Don't Rock the Boat, please
Flotsam was lounging in the galley, making for himself quite the meal out of scummy coffee and stale cookies. He plundered all the pink ones, even digging about in the tin to root hidden survivors out. He was feeling thoroughly self-indulgent and reckless, as people sometimes do when they expect their personal circumstances are about to fall out from under them.
“You, my friend, are the very last,” he said, holding up the final pink cooke. He stared at it with the wide, unblinking eyes of a fixated cat. “Came all this way. Crossed the ocean! But now I’m going to eat you. I’m going to put you in my mouth and I’m goinf to foo you and...” he swallowed, “that’s the end.”
Flotsam washed the sugary paste gumming up his teeth down with another gulp of warm coffee. The mug clanked as he set it down. Flotsam realized something. “I miss you already.” It wasn’t even as if the pink ones had been much better, they were as stale as the rest. He just liked them more.
It occurred to him too late that he should have explained his villainous plan — in exploitable, exacting detail — to the Last Pink Cookie before setting it into the unknown. Flotsam tried to consider what exactly that plan would have been and gave up.
He considered instead something that he did know.
Flotsam knew he was unusually powerful. His limited experience only gave a few ponies to compare himself against, but even then something in him just knew. Not one in a hundred unicorns, not here, not anywhere, could do as he did. In the city, something would come up for him. Or he’d make it come up. Either or. Magic like his did not have to speak softly, or carry a meek mop. So far it had — by his choice, no less — but it wasn't the only option available to Flotsam. The future did not have to be scary for someone who could deflect cannon balls, turn aside fire and storm-tossed hazards, no sir it did not.
It was still a little scary, to be fair.
Nauticaa had given him this time to make up his mind — what there was of a mind to make up — but from the onset there was really only one option that felt real to him. Stay on board, quiet, subdued and waiting? No.
The idea didn’t disgust him, not in the slightest. Flotsam quite liked the Mother, her crew and captain, but the idea of hanging on inexorably repulsed him. He could be comfortable here, but the moon couldn’t stay in the sky, the tide couldn’t stay high or low, and Flotsam couldn’t stay on the ship. His time, he felt, had come.
He didn’t want to go and he didn’t dislike staying, but... well, he stared at the table top, sipped his coffee without really tasting it — making it marginally better, as it were; he hadn’t made a very good pot at all — and if he could put it into words, what he would convey is that while the ship had stopped moving, some kind of inertia was dragging on his spirit, pulling him further forwards still.
The ship had stopped, but he had not. This, here, now, cookies and coffee and waiting: this was just formalities.
Flotsam would leave The Captain to her business and himself to a bounty of charred caffeine and months-going-on-years-old baked goods.
A groan lurched into the galley. Grammar says that a groan can’t lurch, only a thing that can groan can lurch, but in this instance it really was the groan that lurched. The pony that voiced it was dragged, zombie-like, behind.
Hop Scotch was either newly of the undead, or so immensely hung over as to be also be over, under, upside-down and possibly even sideways.
The mare, her colours a good few shades more pallid than usual, collapsed on the bench. She slumped against Flotsam, who bore her slight weight easily. Her face was lost in a tangle of wiry, partied-out, exploded-looking hair.
Flotsam topped up his mug and slid it over wordlessly.
Hop Scotch moaned a ‘thank you.’ Well, truth be told, what she actually moaned was more to the effect of ‘the world is slightly less miserable while still being absolutely, 100% miserable,’ but in cases like this, one just had to creatively interpret the meaning in it.
“Fun night?” he asked.
Hop Scotch leaned into Flotsam. She nodded slowly, which really meant she rubbed quite intimately against his chest. Flotsam had imagined himself enjoying moments such as these more than he was currently finding. Of course, in those idle fancies he had not considered that the ponies of his affections would have extenuating circumstances.
Namely, Hop Scotch smelled bad. The underlying scent of mare was there, and that was a pleasing enough scent, but what that underlay was a brewup of brews, sweat, a night’s grime and all those sporting activities that don’t involve a good, focused wash.
The little mewling affirmative sound Hop Scotch made as she nodded though; that was admittedly cute. She fumbled under her snarl of messy hair and dangled something black and silken from her hoof.
“Got a new ‘patch,” she announced, sounding quite proud, even through her groggy — perhaps grog-induced — fatigue. “Got it off a guy.”
Flotsam delicately tried to extricate himself. Hop Scotch was a mess, her hair was sticking to him in places and it distressed him to no end. He froze in dread when she heaved; the moment was ugly and scary and went on forever.
Hop Scotch swayed. She navigated the shaky procedure of bringing lukewarm coffee to her lips and putting it inside her. She swallowed, took two deep breaths then coughed abruptly. “I’m alright,” she said, peeling away from Flotsam until she was sitting upright more or less on her own power, if swaying steadily. “I’m alright.”
The silence became companionable, less pukey. Hop Scotch cradled her head on the table and covered her eyes. She murmured, “So you’re leaving.”
“Who said that?”
The mare shrugged her shoulders and stirred the air lazily. “It’s just the word going around.”
Flotsam was a little curious to know just where the word going around had started. He wasn’t exactly long from his chat with The Captain, whom Flotsam could not ever see being a flippantly chatty mare. He hadn’t given her his decision yet.
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe he was just predictable.
“Yeah. I can really start looking for, you know, this...” he trailed awkwardly, gesturing his hooves nebulously around his head. “Who I am, I mean. Nopony on the ship knows me — the other me, or... the past me, The... real me?” Flotsam wished he could take back the last words, they didn’t sit well with him. “I’m not sure how to put it, but, yeah. Nopony here knew any of that. In the city I can do more.”
He hadn’t planned it out yet. Going around asking “Do you know who I am?” wouldn’t be an entirely bad start, though it would be a bit silly.
Hop Scotch hummed affably. “Ships from everywhere come through Rivaplút. Somepone’ll know something, if you can just find them. Maybe someone's looking for you.”
Flotsam sighed and leaned back, the better to stare forlornly to the sky, though in the galley really it was just to the ceiling. "That'd be nice to believe." Did he, though? He honestly couldn't say. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he could almost as readily believe that there was nothing before, that he'd simply been born of the water with delusions of more, but he never really committed to this. It seemed that little bit more far-fetched than his already weird circumstances. A real-life magical avatar of the ocean incarnate would be more mer-maidy, pretty and shining and maybe that little bit scary, he figured. Certainly less Flotsam-y.
He stared, lost in thought. There was always the risk of tipping over backwards from this position though, what with the benches having no backs. Flotsam stretched, popped a few vertebrae pleasantly and slumped forwards. He gave the cookie tin a prod, it slid away with a noisy rattle. “If I could just remember on my own...”
But that didn’t seem to work. Not at all. Questions from The Captain and the crew, the fantastical guessing games with Patches; sometimes Flotsam felt he just glanced off the edge of his memory or passed in reach of it, if only he could grasp it. And he remembered remembering — it came in those moments when magic pried something loose in his head and the glimpses came — but the memories themselves went away again, leaving only silhouettes and shadows on his thoughts.
Flotsam was quietly startled from his brooding by the grip of Hop Scotch’s hooves around him. Putting her body into it, she rocked him gently. A pony could forgive sticky hair and general whiffiness over an embrace like this, and a pony did. Flotsam let the hug take him.
“You just gotta look,” said Hop Scotch. “You’ll find something.”
Flotsam did feel better, even if he spotted the nice platitude for what it was. If anything, he liked it more for that. It made him smile. “What your saying is, my ship will come in?”
Hop Scotch scoffed. “You are literally on the ship that came in.”
“But time and tide wait for no mare?”
“You’re no mare.”
“Don’t rock the boat?”
She bumped her hip against him. “But everypony knows you desperately want to.”
Flotsam had no presumptions about being a wit, having presently exhausted his current supply. He managed in the interim, “Uh...”
Hop Scotch gave him a playful shove. “I’m rocking you right now.”
“Okay okay, you win.” Flotsam put up his hooves in honest defeat.
“Damn straight,” mumbled the mousey earth pony. She groaned unhappily. “And my prize is coffee. Give me coffee.”
Flotsam couldn’t argue. He poured the last sludge-like dregs of the brew into the mug and let Hop Scotch go at it. She swallowed weakly and, a second later, gave a toxic little cough. It passed, and she kept it down, albeit with some apparent effort.
Harpoon came in and without ceremony dropped herself at Flotsam’s other side, forceful enough to make the bench slam and ponies’ spines jolt, right through their butts and up to the napes of their necks. She paid neither of them any sign of acknowledgement and dragged the cookie tin towards herself with a noisy scrape.
The First Mate was always rough to Flotsam’s mind, in a stone of a storm-shorn shore kind of way. Even against that usual standard she seemed a little more haggard, but there was something languid in her movements, too; it put Flotsam in mind of a mare who had burned through too much energy in the last twelve hours to bother spending any more on keeping herself tense and stiff. She scrutinized a cookie with little interest and with a flick of her hoof tossed it back again like an underwhelming catch of fish. Her wings rippled at her back and crackled at the joints before she settled, not touching Flotsam at all but close enough all the same that he could feel her prescence, his eyes opened or closed. Around hers, there was a bruise, with swelling in her cheek and the general air about her of a cat that had won her fights and claimed her spot.
Harpoon put a hoof to her jaw and cranked it sideways, making it give off a loud crack before settling more fully into her chosen spot. It was, Flotsam realized, the most relaxed he’d ever seen her.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was that one time...
“Do you believe in hair of the dog?” asked Hop Scotch. She upended the stained mug and three sets of eyes watched as a molasses-slow dribble of dregs-of-the-dregs misbegotten coffee drooled downwards before falling in a sad splat of black. “I think the dog's hair tastes better,” she mused bitterly.
“I believe in holding my drink,” said Harpoon. That was her, always a flat answer, and maybe with a bit of snide on the side. “It’s good to use up the old stock.”
Hop Scotch only shrugged and, fed up by even that slight action slumped head-into-hooves again. “It was there,” she said, gesturing vaguely to empty mug and pot. “So I drank it. Good had nothing to do with it.”
Harpoon grumbled something in a tone which, to Flotsam’s ears, suggested a message along the lines of “that was your logic last night and look where it got you.”
It either slipped over Hop Scotch’s head or she blithely ignored it. As skins went, the crew mares tended to have rather thick ones. Wilting wallflowers didn’t do well here, and even if nature had intended Hop Scotch to look the part of one, she certainly didn’t act it. The Look, such as her thing for eye patches, just helped correct nature’s Hop Scotch brand marketing error, as she saw it.
Maybe nopony else would consider losing a leg — while still horrible — to be a chance to come into her own identity, via peg-leg. Flotsam couldn’t imagine Hop Scotch being quite so devoted to the image of a freebooter corsair so as to get a saw and take the proactive stance, but... the impression was there, even so.
She looked like a mare that had thought about it. At least she wasn’t trying to shove Parrot onto her shoulders.
Hop Scotch might have fallen asleep, only the mare’s eyes shot open and they showed whites. She heaved and moaned. She burped and there was an audible splashing sound inside her. “Oh no.” Hop Scotch launched off of Flotsam and the table, hit the floor at speed and was still accelerating while a horrible sound rose in her throat and raced her out the galley.
“She’s fine,” Harpoon said.
“Yeah,” said Flotsam, wondering. Since Hop Scotch took the night watches zealously and was practically nocturnal, he figured, that made daylight Hop Scotch’s midnight and her waking hours — as they were — had been spent, in her own words, rioting. “Has she even been to sleep yet, do you think?”
Harpoon only shrugged. Hop Scotch’s problems were Hop Scotch’s problems. Flotsam cared a little more, or at least more openly. Right now her problems were — hopefully — going overboard into the salty waters of the harbour. Not just for her sake, nor just the ship’s, but the mop’s, too. Tedium and long days had endeared the thing to him. It was silly, but it was what it was. You cared about what you cared about, whatever that was. It was the symbol of his contribution — sans feats of mighty and terrible magic — that were his. Modest, meagre, but willing.
He felt oddly ambivalent about that.
“What about you?” he asked.
Harpoon turned abruptly. Their legs brushed together under the table and she tossed the question back at him. “What about me?”
The pegasus was muscled, tufty with her thick coat and unapologetically rough. She could impose on a pony, whether she meant to or not, and Flotsam after all this time was still never quite sure which it was. At the very least, she had to be aware she was doing it. He could feel her effect working on him. It was something he liked, not that he’d admit it in so many words. “Your eye,” he suggested, nodding to her bruises.
“It’s nothing.”
“Right,” said Flotsam. He wasn’t sarcastic about it, either, sarcasm not being something that came too readily to the unicorn. Harpoon was quite apparently fine and, as a few tufts about her chest rose up on the tiniest bit of satisfaction after he’d mentioned it, it seemed she was quite pleased with herself. She’s been fighting, he thought. Brawling, even, which is like fighting only with more heart and better improvisational skills.
Flotsam waited for the next bit.
“You should see the other mare,” Harpoon added brusquely, more or less on cue. Some conventions you just had to honour, after all.
He didn’t think to think before he spoke. This is a huge cause of problems in the world. “Was she hot?” he asked, suddenly feeling leaps and bounds and backflips at odds with himself. The words were out, the words had come at him sideways, and the imagination had a way of running away with itself. To be studying Harpoon and then come out with that...
They could be horrible sometimes, the reactions Harpoon didn’t have. It made you feel like you’d taken a leap of faith only to find open air and a long drop. “Eh. Wasn’t bad.” An unfriendly grin snuck into her bruised features. “Cost her some money, getting teeth those teeth put back, though.” Harpoon gave a rare flash of her own.
Flotsam laughed heartily. It was wrong to, he knew, but his own embarrassed shame about finding some stranger’s misfortunate pain funny somehow only stoked his outburst higher. Sometimes you just needed a laugh that wracked your ribs hard enough that it became difficult to breathe, and you took the first thing coming that could even remotely give you that, good or no.
“Remind me never to tumble with you,” Flotsam choked out.
“Eh” said Harpoon with unusual emotion. “Wouldn’t be so bad. If you’re done with being The Captain's pet.”
Flotsam stalled only an instant. “I am,” he admitted. "Done with it, I mean. But I don’t know myself. Don’t know this city. It’ll be great,” he said, managing a rare spat of natural sarcasm. Flotsam sighed and panted a little as he caught his breath. “Amnesiac, lost and full of magic. Or crazy,” he tried. “And crazy. Yeah. Wooh.”
If he’d had a little paper flag just then, he would have waved it. Partially for self-depreciation, though. He flashed Harpoon a side-long grin. “Why would it be different with me, anyway?”
Harpoon snorted. “Because I would you push-over, Flotsam.”
Flotsam jostled back at her with more confidence than he actually felt. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, grabbing his shoulder, she pushed him down. Flotsam saw a ceiling and then the sultry face of Harpoon coming over him. “Something like that.”
The view was entrancing. The lazy and amused dominance in her expression, the tuft of her chest and the half-notching of wings that even now he could feel brushing at his sides. The view went further down. All the way down, in fact, to the part where their bodies formed a sort of hinge between them.
Patches is going to walk in right now, the little, more efficiently cooled part of Flotsam’s brain thought. She'll walk in because that’s the sort of thing that just happens.
He dared a glance. No Patches came in. Huh.
It'd be one of the other mares then, Flotsam figured. Gentle giant Windlass or moody Shanty, or stars forbid the raunchy and uncouth duo of Scuttle and Hard Tack.
Flotsam glanced a second time, first daring, now almost wishing the expected interruption came. His head felt tight and over-pressurized. Maybe it would be The Captain herself, despite her rarely ever visiting this place. That'd certainly stir something. But the encounter remained stubbornly their privates, er, theirs, and private. Sometimes convention let you down. Particularily when you called it out, it snubbed you.
"Well?" asked Harpoon.
"Uh," was all Flotsam could manage on short notice, in what he only opened was more of a sexy moaning than blank droning kind of way. He was still in his head, making little sense of big things. He smiled and turned his head, made an effort of staring into Harpoon's eyes and studying her in detail.
Ca...?
What happened last time, exactly? Remember the beach?
Most...ly?
I remember it was hot!
Cadance?
It was hot because there was fire! I should have burned!
Ah, but you see, you shouldn’t have burned, because that would be horrifying agony. And when horrifying burning agony becomes a ‘should’ in life, something, somewhere has gone very very wrong.
...why am I...who is...? This is wrong!
Okay, good point. And I did a top-notch job with myself, even if I had nothing to do with the thing I did to save myself from the thing I got myself into. Good to know that I’ve got my own back, or something?
...Yeah, sounds about right. Oh hey! Pay attention already! She's gunning right for us!”
I can’t...I can’t...
You know what? I’m thinking it shouldn’t be me rolled onto my back!”
Go on, Sammy, my me! Piracy and burying your treasure and all good things!
Of course, Flotsam’s actual inner discourse was much faster, much less verbal and much less dualistic, but the end result of his thoughts were the same. He pulled himself up, caught hold of Harpoon — she was startled, for once! — and with a growl rolled them together onto the deck. They hit bottom with a slam and Flotsam came out on top, pinning Harpoon’s spread wings under his hooves.
Flotsam breathed in the coarse scent of her. She pulled him down. She stole his voice with her lips.
...help...me...
The pegasus pushed Flotsam away. For a moment an unbroken line of shiny saliva linked them, which is itself always a sure sign that things have gotten serious indeed.
Harpoon rumbled with low, seductive laughter and the link broke. She turned her lower half under him, in effect closing the window of opportunity. “Save it for later,” she suggested. “When we’re not on her ship.”
Flotsam nodded hasty agreement, which is not hard for the frustrated male brain to do in this situation. “When we’re not in the middle of the galley floor,” he was quick to point out.
"That, too." Harpoon gave a chuckle, low, throaty and incredibly appealing. Flotsam hesitated in disentangling himself from the pegasus. Having her under him felt incredibly, well, incredible. He was loathe to let go of that. Reluctantly, blushing, lusty and assertive as an idiot, he did so. Harpoon rolled to her hooves with an easy motion. She rolled her shoulders and flapped her wings a few times
Flotsam grinned. There was nothing furtive about his gawking for once, and knowing that she knew that made him feel damn fine.
Something decidedly unwell was creeping in him though. He had tolerated it, he had ignored it, but now it presented itself all the more insistently. Pain tempered Flotsam's elated mood somewhat, like a lump of ice floating inexplicably down a warm stream. There was the pressure in his head, knotted and snarled behing his eyes, and growing bigger and snarl-ier. “I’m going to get some water, try to clean up a bit.”
Harpoon scoffed. “You do what you want.” Her tone was encouraging, although suddenly Flotsam’s internal world was not.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, keeping his lusty manner more or less in tact.
“Sure.” Harpoon scoffed in a brief, barking way that a pony could miss if he weren’t paying attention. “Bring your friend.”
For a moment, Flotsam hesitated. “Oh,” he said as realization dawned. He grinned like a happy fool, despite his mounting migraine, which was of course only his second favourite type of mounting. “That friend. Yeah.”
He chuckled awkwardly and took his leave. A chance to splash his face and get some fresh air would see him right as rain, Flotsam promised himself. It was just a matter of sorting himself out and waiting on The Captain, now.
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Snrrk.
Mounting.
I adore Cadance... I truly do. I totally get why Flotsam would only want the pink frosted cookies out of all that the tin had to offer. But still... that Harpoon...
Ugggggh, I am happy and distraught at the same time!
More of this story has come, but it only makes me want more!
The pink one is gonna walk in on them and there will be nothing left.
i.ytimg.com/vi/MsuH1msEkvM/maxresdefault.jpg
7295992 I must save that. That picture is amazing
Oh my god, Shiny's in there somewhere! He's fighting so hard, I just want him to win. He knows who he is, and he knows who his mare is, and it's turning into a fight between him and Sammy.
found this story at random gave it a chance read it liked it fav it more please
Prince Armour is missing..... why do i have a feeling someone on teh crew is not going to be drunk and have seen a missing poster
Qapla'! I love seeing updates for this story. At some point before the end I need to go back and start over so I have the complete picture in my mind. Also, you seriously make me want to find more pirate stories like this, but I come up empty. How dare you make something so charmingly unique, petaQ.
Jeeze, why is it i start thinking up a story i find one along similar lines and it's so dang much better than my own feeble attempts? Grrrr... more please! =^_~=
I both hope they get together and don't. If only there was a way for both Shinning and Flotsam to get what they want.
Harpoon is such a good character. I love her.
Another enjoyable chapter. Well done.
That just means
ShiningFloatsam is a good pony.To quote the late, great Terry Pratchett:
This was playing in the background as I was reading, pleasingly enough:
7300637
You want to write that, or can I stick it in my ever growing pile?
7295992 I've seen that picture before... What movie is it from?! Bangs head against desk. I think he is an Alphabet Operative and he's pissed off at someone, about to 'shoot' them with his cig hand... What is it?
7300898
Eh, I still have Gargoyles fanfic from 1996 in my "I'll get to it one day I swear" pile...
I honestly would love to see an AU of this fic with Blueblood in place of Shiny though.
7301855
Unless my memory utterly fails me, that's Willem Dafoe in The Boondock Saints, towards the climax of his 'There was a slaughter here!' monologue.
7302328
I was going for this quote when I put that picture. I love boondock saints.
*Cadance walks into the room and sees Shining Armor and Harpoon making out*
But slaughter is an aptly picked synonym to sum up what he gets across though.
7302328 Yes! Yes! That's what it is! Ahh,such a good movie.
That was very clever, putting the hidden text in that color. I honestly did not even notice it until I went back and re-read that section. Based on the commentary it might have just been me who missed them on the first go.
That's...
!
The wait is killing me!
I want to see what happens next!
But alas...I know the demon that is procrastination.
7353222 To be fair, this week the demons' names are busyness, socializing, group organizing and sex appeal. Procrastination demon said they would show up, but then said they'd do it later.
7353301 Goodness, that is dastardly and I love it.
7354184
that sounds pretty funny, maybe every other chapter from now on can do that to trip them up
It has come to our attention that this story is overdue for an installment. Please remit one chapter on or before the 1st of December. If one chapter cannot be provided a short note updating us to the current status would be acceptable. Thank you for the balance of the story thus far and we hope to receive more from you in the future.
Update on an update pls?
7868386 Having done bugger all for this story in ages, I actually have a fair chunk of headway done for the next chapter and am getting back into it. You time your comment well
7872137 Hooray!
7949052 Well sure! Almost always it's the WOMEN being sized up like a piece of hot sexy meat.
It's rather infrequent when MEN are sized up as a piece of hot sexy meat, and even then rarely to the degree that women are!