"It was pure luck, really, that this hadn't happened sooner. Two years of keeping out of his reach had really been testing the limits of fate, and the sane voice inside her head kept telling her she would have to face him eventually. The world was b...
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For your world is delicate and mine too harsh; a robin cannot fly the oceans, but my wings are long and I've learned to sail them - but now these storms have become my home. And they will not let me leave.
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Bulut was being fidgety. The restlessness sat unfamiliar on his shoulders, and perhaps it would have concerned Deren if not for the group of semi-strangers residing on the Albatross amongst them. She knew only a few. Bulut knew none.
Can's crew had begrudgingly settled amongst her own like geese amongst ducks. An outsider might not have even noticed the discrepancy; after all, pirates tended to be cut from the same haggard patchwork of cloth and sewn together by the same crude hands. But the difference was more than obvious to themselves and was only amplified during the distance at mealtimes.
The whole ship was tense. An enmity hovering between the two captains that Deren could almost taste. Under other circumstances, she might have suggested they simply screw it out, though she was certain that to say so out loud would earn her a death glare from Sanem that could rival the eyes of the reaper himself.
Still, it felt as though if something didn't settle soon then Guliz might find herself having to stitch up a frustration provoked stab wound.
---
Sanem was lost to him.
It was foolish, and Can knew it, but a part of him had always hoped that patching their broken pieces back together with bandages of apologies and rewritten promises would allow him back into the life of the same woman he'd betrayed two years ago.
Instead, he was faced with the reality that despite having found her, he was searching still.
The warmth of the body he'd known, now turned cold, as even her eyes refused to acknowledge his presence on the ship he knew almost as well as his own. That brilliant and contagious light in everything she did, now dimmed like the faint glow of a charred and blackened lantern. The gentle comfort of the voice that used to talk to him across the absent distance of his bedsheets under the gentle light of the morning sun - all now miles away and further from him than it had ever been.
But it wasn't just Sanem that was out of his reach; trying to integrate himself back amongst her crew felt as futile as attempting to stitch back on a severed limb long after the wound had scarred over.
No one would admit where the ship was headed. Sanem had asked for no instructions in returning to her cat, it appeared his one and only peace offering was going to have to wait.
Only one on her ship seemed happy to talk to him, one he did not recognise and who had introduced herself as Ayhan, who, in all her flippant obliviousness, appeared to not have been sailing on the Albatross for long. She could answer very few of his questions but seemed to have plenty of her own. And wouldn't stop talking.
