Long time no see.
I know. I'm sorry. Things got hard, and it felt too strange to escape to a world where the power of the sea was such a romanticized thing while I watched so much of my country disappear into a hurricane.
Anyway. Have some sailors, and remember love. Imagine what trust feels like when you carry it in a place deeper than your bones.
Alternate title: I had never before seen darkness like that
As always, comments and feedback so greatly appreciated. Love and peace and someone to call family, a place to call home, to each and every one of you. Never let anyone take that away. Never let anyone tell you, you deserve any different.
***
The men were waiting for us when we got back to the ship.
"Steady," the Captain called to them as soon as we were close enough to be heard. "It's alright, lads."
His words did little to calm the crew. Cass's seas had lessened significantly from when we had arrived leading to the appearing of our being becalmed. I smiled to see it, remembrance on my skin like smoke. Cass had once becalmed a captain for thirty-six hours for saying something she hadn't liked; he had rowed back into her chambers, sobbing, begging to be let out of his prison. Only then had she given him back his currents.
She was more merciful than I. I had once taken the currents from a captain for eternity. If he found wind, so be it, but the sea would never again bless his boat.
"Did she have to do this? It's upsetting my crew." The Captain's voice brought me back from thoughts of ships locked eternal in glass-like seas.
I smiled at him. "It will lift when it is time to go."
He let out a huff of annoyance. "Isn't our time of departure my decision?"
It was fate's. It was already determined, long before we had even arrived. Before we had met. I shrugged and pulled his arm around my waist, but he merely scowled and pulled away to go to his men.
The Captain moved through them carefully, reassuring here and patting an arm there. They shifted before his presence, parting in the face of power and authority and that was good, that was something, but I saw how they were not fully settled and moved behind my Captain, my own bulk and ease it's own kind of reassurance.
Still they milled about like errant currants. This was not my area of expertise; if they were truly water, I could have calmed them, navigated them. They were not water. They were land boys, and their nervousness annoyed me.
The Captain handled it much better than I. He drew them after him as he walked over to a barrel, pulling himself up on the makeshift stage in a show of rippling muscles and controlled power that left me smiling, spinning. Hearing his songs in my heart.
"The Lady has given me - us -" he looked over his men's heads and caught my gaze and I poured out my love for him, let it fall hot and swirling over these nobodies' feet and was surprised when they did not yelp from the heat of it, "her blessing. This is a good voyage, lads. This is the best voyage, the only voyage. When the Lady herself speaks well of it." He stopped and spread his arms wide, grinning, his teeth flashing white, his soul flashing brighter than the sun.
I watched the men begin to relax at his obvious comfort and jubilance. My Captain was good at what he did, and I too began to relax to see it.
"What of the naming." Finn had been with us on the way back; he had seen the cave light up, must have watched it go dark. Might well have heard Cass yelling all the way back from where he stood. When we had emerged, hours later, easy and calm, Finn had nearly started crying from relief. He still carried threads of his nervousness on him and I watched as he twisted those strands into his words, winding the men up again with the pressure of his emotion. "What did she say of the naming?"
The Captain's eyes landed on me for a moment. I saw him wrap himself up in something light, something dark, something dangerous. Watched him become the thing I would always know him to be.
"Ah, yes." He sounded bored, but I saw the way his very skin sparked with contradiction. "There is that."
The men waited. They did not look relaxed anymore.
"Full disclosure," he said, eyes glancing over the men before him to land on me, so dark, so endless, all for me. Everything for me. "I am now named. I name the Sailor; he names me."
There was instantly a stir among the men. The Captain ignored this and continued on. If you did not know better you would think he was bored. The men knew better.
I knew best.
"The Lady assures me this is not a problem. Our names are useless to anyone but each other, or something." He announced it like it was nothing to him, but he stared at me as he said it and I saw all the things this meant to him. All the ways this intimacy touched his soul. All around us the room still stirred, but they were nothing. They had always been nothing.
I had the Captain; I had his names, I had his love, I had his trust and I had his life. And he had all the same of mine and more. I smiled into his gaze and watched the way that made him turn soft and hard all at the same time.
"How sure are we of this?" A man who's name I had never bothered to learn spoke up, breaking my attention from my love. It was not a smart decision and he was lucky he could not see my eyes from where he stood with his back to me.
But the Captain merely smiled, a lazy expression that somehow carried a promise of so much action if he was pushed even the slightest bit further, the laziness made so much more pronounced by the obviousness of the violence it sat in front of. A thousand contradictions and he wore them so easily. Carried them on his skin like patterns of sunlight and I stopped trying to parse out what was real and what was glimmer and instead simply enjoyed the sensation as I bathed in his warmth. "I'm betting my life on it. I'm betting the Sailor's life on it."
There was a quiet swell as the men turned to look at me. I stood still and did not even try to mimic the expression the Captain had affected. I had never known how to make myself into a contradiction. I would never be anything but exactly what I was.
They turned away, possibly not comforted by what they had seen.
"I'm willing to bet your lives on it," the Captain continued, softer. "Have I ever placed you in danger that was not needed?"
Another swell, this one quieter yet. I knew there were stories here, actions shared. I watched memories fit into the men's bodies and knew they would come to remember what I could never forget, that the Captain was a good one, that he was Captain first and foremost. That he cared for this ship and his men and would never abandon them to danger.
They knew this. They carried it in their bodies, their memories. Their shared pasts. I watched this come together for them even as they shifted, uncomfortable with the idea of such a change to their lives.
"We trust you, Cap," Natch said quietly. I paid close attention; every man in the room nodded.
"Good." A careful observer might not have noticed any change in the Captain's body; I was no simple observer. I was the Captain's love eternal. And I saw the way his eyebrow unknit, just the smallest amount, watched his shoulder's go down the same. Then he moved on to other orders of business.
