Shipwrecked

Before

Rooting for the heroine will often lead to your death,

but, as will rooting for the villain, the villain will hurt you just as much as your friend.

A smile tugged at her father's lips as he wove tales about ships lost at sea, mermaids rescuing them, and all that just to have the villain win. Those were his favorite kind of stories; the ones that left most people unsatisfied, or ones that were searched, and found wanting.

A few times, her mother had yelled at him for it, saying it would ruin the girl's childhood, not knowing of happy endings. But he'd just laughed and spun her around the deck, saying they'd build their own happily ever after, there wouldn't be room for villains.

Near the end, she had still brought this up, attempting to turn every night into an argument over fairytales with unsatisfactory endings, begging him to change the way he told them. He laughed and laughed; claiming nothing could be wrong with a children's story.

Perhaps, if they'd all paid better attention, they could've identified her paranoia as something to be aware of, something to watch closely, but no one expected more from her, not the crew, not the people inland at the docs they rarely visited, not even her own husband. He was used to it, it was one of the reasons why he'd loved her, every part of who she was.

But no one could have guessed what she did next, it was unexpected, even for her.

Late one night in the fall, she was dancing on the deck, alone, singing about the moon, and then she wasn't. The captain heard a loud splash as one of the row boats was pushed over, he ran out of his quarters just in time to see her rowing away, toward nothing at all really, just the moon. She yelled or sang something over her shoulder about needing to see how close she could get to it, and then she was gone. Ignoring the captain's cries for her to COME BACK and leaving her daughter, barely a year old, to hear her mad song as she left.