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The ship creaked, groaned and moaned as she was dying.

She was a man-of-war with fifty cannons here, fifty cannons there, two front and two back, and leading the voyage was the figurehead of a salt-washed mermaiden with wooden eyes. Her captain's name was Commodore Gildarts and he was a dumb ginger with a pegleg and a smithed arm that buckled to tell whenever rain lurked beyond the ocean edge. He had named the ship after his lady love Cornelia, and he gloated over her beauty as he remembered it as often as he could—when he slept on the sea floor, sharks eat his flesh and crabs his bones, he would think of her, and he claimed it loudly when drunk and proudly when sober.

Natsu only wondered what kind of woman Cornelia was. If she had been as lavished as the ship, with its fifty and fifty cannons. If she had been watching like the mermaiden. None of the crew, two hundred men strong, had ever seen her to tell. Was she as beautiful as the sirens Gildarts swore he saw when the fogs were thick and murky, or beautiful through a lonely sailor's eye? Was she kind to all or kind to one or kind to none? Cornelia's namesake was legend on her deck and half the ocean was the captain's tears for her, for he was fragile as a woman when it came to love. That was the ship's own shanty, written by a romantic who had yet to admit that, yes, he was indeed the one who thought of love stories when there were none but lads around. But soon enough, Natsu had learnt it too. Fifty shanties lay between this little coconut island and the next and they shared it to the passerby ships that hoisted the same King's sails. The song ended tragically, more so than Gildarts' other loves did—she was the lucky one and left and died before he did.

There were no shanties anymore. The storm carried word the wrong way, out into the black where there were not even moonlight, even less any ship to rescue the shipwrecked. Natsu had already realised, and come to terms with both the tragic, tragic demise of a ship and her crew that seemed more and more inevitable as the waves grew, and the violent nausea that taunted his belly and soured his tastes, but which one was worse, was choosing between water and bread. If anyone was telling him anything, that he was pulling the ropes the wrong way, he would never hear it. The weeks of sailing without land in sight had taught him enough to know which ropes to pull, so perhaps that was not the murmur he heard fly to and fro, but what use had he of it when he barely could stand up anyway?

"Do not worry laddies, she is unsinkable!" Gildarts always bragged, and even did now as he hung in the ladders for dear life with his good arm and shielding his eyes with the bad and bellowed to anyone who could hear with an ear-to-ear grin until he gargled the rain like rum. The waves were overtaking the deck, showering the planks and rocking the ship like a pendulum. Nets that laid free were swept with the water into the sea, those without foothold were swept with the water too, but with screams. Gildarts probably didn't know he had lost five of his laddies already when he yelled: "I think I see a bit of sun!" Natsu wanted to punch him. There was not even a horizon anymore; the sea and the clouds had taken the same colours and dominated every direction until they had to chance the way to blue skies. North wind took the sails and made the rain into needles. Natsu shivered, shaking as he tugged at his second skin, the drenched shirt sticking to his body. He was half-way to a freezing death, half-way to a drowning death, and all the way to a certain death. But no matter how unconvinced he was of the ship's survival, he had to have hope: Cornelia could not go down here.

Not necessarily because she was a beautiful ship, even if she was. Only the best wood for Cornelia's shiny strengthened hull, of course, and threads of silk woven into the sail cloth for good luck and fortune. But it was not the ship that needed life but what she carried.

Natsu hadn't seen his brother for a good long while, since the sky was blue and the sea turquoise of the shallow transparent shore when the ship had just set sail. Gildarts was so honoured with their presence that he put Natsu in the hammocks under deck, with the rest of the three and twenty sailors working the ship. Quarters put rope makers with commodores when sailing the world in a box, big to the eye but small when sharing with three and twenty.

Well, usually, Commodore Gildarts had his own captain's cabin, but for this voyage that looked to be the last, the cabin was taken. For no one less than a king would he give up his cabin, but on from the harbour to the ship with gold in the linings of his clothes stepped just a king, and his king no less! His King Zeref was humble and shared the pretty words that he ruled with: praise for the ship and her beauty and that she must, just must, be able to take them safely to land.

Gods spit in his face.

It felt like a long time ago, a thousand years at least, when they had entered the captain's cabin while the ship just set sail; the last time Natsu had seen his brother and likely ever would, he thought that as the floor underneath him slipped away and he crashed into the railing.

In Commodore Gildarts' cabin, the windows, tall as Natsu himself, faced the endless ocean and the table hammered to the floorboards was littered with charts. Maps of the world he knew, Alvarez in the middle and the lands around them, scribbled on with an undecipherable handwriting, but he could guess: ports, towns, port towns, places that Gildarts had went and gone and done things that Natsu probably did not want to know. Dumb and crippled as he was, he'd not done for nothing, and Natsu envied that, even if it was also the only thing he envied.

"Gildarts." Gildarts cocked a brow. "Commodore," Natsu corrected himself and rolled his eyes, "I think you've got some bad maps." He held up the map to the stray rays of sun, squinting at the scribbles. He found it deep in the mess of scrolls of maps, picturing a coastline and a bit of land and even more names written by a handless child. Whether islands or whole worlds, he couldn't tell, but the frown on Zeref's face told that he did not either. The lands were perhaps even so strange they could only be found in Gildart's fantasy.

"Aha. That's what I thought, see?" Gildarts snatched the map back and traversed the room, front and back. "Your Highness' kingdom is nowhere I can see. Can you see it?" He shoved the map in Natsu's face but ripped it away before he could take a look. "That's a trick question by the way, of course you can't. But I figured it out."

For some reason, Natsu didn't think he did.

"The promised lands! What else? There, there's gold, and rum, and salvation, for those who needen it. Women and everything you can dream of."

"Fairy tales," Natsu said.

"Legends," Gildarts persisted.

"Such as yourself." Zeref's voice was a zephyr, flowers and song compared to Gildarts', whose was deep, gruff and meant for commanding, and whose words didn't matter as long as he pulled them from the bottom of his lungs. Zeref could whisper and people would kneel at his feet and call a lick to his boot an honour. "Your name's been around, Commodore. No one knows which stories of you are true or not, but the arm certainly seems to be." He nodded at the uncovered metal arm that shimmered in the noon sun.

"Well, that depends on what you've heard…"

"You were supposed to retire when you returned," said Zeref, pretending as if Gildarts hadn't talked. "It is not in a Commodore's interest to explore, but it is in yours, isn't it?"

Natsu interrupted. "Wait!" His eyes wandered the maps again. Fiore. "Do you think these are real?"

Zeref glanced out the window, as if trying to find the missing coasts on the horizon. "I think we've more of the world to see, is all. When the sun sets for us, it rises somewhere else. And Alvarez could become an empire again.

"Commodore!" Gildarts jumped. "Once we hit harbour, you have the offer to take your ship and the crew that wants to stay and sail with you, and go wherever your heart says to go. Have your salvation and chase your gold, on the condition that you do this in the name of Ankhseram, and your home."

"We'll find someone better," Natsu grinned.

Natsu couldn't tell people like Zeref could, but Gildarts was an easy canvas, red for anger and black for sorrow. Now, he shone. Perhaps he needed to leave all along, perhaps he really had loved Cornelia. Mourn the wife in the peace of the sea and find new pastures, to forget and move on.

That evening, Gildarts confessed when the crew shared drinks and stories in the last glow of the sleeping sun that, "I've a daughter your age."

"I won't marry her." Natsu had said the same thing enough times before for it to come naturally. Everyone wanted to wed their daughter to a prince.

Except Gildarts, of course. He even chuckled. "Don't worry. I'd never let you, and even if I did… I don't know where she is." He looked down, sad or in shame, or both. They had been a month to sea and it was the first time Natsu had seen anything but joy, true or feigned, from Gildarts. "Her name is Cana. She's Cornelia's. Looks just like her, too." That was all Natsu needed to understand. The shanty about Cornelia told how she left the Commodore to die young, but nothing of any children that came of her. "Last I heard, she disappeared on a ship to somewhere. Away from Alvarez, at least. Where then, I'm going to start looking as soon as I'm pardoned."

Natsu gazed over the pink horizon without land in sight. "It's gonna take a while."

"I wouldn't want to die before I tried. You'll know how it is, someday."

And someday would never come, as the storm approached quicker than any ungodly storm ever had. What did you do to deserve such a storm? Natsu wanted to ask. At first, a little wave had rocked the ship, no more than a cradle. Why would he think anything of it, when the sky was still clear and warm? Then came a second wave that took his foothold and threw him against the railing, had him staring into the deep blue depths and watch the waves foam. Not even then had he thought that they were going to die.

Zeref had not left the cabin for days–-and probably swatted the storm away like a fly. As long as the sun was up, and under candlelight by nightfall, he studied the maps of land and charts of sea, and Natsu could only wonder if it made him any wiser—he'd not talked to anyone for just as long. Natsu had amused himself with the thought of Zeref bursting through the doors to the open deck, frothing at the mouth and pointing at the moon.

That was all once upon a time, when the sky was blue and when Natsu had thought that nothing could be worse than a bit of seasickness.

Of course, he was wrong. He was wrong most of the times, and when he was right, he'd rather be wrong.

"Abandon ship!"

What a funny thing to say, he thought. There's nowhere to abandon to.

an. lazy n didn't edit. thank you for your attention.