First story, so bear with me here!
Comments and suggests always appreciated and welcomed.
A sailor finds himself falling hard for the pirate captain that captures him. But he has a plan, and this does not fit into it. Will he be able to set aside his strange desires to get to where he needs to go?
When you're the captain of a pirate ship, you're used to things going your way. If they don't, you can usually make them. But when a man shows up at your doorstep, tied, and begs you for a kiss... well, that just seems too easy. Doesn't it?
********** *
The ship getting taken by pirates was kind of fucking up my plan.
I'd had a plan. Not a good one, but one that had been working for me. Hit a guard over the head. Check. Make my escape. Check. Pick the locks on the shackles they had on me, ditch the metal constraints in the river, and get down to town. Check, check and check.
Get on a ship, use a fake name. Get hired as a sailor; I'm a big guy and they can always use more men. Get a job. Get a wage. Get out of the city. All of that, all a big check. Now the plan had been for me to get off the ship at the next port. To take the money and run, start again somewhere new. Somewhere where they didn't know my name.
Not incredibly original, I know. But having a plan was important when things get tough. Having a purpose is sometimes the only thing that gets you through. And this plan was important. It was going to get me back to where I belong. It was going to let me kill the man who'd taken my life from me in the first place.
So yeah, the pirates were throwing a bit of wrench into things.
They'd pegged us for the merchant ship that we were, taken us in less than twenty minutes. It's important to be able to recognize skill when you see it, and I saw it in them. I watched them, mechanically unloading our cargo, our captain wringing his hands. I could have fought to save the cargo, I guess. I could have helped the captain, helped his Majesty. But neither of them had ever been much of a help to me. Besides, I wasn't interested in what they were doing with the merchandise; I wanted to know what they would do with
us
.
We waited around, hands bound, some of us nervous and all of us alert. I watched the pirate crew move between our ships. We hadn't fired a volley, hadn't taken any of their crew. And, if I still knew anything about anything, and these were the southern pirates I thought they were, that should keep us safe. Around here, they were more prone to flights of mercy than the strategy of razed grounds. In the event of capture, this was supposed to translate into lighter prison sentences.
I spat.
Finally, the pirates sent a delegate over to explain what was going on.
"Alright, you lot. Here's how this shakes down. We don't wanna have to hurt any of you, and we don't want any of you to hurt us. Part of not hurting you is not leaving you alone in the middle of the sea unarmed. We're not unreasonable, see, just trying to make our living. But, we can't leave you with the means to shoot us, either. See our dilemma?"
And sure, I did, but I also saw something else.
Someone else
.
He'd walked out onto the quarter deck of the ship across from us, an attractive thing in it's own right, a light little schooner that leapt through the water like it was dancing. The dip and pull of the ocean made the man hard to focus on, but once I'd seen him I wasn't going to let anything take him away from me. His red hair whipped wildly around, mirrored by his black cloak, by the sails and the ropes around him. He was an extension of the ship, and the ship an extension of the sea. In the midst of these southerners, surrounded by people I didn't spare a second glance, he demanded my attention. He looked like a pirate. He looked like a commander. A commander of men, a commander of fleets. Fuck, he looked like he could command the ocean and she would obey.
He looked over at me, and for a moment our eyes met.
Then the rolling of the sea took him from me. When the deck bobbed back into sight, he was gone. I searched about frantically trying to track him down, but it was futile, the deck empty of commanders and filled with nobodies. I thought about letting it pass, whatever had just occurred. It had been a strange moment, something so intoxicating, so demanding even at such a distance. What a feeling he had given me, in just that glimpse. I wanted it back. I never wanted to feel it again.
I shook my head at myself. Whatever was happening, it didn't fit into my plan. I had a solid chance at making it to my destination, if I just stuck to what I had set out to do. A good shot at making it out of this alive, and then making it on to my real goal.
Then again, since we'd been attacked we'd most likely be returning to port. Port was not a good place for me right now, with His Majesty's men and the bounty hunters swarming. By now they most likely had the wanted posters up, too. Besides, I wasn't returning to land. I wouldn't. I needed a new plan, and I needed it fast. But instead of thinking about what was going to happen, I found myself searching for the man I had just seen.
I scanned the ship, ignoring the man in front of me. He was asking something, but he was short and demanded nothing of me so I just looked over the top of his head. The wild red hair was nowhere to be seen. The black cloak didn't flow. Then, suddenly, blissfully, I caught a glimpse.
Just a glimpse, that's all it took. The plan had already been fucked. I didn't have another one ready to go. So when I saw the glimpse, when I caught sight of him for that moment, it was over. I was done. The man in front of me said something again, impatient, but he wasn't enough, certainly didn't command me and I pushed past him and headed toward the other ship.
They hadn't learned yet, these men, that ropes can't keep me. They hadn't the time or the experience to know these things, and so they had tried knots instead of steel to keep me tied down. Good knots, sailors' knots, but there is no knot that can hold me, no rope that my fingers can't undo. These men might have learned to be sailors, but I had been born one. And so I left them in the dust.
I heard them coming after me, the men, but I didn't care. I was on their boat faster than they could think to react, faster than they could even really understand what was going on. I move quickly for my size. But they caught on soon enough and I felt them pulling at my limbs, trying to stop my headlong plummet into their space. It might have worked, and I might have been escorted back to the merchant ship, but I caught a flash of black and a whip of red and bulled through the last of the men and then there he was. He turned just as I approached, my limbs dangling men, my shoulders turned to hooks for them to hang, my back even carrying one. But their extra weight was nothing, not compared to him. I stopped a few feet back, halted by his very presence.
His hair was not red, not the way I'd thought it was. The light had lied to me, had played tricks on my mind, had danced through his thick curls and reflected colors that shouldn't exist. Even as I watched, it happened again, the sun picking up hues and pushing them to my eyes, blacks and browns and purples, indigos, royal colors, godly colors. Sunsets and nightscapes, all hidden in his curls. I wanted to watch his hair capture sunlight all day, but the kinks fell into his face, and I saw his thick eyebrows, the way they drew together and pinned frustration in place like a specimen to study, and then I saw the lines of his cheekbones soft and sharp and everything, and the sweep of his lips, his lips, his lips, frowning out at me, and staring out from all of it, controlling all this wonderful terrifying mystifying experience were his eyes, dark and deep and demanding, and I wanted him to demand of me. I wanted to be able to do everything that he asked.
"What is this," he asked, not to me but to the men trying to hold me back. They must have said something, but all I saw were his eyes, his lips, the way his brow furrowed even more.
"Well," he said, still not to me, but close enough that his voice rubbed against me and I wanted to press against it, just to be nearer to him, "he's here now." He looked at me then, looked me over, those eyes threatening to consume me. I wanted them to. I wanted them to light me on fire, wanted to turn to ash. At least then I couldn't feel the intensity of whatever it was I was feeling in that moment. At least then it would be over.
"Bring him to dinner, I guess." He turned and walked away. The moment ended. Somehow I was still standing.
