A Fairy's Tale (Eustass Kid & OC)

Chapter 32: The Truth of Her

"Boss, I don't know why you kept us out of the loop, but we can't help you if we're in the dark."

Heat spoke clearly and with purpose, with hardly a hint of that lazy backwater drawl he usually slung around. The captain spared him a backward glance, taking a moment to gauge his mood before answering. It wasn't that he didn't trust Heat, or that he thought Heat would betray him to help Loklynn. This situation was just... special, where Heat was concerned.

Heat was a lot like Loklynn in that he was way too empathetic for his own good, the type of guy who couldn't hurt a fly unless that fly was an attacking enemy. For a pirate with a bounty of nearly sixty million, he certainly had no problems getting along with common folk. Like Loklynn, he'd somehow come out of his tradgedies with his humanity in tact, a strength that Kid secretly envied. Granted that they didn't recognize him from his poster, he treated every person he came across like a friend until they proved otherwise, even if people kept proving otherwise, over and over again. It was actually kind of ridiculous how someone who looked that heinously ghoulish could be so good with kids... point being, the Kid Pirate's resident corpse wasn't exactly a traditional pirate either, despite how the papers painted him.

Kid knew that Heat saw Loklynn as someone who was just as lost as he was before he'd joined, wandering around without a home. Heat looked at her and saw himself; if Kid acted rashly where Loklynn was concerned, it would be like he was directly hurting Heat.

Captain Eustass Kid, as a rule, would rather have slit his own throat than hurt someone he considered one of his own.

"We might've fucked up a little bigger than we thought," Kid muttered. "When Killer told me his theory, I wanted to believe he was wrong, but... it just made too much sense. That had to be it, but we had to test her to know for sure. She wasn't just gonna tell us on her own, and torturing her... fuck."

Behind their ranting captain, Heat and Wire exchanged twin looks of growing alarm.

"Boss...?"

He gave no indication that he'd heard Heat, focused too wholly on the battle to pay them mind.

"For the record, I wanted to be wrong." He gritted his teeth, shoved his flesh hand roughly through his hair to frustratedly grip the crimson strands. He hadn't been this mad at himself for a long time. "I wanted this to fail. I wanted this whole stupid thing to be a giant fucking waste of time, because I couldn't think of anything worse than being proven right."

"Boss," Kid's shoulder was grabbed in Heat's spindly grip to turn him partly around. "You're not making any sense. I don't care what you guys did, explain that later; just tell us what's going on now. I know you didn't tell us because you didn't want... look, we'll be right behind you, just like always."

Well damn... now didn't he just feel like an asshole? Kid kicked himself for being stupid enough to doubt his crew.
His stomach lurched as he witnessed Loklynn flashing forward with a terrifying ferocity to attack his best friend. She had some skill; this could get ugly.

Kid had sent Killer to be cautious, deciding it would be better to deploy a single 'scout' ahead of the group to gauge the extent of her abilities before he could decide how to recapture her. With his passion for combat analysis, talent for strategy, and inherent talent, Killer was the obvious choice for a battle with little to no prior information.

But Kid didn't think she'd be this good. If she actually managed to catch Killer's interest and give him what he considered to be a worthy challenge... this whole mess was liable to get a lot more complicated.

"Change of plans, men," Kid ground out. He knew without having to look that both Wire and Heat would both be watching him intently, knowing how serious things could get now and trusting him for their orders. "First, we're gonna have to wait 'til the baby jughead gets away; there's no way for us to bring her down safely as long as he's still nearby and in danger, so we need to let those two keep each other busy while he escapes."