#ww-no.6

[susiequaz12]

Fish- 6, Tied to the Mast

Well I’ve tried to keep these short, but this one is gonna have to be an exception. Oh well, part 6 of @amonthofwhump‘s May challenge. Here we go.

Content Warning: slight drowning, manhandling, a bit of fighting, threatened with a knife, tied up, stress position, heights

- - -

It had been hours. Everyone had gone to sleep. Once the Captain realized after three hours, that Fish wasn’t going anywhere, and wasn’t drowning, he decided to leave him overnight and check on him in the morning. See if he was still alive.

The problem was, Fish didn’t know how long he could last. 

He had alternated between holding his breath and trying to breathe through the murky water. That was more of the challenge. The water was barely clean, so trying to filter out just the oxygen to go through his lungs was more of a challenge than it usually would be. He was getting tired fast, and he could possibly end up drowning soon. The thought scared him, as he’d never really been close. He was never scared of the water, never worried about drowning even being a possibility. 

Alik and Sweeney were sleeping in the bunks on the other side of the deck, and Fish thought if he could wake them up he might have a chance of being let out. But would he want to waste his energy?

As water seeped into his lungs and he coughed and sputtered for a countless time that night, he realized yes. He needed out.

After several minutes of throwing himself at the wall of the tank, kicking it, sloshing the water everywhere, he didn’t succeed in getting their attention. Only in wearing himself out. In a last desperate attempt, he exerted all his energy, kicked hard at the front of the tank with all his body weight, and he crashed to the ground. 

The tank thudded on the floor, spilling water everywhere, slamming the boy’s head on the ground. He groaned out, and within a few seconds, Alik had ran over.

“What did you think you were doing kid?” He pulled out a knife and cut off the rope tying his ankles together. “First you come on our ship, you wake me up, and then you break our tank? Who do you think you are?!” Alik jerked Fish onto his feet and dragged him towards the ladder that led to the upper deck. Alik may have been shorter than Fish by nearly half a foot, but he was still strong. He removed the ropes from around his wrists and ordered him up the ladder. “You’re gonna regret coming on our ship.” 

Fish climbed until he reached the top deck. “I didn’t really have a choice…” he mumbled.

“What?!” Alik cried, shoving Fish to the ground. “Did you just talk back to me?” He kicked Fish in the ribs and he rolled onto his side before rising back to his feet. 

“Yeah, I did!” The boy cried. He swung a fist back and it hit Alik right on the side of the head. Fish backed up immediately as Alik came at him once again. 

He swung a punch that missed, and the two chased each other around the deck of the ship. Fish was wearing out fast, slowing down, losing his energy. Alik lunged for him, pinning him up against the mast of the boat. Alik’s knife pressed flat up against the boy’s throat and the other arm jabbed across his stomach, holding him in place as he wiggled and squirmed, painfully aware of the sharp blade pressed against his neck.

“Sweeney!” Alik called. “Sweeney, grab some rope, wake up you big lard! Sweeney!” 

Sweeney soon came up the ladder looking bleary, holding a long length of rope in his hand. “What is it?” 

“This little piece of crap thought it’d be funny to wake us up, break our tank, pick a fight, and be a nuisance. Unfortunately the Captain still wants to keep him or whatever, so we’re gonna teach him a lesson of our own.”

Sweeney sighed, but did as he was told.

The next thing he knew, after a bit of struggling, Fish’s arms were tied behind the mast, and his ankles were once again bound together. A sort of pulley system that was attached to the mast was lowered, and another thick rope was thread through the ropes in between his wrists. 

“Raise him up.” Alik demanded.

Sweeney pulled the rope and Fish’s arms were wrenched higher as all of his body weight was rested on those limbs. He cried out at the pain that it caused, and swung back and forth as the pulley lifted him higher and higher above the deck, his back scratching and thudding against the hard mast. The pulling stopped and Fish hung there, suspended far too high above the ground.

“I’m going up.” Alik called from below. “I gotta make sure he isn’t going anywhere.”

There was a small part above Fish where the mast split into two pieces, making sort of a T shape. Alik climbed up, balancing above one of the branches, and Fish groaned out as he was pulled to rest just above that section. There was only a foot or two keeping him from the very top, and he didn’t dare look down. He jostled, crying out as he was turned to the part where the two pieces of metal met. He was grateful when his feet rested on the solid pole. 

With the agility of a child climbing a tree, Alik managed to lower Fish’s arms behind him and detach them from the pulley. The length of rope was then used to wrap around the pole countless times, pulling tight against his chest and torso, traveling down his legs and reaching up to his shoulders. Alik tugged on each knot, pulling it impossibly tighter with each new coil around his body. It seemed as if a giant snake was about to strangle him. He couldn’t get enough air. A slight wheeze escaped his lips as Alik tugged the last knot tighter and kicked his feet out from under him. The boy screamed as he twisted to the side, losing his balance, but remained suspended far above the deck.

Alik climbed down from the mast and went back below the deck with Sweeney. Leaving Fish hanging from the mast, for the worst night of his life.

[rhosavirgoart]

Day 6: Tied to the Mast

@amonthofwhump prompt list

(Alternatively "Resist the urge to set this whole ship on fire; the rats deserve to live")

[thewhumperinwhite]

May 6: Tied to the Mast

While Kian is being horribly tortured on one ship, Aaron is getting Mildly Bullied on another.

This is for @amonthofwhump‘s Water Whump 2020 challenge. I missed a couple days, partly because I didn’t have specific ideas, and partly because It’s Finals Week. Anyway Here’s This. This is roughly simultaneous with Anchor

Previous: Anchor / Caught In A Net.

TW for: very mild reference to past abuse as punishment for a speech impediment; smoking. Also, Dessa Tries To Start An Argument About Religion.

----

While it certainly isn’t comfortable, it doesn’t actually hurt as much as Aaron worried it would. Really, the ropes around his waist and arms hardly bother him at all, physically. The heat of the sun is a bit much, and it’s making him very thirsty, but other than that they haven’t hurt him at all.

Aaron supposes that makes a degree of sense, because he’s pretty sure he’s only here because the Pirate Captain thought it would be funny? So there was no cause for them to pull the ropes particularly tight.

Also he told them point blank that he’d never held a sword before, so perhaps they justifiably assumed he wouldn’t be trying to struggle his way out.

The rest of the crew is belowdecks, or at least he’s fairly sure they are. It’s possible they’ve been killed and thrown overboard, but Aaron would like to believe the best of these pirates for as long as possible, because otherwise he thinks he’ll probably cry.

When they’ve done getting the ship ready to make way (or at least that’s what he assume they’ve been doing; Aaron doesn’t know anything about boats), the Captain picks up a crate from elsewhere on the deck, deposits it in front of the mast (and, by extension, Aaron), and sits down on it, lounging back and pulling a large ornate pipe from her brocaded jacket.

Aaron will be the first to admit that he doesn’t know anything about women. He feels he doesn’t even really know what people expect of women, let alone what actual women are like. Still, he is fairly certain that the way the Pirate Captain is sitting is not considered ladylike. He feels it would not be wise to mention this, so he just blinks down at her while she lights her pipe, instead.

“So,” the Captain says, and she blows a fairly impressive smoke ring in Aaron’s direction; it breaks against the coil of rope around his chest. “You’re a man of God, eh?”

Aaron... genuinely isn’t sure what to say to that. “I... suppose?”

“You suppose?” the Captain says, raising her scarlet eyebrows. The Abbot had a saying about redheads and their inherent relationship with the devil; Aaron’s brain starts automatically trying to summon the specific memory and then he remembers that she is a Pirate Captain and probably the Abbot would disapprove for more pressing reasons than the color of her hair. Though Aaron, who has admittedly spent a few hours in the heat and is not thinking the most clearly he ever has, can hardly look at anything else. The Captain’s hair is a cloud of the reddest, wildest curls he has ever seen. Also, he has never seen a woman without a kerchief over her hair except his mother, and her hair was straight and black, like his.

“Won’t He be disappointed to hear you aren’t sure?” she says, smirking, her pipe in one corner of her mouth.

It takes Aaron a moment to realize they are still talking about God, somehow.

“Oh,” he says. “Well. No, I, you see, I actually haven’t graduated yet.”

“Graduated,” the Captain says, shaking her head, still smirking.

“Yes,” Aaron says, and he can feel his cheeks heating up out of sheer awkwardness because this is in fact the most he has spoken to any woman since he left his mother. There are women who clean at the Abbey, but you’re not allowed to talk to them. “Well. I— they won’t ordain me until I. Until I serve my first parish, actually. So I’m— I suppose I am—” He is a man of God, he is, objectively; he doesn’t know why it suddenly sounds so grandiose a thing to claim. “I suppose I am... a m-m-m-an of God.” The Abbot had been fairly proud of the effect he’d had— or his walking stick had had, anyway— on Aaron’s stutter; Aaron thinks with despair that this is another thing to add to the list of unfavorable reports the Abbot will receive when he finds out what has happened to Aaron.

Assuming he ever actually does find out. Assuming they don’t dump his corpse in the middle of the sea when they’re finished with— whatever they’re doing now.

He clears his throat and makes himself keep talking.

“I’m just not a. P, -riest. Yet.” He says it like that, Puh-riest, because his tongue locks up halfway through. Perhaps it would be best for everyone if they dumped him in the sea and had done with it, after all.

“Hmm. That makes my question a bit more interesting, then,” the Captain says, resting her elbow on one of her spread-open knees. “Why did God sink your ship, young master Not-A-Priest?” She asks pleasantly, looking up at him with her head tilted like a large, deadly, blood-colored cat.

“Uh?” Aaron says, in an act of eloquent apologetics.

“You’re on your way out to make converts, aren’t you?” the Captain says, still with that dangerous feline glitter in her eyes. “So why did God scupper your ship? Doesn’t He want you to reach your destination?”

Aaron blinks at her. He has the unfortunate feeling, sending extra sweat down his already-soaked back, that he is either being made fun of or utterly failing a test. “I think— I think the wind scuppered the ship, actually. It— did something to one of the masts? I don’t know very much about boats.”

“Yes, I can tell that from your cravat alone,” she says, grinning, and Aaron feels himself go red all the way up into his ears. “But doesn’t your God control the wind, shepherd? Did your Lord, perhaps, intend us to come to your rescue? Perhaps he was trying to save our poor damned pirate souls, eh?” Her eyes twinkle at him, and he has the sense that she’s setting some kind of trap, but he also feels his mouth moving almost on its own accord, far faster than his brain.

“Oh, he wouldn’t send me to save anybody,” he says, almost desperately.

The Pirate Captain blinks at him, and then she throws back her head and laughs, long and hard, like a baying dog.

“Ah, God,” she says, wiping at her eyes. “God, I’m going to like having you aboard, little Priest.”