Rolling Dice

Slice-of-life short. Two men on a pirate island have a friendly conversation one evening.

More of Achiel Vermeer and Haughty Paris, just some Gen slice-of-life, about 1k.

Note: I am unfortunately still recovering from this nasty virus I had at the beginning of the month, and whether it was Covid or another influenza, my recovery is very slow and writing is quite difficult.

Thanks to everyone for your good wishes and your patience as I slowly continue to heal up, I absolutely abhor when sickness prevents me from writing properly, and I am unspeakably impatient about it all, as I ever am.

— –

“It’s going to squall,” Paris murmurs, leaning his elbows on the balcony railing. Now and then, a few of Vermeer’s coworkers look curiously up to the two of them through the open doors to the balcony. Now and then, Vermeer will chat to him in a coffee shop or — he prefers — on the bench outside Tom Bale’s haberdasher’s, their backs to the stone wall.

“A day or so’s storm, that’s all,” Vermeer says, not looking up from his log of numbers, which he’s reading through line by line, tracing his progress with a pencil, before paging onto the next one. “After the storm is done battering your battened hatches, you’ll make quite the pretty penny from the enforced break, as you always do.”

“I suppose,” Paris agrees, sipping from his drink.

Vermeer doesn’t like it in the brothel — he doesn’t like brothels in general, finds they’re too easy for one assassin or other to move through undetected and unnoticed, and he doesn’t like people touching him without warning either, even if they’re not doing so with the intention to kill him (which he never believes is the case).

And even if Paris particularly wanted to spend time in the tiny, easily-defensible cell that Vermeer calls a bedroom, windowless, Vermeer wouldn’t stand for it.

“Are you fucking him, that Ross Forthright?” Paris asks.

The quiet, papery slide of Vermeer’s pencil on the page stops abruptly, and Paris turns to look at him. Vermeer isn’t looking up at Paris, but is staring down at the log.

The Feathered Bird had set out from port last night, information Paris had received from Ewan Jones when he’d dropped in for one of his usual visits. Jones was a generally tired and irritable man on his visits, and he had no pension awaiting him, no easy ability for retirement, to soothe that attitude — and, being something of a passive man by nature, he had undertaken no especial plan to consider his future, or change its potential.

He is a reliable client, for all that, and ever an easy one, soft to touch and to look at, and he had a very pleasant voice. Paris did not much like many of the English accents, and whilst he enjoys the musicality of the Irish and the Scots, he does sometimes struggle to understand them. Jones’ Welsh lilt is soothing and even, and the natural dullness of his character only adds to the soporific effect of his company.

He doesn’t consider himself much of a gossip, Paris doesn’t think. He doesn’t gossip for the sake of social favour, and Paris is aware he doesn’t bandy about his crewmen’s names whilst aboard the Levity, is more of a listener than a talker. It is simply that he likes Paris very much, likes to chatter and talk to him where he doesn’t much his crewmates, and so anything he hears, he passes along to Paris — and Paris is a businessman.

He makes use of such things.

“I wondered that you hadn’t heard of it sooner,” says Vermeer, and his pencil resumes its rhythm on the page before he turns it over. Paris smiles. Belgian accents aren’t always easy, either, but Vermeer pronounces his English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and any other language he uses, with the crisp and incisive attitude he applies to his study of numbers. “He propositioned me in August, when that hurricane broke after the three days of swelter.”

“Is he good?”

Vermeer pauses a moment, looking considering, his brow furrowing, his lips pressing together. He taps the head of his pencil against the cleft of his chin twice.

“He’s enthusiastic,” Vermeer says. “He suggested on our first social engagement that I bind him down to assure myself of my security in fucking him, which has worked rather well.”

“Skilled?”

“In some things,” Vermeer says. “A good kisser, and rather expert at finding the sensitive spots on a man’s body. And less a skill, but more…” He trails off, considering, and then says, “When fucking him, or even merely rimming him, he can come untouched, and not only that, but he comes quite explosively. He’s a little younger than me, even — he isn’t fifty until next year — but he shoots like a geyser. Very…” He gestures vaguely in the air ahead of them, his expression as serious as it is. “Artistic.”

“You’re a very queer fellow, Achiel,” Paris says, not without affection. “Do you worry for him, away at sea, a storm coming?”

“No,” Vermeer says blandly, finally closing his log and setting it aside. “What would worrying do? If he dies, he dies. We’re as likely to die here as he is at sea.”

“You’re as likely, maybe,” Paris corrects him. Sighing, he drains his class. “Tavli?”

“Very well,” Vermeer says, and he looks at Paris as he comes to sit across from him, laying out the board between them. “You’re to be thirty soon.”

“What about it?”

“You’re bored here,” Vermeer says, blunt instrument that he is. “And you aren’t bound here in the way others are. You have more than enough money to leave, find different work. Your target when first you signed on with me, we surpassed it two years ago. You have damn near to double in your coffers what you once said would be enough for you to go.”

“Resent my custom, do you?”

“You’re a reliable client,” says Vermeer — he means nothing by it, and if anything, intends it as a compliment, not an insult, but Paris feels the implications of the statement drip down his spine like a spill of cold water, and he is quiet, considering it.

Is he any different to Ewan Jones, when it comes down to it?

“The dice are yours,” says Paris, and slides them across to Vermeer.

His accountant, a severe man but not an unwise one, takes the dismissal as delivered, and begins to play.