Swim In The Smoke

Chapter 1

"What about this, Captain?" Liam asks, nudging the boy kneeling between their feet with the toe of his boot. The boy hisses and swipes at him, slurring out something unintelligible around the makeshift gag Niall had to stuff in his mouth. He misses by a mile and tries again, just as ineffectively.

Harry looks down at him, at the way the sun streams over his face and shoulders, at the way the gag stretches his mouth, lips pink and chapped. He's lithe and pretty, smudged all over with dirt. They had found him tied up below deck, mostly unconscious, next to a barrel full of gold. He's clearly a prisoner, but there's something familiar about him, something that niggles at Harry's brain. Something he can't quite put his finger on.

"Put him in my cabin," Harry decides, turning back to deal with the rest of the loot. The boys screams out jumbled curse words at Harry's back, muffled by the gag, and Harry can't understand any of it.

He still gets the impression that there's a rather thrilling selection of words.
They're easy enough to ignore, though, especially when there's sacks of gold sitting in front of him waiting to be dealt with. So. That's what Harry deals with first.

He's in the middle of divvying up the crew's shares when Niall comes barreling into his back, brandishing a ledger like it's a weapon, right in Harry's face.

"He's a prince!" Niall shouts, waving it like a madman.

Harry swipes it, just so Niall will stop shoving it up his nose. "Who's a what now?" he asks a little absently, already turning back to the loot with the paper in one hand.

"The boy," Niall says impatiently, gesturing emphatically with both hands. "The one we found below deck? He's Prince Louis Tomlinson of Yorkshire."

"He is not," Harry says, skimming the smudged ink quickly.

He is.

Fuck.

There's exactly forty-three crew members aboard The Wandering Sparrow, and Harry trusts each and every one of them with his life.
That being said, there's no denying there's a handful who Harry trusts to take part in the decision making process, so he gathers them up and lays out the facts they know so far. It doesn't take long.

"We don't have the resources to fight off anyone who might come for him," Liam says logically. "If the Navy comes for him we're fucked."

"They haven't so far," Zayn points out. "According to The Tide's papers they've had him for three weeks and so far no one has found him."

"Think we could ransom him?" Niall asks, which is exactly what Harry had been thinking.

"There has to be a reason that no one's come for him yet, though," Harry says. Sometimes he hates being the voice of reason.

Liam makes a vague noise of agreement. "Well, there's one way to find out," he says grimly. "You want to talk to him or shall I?"

"I'll do it," Harry decides, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the way the boy's face had looked when he'd been thrown into Harry's cabin, red with rage and dirty, still beautiful underneath all that fierceness. His attractiveness had been clear despite all of that.

The way the lads laugh at him as Harry makes his way to his cabin tells him they see right through him.

The cabin is silent, at least from the outside. Harry opens the door slowly, carefully, and steps inside. The boy - Louis - is still tied up, thrown onto the hammock and left there, by the looks of it. He's awake, staring Harry down with as cold a glare as Harry's ever seen. The feeling that he'd be spitting insults if he wasn't still gagged is hard to shake.