A/N: Thanks to CanaceErinn, my fabulous beta!
TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons,
And buccaneers, and buried gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
--So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballentyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creation lie!
-- Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
I remember the water.
Dark…murky…one could easily get lost in there, if one were stupid enough to swim.
I can almost smell the dampness in the air.
The rough hands that I had felt many a time. That hair, long and braided and full of silver beads. I will never forget the way the moon shone off the silver, making tiny stars twinkle out of nowhere. He was something out of a story…someone so interesting, yet so different.
It was an endless dream.
Those years of my life are some that I will never forget. Even if I had not taken the care to write my adventures down, I could not have possibly forgotten those days, weeks, months spent aboard that ship.