aka you dumb ho she’s “nervous” because she’s being manhandled by a hot pirate captain in close quarters, not because of bugs
Transcript for the above:
“Aspen!” she is calling out, before seeing I’m already on my feet. “Oh. You’ve heard.”
“I haven’t,” I say, already moving closer to her (and the stairs). “What happened?”
“There’s—” She hesitates, which means it’s a creature she doesn’t know how to describe instead of somebody getting hurt. “There’s giant water skeeters out there.”
When she doesn’t move out of my way on the stairs, I set my hands on her to move her myself. “There’s what?”
“Bugs, big bugs,” she babbles as I squeeze past her on the stairs, sounding more nervous than I would expect. Does she have a thing about bugs?
I want to ask her how, and why, and what she possibly means by that, but Aspen stands up. She takes her pajama shirt off while she does, and I promptly get distracted.
“You must be out of your mind,” Venus opines. “You did see her, right?”
“Of course I saw her,” I reply calmly. “I saw her saving our lives, same as you.”
“We did not see the same thing,” Venus decides. “You might’ve seen River saving our lives, but I saw her grow tentacles and teeth and tear apart a stunner.”
I try for a smile through my shaken heart. “Are you calling your captain a liar?”
“I would never,” she professes. “But I am trying to figure out why you don’t seem surprised.”
“She fell out of the sky, Venus,” I remind her. “We knew she was different.”
“Not this different,” my first mate mutters.
I sigh, giving up on the smile. I’m sure Venus can see through it, anyway. I try to wipe the monster blood off my hands, but it doesn’t go anywhere except to smear over my clothes.
“All right,” I admit. “All right. I haven’t talked with her yet, but you and I both know that as soon as we get out this door, our crew is going to throw all the questions they have at us.”
Venus nods, but stays quiet to listen. Which I really appreciate.
“So what I need to know is, are you going to back me up, or not?”
This is the thing that makes her smile. Tossing red locks behind her shoulder, Venus takes a step or two closer to me.
“Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll handle the crew. You handle the girl.”
I grab the back of her head and bonk it gently against mine. When we stand up apart from each other, I imagine that we wear expressions of mirrored determination. We each have a hard conversation ahead of us, but at least mine is with only one person.
The one person who I have no idea what to say to.
River’s head snaps up when I enter the room. She looks at me with an anxious expression, as if she isn’t sure about what I’ll do. For now, I have to settle for sitting across from her.
“Please don’t throw me off the ship,” she blurts out.
I can’t help it. I laugh.
“Why would I throw you off my ship?”
“I--because of what happened,” she says.
“You saved our lives,” I remind her. “That’s what happened.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell everybody else?”
“Venus is handling everybody else,” I reassure her. “It’s just us.”
River surges forward and slams into me for a hug. She catches me off guard, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to wrap my arms around her.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, obviously freaked out.
“What for?” I ask, pressing my face into the top of her head.
“I’m the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” she weeps into my chest.
I rock back and forth to the motion of the ship with River in my arms. Hopefully it helps.
“Please,” I dismiss lightly. “There are greater horrors in these waters than you could ever be.”
“You don’t know that,” River says, but she sounds slightly comforted despite herself.
I laugh again, letting her feel the relaxed movement of my shoulders and my chest.
“You’re right. You could be the worst thing in the entire ocean, but you know what?”
River pulls her head back to look at me with big, wet, brown eyes that remind me of a doe’s. For the first time since I came into the room, she looks hopeful.
“What?” she asks me quietly.
“If that was the case,” I say solemnly, “then I’d be glad you’re on our side.”
I didn’t think it was possible for her eyes to get any wider, but they do. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of things that way.
“For real?”
Leaning down, I bonk my forehead down gently onto hers. Somehow, River misinterprets the motion, and brings her head up to kiss me.
I shut it just as quickly. I haven't been around for that long, but I still haven't seen Aspen look at me the way she is now. Sure, she's in the middle of battle, but I wouldn't think that she would be directing that adrenaline, homicidal rage at me.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" she yells.
I duck as a fish goes flying overhead. I hope it isn't one of the ones I've seen flying around that have teeth.
"I want to help!"
I mean, I found a club and everything. At least, I think it's a club. It could be a discarded table leg.
I'm snapped back to the present when Aspen steps closer to me and says, "You were supposed to leave!"
Then she stabs at me. I flinch as I try to block, but I miss.
Luckily, she wasn't actually stabbing at me. She was going behind me, between my arm and my side, to stab at something behind me.
I don't get to see what it was. Since Aspen is so close against me, since she needed to stab past me, she has the opportunity to grab my arm and drag me with her.
"I told you, stay below deck," she yells back at me as we go along.
I rip my hand out from hers. "No!"
Aspen turns again, still angry and clutching her weapon. But because her eyes are focused on me, she doesn't see the attack until it's too late. Some kind of tentacle reaches up above her knee, wraps around her thigh, and lifts a gigantic mouth with teeth up into the meat of her leg.
A scream of pain rips its way out of her throat. She falls to one knee, the one that doesn't have a leech from hell attached to it. I rush over, consumed with one thought:
I dash over to Aspen, who has dropped her weapon entirely in order to grab at her leg.
"What the fuck is that!" I exclaim, staring at the writhing, wiggling thing.
My first impression was that it was a leech, or a lamprey. Now that I am closer to it, I can see that it's more like a mangled octopus, or a squid. This thing has tentacles, at least four of them, and a gaping mouth full of concentric rings of teeth. They all point inward, of course, which I see before it goes in for another bite.
Thinking quickly, I stick my club in between its mouth and her leg before it can connect. Grasping it with both hands, like a baseball bat, I get as good a grip as I can and wrench the damn thing off of her.
Aspen yells again, though I can't tell whether or not its from the pain of the bite or the pain of me ripping it off her legs. For all I know, its tentacles have teeth, too.
I throw the entire thing, club and all, as far away as I can. Since I'm using the momentum of me getting it off her leg, I'm sure that I get some good distance on it. I don't watch to see where it ends up; I need to tend to Aspen.
She is groaning in pain pretty consistently. My hands hover over hers, unsure of what to do.
"It's bad, isn't it," she says through gritted teeth. "Fuck, it hurts like it's bad."
I glance up to see that her head is tipped back. Maybe in pain, maybe because she doesn't want to see the blood pulsing out, or the layers of flesh exposed to the salty sea air.
"Uh, it isn't great," I admit before I can realize how it sounds. "But--but tell me what to do, what can I do?" She shakes her head, but I insist, "Tell me how to make it better!"
Aspen pulls her head forward to lock eyes with me. "I might pass out when we do this, so listen carefully."
I freeze, trapped by her blue eyes.
"You'll need to help me stand up. Grab my blade to defend yourself, and then loop my arm around yours and stand up no matter how hard I pull down on you. It's going to be difficult, River, so you'll need to be strong. You need to drag me to Vera's if that's what it takes. Okay?"
Vera. Of course. The ship's medic!
"River," Aspen snaps, beginning to breathe heavily. "Do you understand?"
I pick up Aspen's sword, gripped tight in my fist, and nod. "Don't worry, captain. I can fix this."
