Ok, so this might seem like a one-shot. As a matter of fact, it just might be... Maybe.
Or is it?
I dunnow.
*8*
The specimen
Blue eyes.
That was all he could think about.
He'd seen in in young teenage girls before. It wasn't that rare. But this girl… Man, she was a specimen.
How was it that she had found her way into this crowded bar full of filthy, mentally ill scum of the earth… How it didn't even seem to faze her, like she'd lived her whole life in places like these, surrounded by noisy drunk pirates… How she even managed to blend in and inspire to those who talked to her enough respect to leave her alone… That, he would never know. But he was obligated at the very least to pay an homage to the goddesses for letting him cross the path of such a rare creature for she had the most beautiful, carefully shaped deep blue eyes he'd ever seen before.
And they were worth a fortune.
He was a businessman, soaked in this big, wide, cruel world that people called piracy. The things he sold, well. He couldn't spread the word as far and wide as he'd want, for it wasn't exactly what you would call legal. All you needed to know is that this kind of rare beauty, this kind of delicacy, was his job to look for. It didn't matter where he found clients, or how he found clients. People… Have horrible sides to them. And especially in piracy, that meant business. That meant rubies. And that means very little competition. And, for somebody who'd been in the game for so long, well. Heh.
That girl had something worth way more than a few silver rubies.
He didn't even know her name. He didn't even know if she were precious to anyone. All he knew was that it was her mistake for stumbling into such a dangerous place unguarded. He'd already been carefully watching her for a while since she arrived – I mean, she had presence, you know. There was something royal about the way she hold herself, and you knew when she walked passed just by the aura she declared around her. But she were still merely a teenager. Maybe 13 years old. Maybe 14. And, well… Sadly, that was the merchandise he sold. And he'd already decided he would sell her. And getting close enough to reach her was what he'd been working on for the past few minutes.
How easy it was.
He'd kidnapped people before. He'd kidnapped women, children. It didn't even matter how much they kicked and screamed. He knew how to calm them down. He'd kidnapped every type. The crying type. The yelling type. The frightened type. He'd seen them all. He's kidnapped men, even. Men his own size. Strong men. He knew how it worked. He'd done it before. And he'd been doing this job for years. It was all the same: people were like animals. It was all the same as hunting: carefully choosing your prey. Observing it. Studying how it moves, how it breaths, how it lives. What it is doing, where it plans to go next. Predicting. Knowing. But you had to choose it, first. The prey had to have something special to it. Something others didn't have – that's what brought the price up. The rarer the specimen, the better the reward.
And this girl, with her golden hair, her pointy ears, her tender brown skin and her amazing, deep blue eyes, he thought with a hungry grin, was worth a million.
Now he knew it wasn't always easy, and he knew just by looking at her that she was the type that wasn't afraid, the kind of difficult prey that still manage by some miracle to think straight even though their life was in danger. The kind that had seen it before. The kind that was hard to catch off guard, like an attentive eagle.
And yet this. This, was perfect. Busy, her whole body turned in the perfectly opposite direction from the one he was coming from, was perfect. The density of the crowd, the agitation, the dancing light of the torches, the cozy atmosphere… Every detail was in perfect harmony, hiding him, making place for this unique occasion to capture such a rare, beautiful specimen.
He was about four or five meters away from her by now. Soon, he would have to make sure she'd be quiet. It was a bet, but it was doable. Experience was the key to this sort of rare occasion, and he could already taste the excitement of hunting such a valuable target with his sharpened by the years skill. Yet suddenly, a weird, eerie feeling crept through his bones. He felt a big heaviness tensing the atmosphere around him and closing in, stripping him from his pleasurable sense of being a hunter. His feeling of being a predator washed away as a terrified, instinctive fright replaced it as if he were slowly turning into the prey, into the one being watched. It was then that a single light pressure to his wrist told him something had delicately caught his sleeve, building up tension as he gradually turned around to see what was causing such a change in the atmosphere.
"Excuse me sir!" Said out of nowhere the excited voice of a blond young man dressed in a strange, unfamiliar green tunic. "Excuuuuuse me!"
It… Was just a little boy. No, wait… He… wasn't that young. Probably the same age as the girl who had the blue eyes, probably? The heavy tension cloud that had been looming over him for the last few seconds had all of a sudden been lifted, leaving him with this strangely dressed child eying him with concerned curiosity as he realized his speaker looked frightened.
"Are you all right, sir?" He said worryingly to the adult, afraid he had done something wrong by addressing him.
"Yes… Yes, of course, I'm sorry." The pirate responded, trying to display a friendly behavior despite keeping an attentive eye on his prey. The girl hadn't moved, even though she had oh so very lightly stiffened, as if being suddenly aware of something. But it was so slight he was practically sure it was simply another fragment of his imagination since there was still quite the distance between them.
"I'm sorry, my boy… I thought you were… Someone else. Can you give me a minute?" He asked as he finally replaced where he'd seen the young boy's typically green cloths before – they were the ones traditionally given to young males when then came to age on Outset Island – if his memory wasn't failing him quite yet. "I'm a little busy, right now.
- Oh… I'm Sorry…" answered his disappointed, kind voice. "I didn't mean to bother you, sir... "
The old man turned back to his objective in hopes the lost young boy would understand this wasn't a good time, would thereby have learned their lesson and left him to his work already. But the grip the boy had on his wrist didn't get any lighter. As a matter of fact, it seemed to tightened.
"Though…" Continued the boy's voice as it got deeper, like he didn't want to let the man go before he'd finished his sentence.
It didn't matter anymore whether or not he was actually interested in what the kid was saying: his attention was getting pulled back by the surprising strength with which he was now damaging his arm. In a last, exasperated hope of getting the child to leave him, the pirate turned around to shoo him away but couldn't seem to get any further with that plan other than simply turning towards him as he was froze in place by his expression.
And it wasn't anything close to any of the children's he'd ever met before. The heaviness. The tension. The feeling of being watched. It all suddenly came back as the small, little human calmly stared at him. A cold, polite smile was decorating his lips as he continued his thought.
"If you touch her, you'll wake up one morning with a sword through your throat."
If he'd ever been capable of telling when someone wasn't kidding, this was it. He'd never seen such a simple, confident threat on a child's traits before. As if this small, adorable boy could read his every thought and was just kindly reminding him that he was stepping over an invisible boundary. And just with the help of a mere glance into his eyes, he knew this little man could kill him. The aching cold that run through his spine warned him it was no joke. If he ever did so much as to come close to the young girl with these kind of thoughts in mind, he would die by the hand of this smiling child.
Then, unexpectedly, the boy started to laugh. A childish, innocent laugh of a kid who'd just managed to pull off the biggest prank of his life.
"If you could see your face, sir!" He loudly giggled, attracting the attention of every person standing in a one meter radius, foiling every chance he had of pursuing his first intentions. "Man, I really managed to scare you, didn't I? I've been practicing my pirate glare for a while now! So how was it? Was I scary? Were you scared?"
His endearing expression close to what you'd expect of an excited little puppy managed to soften every adult who happened to watch the scene, which you could tell by a general "Awwwww!" coming from every direction in the room, even from some of the drunk old men you would have previously thought were knocked out by the root beer. The old pirate now knew there wasn't a chance in Nayru he could kidnap the girl without immediately being caught before he could even get to her. Yet, in a lingering remain of his hunting instinct, he turned around one last time to see what he had once hoped to capture that day.
But she was gone.
He'd only peeled his eyes away from her for a mere second and the girl had already found a way to disappear into the crowd like a gust of wind that you couldn't even tell had really existed.
That somehow made him laugh.
Din all mighty, he'd been right. That girl… She was quite a catch. A very rare specimen for sure, worth even more than he'd already thought. Man, what a shame. He would have made a fortune.
Unfortunately, he'd made one mistake upon trying to capture such a noble prey.
She hadn't come unguarded.
