Across an Ocean
*Alternate Reality* After a voyage to America in the 1890's, two ill fated emigrant lovers (S +D) are separated only to discover each other years later, when love may not be given a second chance.
Prologue
The sun's radiance filled the sky as the air hummed with a vibrancy that held this instant fixed in time, forever. This was it. This was the moment they had been anxiously anticipating their entire lives. There before the two figures, past an old disintegrating dock, towered the the fruit of their extensive labors, their passage, and ultimately, their freedom.
And, if the darker one angled his head and squinted a little, he could just barely make out the crew milling about on deck, trudging their bodies along as they reluctantly shook the last reminiscences of sleep from their obstinate limbs. And as he stared, his eyes were stunned by a sudden glint of the sun reflecting off one of the steel cylinders.
He had to look away.
The moment was shattered. But inwardly he allowed himself a smile. He would be with those on deck soon. Casting one last nostalgic glance behind him to the rising sun and the wretched decay of his homeland, he turned and joined his fair brother as they excitedly advanced in the direction of their home for the next few weeks, looking beyond the murky shores in which it sat, to the America's.
~~~~~
Her fear was unprecedented they said. She had no reason to feel the way she did. She shouldn't have been feeling anything at all. But she was.
It was paralyzing, infuriating, invigorating. It was anything and everything, nothing yet something, a potluck, a concoction, a torrent of every feasible damnable emotion that she was never to have felt, witnessed, or imagined in the wildest her of dreams.
And they expected her to stay silent, still, a rock in the middle of the stampede of events that was thrown her way. No. That's not right. They didn't want her to stay. They just wanted her stifled. But they wanted her to be a rock all right, a rock drowned at the bottom of the Atlantic where they would ever never have to see her again.
She didn't want to leave her home, her friends, and whoever else remained to be called family. She didn't want to be carted off to some far away distant land like some horse, but that's what was going to happen. As she caught the first breath of rotting wood intertwined with the scent of salt spray and compacted bodies, she was made to approach a contraption made of lumber and steel – her floating cage.
And she was powerless to stop any of it.
