The Storyteller: The Tale of the Hunted

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Seventeenth Birthday

Sen settled quickly into ocean life, though her first year aboard the Cocoa Black only served to show her how much she didn’t know. The crew was patient, though, and quickly corrected her mistakes so nothing was amiss on the ship. The kids especially, three of them around the age of ten, loved to show off their knowledge to their new crewmates.

Those who showed the most interest in her, Sen noticed, were the young men all around her age. She was up in the crow’s nest one day with Bajo when she realised exactly why this was.

‘Oh!’ she said suddenly. ‘Skipper’s trying to set us up, isn’t he?’

Bajo laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, Teza, mostly,’ he admitted. ‘But yeah, that’s partly why he brought you both onboard. Too many young men on the ship, he realised, and he didn’t want to lose us just because there was nobody for us to marry, so…’ He gestured to Sen.

Sen burst out laughing. ‘Talk about planning ahead.’

‘Yeah! Well. I mean we didn’t argue.’

‘Well, go on then,’ Sen said, glancing slyly at him before turning her attention back to the horizon. ‘Sell yourself to me. Why did you join the Cocoa Black? What made Skip decide you were worth your weight in salt?’

Bajo laughed awkwardly at the quiet jibe. ‘Because of my experience with Captain Tu, if you must know.’

‘Oh, really?’ It was no secret the pirate lord was Gendas’ prime target, but there was still no solid information to say she was still alive. Most of their targets over the last year were rumoured to have had some close connection with Tu, but none yet had yielded any results. ‘You have experience with her, too?’

‘Nothing like yours,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘This was on my last ship, the Mayflower. And I promise we weren’t pirates! Our captain was one of those who didn’t trust Captain Tu, even back then.’

‘Neither did Sula,’ Sen said with a shrug.

‘One day we caught sight of Horizons away off behind us, and Skip immediately told us to open the sails and outfly it. We went for six days solid, but Horizons was slowly catching up to us, so on the seventh, it caught us.’

‘What for?’ Sen asked. ‘She was still just a bounty hunter back then.’

Bajo shook his head. ‘Apparently not. We tried to fight them off, of course, but we were just a merchant trader and didn’t have the same level of skill they did. Those of us who survived, they tied up. Captain Tu herself tied Skip to the mast while the rest of her crew went below decks and robbed us blind. Then she slit the captain’s throat as a warning about any of us telling the authorities, and left.’

Sen crossed her arms over the edge of the wooden bucket they sat in. ‘Good story,’ she complimented. ‘Completely fabricated, of course, but I liked it.’

‘What?’

‘You might want to throw a little more swashbuckling in there, though. Say how you killed at least one of the pirates yourself, or looked in her eyes and saw the bloodthirstiness already, something like that to make it more dramatic.’

‘What do you mean?’ Bajo’s voice trembled.

Sen shrugged. ‘It may have worked on others in the past, poor sods who want to believe anything they hear about the notorious Captain Tu, maybe even Captain Gendas, but I’d like to think he’s more savvy than that. Because you and I both know that if she had hunted down a ship back then that wasn’t a pirate, she wouldn’t have left any of the crew alive. A warning?’ She scoffed. ‘Please. Captain Tu doesn’t give warnings. She just does it.’

‘But it really happened!’ Bajo almost sounded as though he were begging for her to believe him.

Sen gave him a sweet smile and patted his cheek, then swung over the edge of the bucket. ‘Come on, romancer. Shift’s over and I’m hungry.’

She recounted Bajo’s story to Kaiji that evening. The two of them were resting on the foredeck, Sen with her back against the railing, Kaiji sitting between her legs and lying back against her stomach.

‘She killed the captain as a warning?’ Kaiji stifled a laugh.

‘That’s what I said!’ Sen agreed.

‘Oh poor, precious baby,’ Kaiji cooed. ‘Points for trying, I guess.’

Sen shrugged and laced her fingers behind her head. ‘It’s all a moot point, anyway. It’s not like I’m interested.’

Kaiji didn’t say anything, but Sen could feel her tense just a little bit. ‘In Bajo?’

‘In any of them,’ Sen confirmed, watching the top of Kaiji’s head closely. ‘Why would I be, when I’ve been wooing you the last two years?’

Kaiji laughed, as Sen knew she would. ‘Two years?’ she blurted, rolling over awkwardly so she could brace her arms either side of Sen’s body. Their year of sword training, followed by another year on the sea, had bulked up Kaiji’s arms and shoulders significantly, further emphasised by the angle Sen now looked at her from and the shadows cast by the setting sun. ‘Try the last decade, you blind idiot,’ Kaiji said with a grin. ‘I’ve been saying we should get married ever since Tu said it was possible.’

Sen parted her lips in a predatory smile. ‘Better hurry up and kiss me, then.’

Kaiji waited for just a moment, her eyes watching Sen’s lips before meeting Sen’s eyes again, as if to take in what she had been pining for over so many years, realising it was finally coming to pass. Then she pushed herself forward, her lips brushing tantalisingly against Sen’s.

Sen closed that last distance, pressing her lips firmly against Kaiji’s. They were dry and cracked, at least until Sen’s tongue moistened them, warm and soft. Something was digging into her back that she hadn’t noticed before, her right leg had gone to sleep, but Sen felt as happy and comfortable as ever she had.

Kaiji broke off to pull herself up to her knees, allowing Sen to reposition her leg and pull her back off whatever had been poking into it, then Kaiji took her face in both hands and kissed her again, light and sloppy so that Sen giggled at the squishy noises they made. Kaiji giggled back, breathless, then made another amused sound when Sen rested her hands on Kaiji’s hips.

Ever since they had both hit puberty, Kaiji had always had more obvious curves than Sen. Sen’s own chest was still barely more than when she was ten, while Kaiji now wore clothing to support her breasts and keep them comfortable. Sen had always been quietly envious of her for that, but now, right now, she could only appreciate Kaiji’s body.

She slid her hands up and down against Kaiji’s skin as they kissed, tracing the curve of her hips, her waist, the small of her back and the solid muscles that had developed there. She pulled her close in a hug, bare belly pressing against Sen’s own.

‘Do you think Captain Gendas would marry us?’ Sen murmured against Kaiji’s lips, turning each word into a kiss.

Kaiji shrugged. ‘Probably not, if he’s so keen on setting us up with his crewmen. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Mama already said she would if I asked.’

Sen grinned and bumped her nose against Kaiji’s, brushing it back and forwards in a funny little stroking motion that made Kaiji giggle and scrunch her nose up. ‘Perfect,’ Sen replied. ‘Because if we were to front up to the king and queen, I’d have to be the one disguised as a man.’ She slid her hands up to Kaiji’s breasts and squeezed them through her binding, just to prove her point.

Kaiji laughed. ‘That feels good,’ she said, voice husky. ‘Squeeze them again.’

Sen did as asked, pressing her palms against Kaiji’s chest, massaging a little before hooking her fingers into the binding. She glanced up at Kaiji’s face, asking permission with raised eyebrows, and Kaiji nodded. Sen pulled the binding down around Kaiji’s waist while Kaiji pulled her shirt up and over her head.

It was hardly the first time Sen had seen Kaiji’s breasts—they had swum naked together since childhood, and that didn’t change aboard the Cocoa Black—but it was the first time she had been allowed to openly appreciate them instead of taking sidelong looks when Kaiji wasn’t looking.

‘There’s so much more of them!’ she said, squeezing her own together under her shirt.

Kaiji settled her hands on Sen’s shoulders with a coy little smile. ‘Can you kiss them, too?’

Sen grinned coyly back, brushing her fingers over Kaiji’s skin. She traced the line from her shoulder down her breast to where they folded, heavy, over the skin of her ribs. She lifted them up with her palms, squeezing her fingers into the squishy flesh, so soft and gelatinous compared with the hard muscle of Kaiji’s back and stomach. She watched Kaiji’s chest rise and fall, dark skin glistening with sweat and prickling under the dusk chill, then she cupped her breasts and bounced them up and down, because they were too jiggly and fun to resist.

Kaiji laughed and smacked the back of her head. ‘That is not kissing!’

‘Oh, come on.’ Sen grinned up at her. ‘Like you don’t do that yourself? I do, and mine are nowhere near as fun as yours.’

She leant forward, licking the salty sweat from Kaiji’s chest. Kaiji stroked her short-cropped hair, fingers massaging over her scalp.

Sen kissed over Kaiji’s breast, tasting more salt mingled with the taste of Kaiji herself as she pressed her tongue against the gooseprickled flesh. She heard and felt Kaiji take a deep breath in as her mouth closed over Kaiji’s nipple.

‘That’s more like it,’ Kaiji said on her breath out. Her hands almost hugged Sen’s head, pulling her closer, pushing her self deeper into Sen’s mouth.

Sen licked her tongue against Kaiji’s nipple, experimentally nibbled at it with her teeth and drew a quiet hum of pleasure from deep in Kaiji’s chest, so she did it again. She was just doing to Kaiji what she knew felt good on her own body, only she was doing it with her mouth instead of her hands. It felt good to feel Kaiji’s responses to her touch.

‘Why has this taken so long?’ Kaiji wondered aloud.

‘Dunno,’ Sen mumbled, then pulled back just enough to answer. ‘Mouth’s too full of your tit to really think right now.’

Kaiji laughed again as Sen began giving her other breast the same attention while holding her hand to the first.

Why had it taken so long? Because she had been so consumed with trying to find Tu. She hadn’t seen Tu in so many years, and yet she had still so totally enveloped Sen’s life that she had been near-blind to what had always been beside her. Who had been beside her.

Tu was away back in her past now. Maybe stories about her would still keep coming up, and she wouldn’t kid herself into trying to avoid them anymore, but she could think of them as distant now. Tu was her past. Kaiji was her past, her present and her future.

‘I love you,’ she murmured around Kaiji’s nipple.

Kaiji giggled. ‘Me? Or my tit?’

Sen laughed and pulled away only so she could kiss Kaiji again on the lips. ‘Both of you,’ she answered. ‘Complete package of perfection.’ She took a deep breath, resting her arms around Kaiji’s waist as she smiled up at her. ‘Tu’s gone. It’s just you and me from now on.’

Kaiji smiled so wide that tears began to glisten in her eyes. ‘You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you to say that.’

‘About a decade?’

Kaiji shrugged. ‘About that,’ she agreed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. ‘Thank you, for finally realising it.’

STUFF

o And then KISS! This also took longer because you ladies decided to go an find a ship instead of making out and there was no room left in the last chapter for the making out.

o If this was a Raykinian ship, everyone would've lost bets right about now with who the girls would be shacking up with. Except Gendas, because I swear to god the man knows everything.

o I've been debating whether to make this porny from here on, but I don't think so. Halfway through a book is a bit far in to be introducing the porn, especially when the protagonist started out as a newborn baby. I don't think it's that kind of story. Maybe next NaNo

o Mayflower is a rooftop cocktail bar in Adelaide!

o I want a girlfriend with fun boobs =( I live vicariously through Sen now.

o Spoofy how appropriate your music choice as I post a Tsayth chapter.