Oystercatcher Tide Pools and the devil makes three

You know that saying, Finch quipped back, meeting the buccaneer's gaze steadily for a moment before flashing her teeth in a cruel grin, about faces only mommy could love. He did look a little like a rat, she decided, with that one tooth protruding over his lower lip. At least it wasn't as yellow as a rat's teeth.

These were just jokes, of course. He wasn't the ugliest mug she'd seen, not by a long shot. He needed a meal or twenty, but aside from looking a little unhealthy, he wasn't hard on the eyes. Really, she wasn't ungrateful to Badtooth for helping her out of her predicament with Mullins. Quite the opposite; she supposed she was also following him now because she was at a loss how to repay him, and idle banter was easier than talking about what happened back there, how she ended up in that whole mess.

Or why he got involved. What he wanted with her. Whether he was as much a ruffian as those other crude, shit-for-brains pirates.

Finch was about to get an answer to at least one of those questions. A flat cast gradually blanked out her expression as "Badtooth" went on, only to drop his accent completely and give himself a new name. By the time he finished talking, her entire expression might as well have been W T F painted in large, yellow lettering across her soft grey forehead.

Her steps faltered in tandem with her changing expression until she stopped dead in the sand and asked, so, what, you just play pretend pirate like it's some... Some game to you? It wasn't a game to her. Granted, Winterfinch wasn't exactly a pirate by choice. Once, she lived in a resplendent valley of windsingers and greenweavers. But her time with pirates was no game. Mullins was no storybook villain, for all his cowardice, and she didn't know what to make of this... Rex, was it? Making light of it all for, what, his amusement?