What Once Was Lost

It all began with a ship.  She rested in the docks, the wind fluttering across her closed sails.  The waves gently splashed against her hull.  Loud laughs, singing and conversation flowed across the docks from many other ships, but the crew of this ship was much louder than the rest.  Their worn leather boots, aged too quickly with the salt water, thundered across the docks as they moved cargo to and from the ship.

He heard the thumping of the more familiar boots before he felt the hand that clapped his shoulder.  It jostled him, but he merely chuckled.  A much gentler and softer hand squeezed his arm.  Those same fingers brushed a lock of his red hair out of his eyes.

“So what do you think of our ship, Daniel?”  A male voice asked.

Daniel turned to the ship once more, “Though I cannot see her, she is beautiful.  It is almost as if…she were calling to me.  And the sea…it is as if she calls me too.”

“Then I guess you ought to go to them.  No since keeping a lady waiting.”  A female voice said.

He chuckled again and then stepped forward.  There was a simple hesitation before his own wore leather boots stepped onto the deck of a ship for the very first time.  Every worry vanished.  And he knew at once that this was where he belonged.  Finally he had found what he had been looking for, a place to belong, a place he could call home.

The years passed by quickly.  Every day Daniel and his Captain dueled and Daniel soon became more familiar with battling and traveling across the deck without the use of his eyes.  He even began to sense the sea itself, guide it through his other much more sharpened senses.  Life as he knew it changed completely and he felt at peace, at home even through the hardships.

But all of that ended during the storm.  He lost everything he had found.  He lost his home, his love, the family he’d become to love and his Captain…his best friend.  He washed ashore, the only survivor.  And then there was imprisonment, torture, but none of it compared to the pain of his loss.

More years passed by far too slowly.  And then he stood on a beach, the skeleton of a ship standing before him.  He stared up at the wooden bones that loomed over him.  And then he began his work, building her and giving her life.  The sea called him.  It was home.  How could he be away from his home though he had lost so many loved ones?

Even more years passed by, but now he stood on the deck of his own ship.  A crew rumbled across the deck, seeing to the running of the ship.  Beside him a woman laced her arm into his and two red-haired twin boys raced about the deck.

And then the man Daniel had once called Captain walked onto the deck.