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If I were to blame anybody for any of it, I would have blamed my parents for teaching me how to read.

I spent many years of my life indoors, due to a weak body and a delicate temperament. One of those things persisted into my adulthood, and the other did not. If you were to ask which I'd have preferred to keep, I wouldn't have an answer. The choice might have been much easier, if only kindness were expected amongst men, but the world was a terrible, unkind place. To be kind was a weakness. To show emotion was a weakness. This was, as I would have thought too crass to say at the time, a pile of horseshit. And that was propriety.

I always thought you should just pick and choose the people whose opinions you really cared about, and tell everyone else to screw off. Which, I admit, is probably a strange thing to suggest just after suggesting that I wished I might have been able to be more kind.

Reading, in those years, was the only thing I had. It exposed me to all sorts of things I'd never have been exposed to. Nonfiction taught me things I'd have needed to leave the house to learn, which was the point of it all. We weren't wealthy enough for a tutor or anything like that, so my parents had to do that work themselves. This wasn't great, since they weren't the best teachers, but they did the job, and I taught myself the rest. That's how it needed to be, too fragile to go out in the world, weak body and prone to sickness. And that sort of thing becomes self-fulfilling, too. Don't let a kid lift anything, and he won't be able to lift anything. Keep him sheltered from the world, he can't survive out in the harsh reality of a cold, uncaring world, with death and disease and that terrible, unkind thing that was humanity.

That's what the nonfiction was for, though. We bought and traded for- often with old books of our own, given how expensive the things could get- books on economics, history, and other cultures. I didn't know what they thought I'd be using the latter for. I liked those enough, especially those ones that would let me pretend I was anywhere else for a few minutes, but the fiction, rare as it was that I was able to get my paws on it, was so much better for that. It was absolute fucking magic.

For a few hours, I could live life as an adventuring hero, slaying monsters straight out of folklore. Oh, the hellish things men would put their silly little imaginations through for a little bit of drama. And, for some reason, I longed for that. You could guess why, I suppose. I longed for anything but the safety and comfort of the home, and for the world whose terrors I did not yet know, and I thought that even if I had known them, and known that terrible evils existed that were worse than any in fiction, I would still have wanted the escape.

It was those books that taught me about my body. I doubt my parents ever knew about that part. They were, most often, quite unassuming to start; books about an adventurer going just a little further than the kiss after he saves his princess, if you get my drift. "You can do that? With the... and the..." And, of course you could, and I found my own ways of pretending I could do it, too, alone in my room.

My childhood masturbatory habits were embarrassing, but probably less so than the other fantasy that reading fiction had brought on. Flintlock to the head, if you'd asked 13 year old me what I wanted to be, my answer, immediate, resounding, confident, was that I wanted to be a pirate.

They didn't write nonfiction about pirates, not the kind that would've been useful to really inform me on the decision I'd have been making, because much of what happened was unknowable except to those who had been killed or who could not tell their own stories in writing, and the rare few historians who saw the anthropological value in documenting the events of pirating were often biased against them, which I understand made sense as a warning, and was a direct reaction to the terrors that pirates wrought, but they were not, wholly, accurate. They raided civilian ships, even sometimes military ships, and destroyed families and economies. They were dirty, somehow dirtier than navymen, and rife with disease of every kind. Also, somehow, more than navymen. On basically the same living conditions, you had to wonder how that was, but I guessed the government probably didn't like their heroes being called dirty fleabags with syphilis and scurvy.

The fiction, on the other hand, was just as much a bastardization of the truth as the truth was, but it was fucking glamorous. Drinking in port, going back out to sea to drink some more, to fight in naval battles, to board ships with raiding parties, guns heroically ablaze, rapiers drawn. Violence wasn't pretty, but it was attractive when the stakes were as low as they were in fiction. The main character, our pirate captain, would never have been cut down. More than that, though, I loved the pirates that didn't need the violence at all, the pirates who were in it for the hidden treasure. Hidden treasure didn't make a lick of sense to the part of me that had read anything on the economy. Folks made their money, turned it into pure gold, and buried that gold on remote islands in the hopes that nobody would find it? Or that they could come back later? Unlikely.

Unless, it was the treasure a pirate needed to hide to conceal their crime, treasure they'd come back for some day. They'd better've charted their map correctly, tracked their spot with that famed mark of X. Or, they had to hope whatever map they stumbled into was legible and legitimate. The pirate crew wouldn't rape or pillage, they'd finance their journey on small time successes of treasure hunting. These were the pirates that were allowed to get the girl, too, because they weren't too busy killing people to treat a woman right.

I learned very quickly, though, that most all fiction could be pared down, with regards to their contents, and categorized in one of three ways: Fantastical, action packed stories of heroics and adventure; the smutty sort that polite society would pretend to be revolted by while secretly enjoying behind their closed doors, (men while off to war or to sea, and women in the absence of their husbands); and those stories that were both. This last was my personal taste.

When you're young, it isn't exactly easy to separate all of the fiction about pirates from the reality of being a pirate. When I heard the words, what I heard was freedom. To be a pirate would be to sail the open seas, to visit foreign lands, to drink and be merry. A child wouldn't consider how difficult it was to maintain a ship, and the work she needed done to keep her afloat. A child wouldn't consider that a life lived under the rules and decisions of a captain wasn't a free life at all, and to be a captain was to be constrained by the wants and needs of a crew who might mutiny at the slightest sign of weakness.

Still, the idea was a fairy tale all its own. Free from the countless hours, months, of sitting and waiting, of lookouts and deck swabbing and eating nothing but hard tack, free from the hierarchical structure of a ship, a pirate's life was everything a young man would have wanted.

It shouldn't be a surprise that I left myself to flights of fancy when out of my own reading material, or that I dreamed of piracy above all else, but those dreams faded as I grew. They did for most, I supposed. It was quite specifically a young one's fantasy to escape from his home and to live like a lush. Most who were in the life made it there one of two ways: conscripting before growing out of those fantasies, or finding themselves with no other option, whether it be financial or legal trouble giving them little room for option elsewhere. Rarely, I'd heard tell of a third group-- some pirates, low on the able seamen needed to operate their ships, would take example from the Navy and, effectively, pressgang off of ships they'd taken. They preyed on the fear of their victims to bring them into the fold, particularly if they had some special skills, like cooking or medicine. They offered that same ideal of freedom and a promise of better pay, and that, I suspected, was actually true, considering a merchant, a navy man, or even a privateer didn't reap the whole of the rewards from whatever haul they brought in.

Even still, the pirate life was for the desperate, and I, in my sheltered youth, was not quite desperate. I yearned for more, but I was not desperate. I may have remained smaller and weaker than other cats my age, but my health was on the rise by my teenage years, and if I didn't enter society, start to learn a trade, I'd have turned into a burden, feeling like an invalid, though I supposed that was exactly what I was for quite some time.

I couldn't take after my father's laborious work as a carpenter, though I learned pieces of the trade through him throughout my youth. He built furniture, mostly, and I would watch as I sat with my books, coming to understand well the way each piece fit together to create the finished product, knowing that the pieces needed to be stable, and to last. The artistry behind it developed over my years, too. The designed etchings became more intricate, and my father became better at hiding the seams and nails, and noticing this helped a lot for my own understanding. The more I studied, the more I noticed that he was using some sciences I didn't think he understood the depths of. I could read about downward force and distribution of mass-- I'd gotten quite deep into sciences in my later years-- but while my father didn't know a lick of it, he knew the wood and the craft well enough from making enough chairs that collapsed under a bit of pressure to know how to apply the concepts. He was quite smart, even if he never took to books, not quite as I had.

My mother cared for me, primarily, though she helped a local tailor as a spinstress every so often, just a few days a week for some extra coin. It wasn't often a job for married women, but she was good at it and liked it enough, and Albert was glad to have her.

It was this good favor that landed me my apprenticeship.

Our town had only three tailors, still expanding to the verge of being called a city. When our country established trade with foreign nations in the east, it became far more important to have trade settlements and the like along those routes, and we were lucky enough to be a convenient stopping point from either direction, in the shadow of the mountains to the east and the long roads towards the capital in the west.

In light of this increased need for production, Albert wanted to expand his business, but he ran into a snag when his wife, a gorgeous, full-chested woman named Lisa, became extremely ill following the discovery of her pregnancy. She lost the child in a matter of weeks.

It took years of trying, according to Albert, to get Lisa to carry again. After almost succumbing to her sickness the second time, after failing to carry to term once more the third time, they decided to stop trying.

I was a part of the solution. I would be ready far earlier than their child, and was already showing myself to be capable with numbers and people, if not my paws. I learned to keep his books, first and foremost, while learning pieces of the trade. I took over measurements, which allowed us to see new clients while he continued his work, and I even could do some of the menial work, easy stitch jobs, mending and affixing buttons, and the like. Anything to allow him to expand his business, especially as he took on another apprentice not long after me.

I wasn't offended. I knew I wasn't suited to work as a tailor. My delicate, uncalloused paws couldn't handle being pricked with a needle, and my weak arms couldn't steady themselves for long enough that I could do the important work of precise cuts and hems. He needed someone to truly succeed him, even young as we all were at the time. Albert couldn't have been much older than 30, and I no older than 16, but I was always told that unpreparedness brought disaster.

Magnus was that plan. His family, hares like Albert, had relocated to the city in search of a better life from a farming town up north. His father joined the guard, leaving Magnus to search for an apprenticeship at just the perfect time. He was only a year my junior, making him just the perfect fit.

Albert had once said that Magnus and I got on like a house on fire. Those wouldn't have been my words, but maybe he was right for the way Magnus and I tended to interact with other people. I had never been around anybody my own age, and Magnus was glad to be away from his family for the first time, living with Albert, so we both opened up far more easily to each other than to most people. This was a glacial pace, yes, but this assessment from Albert was delivered years later, with the benefit of hindsight and of years of friendship.

Magnus had always loved stories, but wasn't the best reader, so I helped him learn, offering him some of my own books, while he told me tales of a childhood and life that I could have only dreamed of, the sort filled with imagination and adventures and friends he left behind.

He was embarrassed about how much he enjoyed my own favorite novel, A Golden Bounty, about a pirate searching for treasure and finding love with a lioness. He enjoyed its contents for slightly different reasons than my own, I learned, which was the first time I had ever really considered my own differences from most men of my age, but we reveled in the topic of our burgeoning sexual interest the way many teen boys likely had. It hadn't meant anything, but taking him in my muzzle for the first time solidified how I felt about the ordeal. I had never considered the way I had always imagined the pair of lions in the books when they were together until I learned how differently we saw them. Magnus focused on the lines about her breasts, about her opening herself up to him, while I liked to imagine the penetration, his hardness sliding into her muzzle and between her legs, and it came collapsing down on me why we each focused on our specific set of tools.

It was only a few times, but they were glorious for me. Magnus was all too happy to be done with me, though, when he met Catherine. That isn't to say he cast me aside. We remained exceptionally good friends for both of our circumstances, and I understood that he would rather be sticking it elsewhere. I harbored no feelings for Magnus, but the concern I held was that I wasn't sure how to get back what I was losing, when it was something I never knew I wanted or needed until it fell into my lap.

Magnus and Catherine married, and before long there was a young cub running around to one day take over the growing empire. And that's precisely what it was. I understood business well. When we lowered our prices, Albert thought I was going mad, but I quickly proved to him by way of soaring profits exactly why-- his expert skills were at a premium for a long time, but the taking of apprentices allowed him to get his work done more quickly, but not all could afford his services or wares. We didn't want to be the cheapest-- we wanted the reputation of quality and prestige, after all-- but we never closed up shop early again after that decision. I was unassuming, in my small stature, but I wasn't afraid to make risky and ruthless decisions for the sake of profits. Albert brought the veteran steadiness, a reputation, and, importantly, the skill. Magnus brought youth, staying atop trends with the help of Catherine, and he brought an attention to detail that I was always astounded by. After a few years, his work was flawless, and Albert often left him the finishing touches. It was a three pronged attack that allowed us the most efficient use of our time, all working on something productive at once as we passed tasks along down the line.

We all liked this arrangement, which meant it needed more of a contingency than Magnus's son, Silas, might provide in those many years down the line it might take to begin his apprenticeship, and, as luck would have had it, by the time Magnus and I were experienced enough that we were no longer considered apprentices, we had been doing so well that we had put one of our competitors out of business. That tailor, Oliver, had expected that my visit to his storefront was to gloat, when, in reality, it was more of a press ganging. His son Henry could read, and was quite good with numbers, and better with a needle and thread than I was, and Oliver didn't so much mind taking orders himself.

We had become a regular company of tailors, and, impossibly, I found myself the leader, in a way. I kept the books, doled out the pay, even helped keep us organized and on schedule. I tracked dates, and organized the purchasing of materials. I had spent those years learning foreign languages, too, as more and more foreigners came through our trade routes. I was inspired by the old books on other cultures I'd read in my youth, and I spent many evenings trading lessons with any foreign traveler who was willing, and buying any foreign language books they might have.

I was happy and fulfilled, but there was still something nagging at me. After such a sheltered childhood, I was living a sheltered life as an adult. I had moved into Magnus's room above the storefront, after the birth of Silas and his marriage to Catherine left them buying their own rather large house, so most days I journeyed no further than the bottom of the staircase. A good, exciting day, perhaps once or twice a week, had me walking to the market to sell our coats and dresses, or to buy more cotton and silk, sometimes bringing Henry with me to haul it all. A great day would involve all of that and a visit to the pub with Magnus, though that got more rare once Catherine announced her second pregnancy.

On one of those rare days, though, I gave Magnus my confidence with regards to my thoughts of a stagnant, sheltered life, and I was shocked by his suggestion. It was outlandish, absurd, and unthinkable. That was what I told him. But once the seed was planted, the idea was inescapable. It chased me, day and night. It took its hold. I watched Henry more closely. I practiced my language, and my reading. And when we had enough inventory for me to do so, I packed up a cart, found a traveling companion who could show me around and help to translate if he was needed, and headed off to sell our goods in our neighboring country.

The journey was long, and it was arduous, and it was often terribly boring. Yes, even with a companion, even in a carriage. But looking out at the mountains was beautiful. Seeing the world outside of drawings and paintings took my breath away. The flowers, the trees, even the grasses were different! There were so many colors, so many species I never knew about. Their buildings were different, and their food was different. I saw things I had only read about, described in books, and left with only my imagination to see. The boredom had been more than worth it. I even gained an appreciation for it, if I were honest. One could only take so much newness and excitement.

This attitude extended to my home upon my return. To be in a familiar place was a hell of a comfort, I had learned, but because I had taken efforts to ensure that the rest of our little family functioned just fine without me, the business could run without me for a few months. I would, I decided, head off again.

It was on that second trip that our wares caught the attention of some minor foreign nobility. And wasn't that just the way? The fiction I'd read led me to believe that this sort of thing just happened, but Albert was far more excited. They were, after all, his clothes, and this was his money to make or lose. It was clear by Magnus and Oliver's reactions that this, unlike what the books might have had me believe, was not simply to be expected. Being invited overseas, too, was not to be expected, though, a few years and a few more lengthy journeys later, that happened as well.

We were offered an exorbitant amount of money to travel to dress this family of nobility for an important event, of what kind I knew not. The letter I had received used a word I was unfamiliar with. Reading their language was quite a bit more difficult for me than speaking it. It seemed, though, that they wanted to show off their wealth, and that wearing foreign garb was a good way to do that. I, of course, offered first to take their measurements and ship out the clothes, but they insisted on our travel. As the entire family was to match, there couldn't be any chance that even one stitch were out of place. We understood, of course, and considered.

Albert needed to go. They were his designs, his business. I needed to go. I was the point of contact and, unofficially, the translator. Albert and I both wanted Magnus to go. Magnus was just as important as either of us to the success of the business, and had become an extremely valuable collaborative voice. If we wanted our best, the three of us were it. We would be short handed back home, but the money was worth whatever business we had to decline for it.

Looking back on it, I'm unsure why I felt that way. Now, I understand that what I had done was choose the wealth of another family, another country and their people, rather than continue to serve the community who had allowed us to grow to this point of success. I suppose it's that I knew that that was the ultimate goal for everything that we did. It was my duty, rather specifically, to pay attention to the coin we made, to count every last bit. The point of it all was to expand, to gain wealth, but we were earning more wealth than we knew what to do with by taking the job. We had already grown to the point that I considered myself among the wealthy, though that bar wasn't especially high. Most used their coin simply to live, and to have excess was to hoard that wealth. I had no family, no taxes on my home, as I lived above the store, no space for luxury items to keep around the house, and no time to fund hobbies or trips, apart from those I took to sell our goods.

Albert and Magnus had long since stopped teasing me about keeping what I had for dowry. I had grown out of my days as a quiet, polite cat and into a shrewd businessman, and I carried myself with that. My short stature and friendly face still made me disarming and unassuming, and I wasn't afraid to use that with customers, but there just wasn't much need to tease a cat well out of courting age about his feminine attributes and lack of a bride. It was just assumed I would never have one. Even young Henry had grown up, with a little one on the way. I was the only one of us without a family, and I found that I had never wanted one.

Magnus's family was his one point of hesitation in joining us. He had a third child who was still young. He must have really enjoyed fatherhood. And fucking his wife. He didn't want to leave Catherine alone with three kids, though. It didn't take much convincing between his mother, my own mother, and Lisa to find enough help for her that Magnus didn't feel like he was abandoning her. They were all happy to do it. None of them had reared newborns in nearly 30 years.

Oliver assured us that the business, and the families, were in good paws, and we felt quite heartily that we could trust him. When he lost his business, we knew it was not due to a lack of skill as a tailor, and in that regard he had even grown quite immensely. Henry was already doing the books nearly half of the year, sometimes, when I was off on my trips, so we could rely on them in all respects.

So, we left. We traveled together, Albert, Magnus, and I. For many of our years together, a side effect of our growing success and notoriety, our personal interaction was limited to an hour or two at a time at the pub. That really added up over so many years, though, and we were a family, and that week was my first time truly feeling that familial relationship to my very core that we three, not an ounce of blood shared between us, were as much a family as there ever was. Though, this fact certainly made my prior experience with Magnus awkward in hindsight.

On that front, I confessed to them that week, as to my predilection. I wasn't really afraid anymore, not with the hazy, wistful atmosphere of the dreamlike situation we had found ourselves in lowering my inhibitions to a near inebriated state. I probably should have been afraid, if I'm being honest. Buggery was a capital offense in parts of the country, but I had never actually participated in any buggery, apart from those few times with Magnus in our younger days, if that counted. Not only was I certain he wouldn't divulge these acts to a single soul, save Albert, but I wasn't sure he'd have been believed if he had, given his large and quite happy family. A man who clearly loved his wife so much could never be that sort of sinful vagrant.

The attitude around men fucking other men wasn't reassuring, which was why I had kept it a secret, but that was mostly the fault of religion. I apologize, as nobody particularly likes a man who brings religion into things where it is not needed. Albert was religious, but he didn't stick hard to the gospel like Oliver did. Albert saw the book as a suggestion, something written by man and for man to take lessons from and interpret, and understood that all we could do was our best. Magnus felt much the same as I did. We had been raised to believe that there was some greater power, a God, and we might have believed in God and we might not have believed in God, because there was nothing to indicate that either instance might be true, but that the God we had been raised with made men with intention, the sort of intention that, itself, would have created that skepticism, and which, in my eyes, extended to the teachings of man of His book.

They were both glad I trusted them with the truth. I'm glad I did, too. Though, it started the marriage jokes right back up, taking a surprisingly similar form to what they had before. Yes, they said, I might still need a dowry after all.

Once in port, we asked around, and then found ourselves waiting a few days for the departure of the next ship bound for our destination, carrying cargo for trade and sale and with only two rooms for passengers. The three of us shared a room, hardly large enough to fit all of us and our goods. The captain offered to allow us to stow them with the rest of the cargo, but given the nature of our trip, we felt it best that we not allow our goods out of our sights. We held no distrust for the crew, I argued, but the matter was very sensitive, and involved nobility, and and materials which had to be handled with quite a bit of care and were not quite easily replaced and after all, we hadn't the slightest idea how they might fare at sea, and this combination of things was enough to get him to relent.

I had never seen the ocean on my travels. I might have said that I was afraid of it, if I could truly admit it to myself. My pirate fantasies gave one cause; I didn't quite want to be enamored with it the way I had heard some men were. But just as I didn't want to fall in love, I did not want it to be a disappointment.

But the real thing... well, it was terrifying. Vast and endless, for one. Ships seemed like deathtraps, for another. For all my studies of sciences, I had never learned how they floated, which worried me. All those books I had read never told me how terribly they rocked and shook. Storms, I knew, were terrible, but even just loading our cargo in port I felt terribly sick. This did come to its logical conclusion. The captain laughed at me and told me I'd get my sea legs. I wasn't so sure. Even if I could rather easily work out what the expression was supposed to mean, I couldn't see how I was supposed to do it.

Yet, in spite of the cramped space and unimaginable discomfort, I was enamored. I felt impossibly small, and impossibly large. The world was even more vast a place than I had ever imagined. It would take a ship that looked to be taller than two of our town's churches stacked atop each other a month to reach our destination. I was terribly, horribly small. That had always been the case, though. I was always short. Always frail.

So, you see, I was fucking huge, because the world was a huge, terrifying place, and I had conquered it. I had traveled. I had made a name for myself, for our business and for Albert. I knew languages that thousands of people I'd never meet spoke every day. My influence had transcended the bounds of anything I had expected of myself, at least once I tempered my pirate fantasies. The sea and its grandeur were a reminder that the world was as much mine as it ever was anyone's.

I just wished I could have taken to it better. I spent the first week aboard in and out of lucidity, unable to keep anything down and even struggling to stand at times, the slightest shift in gravity sending me reeling. It was, oddly, better once we were moving, but still not easy to handle. Albert and Magnus got on much better in all regards. They befriended the other passengers, a researcher or professor of some sort and his assistant, in the week that I was unwell. They were, in effect, exactly the sort of people I would have wanted to meet. I knew not what they were studying, but that didn't matter much. I kept up with my reading in my free time for all of those years, what little I had, which amounted to reading a few pages before bed every night. I wanted to know what they knew, but I was locked away, yet motivated by a desire to rid of my loneliness and boredom.

The second week, I was more capable of being on my feet, and I learned that they were botanists. The professor, a bear named John who was likely Albert's elder, had been traveling the world for many years under the employ of a prestigious university.

His assistant was one of his students, a timid young otter who often deferred to his professor, rarely spoke unless spoken to, and did so in a light and sweet voice. He dressed very smartly, considering our situation. None of us wanted to wear finery on such a vessel, but he never gave up his propriety as the seamen had, who could be seen in as few layers as they could get away with at any given time, a habit which most of us kept with, but he was never wearing less than a shirt and vest, which he kept far more clean and tidy than I'd have expected.

That was until a sleeve of his shirt caught on something (a hook? Some jutting piece of wood? I never learned) and tore halfway to his elbow. We were all on the way to dinner, so I offered to stay behind for the few minutes it might have taken to mend it, instructing the others, with John in the midst of a story about a country in the north and their interesting uses for the intestines of their livestock, to go on and ensure that there was enough left for us.

When we were alone in my small quarters, he stripped down to his fur, allowing me to see the curves of his upper body. His stomach was soft, but his arms were far more muscular than I'd have imagined. Botany, I thought, was perhaps as much of a sedentary lifestyle as tailoring, and, yet, he looked as though he'd have fit right at home on a farm. He did not quite have the musculature of my carpenter father, or of the men of the city guard like Magnus's father, but I was far more used to seeing the frail bodies of those who needed not their own power, and, so, he impressed me. I, in a moment of weakness, commented on it, to which he looked embarrassed, and explained that his work involved moving and carrying things for the professor quite often, hauling their packs around as they traveled as they did now, and even helping him with- yes- something like farming at their university, cultivating plants for studies of both their looks and their uses.

I lamented the tearing of what, upon closer inspection, was a very well-made piece of clothing, with high quality cotton, lovingly stitched, and, importantly, in fashion, by my eyes. He worried, though, that any restitching or patching would leave it looking ragged, or dirty, which only strengthened my resolve to do a good job.

That was the best damn job I ever did on patchwork. I didn't have the right color thread to stitch the cut together invisibly, so I made the same cut through the other side, to a wince from the adorable otter, and took a beautiful skein of deep blue thread, near a perfect match for his favorite vest, and carefully mended both tears with a series of carefully placed lines that crossed over each other like the letter X stacked atop itself.

While I worked, I asked him more about how he ended up working for the professor, and he asked me about how I ended up with a family of hares. I found it quite funny, as I didn't think Albert and Magnus looked at all alike enough to be family, but I also couldn't say that they weren't family at all. I understood that he did mean by blood, but it felt important to not correct him.

I did not once consider our position at sea until I felt a sway as I checked over my work.

The otter was far more talkative away from the professor, and after this incident, I found time to get him alone far more often. I had taken a liking to him. This, I knew, was dangerous. And, yet, something within me knew, for certain, that this otter was out for the same sort of danger. I couldn't place a finger on a specific event, but it was the culmination of signs that I knew from myself that I saw in him. He was as married to his studies as I was to my work. He was almost afraid of looking at the men working the ship. And even the way he reacted to my comments on his body; he was embarrassed, I could tell, but I thought back to talking about all of those old pirate books with Magnus, and noticing that I was different. The otter didn't seem to know what someone uninterested in his own gender might say in either of our positions.

I became certain of my hunch approximately halfway through our trip. I woke up early one morning and went above deck only to see him wistfully staring out at the horizon, and something about that moment filled me with a sense of surety and purpose. I approached, the sleeve of my shirt brushing against where I'd patched over his. He looked at me, eyes alight with a kind, satisfied smile, and I felt his tail touch mine.

We silently watched the rising sun together, flank against flank, until the stirring of the early morning turned to regular daily activities, and it was time for breakfast.

It was peace, and hope. I wasn't sure where things would go between the otter and I-- I hadn't even learned his name, for fuck's sake-- but I knew, looking out at the endless expanse of the world, reaching far beyond the eye could see, that I was where I was always meant to be. It wasn't love with this young man, but I suddenly understood the reverent way that Magnus and Albert talked about love, about their wives. Even if it wasn't love that I was feeling, it was something that reminded me that love, romantic love, was real, and it was the first time I felt I could have it.

I've made it seem in these pages as though my acknowledgement of my desires for men was an afterthought, something that came to me rather easily, and I assure you that this could not be further from the truth, but there is no particularly easy way to describe the years of unease, the feeling of secrecy, of sin, in a way that you, the reader, might understand, and in particularly if they were woven in the midst of news of success and happiness. It was difficult, though, to see the people I cared about find happiness with no thought that it might have been on the horizon for me, to get close to men every day as I took their measurements, oftentimes entirely unclothed, might I add, and to not once think of myself.

It was the story of the sort of hardship I knew best- forced to watch the world move on around me while I was left not just behind, but secluded and alone.

I had no fucking clue what hardship was. My childhood wasn't easy for me at the time, but I was fed, I was clothed, I was taught to read and given books, and I was given an apprenticeship when I was ready, where I never once faced hardship in 15 years of business. Everyone wants to believe they've had it so fucking hard. Everyone wants to believe that they overcame the odds to end up happy. I did not enjoy the slow dawning realization of the easy, simple life I had been so generously handed. I had suffered, yes, and I could not equate my suffering for that of another, but I would have held onto the life that I had with everything I had if I had the faintest clue what I could have had instead.

I wouldn't have had any idea when I woke up that that would be the last day of that beautiful life.

I woke in the middle of the night to the ship swaying wildly, and the harsh sounds of what I could only believe was thunder. This, I thought, was my first storm at sea, though Magnus and Albert were suspiciously absent, and I could hear from above deck the very frantic sounds of orders being barked. While I couldn't make out any of the words, it was clear by the urgency with which they were being delivered, and the frantic stomping around above me that accompanied them, that this was not expected, like a storm may very well have been. Moonlight, unfiltered, streamed in through the single window of our cabin, and as far as the eye could see, the night was beautiful and bereft of any clouds.

I couldn't do anything but sit as it became increasingly clear to me what was happening to us. I couldn't help but feel I had done this somehow, that my one moment of happiness caused this extreme moment of irony. What I'd always dreamt of as a naive young child was going to come back to haunt me. This was punishment, perhaps, for thinking even for a moment that I could pursue my heart.

Cannon fire, not thunder, rattled the boat once more. I wasn't sure if they were our cannons or theirs, but it was clear I couldn't do anything but curl up into a ball in the corner of the room, hiding under the desk we were offered and behind the few boxes of supplies we'd brought. I was sure that once everything was said and done, they were likely to go after what goods the passengers had. We were more personally wealthy than anyone else on the ship, so if it was wealth they were after, this was as good a place as any, but it wasn't as though I had any better options than to hope that I was looked past.

Gunfire rang through the blackness of the night, closer than I'd ever wanted to be to a firing weapon. If I wasn't found, would I ever be able to live? They were liable to sink the ship, and we were only a bit over two weeks into a trip that would take over a month. We were, I assumed, about as far out to sea as it was possible to be, and I would be left alone.

And what of Magnus and Albert? They were still nowhere to be found. They had families, for fuck's sake. Magnus's kids couldn't grow up without a father.

Pirates didn't give a damn who had a family, or what was ahead for these people. This was a trade ship. All they cared about was stealing our food and coin, and living another day.

The increase in the rate of gunfire signaled that they were certainly here in full force, and a battle was taking place on the upper decks, just atop the place a budding romance took place hours before. It was cruel, terrible to imagine, but imagining it was the only thing a lifetime of reading had prepared me for.

The fighting was slowing, until shots started to ring out in less regular intervals, one at a time. The irregular rhythm and single nature of each shot told me all I needed to know about these, and the gunfire only a cabin away forcefully, life-shatteringly, declared a winner. Two shots. One for each passenger there.

I held back tears. I tensed every muscle in my body to keep myself from shaking, rattling the boards or the desk or anything else, but I wanted nothing more than to wail out in agony, and, yet, I was still hanging on to one last thread of hope. I needed at least one of us to make it back home alive.

I glanced in the direction of the window, our beautiful little source of air and wind. It was tiny, and it didn't even open in full, but Albert had joked once that he thought I could fit through it. I'd never swam before. Would I even live past impact with the water?

I didn't get far past that thought when the door creaked open, and slow, methodical footsteps cut through the somber silence that had followed those last gunshots.

I closed my eyes, and felt my heart beating out of my chest. It felt hot and terrible, as though my own body was going to kill me before this pirate could.

A loud crash just feet away startled a gasp out of me. One of the crates of goods, crashing to the ground. He was going to find me. I tucked my head between my knees. I didn't want to see it happen. I didn't want to face my own death, or give this man the satisfaction.

Another crash later, and I heard a low, throaty voice. Something cold and metallic touched the back of my head.

"There's the kitten I was lookin' for." The words came out slurred, in an accent unlike anything I'd heard before. "Ya look a bit younger'n I thought, but I'll take what I can get. What say? You wanna be a pirate?"