#tessront

He’ll be back, he thought to himself as he stared down at the corpse.

He knew the pirate would come back, because he himself had experienced that feeling before. The feeling of being jerked back from the death, pulled from the back by the nape of the neck, and floating around for a day in nothing but bones and cartilages. He made sure the fellow pirate was dead by kicking the body around a little; a little disrespect to the dead, but apparently they never remained completely dead in this land. This was land of fiction, a land of distortion. This was a land that he remembered growing up abandoned, maturing to be the kind of reckless robber who demanded things fair, because he didn’t have anything fair for him.

But in war, truths were only truths if they seemed completely unreasonable. The salty water sloshed by his boots, and he dropped down to his knees to pull at his shoulder and flip the man over, but there wasn’t much of a pretty sight to be seen. It was too bad; when they were opened, the pale eyes tugged at a far, unknown corner of his heart. Like something familiar, like the feeling that he wasn’t truly abandoned to fend off things by himself.

I love him, the pirate’s voice echoed in his mind.

Perhaps he wished that someone had said those words about him instead.