suit of cups | iii

Hawkins drew six cards every morning. The first three were his personal reading, and the next three were for you. With your permission. You rolled your eyes as you gave it, but listened to his interpretation, and you in turn reminded him which of his houses had planets transiting through them. You said it was easy because your rising signs formed a trine to one another, his Cancer to your Pisces—only possible with signs of the same element. To him, those were The Chariot and The Moon, and your eyebrow visibly twitched when he said so.

He was fourteen and you were twelve when your grandfather taught the two of you and some of your cousins how to sail in a small double outrigger boat, an old but still-sturdy fishing rig retired from the family business but deemed safe enough for children on calm waters. You were only allowed to sail within a small bay separate from the commercial port at the island's northeast, and for the first time in your families' friendship, Hawkins felt guilty about accepting so much good will. Before this he had some pride and felt offended on his mother's behalf, that any help offered in his upkeep judged her as inadequate. His powers also meant your family would bear responsibility if he drowned, but they accepted the risk and kept sharing things with him like food and a sailboat and their roof, kept sharing you.

The two of you monopolized the paraw. Your older cousins already worked on larger fishing boats while this was functionally a sailed canoe, so the novelty was gone. The ones closer to your age gave you (and him) wide berth, so all summer the two of you sailed circles around the bay, taking turns reading your respective crafts while the other rigged.

"I don't know, Hawkins, it's a little cloudy," you hedged as you used a ruler to keep your place on your ephemeris table. You laid on your stomach on the floor of his room, knocking your shins into him as he sat with his back against his bed, his cards on the floor. He'd been fashioning some sort of stand for them out of straw, mostly to keep them off dirty surfaces, but the mutability of layouts he used made it difficult.

"All the more reason to practice. Do you think pirates get a choice in what the weather is like?"

You kicked his thigh with purpose. "Fine. But if we capsize or get rained on..."

"I didn't draw any Cups," Hawkins said.

"Really." You didn't sound impressed. "There's wet majors though. Did you get any of them?"

Just The Moon, but if he said that you'd be reminded of your sign correspondence rant. "We both got the Six of Swords."

It took you a minute to visualize it: two figures in a boat disembarking, a ferryman and their passenger. "Isn't that bad?"

After a year or so of using his mother's cards, Hawkins saved up enough money doing readings at the farmer's market to order an entirely pictorial deck, quicker for his personal recall than pips. You really preferred words and patterns over images, and responded to the pip deck like he didn't, but you gamely learned the pictures anyway.

You whined the whole time you followed him to the dock. It was cloudy, but the clouds were fluffy and white, not at all heavy with rain, and soon you were out on the water again, where Hawkins was starting to feel at home.

He wanted to see the world. He always had, as he and his mother moved incrementally throughout the North Blue and he noticed the slightest of differences from island to island. Then he met you, and the thought of the Grand Line struck him like lightning. That, and Devil Fruits being more commonplace there. He must have eaten his before he could talk, since he didn't remember it and never could swim to begin with. Your family had been fishermen for centuries, but your own mother neither swam nor feared the water. When the mentor you now shared said you would travel together, he knew that meant he would go to sea.

It was to those happy thoughts that Hawkins reclined across from you in the long outrigger and dozed off. Until...

"Hawkins!"

You shook him awake far more violently than he thought he deserved, and the first thing he noticed was the air was cool, cooler than it should be for a summer afternoon. He blinked one eye open and saw it was nighttime, sunset or just past sunset.

"Shit." You gasped, scandalized. "Don't be a baby," he grumbled as he started sitting up, but you smacked him in the shoulder so hard he went straight back down.

"I knew today wasn't a good sailing day!"

"It didn't rain."

"We're lost. Do you see the coastline?"

Hawkins squinted vaguely where he thought he horizon should be. "...No."

"Fuck!" you hissed.

"Fuck," he repeated.

"We're fine, actually. Okay. We're good." He didn't know if he believed you, but you nearly snapped your neck with how quickly you grabbed the compass that hung from it. "Okay. The new moon was four days ago, so she's waxing. Does that look like a quarter to you?" Hawkins knew better than to answer. "Either way, we can't have moved too far. Good thing the sails were furled."

You chewed your lip and looked up at the sky. He followed your gaze and saw only a field of stars, those clouds you worried about long gone. He stared long enough that his eyes started to water.

"Are you crying?"

"No." He wiped at his face with the back of his hand.

"We need to shunt. I think we've been going southeast."

"You think? How certain are you?"

"I'm not a navigator!" you snapped. "I don't know. I don't have like, a percentage for you, but I'm reasonably sure. Look. There's Polaris."

You pointed, and he supposed some of them looked brighter than the others, but he couldn't be certain. It amazed him that you read the sky like a map written just for you, and he wished his cards were half as useful to your shared survival.

"I'm putting my life in your hands."

You huffed. "It's already there." Hawkins stared, and wondered if you understood, without his saying it, everything you meant to him and how lost he would be without you, that the depth of it all would embarrass both of you, and—"You can't swim."