Hey guys, I am sorry for the long wait and everything. I am still incredibly busy with my studies, and there is so much to do - it is a little overwhelming at times.

I don't know when I will have the time to write again, or the inspiration (outside of when I should be cramming for exams), to continue this story, so I apologize beforehand for what will probably be another long wait.

I used the deadwood to make the fire rise
The blood of innocence burning in the skies
I filled my cup with the rising of the sea
And poured it out in an ocean of debris

I'm swimming in the smoke
Of bridges I have burned
So don't apologize
I'm losing what I don't deserve

-Burning In The Skies, Linkin Park

Off the coast of Elodea, The Grand Line
Jan. 15th 2400

A roar, much akin to that of some monstrous beast, rang out behind her, a sound so loud it could be felt as it passed through her: a reverberation in the cavity of her lungs, an agonizing pressure on the tympanic membranes in her ears. She cried out in pain as one of them ruptured, and, a moment later, in surprise when she was knocked her over and she fell to the deck of the small ship she and Hawken had commandeered in the harbour.

She could not help the disorientation, which welled over her as she tried to get her eyes to focus on the tarred planks in front of her nose, but for some reason her sight refused to obey. Her ears were ringing and every time she swallowed there was a stinging sensation in her left auditory canal as if someone was driving needles into her skull. She wiped her hand over her left cheek to abate the tickling feeling that, despite all the other things, which were going on, refused to be ignored. When her hand came away bloody, was when she started to worry.

So she went through the routine check-up. She wiggled her toes, then her ankles and her legs, and continued the same procedure with her arms. She concluded there was no nerve damage as all her body parts seemed to be under her control, there were no broken bones in any of her extremities and, from what she could tell by the absence of pain, no damage to any of her vital organs either. In fact all that was wrong with her, aside from her ear, was a pair of bruised knees, an abrasion on the front of her right shoulder and along that same collarbone, and a scrape on her chin from when she had skidded across the deck.

During the time it had taken her to reach that deduction her eyes had stopped swimming and she looked around in the attempt to get a hold on what had happened. Hawken was sprawled out near the mast, blood welling from a broken nose and a nasty scratch across the right side of his face. He was speaking to her, but no sound came out. She tried to tell him, but for the first time in her life, she could not hear the words reverberating inside her skull as her tongue formed them and her vocal cord brought them to life. All she could hear was that insistent high-pitched tone, which was still in her ears.

She was pushing herself up into a sitting position when something struck her hand, and she yelped in pain and surprise. A pebble rolled away from the point of impact and came to rest on the black wooden boards a few feet from where it struck. A moment later something else hit her in the back of the head and she discovered that all kinds of miniature missiles were bombarding her newly appropriated vessel. There was only one place where they could have come from, and she turned around to face the explosion's point of origin.

Her brain could not quite comprehend the horror of what was unfolding before her eyes. It registered the images that her optic nerves recorded, but none of them made any sense.

A moment ago Elodea, the island of her birth, the only place in the whole world she knew, had been the image of peace and idyll. It had been green and lush and fertile, with that perfect small-town feel as if it had enough in itself and did not care for the troubles of the outside world. But now, now it was unequivocally the worst sight she had seen in the fifteen years of her life, worse than the blistered, bleeding body of Tanner Serh, when he had been dragged from his burning home, worse than the bloated corpses she and Hawken had once found on the beach.

She felt as if she was having a nightmare. Surely she had to be having a nightmare.

But no, her senses told her. The cloud of dust and smoke, which billowed around the island, was not the figment of a dream, and neither was the raging inferno behind it. She could not write the uncanny shade of the smoke off as an image her subconscious mind had conjured up to scare her, could not deny the vivid reds, oranges, yellows, which clashed with black and grey to form an abstract, awful work of art in the sky above the island.

A gust of wind blew the obscuring smoke away, and suddenly she was staring at the burning wasteland, which was all that was left of her former home. Half the island had already sunken to the depths of black oblivion and, as she watched, powerless, helpless, more pieces of land broke free and were swallowed by the hungry waves of the ocean. The two towns and all the villages had been erased from the surface of the planet, the forests had been flattened by the force of the explosion and the flames were devouring everything that could still burn. She could not hear the roar of the fire, and, later, she would bless herself lucky that the blast had rendered her deaf, because she could not hear the screams of any who might have been burning to death if any of her countrymen were still alive at this point. She could only wish she had been temporarily blinded as well.

The debris, which could not sink, floated on the water around what was left of Elodea, an unsorted mess of irregular sized items and blackened wreckage. In varying states of charred and broken, she could not find it within herself to try to distinguish what had once been a chair, from what might have been the baker or the butcher's son.

The shower of dirt and pebbles, which had rained down on the small vessel was dwindling and ash was drifting down from where it had been blown into the atmosphere. It settled like snow of the waves and in her hair and she could not help the acrid taste in the back of her throat at the thought that it might be all that was left of a person she had known. Perhaps, she thought with bitter morbidity, it was her mother's last act of spite.

The shock wave had broken the ropes, which held the sail in place, though luckily the sail had remained largely undamaged. But until she and Hawken replaced them, they were going nowhere fast, and neither of them seemed able to tear their sights away as Elodea drew its last breath. The stolen vessel drifted further from what was once a shore and Calico found herself unable to cry. Even when the sea swallowed the last bit of the island, she still did not shed a tear. Everything and everyone she had ever known had disappeared in a matter of minutes and she remained as unmoving and expressionless as the day her mother first called her a monster.

It was because her new reality had not settled on her, she knew, the horrible crime she had just committed had not had the time to sink in. Later she would cry her eyes out, she woved. Later, she would show that she was as much human as they swore she was not. Later.

Onboard The Nocturne, open sea, The Grand Line
Jun. 21st 2407

Calico woke up at an unearthly hour bathed in cold sweat and with a heartbeat far exceeding that of a normal resting person. At first she was unable to breathe properly, partly because the nightmare still had its claws in her and partly because of the humidity that assaulted her the moment she returned to consciousness. She felt clammy and hot, and knew that she would not be going back to sleep anytime soon. Instead she dressed and left the confines of her cabin to find a respite from the closeness.

Outside the new day was drawing its first breath, brightening the world in that greying, ephemeral hour where everything seemed the figments of dreams. They young captain could make out the black outlines of her ship against the brightening sky; the rigging an intangible ladder to the heavens, the crow's nest a black smudge against the clouds.

Ikara, who had the wheel that night, called a greeting that went only half-heard and was acknowledged by an absentminded wave in return. A familiar sense of emptiness had taken a hold of the captain as she drifted towards the prow, where the breeze, the forward motion of the Nocturne created, was most potent. It was the same emptiness, which always followed the nightmare, the acute knowledge that even though she regretted the destruction of her homeland, there had not been a single person on that island who's death she mourned. It was the knowledge that seven years later she had yet to fulfil her promise.

An hour dragged itself past, agonizingly slow as the horizon brightened and she watched the pale dawn creep over the world in a spectacularly unspectacular progression from near-black to a deep blue-grey colour. The sky had threatened rain since the day before, but as it was, it had yet to make good of that promise.

The grey clouds had greeted them the previous afternoon, a dubious welcome from the island they were closing in upon. Something in the air had thrown Kaname into a fit of fretting and calculating and fretting some more, and while the air pressure had dropped and the temperature risen, he had given his estimate that they would most likely reach Evergreen Kingdom before the storm broke.

Calico considered herself a descent navigator. It was not difficult to follow a logpose as long as you remembered to check its position at regular intervals – even if she could not account for the eventual whirlpool or the seemingly random currents in certain places. When outside the Grand Line, she could even operate a compass and sextant, or plot a course from the position of the sun and stars. Yet while those were skills that could be learnt fairly easily, Kaname had an ability, which made him a phenomenal nautical navigator. He seemed to be instinctively attuned to the weather, as if his body felt even the slightest changes in air pressure and temperature, and by that he was able to predict the movements of the sea currents, changes in wind speed and even when it would rain. The young pirate captain was certain that this innate sensitivity was something only a handful of people worldwide possessed.

The rest of the crew had not known of the threatening tempest until just before twilight when the wind had died and their sails slackened. That the wind speed dropped from one moment to another was not an entirely unusual phenomenon on the Grand Line, but in this case it alerted everyone to the oppressiveness of the atmosphere, which had been increasing steadily for hours. And then Kaname had proved his worth yet again by guiding them to a passage of wind, which propelled them towards their destination with a decent speed. It was times like those that everyone forgave his jumpy character and his peculiar attitude, because no one wanted to row the rest of the way, and no one wanted to be caught in open seas during a storm.

After sunrise Hawken joined her with a cup of steaming tea and a basket of freshly baked scones. For a while they stood in companionable silence while seagulls played above the waters and unknowingly heralded the proximity of an island that was still hidden behind the edge of the horizon. Behind them the "goodnights" of the night watch rang out and the "good mornings" of the day watch greeted them from the stairs that led below decks.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Hawken asked her after some time. There was no condemnation in his enquiry, and she could tell he was not questioning her decision either. Rather he was making sure she had thought things through and was not about to do something she would regret later on.

She did not look at him, did not have to, and, perhaps, some small part of her did not want to either. She knew why he asked, knew that he knew how she sometimes let anger overshadow her judgement and made rash choices she usually ended up wishing she had not made.

"I am sure," she said firmly, because although she was angry at Ace, at the Fates, at the world and at the baby for being there, unwanted in her womb, she had spent enough time on her own lately, unable to fend off the most pressing matter on her mind (even if she had persistently tried), and she had looked beyond that anger. And from that, one blaringly obvious fact had emerged to shine brightly in the darkness before her: allowing the child to be born would be the worst thing she could ever do to it.

"You are not your mother," he said quietly, but with a certainty that might as well have been moulded from molten rock and left for the world to see for eons to come.

She sighed. She should have expected Hawken to bypass all the crap and the half-truths she could feed to other people and cut straight to the heart of the matter. He always had and, she suspected, always would see right through her as if she was as transparent as glass. She should have known he would hear all the things she left unsaid.

She supposed it was an understanding born from years of companionship and the formation of a bond that ran deeper and stronger than blood, but though he seemed to read her like an open book, the same was not true in the reverse. She could not look at his face and discern every emotion there and the reasons behind them. She had known him for so long that she recognised the small changes, which betrayed his general state of mind, and she knew him well enough to guess most of what lay behind. Still, she could not see through the layers as easily as he did, could not look at him and just know the right things to say. But Hawken was clever with people and had an instinctive understanding of the workings of the human mind or an inborn ability to read body language or some other aptitude, which allowed him to connect and comprehend on a deeper level than any she could ever hope to achieve. He was like Kaname that way; born with a gift few others shared.

Hawken knew her deepest fears, as she knew his, and somehow he had known that it was this fear, and not her anger, which had led her to take the first steps down the path she had chosen. What he did not know was that although Calico had skirted around it ever since it had first manifested itself inside her chest, too afraid of what she might find to study it in detail, she had confronted that concern as well. It had not been because she had felt any desire to do so, but rather because she knew that whichever way the scales tipped would have enormous influence on the life of her unborn child.

"No," she acknowledged and left the rest of the sentence to hang unsaid on her next exhalation.

Judging by his sharp look in her direction he had once again picked up on the things she had not said, things that lay implicit in that one word. "Callie!" he exclaimed, exasperation, impatience and shock warring in his voice.

"Don't argue," she told him flatly, tiredly, "it won't change anything."

And Hawken, of course, did not listen.

Hawken could say what he wanted, though. He could disagree from here to the end of the world, but he was not omnipresent, he was not God. He was only human, and as such he was bound to be biased - and especially about personal matters. He could not judge her without prejudice because he was her friend, and their bond indisputably made him overlook at least some of her flaws. Besides, what friendship could last if one part thought of the other as a monster?

So Calico let him talk, she let him rant and argue to his hearts contend, and while her heart warmed by his words and convictions, her mind remained as resolved as ever.

Rainy Town, Evergreen Kingdom, the Grand Line
Jun. 21st 2407

Hours after Hawken had pushed off from where he had been leaning against the railing and had ended his monologue The Nocturne glided through the murky waters of Rainy Town's harbour. The clouds had thickened and the world seemed cast in premature dusk.

Calico still stood in the prow of her ship, but the reduced speed, which resulted from her crew's effort to manoeuvre the vessel into place at the quay, no longer served to stave off the oppressive weather.

It was not their first time in Rainy Town and, the redhead assumed, neither would it be their last. Still, no matter how many times she saw the place, it's peculiar structures never failed to amaze. All the buildings were constructed entirely out of stone and roofed with dark slate, but even in the untimely twilight, the craftsmanship that had went into constructing each of them did not go unnoticed. It was not the houses, however that commanded your immediate attention when you arrived, but the characteristic structures, which spanned the spaces between the buildings. Because every street was raised above the ground on stone supports and covered with wooden planks to keep the inhabitants feet from getting wet and muddy, and they were roofed over by a wirework of intricate steel constructions with every gap and hole between them covered with panes of glass, to ensure dry passage between destinations. The coverage was designed to lead the rainwater towards a number of pipes, which drained into an underground network of tunnels and eventually led the excess water into the sea.

Rainy Town had not earned its name for nothing. Evergreen Kingdom was probably the place in the whole world where there fell the most precipitation, and since it was the country's larges port, most people who came to the island, came to this very place. Once the city had had another name, but as time passed, people had adopted the popular sailor's slang and eventually the city council had given in to popularity and changed the name to its current form.

Calico beheld their destination as the Nocturne closed in on her mooring space, confident that her crew knew what they were doing and had no immediate need of her instructions. She had once been fortunate enough to see Rainy Town in sunlight, which was in fact a rare delight, and she had realized the appropriateness of its other nickname. Because in the sun the millions of differently angled glass panes had sparkled like diamonds and the Crystal City had lit up from within in a dazzling display of light. Even in this weather the settlement held an undeniable beauty as the lamps illuminated the inside of the covered streets and their warm glow reflected on the glass to create an ethereal, inviting atmosphere.

When the last of the mooring lines were secured to the bollards, Calico gave Salen and Bol orders to continue watching the ship and granted everybody else leave to do as they pleased. With no further ado, she disembarked and went in search of a medical facility with a reasonable doctor who was willing to let go of his own ego and do as his patients asked. She could not help but notice Hawken's watchful worry and Denn's venomous glare on her neck as she walked down the gangplank.

The buxom brunette had not spoken to her since their encounter in the captain's cabin a week prior although Calico, fed up with being scooped up indoors and almost desperate to get some training done, had left her private quarters the day after. The willowy redhead had kept mostly to herself though; caught up in her own thoughts, and her friends had left her alone.

Calico strode across the paved expanse between the quay and the glass covered streets. As she ascended the stairs a violent gust of wind slammed into her back and a moment later a light drizzle picked up. In the short time it took her to get up the rest of the stairs and under the sheltering construction, it had turned into the kind of downpour Rainy Town was renowned for. She moved away from the opening and deeper into the city as a lightning split the sky overhead, momentarily banishing all shadows in a bright, white flash. She did not pay much heed to the weather though, as she searched for a local, who might give her directions to the doctor. Most of the foreign visitors were clearly distinguished by their upturned faces and frequent exclamations of wonder as another lightning briefly blazed to life just to disappear again a second later. The natives, however, were accustomed to such displays and their casual disregard for the raging of the elements left no doubt as to their origin. It was not difficult for Calico to identify one such woman.

Armed with a thorough set of directions to what was allegedly the best doctor in town, the young pirate weaved her way between unflappable inhabitants and gawking tourists until she found the white door that had been described to her. The door was adorned with a bronze plaque, which proclaimed that Doctor Abre Nettlese received patients between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and that everyone was welcome.

The redheaded captain pressed down the handle, and resolutely entered a waiting area adorned with two coffee tables and an assortment of chairs aligned along the walls. She gave her name to the secretary, received a number, and took a seat with one of today's newspapers.

She had made a habit of reading the paper every morning, but the unfortunate circumstances of the past few months had left her uncommonly negligent on that front. Therefore she was surprised to read that there had been an incident on one of the first islands of the Grand Line, where a rampaging green-haired swordsman had killed a rather large number of bounty hunters. There had been some wild rumours in circulation as none of the survivors had been particularly happy to divulge exactly who the culprit was, but it had been established that the man was Roronoa Zoro of the Strawhat Pirates.

The name of that crew left a bitter taste on her tongue as she recalled that day when she had shown Ace his brother's first wanted poster, the same day where the child she was going to have removed had been conceived. She would not think of Ace though, so she banished his charming, freckled face from her thoughts and returned to the paper.

The victims had not been very forthcoming as to why so many mercenaries had been congregating on that island either. The author of the article, however, presented what mostly appeared to be a conspiracy theory, and marked them as members of the elusive Baroque Works; sent there to prey on newbie pirates as they emerged from the Blues. Although he was not able to present any evidence, there was something about it, which set little warning bells ringing in her head. Only gossip had reached this far into the waters of the New World, but since she had first heard about them two years ago, the reports had only grown more disturbing. There was a limit to how much credit one could afford such things, however, and Calico was not of a habit to believe everything she heard.

Another report made mention of a rookie pirate crew that was burning its way through its first string of islands on the Grand Line, and left behind a trail of death and destruction on par with Malhollo the Dread. Survivors' statements marked them as a ghastly bunch led by a red-haired devil with a taste for carnage. In the article figured a picture of the smouldering ruin of a city and the wanted poster of one Eustass 'Captain' Kidd. The young woman stared at her fellow redhead and wondered if that demonic streak they shared could be attributed to hair colour or if it was something else, which was to blame. He certainly looked the part, she had to give him that, with his maniacal smirk and those piercing eyes he made no attempt at masking the cruelty upon his face.

Her name was called, and Calico was glad for the distraction. She did not like to be reminded of what she was.

The doctor was a tall, spindly creature with a pair of thick glasses that enlarged his eyes and made him look like a peculiarly mix between a man and a nocturnal animal.

"Hello miss," he greeted her and shook her hand politely. "What can I do for you?"

She plopped into a chair beside his desk and explained to him the details of her condition. She let him know that she had thought long and hard about whether she should keep the baby or not.

"An abortion, you say," he said, scratched his chin and sent a pointed look in the direction of her stomach. "And I can hear you have thought it through as well. How far along are you?"

"About eight weeks," she answered.

"You are in luck then," the doctor declared. "Since it's so early in the pregnancy, all that is required to terminate it is the ingestion of a simple pharmaceutical. All you have to do is swallow a pill and the rest will take care of itself."

"Perfect," she told him.

"First, however, I will have to perform a gynaecological examination to inspect the size of the uterus and ensure that you do not have any sexual diseases."

So Calico dropped her pants, lay down on the examination couch and let him do his business.

When doctor Abre was satisfied, the young woman donned her clothing and reclaimed her seat by his desk. The man had bustled off to an adjoining room that, as far as she could tell from where she sat, held all his equipment as well as an assortment of pharmaceuticals through which he was currently rummaging. She heard an exclamation of joy, and soon after the bespectacled creature emerged carrying a small plastic container.

"I will give you some privacy, miss" Abre said and headed for the door to the waiting area. "If you would follow me." He led her through another door, behind which was a short corridor, and motioned her into one of the small rooms, which abutted it. "When you are done, please go back to the waiting area and wait for me to check up on you. It is unlikely anything will happen, but since I am not your regular doctor, and thus am unfamiliar with your medical history, I want to make sure you do not have an allergic reaction to the drugs."

The redhead nodded numbly as he placed the container with the pills on the table, poured her a glass of water and then made to leave.

"Take your time, miss," he said. "There is no rush."

Calico plopped into the chair, but had yet to make a move for the pills. They lay so innocently on that plastic tray. It was almost inconceivable that two so small capsules held the power to end a life before it had begun. But fact was that they had, and once she swallowed them, there would be no way to withdraw, no going back.

'When you're old enough to play, you're old enough to pay,' the Doc had said during their argument, but Calico knew that children should not be a price, which had to be paid. They should be a joy and a blessing and people, who could not see that, did not deserve to be parents. And then there was the wellbeing of such a child to consider, because as a parent, you had a responsibility to ensure the best possible conditions for your offspring to grow.

Calico had never wanted children, never dared to trust herself with the life of a child and had always been afraid that she could not shoulder the responsibility. Furthermore, she could not give birth in good conscience when she knew the world she would be bringing a baby into.

She could not expose it to herself in good conscience either. She was a monster, a murderer. She already had so many lives on her conscience that she could be swimming in their blood, and, although Hawken would object, one more should not make that much of a difference. Abortion was not even murder, if you believed some people, because the foetus did not have awareness this early in the pregnancy. Some even claimed that it was not a person until it had left the womb.

And yet, as she stared at those two inconspicuous white tablets, she realised that it did make a difference. This child was not an enemy who threatened her or her loved ones, it was not some great evil that had to be vanquished or an opponent who refused to give up. It was her child, her own flesh and blood. Pure and untainted by the woes of the world. Innocent.

Something sour welled up in her throat and she had to concentrate not to vomit on the doctor's spotless floor. She had already killed so many innocents, people who had not stood in her way or opposed her, people who had never wronged her, people who did not deserve to die. If she could swim in the blood of her fallen enemies it was nothing compared to that of the lives she had stolen. The lives that still haunted her at night when she slept.

She wanted to curse herself. This internal discussion had already unfolded several times and in the end the result was always the same. By killing the foetus, she would be saving it from a world without pity, from a mother, who was a monster, and a father, who was good for nothing. It would be a mercy killing. It would be a kindness.

She made a grab for the pills.

Elodea, The Grand Line
Jan. 15th 2400

"Move that keg over here, Hawken," a fifteen-year-old girl shouted and motioned with her arm towards the spot where she was arranging the remains of their hideout. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her golden eyes shone with excitement in the glow of the lantern she was holding.

"Are you sure this is necessary Callie?" the black-haired boy asked, sweating from moving the powder keg they had stolen the day before. "We could probably put this to better use when it comes to a confrontation with one of those pirate crews."

"Probably," she agreed with a grin as she set the lantern down, "but we don't want anyone taking over our stuff, or going through our secrets. Do we?"

"Then set it on fire!" her contemporary exclaimed with exasperation. "There is no need to blow up the swamp."

She gave him a contemptible look and grabbed the keg from his hands. "Where's the fun in a fire? I want to leave with a bang! And if we splatter this whole place in stinking swamp sludge, it's even better. A big, fetid fuck-you to all the suckers on this island."

"What about the pirates?"

Mihawk Calico shook her head and wondered if he argued because he really was worried, because he knew she hated it, or if he did it for the sake of arguing. "I will protect you from the pirates. I can cleave them with my swords before they get within firing range. Satisfied?"

She knew he was not, but Hawken still threw up his hands in surrender. She knew that he knew she had made up her mind, and there was no point in arguing, because she was not going to reconsider anyway.

"You used to be fun, you know that?" she accused, grunting now with the effort of moving the gunpowder.

Hawken sighed and reclaimed the barrel. "And you never made much sense to begin with."

She slapped him on the shoulder, grin back on her face, as he placed the combustible on the pile of things they had decided not to bring on their journey: A manifesto describing what was required in order to be accepted into their gang, an inventory of the things they had stolen, Calico's collection of embroidered napkins, her mother's favourite shoes, Hawken's array of wood carvings, glass bottle lanterns and fishing rods, the tree stumps they used for chairs, the boards that had made up the walls of their hideout, the wildflowers they had gathered and dried. It would all burn.

"I'll set the fuse," the redhead said. "Should give us about half an hour to get out of here."

"Great," the boy responded, "I can't wait to get off this island!"

"Yeah, and out of this reeking bog!"

Rainy Town, Evergreen Kingdom, the Grand Line
Jun. 21st 2407

The sun had long since set in a display as uneventful and dull as the sunrise had been that same morning when Calico found her way back to The Nocturne. She waved at Bol and Kaname, who had drawn the evening watch and were on guard duty until midnight. One never knew what could happen in a Grand Line town, and it was better to take precautions than to come back and find your ship gone or to be woken in the middle of the night with a knife at your throat.

The boards under her feet made no sounds of protest as she crossed the deck and neither, for that matter, did the stairs as she descended into the bowels of the ship. One of the first things she had taught herself after she bought The Nocturne was how to move silently about its hallways and staircases. She had oft wondered about that peculiar tendency on her part, but she had never figured out what had sparked it or why she had maintained the skill so meticulously throughout the years. Perhaps it was an unconscious precaution she had taken in case someone unwanted slipped onboard so she could overpower them before they knew she was there, perhaps it was a wish for privacy because everyone did not necessarily need to know where she walked. Perhaps she was just a sly, sneaky persona, who enjoyed being able to tiptoe about with no one being none the wiser.

There were only three rooms on this deck; the galley, the library and the training area, with the library in the stern beneath the Captain's cabin and the two other located to either side. She made her way down the hallway, aiming for the kitchen and the possible leftovers from dinner. She had not eaten anything since the scones that morning, and truth be told she was famished. She could hear voices through the open door, Denn and Hawken mainly, but she guessed the rest of her crew was there as well. They worried about her, she knew, and she had given them little reason to put their concerns aside.

She knew it was a bad thing to eavesdrop on her friends, but Calico was drawn to the sound of their discussion and the warm glow spilling trough the galley door lured her in like a moth to a flame.

"I don't know, Hawken," Denn's voice sounded exasperated and tired. "I just don't understand how she can do something like that, say something like that."

"It's her decision Denn," Hawken said, and Calico realized they were talking about her. He sounded just as tired as if this was a conversation they had repeated several times in the past few days. "If she does not want a baby, you cannot force her to."

"But to murder your own child –"

"Even if I agree with you," Ikara interrupted, "it is obvious that the Captain does not feel the same way. Abortion is a controversial matter, and you said it yourself, she has though it through. So even if we feel her reason is flawed, from her perspective she has made the choice that is right for her. We cannot fault her for that."

"But still," the Doc chimed in," there are other options than terminating the pregnancy. She could give it up for adoption."

"No," Hawken said quietly, as steady an unbending as a mountain, "she could not."

"You keep saying that, Hawken," Denn hissed, "but what does it even mean? It is not as if it would kill her to give it away."

"It wouldn't kill her," he acknowledged, "but it might very well be the death of the child."

"Would you just explain to us why that is?"

"No. It is not my story to tell."

Calico could understand Denn's frustration even if she felt a sting of betrayal that they were discussing this behind her back and not talking to her face to face. And she had to hand it to her best friend that his answers sure were infuriating. She also had to admit that the stubborn way he defended her and her decision was quite heart-warming.

"You are impossible, you know that?!" The young captain could imagine Denn throwing her hands up in surrender. "You and Callie both. Absolutely impossible!"

They lapsed into silence and Calico debated whether she should slink away before one of them decided to exit the room. It would be awkward for both her and the others if they discovered she had heard what they had said, even if it were only the last part.

"What did the captain mean when she called herself a monster?" Val piped in after a while, eighteen and as innocent as they come.

Hawken's tone was mild when he responded, "It's a long story, and not mine to tell either."

"She can't be though," the girl insisted. "She's good, and kind, and compassionate. She helps people."

"Indeed." Hawken's tone was bitter when he replied. "The problem is getting her to believe it."

There he went again, with his ignorant convictions and his naïve beliefs. He should know her better than anyone and still he refused to acknowledge the truth. She was not a good person.

Calico decided she had heard enough and turned to creep away before she was discovered. But before she could even take the first step, a loud mewl sounded from near her feet and a soft, furry cat rubbed itself against her lower leg with a purr. She almost jumped out of her skin, her heart rate increasing as adrenalin spiked and her muscles tensed, ready to flee or fight.

"Fatty!" the red-haired pirate hissed through her teeth and under her breath as silence once again settled over the congregation in the galley. A chair scraped over the wooden floor as she bent to pick up the grey tom and soon enough Ikara stuck her head out of the door.

"Captain," the other woman greeted as Calico stood there in the hallway with an armful of cat and tried not to look guilty.

"He surprised me," the redhead said and motioned toward the purring miscreant in her arms. There was no way she could head back to her cabin now without raising some kind of suspicion, and with a mental sigh, she prepared herself to play ignorant of what she had overheard. "Are there any food left?"

Moments later she was sitting in a chair at the dining table in the galley while Barra bustled around in the pantry to find something suitable to serve as a late dinner because he refused to reheat any of the leftovers from the crew's dinner. A slightly awkward silence was the only indication that her friends had been talking about her before The Fat had foiled her silent retreat, and if Calico had not heard them arguing, she would have assumed it was because they did not know how to treat her after all the things she had recently struggled with.

She made casual small talk; asked the Doc if he had managed to stock up on his medical supplies, and Barra nodded when she enquired about the pantry and the conditions of their supplies. Salen had not yet managed to locate the spare parts he would need as The Nocturne's resident ship's carpenter because he had had been on watch duty most of the day, but he expected it could be easily done in the morning.

Then Barra placed a plate of sandwiches in front of her, and she concentrated on filling the hole in her stomach. The rest of the table lapsed into silence once more as they watched her eat, and Calico could not help but feel the pressure of their watchful eyes. When it became clear that she did not intend to tell them of her day, a timid conversation started up, though it soon progressed into what on the surface seemed like a regular exchange between them. The tension was still simmering beneath the surface though, and Calico soon excused herself.

"I would like it if everything was packed and ready to go no later than tomorrow afternoon," she divulged before she departed. "If that proves difficult, however, we can stretch it a day or two. Whatever the case, I would like to get off this island as soon as possible."

"Where are we going in such a hurry Captain," Hawken asked.

"Well," she said with a grim smile, "I think it's about time I paid my dear uncle a visit."