Repulse is knocked out of the fight, and it’s—Prinz Eugen to the rescue?!
tags: azur lane, fan fic, nsfw
TAKAO WHOOPED in victory even as Repulse went down, the volleyball she had lunged for rolling just out of reach.
“Game point!” the commander announced from the referee stand.
Prince of Wales reached down to her teammate. “Get up,” she hissed, eyes fixed on the opposition. It was one thing to lose; it was another to appear weak.
“I can’t,” Repulse whined, clutching at her leg. “I think I twisted my ankle.”
“There’s no shame in an honorable defeat!” Atago called out, her very dishonorable smirk making it clear there was a lot of shame riding on the match.
Wales bit back a snarl and turned to the sidelines, looking at who she could call in. Renown was itching to get into the fight, and the light cruisers were staring daggers at the Sakura ships. Even Hood started to take off her glasses in preparation, this threat to the Royal Navy’s honor enough to rouse her from her splendid isolation. But a circular pool float bounced into the Royal Navy flagship, tossed away by a new challenger.
“Prinz… Eugen?” Wales asked, incredulous that an Ironblood ship would jump into the fray.
Despite having volunteered herself, Prinz Eugen maintained a look of bored detachment. “Is there a volleyball game? I think I’ll join in.”
One of the Takao sisters—Wales wasn’t looking—scoffed. “Is the Royal Navy so hard-pressed that they’re turning to enemies for players?”
The other Sakura cruiser chimed in. “Who cares, sis? Hohenzollerns, Hanoverians, they all sink the same!”
Wales leaned in close, her whisper sharp. “This isn’t your game to play, Eugen. It’s ours, win or lose.”
“And if I’m not out here, you will lose,” the smaller cruiser coolly whispered back. “Renown is just as thin-skinned as Repulse, your cruiser line isn’t any match for these two, and Hood’s still healing. Face it, princess: you need me.”
Wales weighed her options. Honor and loyalty demanded that this was a Royal Navy affair. Hell, even an Eagle Union ally would have boosted her more than this Ironblood heavy cruiser. But…
Eugen licked her lips, the gleam in her eyes belying her affected nonchalance. For some reason, she wanted this just as badly as Wales.
“Okay, we’re good to go!” the battleship turned and shouted up to the admiral. “Two princes, against the Sakura sisters!”
“So be it!” Takao announced, lining up on the back row. “Ironblood ship or no, Force Z is sinking—again!”
She served the ball with an impressive crack, attempting to end the match with one swift killing blow, an ace straight into the sand. But Eugen blitzed ahead, artfully deflecting the speeding ball up and away. Wales hesitated, momentarily angered by the cruiser’s showboating. Then she realized that Eugen had executed a perfect pass and set Wales up for her own spike. Unprepared for the sudden counterattack, Atago floundered on the response; the sidelines cheered the first Royal Navy point in what felt like ages.
Eugen smiled wolfishly, drinking in the sight of her flustered opponents. Wales gave her a congratulatory high-five, but her face was drawn and serious. “We’re still down ten points. We have to do that ten more times, and then we still have to beat them by two.”
The cruiser caught the high-five, but then didn’t pull back. Instead, she slipped her fingers through Wales’, pulling the two of them close. Eugen was suddenly at Wale’s shoulder, warm breath against bare skin.
The battleship froze, shocked at the unexpected intimacy of the moment. It was as if they had become the only two ships on the beach.
And then Eugen was away, as if nothing had passed between them, getting ready for another serve. Wales shook her head, trying focus up on the fight ahead of them. Twelve straight points. They could do this.
And they did. The two Takao sisters started to fold, their forward momentum sapped. They turned silent, then sullen, their earlier domination now a desperate attempt to score one last point and escape.
Eugen turned the knife, alternating between cool detachment and sly engagement with the sidelines. One serve, she would be clinically focused on eviscerating the Sakura defense; the next, she would point at a ship in the growing crowd and blow a kiss. Even Hood played along, bashfully twirling her parasol when Eugen winked at her.
Wales tried to stay implacable and undistracted, but even she was affected by Eugen’s charms. Ever since she had tangled with Bismarck, and then later, after the disasterous Force Z sortie, things hadn’t been… right. But right now, in this moment, in this meaningless volleyball game that felt like it meant far too much, things could be… okay.
Now Sakura ships were beginning to turn out in force, too, trying to coach their flagging sisters to victory. But Takao and Atago would have none of it, turning their backs to talk in hushed huddles between serves.
After eleven straight surrendered points, Atago finally snapped. “God dammit, Wales. At least Edward had the sense to abdicate with some grace,” she tried to quip, but the humor was gone out of it. The comment came across as a malicious snarl, a mean-spirited reference to Wales’ storied name.
The crowd quieted. “Dirty pool!” someone called out from the sidelines.
Wales’ expression stayed stony, but behind her mask she could feel her meager happiness evaporate. Eugen glanced back at her partner, and the battleship saw a momentary look of pain and concern on the cruiser’s face. And then Eugen swiveled back toward her opponents. “Hey, Atago, since you’re bringing up the past—I’ve been meaning to ask: did your impressive ‘torpedo bulges’ come standard, or did you get them upgraded in a retrofit?”
The crowd murmured at the diss; a few of the lighter Sakura cruisers, always intimidated by Atago’s wider beam, even sniggered. But whatever goodwill and happiness the game had accrued was now well and truly gone, the stands on edge as they watched what had become a very heated, very close battle. Atago lapsed back into silence, glaring across the net; words wouldn’t determine what happened next.
The Royal Navy had pulled ahead by a point, and the next was potentially the game. Wales tried to refocus, tried to pour her heart and soul into this thing that she suddenly, desperately wanted, this thing that had been impossible and was now right on the edge of her fingers, obtainable, real, just beyond reach but there. She grasped for it, as if scoring this point could make everything that had come before okay, as if…
Eugen served. Atago jumped for the volleyball, and in one fast, vicious swing spiked the ball back onto the other side of the net.
Straight into Wales’ face.
The battleship fell back hard, blown away by the force of the hit, her nose already streaming blood.
The crowd gasped. The commander half-stood.
It was unclear how intentionally the strike was. To her credit, Atago looked as shocked as the ships in the stands. But she didn’t move to help, either, instead clenching her fists and lording defiantly over her fallen foe. Whoever stood against the Sakura Empire deserved exactly what they got.
“She’s okay, she’s okay!” Eugen called out, sliding over to her downed teammate. The cruiser slipped her hands underneath the battleship, trying to flip her over; Wales was already gagging on the blood flooding back down her nose and into her throat.
“Shield…” Wales murmured, trying to cough out the blood in her mouth. Eugen looked on, confused.
“Your shield… don’t let them see…”
The cruiser nodded in understanding, and in a flash of blue the two warships were suddenly surrounded by Eugen’s shield, panels of opaque energy panels rotating around them, shutting out the rest of the world.
Wales rolled over onto her front, leaning down onto her forearms. Eugen rested a hand on Wales’ shoulder, concerned when she felt the battleship convulsing under her. It was only when Wales gasped for breath that the cruiser realized her partner was shaking with sobs.
Wales was trying to keep her composure. Just like she had when she watched Hood sink. When she watched Repulse sink. When she—
Why the hell was it so hard right now? Get up. Stiff upper lip. It was just a game. It was just a volleyball to the face. She had taken worse.
But she couldn’t. The sudden pain of the injury, the strange intimacy of this moment with Eugen, the fear of losing: together, it was ripping loose all the anger and sadness she had carried inside of her since… since…
“They sunk me. They sunk me, Eugen,” she cried, blood and tears streaming into the sand beneath her.
“We can still win this!” Eugen replied, misunderstanding what they were talking about. “And… I know we really want to win, but in the end, it’s just volleyball.”
“They sunk me, and Hood, and Repulse. I don’t know… I don’t know what to do after that. How do you come back from—how do you live when you… when you’ve…”
The battleship fell silent, her outburst concluded. Her breathing slowed, her tears dried. Then she pulled herself up, far sooner than Eugen thought possible. Her face was again implacable stone—wet with blood, but unbroken.
The cruiser smiled back, as if oblivious to what had just transpired. “You ready for this, Prince of Wales?”
The battleship nodded, staring dead ahead. “I’m a warship of the Royal Navy. We don’t drown until we damn well mean to.”
The shield went down, and the crowd went wild. Wales took a page out of Eugen’s book and waved stiffly at the stands, but she made no move to clean her face. A warship could wear her wounds just as well as she could a fresh coat of paint. Blood was nothing to be ashamed of.
She looked for Repulse, then Hood, grimly nodding once to each.
Then she looked at Eugen, who smiled back. And despite the pain radiating through her bruised face, despite everything that had transpired, Wales felt her impassive, bloodied face stretching into a smile—a genuine smile, something she hadn’t done since… since she had sunk.
Maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be okay.
Eugen served. Atago moved to hit it back, a repeat of the last killing blow. But Wales was running this time, jumping up, meeting the Sakura cruiser at the net. The ball connected—
“—god, that was an amazing game. Do we even know who won?”
Wales bounced her head back in a grin, then winced at the pain in her nose. But the smile quickly returned to her face. “Does it matter?”
Atago had hit the ball onto the Royal Navy’s side, and Wales instantly returned it. After that, everything became hazy. Someone in the stands apparently thought the game had been decided and charged onto the sand court. And then everyone was running into the game. A Sakura destroyer took a swing at Royal Navy cruiser, and the long-awaited brawl was on. And then the admiral was tipped out of the referee stand, and that was when all hell really broke loose.
In the ensuing melee, Wales grabbed for Eugen, and the two of them just ran. Out of the crowd, past the sunbathers and the sandcastles, past Akashi’s ice cream stand—Eugen scooped two popsicles off the counter with a shouted promise of repayment—and then they ran until they were out of breath from the running and the laughing and the crying.
And now they were slowly walking down the beach, into the setting sun, cold popsicles cooling their parched throats.
Eugen looked thoughtful. “I guess it doesn’t.”
The cruiser pulled out a pair of shades to block the setting sun’s light, but Wales had lost her sunglasses somewhere along the way. Rather than look down the beach through squinted eyes, she settled on stealing glances at the Ironblood cruiser.
“I wanted to thank you, for earlier,” she finally spoke up. “You—”
“I died in nuclear fire,” Eugen interrupted.
Wales swallowed uncomfortably.
“My… other self? The warships we originally were, or are. I don’t know how timelines and realities work here. But in that version of the world, I survived the war between what are now the Azure Lane and the Crimson Axis.”
She sighed. “Not that it did much good. I was handed over to the victors, who had no need of me. They mustered me into the largest surface fleet ever made, and then tested the potency of nuclear weapons on us.”
Wales tried to assess how Eugen was feeling, but the cruiser’s dark glasses made her expression inscrutable. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Eugen shrugged. “There’s always a better weapon. For you, airplanes. For me, nuclear bombs. And now, for both of us, the Sirens. But that’s something of a cold comfort, isn’t it? It doesn’t make being a weapon any easier.”
“I…” Wales started, hesitated, started again. “I can’t sleep most nights. I wake up from a nightmare I can’t remember, and in that first moment of consciousness, in the dark, when my sheets are drenched in sweat and sticking to my skin, I’m… drowning again. I can’t see or feel anything but the dark water, and I’m…” She choked up. “I don’t know if Hood or Repulse, or hell, any of the other ships are the same. We’ve pretty much all sunk once, right? They’re coping somehow, right? But I… I just can’t… I’ve never talked about this with anyone else.”
Under her dark shades, Eugen flashed a wan smile. “For me, it’s the sun.”
Wales froze, the horror of the situation lancing down her spine. On instinct, she moved to crush the cruiser in a hug, to shield her from the sun’s merciless rays.
Instead, her popsicle broke loose and tumbled through the air, splashing her own neck and décolletage with sticky, melting syrup. “Well, crap.”
“Oh no, your swimsuit!” Eugen yelped, suddenly energized. “It’s going to get stained!”
“Ha, it’s not that—Eugen?” Wales was interrupted as the cruiser grabbed her hand and pulled her toward one of the beach huts close by.
“Come on, Wales! I know a trick to stop it from staining. Follow me!”
They tumbled into the cool shade of the hut. “It’s just a swimsuit, Eugen! It’s going to be okay…”
Eugen took off her sunglasses, and Wales trailed off when she saw the look in the cruiser’s eyes.
“Wales, do you trust me?”
The battleship couldn’t catch her breath, but she didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Then sit on the bench. Close your eyes.”
Wales did, her heart racing, waiting—
—and then felt a cool, wet towelette drag across her breast.
Wales peaked one eye open, and Eugen clucked at her. “Don’t move. I also need to get this blood and sand off your face, and I don’t want to hit your nose.”
The battleship laughed, then kept laughing, the sudden realization that she—elegant, beautiful Wales—had been walking down the beach, listening so, so intently to Eugen, sharing her darkest fears with Eugen, all while her face was a visage of dried blood and sticky sand. “Oh god, I just realized I’ve had blood on my face this whole time,” she mumbled through Eugen’s ministrations. “And here I thought—”
Eugen’s lips brushed against hers. Then their tongues met, a slow and gentle probe, a tender kiss.
“—that you were going to lick the popsicle off of me,” Wales eventually continued, quietly.
Eugen smirked, a playful finger at the side of her lips. “I would, but we’re fresh out of popsicle. It looks like I’m going to need something else to taste.”
The cruiser straddled the larger battleship, flesh on flesh, and Eugen used her positioning and momentary heigh advantage to cup Wales’ face and tilt it up to look at her.
“Why… me?” Wales begged.
“Wales, you really need to shut up.” She slipped a hand between them, her fingers gliding along the front of Wales’ bikini bottoms, teasing her wet pussy through the thin cloth. “No more questions, no more revelations, no more fucking ship metaphors.” Her other hand slipped off Wales’ chin to glide through her hair, gently tugging it so that the battleship had to look even further up. “No more words.”
She leaned down and kissed Wales on the lips, even as her hand finally slipped inside of the swimsuit and began to finger the battleship in earnest. Wales pressed into it, twitching and dizzy with pleasure. She broke their kiss to gasp, mewling as Eugen slipped inside of her. She was close, so close—
Eugen pulled back and stood up, a devious look on her face. “I did mean what I said. I do want to taste you.” She took Wales’ hand, kneeling as she did, pulling the battleship off the bench and on top of her.
“You said no more talking,” Wales growled, untying the string on her bottoms. Her knees were planted on either side of the prone Eugen, her exposed pussy inches from the cruiser’s eager mouth.
“Then find a way to shut me u—”
And Wales did.
“Because we’ve fought each other,” Eugen said weeks later, apropos of nothing.
Wales, who had been dozing with her head in Eugen’s lap, peaked open an eye. “That makes no sense,” she said. But as the words left her mouth, she knew she was wrong.
“Maybe you’re right,” Eugen replied, feigning nonchalance, not looking up from the book she was reading. But her cheeks had turned red, a little embarrassed that Wales was awake enough to have heard her admission. “Maybe I just have a thing for being the smaller support cruiser to a big, mean battleship.”
“Look, if this is your way of asking if I’ll put on an Ironblood officer’s cap and roleplay out Operation Rheinübung with you… okay, I guess I could be convinced.”
“That’s not what—no, I—” Eugen sputtered.
“I know what you meant,” Wales said, gently interrupting her stammered protests. “I’ve known what you meant for a while.” She closed her eye again, content. “I remember the first time I saw you in the harbor. You were seriously talking to another cruiser, and I thought to myself, yes, that is the cruiser I fought, proud and powerful and beautiful. But then you smiled and laughed, and I didn’t know what to think.”
“I remember seeing you glaring at me!” Eugen teased, sliding her hand through Wales’ hair. “I thought you hated me for a while.”
“Maybe I did. But… but we’re two of the few ships here that have actually tussled with each other and survived. I think that… I want that to mean something.”
A moment later, Wales continued. “Hey, Eugen? I wanted to thank you, for giving me a goal to work toward.”
“Hmmm?” The cruiser raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Not today, and probably not for a while, but I… I’m…” Wales sat up, energetic and stressed and fumbling her words. But she needed to say this, and Eugen squeezed her hand. “Look, I’m still trying to work out some stuff. I still have night sweats, and I’m afraid of the dark, and when I think I’m drowning I panic and can’t breathe. But I… I want to get ice cream with you again, and walk down the beach, and then I want to… return the favor.”
Wales glanced away, blushing, nervously wrapping a strand of hair around her finger. Eugen was trying to process what the battleship was saying. “I mean, if you want to steal some popsicles for us, I’m okay with—”
“I want you to ride my face.”
“Oh.” Eugen cleared her throat, her cheeks a deep scarlet. “Yes, that’s me. Eugen. Just… helping where I can. Giving out face-sitting missions. Yes.” And then her eyes narrowed as she collected herself. “You’re going to need to be really, really prepared. Because just talking about this has me… there is a very real possibility that you will drown.”
“Well, I’m a warship of the Royal Navy.” Wales smiled. “We don’t drown until we damn well mean to.”
The wonderful artwork of Eugen and Wales was provided by Hamu; see more of her work and her commission info on her twitter!