Your ancestral land was somewhere to the south of here, on the equator that sliced the Grand Line into wedges. Wano's borders, in practice, were only closed to the World Government, and Wanoan pirates weren't as rare as Kozuki Oden would make them seem, some even traversing the Calm Belt to Kano's shores. But they were part of the reason your great grandparents' generation risked the Calm Belt themselves: piracy between non-affiliated nations was no one's problem.

Hawkins didn't have much empathy to spare when he was more worried about his crew. He stored Faust's Vivre Card in his pauldron and yours in a pocket sewn into the inside of his every shirt. Faust's was a recent addition since Hawkins entered this alliance, a pit stop made before docking at Kid's base. Hawkins instructed Faust that at the first sign of trouble, the Mink was to manhandle as many of the men back onto the Grudge Dolph as possible and disembark immediately, leaving their captain and any stragglers behind. While Kid's subordinates went through a cavalcade of horrors, Hawkins had the dubious comfort of seeing his vice captain's Vivre Card wax and wane and wobble in circles as they tried to navigate the New World.

Don't come. Don't rescue me.

This was it for him.

At night, he set these scraps of paper on the floor by his futon and fell asleep watching them twitch and spark. Yours was torn in half, half on the Grudge Dolph. If Faust had any sense, he'd find you and tell you what happened to your captain; if he had any luck, you'd navigate them back to the North Blue yourself. Your Vivre Card was almost always whole, only singed at the edges with periodic exhaustion that healed over with a night's sleep, he assumed, and it always pointed west toward the Red Line.

🜄

The first year without you was hell.

They had no democratic way to use your bed besides letting your office-room become a sort of second sick bay or a guest room. You left a copy of your log there; you'd always kept parallel notes and charts, which was only sensible archival practice, but Hawkins couldn't help but think you anticipated leaving from the very start.

Irrational as it was, Hawkins looked for you everywhere, on his ship, in his cards, on land, as if you'd follow them like rumors about your fortunetelling claimed: that you weren't a pirate yourself, but a spectre on his trail. Hawkins' Witch. Spectre was more right, the way you haunted him.

That rumor didn't follow him to the New World, replaced by a reputation for brutality. In some ways, he was free: from your judgment, or more like your pain, your cursed empathy. After dismembering those pirates at Foodvalten, Hawkins was tense, waiting for you to bear down on him, but you didn't. And the silence ached.

Hawkins missed having another reader aboard. Most of the crew knew, at least, the Major Arcana, but Faust's knowledge of the Minor Arcana was rudimentary at best, and the Mink didn't care for divination, more taken with astronomy and the phases of the moon, nature and its cycles. You would counter his interpretations entirely, or pull from one of your own decks with insights he'd never think of, that he disagreed with, your stubborn way of shuffling only uprights.

And he missed you in his bed. Sex was a tertiary interest to the sound of your breathing, the scent of your perfume after a shower, your fingers idly combing through his hair, and knowing you were safe as you could be for the night, in his arms.

🜄

Hawkins doesn't often think the women of Wano resemble you. Their culture was too distinct, and Wano's climate too variable for that to be the case. Your skin was darker, your eyes infinitesimally rounder, and your hair had more texture. Beyond rice, the cuisine wasn't quite like your family's, either, so he felt like a guest in the wrong house.

The children made him think of you, though. How none of them stuck out, how alien you were to your North Blue village. Hawkins supposed the equivalent would be himself growing up here, or your homeland. He knew he was alien here, all the Beasts Pirates were, and you'd disapprove for the same reason you'd shook your head over headlines about Alabasta: "Pirates aren't imperialists. We're not supposed to stay on land, much less rule it."

Somewhere between the stars and the sea, you cultivated quite the political vocabulary. He would have attributed it to arguing with those Marine cadets you met while he was gone, but now he saw the conditions of a World Government non-affiliate and thought, with some irony, it was a wonder you were a pirate and not a revolutionary. Hawkins was grateful you chose the former, if only for a while.

Speaking of Marines, X Drake sometimes got in a friendly mood, usually if he had a bit of sake. Hawkins knew it was loneliness rather than fondness, missing his transparently obvious brothers-in-arms in the Navy, and Hawkins was the closest thing he had to a peer as a new addition to the Beasts Pirates.

Hawkins indulged in one drink. It was your birthday, and he hoped you were having one, too.

"What about you, Hawkins? Got anyone waiting for you?"

He regretted it already.

"Come on. Pretty boy. Some women are into that."

Hawkins' lip curled at what he knew Drake meant as a compliment, but smarted from childhood. "You're drunk."

"Oh? So there's a woman? I remember—" Drake hiccuped. "Your crew was all men. A girl at home? Or that witch?"

He said it facetiously, and Hawkins was glad to know the Navy wasn't interested enough to pursue you.

"I'm leaving."

"Don't you want to make it out? Get back to her?" Drake called after him.

Idiot. Awful spy.

Kizaru all but blew the Zoan user's cover at Sabaody. Hawkins tried to discern his allegiance only to be led in circles by the Seven of Cups, the Five of Swords, and the Moon. It all screamed not to trust the other Supernova.

Hawkins didn't trust anyone outside his crew, not Kid or Apoo for a single second of that alliance. (Of course his crew always includes you.) What possessed him to enter it, anyway? The fraternity of Sabaody two years prior? That was certainly Apoo's angle. Did Hawkins really think they or he stood a chance against Red-Haired? Kid lost to him once already. Why Red-Haired? Because he was one of the younger yonkou? Now that Hawkins made regularly contact with Kaidou, he laughed at the idea.

If Kaidou was the Devil, Red-Haired must be the Emperor. Big Mom was a grotesque sort of Empress, the Taurean goddess's logical extreme. And something about Blackbeard lying in wait all those years was like the Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man heals himself before returning from limbo, stronger and more ambitious than before, but Hawkins isn't like Teach. So he takes the hand he was dealt and returns to Kuri, thinking of you.

🜄

"Captain."

You didn't need to announce yourself as you stepped in the shower behind him. He smiled to himself, not turning around but stooping slightly for you to comb conditioner through his hair. You made a fond, exaggerated noise of annoyance.

"You're welcome."

"Thank you," he said, and he tried not to audibly react to your touch.

"How have you managed without me?"

You meant the years of only being crewmates, but Hawkins revisits these moments from your too-brief reunion like they're burn scars.

You didn't mean to be cruel. You were hurting, and he could help. But he looked at your empty room, or a gap in his wardrobe that he knew you were responsible for, and cursed you. How dare you remind him what he missed. How dare you dangle a dream he'd forgotten and the run away.

There's public bathhouses in Wano, mixed-gender, and Hawkins imagines walking into one with you, even as crewmates, not even touching each other, and any man or woman who coveted you would see the distinctive black cross between your shoulders, as large as the one at his throat and know you belonged to him first.

The thought of you moving on made him ill, moreso than whoever you slept with when he first traveled the North Blue, moreso than the one-night stands you sometimes had after you broke up. It meant he really was suspended here, and the world spun on while he didn't, Wano didn't, clutched as it was in its shogunate and Kaidou's claws.

The other Headliners made frequent visits to the Flower Capital's hanamichi, and Hawkins saw how young some of the geisha and maiko were outside these tea houses and became possessed by your bleeding heart. He wondered what you'd say. It wasn't necessarily sex work, and these women and girls could be as well-educated as you. It more reminded him how you called tarot a party trick; that an astrological reading was a kind of show; that you must have also used your beauty to draw clients. What did you say about your career reading cards in port cities? "It helps to be exotic."

The way some of the Beasts Pirates looked at the geisha reminded him of the leers he tried to shield you from, physically with the breadth of his body or forcefully with his Devil Fruit. You tolerated it depending on your intimacy at the moment, and welcomed it more before you left. To some degree, you hid in him, the new you who'd killed, the new you who'd survived.

He told himself you were happy, you were walking in the light, you were safe.

🜄

Hawkins didn't need to draw a single card to know Straw Hat's landing in Wano marked a major change.

When he tried calculating the younger pirate's chances of surviving Akainu, he drew several confounding spreads, and no matter how he shuffled the same two Major Arcana cropped up: Death and the Sun. Back then, Hawkins discerned Death signified Trafalgar Law, and the Sun came from Jinbe, First Son of the Sea's crew, the two men that fled Marineford with the injured Straw Hat.

But.

Every few mornings since your birthday, Hawkins pulled Death.

Where Straw Hat was lately, the Surgeon of Death was surely near. But Hawkins wasn't that naive. Something was ending: Hawkins' life, the Kurozumi clan, the shogunate, Wano's isolation, something.

Your cards were almost pedestrian. The Ace of Cups. The Two of Swords. The King of Coins. A choice, a new chance, presented by an older person, an earth sign. Hawkins didn't go around asking people's birth dates like you did. He didn't know Kaidou's, he didn't know Kid's or Apoo's, Drake's or any of his fellow Headliners'. He knew his crew's because you kept track.

Hitokiri Kamazo, he thought ironically as he looked at the Two of Swords.

The early morning before Himatsuri, your Vivre Card looks brand new, like it wasn't haphazardly torn but sold in a half sheet. It damn near glows in the darkness of Hawkins' room. Was it possible to become more alive? Only you could.

He wonders if you even look at his, and knows you must, at least every few days. You were too soft not to. He wonders if it reacts to his lost Straw Dolls, or Trafalgar bisecting him, and he wants to explain himself. You'd scold him or punch him over it, but hug him, always grateful for a false alarm.

Or maybe you were complete because you were without him, because you'd forgotten him. In that case, he can sail to Onigashima with a clear conscience. He'll serve, like the Hermit ought to, alone and without complaint.