When Pintel was a child, he had a pet cat.
It was one of those scrawny alley types, half-starved, with unsightly orange hair left in tufts, with a bitten off ear. Pintel had found it in the back alleyway when he was playing marbles with his friends (it was rather embarrassing actually – it had meowed in a pitiful way and rubbed up against his trousers, making the other boys laugh).
He had brought it home and instantly regretted it, because his mother had instantly cuddled it, scratched it under the chin and brought it a bowl of milk.
And that was that. The cat stayed in their home.
Pintel liked watching the cat. Unlike other cats, who would curl up neatly into a ball in the sun and wash themselves, the cat would sleep sprawled on its side, its four legs splayed out on their kitchen floor like some kind of accident-prone spider. Sometimes Pintel's little brother would throw rocks at the cat (he was a child and thought it was great fun) and the cat would jump in the air and kick its legs out in a spastic dance.
Pintel was, he admitted, a bit mean to the cat; it seemed to favor him the most out of the family, following him wherever he went, meowing when the door was closed on him. Pintel would either ignore it, kick it, or swear at it (depending on how he felt and in what hearing range his mother was).
He didn't MEAN to be cruel. But it was clingy, annoying, and for the six months it spent at their house, it never once stopped looking starved and lonely.
Pintel did feel a little sad when he came home one night and saw the cat lying by the side of the road, unmoving, with flies on its head. He was never sure if it had got trampled by the horses that drew wagons and carried people, or if it had just given up.
Life had gone on without the cat, his little brother gave up throwing rocks at animals, his mother put away the milk dish that sat in the sunny corner. But Pintel, for some strange reason, had wanted to apologize to the cat. For all the times he had brushed it away with his foot as he exited the house, the times he had forgot to feed it, when he would ignore it while it sat and stared at him with those hollow eyes…
One of them was different from the others, actually. It wasn't all black, more like a sickly pale brown, with a wider iris and pupil in the middle…kind of like a lazy eye, because sometimes it would roll out of sync with its other good one…
Pintel started out of his haze with a snort. Ragetti's face was inches from his own, and the older pirate lashed out in surprise, catching the lad in the shoulder.
Ragetti yelped and tumbled backwards, legs flailing. Pintel was on his feet, panting. "Christ, lad, whot were ye thinkin'?" he growled.
"'M sorry!" the lad mumbled. "I jus' wanted t'apologize, but it looked like ye were dreamin'."
"Wasn't dreamin'." Pintel muttered, picking up his mop again. Barbossa had gotten fed up with Ragetti's eye antics and told the both of them to go down to the brig and mop. It wasn't even Pintel's fault, but he had come to have the misfortune of having 'and Ragetti' tacked onto the end of his name whenever it was spoken.
The lad was still hunched over, expecting another blow. Pintel heaved a sigh. "Sorry lad, t'was my fault."
Ragetti looked up with a bright grin (the cat meowed happily as Pintel's hand came down and petted it).
"S'alright!" he chirped (the cat curled up to him in the warmth of the kitchen as his mother was hit by her drunken husband in the other room).
"Pintel, are ye gonna do any mopping? Barbossa'll take me eye again if'm not done."
Pintel turned. "Yea lad, I'm comin'."
The scrawny cat padded away into the darkness. Ragetti stepped backwards into a pool of sunlight and Pintel felt at peace.