He watches them by the fence, thinking quietly about the laughter that echoes over the tall grass that bends gently under the caress of the early evening wind. The sun is setting quietly, opening the door to the ending of the day. The moment he sees is near-perfect, so much that he wishes he had some way to capture and preserve it to keep in his little wooden box, to turn to when the world seems to be on the verge of ending out at sea.

But he has neither a way nor a prayer, and he chooses not to dwell much on such sad thoughts. He is a man of few regrets and fewer wants. The life he leads teaches you to be thankful for the present.

And he is. Always.

There is a simplicity to the image they make: the silhouette of woman and two children in a world all their own. It tugs at his heartstrings and he knows that this is all he could ever want should God ask him what he needs.

The boy, the older of the two at five, hoists himself up on the fence, straddling the wood as he might the small pony he rides in the late mornings. The hand he extends is to the little one, his sister, so young still at three. They are a unit two of the same kind. Their mother's children and no one else's.

He remembers their faces pressed between the bars that spill onto the staircase, the way their eyes watch the ongoings of a house that is not really theirs, but makes them safe. He remembers how their hands clasp, one over the other, the sincerity of the security that they find in each other. He likens it to the memory of the lines on a ship. Safety lines that keep him and his fellow sailors safe onboard when the world seems too apocalyptic to return to the way it once was. He knows that this comparison is too flimsy and less tangible, unable to truly relay that which is unexplainable by mere words alone.

He turns his eyes now to her figure, and as his fingers close over his palm he remembers the feel of these threading through her soft hair. The pressure behind each as they traced the contours of her body, warm beneath his only two nights before. He calls to him the shades of that memory: kisses so hushed they were secret even to them, laughter muted as they made love for the first time, though he was not inexperienced, and she no blushing bride.

He wonders what he has done to merit this chance and turns his face upwards to the clouds that spread overhead like the sails on a mast. Perhaps it is that he has always known that what he feels is all that he has kept inside himself for the past six years. That the love he knew of was the gaping hole over his heart, the same one he shot into himself when he let her go that first time. The same one that refused to fade even when he knew she had vowed herself to another: a man who gave her the two treasures she valued more than her own life. The same man who drove her back here, injured, to the place where their roads could meet once more.

It is this thought that once sat at his bedside many a night, waiting, he supposes for some acknowledgement on his part. It is that same thought that he can almost swear let out knowing laughter when he walked through the door almost a week ago and saw her arguing with her uncle. Her face is older now at twenty-three compared to the girl of sixteen who snuck out under the wine-colored summer sky to see him. But despite these changes in her, both inwards and out, he knows that she is still that same girl, a single silk ribbon in her dark hair.

He supposes that if he truly admits it to himself, he will realize that has spent the last six years in patient regret, conversing quietly with the Father up above while steering his captain's ship through bad weather, the temperamental sea and one-too-many battles he has given up counting.

I miss her, if you must know. He knows he has uttered those words between prayers more times than he can recall. He knows them well enough without having to think them over while grace is passed over meals.

Now she is here again, a lifetime away and back, with a child on each hand, and her feelings for him plain and true still in her eyes.

I don't need much. He remembers her words against his heart, her lashes like butterfly wings over his skin. I don't ask for anything that can't be given. Her lips taste of the familiar, like the spray of sea on his face.

He wants to be so much more than who he knows he is, to surpass the life that he knows, giving her what he still believes she deserves: the life she was born to, the same life she married into, the same one that she'd run from.

He wants to be able to provide for them all, the way a man is expected to do. The way a man could be proud of in his old age.

But when her whispers echo in his mind he understands the words she gave to him between gasps and heartfelt cries of utter surrender:

Security can be given without love. But love... the true kind, the selfless kind, can never be given and lack security.

The high-pitched cries of delight shatter the stillness of the evening, and he sees the young ones running through the same tall grass, the bark of a dog not too far away. The needle-like petals of the flowers that grow there take to the sky like the gulls at the ports he knows by face and name, and he sees her standing, her arms crossed gently over her stomach, her face though shadowed, is turned to him.

He smiles when she extends a hand, a leaf fluttering out of it when a gust of wind rushes past her, lifting her hair as though she were swimming in the sea.

Love me? She is asking again in his mind, her palm tracing a map for them both over his skin.

Always.

Always.

Inspired by Vienna Teng's Anna Rose played on loop on iTunes.

Lovingly dedicated to Sleepwalking Dreamer who dragged me onboard the HMS Surprise (not) kicking and screaming and introduced me to the wonders of period movies.

I'll not say who this is.
There are enough cues to show.