lucetilogs | The king and his men stole the queen from her bed . . .

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The king and his men stole the queen from her bed . . .

Who: A

seventeensir and anyone aboard the Britannia.
What: Elizabeth wakes up aboard a ship that isn't hers. (INTRO LOG~)
When: Backdated to November 8th
Where: Aboard the Britannia.
Summary: That the ship isn't hers seems to be the least of her worries. When wild assumptions regarding the ship's own gallant captain lead to misunderstandings, introductions get off to a less than desirable start.
Rating: PG-13, mostly due to the accusations Liz will throw at poor, unsuspecting Horatio.

Elizabeth woke to the very familiar feeling of the ocean beneath her, gently rocking the ship on which she slept. She stretched in the bedclothes, keeping her eyes closed, for the moment she opened them would begin the battle's day, and she was not ready just yet. A moment of pause before she faced the enemy whilst swimming amongst the sharks of the seas would not go amiss.

Yet her eyes were assaulted by far more than the garish light of morn. This cabin was not that of The Empress. Nor could she claim it was that of the Black Pearl. To her knowledge, her memory was without lapse, and yet she could not explain why it was this cabin's image that swarmed her sight.

She rose quickly, the effect this sudden change would have on the tides of this war. The strategy they had devised by candlelight just the eve prior could be lost if things were not in order. The pain in her back panged her conscience, and yet she pushed it aside for more pressing worries. How quickly she dismissed its oddness, and yet it was a foreshadowing missed to warn what had befallen the pirate king.

She took to the deck immediately, looking for a soul that would follow her. She bellowed as soon as the door swung open, giving the very impression she would need these men to have if they were to follow her against Lord Beckett's waiting armada.

"All men lay up to the quarterdeck! Tai Huang, advance our position! Man of the watch, I want report!"

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"Madam!"

The call is not unfriendly, but it is meant to command attention. The dress and manner of her arrival bear all the hallmarks of a New Feather. He himself woke on a strange boat without a soul but that strange book to help him. ...That she was bellowing orders and calling for a report, he noted, but there were other issues to be dealt with first. She might well be from some strange world, as others were, where women sailed and commanded vessels.

"You are on board Britannia." He had almost said 'His Majesty's Ship' but had, in fact, stopped himself. This ship was not a part of the British Royal Navy. It belonged to no king. Merely to a captain and a lieutenant. Though his uniform might have added the words for him. "I am her captain, Horatio Hornblower."

The first order of business would be to see her properly dressed, he decided. He could send her back into his cabin, from where she had emerged. Thank God, he considered, he was an early riser and had quit it several hours ago. His sea chest would be in there, along with the clothes Jilly had borrowed herself not terribly long ago. They were not truly suitable for a woman, but it would be better than a simple shift.

Elizabeth spun to face the uniformed man standing upon the quarterdeck. Never mind the pain in her back or that it was far cooler weather than it should have been in the Caribbean. Now was not the time for civil talk of weather.

For a moment, all she could manage was a look of haughty surprise. "I am Captain Swann, pirate lord of the South China Seas and king of the Brethren Court, amongst whom I sail and command for--"

Her speech halted as her eyes fell away from him and along the ship, taking in her surroundings. This ship was not out at sea, but moored. The chill of the air began to register as her skin prickled with cold and slow coursing fear. His uniform was different from that which she knew, and yet there was no doubt in her mind that it was that of an officer in an armed force.

As her eyes traced the rigging of the vessel, hoping to take away what hands she had been carelessly placed, she locked on the flag.

British Royal Navy.

Do not go to Shipwreck Cove. Beckett knows of the meeting of the Brethren. I fear may be a traitor among them.

Had she been betrayed? How had she not noticed? Who had done this?

Even more pertinent, how could she have acted so rashly, announced all her piratical titles to a captain of His Majesty's Royal Navy?

"--oh God."

A pirate. A pirate on his ship. A pirate captain on his ship. A pirate lord on his ship. A "king" of some...

And this captain pirate lord "king"... was a woman.

On his ship.

Horatio braced himself, never quitting his position on the quarterdeck.

His voice is more strained than he likes, his posture more tense. "You are in Luceti now, Miss Swann."

She could not name where Luceti was, but only saw in whose hands she had been placed that brought her there. She could see him tense, and she took a step back, feeling the wood of the deck beneath her bare feet.

Noticing that they were bare caused her too look down. Last she recalled, she had been completely clothed in layers of cloth from the orient, further guarded by leather armour with a jian and a cutlass for each hip. Yet the view that graced her seemed utterly bare. She was in no more than a slip! Her jaw dropped. What was she doing, dressed so indecently?

Her gaze flickered back and forth from her own body to that of the tense naval captain.

"I take it we're not in the Caribbean." Her voice was pithy. Her mind reeled as she retraced her steps.

Straight out of bed, out of the captain's cabin and onto the deck--

Out of the captain's bed, onto the deck.

Out of the captain's bed...

She narrowed her eyes and still took another step back away from him. Dear God in heaven, had she truly been abandoned, left to this?

Edited 2011-11-14 05:17 (UTC)

And there was her realization of what she was wearing. At least her shock was some relief to him. Married-- even for so little a time as he was before he had gone to sea, come home only to quickly return into service, then back home again just to be brought here-- he could respect a woman's modesty but was not so flustered as a bachelor gentleman of his time might have been. Still, he politely turned to look out to the sea, his profile facing her but no more.

"We are far from it, I am afraid to say. And," judging by her voice, this would be another question, "far from England." Far from his beloved Navy, far from any place where the flag that flew from Britannia's mainmast might have had true importance, far from where he would have needed the guns absent on the deck, far from the familiar. "It is... an inconvenience to us all." Thinking, he modified that last remark. "Or, at least, to most of us. Those with sense. Or something to go back to."

He turns his head only briefly to look at her. He thinks of offering her the spare clothes that are in his cabin. A man's clothes, but they might be warmer than that shift. Yet that might presume too much. Perhaps he would do best to wait. Offer them when she asked for something more to wear or indicated that she felt the chill in the air. It seemed unkind to say anything about her state of dress yet improper to call attention to it, and he had not decided which he would rather risk being thought of as.

"An inconvenience, Captain?" She could not help the bitterness that seeped into her voice. Everything was becoming painfully clear.

"In having a pirate as your prisoner, and having such a distance to sail, you find it inconvenient that the liberties you have taken with your prize must cease, do you?"

Her hands wrapped tightly around her body as her look remained as heated and accusing as her words.

The implications had not yet set in upon the captain. The mark of a truly innocent man, perhaps.

"I have no prisoner, madam. You did not come aboard this ship by my own doing." Though his statement did not make it difficult to take him as toying with her, avoiding any admission of his own guilt, for his words could be true but not a restatement to a lack of guilt had someone else brought her aboard. "There are no prizes to be found here."

"Not by your doing, was it? Then by whose authority was I placed in the care of your wandering hands? Did Lord Beckett see you rewarded for your efforts?"

Not a prisoner! So by being made the Captain's strumpet she had acquired privileges! The thought made her feel utterly sick. How dare he be so dismissive of her, playing coy, or so it seemed.

"You are a cruel man, Captain Hornblower."

Wandering...

The nature of her implications sunk in, and his eyes widened. He forgot not only how to breathe but also forgot that he needed to do such a thing. Had he been more aware of her now, more conscious of everything all about him, he might have objected to being called cruel, particularly in that tone.

"I would advise you, Madam," he drew himself up even more (if such a thing were possible) and his shoulders drew back further, "to regard your words more carefully. You make an accusation, Madam, that no man would take lightly."

"Do you expect that any woman would, in spite of her situation, sir?"

Fear was subsiding for anger. She saw how his eyes widened, how he straightened himself. Clearly this was not a man of guilty feelings, but guilty by what he had done. Her assumptions seemed proven by the way he spoke, the tone he used, as if cautioning her against bringing his actions to any light or attention.

She never was one to bite her tongue or bide time. Her jaw tightened and she lifted her head, taking a stance far more fitting of the rank she had acquired at the Brethren Court just days before. Where she had previously taken steps back, she took strides toward the quarterdeck upon which he stood.

"What pains would I find, Captain, if I should choose not to?"

She clung her folded arms together that they might not shake.

"Do you really take a pirate of the fairer sex to be so docile as to allow you what you please, simply because she is fair? I make my accusation with all my words behind it, Captain."

All this arguing had drawn the attention of the only other crew member aboard the Britannia. He'd started up from the gun deck, then halted on the steps, listening to things develop. At first, it had been semi-amusing, hearing a woman chew the captain out, but her implications, then accusations, made him jog the rest of the way up the steps, heart in his mouth. There wasn't anything funny about a scared woman. At her last words, he was on deck, a pacifying hand extended.

"Miss. You've not been harmed. Look round you and you'll see this ship isn't even crewed. Look behind you and you'll find a very lovely pair of wings that'll hopefully prove you're in another world entirely. People come and go here, and no one controls when or where they turn up." A slight change of tone. "Moreover, Captain Hornblower is a man of good heart who doesn't have the slightest idea what to do with a woman, thus rendering your accusations utterly impossible."

"Mister Kennedy."

He sounded both relieved and ever so faintly annoyed at the same time. To hear Miss Swann's accusations countered was good, certainly, but he couldn't help but think that perhaps Archie went a little too far in that reply. Still, he knew better than to speak on that point just now.

His eyes went back to the woman, back still straight and body tense at being so spoken to. Yet there was nothing he could do. He could not defend himself. She would no doubt find a way to twist his words. He had no proof, save the evidence Archie had offered as to her presence in a world not her own. And he could not shout her down or threaten her without seeming to prove her right.

So he stood on his quarterdeck and watched.

As Elizabeth spun to catch the voice who spoke to her, a flash of cream flooded her peripheral vision. She made no note of it until after he finished speaking, her look of anger melting away to show her for what she was:

A frightened woman ripped away from what she had known to be.

She stared down the Lieutenant with all the confidence she could muster, a faint challenge residually clinging to the emotions displayed by her eyes. Yet an angled chin can only hold so much pride. Nervously, she looked over her shoulder and caught sight of exactly what outlandish attachment the Lieutenant spoke of.

Wings.

Feathery, off-white wings.

"Dear God in heaven."

This couldn't be the entrance to such a place. No, she'd long ago forsaken her admittance through pearly gates in a single fateful moment aboard a blacker pearl.

"...You're not dead. It's what everyone thinks at first. But apparently everyone on this little world has them, the wings, so when you arrive you get a pair of your own. They'll stop hurting after a day or so, and eventually you'll sort of forget you have them. Between now and then, though, I'd be careful with them. They bang into absolutely everything they possibly can."

"To say the least, Miss Swann," his voice is struggling for civility, something in him still burning and yet frozen from the accusations, "you are in a place far, far from what you know."

Elizabeth took the moments the naval officers spoke to take in her situation. She turned through the logic in her mind, taking deep, shuddering breaths.

If there was a soul who could, it was she that understood that death was not so dull. It was a rather clever thing, dangerously so, that enjoyed dangling devilish things over men that saw them not alive but something else entirely.

If there was a woman who could accept the unnatural and know it to be predictably unpredictable as such, it was she who had come to know the barbaric and thornier veins of the world in her travels.

If there was a sailor who could know that entire worlds existed, it was she who saw the locker of Davy Jones, her transport a rare green flash of light on the horizon. Places were terribly odd, thin veils separating the nearly inaccessible, and she knew them to be.

One breath, then another, less quivering. She gripped her shoulders, feeling the chill and finally noting things she had purposely pushed from her mind previously. The pain in her back, the feel of the sheath over her form clearly not a slip she would have donned, the absence of deckhands and the furled sails. The quiet of the shore, far gentler than the lady ocean she knew.

A less accusing question, and more searching, her voice softer and gentler.

"Was I brought here by either of you...sirs?"

"This place brings us here, mad as it sounds. No one's been able to get back on their own." Archie breathed a little easier as the woman seemed to calm down. "Let me...get you something warm to wear. Beg pardon, I'm Mr. Kennedy. First lieutenant aboard this ship. If you'll excuse me for a moment." He salutes her without a lot of conviction, very much preoccupied, and heads into the captain's cabin at the first sign that he's given leave to do so.

Horatio nodded as soon as Archie mentioned finding the woman something else to wear. He was struggling to keep his composure, constantly lecturing himself about the difficulties of arriving in this place, how poorly he'd handled it at first, and that the circumstances had seemed rather set against him. To hold a grudge for what she had suspected... would be an ungentlemanly reaction.

"While I cannot promise it for the rest of this place, I can assure you, Miss, that no harm will come to you while you are on board Britannia, least of all from Mister Kennedy or myself."

Elizabeth nodded at the explanation, then again at the Lieutenant's offer. Once left alone to look at the Captain she had accused one deck higher, she could not find the strength to do so.

Everything was utterly wrong.

"Thank you."

She turned away, a sudden breath as though she had something far more winded to say, though wind was all that followed. An exhale of mild defeat. She had no challenge in this moment, nor did she wish to.

"Captain..." She clung to her shoulders tighter and willed herself to look toward him. "My deepest apologies for my accusations. It is a very harsh place, where I have been taken from."

"The... The world is a very harsh place, Miss Swann." It's as gracious and understanding as he can be. He won't apologise himself. As far as he is concerned, he did nothing to give her the impression she got, and there is little, if any, cause to admit error. Particularly when he sees none made by him.

"Your reaction is understandable, and your apology accepted."

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