Fic: Adrift on Lonely Waters

[wintersday]

Title: Adrift on Lonely Waters
Fandom: Sunless Sea
Major Characters/Pairings: Zee-Captain/The Lady in Lilac
Wordcount: 235
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: You do not remember inviting her aboard, but she is here, so you must have. (Love, loss, forgetting. Only mostly in that order.)
Notes: Written for the prompt honey, green tea, lavender, for the three-sentence fiction. Captain's gender unspecified.



Lavender

You do not remember inviting her aboard, but she is here, so you must have.

You stand at the prow, your face turned Northward, and she stands beside you; her hand brushes yours, feverishly warm in the cold. The wind changes, and instead of salt and frost, you catch a breath of her perfume: spices, dried orange peel, the scent of a surface flower whose name you cannot remember and will not remember, except briefly, in dreams.

Green Tea

In dreams, briefly, you are safe.

When you wake, you are not safe, but you are warm; she sits in the flickering lamplight of your cabin and pours two cups of steaming tea, though you are the only one who drinks. What you pour out is stories: old sorrows and old loves, those you lost and those betrayed, the ones the zee has taken; each she lifts from you and tucks away, carefully, until you’re almost weightless.

Honey

You’re almost weightless when you fall into her arms.

You wake with your lamp gone dim and the North’s chill on you; you remember the feeling of silk against your skin, the taste of honey when she kissed you, and only fragments after that: her warmth, her weight, her lips against your throat, the darkness of a sweet and dreamless sleep.

You do not remember her leaving, but there is no one here, so she must have.