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Chapter 26
Sail
Rain and wave water splashed against the crow’s nest turned sailboat—hitting Free, his hard light shell clotting and expelling steam where it was hit.
The cove wasn’t far, within Lav and Free’s sight, however, the kraken’s arms still pursued them, and the smallest wave taken at the wrong angle could capsize them.
“Arm, starboard!" Lav shouted.
“Is that left or right?!” Free said.
“Right!”
“Got it!” Free angled the sail, dodging a tentacle at the very last moment.
Lav pointed at a clearing in the waves, “Through and fast—it’s a clear shot to land!”
“How do we speed up?”
“Catch the wind, sharpen and thin the sail!”
Free tried to shape the sail as Lav instructed, making it more rectangular—however, instead his own hard light seemingly rejected his will. The sail unfurled into strands before transforming into hole-filled wings, significantly slowing them down.
Free tried to flap these wings, but they were completely useless, barely moving the crow’s nest forward. Without their speed, a tentacle grabbed and coiled around the crow’s nest. Leaving them dead in the water with more tentacles beginning to surround them.
“Great, what are we gonna do now?” Lav drew her broken cutlass.
Free retracted the sail-turned-wings and attempted to form a saw, but the hard light congealed around his arm into a mound. The hard light he had used for the sail was completely unusable, unable to form into anything, but… he still had the hard light which made up his now thin shell.
“Kid, hold tight!” Free grabbed Lav and put her on his back, then transformed his legs into a grasshopper—gaps in his shell exposing his inner frame and the mechanical heart caged in his head.
“What—”
Free jumped onto the rim of the crow’s nest and leaped off it towards the shore, then morphed weak, flimsy wings, which only bat once before breaking down. However, that single bat increased their airtime just enough that their trajectory was straight for the cove’s shore.
Now all they had to do was brace for landing.
***
Free awoke to sand in his face and pain all over. He had clots all over him, couldn’t transform to any extent, and his vision was blurry, but… he was alive. After a momentary celebration, Free took a deep breath and slowly stood up, notching Lav was nowhere to be seen.
However, there was a set of boot prints about Lav’s size leading to further down the shore. Free followed the tracks, limping, and as he thought, Lav was at the end. Sitting with her head in her knees in front some random wood wreckage shoddily reassembled into half of a boat. Her broken blade was stuck in the sand beside her.
Lav glanced at Free then quickly turned back to look out at the ocean.
“Oh—so, no ‘you’re not dead!’ Or ‘are you ok?’” Free yelled.
Lav didn’t reply.
“Great, you left me for dead so you can play shipwright—that’s the kind of thanks I get?”
“...”
“You know, for once, for once I thought—” Free sighed and kicked up sand, “Whatever. Let’s get going.”
Lav mumbled something.
“What, got something to say—”
“I’m not going back!” Lav stood up and grabbed her blade.
“What other choice do you got? Your ship’s wreaked, you obviously can’t make a new one, your crew’s gone, what’s left in your pocket? Come on, let’s hear it.”
“I’ll just commandeer and sail on my own,” Lav stepped back. “And you can’t stop me.”
“I can’t, great deduction,” Free rolled his eye. “Do whatever you want, I don’t care—it's your life,” Free turned away from Lav—then realized what he had said, turning back around to see Lav about to dive into the water, “Wait!”
Lav stopped, “Thought you didn’t care.”
“I didn’t mean it. Bad first impression, I know—bear with me, we almost died.” Free sighed, “Look, I’m not gonna say I know what’s going on in your—”
“Then don’t,” Lav pointed her blade at Free and glared back at him, the bandage around her arm was loose, the gash had reopened. “You’re not the one stuck in this stupid dust heap hearing people go on and on about golden ages. About how things used to be better, used to change, when legends were made. Where no one has a dream bigger than copying what was before.” Lav looked back at the dusk horizon, “You’re an Alien, you can go anywhere, see anything, make any legend—you can’t understand.”
Free was confused on why Lav would bring up Aliens on that last point, but brushed that aside to answer, “Not everyone’s an Alien because they want to, plenty don’t get the choice.”
“Doesn’t muck up my point, I’d do anything if it meant I could… be something. Something more than just another townie betting her home on a shanty festival each year—” Lav twinged in pain, lowering and grabbing her arm.
“We need get that arm checked out—”
“Don’t you dare move,” Lav switched her to the other arm and raised it again. “I’m done working towards someone else’s dream, a stupid one at that.” Lav scoffed, ““You know how long Lilipass’ restoration is gonna take? Generations. Plural. And each year is a coin flip of whether it all goes to waste. All for what? A stupid island? And what kick started it is even stupider—all screwed over by chance.”
“Chance?”
“The Dust Devil, moron—hasn’t it been drilled into your head yet? No one could’ve predicted it, something like it was completely unprecedented. And eevn after thirty-seven years, no one has a clue what caused it.” Lav bared her teeth, “Doesn’t matter. It robbed us—everyone around the equator—of a future.” Lav shook her head, “I’m wasting my time on you!”
“No, hold on—I do get what’s that like!”
Lav’s ears perked up.
“A hometown with nothing good about it, no real future beyond just hanging on—”
“Liar!” Sal told me about you—you come from nothing.”
Free’s eye pinned and he looked away, “N-no, I—Well, it’s not exactly… It’s complicated—”
“Shut up, I don’t need your pity,” Lav turned around and ran.
Free tired following but the best he could do was limp a bit forward then trip. Sand in his face, and a kid about to run away from home, he wondered how this “pit stop” turned out this way.
And why
did
he care anyway? It's the kid’s life, what right did he had telling her how to live it. Especially since he barely knew her.
If he was worried about getting in trouble, he'd just tell the others that Lav swam off before he could reboot. A win-win for both of them…
No, that didn’t sit right. He felt the same thing that irked him this entire trip—
Whatever.
Now wasn’t the time and it will never be the time, Free thought. He had better things to do than look back, right now, he had to think of something, anything, to say to Lav.
With little time left, Free shouted the first thing that came to mind, “This is how your ‘legend’ starts?”
Lav stopped at the dead edge of the tideline.
“Can’t say I know much about being a captain,” Free rose. “But stealing a boat and leaving your crew behind? That’s not how a captain, a leader—a friend worth anything acts.”
“...”
“From what I saw, those two were the ride-or-die types right? You don’t sail into a strom and face a kraken head-on with people you don’t care about. How do you think they’d feel if you ran off without a word? Wasn’t this whole ‘dream’ theirs too?”
“...”
“I’m not gonna tell you that you have to do something, or you own anyone anything—It's your life, you gotta do what you want with it. So that I know you're doing what you really want, not just running, I’ll ask again. Is this how your legend starts? Will this lead to your dreams coming true the way you want them?”
“...It isn’t how I wanted it, but I have to take the only chance I get,” Lav mourned. “They all probably hate me anyway. This is better for all of us.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Why? Poppy and Clary have no reason too, everything that could go wrong did go wrong—that’s whatever. Sal may be mad at you for the whole sabotaging thing, can't say that for sure, but if she hated you for it—she wouldn't have gone to find you in the middle of a storm.”
Lav turned around, “The kraken was my fault!”
Free looked confounded, “How—”
“I dueled Foxx and kicked him into the mast the bell was on—it was my fault for even accepting that duel, I should have known—argh, it’s even stupider that I took it as far as I did.”
Free realized he was missing even more context than he thought, “Didn’t you make up though? You two weren’t acting like that from what I saw.”
“Yeah, we did, but what if…”
“What if what?”
“...I don’t know,” Lav’s scowl shifted into a face of regret.
“Sounds to me it was an accident, sure, a big one, but an accident where no one got badly hurt other than you, that ship, and me. And I know I look bad, but thankfully only my shell got damaged, that heals fast… relatively. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
Free sighed, “You had a big vision and big hopes of an idyllic start to your ‘dream,’ and it all came crashing down ‘cause of bad luck and rash thinking, it happens. And sometimes… that does mean the end of a dream, sure, some mistakes you can’t come back from—that’s not your case.”
Lav looked to the ground.
“You still got your crew, you still got a whole life ahead to make your dream a reality, and most importantly—you got a drive to find something bigger, better out there—whatever that may be.” Free walked over to Lav, “Chin up, take a breather, and face what comes next head on—don’t go throwing away everything you got going for yourself already.”
Lav looked at the blue sea reflecting the dusk horizon, took a deep breath, and gave free and small, subtle smile, "Alright. Let’s not waste time then." “Yeah, let’s—” Free’s attention went to Lav’s arm, which was bleeding a bit, “Wait hold on, your arm comes first.”
“I’ll be fine, I barely feel it.”
Free gave Lav an annoyed look, “Kid, don’t even try that.” Free checked the wound and re-wrapped the bandage, “That will have to do. What gave it anyway? Nastiest cut I’ve seen in a while.”
“The kraken.”
“...Didn’t see blades on its arms—”
“Say, what’s the truth about where you come from? Since we're getting nosy.”
“Fine, fine, it was the kraken, totally.”
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