secret

[catwif3]

rating: pg/13

word count: ~2900

fandom: fallen london/sunless sea (original characters)

originally posted 1/22/16

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there’s something almost ironic about having a name like “aurora” in the neath. acantha supposes she could change it back– it’d used to be “arora” some generations ago, but they’d anglicized it when the family moved to britain– but it’s too delightfully inappropriate, down here where there are no stars.

acantha thinks she’s done fairly well for herself, honestly. she has many acquaintances if few friends. there was that nasty business with aunt ritika, right after she’d moved down, but the letters asking after her have mostly stopped, even. (this might have more to do with acantha changing addresses without taking the trouble to inform surface relatives than with anyone actually ceasing inquiries into aunt ritika’s mysterious disappearance.) it’s not like she’s wildly successful, she’s not fooling herself. she lives above a shop in veilgarden; not precisely glamorous. she writes trash on commission for a living.


but it’s not like she’d be any better off in her parent’s crowded house above, and there are so many things to learn and explore down here. also nobody to stop her from getting into the kind of trouble she tends to seek out, honestly. most of her new friends are already mired in the muck she’s raking herself into, and so think nothing of teaching her their ways.

today acantha has the opportunity to make it all the way out to wolfstack docks, where, admittedly, she’s not all that popular since that incident with the urchins and the cannon. but she has faith that she’ll be able to talk relevant parties around, if she stumbles onto them.

faith turns out to be fairly unnecessary, however: the docks are deserted today. acantha wanders, searching vaguely for where the action is bound to be. her pockets are weighted with rostygold from her last trip to watchmaker’s hill, and zailors are usually half-desperate for a good time, the cheaper the better. it’s amazing what a few coins, a bottle of wine, and an ingratiating smile will get you, with the right crew.

acantha stops for a moment to look up (and up, and up) at the prow of one of the biggest warships she’s ever seen. the dock it’s moored alongside seems to stretch out forever into the bay, until it might as well be out in the zee itself as far as acantha is concerned. acantha wonders if she’s strictly allowed to be on that dock. does it count as trespassing if you’re not on the ship? is the part of a dock that a ship is tied up to private somehow? the ship is probably military, and acantha doesn’t need any more trouble with the constables than she already has.

of course, she didn’t get into that trouble by paying heed to sensible concerns like that, so she takes a detour to tour (heh) along the side of the ship. it smells like fire and iron and blood this close, the brimstone scent of its fuel hanging like a haze over the smells of the bay. acantha wonders if you’d stop smelling all those things once you’d lived on a ship long enough.

“i’m not looking to zail anytime soon,” a soft voice announces from behind her, and acantha whirls and almost throws a punch instinctively in her alarm. she hides the knuckledusters in her skirt as soon as she realizes what she’s doing, and takes a step back from the taller, slighter woman who’s crept up on her, feeling like her heart may just beat out of her chest. what the hell. acantha hadn’t heard her coming at all. the docks are no place to let her guard down like that.

“o-oh, um. i’m not– that is, i was just looking. it’s a very impressive ship and all.” acantha finds her words after a brief stumble into incoherence, and conjures a flirtatious smile to go with them, looking up through her eyelashes at the other woman. older, probably, judging by the silver threading her black hair, but her sharp pale face is curiously smooth and unlined, almost colorless.

“mmm,” the woman grins, a barely-there flash and gone again. “you didn’t seem the zailing type, but stranger things have happened.”

acantha almost laughs. her, a zailor? no, no, no, that’s how people die– for real, permanently and all.

“is this– your ship, then?” she asks, as prettily as she knows how, with that little breathy upward lilt that makes her sound appropriately awed and inspired.

“yes, that’s the sinesis.” the woman looks at her; not quite glaring, not quite… anything. just a long flat hard stare like she can see straight through acantha’s (generous, usually quite handily beguiling on targets of many genders) cleavage to her red beating heart. “you haven’t been below long, then, or don’t follow politics,” she adds.

“the great game, you mean? i’m afraid i only dabble.” acantha checks a frown before it can ruin her performance of flattery, wondering who exactly is this woman– a zee captain? of some distinction if she expects acantha to know the name of her ship. acantha’s only met the more disreputable kind of captains, before, the kind carousing with their crew in the kind of dives that make acantha nervous still.

“just as well, then,” the woman says, though. acantha makes a note to ask around about this mystery later.

“the sinesis, did you say?” she asks, to make sure. “and what about you, captain…?”

“tierney. lynch. not captain, right now. i’m– retired, i guess.” her eyes blaze up strangely on ‘retired,’ as though lit from within, and for a moment acantha isn’t sure whether they’re the brown she’d vaguely marked or red.

“oh? sounds like a story,” acantha purrs. “i could buy you a drink, lighten that load a little?”

tierney raises one eyebrow at her, that flat stare drilling into acantha’s skull.

“you may regret hearing it.”

“try me.” acantha grins, more predatory than persuasive, and receives a flash of a smile even more so in return.

“all right then. i know a place nearby.”

tierney stalks off at the kind of brisk pace of one who is used to walking everywhere, and used to being kept up with as a matter of course. acantha has to hurry to match that pace, but it’s not beyond her.

the place tierney leads her to is deep in the maze of the docking district, which tierney navigates as though she’s been doing it all her life. hell, maybe she has been. sometimes acantha forgets that not everyone in london is an immigrant, that there are at least two generations or so who were born 'neathers.

it’s cozily lit inside with both gaslamps and candles, lending an almost eerie yellow-green glow to the polished surfaces of tables and counters. tierney goes straight to one of the tables by the far wall, not even stopping to look around. a usual haunt, then. people look up from their glasses at tierney, acantha, then look away to talk hurriedly among themselves. tierney is known, then, too; noteworthy. acantha wonders if this encounter will make its way back to veilgarden. she swears she doesn’t mean to do outrageous things, really. it just turns out that people find the things acantha likes rather, well. scandalous.

acantha settles into the seat across from tierney with a flourish of skirts and leans flirtatiously over the table to prop her chin on her hands.

“drink of preference?”

tierney shrugs one shoulder, waves a hand dismissively.

“you choose. once you’ve spent too long at zee anything becomes good enough, honestly.”

a grubby man in an apron comes to take their order. tierny stares him down until he goes wide-eyed and fidgety, a process which acantha watches with some amusement, until tierney breaks off finally without saying anything.

“bottle of morel '72,” acantha says, and the man turns to her with obvious gratefulness. she flashes a chink of red gold at him inquisitively. if this is one of those bazaar-associated places that only accept echoes, she’s a bit up hell’s creek with only half a paddle– but he nods at her and hurries back with a bottle and two glasses. good. rostygold, a lady of acantha’s particular exuberant temperament has no trouble acquiring; things that net echoes take more roundabout work, she’s finding.

“how long have you been below?” tierney asks. she’s so soft-spoken that acantha almost has trouble hearing her over the chatter and clatter of the establishment. it hadn’t seemed so hard out by the quiet of the dark water.

“not yet a year,” acantha says, because it makes it sound like much longer than the few months it’s actually been without actually lying. being new around here just makes her a mark, and acantha likes to keep it the other way around.

“miss the surface?” tierney asks.

acantha busies herself with pouring the wine for a long moment. what does this woman want to hear? she’s not quite sure. she’ll just have to trust that tierney might like whatever she has to say. people usually do. and if they don’t, well, that’s what a good right hook is for, honestly. somehow acantha suspects she might be slightly outmatched here, though.

“i don’t think so,” acantha says, almost more to her wine glass than her companion. “it’s new. it’s different, down here. even if i can still move back up, i don’t think i would.”

“romance of the underground?” tierney says. she looks briefly almost– sad? her expressions are so twisted, so fleeting, that it’s hard to read her. “i saw the sun for the first time only once i went to zee,” she says. “we cannot live with it, anymore, but we want it so. it’s interesting, that so many will throw that away for the supposed sparkle of the false-stars.”

acantha almost protests, but checks herself– there was no insult in what tierney said unless she chooses to take one, she thinks. and zee-stories for just some wine is an offer one doesn’t get every day.

“you asked me about my– retirement,” tierney says. acantha braves to watch tierney’s face again and is once more conflicted over those eyes: wide, bruised, brown or red? red? (yet certainly not a devil. acantha knows devils, now, and tierney is… the opposite, maybe. frozen rather than molten.) “have you heard of kingeater’s castle?”

acantha thinks, sure, and then– no, never, it’s just one of those place-names certain people are supposed to know about, but anything further than venderbight or the cumaen canal is a mystery of blank cartography to acantha.

“never heard of it before,” she admits.

“zail as far south as you can and as far east as you dare, and that is kingeater’s castle. a mountain rising out of the zee, bigger than some islands, and in its crater at the altar of its heart– despair.” tierney bares her fangs, a parody of a smile, white teeth glittering against red gums like jewels. acantha didn’t expect her to be so poetic.

“it does strange things to people, kingeater’s castle. it is huge, and dry as bone, and empty. we don’t know who built it. the khan, the presbyteriate even, don’t know who built it. maybe the principles did, but if they told me, i forgot.” tierney shrugs that same one shoulder, gaze going distant. she swirls the wine in her glass, seems to remember that it’s there, and drains it down as though it were water and she’s back on that dry dreary rock with none in sight. acantha supposes that’s what she meant when she said any kind would do.

“we’d been there before. there are rites– well. that’s another story, i suppose. there are powers far out in the zee that are more mysterious and differently compelling than the devils and churches here.” she stops, looks confused. acantha refills her glass and stays quiet: she doesn’t have the knowledge to help guide a story like this.

“the drowned man hums tonight,” tierney says, more to herself than to acantha, a low susurrating sing-song of a recitation much practiced. acantha shivers, wonders if she’s heard that before. (who is the drowned man? surely there have been whispers. is it familiar? is it not?)

tierney is quiet, staring, a long time. if the neath does strange things to people, it seems that the zee does even stranger. acantha hides her fears in her wine glass, the sound of the buzzing of the other patrons rising and seeming to press on her ears. it’s as though this woman carries the chill of the zee with her: acantha regrets taking off her jacket despite them being snugly indoors.

“i ate them,” tierney says, soft and sharp and sudden, grinning again, or grimacing, eyes even wider and red, red, surely that is red like fresh-spilled blood. acantha is frozen, hypnotized, trapped. tierny is staring her down into the depths of the unterzee. (who is this captain who is she what has acantha done)

“i killed them all, a red riot of murder. they fought, oh, they fought for their lives and i took them, took their pieces from them. he built me an engine more powerful than any other his beautiful trespassing brain i ate him. he wrecked our enemies his beautiful charred fingers they tasted like gunpowder i ate them.”

it is a sermon: delivered to an audience of one. she was wrong; this is not just a zee-story but a tale of terror wrapped in maniac prayers. tierney is not any louder than before but she snaps, she shrieks, and no one else is hearing this but acantha, oh god is she going to die. surely one dies for the knowing of these kind of secrets. (so long as she can still get back up after it will be fine, right?)

“all my bright beautiful officers from all across the zee they gave their futures to me as the drowned man did, all twenty-one crew members they screamed and screamed but you know zailors are worth less than mutersalt after all.”

tierney licks her lips, her eyes not leaving acantha. her tongue is very red. she is not even breathing hard, though it seems like she should be. acantha barely dares to breathe at all.

“and then. i was alone. only my navigator who has nothing left to be eaten already. and he and i zailed all the long, long, slow way home. the zee is dark and even more terrifying when you are alone. there are things in the deep that could sink even my sinesis. there is so much wide water. it is as endless as it is cold.

“so i’m retired, like i said. for now. the sinesis lies empty but for those two trapped within its hold. until i need to go. perhaps north again. one day.”

she raises her cup, studies acantha over its rim. acantha tries to remember how to be charming. she’s not used to the weight of the zee, the sheer size of it– no whispered hint this, no cryptic clues: this was a full secret, a confession poured into the ears of– who? just another hack writer of low virtue from veilgarden, and this zee-captain now staring at her not even expectantly, just interested, mildly amused.

“so, do you regret hearing it?” tierney asks, finally.

“no,” acantha hisses, so vehement she surprises herself. “it was true, what you just told me, wasn’t it?”

“yes,” tierney says. “i could make you believe a lie, perhaps, but what is the fun in that? i’m very lacking in fun, these days, all alone in london.” she stops a beat, drinks her glass dry again as though remembering it, again as though still parched for it. “unless you prefer a lie? i met some like that in varchas.”

“i asked for your story, and if i got a little more of it than i was expecting, then i am honored,” acantha says carefully. the taste of the wine lays heavy and earthy on her tongue. “even if you only picked me to tell because i’d be easy to silence if need be,” she adds, trying for levity and probably falling far short.

“i picked you because you’re the first to ask, actually,” tierney says. “and i have so very many secrets, and nothing to do with them anymore. it has more value with you.”

“i– thank you,” acantha says, still feeling rather adrift. it is not a rare sensation, since she came below, but it’s been becoming rarer, as she learns the ways and rules of fallen london. tierney nods, and stands abruptly, reaching out to finger the neck of the bottle of wine, still half-full.

“do you mind?” she asks.

acantha shakes her head. “no, of course– it’s yours. for the story, i said before.”

tierney takes it, tastes the lip of the bottle and tips it up at acantha like a toast, like a blessing.

“perhaps i’ll see you around again, then,” she says, and turns to go.

“veilgarden! i-if you’re ever in the area– that’s where i usually am,” acantha calls after the wiry retreating form, and immediately blushes hot with how silly that was. tierney salutes in some careless manner with the wine bottle, though, so perhaps it was not an entirely foolish gesture.

acantha settles back with the last drops in her glass, and then shakes herself back into her jacket and leaves a scatter of coins on the table, feeling eyes on her as she winds her way back out to the chill salt wind of the docks.

that was quite enough for this venture, she thinks. home, to the laughter of the honey-dreamers and the comfort of the familiar degeneracy. if she doesn’t have nightmares tonight, it will be some sort of miracle, probably. but that’s a price she’s found worth paying for many things, down here.

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(tierney and acantha reference:)