Chapter Text
A few days later…
Two days before they reached the Bay of The Damned, they ran into The Great Maria trying to sail into the treacherous waters. However, this fight hadn’t gone as smoothly as the previous one with the Drunk Princess.
The captain of the Great Maria wasn’t a novice, and as soon as the Thunderous had fired their first cannon, they were ready to retaliate. Changbin had almost been thrown off the ship by one of their cannon balls straightaway.
They managed to line up the ships, and pirates from both crews clashed in a deadly fight. It hadn’t lasted long. With The Great Maria’s captain more interested in retreating in time to still have enough crew alive to sail into the Bay, and the Thunderous being outnumbered from the beginning, both captains opted for a retreat.
Jisung had made it back to the Thunderous with a gash on his arm and missing his sword, which he had to leave plunged into someone’s guts. Minho had taken a blow to his back after taking down three pirates trying to get into the lower-deck, where Seungmin hid to avoid partaking in combat.
It wasn’t a complete loss for them; they had made a dent in The Great Maria’s crew, which would delay their plans in the Bay of The Damned. But they had sustained quite a few losses, too, which in the long run might make it harder to intercept the enemy ship in the future.
Most of the crew needed Seungmin’s assistance, including Minho and Jisung, who had both retired to Jisung’s chambers until Seungmin had dealt with the most serious cases. Once Seungmin had shown up to take care of their wounds, the doctor had to shut them up as they bickered to decide who’d be treated first.
“Shut your traps! I’m treating you first, Jisung- nah ah! Don’t give me that face, you’re the captain of this ship, and I need to make sure you don’t lose that fucking arm to a stupid infection. Minho’s wound is bad but nothing that can’t wait a little longer,” Seungmin said sternly.
Of course, Seungmin knew that Minho would heal pretty quickly from his wound. Not as quickly as a full mermaid would have, but still much faster than a human.
Minho laid Jisung down and took his spot beside him, careful to lie on his side so he’d not aggravate the wound on his back, and settled down to watch Seungmin work.
Seungmin wrapped the wound efficiently, and just as quickly put some ointment on Minho’s wound and wrapped him up.
“Doctor’s orders are: no fucking. Do you understand?”
Minho and Jisung nodded with colour high on their cheeks, and Seungmin left the room without another word.
“He’s scary when he’s like that,” Jisung noted absentmindedly.
“He takes his job very seriously. If we mess around he might kill us himself,” Minho told him quietly. “How’s your arm?” he eventually asked, playing with Jisung’s hair.
“It doesn’t hurt too much anymore now. Whatever was in that nasty paste he shoved into the wound is helping,” Jisung replied with awe.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know what’s in there…” Minho snickered, then grimaced, “I bet there’s like- whale sperm or something equally disgusting.”
Jisung grimaced and smelled his arm, gagging at the smell. “I wouldn’t doubt that. It smells foul…”
“Yeah, but it works, trust me. Seungmin saved Chan’s- my previous captain’s life with shit like that. And when he almost had his eye gouged out by a mermaid, Seungmin did a good job, too.” Minho left out the little detail that said mermaid wasn’t as bad as the story made it sound.
Jisung whistled. “Wow. I can’t say my encounters with mermaids were that murderous.”
Minho’s interest piqued. “You’ve seen one before?”
Jisung nodded hesitantly. “More than once, actually…”
Minho blinked in surprise. “And yet you’re here…”
Jisung chuckled, wincing as his arm moved as he laughed. “Well, yeah. I was lucky, I suppose…”
Minho scoffed indignantly. “There’s no such thing as luck when it comes to mermaids. There are circumstances at most…” He squinted at Jisung, who looked at him amusedly. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The captain smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know…”
Minho groaned, frustrated. “So that’s how it is?”
Jisung’s smirk turned fond, and he raised his good arm to caress Minho’s cheek. “You have your secrets, too, pretty.”
Minho’s face hardened. “I don’t!” he said, although he most definitely did and Jisung was spot on.
“No? Then why won’t you let me kiss you? We’ve done all there is to be done… You said that you’re mine, and yet that’s where you draw the line…” Jisung asked, raising an eyebrow.
Minho was taken aback, not expecting Jisung to call him out so openly. “Wh-what does that have to do with anything?!”
Jisung sighed. “Everything, and you know it. You have a secret… Something you aren’t ready to share with me, and I mean… I won’t say it doesn’t hurt, but I respect your boundaries. I just have my secrets, too.”
Minho couldn’t help but feel guilty. Jisung was right, after all. They each had their own secrets, which they were clearly not ready to share. “I-”
“It’s fine, Min. Just… let it go.” Jisung said quietly.
Minho nodded, but still held onto his guilt. There was an awkward tension between them now that he didn’t like, and they fell asleep like that—distant in a way Minho hadn’t felt since their first encounter.
🐚
The next day, Jisung woke up before Minho, and the first mate opened his eyes to the captain looking out the window.
Minho’s guts twisted with the feeling that he’d stepped out of line the previous night, but he still tried to sound normal as he greeted Jisung. “Good morning…”
Jisung didn’t turn around, but replied, “Good morning, pretty.”
Minho sighed in relief, catching the corner of Jisung’s lips raised in a smile.
“I saw mermaids two times in my life…” Jisung started, catching Minho off-guard. “The last one wasn’t as memorable as the first… just a bunch of mermaids, swimming in the distance. It was sunrise, and it looked like they were… playing? They weren’t hunting, that’s for sure. Obviously, the captain immediately told us to sail in the opposite direction.”
“Jisungie, you really don’t have to…” Minho reassured him, reaching out with his arm as he stood up carefully. He had to touch Jisung. He had to let Jisung know that he didn’t care whether he had a secret or a hundred. He’d just been curious, he’d just-
“It’s alright, pretty… I want to,” he reassured Minho, gently taking his hand into his own, and continued, “The witch already hinted something at you… And now look how far you’re going with me! Going as far as sailing into the Bay of the Damned with me… So it’s only fair I let myself be open with you. The closer we get to the Bay of The Damned, the more dangerous it’ll be to be near me… So I need you to know, even if it scares me that I might lose you…”
Minho held his breath as Jisung’s eye welled with tears. The first mate shook his head, tenderly kissing Jisung’s knuckles. “Jisung… Sungie, my love… Nothing you tell me could possibly make me not want you anymore. Nothing.”
Jisung smiled grimly. “I guess we’re about to find out…” He then took a big breath, and with another encouraging nod from Minho, he resumed his story, “I never take the eyepatch off because I was cursed when I was a child. My eye… As the witch told you, I can… see with it. I see things that I shouldn’t. Spirits, demons, souls lost at sea, dead lords—call them whatever you want.” Jisung sighed, shaking his head. “The problem is… If I can see them, they can see me, too, through the veil.”
Minho gulped, taking in Jisung’s words. That was… bad. The witch’s words had been more literal than Minho had expected…
His mother had told him of these sorts of demons… even mermaids feared them—souls lost at sea, who had never been taken to Davy Jones’s locker. In their despair to find their way home, they clung to any semblance of warmth, any form of closure, any shred of the life they’d lost. For pirates, who usually died seeking gold, they ended up drawn to lost treasures and sunken ships. Ultimately, they lost their memories of their lives, and whatever humanity they had was drowned by the waves above. They turned into mindless demons who claimed lost treasures as their own, cursing anyone who dared take away their anchor to the world of the living.
After all, ‘the biggest treasure to those who were dead, was life itself,’ as Minho’s mother would tell him.
“Oh, Jisung…” Minho eventually murmured, hugging him and kissing the top of his head. “But how did this happen? Is there a way to help you?”
Jisung shook his head. “I’m not sure anything can be done… But as to how it happened… My father was a pirate…”
Jisung continued to tell him that when he was four, he’d tried to run away from home, sick of his mother’s nagging, and tried to join his father on the ship. As a kid, he romanticised the life his father lived, full of adventures, battles, and treasures.
He was obviously found out, and his father had to plead for his life. There was no way that the captain would return to shore just to deliver a stowaway, so his father had promised the captain that he’d be of use to the ship. He mopped the floors with his father, and despite how ungrateful the work was, and how much less epic he’d found his dad’s life to be, he’d been happy to be with him.
“My father was a pirate, but he had a heart of gold…” Jisung praised him fondly. “He’d turn hours of working like a dog into playtime. He made a game out of everything, and in no time the crew grew fond of me. And as time went by, they became my family, too. But it wasn’t all good, of course… They were still pirates, after all, and my father’s captain wasn’t a good man.”
The captain, Jisung told Minho, had been obsessed with the lost treasure in the Bay of The Damned. So he had led the ship into the bay, thinking mermaids would be their only challenge.
“In retrospect,” Jisung said, “an experienced captain and crew would’'ve suspected that something wasn’t right as soon as they sailed into the Bay and weren’t swarmed by mermaids… Perhaps the prospect of riches had blinded the crew, or maybe they had been lured by the demons from the moment they sailed into the Bay,” Jisung commented with a shrug. “I didn’t notice anything either, of course. I was nothing but a child.”
He continued, “It was all too easy to get into the cave and retrieve the treasure… That I remember well. They took my father with them, and I had to stay behind…” He frowned, his grip tightening on Minho’s hand as he guided the first mate back to sit on the bed. “My guess is that once the pirates touched the treasure, they were cursed to see souls lost at sea…”
Jisung looked into Minho’s eyes for the first time since beginning his story. “The problem with being able to see the dead is that the dead can see you, too. You know, it’s like that saying, ‘if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.’ And the cursed treasure had been tied to very dangerous vengeful spirits.” Jisung paused to take in a shaky breath, but Minho could already guess what happened next even before Jisung continued.
“The ship was raided by the dead that night… And I watched as they were dragged—literally—into the sea, some of them, even then, holding onto their share of the treasure. I only managed to escape because my dad realised the dead could only touch the men that could see them… So he told me to close my eyes, and not open them no matter what.”
Jisung’s eye watered, and Minho cradled his face between his hands gently. “He told me to give him back the coin from the treasure that he’d given me. It was a copper coin, nothing much… He had said it was payment for being a good mate to him,” Jisung’s lower lip wobbled, and he sniffled, trying his best to hold back his tears. “I didn’t want to let go of it… It was like even I, as a child, had been corrupted by the treasure…”
“So you kept it?” Minho couldn’t help but interrupt him.
“No, no…” Jisung said with a grim smile. “He said I’d die if I didn’t give him the coin, and I think that snapped me out of it. I didn’t want to die by the demons’ hands… so I gave him the coin…”
Minho wiped Jisung’s tears away with his thumb. “You were very strong… I can’t possibly imagine how hard it must have been…”
Jisung nodded and inhaled deeply, trying to compose himself. “My dad said his farewell after that… I’m not sure why he didn’t just close his eyes and stay with me, but my guess is that the pull of the treasure was too strong for him. He told me again to keep my eyes closed, to be strong and swim to shore… And then he let go of me, and he was gone.
“I did what he told me… With my eyes still closed, I jumped off the ship. I swam to shore blindly… letting the waves guide me in the right direction…” He chuckled wetly, wiping snot from his nose with the back of his hand.
Minho could barely breathe as Jisung retold his days alone. He almost hadn’t made it to shore, being such a young child. He thankfully wasn’t taken by the current to the sharp rocks—which could have easily happened.
The captain admitted that all he could do was cry, unsure of what to do, too afraid to open his eyes, unable to find shelter, food, or water.
Until, on the third day, he heard a beautiful singing voice.
“My father had warned me that those were mermaid-infested waters, so I tried covering my ears, but the voice couldn’t be muffled by my hands… It was inside my head…” Minho watched as Jisung’s gaze seemed to travel to the past, and the first mate could almost feel Jisung’s elation for the voice. “Wonderful notes, velvety even to my young ears… Once the voice told me to open my eyes, I couldn’t fight it…”
Minho gulped, scooting closer to Jisung as if he could protect him from his past.
“Before me was a mermaid, and whilst I knew of the danger they posed, I couldn’t help but move closer to her when she beckoned me…” Jisung looked lost in his memories, and Minho peered deeper into his gaze. Fear, hunger, so much cold, but above all else—even under those circumstances—utmost awe.
“Wh-what did she do?” Minho asked once he noticed Jisung wasn’t continuing.
Jisung shook his head to get out of his daze. “She spoke in verses, a beautiful poem that offered me an escape from my damned fate. She told me to eat the plant she was offering me… and I did.” He chuckled awkwardly. “To be honest, I don’t think she was really giving me an option. I was sort of compelled to comply. But she sang beautiful reassurances to me, that the plant wouldn’t rid me of the curse, but I’d at least be able to see more than just the dead.”
The captain concluded his story, telling Minho that, in the end, one of his eyes had completely recovered from the curse, and the other had remained tied to it.
“You know that there aren’t many ships that go into the Bay, but the Bay’s lighthouse had been already built by then, so with an eye freed of the curse, I made my way towards it, and the lighthouse keeper helped me find my way back home.”
Minho nodded slowly. He wasn’t sure how much of what the mermaid had told Jisung was true, but if Jisung being alive was any clue, he supposed that he was lucky enough to meet a mermaid who had been touched enough by his misfortune at such a young age that she’d decided to help him.
However, it did leave Minho with a bitter aftertaste knowing that this mermaid hadn’t done all that she could’ve done for Jisung. She could’ve tried to give him a single tear, and maybe he’d have been free from his curse completely. Fine, perhaps not completely—if Hyunjin’s tears hadn’t been enough to cure Chan’s eye, maybe a mermaid’s tear wouldn’t be enough to fully rid Jisung of the curse—but they’d definitely do a better job than a fucking plant. He couldn’t help but think that she probably thought that, even as a child, Jisung deserved to suffer at least some of the consequences of touching a cursed treasure.
Minho startled as Jisung poked the frown between his eyebrows. “Don’t make that face, pretty. You can’t change the past. I’m here now. I’m fine.”
The first mate inhaled deeply, agreeing silently. “I still don’t like any of what I’ve heard…”
“I’m fine, Min… Don’t look so solemn… I didn’t mean to upset you with my past,” Jisung soothed him, his good arm raised so he could massage one of Minho’s shoulders gently.
Minho kept quiet, lost in thought as suddenly the witch’s words replayed in his mind. ‘Danger hides in the shadow of the one whose eye can see, for the dead lords of gold have claim over his soul… Forsaken souls, cursed by the sea, corrupted by their greed for gold and thirst for blood. Ghosts of old who still roam the land of the living. The usurper of thunder, the one whose breath and heart belong to one blessed by the sea…’
Her cryptic words hadn’t been so cryptic after all, and they made complete sense now. Jisung was obviously the usurper of the Thunderous, and he had an eye that could see the dead. The dead lords were certainly the demons that Jisung said haunted him… And through the curse they had claim over his soul.
“What happens if you take off the eyepatch?” Minho asked, already dreading the answer.
“They- the demons are always around me… They don’t stop following me just because I’m not looking at anything, or because my eyes are closed. But with my eye covered, I can’t see them, which means they can’t see me, and so they can’t touch me,” Jisung explained. “At least that’s how I’ve always understood the curse… I did some experimenting when I was younger…”
“How so?” Minho asked.
“For instance, if I take the eyepatch off when I’m on shore, it takes longer for them to appear. And if I stay on shore for a while, and travel to another place through land, it also takes them longer to get to me,” Jisung noted.
“What if you’re never at sea…?” Minho questioned.
“They can follow me on land,” Jisung immediately replied. “There’s nowhere I can hide from them, which is why the eyepatch always stays on,” he winked.
Minho rolled his eyes as he took that in as well. “So if you were to take it off and look around, they’d see you back, and physically drag you into the sea… even if you were miles into shore.”
Jisung nodded. “Pretty much. I mean, I never tested it as far as letting them drag me anywhere. I’m not crazy. But they follow me inland, so I assume that, yes, they can drag me from anywhere… I tried talking to a witch once, and she said that they can’t take the soul of a living person, apparently. But they can claim me once I’m dead, which is why they have to drown me first… physically, of course.”
Minho rubbed his temples. Well fuck. “What did this witch look like?”
“It was a ‘he’, actually,” Jisung elaborated. “Why? Do you think the witch that guided you here could be the same person who told me that?”
Minho shrugged. “I thought that might be the case, but the witch who spoke to me was a woman…”
They sat in silence for a moment, with Minho replaying in his head all that Jisung had told him, and the witch’s words…
Minho sighed. He hated to admit it, but it looked like Kim Seungmin had been right, and the witch’s words were not only a warning, as Minho had thought, but also a prophecy… Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it?
‘The usurper of thunder, the one whose breath and heart belong to one blessed by the sea…’
Everything else that the witch had said was related to Jisung being cursed, which had already passed, but not that segment. Jisung wasn’t currently blessed by anything, let alone by anyone blessed by the sea… Which meant that he would be, or could be, in the future.
Minho groaned internally… A prophecy, huh…
He now knew how to save Jisung…
He only had to be brave and make a move…