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“Mail call, Cap’n.”
Fortune looked up from the desk in her quarters just soon enough to dodge the small stack of envelopes Rafen tossed onto the lacquered top.
She pulled the cheroot away just long enough to gripe “Unprovoked” and give it a brief tap on the ashtray nearby.
Rafen gave an unrepentant shrug and threw himself into the high-backed chair across her. “Making sure you’re awake.”
“Hm.” She gingerly set her fountain pen far away from the documents spread before her and set her smoke back between her teeth. In a movement so familiar as to be second nature, she gathered up the pile thrown over her desk and gave them a quick tap against the wood to square them up. Her free hand finger-walked through the stack. Fortune gave a pensive hum and lifted her head again, a manicured brow quirked. “You going through my mail again, old man?”
“Figured you’d prefer I be the one to get their fingers blown off over you in case of a hex.”
Fortune snorted, a smirk twitching at her lips. “I do tend to need mine, yes. Appreciate the consideration.”
“Thought you would.” He cracked his neck with a grunt. “Didn’t read ‘em, if you care.”
She really didn’t. “You could at least pretend to be sorry.” Wasn’t like most of her correspondence these days didn’t come through her first mate anyway. Turned out acting on the false promises the Black Mist plagued your mind with tended to make folks a touch skeptical on your ability to rule. And Bilgewater had never really been what one might call the peaceful democratic type to start with.
No one had been stupid enough to step to her just yet, but that was little comfort. If she never woke in a panic from another nightmare about her drowned crewmates dragging her Mist-wracked body down to the depths with them, it would be too soon.
Rafen clapped his hands once, deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. Fortune startled—glared. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “I know that look. Whatever you’re thinkin’ about, you’re doin’ it too hard.”
Fortune pondered several different dirty jokes to respond with, but in the end decided she was simply too weary to take such obvious bait right now. Her eyes dropped back down to the envelopes in her hands.
Then she noticed the glitter rubbing off on her hands and desk. “Ah, fuckssake, man,” she huffed, gingerly digging the sparkle-laden letter from the middle of the stack with a thumb and forefinger. “You put that there on purpose.”
Rafen’s grin was beyond obnoxious. “Did not.” He pointedly wiped his hands off on his trousers, drawing Fortune’s attention to the streak of glitter they left behind. “Just thought that one might interest you.”
“So put it on top, jackass.”
He waggled his fingers at her, nonplussed. “Sticks and stones, cap’n. Go on, take a look. Might suit your fancy, even.”
She was already sliding a finger beneath the broken wax seal. “Don’t tell me what to do.” Fortune made to pull the tri-folded sheet out—then, thinking better of it, put the stack of thus-unsullied requests and reports and letters to the side first. No point in getting everything on her desk covered in sparkles. She frowned down at the folded page, turning it over in her hands. Rare that she got much of anything in these days that was written on vellum. Rarer still that it’d be dyed black as pitch. That was a marker of a dramatist if she’d ever seen one.
“Where’d you say this was given to you?” she spoke up, glancing up at Rafen again.
He shrugged, helpful as ever. “I didn’t. Just kinda showed up.”
“Oh, well, brilliant.” She unfolded the page, smoothing it flat against her desktop with both hands.
An invitation, it seemed, if the long, looping cursive was anything to go by. She skimmed its contents.
Fortune frowned, slowly lowering her cigar to rest on the edge of her ashtray. Read over it again.
“Well?” Rafen prompted.
“Huh.”
“How very eloquent.”
“Didn’t think they’d be doin’ another Gala this year,” she said, schooling her tone into practiced neutrality. “Rather thought the Harrowing would’ve ruined the mood.”
Rafen lifted a brow. “That a pun?”
“Fuck off, mate.”
He laughed, unbothered. “C’mon, now, Serpent knows you love an opportunity to get all dolled up. And you haven’t had a half-decent chance since the whole… Nautilus thing.”
Fortune threw herself back in her chair, scowling now. “Aye, just so happens that having your mind hijacked to nearly ruin the city you’re trying to save tends to put a damper on the damn mood.” She tossed the letter back onto her desk, heedless now of the glitter left in its wake. She finger-combed loose strands of scarlet back with one hand, huffing out something close to a sigh. “I don’t have the bloody time for frivolities anymore.”
Rafen looked at her for a long moment, weathered expression unreadable, pale eyes burning into her crumpled form. “You’ll kill yourself at the rate you’re going, Sarah,” he said at last, straightening up to regard her sternly.
Sarah grunted. “Gotta go out somehow.”
“And you think Bilgewater would survive another power grab? After everything we’ve had to do for you to take hold of the city?” For just the briefest of moments, something like pity flickered into his face. “Did our crewmen die for no—?”
“Don’t,” Sarah ordered, voice cold and raw. She sucked in a steely breath through her teeth. “Don’t you dare.” Her knuckles were white on the arms of her chair, fists trembling. “…They died because of a stupid, impulsive decision,” she finally said softly. “I wanted it to be for this city. But if they died for it, it… it has to have been worth it. I have to make it worth it.”
She passed a hand over her face, feeling suddenly much older than she had any right to be. Rafen, for a change, had nothing smart to say to that.
“Bilgewater hasn’t had time to heal,” Sarah said after a moment, voice steady again. She dug two fingers into her temple, working at the burgeoning ache there. “So I don’t have time to go prancing about. There’s work to be done.”
“There’s always work to be done,” Rafen said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “That doesn’t mean you’re the one meant to do all of it. As above, so below and all that.”
Fortune was so incredibly not in the mood for riddles. She hadn’t even cared for them before her life was all long days and sleepless nights. “Spit it out, old man.”
“Bilgewater hasn’t had time to heal?” He shrugged, splaying his hands in silent question. “Aye, not surprising. Its queen hasn’t even had time to sleep, let alone heal.”
There was no adequate rebuttal for that, and they both knew it.
Fortune glowered silently nonetheless.
“And you’re thinkin’ this…” She motioned down to the offending letter. “…event, for lack of a better word—”
“It is an event—”
“—is somehow just the kick in the ass I need to, what, start healing? Getting all dolled up for nobody to parade around in front of people who’d rather me dead?” She snorted, letting her jaw rest heavily in the palm of her hand. “How incredibly fun.”
“They don’t have to rather you dead,” Rafen insisted, a glimmer in his eye now. “That’s the thing, aye? C’mon Sarah, I’ve known you since you were little more than a scrappy little street rat with a chip on her shoulder and a world to burn through. There’s not another man or woman alive who’d ever have had the nerve to move against Gangplank, let alone try to dredge this serpent pit up from the muck.” He nodded sternly, thumbing at his nose. “That’s the mark of a dreamer, Sarah. That’s who you are, it’s what you do. Is it so wrong to want the rest of the world to see that part of you instead of what they think they know?”
“Bilgewater doesn’t let people dream, lad,” Fortune scoffed instead of answering, tilting her chair as she leaned back. She pointed the envelope at him, half-accusatory. “Not anymore anyway. Pair of us would know that more than most.”
“Aye, and if the lady would direct her attention an inch lower on the letter,” he returned, just as scathingly. His scarred face softened as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “C’mon, cap’n. Could be as good a chance as any to get the nightmares out of your head and into the open. Might be good for you.”
Sarah let out a slow, hissing breath through her teeth. “Good as a hole in the damn head.” She flipped the invitation open again, making a show of skimming over the page. “Don’t suppose they’d let me give the old Saltwater Scourge the ass-beating of a lifetime if he shows his face, do you?”
The bluntness startled a bark of laughter from him. “I’d reckon not. Likely as anything same rules as a captain’s requiem.”
She tutted. “Disappointing.”
“I hear word that invites have shown up at a few other... notable estates, though. The du Couteau household, for one.”
That got her attention, brows raising very nearly to her hairline. “No shit? Kitty Kat’s actually showing at a formal event? Bet she’s livid about it.” Sarah tapped the creased fold of the invitation on her kneecap, thinking, thinking. It had been a minute since she’d had cause to rub elbows with Noxian nobility. She snapped the fingers of her free hand abruptly as the thought occurred: “Should really return that coat of hers if I go.”
Rafen was nonplussed. “The one you stole.”
Sarah wrinkled her nose at the idea that she’d stoop so low as petty theft. “I didn’t steal it, she left it.”
“Because you didn’t tell her it was still here.”
“Not relevant.”
Rafen threw his hands out to either side, dark brows cockeyed in his bewilderment. “Extremely relevant!”
“If I go,” Fortune spoke over him, fanning herself with the letter as if to waft his protests away, “we’ll need to lay some serious groundwork here beforehand. I don’t want to get back to find the place on fire because somebody thought to get cute while I was away.”
“What, you don’t trust me now?”
Fortune laced her fingers together beneath her chin, fluttering her lashes in his direction as she purred out a sickly-sweet “Oh, with my very life, lad!” Rafen rolled his eyes so heavily she thought they might stick that way. The thought made her grin as she folded the letter up again, pointedly running her nails along each fold to really crease it.
She flicked the letter back at him so deftly it nailed him directly in the forehead with a sharp paper corner.
“Direct your own attention an inch down, ya smug bastard,” Fortune declared with a broad grin, picking her dwindling cheroot back up from where it teetered on the ashtray. “I get a plus-one. I don’t suffer gauntlets alone, lad. You’ll be escorting me.”
Rafen sucked his teeth loudly, flipping the paper open again in disbelief. “Oh, c’mon now, you don’t actually expect me t—”
“What I expect is to be picked up promptly,” she informed him, grinning like a mouser with its prey betwixt her paws. “And chocolates. Dark, preferably.”
“You disgust me.”
“Flowers would be nice,” she mused, returning her smoke to her lips. “Are men still expected to provide the corsage?”
“So long as you’re not expecting me to provide a nightcap.”
Fortune lifted a brow. “Try it and die.”
“Fair’s fair.”