Chapter 19: Celebratory Shanty
The captain’s door shut with a final click, sealing them in a pocket of sudden, profound quiet. The frantic energy of the sickbay, the crew’s relieved sobs, the lingering tremor of his own magic—it all fell away, leaving only the heavy, solid reality of the man beside him. Vil let himself be pulled down onto the edge of the bed, his legs finally giving out. He was trembling, a fine, uncontrollable shiver that started deep in his bones.
Leona’s hand, warm and rough, settled on the nape of Vil’s neck, thumb stroking the tense muscle there. “Stop it,” he murmured, his voice still raw but firm.
“Stop what?”
“Shaking. You’re making me seasick.”
A weak laugh escaped Vil. He leaned into the touch, his forehead coming to rest against Leona’s temple. He could smell blood, salt, and beneath it all, the familiar, sun-warmed leather and spice scent that was purely Leona. Alive. “You are an impossible creature.”
“Takes one to know one.” Leona shifted, a hiss of pain escaping him as he adjusted his newly healed shoulder.
Vil’s head snapped up. “Are you—”
“It’s stiff, not broken. Don’t start.” Leona cut him off, green eyes glinting in the dim cabin light. He looked exhausted, shadows pooling under his eyes, but the sharp awareness was back. He was present. “You look worse than I feel.”
“I just watched you die,” Vil said flatly, the words dropping like stones between them. “I felt your heartbeat stop. Forgive me if my complexion suffers.”
Leona was silent for a long moment. His gaze travelled over Vil’s face, noting the dried tear tracks through the soot, the wild disarray of his usually perfect hair, the haunted shadows in his amethyst eyes. “You didn’t let me,” he said finally, his voice low.
“I couldn’t.”
Another stretch of quiet, filled only by the ship’s groans and the distant murmur of the crew on deck. The celebration was already beginning, a muffled percussion of stomping boots and hearty shouts seeping through the timber.
“They’re making a racket,” Leona observed, tilting his head towards the noise.
“They have reason to.” Vil sat up straighter, pulling away slightly. The practical part of his mind, the part that wasn’t reeling from emotional whiplash, began to stir. “You need to rest. Properly. The water healed the injury, but your body has been through a trauma. You need sleep, and food that isn’t salted beef or rum.”
Leona gave him a look that was pure, unadulterated annoyance. “I just got stabbed by a magical octopus and resurrected by a crying siren. I’m not taking a nap.”
“You are,” Vil insisted, standing up. He moved to the small wash basin, wetting a cloth. “And you’re getting cleaned up. You’re covered in blood, most of it your own. It’s unsanitary.”
“Since when do you care about sanitation on a pirate ship?”
“Since I decided to stay.” Vil returned to the bed and, without ceremony, began wiping the grime from Leona’s face. Leona batted his hand away half-heartedly, but ultimately submitted, closing his eyes with a long-suffering sigh. The gesture was so intimate, so mundanely caring, that it stole the air from Vil’s lungs for a second. He focused on the task, wiping away the evidence of their battle until just the tired, handsome face beneath remained.
When he was done, Leona caught his wrist. “Your turn.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a mess.” Leona took the cloth from him, his movements surprisingly gentle as he wiped a smudge of ash from Vil’s cheekbone. His touch lingered near the corner of Vil’s mouth. “There. Almost presentable.”
The door shook under a sudden, vigorous pounding. “Captain! Boss! You alive in there or do we drink your share?” Ruggie’s voice, brimming with unfiltered glee, echoed through the wood.
Leona rolled his eyes heavenward. “We’re coming, you noisy scavenger! Keep your paws off my good rum!”
He stood, testing his weight. He was steady. Vil watched him, a knot of anxiety loosening in his chest. Leona stretched, the muscles in his back and shoulders rippling under his torn shirt, and cracked his neck. The casual display of returning strength was more reassuring than any healer’s assurance.
“Well?” Leona offered a hand, a lazy, arrogant smirk playing on his lips. It was the most beautiful thing Vil had ever seen. “Shall we go shut them up?”
Vil took his hand. “We shall.”
The hatch to the main deck swung open, and the world exploded into sound and light.
Night had fallen, a clear, deep velvet scattered with indifferent stars. But the Savanaclaw herself was a constellation of chaos and joy. Lanterns swung from every mast and rail, painting the deck in pools of swaying gold. A fat barrel of rum had been broached in the center of the deck, surrounded by a ragged choir of sailors using mugs, cups, and in one case, a polished helm, to drink.
A fire had been built in a huge iron brazier, its flames leaping towards the sky, casting dancing shadows over the faces of the crew. Someone had produced a fiddle, and its reeling, jubilant notes twisted through the air, tangled with laughter and the stamp of boots on wood.
It was another party, but this one was different. The relief was palpable, a physical thing in the salt air. It was the giddy, roaring joy of men who had stared into the abyss, lost their captain to it, and then by some miracle, watched him walk back out.
Jack, usually so stern, was spinning a laughing Epel in a surprisingly graceful jig. The young siren’s purple hair flew out behind him, his face alight with a freedom that was still new and wondrous. Nearby, Ruggie had an arm wrapped tightly around Rook’s waist, whispering something that made the blonde siren throw his head back and laugh, a sound like clear bells cutting through the rougher noise. Rook’s green eyes sparkled in the firelight as he leaned into Ruggie’s touch.
As Leona and Vil stepped fully onto the deck, a sudden hush fell. Dozens of faces turned towards them, illuminated by flame and lantern light. For a beat, there was only the crackle of the fire and the sigh of the sea.
Then, Ruggie let out a whoop, raising his mug high. “TO THE CAPTAIN!”
The deck erupted. “TO THE CAPTAIN!” Glasses and tankards thrust into the air, rum sloshing over sides. “AND TO THE SIREN WHO PATCHED HIM UP!” The toast was echoed even louder, with whistles and stomps.
Leona raised a hand, a gesture for quiet that took a moment to be obeyed. He looked over his crew, his domain, his mismatched, loyal family. A faint, genuine smile touched his lips. “The Octavinelle scum are fish food. The Savanaclaw sails free. Drink up. You’ve earned it.”
That was all the permission they needed. The music surged back, louder. The dancing resumed. Vil felt himself being pulled into the current of it all, guided by Leona’s hand on the small of his back.
They were handed tin cups of rum. Vil sipped his, wincing at the harsh, fiery burn. Leona downed half of his in one go, grimacing appreciatively. They moved through the crowd, receiving claps on the back, nods of profound respect, and grins that spoke volumes.
It was Epel, flushed and breathless from dancing, who shouted it first. “A kiss! For luck!”
The cry was immediately taken up by others. “Aye! For the captain’s health!”
“For the alliance!”
“For the pretty picture!”
The chant grew, unified and rowdy. “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
Vil felt a flush creep up his neck. This was a different kind of exposure. Not the predatory admiration of sailors he’d lured, but a boisterous, warm-hearted demand from people who now, inexplicably, seemed to consider him part of the fabric of this ship. He looked at Leona, unsure.
Leona’s expression was a masterpiece of exasperated tolerance. He glanced at the chanting, grinning faces of his crew, then down at Vil. He sighed, a long-suffering sound utterly ruined by the gleam in his cat-like eyes.
“Nuisances, the lot of them,” he muttered.
Then, in one smooth motion, he dipped Vil backwards. Vil gasped, his cup falling from his fingers to clatter on the deck, his hands flying to Leona’s shoulders for balance. The world tilted—lanterns, stars, the circle of roaring faces—all spun around Leona’s smirking face.
Leona didn’t hesitate. He kissed him.
It wasn’t the desperate, life-affirming kiss from the cabin. This was different. It was a statement. A claiming. Confident, deep, and just long enough to send a fresh wave of cheers crashing over them. Vil melted into it, letting the sound and the sensation wash over him. When Leona pulled him back upright, the deck was swaying more than the ship warranted.
The applause was deafening. Whistles pierced the night air. Ruggie was cackling. Jack was actually smiling broadly. Epel looked delighted. Rook was applauding with elegant grace, his arm still linked with Ruggie’s.
Leona righted Vil, keeping an arm firmly around him. “Satisfied?” he bellowed at his crew.
They roared their approval.
“Good. Now get back to it. Some of us need a drink in peace.”
But peace was not on the agenda. The fiddle kicked into a faster reel. Leona, instead of retreating, kept his arm around Vil and began to move to the music. It wasn’t a formal dance, just a slow, swaying rhythm in the midst of the chaos. Vil, his head still spinning, followed his lead.
They danced. Or rather, Leona steered them in a slow circle while the world partied around them. Vil rested his head against Leona’s good shoulder, listening to the strong, steady heartbeat beneath his ear, a rhythm more comforting than any song. He watched the celebration—Jack teaching Epel a clapping game, Ruggie attempting to braid Rook’s hair while thoroughly intoxicated, sailors arm-in-arm, singing shanties gloriously off-key.
“This is ridiculous,” Vil murmured, without any heat.
“Told you,” Leona replied, his chin resting on Vil’s hair. “You signed up for a mess.”
“I did.” Vil closed his eyes, breathing him in. “I don’t hate it.”
Sometime later, as the moon climbed high, there was a series of sharp pops from the stern. Vil looked up to see brilliant emerald and amethyst starbursts painting the sky. Someone—probably Rook, with his sense for the dramatic—had produced fireworks. They weren’t the grand displays of a royal port, but simple, bright charges that bloomed against the night with loud, cheerful bangs, reflecting in the dark, endless sea.
Each burst was a tiny, beautiful end. A celebration of survival. A promise of something new.
Leona watched the colors dance across Vil’s rapt face. “A bit flashy, don’t you think?” he drawled.
“I think it’s perfect,” Vil said softly.
As the last firework faded into drifting smoke, leaving the stars to reclaim the sky, Leona turned Vil to face him. The noise of the party seemed to recede, leaving just the two of them in a pool of lantern light.
“So,” Leona said, his voice low. “Land?”
“Land,” Vil agreed, a thrill of nervous excitement mixing with the profound peace in his chest. “Somewhere with a cove. Deep water for me, solid ground for you.”
“And for the kid,” Leona added, his hand slipping to rest, warm and heavy, on Vil’s abdomen.
Vil covered Leona’s hand with his own. “And for the kid.”
A slow, genuine smile spread across Leona’s face, one that reached his tired eyes and transformed him. It held no arrogance, no lazy mockery. Just a simple, fierce happiness. “Alright then.”
The fiddle started up a final, gentle tune, a slower shanty about coming home. Around them, the crew began to sing, their voices rough but harmonious in the cooling night. They weren’t sailors and a siren anymore. They were just a ship, sailing on under a mended sky, towards a future they would build together, one messy, perfect day at a time.
The celebration burned itself out gradually, like a fire running out of kindling. The shanties grew slower, more slurred. The stomping boots gave way to stumbling ones as the crew, one by one, drained their cups and staggered belowdecks or into corners wrapped in sailcloth. The fiddle finally fell silent, its player snoring softly against a barrel.
Vil felt the change first, a deep, familiar ache in his bones. It was a pull, a liquid weight gathering in his limbs. His six hours were up. He glanced down as the faint, shimmering light began just below his knees, the sensation not painful but inexorable, like a tide coming in. He touched Leona’s arm.
“My time is done,” he said softly.
Leona, who had been leaning against the rail watching the last of his crew disperse, looked over. He didn’t question it. He simply nodded, pushed himself upright, and fetched a blanket from a nearby chest. He wrapped it around Vil’s shoulders as the transformation took hold, the human flesh melting away into shimmering scales, the light mercifully hidden by the wool. When Vil pushed the blanket aside, his lilac tail gleamed in the moonlight, its finned edges brushing the deck boards.
“Can’t have you flopping around like a caught trout,” Leona said, his voice rough but his hands gentle as he helped Vil maneuver to the ship’s side.
“How chivalrous,” Vil replied, but his grip on Leona’s arm was tight. He slipped over the rail, the cool embrace of the sea a shocking relief after the dry heat of the deck. He sank into the black water, then surfaced, pushing his wet hair back from his face. The ocean held him perfectly, its familiar buoyancy a return to his true self.
Leona sat on the edge of the deck, his boots dangling near the surface. The ship was quiet now, just the creak of wood and the lap of waves. The moon, huge and silver, painted a path on the water directly to Vil.
The silence felt different. Not empty, but full. Charged.
Vil looked up at him, traced by moonlight. The bruise-like fatigue under Leona’s eyes, the set of his shoulders—they were real. This was real. The fear from the sickbay, the raw, tearing grief, had condensed into something heavier and more permanent in his chest. Not a burden. An anchor.
He began to sing.
It wasn’t the healing lament, raw and fractured. This was older. It was a siren’s song, yes, but one from a different tradition. A private one. His voice, clear and unfettered by pain, wove through the still air.
“I’ll swim and sail on savage seas,” he sang, the notes rising and falling like gentle swells. “With never a fear of drowning.” He held Leona’s gaze, the green eyes watching him with an intensity that made the words vibrate in his throat. “And gladly ride the waves of life if you will marry me.”
It was a question woven into melody. A proposition set to the rhythm of the sea. For the dancing and the dreaming, the song continued, through all life’s sorrows and delights. It spoke of shared mornings, of weathering storms, of finding a harbor. It was about coming home. Vil poured every ounce of the future he now dared to imagine into the words.
Leona listened, unmoving. The song washed over him, but there was no enchantment, no trance. Just understanding. He heard the offer beneath the melody, the vulnerability wrapped in perfect pitch. When Vil’s last note faded into the sigh of the waves, the silence that followed was thicker than before.
Leona stood up on the deck.
He didn’t hesitate. He toed off his boots, unbuckled his belt, and let his coat fall to the deck. He stepped out of his trousers. In a few economical movements, he was stripped to the skin, his body a pale, scarred silhouette against the night sky.
Then he stepped off the ship.
He entered the water with barely a splash, a clean cut into the dark. He surfaced a foot from Vil, shaking the water from his hair, his eyes never leaving Vil’s face.
“You sing a pretty question,” Leona said, his voice low. Water streamed down the planes of his face.
“It’s not a question,” Vil whispered. “It’s a promise.”
Leona closed the distance between them. The water supported them both, a cold, buoyant world that belonged to Vil. Leona’s hands found Vil’s hips, his fingers splaying over the smooth transition where skin became scale. He pulled Vil against him, their bodies aligning in the weightless space.
He kissed him.
This wasn’t like the kiss on deck for the crew. This was nothing for an audience. It was slow, and deep, and devastatingly thorough. A reclaiming. A confirmation. Vil’s tail moved instinctively, coiling slightly around Leona’s leg, anchoring them together as Leona’s tongue traced the seam of his lips, as his hands mapped the dip of Vil’s spine. The taste of salt and rum and Leona was the only thing that mattered.
“I can’t stay on the deck,” Leona murmured against his mouth, his breath hot. “Not when you’re down here.”
He kissed along Vil’s jaw, down the column of his throat. His mouth was worship, his hands a liturgy. He whispered against the water-cooled skin, words swallowed by the sea and given only to Vil. “You are the most infuriating, beautiful, impossible thing I’ve ever held.” A kiss to his collarbone. “I love you until it feels like my ribs might crack.” His lips traveled lower.
Vil arched into him, a gasp caught between the water and the sky. His fingers tangled in Leona’s long, wet hair, holding him close. The moonlight made a cathedral of the ocean around them, every droplet glittering. Leona’s affirmations were not pretty poetry; they were rough, honest things, hauled up from a place he’d never shown anyone. They were every bit as overwhelming as his touch.
Their joining in the water was a slow, rolling confluence. The sea cradled them, lifted them, allowed a gravity-defying closeness. Vil felt every shift of muscle under Leona’s skin, every controlled movement as Leona supported them both. It was not frenetic, but profound. A deliberate merging.
Leona’s forehead rested against Vil’s, their breath mingling. The world narrowed to the points where they were connected: skin to scale, heart to heartbeat, the secret place where they were one. He moved with a rhythm set by the ocean itself, a push and pull as old as the tides.
“Mine,” Leona breathed, the word a vow. His voice was strained, thick with feeling. “All of you. This.” He moved again, a slow, deep roll of his hips that drew a choked sound from Vil. “The life you’re carrying.” Another movement, deliberate and deep. “And the next one.”
Vil’s eyes flew open, meeting Leona’s. The intensity there was boundless.
“I want to put another one in you,” Leona said, the words raw and unfiltered. “Right after this one. I want a whole crew of our little monsters.” He kissed him, hard and possessive. “I want you full of me, over and over. I want you heavy with our children, on land and in the sea. I want everything.”
The declaration unraveled Vil completely. It wasn’t a sweet fantasy; it was a voracious, physical claiming of their shared future. He cried out, the sound swallowed by the vast, listening night, and the tension in him broke in a wave that had nothing to do with the ocean. Leona followed him over, his own release a shuddering sigh against Vil’s throat, his arms locking around him, keeping them afloat, keeping them together.
For a long time, they simply drifted, tangled in each other and the dark water. The ship was a distant shadow. The moon climbed higher. Leona’s fingers traced idle patterns on Vil’s back, over the sensitive places where his tail began.
“Was that a yes?” Vil asked finally, his voice quiet and rough.
Leona huffed a soft laugh, the air ruffling Vil’s damp hair. “That wasn’t a question,” he repeated Vil’s words back to him. “It was a promise.” He tipped Vil’s chin up. “Yes. To all of it. The marrying. The children. The mess. The whole thing.”
Vil smiled, a real, unguarded smile that felt strange on his face. “Good.”