Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter One: In Which Jessie Falls From The Sky

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It was slow and I fought it.

I wanted out of the darkness, quickly, now; and at the same time I wanted to stay in it forever.

Why? Are you feeling guilty? You got out of the water and someone else, some poor bastard--

No.

Shut up.

The room around me creaked and bobbed. Dry. I found myself staring up at the ceiling, hewn beams and smoothly polished planking, small dark metal nails. I didn't remember opening my eyes.

Yet, I was awake, clearly. I sucked in an experimental breath, shallow and cautious. It did not taste of salt. It tasted of stale tobacco, of furniture polish and ripe cheese, of men closed in too long in one place. The back of my mouth tasted like vomit. My tongue was tender, a cut from my teeth blazing across the middle.

I shifted. My hair was wet, but I was dry, swaddled naked and cocoon-like in cool, slightly scratchy sheets that did not glimmer in the semi-darkness like I thought emergency foil blankets ought to. These were cloth, roughly the texture of burlap, but with a softer, finer sheet between my skin and the warm outer-blanket. The mattress was a sack, vaguely lumpy and pokey.

My right hand throbbed. It was exposed to the air, left out of the carefully tucked bedding. I tried to lift it and even the small shift of my arm was enough to send searing pain sizzling up my nerve endings. I muffled a whimpering yelp and decided that if my hand couldn't move up towards my eye level, then the rest of me should move down to it instead.

I sat up gently, wriggling my left hand free of the linens to steady myself against a wooden wall, to tug fretfully to keep the sheets high enough for decency. I closed my eyes, and when vertigo failed to present, opened them. The world under me continued to sway and bob and I choked back another desperate whimper.

Just stop, I thought. I just wanted solid ground under my feet again. Why won't you stop moving?

I looked down at my right hand. My last two fingers had been pulled flat and straight against a pair of splints, bound expertly with swaths of white cloth. There was no blood spotting the bandages - no bones had poked through the skin – but my fingers were hugely swollen and black with bruises. Why hadn't they been drained? Why wasn't I hooked up to a morphine drip? A saline IV? Where was the buzzer to call for a nurse?

The room pitched slightly and this time I couldn't withhold the pained mewl the shifting caused in my stiff and burning torso. My throat was tight, and the bottom of my ribs ached from the puking, from the pressure of the seatbelt, and from the burn of holding my breath so long.

"Miss?" a voice called from the other side of a door. I couldn't see the door, couldn't see much further than my own hands, the ceiling, but it clearly wasn't coming from inside the room. There was at least a thin wall between me and the maker of the sound.

"Yeah?" I croaked, and I realized suddenly how raw my throat was, how dry and awful it felt. Had I been screaming?

I was parched.

I had nearly drowned to death and I was thirsty.

Ha.

The other person took this as an invitation to push into the darkness. A door swung inwards and harsh yellow sunlight cut into my eyes. I raised my right hand to block it before I could think, and whined again when the shift of muscle and bone protested insistently. I dropped it back to my lap and twisted my head away, squinting.

"Please, Miss, do not move," the voice said, and it dawned on me that it was male. The sharp clip of heeled boots across a wooden floor; the door swung closed, blocking off the harsh light.

Another light fumbled into being, a crackling spark struck on the end of a match, wavering and perilous, until it was touched to the oil-soaked safety of the wick of a lamp. For a moment it flared too bright, too orange – too much the colour of recycled oxygen catching fire – before it was shaded by an opaque hurricane glass dropped into position by long, nimble fingers. It created a halo, a safe haven of golden glow that deepened the shadows around us, insulated us from the darkness of the rest of the world. I was able to shut out, just for a second, the memory of what had just happened, trapping it in the darkness that was the rest of the ignorable world.

The face revealed in the new light was youngish, more or less thirty, and handsome in a sort of worried, sharp-nosed, doughy-chinned sort of way. His eyes were remarkably round, deep and brown like a deer's, and filled with more concern than I think I could digest just yet.

"How do you feel?" the man said, and dropped carefully onto a chair a respectable distance away, holding the shaded lamp by its base, perching it expertly on one knee.

"Disoriented," I admitted.

He blinked.

"Your accent," he said, and then cut himself off, as if noticing it was rude. It was this that made me realize that my ear drums had in fact popped in my quick and forceful accent to the surface, and that my problem with understanding him wasn't because of any sort of decompression ailment, but were due to the fact that he was speaking with a clipped British lilt. "Where, Miss, are you from? And how on Earth did you make it all the way out here?"

"All the way...?" I pressed my fingers against my eyelids - left hand - pushing my eyeballs back into their sockets until they hurt. It distracted me from the pain everywhere else. "Didn't you see the crash?"

"What crash? We've quite missed the battle. I'll admit that we have arrived too late to give Napoleon a taste of good British cannon. But just in the nick, it seems, to save a foreigner from a watery grave. Whose ship did you fall from?"

"Napoleon? Ship?" My brain suddenly felt too big for my skull, a sponge that had soaked up too much sea water, pushing to get out, cracking bone and oozing out of my ears.

He leaned forward, looked seriously into my face as if he could see some sort of mental malady in my eyes. His eyebrows, a thick chocolate-brown that matched the careful swatch of hair tousled artfully over his forehead, pulled down into a frowning vee.

"Who are you, my dear?"

"I'm Jessie. Jessie Franklin."

"Welsh?"

"Canadian. Who the hell are you?" And oh, he was surprised by the offensive word, the tone, but no more surprised than I was. I was hurting. I was scared. I was angry, but at whom?

He noticed and forgave. He sat back, fingers still curling and uncurling around the base of the brass lamp, and said, "Post Captain Francis Goodenough, at your service." He dipped his head at me, ridiculously formal, and before I could decide if I should dip mine back, he added: "You are aboard my ship, the HMS Lyre. We pulled you from the water."

Well shit, I thought, staring into the man's earnest face. When I said 'anything but this', I was really expecting...

Uh, anything but this.

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