|| @nacphilim || Pirates & Mutineers || Starter ||
Tomoe spots the incoming ship when it is still more than 15 kilometers away, despite the thick evening fog setting low over the water after the days grueling heat. They have no lights aboard their deck, no lantern in the nest for signalling nearby ships. She sounds the warning bell, the loud clanging waking her crew and most certainly carrying over the waves to the oncoming ship.
The HMS Archon is beautiful and reliant, unsinkable - the East India Company claims. She carries valuable wares occasionally. Fine furniture, jewelry, blue dyed potteries, and luxurious silk fabrics. More often, however, she carries military goods. Canons, gunpowder, uniforms.
HMS Archon is a valuable commodity for pirates. And though she is large, and perfect for long distance trips, she is not a Navy vessel. The ships primary directive should pirates attempt an attack is to flee, full sails in the direction of the nearest navel outpost.
But she is a heavy thing, burdened by the weight of her cargo and the small pirate vessel is not. It catches them less then an hour later. Tomoe’s crew is ill prepared for a raid. Any combat training they have comes from the pit fights they hold below deck after the Captain and his offices have retired for the night. Any strength they have comes only from hoisting sails and cranking the anchor. None of them carry more than a knife on them.
They try to make a stand anyway. It’s a slaughter. Tomoe hits the ground hard on the initial assault; one of them nails her in the back of the head with a plank and she drops like she’s dead. When she blinks back to consciousness, head pounding and sluggish and body battered like she’d been trampled in the chaos, her captain is dead.
His head a greying expression of horror - tears on his cheeks. Coward. Of course he begged in the end.
His mangled body is pushed overboard to chum the waters and she is hauled up along any of the other survivors. They are bound, their hands tied painfully behind their backs. Tomoe curses when one of them pulls at the collar of her shirt - for a moment she is more terrified that his eyes will tip away from her blood smudged face to peer down and spot the bandages disguising her figure and that her fate will be worse than that of shark food. He doesn’t and she’s shoved against the main mast with the rest of her men.
It takes the pirates hours to ransack the ship. Tomoe spends it woozy, blood seeping warm down her neck, and slumped against the back of the boy tied in front of her. He has been a kitchen scully, she thinks.
“What are they going to do with us?” He whispers to her, panicked and small.
No one replies. The answer is obvious. Tomoe tries to think of a way out anyway.
Tomoe glares at the man she presumes is the captain from her place tied against the mast. He’s tall and blonde with a cruel sharp grin and seems completely unbothered by the spray of arterial blood that stains his white shirt. Tomoe hates him immediately and she will continue to do so until she dies. Smug, heartless pirate.
She snarls when one of the pirates at her side jostles her, shoving her forward in the line and one step closer to her untimely death. She earns a backhand across the face for ehr insolence and it sends her reeling into another pirate who forces her back into line.
When the sun came up the pirates turned to the crew for entertainment. Every single person who didn’t die in the raid was slowly but surely being forced over the deck railing and into the waters below. Hands tied and no dry land for kilometers in any direction. If they didn’t drown the sharks would get them.
Tomoe is near the end of the line - not the back, but ever step further from the plank and the short plunge off the end of it gave her another minute to try to think of a way out.
She heard stories that pirates occasionally take valuable prisoners into their crews. Chefs and navigators and the like. Tomoe doesn’t know shit about cooking or navigating but she’s clever. She could lie and figure it out. She does know some stuff about first aid - that’s always useful on a ship…
That hope dies when the doctor is shoved over the edge despite his pleas. The crowd roars in approval.
She could claim she knows how to read the coded notes and ledgers the Captain and merchants write in. But she can’t read - that lie wouldn’t hold up and she imagines the cruelty she’d be subject to would be much worse than a swift drowing.
The wracks her brains for anything in the pirates code that could save her, thinks of any valuables on the ship they may not have found. Anything of value she can trade for her life.
She doesn’t know. She’s scared.
The pirates aren’t here to take any survivors. It’s clear to her that it’s a game to them. THey offer one boy the chance to fight for his survival - the little kitchen scully. They offer him a sword and everything. His opponent is twice his height and three times his width. The boy’s dead before they toss him overboard - his skull bashed in so thoroughly that she can’t recognise his face anymore.
The pirates cheer and Tomoe wants to vomit.
Finally it’s her turn.
She stumbles, panicked when she is pushed into the ring of bodies that forms the circle around the back of the plank. Her turn. She tries to straighten and someone forces her into a deep bow before the Captain.
Her head snaps up to greet the Captain. “Fuck you straight to hell.”
Because Tomoe has never been the kind to know when to shut the hell up. And if she’s gonna die she’s going to go out pissing someone else off. “These are Aizen’s waters, you really think he’s just gonna let you sail through here now that you’ve gone and attacked a ship that’s rightfully his prey huh? Fuck you’re as stupid as you look.”
