walk the prank.

[daemon_angelus]

Vertigo --

A dizzying sensation of tilting within stable surroundings or of being in tilting or spinning surroundings -- his breaths come short and rasped and anxious and they burn his throat and lungs - like how the hellish sun absolutely murders the exposed skin on the back of his neck and his arms and --

Is that a shark??

All that separates him from a churning sea with mocking waves is a plank of wood that creaks and bends too much for Alfred's comfort, but he's the farthest thing from comfortable right now, hands bounded behind him with two lengths of rope eating into his sunburnt wrists, a broadsword a metre away from his back, held by a grinning yellow-toothed man with a bandana around his head --

"Can't we talk about this!" Alfred tries to yell over the wind and waves, but he thinks his voice just comes out reedy and desperate (which he was).

A few of the ship's crew -- pirates, Alfred had come to realise too late, too slow -- hollered and taunted but it is the captain's voice, low and steely, that cuts through the rambunctious cries with eerie finality -

"Get off my ship."

"Kirkla - "

Alfred doesn't even get to finish his sentence.




He only has time to shut his eyes.

Air is replaced with cold, needle-pain water, his body aching upon impact but Alfred had managed to at least lock his knees and cut through the surface of the water as cleanly as he could on entry. He dared not open his eyes, the darkness only driving his mind that much closer to panic but there is rationality and resilience deep within him that forces the panic into a corner and locks it there -

Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic, panic and you drown, don't panic -

If he panics, the water will take him, and the mantra he repeats in his head is you float you float you float you will float -

The stabbing pain and burn in his lungs almost makes him gag but Alfred wants to live more than anything else and damn if he's eaten by the shark or anything the sea throws at him -

He doesn't even register the fingers curling around his collar before he is yanked roughly out of the water.

"Now that was fun, wasn't it, mate?"

Alfred's ears are ringing and all he can do is gasp for precious, precious air, choking on salty water with his eyes stinging and his senses completely lost. Two of Kirkland's crew hoist him into their little dinghy, their smiles taking way too much delight in his sorry plight. While a bald shipmate with terribly muscled arms pulls Alfred over the edge of the tiny wooden boat, his other shipmate cups his hands around his mouth and shouts back up towards the deck -

"We got 'im, Captain!"

Alfred's back impacts the bottom of the dinghy with a loud thud, but he's too busy breathing and realising that he's alive to care. He does see the upside-down image of a small, too-satisfied smile that cuts across the captain's features, arms folded into his crimson coat as Kirkland surveys the scene with amused acid green eyes -

"You're lucky this is how Cap'n Kirkland teaches stow aways a lesson," the muscle-bound shipmate snorts out gruffly as he starts rowing the little dinghy back to the Imperium, "If you'd been on Cap'n Carriedo's ship, I reckon you'd be in some shark's belly by now. If he took pity on you."

Alfred can only groan painfully in response.





please don't kill me for the title.
I should work on my as-of-yet-incomplete Hell verse part |D