dodostad:
Au shenanigans! It doesn’t have a name yet but I’ve been tagging everything “tentarose” :B
She feels him coming from so many miles away. The play through the water, pressures and hints of distant eddies brushing against the sensitive cups of her tentacles, and in the cool and damp of her island cave, Rose frowns. This pirate. This absolute wretched ass of a pirate that refuses to stay away no matter how many times she’s dragged him down to the depths and broken his kleptomaniac fingers. It’s been over a dozen times now. He wants her treasure and her unsurpassed knowledge. He expects to stride in with his leather designer boots and his fur-collar coat and the ridiculous gaudy tricorne hat, a rifle over one shoulder and a sword lashed at his hip, and he plans to take it all. But she feels his ship dock, feels the rock of the keel against smooth sand. He’s here and she knows it, and she loves the chance he always unwittingly gives her to make him look like a damn fool.
She slips from the rocks into the icy water, a smile pricking her lips. She creeps along the bottom of the sunken cave with her tentacles twining and clasping and inching her along, and at the bright sunny entrance that opens up onto the beach, she hovers inches below the surface, hidden in the shadow. A half hour is not that long for a horrorterror witch to wait, and she’s rewarded for her patience.
He creeps in with two other men, men nervous and with hands on their swords, shaky at the rumors and truths of a demon in this cave. Their captain is transfixed, obsessed with rooting his spoils out of the darkness beyond, and she follows under the sleek surface of the water as they pick their way inside. He talks incessantly, reminding his men not to let down their guard. Rose can hear it from under the water as clear as church bells. He’s an idiot if he thinks she cannot hear, and the simmering pleasure she’d been harboring at her own trickery is dashed, replaced by a sick disgust and rage. He thinks so little of her. She’s humiliated him time and time again and still he waltzes in here like he owns the place, like she doesn’t outsmart him every single time.
The henchmen go down with a whispered spell, the oozing condensation on the walls twisting and burning with acid animosity and thrown into the water to their right. Rose strikes in their tumbling, deafening fall into the pool, three tentacles snapping out of the water like whips and wrapping around the captain’s shiny boot. She jerks him into the icy pond. He thrashes and kicks but she has him, more limbs at her disposal than even his deepest nightmares could invent, and she presses his back to the bottom of the pond, looming over him and casting the evil of her silhouette into the light from the entrance. The henchmen escape, leaving the dead silence of rippling waves behind. He coughs bubbles. The only reason he isn’t dead by now is his ability to breathe underwater. She pins his arms above his head. And she smiles with sharp predators fangs as she leans down close to his wide, shocked eyes and whispers into his finned ear.
“I may be able to steal a girl’s voice, but I am not deaf. How many times have I bested you at this stupid, simplistic game you keep insisting on, and still you haven’t learned, Eridan?” It comes out honey smooth, tantalizing and each word tipped with magic to crawl teasingly under his sea-starved skin. And then she throttles him back against the rocks until his head cracks, his tricorne long gone as she roars, “You disrespect me!”
The pool sings with her voice and the rage-tinged magic. Dark energy crackles along the backs of her eyelids, and Eridan sucks for water, trembling in her grasp.
“I’m not fuckin’ disrespectin’ you, seahag,” he coughs, his voice wavering with hinted fear. “You ever think for a second that maybe the idea behind draggin’ my ship out to this backward island was about more than fuckin’ treasure and musty old books?” His teeth are bared, his fins puffed up. He’s all defense display and there’s nothing he can do to escape from her grasp. “I got the utmost respect for you. Else I wouldn’t be comin’ back all the time tryin’ to get your damn attention.”
He’s interested. In her. The laughter bubbles up in her and she doesn’t stop even when he rolls his eyes.
“I always knew this was a game for you, but a game of lovers’ Russian roulette with a sea demon? Please.” Her tentacles twine harder around his limbs. The cold of the sea is eating into his flesh, deadening his fingertips and his lips going white. She could snap him in a second and never look back. He could be nothing more than fishmeal for her eels.
But a part of her loves this game too, even if he’s a child compared to the expanse of her lifetime.
She kisses him, and as he stares dead at her face, she laughs and slips a sleeping spell between his lips and down his simple throat. He falls limp in seconds, snoring lightly in the silence. She’ll drag him to the leeshore of the island and leave him stranded on the beach. Let him walk back to his ship shivering and dripping. He’ll see that it takes more than goading words and a game to actually catch the full attention of Rose Lalonde.