She'd never been so excited to see a tree before. Not even when those geese were chasing her.
Apricity Lucia Priscilla Araminta Millicent Primavera Lunabelle Abstinence Prim leaned her chin on the edge of the crow's nest basket and sighed. It felt as if the air in her lungs was blowing the patchwork sails the rest of the way to the shore. And any moment now, the horizon would yawn open, the rest of the coastline would rise into view, the splendour of Vulpinsula spreading its arms to welcome its wayward daughter... Aaaany moment now.
The sun staggered its way to rest behind her, the ship's shadow stretching like her yearning towards the sandy shores...
Yes, any moment now, as the light began to be claimed by the blue-grey of dusk, that magnificent coastline would... open... wiiiide up...
Apricity Lucia Priscilla Araminta Millicent Primavera Lunabelle Abstinence Prim said a bad word. She clambered down and got her trunk of clothes from her cabin, splashing through the sea water that had claimed the floorboards. She dragged it to the top deck, and then collected the last little casket of fish, and the gull she'd caught the previous day, the gull that had given her so much hope, and piled it on top of the chest.
Then, deciding it wasn't worth it to try and work the bilge pump anymore, or try to bail the water out by bucket, she climbed onto the bowsprit and edged out along to the tip, and pointed her nose toward the island, as if that would somehow help the ship move faster.
Minutes later, she went flying into the ocean as the
Indominable Gusto plowed into a reef and came to a board-shredding halt.
It was dark by the time she'd cobbled together enough broken planks to float her belongings and food stores to the shoreline, and then she just dragged out a few gowns from the chest, wrapped herself up in them, and slept there on the beach until the sun was already wrapping up its business with the following day.
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The first few days had been difficult, but not as difficult as the remaining days. The
Gusto - now a little crow's nest basket and windsock just barely peeking over the waves offshore - had been an excellent distraction, what with the repairs, the cleaning, the rotting skeletons for company, the constant need to pump water out, the attempts at navigation, everything that a full crew was usually required to do. The first few days on the island had been spent full of bedraggled exploration, sleeping fits wherever she pleased, harvesting fibres and twigs, rope-making, setting up crab traps and sad attempts at saltwater filtration bottles and other such devices to sustain herself, and getting absolutely smashed on the remains of the
Gusto's grog.
And now... now she was
bored.
And something about these fish or crabs or coconuts was making her stomach churn.
Nevertheless, she persisted, as she always did. It was a cute name, she decided - Persistence. Too late to add it to her certificates now, but it lingered in the back of her mind, like a slightly tipsy hob at the end of the bar, waiting to try his luck at the last pickings of the evening.
Brief thoughts of her late husband fluttered past, mostly ignored, followed as they were by another wave of gastrointestinal distress - as was usual when she thought of him, even back before their fated voyage across the sea. Boredom was preferable to that git's face.
The sparse little woodlands - jungle? - at the centre of the island were layered thick with traps now, to snap up crabs and birds. The fire pit was smoking softly, bits of the cutter lined up to dry to make another go at a signal fire. She'd salvaged from the wreck several times a day, tearing at sails and dragging them ashore to make a comfortable little abode. But all that was done, and there was little left to do but wait and dream.
She'd started making dolls out of leftover bits of fish bone, leaves that weren't up to snuff for anything else, and empty coconut shells. And then after a few days of attempting to learn string puppetry, she'd focused on carving them little faces and giving them names. And with names came personalities. And with personalities came stories, and she would dance them by their strings around the fire until she felt like her stomach would settle enough to risk crawling into her sailcloth bedding and sleeping the darkness away.
What was the point of survival, she wondered, once you had finally survived?
She worked on her singing voice, and practised what she remembered of the Vulpinsulan accents from the cutter's crew, and composed little ditties that she carved into trees to remember the good parts of, and soon she had built a theatre box at the edge of the woods, decorated it with shells, and put on entire plays for herself while slowly getting rounder in the midsection thanks to a healthy and endless diet of plump idiotic fish and a lack of things trying to kill her.
When not composing performances, she worked on her fashion, cutting and ripping, sewing and splicing, trying to make something that flattered her newfound curves, as well as her older curves. Something flirty, yet regal. Revealing, yet leaving room for the imagination to wander. Something that said, "take me, I'm yours" and "paws off, pervert"; she had actually stitched those exact words into the front and back of one blouse she otherwise didn't find very interesting to the rest of her ensemble.
And every day she would light the signal fire with more and more of what pieces of the
Gusto she could rip up before her lungs flooded. She didn't even care if it was more pirates this time.
Then the wood ran out, which she found out on the morning after a truly torrential rain.
She was feeling fat, and sober, and tired, and dull, and tired, and sober, and damp, and tired, and for once... even a little lonely. So when she ambled mindlessly through the woods looking for a tree to try and break down, and stepped into her own snare and shot up to the top of the treeline and hung there by one ankle while observing the horizon upside-down, she didn't have a lot to say about that particular situation.
What did surprise her was the beast staring up at the sky while laying across the island's opposite shore, and all the crates and netting that had washed up sometime in the last several weeks since she'd patrolled the perimeter.
And what surprised her a little more than that was the great big black speck on the horizon with its great billowing sails.
She made an annoyed little 'harrumph' sound as she slowly spun around, her blouse alternating between "paws off, pervert" and "take me, I'm yours", while her tail tried to keep the remnants of her dignity from her new neighbour's prying eyes. Of all the days to choose not to wear a skirt.
She made a louder 'harrumph' when she failed to attract any attention, and then a slightly panicked, "Hallo?" when still nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen.
She reached up to her thigh, pulled out her knife from its sheath, and cut herself down, grabbing the sliced rope and swinging herself to the tree as she spun rightside-up again. She scrambled down, scrambled over to the... corpse... body? Body. And poked it. Him. Handsome fellow. Kind of marten-like. Very long. Gaunt. Reminded her of her father. She scowled.
Except, he wasn't her father, obviously, and also his chest was moving, just barely, so she should probably do something to make sure it continued to.
She ran back to her camp on the other side of the island, lit up a piece of sailcloth kept dry inside her tent with the embers of the fire, grabbed her sewing kit, put on a skirt, and returned, dragging the large cloth along the sand. She quickly foraged leaves and debris from the jungle, piling it on, making sure the smoke grew black and thick, then knelt by the gaunt, handsome beast, and began fixing the crack in his skull with single-minded determination.
If the ship didn't come for them, she wasn't going to spend another minute on this wretched island alone.
