Chapter Text
Amelia Drake rubbed her temples and looked over her latest set of orders yet again. She’d read them over a dozen times since she’d first received them and she still was in disbelief over them. Why did the Admiralty get it into their heads every so often that what she needed was another ship to mollycoddle and teach the basics of privateer hunting to? She worked best when she was on her own, so unless this was some misguided effort to get her to interact with the rest of the navy, these efforts were utterly pointless. All it meant was that she would have to grit her teeth and dispose of the wig, forced by the nature of the alliance to be upfront about her shortcomings. It always followed the same cycle; shock, demands for an explanation, patronizing attempts at sympathy, and finally a grudging acceptance. She was always glad to see the backs of them.
This latest ship seemed especially unpromising. A nice big ship of the line, perhaps, but that just made it unwieldy and hard to keep up with the privateers. And any man who walked around with a last name like “Hornblower” was either supremely confident in himself and his abilities or some whining little man who only got this position because he knew someone in the right circles. Either way, she was looking forward to finding his weak spots and subtly jabbing at them until he understood that she was, after all, a force to be reckoned with.
***
Archie gazed out over the Legacy and her crew, supposedly supervising but actually lost in thought. If the (extremely bitter) briefing Amelia had given the officers was correct, their support ship would be arriving any day now. Over dinner that night, she had railed against being treated like some sort of tutor, asked to single-handedly train the entire British navy to catch French privateers. He’d done his best to be sympathetic, but throughout it all, there was a niggling thought in his head that he couldn’t silence; was it that Captain Hornblower?
He’d been doing his best to keep track of Horatio’s career, but they’d been at sea for a while now, and it was hard to get hold of copies of naval gazettes. The last he’d heard, Horatio had pulled off a massive coup by defeating a ship that outgunned him. Even the basic outline of the battle had been enough to get Archie’s heart racing. The Legacy’s fights with privateers were all well and good, but a battle like that was the stuff heroes were made of. If Horatio had finally been promoted to a ship of the line, then it was well deserved.
The question, of course, was what he would do if it was Horatio. Well, explaining that he’d actually been alive all this time was a good start. Where he went from there all depended on how Horatio took the news. The Hornblower he knew suffered from a bit of a guilt complex, and possibly had been blaming himself for Archie’s death for years. To have all that taken away…there was no telling what Horatio would do.
But that was a question for another day. For now, he had to focus on getting the ship ready for the new arrival and on keeping Amelia from breaking things in frustration.