Okay so this was supposed to be like about 500 words and somehow it became 5000. Took me two whole days to finish it *cries*

But here you are. Finally. (Though just a little bit late) Space!Pirate Thorne and Space!Mermaid Cress. The AU you didn't know you wanted.

For TLC Ship Weeks

~:~

sand and stars

Prompt: pirates

In her dreams she's a mermaid of old. Gold and blue, and scales and skin, sunlight hair and waves and teeth full of song. Salt and the sea and freedom like she's never known. Will never know.

Sometimes she only swims and swims, but sometimes she wreaks a ship and saves a Captain of downy hair and starling eyes. "Pirate!" her sisters hiss—she has sisters in her dreams—bony, hungry hands reaching to tear something. But she hushes them all and whisks him off to the shore.

Some dreams he's only an ordinary seaman aboard a merchant vessel, sometimes he's an officer of the Royal Navy.

She brushes a lock of hair from his face, gently as she can, marvelling at the roughness of his skin. She dreams in her dream of a hundred things to say to him when he opens his eyes.

"Hello," she whispers to his closed feather eyelashes before she wakes up.

.

For the first time since she was...recruited by the Queen's army, Cress is brought up from deep sleep, not for a routine check-up, but for a mission. A honest to the stars mission. She knows it the moment the technician brings her clean, dry clothes instead of a needle. She's waited for this moment for so long it feels like she's waited for it her whole life.

A mission for the Queen. Her first mission. Her, Crescent Moon of the nameless nebula they plucked her from will be serving the Queen, and if, if, if she's a good soldier, a brave soldier (if if if) she may, she might be rewarded for her service. She might be set free. She might be allowed to breathe, to swim. To go back home.

She wraps a wet end of her hair around her wrist, waiting for the techs to finish draining her suspension tank and quick dry her before proceeding with installing a tracer under her skin. She's somewhat familiar with bits of the routine. They'd brought her out for a small mission once before. Half a mission. Hardly a mission. A task, almost. A chore. A favour, maybe.

Mistress Sybil had wanted a small tear in their large vessel fixed. A scratch at the seams of the wormhole generator that had rendered the Artemisia unable to travel back to HQ. Cress only had to touch it, to assess the damage, the exact points, and catalogue the recovery process. It was simple enough and Cress had done her job, her task, her favour diligently.

She will do this with similar dedication too. This mission. Her real mission.

It's Mistress who comes to brief her, in her flowing robes and dagger lips. Such anger under her eyes. She shoos the techs away who hover like bees, buzzing and anxious.

"Has she been tagged?"

"Yes, ma'am," a thin-lipped boy holds a scanner over her. "All readings are healthy. She's green."

Mistress nods and with a sharp gesture of her nails to follow, turns away and starts walking. Cress hesitates a moment until a tech gives her a gentle push and she rushes to catch up.

"This is your target." Mistress hands her a port.

Cress's cold fingers grasp the colder metal. The screen has a picture of a vessel similar to the one they're in. But smaller, she supposes. The text at the bottom names the craft a 214 Rampion.

"It's a cargo ship but it's undergone some modifications." Mistress says. The downward slit of her lips moves downwards still.

Instead of scrolling through the text on screen—the concise bit of information Mistress feels fit to provide her with, Cress' greedy fingers tighten around the port and only a shift in her concentration is required to establish a link with the ship's mainframe

The Artemisia's network engineers don't see her infiltrate their systems, can't detect her presence gnawing through their firewalls, penetrating their database. For all the tests they've conducted on her kind, Lunars seems to know only the basics about Shells. Only what was already known, to be honest. They have no idea that Cress has been ghosting around their network for years, ever since they brought her here, screaming, and crying, and kicking, and begging.

She had almost torn the Artemisia to shreds then. Almost blown up all six of the reactors she could detect. Almost killed every monster on board.

Her neck tingles with the ghost of a shock collar from once upon a time.

"You're expected to dismantle the craft." Mistress lifts a smooth finger and her nail scrapes across the side of Cress' neck, a non-verbal threat trailing like fog in the air. "There will be no survivors, understood?"

Cress can only nod.

.

She's sent to the prep team to be dressed and further injected with substances that Cress can't identify. Another tracer is embedded to the back of her neck. A tall, scarred man starts to braid her hair.

The port is still with her, and she's expected to be reading up on her assignment, her mission, her quest. But she's gathered all she wanted. The ship they want her to raze is a pirate ship. Which explains the modifications that Mistress talked about, because those are more of the offensive sort than defensive. According to the file she's been provided, the 214 Class 11.3 Rampion has been terrorizing Luna's major trade routes, has attacked eight of her majesty's starships, and once tried to attack the Artemisia itself.

This is a Priority one objective, the concluding text on her port reads. Clean Luna's starspace. Leave no survivors.

It's almost a righteous quest, Cress thinks. Almost.

Over her years aboard the Artemisia, when she wasn't dreaming, Cress had spent reading and watching and gathering information. She knows all about pirates. From first era history books and second era fiction and third era net dramas.

Her cause is right, she tells herself. She's in the right. Pirates...pirates are evil. They're the villains, and in stopping them she'll be...she'll be a hero.

Crescent Moon of some nameless nebula, brave soldier of the Queen's Shell army.

But...there's something else about the 214 Rampion she knows that isn't in her file. Something she's scrounged up from the Artemisia's mainframe. Something that could very well make her heroic cause sinister and...

No survivors, Mistress' voice rings and Cress struggles not to vomit.

.

They let her out as close as they can to the Rampion's co-ordinates without getting detected in turn. It only takes a moment for Cress' lungs to adjust from the oxygen heavy atmosphere to her natural environment. This is, Cress thinks, what the human concept of heaven must feel like. She kicks off the landing port, off the cursed ship, off her prison and she swims.

When Mistress had let her out to heal the broken wormhole generator, Cress had cried afterwards when she had to be dragged away to her tank. To the constricting glass and water and sleep.

She closes her eyes and probes for the Rampion, and inexplicably sees a blue, blue sky and sea foam, the cracked hull of a piratemerchantnavy ship and starling hair and starling eyes and oh. She wrings herself out of the dream, forces herself forwards and faster.

The ship isn't far. She could crack this one's hull just like the one in her dream. When she touches its surface, it's warm like it's not supposed to be. There's a strain in its hum, a hiccup somewhere in the wires and currents and metal that feels like illness. Like a fever.

They must be burning hot and fast, Cress supposes. The cloaking device is in ruins, the shields are at minimum capacity, and they only have their speed to stay safe, stay free.

Only, she had caught them now, hasn't she? What does that make her?

No survivors.

Cress shudders. The Rampion has a secret though. She knows. She can dismantle the ship here and now. She can feel two power cores and all it would take is a little nudge to make the feverish fragile things implode. But there's a delicious secret here, and after all those years and years and years of concocting futile escape plans, this once, this one might be a chance.

Mistress doesn't know she can complete her objective with only minimal contact. If this...if this doesn't work, she can always say that she needed closer access. There's only a quiver of her lips, just a slight tremble before she grits her teeth and forces one of the podship hatches to open for her.

And she slips in like a dream.

.

Cress nearly collapses into a faint when she has a close call with one of the crew within her first minute inside the ship. She knows what pirates do to stowaways. She's read all about it, watched enough net-dramas to carry her heart in her throat as she walks the surprisingly cool floor, her bare feet whispering hastily as she breaks into a run and hides behind the first vent she finds.

It's easy enough to twist her small body into the small space, and as she hesitantly begins to move, she devices a destination in mind.

The underbelly of the ship is dark and dusty, and as she'd expected, hardly visited. She'll be safe here, she hopes. The crawl of wires and networks and control boxes and ports here are everything she needs to know everything there is.

.

It doesn't take her long to find the dainty, dirty, pretty secret the Queen's wanted; the whole purpose of destroying this ship and its crew, and why Mistress wants no prisoners, no survivors. The girl does not look like how Cress had always imagined a princess. She looks worn and frustrated and about Cress' age. She looks so full of glamour and stripped to the bones of it at the same time. Linh Cinder looks like a true pirate, all hard edges and stained fingernails. She looks like Cress' escape.

Cress buries herself in wires and settles down for some deeper probing of the ship and its crew. And this princess pirate of hope.

.

In the end she decides these pirates are nothing like the pirates she knows. They're more heroes than they're villains. They're more revolutionaries. Rebels fighting against an unjust queen, and Cress had always known her Majesty was something twisted, and she'd always known the rumours about what really happened to Princess Selene.

She watches the princess keenly. Watches her train and eat and sleep. Watches her cook and repair and restore. She also monitors the rest of the crew, and goes as far as to minutely research their backgrounds as well. She finds herself scared to the bones by the wolf hybrid soldier on board. He's one of the Queen's. He was. Cress supposes it's quite romantic how he's found love in the equally scary, beautiful, amazing pilot. Her skills are what that's kept the whole of them from being arrested. That, and Cinder's quick repairs. Though there are still a whole lot of things wrong with the ship.

There's an android on board as well. Iko. And if she wasn't so...human Cress might have taken a peek inside her data banks too, to analyse the crew better. But she only observes from afar. Probing Iko would feel too much like invading personal space.

There's the crew surgeon and there's just something about Sir Jacin Clay that Cress finds she dislikes, though she can't quite pinpoint what it is. Maybe it's the way he argues with Iko, or the way he makes Scarlet grit her teeth. When Cinder smacks him upside on the head one, Cress all but claps.

Then, of course, there's the Captain himself. Carswell Thorne. Cadet Carswell Thorne. Deserter of the American Republic Air-force. ID number #0082688359. She has a whole folder about him. And perhaps a little too many photographs. He reminds her of a dream, the dream, her dream. She wants to reach across the wires and networks and screens and touch his hair to know for herself if it's as soft as she imagined.

It only takes so long for her to make up her mind. She reaches for the tracer on her neck first, slides a finger across it and it's gone. Dead. Broken. She touches her wrist next, and the breath she takes next almost tastes like something new.

.

She doesn't intend to establish contact with any of the crew at first. She only tangles herself deeper among the wires and starts repairing what she can. If anyone notices the softer hum, the cooler walls, they don't mention it. That is, until...

She watches through one of the cameras in the cockpit as Captain Carswell Thorne stares intently at a temperature reading. He rests his chin on his hands, squints his eyes, brushes a hand though his hair.

"Darla," he says, "is this right?"

"Core temperate has dropped twenty-six point eight degrees since yesterday."

"I can see that." Thorne makes a soft hum at the back of his throat. "And it's for real?"

"Affirmative, Captain."

Cress nibbles at her hair, hoping against hope he work ask anymore question. She's avoided detection by the ship's computer so far, but if Darla starts looking for her specifically, she'll be found. She'll be caught.

"Was it Cinder?" Thorne asks.

"Negative, Captain. I've been unable to trace the source of the specific repair prompts. But I can—"

"It...it was me."

Cress immediately regrets it as a hundred other possible alternatives come to her just as she speaks up though the audio port. Frantically, she reaches in search of Darla's data banks and internal code and starts to hurl her with command prompts to ignore the new voice, to go with it, the intrusive element is friendly, she writes hurriedly. A friend. Darla accepts the new codes and settles down.

She can see the Captain reach for his gun though. "And who might you be?" He sounds so casual, lazy almost.

"I—I'm the secondary auto control system. I...was woken up when the ship's internal system started experiencing heavy malfunctions." More reworking of Darla's codes to accept this story. She can't have the 'primary' AI questioning her.

It's such a ludicrous pile of lies, the Captain could never believe her.

"You don't sound like an AI," he says. "Why would the Rampion need a secondary auto control anyway?"

Cress scrambles for an excuse. Any excuse. "I'm...I was..." her voice cracks. Her breath hitches. This was an awful, awful idea. "I was the primary but I was decommissioned," she says softly. "My personality chip was diagnosed faulty."

She prays, she prays he'll accept this. She remembers Iko, and hopes he might.

She watches his fingers slip slightly from the gun. "And you fixed the Rampion?"

"As well as I could," she says. "One of the cores is almost depleted. Your shields ar—"

"Those are your shields too, sweetheart." He leans more easily against his chair. Lounges almost. She finds her face heating. Her fingers wind around the wires tighter and somewhere a light flickers on and off.

"The shields are damaged and running on the lowest setting. Cloaking will only be functional for two more days and—"

"We don't have cloaking," he interrupts.

"Yes you—we do. It's damaged and I can't fix it further without new parts."

"What parts are those?"

Cress quickly looks through the database, consults a manual, and another before she gives him a list. The Captain nods knowledgably, plucking a port from his belt and scrolling through it, probably look up the parts. "I have no idea what any of those are," he says.

"But," he lifts a finger, "there's a lovely mech ship headed this way. On route to Space Station Calcifer D-6. ETA..." he consults his port. "Eighteen minutes, forty-five seconds."

He grins at the camera roguishly and she tries her best not to squeak aloud. He stands up. "I'll alert the crew."

She nods, forgetting he can't see her. "O-okay."

Pausing by the door, he asks, "Do you have a name?"

She bites her lip, her heart is like a small terrified animal trying to break through her ribcage. "Cress." It comes out like a whisper but she knows he has heard her when he grins again and she's ready to melt into a puddle on the floor.

"Nice to meet you, Cress." He sweeps into an extravagant bow. "Captain Carswell Thorne at your service."

.

The cloaking device is all the way on the other side of the ship so Cress has little to worry when Cinder ventures into the lower floors of the Rampion to install the newly acquired parts. She watches the mechanic at her work from her little nest of wires, hands and hair tangled.

When the device is functional again, the ship lets out a brief, loud hum. They had also retrieved a core to replace the depleted one, and the Rampion is functioning much smoother now. From the corner of her eyes, Cress catches the Captain pat the nearest wall from his seat at the cockpit.

"Thanks," he says.

"You're welcome," she mumbles into her hair.

.

"Captain?" she asks timidly.

"Mm?"

"Are oceans really as big as the netscreens say?"

He must think it's such a strange thing for an AI to ask. She could ask the others. The crew has taken to her presence warmly enough, and Iko is a frequent video game opponent, but Cress feels a slice more comfortable talking to the Captain then the others.

"Yeah," he says. "You've never seen one? Flown across one?"

"I've seen photographs." She plucks a few strands of her hair and starts braiding them. The long, neat braid the prep team had sent her in had come undone weeks ago.

"We should go then," he says immediately. "Easy enough now that we can cloak ourselves."

"Really?" she whispers, though she knows it's something so trivial, so wasteful to ask.

"Definitely."

.

She has figured out the perfect time slot when everyone is asleep and she can venture out for food and a bath and relief. It took some time, and a few scary almost encounters before she got the timing just right. She makes sure to use everything with care enough that her presence isn't noticed. After running through the cargo log, she even manages to scrounge up a spare American Republic Air-force uniform that falls like an overlarge dress in her small figure and an honest to stars ratty, faded cotton dress. The swish of fabric against her knees makes her squeal in delight and she skips all the way to the kitchen.

Cress had expected the pantry to be filled with canned, preserved food like it was in the Artemisia, but once she saw Scarlet dancing around the kitchen, messing with flour and eggs and chocolate, she hadn't been surprised to find all kinds of delicacies covering the kitchen she'd only ever seen on the net screens before.

It takes quite some herculean will power to not simply stuff herself with everything she sees until her stomach is sore and sated. She samples whatever she can in minimalist terms and envies the crew until she's green as Scarlet's pea soup.

She sneaks some few dry snacks from the back of the pantry, and if the Captain hears her chewing between conversation the next day, he says nothing about it.

.

He truly takes her to see the ocean like he suggested they should.

It's between supply runs, and the crew doesn't protest this unnecessary detour. Cress presses her fingers to the wires, and the wires to her face, lips parted, eyes wide, wide, wide. Her breath snags, catches somewhere between her teeth and her tongue and she holds it there as Scarlet dips the ships lower, lower until they're almost skimming across the blue, blue, blue waters.

It's so big, so vast, so beautiful. It looks like the sea of her dreams. And maybe that was an ocean after all. It looks like it could swallow her whole and she'd let it. She watches through eight eyes, eight outer cameras of the Rampion, eight sided views of ripples of silver and sapphire.

She gasps when the bottom skims gently across the waves. A soft slithering sound. Like the rustle of silk, or the hiss of steam. In her periphery she catches the Captain leaning against one of the ship's larger windows, hair tousled, shirt sleeves pulled back. Beside him, Iko presses her fingers to the glass just mumbling "wow" over and over again, and arm in arm with her Linh Cinder, Princess Selene, Pirate Mechanic stands quiet and still and awestruck.

Cress wishes she could be there with them. Her hands clutching the Captain's palm in between them, pressing a thank you to the centre so he can hold it there until the warm molasses in her breath seeps into his lungs.

He grazes the side of the wall he's leaned against with a knuckle, then taps it like a knock. "Is it like the net screens?" he asks the humming metal.

"Better," she says.

.

"I can get you a body you know," he tells her one day, all of a sudden, in the middle of a virtual game of cards. He throws his words carelessly as he studies his draw on his port.

"I don't—" she begins.

"Like Iko. She was the Rampion's auto control system for a while. I won her body in a gamble. While I was blind!" he says with devilish grin. "So you can trust that I have good taste."

"Um..." She has already started to imagine herself as someone else, someone taller, prettier. Silken hair, smoky eyes, confidence under her chin. Of course she has to remind herself that she's not really an AI with a faulty personality chip.

"Or you can always pick what you want."

"No. I'm okay. I don't want—" she takes a deep breath. "I'm okay. Thank you."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

Even though she shouldn't be feeling this way, something twists in her gut. For just a moment, just this moment, Cress wishes she really was an auto control system with a human personality. Then she could have a new body and she could be there, with the rest of the them, with Captain Thorne. Helping them, a part of them, part of a crew, part of a...family.

She looks down at her hands, tangled in wires, chipped fingernails. She won't be here forever, in her nest under the Rampion, masquerading as its secondary auto control. When Pirate-Cinder-Princess-Selene has finished her training, when the crew has managed to recruit enough allies, there'll be a revolution. There'll be a war. And win or lose, Cress will have to untangle herself from the wires and circuitry. She can half imagine what the Captain's face would be like when he sees her for the first time, discovers who she is, what she is.

She can almost she blue waves and downy hair and accusatory eyes.

.

"Mermaids!"

Cress is dreaming again when she's jerked awake by the Captain's cry. For one statico heartbeat moment fear winds up her ribs at discovery, but no, they haven't caught her. Through her eight eyes she sees them—her sisters who are not.

Brine-touched skin, hunger lips. There are three of them, reaching, clawing, swimming though nothing and stars to tear them into red, yellow, orange.

"—to battle stations!" The Captain's command is transmitted to every room, to every crew member, echoing softer a second time, past the booming first. Scarlet sweats in the first pilot seat, the Captain grits his teeth, studying their stats, adjusting navigation.

Everyone else is scrambling to the weapons deck, warm hands on warm guns, the modifications that Mistress Sybil had despised so deeply. Cress twins herself tightly to the ship's mainframe, seeking deeper, more intimate access, to the very codes and currents of the vessel.

I'm a friend, she whispers, I want to help.

Scarlet tries her skill's best but Cress can feel her not-sisters closing in, faster, and faster. One is so close Cress can see the Lunar seal engraving on her moon coloured clothes. Hands touch the Rampion's outer surface. A harsh command is screamed though, and outside Cress's not-sister Shell grins through knives for teeth.

Don't listen to her, Cress tells the Rampion gently, soothing fingers running circular patterns on its wires. She isn't your friend. Don't listen to her, she wants you to break.

If the Mistress' Shell soldier looks confused, Cress doesn't see it. She can feel more hands, long fingernails digging into the Rampion, metal turned flesh for a moment. Don't listen to them.

She croons, she sings, she sooths, gentle to her non-sisters' grating screaming commands. Fingers draw patters of circles and whorls and letters of affection as outside nails scrape and scratch. Some small part of her can hear Scarlet yelling profanities from her station. Beside her the Captain draws his brows together. "Why aren't they attacking?" he whispers almost to himself.

"Do you want them to, you fu—"

Cress grips her wires a little tighter. We should shake them off, she suggests to the Rampion. Ask them to leave, don't you think? They're not welcome. They mean us harm. They're not your friends. They're not our friends.

There's melody in her coaxing. Enticing, alluring, deadly, safe. Only one of her against three of them. Petite Crescent Moon of nowhere and no one singing alone to zeroes and ones.

Don't listen to them!

Cress hears Scarlet curse the loudest when she makes the lights go out. She takes the power off from every non-essential application and directs everything outside, outside. Her sisters don't expect the attack. They scream when the Rampion's two jittery power cores grasp them by their hungry wrists and surge through their bones.

Cress feels the ghost of a burn around her neck and sobs but doesn't stop until her Shell not-sisters let go. She sees Scarlet jumping into action immediately. "Cinder!" she screams into the public comm system. "Did you install the hyperdive capacitor?"

"Yes, but I haven't run the compatibility tests yet. You can't—"

Scarlet screams back something very vulgar that makes Cress squirm and Captain Thorne grin.

"Thanks," Cinder mumbles.

Cress releases her control of the Rampion, letting Darla take over as she falls, falls, falls. Absently she notes the ship groan as they jump into hyperdrive, before she has started to dream.

.

On her dream sand gold shore, she drags her pirate Captain to safety. He has never woken up here, in this world of hers. This time, this once, the Captain looks like her Captain. Carswell Thorne: pirate, rogue, friend.

She touches his cheek gently. In the first and second era books of Cress' liking there were often sleeping princesses. She brushes sand off his lips and wonders what wakes a pirate. Gold and treasure perhaps. She leans down and her honey hair whispers against his forehead.

"Wake up," she says, pressing her salt lips to his warmth.

He listens.

.

In this dream, she's a stranger. He looks at her as such.

They've never met in the world of real things either, she notes sadly. Not really. Not physically. She's only a voice in the walls. An imaginary control system with an imaginary personality.

From somewhere far away, a distance too great for her to fathom, Cress hears a voice, familiar and frustrated. "Where is she?"

A princess answers. "I don't know. She's not here. See, this is Darla's chip. There's nothing next to it."

"Where's the secondary—"

"There is no secondary auto control system. I've checked the logs and the Rampion only has one AI. It's not designed to have a second one; there's no slot, no—"

"But she was here! You heard her."

"Look, calm down. I'm having Darla run a full system scan. If she's here, we'll find her."

A warm forehead presses against her. Somewhere far away her Captain leans against a wall. His starling stranger eyes are sad. "Wake up," he says fiercely.

"System diagnostics complete. One unidentified life form detected."

.

They come with guns, she's sad to see.

Her Captain and the princess and the android and the pilot and the wolf and the surgeon. Her crew mates. Her friends. Her—nobodies.

They have stranger eyes.

"Cress?" the Captain, her Captain asks hesitantly. They're too far away to quite see her properly. She warps a cord of wire around her finger.

"Mermaid!" someone gasps before she can answer. "It's a mermaid!"

Six guns on her. Even her Captain's. She could never run. She's read what happens to stowaways. But do starships have planks?

She had dreamed in her dreams a hundred different things to say to the pirate captain but nothing comes to her now. Her fear addled mind starts reaching for instinctual defenses. No survivors, it whispers to her helpfully. This is a priority one objective.

She removes her fingers from the wires and sinister temptation and takes a deep breath.

"Hello." She looks them all in the eye, one stranger after the other before she rests of the Captain last. Former cadet. Carswell Thorne. Deserter of the American Republic Air-force. ID number #0082688359. She has a whole folder about him.

He makes a small noise at the back of his throat when he hears her voice, maybe hears an old echo of its laughing in his memory. The hand holding his gun shakes a little, just a little. She gathers up her knees to her chest, arms circling herself, wires in her hair and around her feet, stardust under her eyes.

She almost looks like a mermaid of old, like she belongs among pages of the first era.

She expects him to say something flippant, something casual and dismissive to show the tremor in his hands is nothing. She even expects him to shoot her perhaps.

But his voice breaks when he looks at her.

"I dreamed of you," he says.

If there are any mistakes, let me know. I didn't go through this very thoroughly.