Tales of the Blue Vagabond I ~ The Ballad of Little Crow
RATING: E (smut with Plot, canon-typical violence)
SHIPS: Jinx/Miss Sarah Fortune, Past Jinx/Ekko pining. Also the Syren. But that's a literal ship.
TAGS/TROPES: Pirates, Action/Adventure, Sex, Contracts, Blood, Guns and Smut, Loss of Virginity/First Times, Mentor/Protege relationship, Angst, Drama, Humor, Bisexual Jinx, Transfem!Jinx, World Traveler Jinx, Post-Arcane S2, Breaking That Cycle Of Violence Sure Ain't Easy, First Person POV, Jinx POV.
SUMMARY: Jinx and Miss Fortune. Two curses on mankind. A match made in hell. Or two wounded young women fighting tooth and nail for something they can call peace? Six months after the events of Arcane, a mysterious girl with a penchant for trouble and a skill with explosives and firearms makes quite a name for herself in Bilgewater. Back to back with the deadly and ambitious Captain of the Syren the legend of Fortune's Crow is about to be written in blood, salt, and gunpowder.
That led to the first time I stood in Fortune’s cabin, plighting our troth, as it were. My oath to serve on her crew, but while your boots are on that deck, it’s more binding than any marriage and the only divorce is a bullet and the deep blue sea.
Y’know, people think pirates are stinky, scruffy, dirty ruffians, but my Cap’n? Class act. I’ve seen her sweaty and salty and dishevelled, hair in tangles and clothes torn and spattered with dirt and ash and other people’s blood — unafraid of it, she’s no soft lil’ princess — but when most people meet her? She’s immaculate. Hair, thick and flowing and red as heart’s blood, ocean blue eyes that can cut a man’s heart out with a look, a rouge-lipped smirk people call stuff like ‘sensual’ and ‘coquettish’ and ‘sultry’, fair skin warmed and freckled by the searing ocean sun…she’s a real freakin’ babe and everyone knows it, especially her.
Everyone in Bilgewater with a pulse wants her pirate booty, but if there’s one real legendary treasure no sailor alive has laid eyes upon in this Ol’ Buccaneer Town, I reckon her legs are the X that marks the spot.
How she keeps her hair so silky-lookin’ and her scent bright with fresh vanilla and spices with just a lil dash of sweat, salt and fruity rum— and gunpowder, like me —when everyone else in Bilgewater reeks of brine and pukey grog and old fish beats the hell outta me. Especially the hair thing! Mine’s kinda bleaching to an aqua like the reef-water around some of the islands. It’s nice and balmy-soft sometimes and other times a dry salty crusty mess, especially if I’ve been dunked in the drink. It’s the first time since I cut them off that I’m actually not missing my braids…
“You’ll need to dye it, for now,” Fortune smiles upon me, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Not yet. They’re calculating, thoughtful, “You’re hardly the only blue haired girl from Zaun. Your little cult following’s going stronger after your noble sacrifice, apparently. And nobody’s expecting to see you without the braids…but with the hair and the eyes? Two and two could be put together. And we do deal with the Undercity and the new Barons on a regular basis…”
A scowl knots my eyebrows. Fine. She has a point. But I’m not taking the pink streak out.
“How about purple?” say I.
“Black,” she says, “No need to bleach to get it to stick. Washes out easier when you’re done, and easier to come by.”
I roll my eyes at her and huff, “Ughhh, you’re gonna make me look like my drunken sad sack of a sister in her oil slick era? Ughhh!”
Her smile grows coy. “You’ll be my little Crow. Messenger of the underworld. That’s if you don’t get yourself sent to it first — so we’ll discuss the rest of our terms now.”
Her cabin has the vibe of Silco’s office at the Last Drop. Recognized that right away. All the trappings of the criminal mastermind overlord she is under her creamy freckled skin and flowing fiery locks, all things sharp and dark and hard-edged, but elevated to display taste, restraint, and purpose. Jealous losers used to sneer at my dad as pretentious, envious, a dirty little thing aspiring to be like the very Pilties he despised.
But he knew the power of ‘class, taste, erudition,’ as he put it. He was taking the tools they used to keep us down and making them his weapons and armour. He never stopped being Zaun, not even in the last breath he whispered into my face.
Fortune is the same. She’s is all of those things, but for Bilgewater.
Oh, add style and comfort, those too. That big four-poster bed at the back of her cabin looked like it belonged in some Piltie aristocrat’s boudoir–and might’ve been plundered from one–if it weren’t for all the carved serpents and krakens on the dark polished wood.
Standing there, I caught my eyes flicking enviously back to it. Hell of a lot cosier than swingin’ round in a hammock in a crew deck full of snoring, farting, belching, mumbling pirates every night. But then I barely sleep anyway, so in those first months on the Syren, I spent more time catching my one-eye open forty winks hiding tucked in the nice cool dark of the cargo hold behind some pile of crates or dangling my leg from the crow’s nest under a giant moon weeping silver on the black glossy ocean than I ever did below decks.
That first time in her cabin, Fortune laid down her proposal, straight and frank. Serve her crew, on the gun deck. Turn my considerable talents to maintaining and upgrading those cannons, and the crew’s personal arsenal. Keeping the gunpowder stocked and procuring appropriate munitions at port. Keeping the Powder monkeys–ha, oh the first time I flinched hearing that name, but the little buggers are so cute with their flamey lil’ tails–in line…
And in return, food, lodgings, the camaraderie of her Crew, and a stipend of gold Krakens representing my cut of the take.
“Have we an accord?” she’d purred in her honeyed, sultry voice, the voice that had sent a hundred sailors to their knees, but not a one of them to her bed.
My eyes had narrowed then. I was a cocksure kid, eighteen-maybe-nineteen-probably-don’t-actually-know, big chip on my shoulder from being a crimeboss’s daughter, terror of the twin cities, figurehead of a revolution-that-never-quite-was, bitch-slapping a government with a Hextech rocket, bitch-slapping a populace with their own toxic waste, bitch-slapping an invading army straight back to Noxus, facilitating the bitch-slapping of a mad Hextech fortune cookie demigod…
Jinx, Vilest Villain, Big Damn Hero, Legend in her own Time, high on her own supply, thought she could make demands.
“Just a couple of amendments,” I’d announced, full-chested (though her chest’s a helluva lot fuller than mine, shoulda been a sign I wasn’t gonna win this), “first! I want a really big hat. Second! I’ll be upfront with ya, Red. I want my airship.”
“Yup! It was in pretty good nick before you stripped it. Bit of love, spit and elbow grease and she could still fly again—but not if we let ‘er rot into the sea, so there’s a time limit on that, see? All my gold Krakens, they can go into that if you wanna, but that’s what I want. I do my time for you, spruce up your guns, blow up your grudges, and make you look damn good doing it. And you help me fish out my ship and gimme leave to kit her out…”
I’d leaned in, given her my narrow Jinx eyes, my manic grin, so impressive.
“…end of that, when you’re done with me, I flutter off into the wild blue yon full of fond memories of our time plunderin’ the ol’ briny, and then I’m somebody else’s problem. Or—if you keep it interesting? Allied captain to your growing, majestic fleet, death to your foes from above on command. You’re the big fish, leadin’ the pack, I’m the lil’ bluebird with the real loud ca-kawww, right?”
My reckless, feckless shrug.
“Net win for you, either way. Whaddya say?”
I never saw the trap in Fortune’s full, smiling, devil-red lips. I was too young and stupid and full of my own demons, too used to an Underworld where the mythologizing of my unhinged psycho rep and my dead dad’s looming shadow did half my work for me. This was a different, saltier, soggier Underworld, and there were two shadows spreading over it, one shark coming for another, bigger shark, biding its time until it smelled blood in the water…
And the shadow that was growing was hers.
I had no idea I’d just indentured myself to Sarah Fortune in ways I could’ve never imagined. Might as well have sold my soul to the River King.
“Why, Jinx. What an ambitious proposal. I admire that.”
She’d smiled that devil’s sweet smile at me, pulled the string on a dark cloth purse she’d plucked from her coat.
A gold coin slipped into her palm. Turned over in her hand.
“Symbol of our accord,” she announced, and as she held it up to me, gave a light, surprised laugh and arch of her brow as her eyes fell on what she held, “Well, what do you know? Look–it’s a rare mint.”
True, it was no typical gold Bilgewater Kraken she’d plucked without looking from her purse. It could’ve been plundered or pilfered from the coffers of a dozen different lands; it doesn’t matter which.
One face, as she turned it in her fingers, was a woman, long hair unbound and a fish tail, perched on a rock in the sea. The other, a flying bird, a raven…
“A sign, this accord’s meant to be,” she smirked, “Fortune’s smiled just for us.”
“That mean we’ve got a deal?” I asked.
Her leatherbound hand took mine, fingers strong and uncompromising, and her eyes flashed up to mine with the smouldering inevitability of a lit cannon wick.
Pushing the coin into my palm between us. Her first gift to me; one day, it’ll be her last, too.
“Deal,” she said, and the deal was done.
Didn’t know until much later that Fortune wasn’t just on a pleasure cruise around these balmy isles knocking off a few shinies from Piltie merchants and running contraband into Noxian vassal states for fun and profit.
She was a hell of a lot more like Silco–like me–than I could’ve ever imagined from her flirty banter and charming, smirky masquerade. She had her eye on the big league. She had a mission. A cause, and a prize.
His name was Gangplank. Biggest fish in these waters. Leathery, nasty, cunning old killer, whole town on their knees to him, terrified of a whisper of his name. He’d shot her parents, shot her, and burned her life down when she was just a kid. One of those stories.
Under her feathery hat and vanilla-and-sea-salt perfume and warm, throaty laugh, Sarah Fortune was an unstoppable force, aimed in one direction. She was going to kill Gangplank, crush his empire, and take a steaming piss on his every legacy; dead, dead, dead, tolled the bells behind her eyes, and she didn’t care if half the sea burned with him.
Captain Sarah Fortune was going to war, and I’d just become her secret weapon.
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