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Niles had never felt one way or another about shipyards before trying to wrangle a handful of criminals who clearly knew the terrain better than he did onto dry land.Now, struggling to do exactly that, Niles had decided he hated ships and everything associated with them.He notched another arrow in his bow and looked around, eye darting from wall to wall. Nobody popped out of the woodwork to stab him, but that didn’t mean much. There were too many potentially empty barrels lining the walls that a person could hide in, too many thick coils of rope on the floor that made it easy for someone to stash a weapon as they rushed by in the midst of battle. This was dangerous territory.Niles had rounded up two of the criminals already and had gone below decks to see if anyone else was hiding out in the belly of the ship. Now, he was beginning to regret that decision. He at least regretted leaving Odin on the deck with Leo. He could have used the backup.A muffled crash came from above. Dull shouts and thuds that Niles couldn’t quite make sense of resounded through the boards above his head.He wrinkled his nose at the smell of oil permeating from several of the barrels and scanned the walls again. The storage room remained as cluttered as ever. Unfortunately, now wasn’t the time to dig through the crates to find the contraband the smugglers had clearly been hiding. Nor did he have time to kick over every container large enough to hide a person inside. He’d been down here too long already. He had to reconvene with Leo and Odin sooner rather than later. If someone hadn’t jumped out at him yet, it was doubtful they were down here at all, he thought. And if someone was hiding, then they’d be spotted when they made their escape. The only ways off the ship were either via the deck or one of the portholes that would drop anyone climbing out into the water below. The guards on watch would doubtless hear the splash even if they didn’t spot anyone leaving from above. The chances of catching any stragglers were pretty good.Niles decided to make one last ditch effort to sniff out any rats anyway.“I know you’re in here,” he said, voice purposely tinged with lazy confidence. “Come out now and we might take some mercy on you. If you force us to search, then…”He trailed off, letting the implication stand. Dust danced in the light of the singular porthole mounted in the far wall. The rest of the room was bathed in shadow.Overhead, the shouting grew louder. Suddenly, without warning, a rather ominous boom! resounded from above. Niles wobbled and grit his teeth as the ship rocked from the explosion—admittedly, a milder one than Niles would have expected from the sound.It hadn’t been the worst explosion he could have heard, but it hadn't been very reassuring either.“What in the—”He dropped his bow and, with one last look around the room, raced back up the stairs.Niles threw the door to the deck open and immediately choked on the thick wave of smoke and heat that rolled through to greet him. He covered his mouth with the crook of his elbow and squinted into the large, rolling flames that now covered the deck of the ship.Because the ship was now on fire, apparently. Of course.He decided he really hated shipyards.Just as suddenly as they appeared, the growing fire sent any plans Niles might have had of escaping up in smoke. Greedy flame was slowly consuming every inch of the deck available to it. Heat radiated from the deck like a small sun. Niles grimaced. There was no way he was taking another step onto the deck without suffering some serious burns.It seemed impossible that the ship could catch fire this quickly when Niles had only been downstairs for a handful of minutes. That thought suddenly seemed a lot more plausible when Niles spotted the crispy remains of several overturned barrels across the way.The barrels downstairs had all smelled of oil and other strange liquids. It wasn't a stretch of the imagination to believe the ones topside to be the same. Obviously, the barrels had toppled during the battle, turning the ship into one giant oil drum. All it would have taken was one mage’s stray blast of fire, and then—Mages. Niles’s heart skipped a beat. He didn’t see Leo or Odin on the deck.“Milord!” Niles shouted. He was forced to take a step back onto the stairs, coughing, as another blast of hot air and smoke hit his lungs. His eye watered. “Odin! Are you injured?”There was nobody on deck that he could see, but that didn’t mean much. The fire had already swallowed most of the details of the deck with its angry red and orange flames. It could have swallowed a person just as easily. Niles hoped that wasn't the case. Thankfully, none of the lumps strewn across the deck looked human-shaped.Only a few people had boarded the ship in the first place—only Niles, Leo, Odin, and a handful of other guards assigned to take care of the smugglers—but that didn’t mean they had all made it off safely. Just because Niles couldn’t see anybody else didn’t mean they weren’t in danger.“Odin!” he called again. “Lord Leo!”There was still no reply. The heat from the fire grew almost painful as it licked its way towards Niles’s boots, having not quite reached the stairs yet. His mind raced, trying to connect the dots as to where Leo and Odin had disappeared to so quickly, but he didn’t have the time to think. He couldn’t stand there and wait to burn. He had to move.Tucking his worry into the back of his mind, Niles raced back down the stairs to the storage room. No doubt it too would go up in flames the moment the fire reached it, but Niles wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough watch.That plan was sadly put on hold the moment Niles reached the bottom of the stairs.Niles and the smuggler stared at each other in momentary surprise.The lit match in the smuggler's hand slowly burnt its way closer and closer to her fingertips.Niles snapped into action. He cocked his arrow again in one smooth motion, aiming it at the smugger.“Drop that match and I drop you,” he warned. Above an open barrel of what Niles could only assume to be oil, the smuggler’s hand did not waver. The fire on the deck suddenly seemed a lot less accidental than it had a moment before.Niles and the smuggler looked at each other, each daring the other to move first.The match flame licked at the smuggler's fingertips.She dropped the match, and the oil in the barrel went up in flames. The smuggler leapt back.Niles fired, mentally swearing. The smuggler dodged his arrow in a blur of moment, but the yelp she made told Niles that he had hit something after all, even if it hadn’t been her heart like he'd been aiming for. She was a strong one though. The now lit barrel of oil must have weighed a considerable amount, but as Niles notched a second arrow, the smuggler pressed her back against the barrel and shoved.The barrel toppled. Flaming oil spread across the floor in a swift wave. Ropes, crates, cloth, contraband mixed with genuine wares—everything positioned between Niles and the smugger's sides of the room caught fire in an instant. That included the other extremely flammable containers of oil lining the walls. The room was a powder keg in all but a literal sense. Or so Niles hoped. To make matters worse, the lone porthole that Niles could potentially fit through sat on the smuggler's side of the room, across the division of flame. The porthole was Niles and the smuggler’s one means of escape without risking the fire topside, and clearly the smuggler knew it. She smirked as Niles was forced to shuffle backwards until he hit the wall, trapped between the fire slowly making its way down the stairs behind him and the fire very rapidly making its way towards him from the front. Through the ever growing cloud of smoke, Niles swore he saw her wave at him.Then she made a dive for the open porthole.He didn’t bother with wit or curses. He couldn’t rub the tears out of his smoke-agitated eye or stomp out the little flames that bit at his boots. Those things would have been a waste of time.Instead, he ignored the heat and the flame and the increasing difficulty to breathe. He raised his bow again and took aim.Dark clouds of smoke already curled in the air, but despite that—despite Niles being forced to squint, despite the hummingbird panic in his chest that asked where are they, where are they in the pocket between every heartbeat—Niles was good at what he did. He knew how good he was like the back of his hand.The smuggler began to heft herself through the porthole.Niles’s arrow caught her right between the shoulder blades.She yelped and fell to the floor, motionless. Fire crawled inched its way towards her. The smuggler didn’t move.Niles didn’t bother waiting the extra few beats to make sure she was dead. He simply tossed his bow and quiver aside without hesitation. He wasn’t going to try to fit it through the porthole with him. They were too bulky, too cumbersome. They were only just things. He could buy new ones.Once upon a time, Niles had viewed himself as the same sort of tool. Something easily tossed aside when it became dead weight.He hadn’t thought that way in a long time, though. Not since Leo had lifted the chin of a nobody begging for death and said “How interesting.” Not since those same fingertips trailed Niles’s lips at night, the message “Don’t throw yourself away for me” ingrained in every touch. Not since Odin looked at him, strange and airheaded and fascinating, and said “Partners then, is it?”And so Niles rushed across the room as fast as he could, jumping over flaming piles of objects as he went. So many miscellaneous items had laid spilled across the floor before the fire had even started. Before, they had simply been an annoyance. Now they were all fiery obstacles in the way of Niles and freedom.Painful heat snapped at his legs as he sprinted across the room. By the time he made it to the porthole wall, Niles knew his ankles at the very least were burned. He quickly slapped at the edge of his pants to keep the baby flames nipping at the fabric from growing into bigger ones.That was when he noticed the same flames nipping its way along the edges of his cloak. Fire still raging around him, he spared just enough time to rip it from his shoulders and toss it aside too. By his feet, the smuggler was still.There was a good chance Niles’s shoes were also on fire, but he didn’t bother trying to take those off. The flames were growing ever higher, and it wouldn’t matter in a moment anyway. The loss of his cloak left him feeling both lighter and more exposed.He stepped over the smuggler’s fallen body and gripped the edges of the porthole. The metal on the ledge, hot from the flames, instantly burned his hands. Definitely not as bad as it could have, but still. Niles hissed from pain and from the future ache he know he’d feel in his palms even after a round of healing magic. He powered through it, pulling himself up and wiggling through the porthole until he felt cool, clean air graze his face.Niles sucked in a large lungful of air, relishing the taste. His throat ached from all the smoke he’d inhaled.Then he tipped forward, out of the ship's window, and fell into the water below.It was decidedly less refreshing.Niles kicked his way back to the surface, spitting out a mouthful of salt water. His eye now stung from seawater rather than smoke, but at the very least he could see. He hadn’t realized how cloudy his vision had become until he was finally out of the fire. Being out now was a relief.When Niles looked around and saw he had landed on the far side of the ship, away from the docks, he became aware of several tight patches of skin over his body where he’d likely been burned without realizing. His face and upper body felt mostly fine, but his shins and ankles stung where his boots hadn’t protected him. He’d probably have to check them out later.At the very least, his little burns didn’t seem to be too bad. Moderate at worst, but that was rather lucky given the circumstances.But that would have to wait until Niles got onto dry land. Niles craned his neck up and saw that the fire had dangerously begun to climb the mast. He figured it was a good idea to get out of the water and away from the ship sooner rather than later.Besides, the sooner he found Leo and Odin, the better.Niles began to swim over to the end of the dock. He didn’t see anybody else immediately, which made that hummingbird panic in his chest swell some more, but he forced himself to remain calm. Just because he hadn’t spotted anybody yet didn’t mean they weren’t there. The ship and several large pieces of cargo that had failed to make it on board before Niles and the others had stormed it were currently obscuring part of the dock.He told himself that they were waiting for him on the dock because gods forbid Leo or Odin was still on the ship.Finally, he reached the wood of the dock and grabbed on.There was no ladder, but the platform wasn’t very tall. Niles probably could have pulled himself up the same way he had pulled himself through the porthole. He stole a moment to catch his breath first.“Hello?” he called out. The water was cold around him. Just yards away, the ship continued to blaze. “A little help up would be nice, assuming you’re all still alive.”He couldn’t keep the tightness out of his voice completely. It was now or never.Nobody replied.“Hello?” Niles called again, louder this time. His knuckles had grown white with force as he squeezed the wood of the dock.Then, finally, there was a reply.“Niles?”It was Odin’s voice. Niles closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against a piling in relief. His shoulders slumped in the water.Leo’s voice came next, louder and closer. “Niles? Where are you?”Niles lifted his head and raised his hand over the edge of the dock. He waved it.“Over here!” he said loudly. Footsteps thudded across the wood and over to where Niles sat, bobbing in the waves.Twin faces of surprise appeared over the edge of the dock at once. Odin and Leo looked a little mused, but no worse than Niles felt. They reached for him in unison and pulled Niles onto the dock. With solid wood under his feet, Niles was immediately aware of how heavy his soaked clothes felt against his skin. Water ran in rivulets down his limbs. He was also aware of the burning sting of pain resonating from his right leg especially. But when Leo and Odin threw themselves around him, he forgot all of that in an instant.He looped his arms around both Odin and Leo’s shoulders and pulled them close. Niles breathed them in, smelling the faint layer of smoke that had intertwined with their natural scents. Under the salt, he was sure he smelled the same.“We thought you were dead,” Leo said, pulling back just enough to speak. “The guards are currently detaining the smugglers we already apprehended. But Niles, when the fire started and you did not surface from the storage hold…”Leo’s face lacked its usual color. Niles kissed Leo’s forehead in comfort as Odin ducked out from under his arm.“Fret not, milord!” Odin pointed at Niles with a dramatic flourish. “Is it not as I said it would be? Niles, bursting forth from the flames of damnation! A triumphant and suspenseful return! There was never a reason to doubt our success.”Leo sent him a withering glance.“Yes,” he said dryly. “Of course I should have believed you from the start. After all, it wasn't you who I had to physically drag off the ship to keep you from charging through the fire to find Niles, was it?”The tips of Odin’s ears grew pink. His comically wide eyes said he'd been caught.Niles chuckled. “Always trying to play the hero.”Odin choked on several false starts. After a beat, he dropped all pretenses. The false confidence fell from his face, and his body language changed entirely. He stood up straighter.“Well, I wasn’t going to just leave you there, was I?” he said. Then his eyes darted to Leo in a panic. “Not that Leo was either! It’s just—”Niles shook his head and looked towards the ship. Smoke billowed out of every hole, and dockhands were scrambling in the distance to put out the flames before they spread. But there weren’t any other boats close enough to catch fire, and the ship was already in the water. Doing anything besides waiting for the fire to burn itself out seemed pointless.“I get it,” he said to both of them. “I couldn’t get out on the deck either, so there’s no way you could have come in that way. I probably would have been mad at you for getting yourself hurt if you tried.”Odin sent him a small, sheepish smile and squeezed his hand. Niles squeezed back.Leo, however, wasn’t quite sated. He was still trying to justify making—in Niles’s eyes—the right choice.“If reaching you had been a possibility, we would have taken it. But we didn’t know the situation below deck, nor how to get to you without seriously injuring ourselves in the process.” Leo shook his head. “I was determined not to lose both of you in one day. The fire spread so quickly that we had to jump ship, and by that point…”“Leo.”Niles dropped Odin’s hand so he could cup Leo’s cheeks instead. They were more or less the same height, so Niles looked Leo in the eye easily. Leo wasn’t crying, but he did sport a pained expression Niles had only seen a handful of times before. Niles didn’t like it.He brushed his thumbs over Leo’s cheekbones. “I’m still here. You and Odin are still here. We’re all fine, so don’t think about what-ifs.”He wasn’t going to mention the few scary minutes when he’d been in Leo and Odin’s shoes, unsure as to if they had escaped safely or not. The terror of not knowing in those long minutes had only been matched by the relief of realizing they were still alive. Niles knew exactly what Leo was feeling now, but he also better than to question lady luck when she took pity on poor souls.“I know,” Leo sighed. Between one blink and the next, he’d seemingly composed himself again, but Niles could still read him well enough to note the residual tightness around Leo's eyes. Leo laid his hand on top of Niles’s and kissed the inside of Niles’s wrist. “I didn’t mean to bring down the mood. I’m glad you’re safe.”“It’s alright,” Niles said. There’d be time to comfort each other more later in the privacy of their own bedroom. They had a few more things to sort out before then. “Is everything else taken care of already?”“That depends.” Odin nudged Leo's hip with his own. They both faced Niles, mere inches apart. “We caught the fourth smuggler just after he set the ship on fire. Were there any others?”Niles sighed through his nose. Capturing all but the last smuggler alive was rather good luck, considering, but it still felt a bit like a failure.“Just one,” he said. “She tried to trap me down below. We fought.”Collectively, they glanced towards the ship. The loud crackle of the fire was almost haunting in Niles's ears. A darkened silhouette in the midst of the blaze was all that remained of the once impressive ship. Odin and Leo seemed to pick up the smuggler’s fate without it having to be said.Leo turned back to Niles, nodding. “Understood. That should be the last of them then, unless there are secret members we don’t know about. But the guards can interrogate them once they’re somewhere secure. We should wrap up here for now.”Following Leo’s lead, they started to make their way down the dock and back to solid land. The pier itself wasn’t ablaze thanks to the work of several preventative charms that were etched into various points along the dock, but Niles, Leo, and Odin still made sure to stay on the far side of the dock when passing the burning ship, just in case.The remaining smugglers were chained together and forced to sit on the the ground while Leo talked to the guards overseeing their capture. Niles and Odin waited in the wings for when he would finish. Like the proper retainers they were, they made sure to keep their eyes on Leo instead of each other. Still, that didn't keep Odin from hooking his pinky finger around Niles's without looking. Niles curled his pinky around Odin's gratefully. Relief still sat in the forefront of Niles's mind.When Leo rejoined them and they were securely out of sight of any prying eyes, Niles pulled Odin and Leo aside and kissed them both.Odin then accidentally nudged the burn on Niles’s leg with his own. He winced. Leo promptly chided Niles for not mentioning any injuries earlier, and Odin moved to step back, looking worried.Niles shook his head and kissed them both again. They were all just fine.