"Ulla felt hate bloom in her heart."

[neverwaitslong]

Who: Ulla & open
When: Early August
Where: around the Clipper
Warnings: Anger, possible ineffectual violence
What: Furious mermaid is not settling in well

Being captured all over again was bad enough.

But then there's this, her power stripped from her, stuffed into a body that used to be hers but doesn't feel like home anymore. A body even more ill-suited for being trapped in the confines of a ship than her eel tail was. At least that let her slither. Slow and unwieldy, but not impossible. Now, she'd flop on the deck like a caught fish.

The beautiful silver scales on the fish tail she grew up with are a reminder of all that she lost, and she hates it.

"Warren!" she yells. Because if he's here, it would at least be some consolation. He has to be here.

--

Eventually, Ulla figures out that the ridiculous ostentatious open seashell is meant for her, as a form of transportation. It feels like a mockery of a throne, an absurdity. She misses the fishbowl Warren got her. She misses her old cabin, with the comforting weight of water pressed around her. She misses Warren. And she's furious all the time.

All of the songs she sings are angry, impotent things that would tear the ship apart if she could put any real power behind them. She composes spells of destruction, and wishes they were more than an intellectual exercise.

[For Nanny Ogg]

Ulla glares daggers at her new warden. Or assistant, or whatever they're calling themselves here. "I've already had a warden for two years. You aren't him."

Comments

[neverwaitslong]

Ulla nods. However mixed her feelings about this meeting, it isn't what she'd wish on him, either.

"What's your name? We never exchanged those. There was a breach, once, where I lived another life and grew up alongside you, but I never know how much truth is in those. Or if you even have them here." She eyes him warily, not sure whether she wants the answer to match what she knew him as in the life where she shared more with him than just dark eyes and sharp cheekbones and a mother she's never met. That would only open her up to more wondering.

"I'm Ulla." She doesn't know if her brother knew that. If the name was given to her by their mother, or by her father once she'd been abandoned to his care under the waves.

[summonshadows]

"Ulla," he repeats; it's possible he did, but she rejected him then and he vaguely remembers a time when he thought perhaps it for the best to leave her to live her life in the oceans if she found peace there. He was confident then that she would come to recognize her mistake, but he has been disappointed before; the end result is that he put her out of his mind, and his time here has made details even harder to remember more than a hundred years ago.

"I've gone by many names," he tells her, honestly. "I'm known here as... Aleksander." He tips his head, watching for a reaction, wondering if that was the name of the boy she followed away to get her answers from their mother in the life she remembers having done so.

"They play tricks like that here, too. Tastes of having back my power at my command only to take it away again. It's a method of breaking the spirit."

[neverwaitslong]

Ulla nods, recognition lighting her gaze. The name is familiar, from the life where she was Ulla Morozova, and not just Ulla.

"I had mine back, on the Barge. All the time. Along with an utterly infuriating warden who for some reason trusted me not to tear the ship apart around us. I was never sure which I wanted more, to stab him or care for him." But she kept falling on the latter side.

"Are inmates ever given their power here, or is it out of reach until we're free?"

[summonshadows]

Inmates. Wardens. He's heard these words in passing, and he's not sure what to make of it just yet. He knows he is utterly unsurprised to find someone with Grisha blood being held as guilty; it seems other people have no idea what else to do with their kind.

His smile this time is thin. "Never." Which is why there can never be a truce between himself and the Nurse, himself and the Assistants. Ever.

"Why would you want to care for someone with his foot on your neck?"

[neverwaitslong]

"Because he's treated me better than any person has in my life," including Aleksander, who didn't trouble himself to be gentle about it when he told her harsh truths that Ulla never asked to hear.

"He would have gotten something out of it, if I got my life back, but I don't think that was ever his only reason. We understood each other. There's no one else I trust to get me free of this place, but he isn't here." Trusting any warden besides Warren is unfathomable.

[summonshadows]

Aleksander has never lied to her, even when she may have wished he would; there is, by his estimation, no greater kindness he could have done her. He couldn't control the Sildroher, and he couldn't control Baghra, but he gave her options that no one else had.

She chose. He neither dismissed nor countered it, even when he perhaps should have. And now here they stand face to face again for a second time.

"Can there ever truly be understanding between two who are not equals?" he asks, but it's borderline rhetorical. He strongly believes there cannot, and he's seen it over and over and over again. "Where has he gone, then?"

[neverwaitslong]

Ulla shrugs, because whatever barriers were between her and Warren didn't feel like they had anything to do with inequality.

"He's mine, and I'm his. He spent two years earning that." And she never made it easy. Trusting Warren was the scariest thing she's faced in her life. Like walking off a cliff with her eyes wide open, knowing what it feels like to crash at the bottom. She kept him waiting awhile.

"He's gone. We were all taken from our ship and locked up separately. Some people wound up here, but he wasn't among them."

[summonshadows]

His dark eyes narrow at the possessive terms, instinctively dismissive that any otkazat'sya could be worthy of anyone with Grisha blood; it's an assumption on his part, he can admit privately, but in this case a non-issue. Ulla is more powerful too than most of the Grisha he has known.

Unimportant just now, although he marks it for later. No information is completely useless.

"Perhaps he will show yet, then. Arrivals are still trickling in. Surely some are merely biding their time."

[neverwaitslong]

"I'm here. The man he loves is here. His former warden, from back when he was an inmate himself, is here too. If he had any control over it, this is where he'd be." She isn't harboring much hope for Warren showing up, though a part of her wishes he'd turn up looking for all of them and tear this damned ship apart.

"And he has a wolf's sense of smell. He'd find us all in minutes if he turned up."