Chapter Text
When the commotion dies down, Lip, Haseul, and Jinsoul gather around a table.
A waitress appears, serving the stew Jinsoul’s fish disappears into. She’s smiling instead of suspicious; all the locals are friendlier all of a sudden. Apparently there’s a prophecy about she-who-conquers-the-fish-of-the-deep and now Jinsoul’s their savior or something.
It means free food, in any case.
“How did you get here,” Haseul says.
Jinsoul opens her mouth to answer and unease sweeps through Lip. Her crew knows better than to divulge the unconventional aspects of their operation, but Jinsoul forgets things sometimes.
Often.
Most of the time.
Lip glares to convey, don’t reveal anything compromising.
“Oh, I teleported.”
Perfect communication, as always. Lip wonders if the kraken needs a human slave. Maybe it could take Jinsoul off her hands, keep her out of trouble.
It takes a minute for Haseul to be sure that’s not a joke, her eyebrows climbing higher and higher.
Belatedly, Jinsoul remembers she’s talking to a rival captain.
“I mean, I swam! Yeah, swimming. I swim really fast.”
“Excellent recovery,” Lip says, face in hands because she’ll lose it if she has to watch Jinsoul’s illustrative swimming motions. “Not at all suspicious.”
“Thanks!”
“You can teleport?” Haseul sounds intrigued rather than any of the usual suspects: disgusted, afraid, about to run the other way as fast as possible now that she knows Lip and her crew aren’t quite human.
Lip needs to be sure, though, so she catches Haseul’s eye.
“You’re ok with this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s an advantage. I like advantages.”
Haseul reaches for Lip as she says it, and Lip thought she already liked Haseul as much as she could like anyone but turns out she was wrong. At the soft pressure of Haseul’s hand on hers, the feeling carves out more space inside her, takes over new territory, and if it keeps going like this Lip isn’t sure she’ll have room left for anything else.
The worst part how nice it sounds, having Haseul claim all of her.
“Do all of you have powers?” Haseul’s eyes slide over Lip, warm and considering, as if searching for some mark of magic. “Or is Jinsoul special.”
“Lip’s is better than mine,” Jinsoul says.
Lip should scold her for another reckless revelation, but she’s caught up in Haseul’s curious wonder.
So often her abilities feel like a cheat instead of a gift. Lip has become expert at using them without detection, keeping to the kinds of speed no one will notice.
But when Haseul says –
“Do I get to see?”
– Lip can imagine a world where her power isn’t shot through with shame. For once she wants someone to know: wants to be obvious, wants to be marveled at.
She decides to show rather than tell.
Summoning speed, she flexes harder this time, so that from her perspective Haseul slows down mid-sentence. Her last syllable slides down the octave until Lip is moving too fast for sound to reach her. The world feels still all around; movement is happening, at very small increments, but Lip exists at an entirely different scale. In this moment, she and the world are incommensurable.
Now the question is: what should she do?
Haseul is about to sip her drink, the mug almost to her mouth. Lip would like to replace it with something, contemplates trading ale for sea water but liquids are unpredictable at high speeds and it would be just her luck to slosh all over the girl she’s trying to impress.
Scanning the room, she sees the bartender paused mid ale-pour, the obnoxious man from earlier immortalized in losing an arm-wrestling match. Lip takes a second that’s 1/1,000,000 of everyone else’s to appreciate the karma.
Finally, her eyes land on the head of Jinsoul’s giant fish, displayed like a trophy on a shelf.
She makes her move, then slows to pace the rest of the world.
“See,” Haseul finishes, attempting to sip from her drink.
Her lips find scales instead of mug and her whole body jerks – cute, Lip thinks helplessly – mouth dropping into an “o” as she looks from Lip to the fish head and back again.
“It’s speed,” Lip says, voice low. “If I go fast enough, it’s kind of like being able to stop time.”
“That’s awesome.”
“It’s useful.”
Haseul shakes her head.
“It’s so much more than that. I have a hundred questions but – Choerry? What can she do?”
“We don’t know. She has a power, theoretically, but we’ve never seen it.”
“About that,” Jinsoul breaks in. “She disappeared from the lifeboat. Just popped out of space.”
“Did the kraken get her? That sounds like what happened to me,” Lip says.
“No, she was the one doing it.”
“How do you know?”
“She said ‘I see now,’ drew some symbols in the air, and vanished. It didn’t feel like when I teleport either. Everything was more…”
Jinsoul makes a squiggly hand gesture.
Well. That clears things up.
Lip is tempted to yell about the importance of sharing vital information, but yelling makes Jinsoul sad and then she gets out her pleading eyes and all progress grinds to a halt until you apologize. So Lip just clenches her hands around the top of the table, counts to ten.
Haseul looks between them.
“Another round?”
;;
Thus Jinsoul joins the merry quest.
Later, as they row out to the ship, Haseul gives Jinsoul a brief on her crew.
“They’re wary, but they know better than to do anything to my guests. Besides, you’ll be in the captain’s cabin with Lip so you can always retreat there.”
“She will?” Lip says. “I don’t want to kick you out of your own space.”
Haseul shrugs.
“No worries. It’ll be good to reconnect with the crew, anyway.”
There’s relief in the prospect of trading Jinsoul for Haseul, but also a little disappointment. Lip was dreading extended alone time with Haseul, sure, but underneath the dread lurked other things Lip hesitates to give a name to. Maybe, she’d thought, with enough time and opportunity, she could work up the courage to-
Except that would be dangerous, so it’s good she won’t get the chance to find the end to that sentence.
Instead, she shares a bed with a very clingy Jinsoul.
“I’m glad you’re ok, Cap. I thought you didn’t make it.”
“You’d be ok without me.”
Lip has always been sure of that: Jinsoul is smart and resourceful behind all the blond, and Choerry could befriend a cannibal who’s trying to eat her. Lip may be the leader in name, but those two were fine before she came along and will continue to be fine no matter what.
Only Jinsoul shakes her head, unusually serious.
“No, we wouldn’t. So don’t do anything stupid.”
Lip swallows down the lump in her throat.
“Going in search of a physics-defying sea monster is pretty stupid.”
“Then at least don’t do it alone.”
;;
Lip gets up at sunrise. When she reaches the deck, Haseul is already there.
“How was your reunion,” Haseul says with a suggestive wink. That’s weird, but whatever. Sometimes Haseul is weird.
“Fine. Jinsoul still snores.”
“Just fine?”
It takes a second, but the implication clicks.
Haseul thinks she and Jinsoul are involved. It’s not the first time someone has made that assumption, and often Lip lets people go on assuming to avoid unwanted attention.
With Haseul, though:
“Oh, I don’t…do that. With people on my crew, or with many people in general.”
“Oh.”
Haseul sounds thrown, her cheeky bravado gone, and Lip wishes she could get herself to look over, see whether there’s a pretty blush painting Haseul’s cheeks. But Lip is thinking back to that night, and she’s sure Haseul is too, and it would be too much to accidentally make eye contact while they’re both thinking about the time they almost slept together.
She might do something crazy. Like kiss Haseul.
And as much as she’d like to, she shouldn’t do that. Feelings are one thing – she can admit that she has them, Haseul affects her too much to try to pretend otherwise – but acting on them is another. Too much can go wrong, and not just in the ‘we break up and it gets awkward’ way.
“So you’re not with her,” Haseul says.
Lip tells herself that’s not hope she hears. It’s just clearing up a misunderstanding, nothing more.
Still, in the name of clarity:
“Not with anyone else, either.”
“Same. Since we’re sharing things.”
“That’s, uh. Good to know.”
They don’t say anything else for a long time, just stand together watching the sea.
;;
The ship sets sail as soon as provisions are loaded and a final round of gossip is gathered.
There are enough kraken encounters now to be sure of the pattern – all the weirdness converges on a central point. Lip has a hunch that whatever waits there is key to understanding this whole thing, but that’s as far as her mind gets. She can’t fit the pieces together: creatures that shortcut space and time, Choerry coming into her own (related?) power, the empire paying pirates to investigate for them.
Try as she might, she can’t come up with a single imagination of what they might find.
They’ll get there soon enough, in any case. It’s only a week’s trip to the location starred on the map, and Haseul’s ship makes good time.
;;
Or, it should.
Conditions are perfect when Lip goes to double check the cargo deck (it may not be her ship, but habits die hard and while Haseul’s crew still glowers at her it’s not like she wants them crushed under a poorly secured barrel).
By the time she gets back, the wind has deserted them and clouds cover the horizon.
“Not again,” Haseul grumbles at the darkening sky.
“Again?”
“This happens every time I sail. Just wait, it’s about to-”
A drop of water hits Haseul’s nose. She goes a little cross-eyed trying to glare at it.
“Rain?” Lip offers.
“How did you guess.”
Lip’s reply disappears under a sudden downpour, and she joins the rest of the crew in escaping below deck.
In her experience, storms crest then break. She expects this one to follow the pattern, to last a day or two at most, but it lingers on with stubborn monotony, neither escalating nor abating.
Except for the rain, steady and plodding, the sea is unnervingly calm. There’s no wind at all, and they spend a week traveling what should take them a day.
Most people stay below since there’s nothing to do, and no danger to the ship beyond what a crew might get up to in boredom. Various games of cards get going; even Jinsoul gets pulled into one, and Lip has to blink to be sure she’s not hallucinating when she sees her own first mate laughing with Haseul’s grumpiest lieutenant.
It’s just Haseul above, alone at the wheel, so as the days accrue Lip decides to keep her company.
“You don’t have to,” Haseul says. “The weather is gross and I’m pretty good at this.”
“I know. I just like being here with you.”
Haseul goes quiet, turning away.
The reaction shouldn’t thrill Lip, not if she’s serious about saving the world over getting the girl. But Haseul has been such an easy flirt up to this point; there’s satisfaction beyond measure in seeing her scour the deck for something to say.
Lip wonders what caused the change. Maybe it feels different, now that Haseul knows she’s available. Maybe Haseul's weighing it out in her mind too, want versus obligation.
As Haseul holds her silence, wondering gets the best of Lip.
Her thoughts spiral out in a hundred directions, imagining futures utopian, catastrophic, and everywhere in between. She needs to know what Haseul is thinking, is desperate for at least the clue of her expression. She’s at the wrong angle, though, with Haseul facing away and cast in shadow.
She could look without Haseul knowing.
Just this once, Lip thinks.
She speeds up until Haseul is frozen, moves until she can see. Haseul's expression is shy – apprehensive or maybe excited? The texture is hard to discern, especially to someone who spends more time with the sea than with people. Maybe if Lip had stayed home and studied art like her parents wanted she’d be able to make meaning from the planes of Haseul’s face.
God, Haseul is beautiful. That, at least, she knows for sure.
Lip stays there watching a fraction too long, loses her grip on time. Only just makes it back into place before the world catches up.
;;
It should stop there.
You’d think Lip wouldn’t need to slow down the world. They’re essentially waiting for weird things to find them, and without a heist to plan or battle to prepare there’s nothing but time.
Time to watch the gray sky, always at the edge of rain (maybe that’s my power, Haseul jokes). Time to bicker with Jinsoul about proper table manners, because being a pirate is no excuse for chewing with your mouth open.
Time to sneak glances at Haseul and feel guilty about it.
But once she’s used her power it’s hard to stop.
There’s pleasure in timelessness: Lip has the luxury of looking as much as she wants, for as long as she wants, without having to admit to anything (or make it too real).
So she does it again and again. Always when she’s alone with Haseul, when there’s no one else around to notice her changing position in the space between seconds. Haseul's not going to see, she feels sure: these days her eyes seem to anchor on everything but Lip.
;;
Two weeks into the journey, Haseul and Lip sit in the captain’s cabin poring over maps. It’s more ritual than necessity at this point, but there's comfort in pretending they're doing something.
As they argue lazily about the best course, Haseul knocks over a pot of ink. Without thinking, Lip speeds up to catch it.
When she slows down, Haseul is staring straight at her.
“You’ve done that before. Around me.”
It’s not a question. That was a test, Lip realizes: Haseul set her up again, and this time she’s sure she didn’t pass.
Lip nods, heart pounding in her ears.
“What. I mean, why…”
Haseul swallows like she’s scared to finish the question.
Shame and self-loathing roll through Lip; she stammers to find an excuse.
“I don’t do anything, I swear. I would never without your permission.”
“Then why?”
Because there aren’t enough seconds in the day to look at you, Lip thinks.
She says nothing, but it feels like Haseul can hear anyway.
Lip can't bear to look at her, so the creak of her chair is the first warning she gets that Haseul moves closer.
“What if you had permission,” Haseul says. Her gaze dips down to Lip’s mouth, the boldest declaration either of them have made.
“We shouldn’t,” Lip says, which only makes the possibility realer. What they shouldn’t do crystallizes in the air between them. Lip breathes it in with every inhale, watches it flicker along Haseul’s eyelashes (she’s leaning forward now, close enough for Lip to count them).
“There are a lot of things in the world that shouldn't be.”
Lip can feel the words as much as hear them, and she knows in a fleeting moment of clarity that if a kiss happens there's no coming back.
“Lip,” Haseul says, small and unsure. She may be the stuff of legend but in this moment she’s achingly human, waiting for Lip to bend down to meet her.
That's what tips Lip over the edge: she'd have to bend down to kiss Haseul. Haseul is shorter, she's always known, but she's never felt it quite like this. Lip is used to being the smaller one herself, and the realization that this time she wouldn't be brings a surge of fondness to balance the want.
She gives in, reaching for Haseul with all of her body.
Then, thunderous feet sound on the stairs. They separate just as Jinsoul appears, to the bittersweet taste of almost.
“Good, you’re both here,” Jinsoul says breathlessly. “Lookout spotted a ship. It’s flying Yves’ flag.”