- Invitation Status
- Looking for partners
- Posting Speed
- 1-3 posts per day
- Multiple posts per week
- One post per week
- Slow As Molasses
- Online Availability
- On fairly regularly, every day. I'll notice a PM almost immediately. Replies come randomly.
- Writing Levels
- Adept
- Advanced
- Preferred Character Gender
- Primarily Prefer Male
- No Preferences
- Genres
- High fantasy is my personal favorite, followed closely by modern fantasy and post-apocalyptic, but I can happily play in any genre if the plot is good enough.
At first, Kane had been afraid to get on the boat. He had sat on the uncomfortable wooden bench, visualizing the whitewashed walls, the rumpled sheets, the corridor so narrow that you could barely walk through it normally, the ceiling low enough to touch, all of it as intimately familiar as his own body. He had thought walking back into that small place would be like walking back into a prison. He had thought it would be bad, would trigger... He had stopped thinking then, sitting husk-like on the bench, handcuffed to the railing, green eyes vacant and black hair falling over his face in the sea breeze, until two soldiers had come to escort him on board. Kane should have known better. Military ships had been his home for the past five years, and as uncomfortable as they might be they were familiar. Something stable and constant. It had almost been a relief to collapse onto his bed, close his eyes, and try and forget the world. Forget the memories. Think, if he was lucky, he wouldn't dream. Now it wasn't staying on he feared. It was getting off.
The USS Breaker had one of the most unlucky voyages in military history, the crew would say once they were safely docked in port, out of the reach of whatever tempestuous spirit they had angered. It was his fault, they would continue, voices dropping to a hushed whisper. That SEAL. Foster. They should have killed him back in Asia, for what he did to that village. But some judge was bribed, and he got off with nothing but a dishonorable discharge. And he brought his bad luck with him. Something would go wrong every time he screamed.
He had not been allowed on deck, to see the blue on blue of ocean on sky. He had barely been allowed out of the small room in which they had trapped him. Ultimately, Kane had been just as glad they had all left him alone. If they had come to speak with him, to torment him, things would probably have gone much worse.
The sound of the waves might have been the only thing that kept him sane. They broke against the hull of the ship, constant and ever enduring. They were a noise that a SEAL could never forget, and they became his pulse. The waves ran through his blood and they, at least temporarily, washed away the contamination in his body and mind. But the waves of shore always sounded different than the waves that crashed against the ship. They were enough to wake him from whatever uneasy slumber he had obtained, and he sat shivering, dreading what was coming. It had been ten months since he has last seen Katrina. She was going to have questions, want to know what had happened, and how she could help. And he was going to hurt her. No matter what he did, he was going to hurt her. All he could do was guess what would hurt her the least, and try and follow that path through.
There was a loose thread on one of his buttons, and he tugged at it absentmindedly. The thread unraveled easily, spooling out longer and longer under his fingers. His hand dropped away a moment later, falling listlessly back onto the thin mattress, but the thread continued to hang suspended in midair. For a moment it swirled as though caught in an air current, before it continued to pull up towards the roof of his bunk. Soon the button was free, and it slipped off the placket falling towards the floor. However, before it reached the ground, it slowed, before floating up to join the thread.
This was his gift, his new curse. If only all of it was that easy.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kane saw a drip of blood fall from the ceiling, staining his white sheet a deep red. Every muscle in his body tensed up suddenly, and he turned his head slowly. Another drop, and another. Soon it was cascading from the ceiling, a waterfall flooding the room. Kane's throat seized up, and he began to convulse on the bed as he desperately tried to voice the panic within himself. Finally the scream burst free. It echoed around the space, growing in fever and pitch. Both button and string fell from their suspended location.
The light on the ceiling shattered, plunging the room into absolute darkness. His scream ended as suddenly as the light, and along with it vanished the blood. The waves raced outside, and Kane sat in darkness until the flashlight of a soldier finally interrupted his death like peace.
"Up."
He did not resist, and the sailor did not touch him. No one had touched him since the first day of his journey, when a brash young man who had tried to grab him suddenly slipped on a puddle of water that had not seemed to be there a moment before and shattered his wrist when he tried to catch himself.
The sun was almost painfully bright, causing Kane to blink hard and lift one hand to shade his eyes. He couldn't see anything beyond the water. It was all washed out with the light. And then he saw her. She was standing there, staring at him, and she was smiling so sweetly.
A tear ran down his cheek, where it was grabbed by a stray breeze and flung into the ocean, to be lost among all the other saltiness.
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