davy jones' locker [windy]

I miss my sea turtles.

Partway through my journey from the little hell island on which I’d been stranded, I’d found another island, less like hell and more like some men’s vision of paradise. Women, everywhere. While they were plenty hospitable to a man charioteering across the ocean with but two humble sea turtles as his trusty steeds, I had been given a meager day of rest before being asked to kindly give them back the knife that went missing from the cook’s station and to even more kindly leave the island. They were even decent enough to row me back to a remote part of the coast. However, I will never go back to that island if I can help it.

They ate my sea turtles.

It’s also colder here on the mainland than it was on either of those god-forsaken islands, and while I am glad for the very kind donation of a coat from the lovely ladies who ferried me back to shore, I almost wish they had ferried me back to the hell island.

Alas.

A little ways up the beach, a boy sits in the sand. Finally, someone new. I hurl the starfish in my hand back towards the water without a glance and make my approach.

“Would you happen to have a smoke I could borrow? Or keep, quite frankly. It has been a long day, my friend.”

“Mmm, yes, I’d say so. Mine got drowned while I was riding the sea turtles, I’m afraid…”

I will admit, the soup made from them was quite nice, but eating a creature that carried you a countless distance through the waves to the comfort of an island that was not an unpopulated hellspot in the middle of nowhere with only rum as a resource was not quite how I meant to reward the poor things.

Mayhaps the next sea turtles I meet will seek vengeance… No matter.

My fingers shake a little as I reach down to grab the offered cigarette, and I stick it between my teeth before raising my hands to examine how the skin beneath my fingernails grows whiter still with the biting chill. I give a disgruntled hum, readjusting the fingerless gloves a little higher. I’ve already lost a toe. A finger would be less than pleasant, but manageable. Thumbs, however… A treasured resource.

With a deftness of a lifetime spent doing and undoing knots, I untie the makeshift belt around my middle, pistol and all, and drop it onto the sand before following suit.

“At least I’ve still got my pistol and my pride,” I reply, voice mumbled around the cigarette as I reach my fingers towards him and waggle them in a vague approximation of ‘lighter, now, please.’ My head bobs as I hum sagely, and I turn my head to look at the boy I’ve very likely disturbed from his- well, honestly he looks like a brooder. Poor boy has no idea what’s going on, does he? “Mmm, less of my pride, turtles be damned.”