Tropical Paradise Saga (870)
Arc XVI: Love Island
Chapter XVIII: Kiss-Kiss Fruit and Other Indignities
The navigation chart appeared one morning, tucked into the Bubbly's supply chest between a bag of dried oats and a rope coil, in a location that nobody could explain and nobody had put it there, which meant, obviously, that someone had.
"This is suspicious," Sam said, unrolling it across the deck, examining the precise, beautifully rendered route it described — sweeping south and west, away from the High King's northern patrol corridors, threading through open water that conveniently avoided every bounty settlement they'd flagged as dangerous.
"Extremely," Tijjani agreed.
"We're using it," Sam said.
"Why not," Tijjani agreed again.
The route was, as advertised, impeccable. No patrols. No pursuit. No sign of the High King's fleets that had been, since Iron Gate, a constant background threat. Beautiful current carrying them steadily south, the air warming by degrees as Frosty Whimsy's eternal winter receded behind them, the ice giving way to grey water and then green water and then, impossibly, a crystalline turquoise that none of them had ever seen.
"This is wonderful," Sven said, his face tilted toward the sun, which had been growing more generous with every passing day.
"This is suspicious," Sam said again, but quieter this time, because the water was genuinely beautiful and he was tired of being cold.
What none of them considered — what nobody warned them about, because nobody on this route was warning anyone about anything, because nobody lived here — was the fog.
It rolled in on the third day, warm and thick and faintly luminescent in the way that morning sea-mist sometimes was, and none of them thought much of it because warm sea-fog was ordinary and this sea was new and sometimes new places had unusual weather.
They sailed through it.
The microscopic blue glowing mosquitoes that bred in exactly this kind of transition zone — sub-zero winter meeting tropical warmth, creating perfect biological conditions for something the locals who avoided this stretch of water called Lovebugs — noted the arrival of fresh warm-blooded mammals with the single-minded enthusiasm of their kind.
Nobody noticed the first bites.
The marks were small and heart-shaped, which was unusual, but also entirely ignorable, and anyway the sea was beautiful.
I. The Progression
Sam scratched his arm on day one, saw a faint reddish mark the precise shape of a tiny heart, said "hm," and went back to his ledger.
This was, he would reflect later, the single most expensive hm of his entire life.
On day two, Tijjani developed a similar mark, and Sven two, and all three of them agreed that the local insects were irritating and otherwise did not think much of it.
On day three, Sam woke up, stood, and sat immediately back down again in the manner of a man who had expected his body to cooperate with standing and discovered it had other plans. Tijjani, examining his arm, found the mark had spread into something that warranted the word rash. Sven slept through breakfast, which had never, in the entire journey, happened once.
"...that's weird," Jens said, looking at all three of them.
"It's fine," Sam said, leaning against the mast with the studied casualness of a man pretending he wasn't leaning because he needed to.
Day four removed every remaining pretense.
High fever arrived, the kind that made the whole world slightly wrong, edges indistinct, sounds arriving from an odd distance. Body aches that made moving feel like a negotiation. Sam's rash had spread, which he found deeply unfair — the rash was, aesthetically, the most offensive part of an otherwise theoretically manageable situation. Tijjani drifted in and out of full alertness with increasing frequency. Sven, attempting to cross the deck, sat down approximately four feet from his destination and did not get up again.
Mouth sores appeared. Eating became painful. Drinking became uncomfortable. The crew, watching three of their number deteriorate with alarming speed, was using words like alarming and we need to find land now and Milos, who had been doing physical labor to compensate for the reduced help, was quietly panicking in the specific way Milos panicked, which was to become very still and very focused and entirely not himself.
Then day five arrived.
II. The Morning of Day Five
Jens woke early, as he always did, the dawn barely breaking over the southern sea. He lay still for a moment in the way he always did, taking stock — the ship's sounds, the weather, the crew's breathing if he could hear it.
Something was wrong.
Not with the ship. With the particular quality of silence from the space beside him, which should have contained Jesper's breathing and instead contained the specific absence of any sound at all.
He looked.
Jesper lay entirely still, the blanket pulled around him, face slack.
Not sleeping slack. Wrong slack.
"Jesper," Jens said.
Nothing.
He reached over. Touched the blanket. "Jesper."
Nothing.
The stillness of him — the total, unresponsive stillness — hit Jens somewhere below reasoning, somewhere that functioned on older, more primitive logic than strategy or thought, and his hands were already moving, pulling the blanket back.
Jesper didn't stir.
He was breathing — Jens could see it, faint and fast, but present — and he was burning, the fever evident in the flush across his cheekbones, and he did not respond to Jens saying his name again, or to a hand on his face, or to the growing urgency in Jens's voice as he said it a third time, a fourth.
He tried to pull him upright.
Jesper, entirely unconscious, slid off the sleeping bench.
THUD.
The sound of a person hitting a deck floor with no ability to catch themselves, an extraordinarily specific and terrible sound, and the entire crew — Sam, Tijjani, Sven, all three of them feverish and miserable in their various corners, Milos already awake, Yuki already watching — went completely still.
"Jesper," Jens said, on the floor now, gathering him, turning his face toward him, checking, checking, checking. "Jesper."
Nothing.
"JESPER."
The word came out different that time. Not louder, exactly — but stripped of something, the control gone from it, nothing left in it but the raw and unmanaged truth of the past six months of Forest of Bones and Black Horseman and carrying him through a collapsing prison and falling out of the sky, everything that had been held carefully in check for every one of those moments now surfacing all at once because Jesper wasn't waking up and wasn't responding and wasn't—
Jens grabbed both his cheeks in his hands. Held his face. The grip firmer than tender, the specific firmness of someone who needed a response and was going to produce one.
"OW," Jesper said, his eyes opening with the confused, aggrieved expression of someone surfacing from a dream that had not involved face-squeezing and now had to.
The entire ship exhaled.
"THANK ODIN," the crew said, in a collective rush that encompassed every flavor of relief.
Jesper blinked at Jens, who was holding his face in both hands on the floor of the ship, eyes doing something Jesper's fever-blurred vision couldn't entirely process.
"Why," Jesper said, his voice rough, "are you on the floor."
"You fell off the bench," Jens said, and his voice was, by a significant margin, the least composed Jesper had ever heard it.
"Skill issue," Jesper said, and passed out again, directly onto Jens's arm.
III. The Great Begging
Jens did not sleep after that.
Clinically. He simply stopped. Whatever mechanism allowed him to close his eyes and not be monitoring Jesper's breathing simultaneously ceased to function, and the result was a man who sat, hour after hour, watching the rise and fall of Jesper's chest with the fixed, unblinking attention of someone who had decided, at a cellular level, that personal vigilance was the only thing standing between Jesper and something Jens refused to think about directly.
Temperature checked. Every hour. The back of his hand, the inside of his wrist, the particular methodology of a man who had learned, in the past several weeks, exactly what running a fever felt like beneath a palm and what running too high a fever felt like and where the line was.
Pulse checked. Breathing checked. Whether Jesper had shifted position in the past twenty minutes, whether the blanket was too heavy or not heavy enough, whether the color in his face was better or worse than it had been an hour ago — all of it, continuous, exhaustive, documented in a private mental ledger that nobody else had access to and that Jens was updating constantly.
When Milos took the rudder, Jens stayed with Jesper. When Yuki managed the sails, Jens stayed with Jesper. When something needed doing and Jens was specifically needed for it, Jens made sure Milos was positioned directly beside Jesper before he left, and returned faster than the task strictly required, and rechecked everything the moment he got back.
"You're staring at me," Jesper said, on the second day, surfacing briefly from the fever to find Jens exactly where he'd been for the past twelve hours.
"No," Jens said.
"You're literally — Jens, your face is six inches from my face."
"I'm checking your color."
"You've been checking my color for twelve hours."
"Your color has been changing."
"Stop staring at me."
"No."
"You're making it weird."
"You're dying."
"I am literally not dying."
"You fell unconscious."
"Skill issue," Jesper said again, which was apparently his position on this matter, and passed out again, and Jens watched him do it with an expression that the rest of the crew, observing from their own miserable corners, found somewhere between incredibly moving and deeply difficult to witness.
"Sam," Tijjani said, feverish, swaying slightly.
"Yes," Sam said, equally feverish, wrapped in every blanket he possessed.
"Is he going to be alright?"
"Jesper or Jens?"
"...either."
"I genuinely don't know," Sam said.
The eating problem presented its own particular theater.
The mouth sores made eating painful. Drinking was uncomfortable. Jesper, whose relationship with food had always been complicated on the best of days, and who was now running a fever high enough to remove any appetite he might otherwise have had, combined with mouth sores that made every swallow an active unpleasantness, simply stopped eating, and the combination of fever and not eating was, Jens understood with cold, precise clarity, going to make everything worse faster.
This was the context in which the Great Begging began.
"Eat," Jens said, on the first full day of the fever, holding out a small bowl of the gentlest thing available on the ship, plain broth, nearly liquid.
"No," Jesper said.
"It's broth. Almost nothing."
"It hurts."
"I know. Try anyway."
"No."
"One spoon."
"No."
"Jesper."
"No."
"One spoon. Just one."
"No."
"It's barely even food. It's hot water that pretended to be food briefly."
"Then why do you want me to eat it?"
"Because you haven't had anything in a day and a half and you're running a fever and if you don't eat something you're going to—" Jens stopped, recalibrated, chose a different approach. "Please."
A pause.
"...no."
"Jesper."
"Stop saying my name like that."
"Like what."
"Like you're about to say something that will make me feel guilty."
"Is it working?"
"...possibly. No. No. My answer is no."
Jens set the bowl down. Picked it back up. Held it out again.
"It's getting cold," he said.
"Good," Jesper said. "Cold things hurt less."
"Then eat it cold."
"I don't want to eat it."
"I know."
"It hurts to eat."
"I know," Jens said, the same two words, softer this time, the patience behind them enormous. "I know it hurts. I'm asking you to do it anyway."
"Why," Jesper said, and the question, under the fever and the exhaustion, came out genuinely rather than rhetorically, a real question from someone too tired to manage a deflection properly.
"Because," Jens said, setting the bowl in his lap, not offering the spoon yet, just putting it within reach, "you're going to get worse if you don't, and I'm not—" He stopped again. Tried again. "I'm asking you. Please."
Fourteen minutes passed.
"...one spoon," Jesper said, finally, with the reluctant tone of a man granting an enormous concession.
"One spoon," Jens agreed, offering it immediately.
Jesper opened his mouth. Winced. Swallowed.
"Again," Jens said.
"You said one."
"I said one to get you started. Now I'm saying again."
"That's cheating."
"Yes."
Another pause. Another spoon.
By the fifth spoon, Jesper had stopped protesting and started simply swallowing with the resigned submission of someone who had run out of the energy to maintain a position, and Jens fed him with the patient, steady focus of a man prepared to do this for exactly as long as it took.
It took, on average, thirty-six minutes per meal, and Jens did it three times a day, and the rest of the crew, observing from their own feverish misery, witnessed the full daily performance.
"If this disease doesn't kill me," Sam said, from under his blankets, "listening to you two certainly will."
"You're very welcome for the entertainment," Jesper said, and passed out on Jens's arm again, with what was becoming his primary conversational conclusion.
IV. Love Island
They found land not because they navigated toward it with any kind of intention but because nearest island, any island, we have sick people had become the crew's entire strategic framework, and the first landmass that resolved out of the tropical haze happened to be, specifically, Love Island.
It arrived looking like every warm fever dream the crew had collectively spent the past several days experiencing — white sand beaches, palm trees, waterfalls visible in the green hills beyond, flowers of colors that had no business being that saturated, the whole thing shimmering in equatorial heat like something a dying person might hallucinate and had not, in fact, hallucinated.
"BEST ISLAND EVER," Milos announced, taking in the beaches and then the women on them — dozens of them, beautiful and armed, wearing practical but decidedly non-northern clothing, moving through the beach's defenses with the organized competence of people who had been doing exactly this for a very long time.
"Those are spears," Tijjani noted, feverishly, noting that approximately twenty of them were currently being pointed at the Bubbly.
"Those are beautiful women holding spears," Milos corrected.
"The spears remain a concern—"
"A minor one."
Cherry Cherry Lady arrived at the beach's edge with the bearing of someone who commanded everything she stood on and was not remotely surprised by anything that approached her shores, because absolutely nothing had ever approached her shores that she hadn't been prepared for. Tall. Beautiful in a way that was primarily about the particular absolute confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether they belonged exactly where they were. She carried a spear taller than Jens, which was significant, and wore an expression that communicated, without language, that she had taken a look at this situation and found it entirely beneath her.
She saw the crew. Counted them. Assessed the state of them — three clearly ill, one barely upright being held by the largest person she'd ever seen, one moving and healthy, one young and feral-looking, one quiet and strange.
"Get out of here," she said.
"I hate this island already," Jesper said, from Jens's arms, opening one eye.
"My people are sick," Jens said, with the directness of a man who had run out of time for anything else. "We need help."
"Die elsewhere."
"I don't know how to—" Jens looked at Jesper, at Sam, at Sven still sitting where he'd been sitting for hours, at Tijjani gray-faced and swaying. "Please. The sores in their mouths mean they can't eat properly. Without food and proper treatment they're going to—"
"Not my problem."
"Then let me explain what kind of problem it is," Jens said, and there was something in his voice, quiet and very absolute, that made even Cherry Cherry Lady, who had never, in her entire life, been moved by a man's tone of voice, briefly recalibrate.
Sam collapsed.
The sound of him hitting the beach was distinct and immediate, and the very specific problem it represented was: he was already on the ground, and he didn't get up.
Sven, attempting to assist, made it approximately two steps in Sam's direction before sitting down himself, heavily, in the sand.
Jesper went last, slipping from Jens's grip in the way that had stopped Jens's heart five days ago and kept doing it, the fever finally temporarily winning the argument with consciousness.
Cherry Cherry Lady looked at the pile of sick men on her beach.
"Fine," she said.
V. The Deal and the Infirmary
The terms were practical. The Love Island had a problem — the Blacktide Pirates, who had been circling their waters for months, their numbers and persistence escalating beyond what the island's defenses could comfortably handle alone. The Bubbly Crew had a problem — several members dying of Honeymoon Fever. Cherry Cherry Lady was nothing if not pragmatic.
"Help us fight them. We cure you."
"Fine," Jesper said, barely conscious, from the ground. "Let's save your stupid island. Then never speak to me again."
"Deal," Cherry Cherry Lady said, with what sounded almost like respect.
The infirmary was clean and competent and run by healers who knew exactly what Honeymoon Fever was and exactly how to treat it, which primarily involved four days of bed rest and regular administration of Kiss-Kiss Fruit extract — a treatment that the crew might have found funny under different circumstances and, in their current state, simply accepted with the desperate gratitude of people who had run out of pride.
"What is the cure called," Sven asked, half-delirious, being helped toward the infirmary.
"Kiss-Kiss Fruit," the healer said.
"We're dying," Tijjani said.
"Correct."
"Give us the real medicine."
"That is the real medicine."
Tijjani closed his eyes with the expression of a man accepting his circumstances.
Jens carried Jesper to the infirmary himself, and when the nurses moved toward Jesper with the polite efficiency of people intending to take over, Jens sat down in the chair beside the bed, still holding Jesper's hand, and did not move.
"We'll take him from here," the head nurse said.
"No," Jens said.
"Sir—"
"I'll stay."
"The patient requires rest and professional care—"
"I'll stay," Jens said again, with exactly the same inflection, which communicated, clearly, that this conversation had a fixed outcome and the nurse was simply being given time to arrive at it herself.
The nurses hated him immediately, collectively, and completely, a unified professional opinion that expressed itself in pointed looks and deliberate exclusion from any discussion about treatment options, which Jens accepted entirely without changing his position or his grip on Jesper's hand.
VI. Cherry Cherry Lady's Discovery
She came to check on the patients on the second day — genuinely checking, because the deal required that they survive long enough to fight, and because Cherry Cherry Lady was, underneath everything, someone who ran a community and took that responsibility seriously.
What she found in the infirmary was: four patients in four beds, three nurses moving between them with professional efficiency, Sam pale and occasionally muttering in a way that suggested his dreams were not charitable, Tijjani asleep with the deep unconsciousness of genuine fever exhaustion, Sven running a temperature that had concerned the nurses enough to increase his extract dosage.
And, at Jesper's bedside:
One very large Viking, sitting upright in a wooden chair, holding a hand, not asleep, not leaving, looking at Jesper with an expression that Cherry Cherry Lady catalogued, privately, as someone arguing with the concept of death and not prepared to lose.
"The others look pretty bad too," she said, from the doorway. "Shouldn't you worry about them?"
"They're probably fine," Jens said, without looking up from Jesper.
From across the infirmary, Sam, currently experiencing a hallucination in which he was renegotiating the Eskmund grain contracts with a very large talking fish, somehow surfaced from it enough to express his objection.
"WHAT," Sam said, to the ceiling.
Jens didn't respond. He was checking Jesper's temperature.
Cherry Cherry Lady stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she intended, watching a man change a fever compress with the focused care usually reserved for precision weaponry, and left without saying anything further.
"Marriage propaganda," she told Baby Boo Boo, passing her in the corridor.
"Did something happen?"
"No," Cherry Cherry Lady said. "Nothing happened."
She went back the next day, and the day after that, and each time the chair had the same occupant doing the same thing, and the nurses gave her updates that included phrases like "the one in bed four's condition is improving but that man will not let us do his bandages properly," which was delivered as a complaint but also wasn't, quite, because even the nurses, who continued to hate Jens professionally, had stopped trying to move him.
She witnessed the feeding on the third day.
"Just one more," Jens said, holding the spoon.
"No," Jesper said.
"You've had three. One more."
"Three was already too many."
"Jesper."
"Stop using that tone."
"What tone?"
"The one that makes me feel guilty. The quiet one. Stop it."
"I don't have a tone. I'm asking you to eat one more spoon of broth that contains, approximately, no nutritional value, and yet somehow requires this level of negotiation."
"Because my mouth hurts."
"I know."
"And I'm tired."
"I know."
"And I don't want to."
"I know," Jens said, the three repetitions carrying between them an entire conversation that Jesper was too tired to have and Jens was too honest to pretend didn't exist. "I know all of that. One more."
Jesper's jaw tightened. He opened his mouth. He swallowed.
He fell asleep immediately after, the effort of it apparently exhausting whatever last reserves the fever had left him, his head dropping sideways against the pillow, and Jens carefully cleaned up the half-finished bowl, wiped the edges, set everything aside, and returned to his chair and his grip on Jesper's hand with the methodical quiet of someone who had many more hours of this ahead and had made peace with all of them.
Cherry Cherry Lady stood in the doorway, watching this, and said nothing for so long that Baby Sunshine, passing behind her, paused.
"Are you alright?"
"Why would anybody do that," Cherry Cherry Lady said, not a question exactly, the words coming out more honestly than she'd intended.
Baby Sunshine looked into the infirmary, at what Cherry Cherry Lady was watching.
"...do what?"
"That," Cherry Cherry Lady said, gesturing at the entire thing — the chair, the hand, the cleaned-up bowl, the hours of quiet sitting and spoon-begging and not leaving. "Why would you do that."
"I think," Baby Sunshine said, carefully, "that's just what it looks like when someone loves another person."
Cherry Cherry Lady went back to her own quarters and had a very long, deeply unpleasant think about this.
"Why don't you just let him starve," she asked Jens, the next day, in the corridor outside the infirmary, because the question had been sitting in her chest for twenty-four hours and she wanted it out.
Jens looked at her.
"You wouldn't understand," he said, without heat, simply, and went back inside.
"I regret asking," Cherry Cherry Lady told the wall.
VII. Jesper, Meanwhile
The women of Love Island had several unified opinions about Jesper Eriksson Karlsson, Prince of Svealand, and most of them could be summarized as: deeply unfair.
Even with a rash. Even with fever. Even covering mouth sores with the dignity of a man pretending he didn't have them. Even waking up from sleep in the second day looking, objectively, considerably worse for wear than he had going in — the undercut sharp and visible above the pillow, the fever giving his skin a color that should have been terrible and was instead, somehow, luminous in the way that deeply annoying people were sometimes luminous—
Every woman in the infirmary noticed.
Simultaneously.
A brief, appalled silence passed through the nursing staff.
"How," Baby Honey said, from the doorway, staring.
"Skill," Jesper said, barely conscious, somehow aware of being looked at despite not being fully aware of anything else.
In the corner, Jens forgot what he was saying mid-sentence, stared at Jesper for four full seconds, and then resumed with no acknowledgment of the interruption.
"JENS?" Sam said, from the next bed, having witnessed this.
"I love him," Jens said, simply.
"WE KNOW," Sam said.
"The entire world knows," Tijjani agreed, hoarsely.
Jesper, for his part, managed, across the four days of infirmary care, to start three arguments, one fashion dispute, two separate leadership disagreements, and one genuinely inexplicable debate about the correct method of braiding hair — all while running a fever, all while barely able to sit up, all while the mouth sores made sustained conversation actively painful.
Baby Sunshine, who had been assigned to monitor Jesper's treatment, emerged from her third check-in looking as though she had survived something.
"Why does he make me angry," Baby Honey said, watching her.
"I don't know," Baby Boo Boo said.
"I think," Baby Sunshine said, "it's his face."
Jesper had also, on the second day, critiqued Baby Sunshine's outfit, unprompted, thoroughly, and with the specific authority of someone who had spent their formative years in a royal court where aesthetic opinion carried real political consequence and had simply never developed the habit of withholding it.
"The belt sits wrong," he said, from his bed, in the tone of someone pointing out a factual inaccuracy. "It needs to sit two inches higher or the whole silhouette collapses."
Baby Sunshine looked at him.
"You're in a hospital bed," she said.
"The belt still sits wrong," Jesper said.
The rivalry that followed was, under the circumstances, genuinely impressive.
VIII. The Blacktide
The alarm bells rang on the fourth evening, before any of the patients were fully recovered, before the healer had given clearance for any of them to stand up under their own power, and Cherry Cherry Lady appeared in the infirmary doorway with the expression of someone who had an agreement to collect on and the world's worst timing.
"The Blacktide Pirates are here," she said. "Get up."
"OH FOR ODIN'S SAKE," said Sam, Tijjani, Sven, and Jesper, more or less in sequence, the four of them expressing, collectively, everything that needed to be said about making your problems someone else's problems while they were actively using hospital beds.
The Blacktide fleet's captain — Shark A. Rogue, the Black Shark, the Tidebreaker, terror of the Southern Seas, man who had sunk thirty ships and was, apparently, still not over being rejected by someone from this island twenty years ago — arrived with the specific furious energy of a grudge that had been aging, and gathering intensity, for two decades.
His commanders were, in their own way, equally thematic: Hammer Jack, enormous and terrifying, who had evolved from pure violence into someone who offered unsolicited relationship advice at every opportunity during combat; Deadeye Bill, lethal archer, still writing poetry about his ex between shots; Mad Dog Kane, berserker, who had not moved on in fifteen years and complained about it daily.
"Can you stand," Cherry Cherry Lady asked Jesper, in the infirmary, the sounds of the invasion beginning to filter through the walls.
"No," Jesper said.
"Can you fight?"
"Also no."
"Then why are you putting your boots on?"
Jesper finished lacing the boot. Looked up at her.
"Spite," he said.
IX. The Fight Itself
It was, by any objective standard, peak Milos: a battlefield full of beautiful warrior women who were exceptional at their jobs, an enemy fleet full of men whose entire martial energy was powered by unprocessed romantic rejection, a tropical island, active warfare, and genuinely no downside that Milos could identify.
He fought alongside Baby Boo Boo, who could beat someone unconscious while making it sound cheerful, and Baby Honey, who swung her heart-shaped battle-axe with a ferocity that made even Jens assess her with professional respect, and Baby Sunshine, who planned the counterattack's flow in real time with a tactical precision that Tijjani, fighting on borrowed energy and willpower, found himself genuinely impressed by despite the fever still hazing the edges of his vision.
"You've thought about this," Tijjani managed, blocking a pirate's swing with his shadow spear.
"We've been repelling them for two years," Baby Sunshine said, already moving to her next position. "You learn patterns."
"What pattern is this one?"
"Mad Dog Kane always overextends left when he's angry."
"Is he angry?"
"He's always angry. He's been angry since—"
"—twenty years ago, yes," Tijjani said. "I heard."
Jens fought through the entire engagement with one recurring priority that shaped every tactical decision he made: where was Jesper. Not in the sense of a general knowing his navigator's position, but in the specific, ongoing, uninterruptible background process of a man for whom this information was as fundamental as breathing, and who interrupted his own combat, twice, to physically check that Jesper hadn't been hit anywhere that Jesper hadn't mentioned.
"I'm fine," Jesper said, the second time.
"You're pale."
"I have a fever."
"You got hit."
"The hit barely—" Jesper stopped, registered that this argument was the same argument they'd been having since the Forest of Bones and would presumably continue having until one of them died of old age. "I'm fine, Jens. There are pirates. Go deal with pirates."
Jens dealt with pirates. He returned forty seconds later.
"Still fine?"
"YOU WERE GONE FOR FORTY SECONDS."
"Things can happen quickly—"
"JENS."
"Right," Jens said, and went back to the pirates.
The finale, when it came, turned less on martial supremacy than on the fundamental unsustainability of Shark A. Rogue's entire approach — a man whose entire purpose and power was fueled by refusing to let go of something from twenty years ago, and who had never quite found the structural weakness this represented until the Love Island's defenses, the Bubbly Crew's contribution, and the particular attrition of fighting people who had actual reasons to be fighting started making itself felt.
He went down. His commanders went down with him. Mad Dog Kane, still complaining, went last.
X. After
The aftermath was quiet and exhausted and mostly conducted horizontal.
Sam collapsed as soon as the immediate threat had resolved, hitting the sand with the dignity of a man who had used up his last reserves and was now done. Tijjani fainted immediately after, elegantly, which was on-brand. Sven, who had fought the entire engagement with a fever that should have kept him in bed, sat down face-first and then simply continued down.
Jesper was carried back to the infirmary by Jens, who had been tracking his deteriorating steadiness for the last half-hour of the fight and had simply gathered him up the moment the last threat was neutralized, with no discussion and no offer of choice.
"I can walk," Jesper said, from where he was being carried.
"No you can't."
"I could probably walk."
"No."
"I WALKED DURING THE ENTIRE FIGHT."
"Badly," Jens said. "You walked badly. I watched."
Jesper did not wake up for four more days.
Jens sat beside the bed for all of them, and fed him when he surfaced enough to be fed, and begged him through every thirty-six-minute meal, and the nurses stopped trying to move him somewhere in the middle of day two and simply worked around him, leaving space for the chair that was, at this point, functionally his chair, and nobody commented on it further.
Cherry Cherry Lady visited once.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the chair and the hand and the cleaned-up bowl and the hours of quiet vigil, and said nothing, and left.
"Marriage propaganda," she said, to nobody.
But she said it softer this time.
XI. Departure
"You're cured," the head nurse announced, on the morning all four patients finally presented with broken fevers and returned ability to eat without visible suffering. "You're welcome. Get out of our island and do not come back."
This was, given everything, perhaps the warmest sendoff they'd received from any island, and the crew, packing with the careful energy of people still regaining their actual strength, found they meant it genuinely.
Baby Honey looked at Milos as they prepared to leave.
"You fight well," she said, "for someone so small."
"I AM NOT SMALL," Milos said.
"You're very small," Baby Honey said, and turned away, and Milos spent the entire departure looking genuinely unsettled by this assessment from a woman who had spent the entire invasion swinging a heart-shaped battle-axe into people.
Cherry Cherry Lady saw them off from the beach with arms crossed, expression neutral, the particular studied blankness of someone deliberately not expressing something.
"You held your end of the deal," she said. "Don't come back."
"Understood," Jens said.
She met his eyes, briefly. Something passed between them that wasn't quite respect and wasn't quite understanding but was adjacent to both.
"Take care of him," she said, meaning Jesper.
"I know," Jens said.
She turned away before he could see her expression change.
The messenger bird found them an hour out from the island, settling on the Bubbly's rail with the resigned inevitability of a world that had decided it was done leaving them alone.
Attached to its leg: a bounty scroll.
New bounties. Several of them, all with numbers that made Sam look briefly, genuinely ill despite having just recovered from actual illness.
Jens. Milos. Sam. Tijjani. Sven. Yuki.
And at the bottom, separate from the others, a poster that had clearly been added recently, the ink fresher:
JESPER ERIKSSON KARLSSON. RUNAWAY PRINCE OF SVEALAND. WANTED: ALIVE. BY ORDER OF THE CROWN.
Jesper looked at his own face on the poster for a long moment.
"Alive," he noted.
"That's good," Sven offered.
"Someone wants to collect me personally," Jesper said, with the cool, analytical calm of a man parsing a threat. "The crown wouldn't specify alive unless someone important was doing the asking."
Jens took the poster. Read it. Handed it back.
"No," he said, simply, which was not a plan and was not a strategy but communicated, with total clarity, his position on the matter.
Far south, where the bounty networks moved and the crews who specialized in exactly this kind of retrieval gathered for contracts, a Norwegian crew received the updated poster. Their captain — Erik Solveigson, patient, quietly ambitious, a man who had been watching a certain blond prince from a tournament crowd almost two years ago and had never quite resolved whatever he'd filed away that day — looked at Jesper's face on the paper.
He smiled.
"We know where they're heading," he said, to his crew.
"South," his first mate confirmed.
"South," Erik said. "We go south."