#it'll be fun (i say remembering the Black Hole Incident)

[daisychainsandbowties]

thinking a normal amount about a treasure planet au. Beatrice on her solar kiteboard, doing the daredevil flip sequence framed against the setting sun and then getting hauled kicking and screaming back to her parents’ house in manacles with a defiant expression on her perpetually dirt-smudged face.

climbing out the window at the first opportunity to go down to the dockside inn, making nebulous plans to steal her kiteboard back but ending up down at the edge of the dock staring past her boots and into the mists. gripping tight to the wood beneath her as she looks up at the sky and dreams of anywhere but here, of stealing a skiff to get off this planet. a reluctant twinge at the thought of going alone.

Bea with all her star maps and her intricate knowledge of spaceships and their solar sails and how to navigate out there where the artigrav net is all that stands between you and floating through nothing, forever.

startling when she hears the familiar sound of someone booking it down the pier on wooden crutches. night has already started to speckle the sky above, and as she listens to the thunk of the crutches on the pier, Bea thinks of the complicated metallic lattice she has on her desk at home, partly disassembled because she’s still trying to work out parts of the engineering. Ava’s birthday is in a month.

she has to stay that long, and then she’ll leave. she will.

turning to watch as Ava races towards her with soup stains on her shirt and messy hair jammed flat beneath a ‘pirate’ hat she bought off of a traveling salesman last year. the tricorn wobbles precariously on her head as she moves. Beatrice just waits, a slight smile on her face.

there are bruises high on each of her arms, from the pincer-like grip of the police bots, manhandling her away from her kiteboard to snap manacles around each wrist.

she rubs at the skin there, but ignores the bruises.

when Ava arrives, a little out of breath, Beatrice holds up a hand so she can help herself down onto the pier. there’s no water beneath them, only a few hundred meters of empty air and curling mist.

Ava keeps one hand on Bea’s and the other on her shoulder, letting the crutches clatter down between them as she sits.

“Mom says you got arrested again,” Ava says cheerfully. “She says they’re threatening to send you to prison.”

Beatrice shrugs, “I wouldn’t mind it, so long as my parents did not visit.”

Ava’s fingers are covered in bright red band-aids, from chopping vegetables all day with her poor hand dexterity. Beatrice watches the colours blur as Ava punches her in the arm, right on the bruises. “Liar, I know you’d miss me.”

her arm throbs painfully, but Beatrice’s expression is carefully neutral as she responds. 

“I might.”

she stays with Ava that night, both of them reading her old book with its floating images of ships and canons and pirates leaping from vessel to vessel. Captain Flint, materialising out of empty space to steal away gems and gold, “the loot of a thousand worlds.” Ava traces the projected lines of the solar sails with her fingers as they flicker into being. 

Beatrice has repaired the book over and over, making the colours brighter and sharper. the tiny shapes of pirates all made up of light. Ava has the book open on Bea’s chest as she lies next to her, legs all entangled in the sheets they’ve kicked off because the night is so warm.

she seems oblivious to how Beatrice’s breath hitches at almost every touch.

they’re almost asleep when they hear the explosion, a ship crashing into the cliff-side, tumbling over and over before they hear the pop and hiss of heated metal. a bloom of smoke outside the window.

Beatrice gives Ava a piggyback ride down the stairs just before Ava’s ‘mom’, Suzanne, emerges with her pulse-rifle primed, hair loose around her shoulders.

they stumble into the yard and discover a pirate, a robot, still bleeding from a wound in his abdomen, crawling from the wreck of his ship. Beatrice heaves a shard of twisted metal away from him and finds the surface slippery with blood.

behind her, Ava sways a little, shivers in the cold air, but she’s still standing when Beatrice turns back to her.

the dying pirate tells them almost nothing useful. he’s half-mad, cluching at Beatrice’s shirt until the seams tear at the collar, then turning to Ava. he fetches out a lockbox from his ship, blood spilling onto the ground at the movement. unlocks it and takes odd sphere from inside.

it drops into Ava’s palm as he rasps, “Whatever you do, don’t let them find it.”

then he wheezes, shudders, stills.

they stare at him, Ava’s free hand finding Bea’s, holding tight.

“Is he… dead?” Ava’s voice in the silence and the dark.

“I think so.”

then, in a burst of light and sound, in a shockwave of displaced air, a ship plummets down out of the clouds, pulling up an instant from the ground.

this second ship looms down out of the sky, pirates dropping from it and suddenly Suzanne is screaming at them to “GET INSIDE” from an upstairs window as she takes potshots at the misshapen shapes swarming down lines of hempen rope.

the air lights up with orange and yellow as explosions ripple down towards the crashed ship, towards the inn. Bea flings one of Ava’s arms around her neck and sprints for the door, Ava holding the sphere (or map?) tightly against her chest.

she sets Ava down gently onto one of the bar stools, runs back to barricade the door. her face is flushed, streaked somehow with engine grease and robot blood, which is black and slightly acidic. 

they exchange a wide-eyed look, too much meaning in it to parse as explosions rock the floor. Ava has both hands clutched around the sphere. 

they both almost scream as Suzanne runs down the stairs in a blur of dressing gown and gun. she has Ava’s crutches in one hand and her rifle in the other. she kisses Ava quickly on the forehead, “Thank the tides you’re safe.” leaves her with the crutches and then goes to fetch an ancient-looking blaster pistol out from behind the bar, presses it into Beatrice’s hands. “You know how to use this?”

“No!”

“Aim it away from your own face.”

and then there are pirates all around the house, glass breaking and fire crackling. Beatrice takes up the rear, pistol pointed at the front door as it bulges under the pressure of pirates flinging their bulk into it again and again. 

they climb out of a window, Suzanne producing a kitchen knife and jamming it into the neck of a pirate loitering uncertainly outside the bolted shutters. there, covered by a tarp, is Suzanne’s old motorcycle with a sidecar attached. lantern-bugs scatter out from under it as Suzanne throws the old tarp away, gestures for Beatrice and Ava to climb in as she covers them with her rifle.

there’s a roar from somewhere in the dark and Suzanne fires a shot, hops onto the motorcycle and revs the engine. then they’re moving, pirates parting before them like the ocean neither of them have ever seen, the vast bodies of water that don’t even exist on this planet.

they seek refuge with Jillian, an archaeologist who frequents the old inn, claiming that she can’t make her coffee taste of anything but soap. she examines the orb, reluctantly passed into her hands by Ava, her and Bea wrapped in an old blanket, sitting by the fire in Jillian’s immense study.

Jillian fiddles with it for an age before sighing, looking almost angry with herself.

“I can’t… seem to make this work.”  

Ava holds out her hand, silent. “let me try,” and Beatrice makes a face at Jillian when she hesitates.

the pirate gave the sphere to Ava; it’s hers. 

it seems much larger in Ava’s small grip. she looks down at it for a while before her fingers start to move, slow but gathering momentum as she presses the little grooves and switches and indents on the sphere. 

until it lights up, showing a map of the known universe, and parts of it that are unknown.

“Is that-” Beatrice feels her words drop away, like the ground beneath the pier where she has passed so many hours sitting with Ava’s hand in hers.

Ava turns to Beatrice, eyes bright as a pair of stars, “It’s treasure planet.”

#treasure planet au #warrior nun #avatrice #and yeah what about cyborg shannon & mary her first mate and their (pirate) spaceship/ literally just an 18th century frigate #thinking of shannon growing increasingly fond of beatrice who helps her with her star charts and the calculations for navigating space #both of them of course planning their betrayal but looking at these two girls slowly realising they're in love #furious conversations in the captain's cabin and lilith up in the crows nest half the time. cam pestering her with tea #🥹🥹 ava with morph the little pink blob who sure yeah belongs to shannon but hangs out 'spying' on mary in the kitchen #i just think ava and bea should run away and accidentally join a pirate crew together #it'll be fun (i say remembering the Black Hole Incident) #anyway maybe i will write this idk