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“The bear’s neck is the big spoon’s handle, see it?”
There was silence for a moment– or as much of it that could possibly be mustered up, if you’re capable of ignoring the crash of mildly annoyed waves, and the creak of tired wooden planks and poles, and the far-off squawks of especially bothersome seagulls, or… distant thunder?
Sally turns and moves below deck, away from her captain and his constellation lesson with his little son– Ursa Major was today’s subject. The captain would never pass up an opportunity to talk for hours about the stars, to tell the great legends and myths that each dot in the sky held. It seemed his son, newly ten years of age, had realized that and used it to his advantage. And so they lied on the deck of their ship and ignored how their arms grew tired from pointing up to the sky for so long, as if attempting to capture a star just by reaching far enough.
That’s what the rumors say about the captain, anyway– he captured the stars and kept the sparkles in his eyes. The rumors about his son, though scarce, say he inherited that same shimmer. They say he’ll be a legendary navigator by the time he’s older; he’ll be the subject of songs and stories that far surpass that of his father.
And they’re true, Sally had said when their tight-knit little crew discussed those rumors. She couldn’t possibly forget the way her captain had beamed with pride, how his little boy’s nose had scrunched up as his hair was ruffled and ruined.
There isn’t much time to reminisce now, not when something dark looms in the distance. So Sally finds her crewmate below deck, obliviously sleeping in her room.
“Puffy!” Sally shakes the woman’s shoulder gently, and her eyes flutter open slowly, peacefully. When she sees someone standing above her, she props herself up on her elbows. “I think there’s a storm in the distance. I need you to help me prepare.”
Puffy blinks once, twice, three times. “I mean, of course I will, but… what does Jordan think?”
“I haven’t told him,” Sally answers. Puffy furrows her eyebrows at her so she cracks and elaborates, “He’s with his son! I don’t want to worry him needlessly.”
With a rub of her eyes, Puffy sits all the way up. As she reaches to untie the ribbon that holds back her curls, she says, “Give me a moment. I’ll meet you above deck.”
And so that’s it. When Sally returns above deck, she takes a moment to observe. For now the thunder has stopped, and the night is calm, but it’s… off. Something is terribly wrong.
Faintly, Sally can hear the conversation between her captain and his son.
“Ursa Major is the big bear. You remember the name of the little bear, don’t you?”
“Ursa Minor!”
Before she knows it, there’s a figure next to her, one that yawns quietly but stands ready nonetheless.
“The storm’s a little in the distance. I believe you and I can get us far enough away without a hitch,” Sally mutters. “And if not, we shouldn’t be too far to dock somewhere as an emergency. Just… try not to panic Tubbo.”
Puffy meets her gaze and nods affirmatively, her eyes shining with determination. That look of resolution is the final thing Sally can distinctly remember from that night. After that it was frantic shouts, the smack of too-close lightning, the taste of salt fresh on her tongue, adrenaline coursing through her veins.
There is none of that adrenaline left when Sally viscerally comes to. She’s still in water, but her knees scrape against the sand below. In the next moment she clocks the sharp pain in her hand; a splinter from the pole she’s loosely gripping.
Unsteadily she stands up, stumbling from a dreadful combination of shock, exhaust, confusion, and panic, because… her crew isn’t there. She’s alone.
She and Puffy had spoken about this once, late in the hours of the night. If they’d ever wrecked their ship, washed up on shore, they’d find each other. They wouldn’t wait– no, they couldn’t wait, time is of the essence. So they would get up and move like their life depended on it.
But now, under a cloudless sky in an unknown location, maybe hundreds of miles from the rest of her beloved crew and the tattered, broken remains of their infamous ship– she can’t move forward. Not now. All her body can muster up the energy to do is fall to her knees and cough up all the saltwater that isn’t meant to be in her system.
The beach she’s found herself on is not kind. There’s no sign of civilization in her line of sight, only a forest roughly three-hundred yards away. When Sally falls to her knees, there isn’t soft sand, but rather sharp shells, unpleasant mussels that further scratch up her knees.
She can’t get a good enough look at the sky to determine what time of day it is when she wakes up. But at some point the sun begins to set, and she takes that as her cue to stop crying and work on surviving. Getting through this day is the first step in finding her crew.
As it turns out, Sally is not on a small island, but instead a rather large landmass. And it is inhabited, just three day’s walk over from where she’d originally woken up.
In fact, the town she finds by walking along the coast for three days is a bustling one. Vendors in their stands line each side of the smooth cobblestone road; some people guide horses, most do not. There are tons of different types of people– some have wings, white or brown or black; some have the height and the wistful purple stare of an enderman; some have horns, whether they stick out a foot from their head or curl around their goat ears, stuffed comfortably between tufts of thick white curly hair, and– wait.
“Sally!” Yells a familiar voice, and in the next moment Sally finds herself engulfed in a bone-crushing hug. “Oh– I’m so glad you’re alive. I knew I’d find you.”
Sally pulls away, a newfound sense of relief washing over her, until a few seconds pass by and it dawns on her that there is no one else there with Puffy. Which means the captain is still missing– and worse, his son.
Apparently the worry is clear in Sally’s expression, because Puffy tilts her head sympathetically. “What’s wrong? Isn’t it good that we found each other?”
“Of course it is. But… you haven’t found the others?”
Puffy’s gaze falls to the ground. “No, I haven’t.”
Tears gather in Sally’s eyes, but only one slips before she hastily swipes it away. She doesn’t expect Puffy to be of any help; they’re both grappling with this reality right now. But Puffy takes her friend’s hands in hers. They’re warm, like always.
“Hey, look. It’s only been three days. There’s time to find them. And it’ll be better with the two of us working together, right?”
A shuddering breath, and a nod. “Right.”
“Exactly. Now,” Puffy lets go of one hand, but begins to lead Sallg with the other. “There’s a wonderful lady who gave me a spare change of clothes. Come meet her.”
That is the beginning of Sally and Puffy’s travels– a kind lady named Stacy who provides them a nice meal, a warm bed, a couple paid “missions” as she likes to call them, a good reputation amongst the citizens of the small town, and an opportunity to pet her two little dogs (though she says that she feeds many more).
When they have enough to leave, they do. They begin in small coastal towns, where there isn’t much to do but fish and gossip. And they do plenty of the former, scraping up money where they can, though the latter is a bit harder when they never plan to stay long enough to connect names to faces. But hearing the latest news is always welcome if it means getting your mind off the potent smell of fish.
(Besides, some of the towns have funny names– even long after they leave, Sally and Puffy still get into debates about what a town called Boatem could possibly mean.)
After some coin is collected doing that for two months, they find that perhaps the captain and his son may have moved somewhere more inland. So that’s where they go– the first stop is a village near a mountain, which lacks the fertile soil for farming but makes up for it in delicious berries and adorable foxes. Lots of the work there has to do with lumber; Puffy is thrilled to finally get some more practice with an axe.
During that short stay, they hear stories. Legends of different worlds that coexist with our own, of normal people who have traveled there and back through fantastical portals built from the rarest, most precious materials. They hear tales of ocean temples, once thriving kingdoms that sunk to their demise and are now hundreds of feet underwater, kept safe by fearsome cyclops guardians. Given their experience with the seas, Sally and Puffy are skeptical that one is true.
Yet one they cannot debunk is the tale of a stronghold, and in its heart a portal which leads to a world of endless night. No sun exists there, and no stars; its inhabitants live and die in darkness, trapped in their own dimension by a dragon who slays anyone who dare enter its domain. No one who has sought to find that portal has returned, and thus it has earned the title of “the End.” Because it is the end of their story.
That’s the best tale to come from the mountain village. They’re not inclined to believe it, but… they like to. It’s pleasant to think that there’s more to the universe than what they’ve seen and experienced.
But that’s only a story. There’s nothing to necessarily confirm it. That is… until they meet a boy.
They find him in a river town at the base of the mountain. Though, calling it a town seems to be an understatement; it’s on course to become a bustling city soon. For that reason, Puffy and Sally decide not to pass it up.
On their ninth night in town, the lanterns that line the streets flicker to a sporadic melody; faintly, a woman can be heard yelling at some kids to stop playing because it’s past their bedtime. The only thing that blocks the stars above is the occasional bat or bird, but they disappear in a second all the same.
The boy sits at the entrance to an alleyway; his knees are pulled up to his face, his chin is all the way down, as if he’s in pain. His shirt is tattered and worn, his pants dirty and his legs likely scratched up. Long, pin-straight black hair covers his face, rendering it difficult to see him in the dim light; perhaps that was the intention.
Yet still, they’ve found him. Puffy has always been better with kids, so she is the one to approach him, voice soft and hands visible.
“Hey,” Puffy mumbles and lowers herself to his level. It’s then that she notices how tall he is, how long his legs are. “Are you okay?”
The boy turns his head up, and he reveals his face; checkerboard splotches of black and white, mismatching red and green eyes, and obvious tear tracks that run down his cheeks. He’s still crying, and with each new tear comes a horrible sound that could only be described as a faint sizzle.
And when he opens his mouth to speak, no words are heard. No human ones, anyway; the sound the little boy makes is a scratchy, high-pitched shrill. If he’s saying a phrase, he’s repeating it over and over, with rapidly growing desperation.
“It’s okay, you’re fine,” Puffy assures him, though it’s entirely unclear whether he knows what that means or not. But it isn’t like she can replicate his shrieks, so she speaks in Common. “Come with us, we’ll help you.”
Puffy holds a hand out; the boy greatly considers his response before carefully, hesitantly, taking her hand. She stands and he does too. They begin to walk hand in hand, and Sally follows closely behind.
“What is your name?” Puffy asks gently. “Do you have one?”
The kid responds with similar shrills. It’s an ah-oo sound, roughly, that he keeps repeating.
“Uh…” Sally pauses, trying to replicate the sound in her mouth, “Ran-boo. Is that… okay?”
She gets a perplexed look in return. He stares at Sally for a moment and repeats his little ah-oo, ah-oo sound a few more times, as if twisting it around in his head, seeing how much he likes it. After five tries, he smiles. Ran-boo it is.
They walk with Ran-boo, back to the home they’re currently renting out– for three months, the longest they’ve stayed in any place– from a friend of Stacy’s. He continues to speak in shrills with varying levels of enthusiasm, yet all the while keeping to Puffy’s pace eagerly.
They return home while Ran-boo blabbers aimlessly about anything and everything, as all kids should. Though, the strange language he speaks in remains hopelessly incomprehensible. As soon as they step through the door, he runs to take a place on the loveseat by the fireplace.
It’s then that Sally pulls her friend aside. She sees the way her friend’s eyes shine in adoration towards this kid, and as much as she’s displeased to do so, she has to say–
“We have a task at hand,” Sally grasps her friend’s wrist, not tightly but firmly, and turns her back to the living room. “Don’t get too attached to this kid, okay?”
Puffy meets her gaze without hesitation. “What are you asking of me? To leave him just as we found him? Shaking, cold, hurt?”
“I know you better than to ask that of you. I’m just saying that we can’t afford to lose sight of our goal. We need to find our captain.”
“Yeah?” Puffy tears her arm out of Sally’s grip. “And then what?”
Sally’s gaze falls to the ground. Her answer remains unspoken.
Without another word, Puffy retreats to her room. She leaves Sally standing alone in the dim kitchen light. Just behind her, a child sleeps by the fire; calm and safe.
As the wood of the floor creaks under her with each step, Sally can’t help but selfishly think it’s the wrong child they’ve found. The one they’re supposed to be with is still out there, so they must keep looking.
When Puffy wakes up the next morning and finds Ran-boo gone, she couldn’t be described as anything short of fuming. She eats her breakfast wordlessly, staring down at the table, the toe of her boot tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Her ears are flicked back and they stay there tensely; when she finally speaks, it’s to tell Sally she’s going on a walk, and she’ll be back by sunset. The screech of her chair getting pushed from the table is closely followed by the slam of the front door.
They don’t talk about it. In fact, aside from necessities like meals and jobs, Sally gets the silent treatment for the next two days.
They never see Ran-boo again.
For weeks, every single night ends up the same. They don’t say much at all, and yet somehow, without opening her mouth, Puffy brings up his name. Over and over and over again.
Sally half-expects him to show up in the doorway– an instant, wonderful cure to her friend’s rage– but that’s too easy. It’s unrealistic in the first few days, and impossible by the time they leave town.
It’s clear Puffy thinks about him sometimes, when they’re wordlessly walking on a trail to their next location. She reminisces– as much as you can reminisce on good times with someone you knew for a day, anyway.
In all honesty, it baffles Sally: how can you possibly forge such a connection with someone you didn’t even exchange a word with? How can you ponder what could have been when there was no chance of a future in the first place?
Because apparently Sally is the one to blame for this– as if she personally kicked the boy to the curb? Ranboo wouldn’t even understand what it meant if she told him to scram! And somehow, for some reason, Puffy is angry at her!
It’s stupid. It’s frustrating and it’s irritating that Puffy is so caught up on someone she barely knew. There are people out there who she knows– people who she loved, and who loved her back– how dare she prioritize someone she knew for a night?
The questions linger in the back of Sally’s mind whenever she finds her friend staring off into the distance pensively. But she wouldn’t dare bring it up first– she doesn’t wish to stick a wedge in a crack and make a rift where there doesn’t have to be one.
So that’s it. They leave the river town five months after their shipwreck. The flowers of early spring begin to blossom, and the world regains its saturation. Ranboo’s name is never mentioned again, and with time the wound is healed. (Or Puffy stops actively holding a grudge, at least.)
A week after they leave the first river town, they begin to settle into its neighboring lake town. They’re decently familiar with it due to its proximity to where they’ve been living already, so it’s easy to hook a small place of residence just down the street from a lovely bakery.
Sally had been peacefully reading a novel when the drumming of heavy rain became too loud to ignore. Puffy had yet to return from her stop at the bakery– if it were anyone else, Sally would begin to worry. But this is Puffy, after all; if there’s one thing she can do, it’s handle herself.
Perhaps this downpour will be brief, and it’ll be over long before Puffy arrives home. So Sally decides against dwelling on the possibilities, and attempts to return to her book. The attempts are unsuccessful, because fifteen minutes later the rain is still pitter-pattering loudly outside. It’s awfully distracting.
It’s awfully distracting until it’s not anymore, when the drumming finally ceases after thirty minutes and Sally sighs a breath of relief. Then she expects her friend to return home soon, but she’s once again proven wrong.
Puffy returns home nearly forty minutes after the rain stops.
She closes the door with a slow, wistful sigh, and she moves to the kitchen table with a basket that she certainly had not left with. She came back with the two loaves she was sent for, but next to them sits four blueberry muffins and an extra banana bread.
Of course, the most glaringly obvious thing is the ribbon that ties Puffy’s hair back– it’s green, and Puffy does not own a green one.
“Oh, Sally, there was the most lovely woman at the bakery tonight! You should have seen her,” Puffy smiles, and she giggles as if recalling a past joke. “I’ll have to introduce you. She’s lovely in every way, I’m telling you.”
Sally raises an eyebrow, but does not raise her eyes from where she’d been picking through the basket on the table. “What’s her name?”
“Her name’s Niki,” Puffy answers in amazement, like the word is some kind of enchanting spell. As she takes off her jacket, she continues in awe, “Ugh, Niki. Prettiest name I think I’ve ever heard. And it suits her, too! A gorgeous name for a gorgeous girl.”
Now, Sally looks up. She meets the warm smile and shining eyes of her friend, and she silently dubs her hopelessly lovestruck.
Out loud, she simply says: “You’ll have to tell me all about your encounter.”
Puffy kicks off her boots and carries them to her room (so they don’t track mud across the house) all the while saying loudly, “That I will do!” She emerges in her socks and takes a seat at the table, leaning forward like she’s telling some hot gossip, and continues, “It was absolutely lovely. I’d been at the bakery down the street for our bread, and I’d already been talking to already begun to talk to her. You know, simple stuff. Her name, where she’s from, the like. And then it had begun to rain, and she insisted I stay until it finished. By that point she was already telling me all about her sibling, so how could I possibly refuse? By the time the rain had ended we were far too deep into conversation to just leave, so I told her all about our travels.”
“About our travels?”
“Our recent travels, and our old ones,” Puffy shrugs. “I told her about the captain, his son. I told her about you, too. That’s why you need to meet her.”
The mention of their old life is enough to make Sally smile fondly. And yet, despite the joy as it brings, it undeniably tugs at her heartstrings. Now someone else knows about their past– but Niki knows it as the past. She knows it as an era that has ended, and that sprouts an ache in Sally’s chest that she can’t ignore.
She refuses to ruin Puffy’s moment, though. “I’d love to. Maybe we can pop into the bakery during her next shift.”
“Perfect! She’ll be working this Tuesday,” Puffy says with a smile. “She gave me these things, for both of us. The banana bread is to die for. So dig in!”
So that was it. Sally found that the banana bread was incredible, and she met Niki that very next Tuesday. Though she wasn’t totally head over heels like her friend, she had to admit Niki was a lovely person.
In all honesty, it’s easy to see how Puffy fell so hard– a strand of purple hair frames Niki’s face on one side, and it sways as she moves around. She speaks highly of everyone she knows, her soft-spoken words shining with a gentle fondness you can’t get anywhere else. She loves to feed the foxes that appear at the edge of the woods, and she plays guitar. She has one sibling, who builds magnificent buildings across the world.
“That reminds me,” Niki says at their third outing, three weeks after Sally and Puffy move into the lake town (six months after their shipwreck), “Eret sent me a letter the other day! They say that their latest build should be done by the end of the year if they’re hasty. Would you like to come see it?”
Sally hesitates to answer, but Puffy does not.
“I’d love to! Is it a large build?”
“Not the largest they’ve done, but the most complex,” Niki answers. “Eret really has such a talent for building. You haven’t lived if you haven’t seen one of their builds in person.”
“End of the year, you say?” Puffy shrugs. “I’m down.”
Maybe that was the beginning of the end, wasn’t it? Maybe the way Sally’s heart dropped in that moment, the way she stuttered and stumbled and very narrowly avoided saying yes– maybe that meant something.
Because she likes Niki. She’s an excellent baker and an even more delightful person. But she’s… temporary, isn’t she? Just as Ranboo was, and just as this search shall be. It will all be temporary, and then they will find their captain and return to the life they were meant to lead.
But now Puffy has agreed to something at the end of the year and that is… far past their planned stay. Months past. Puffy has guaranteed Niki that they’ll know one another much longer than they’re meant to. Until the end of the year, that’s what Puffy promised.
It lingers in Sally’s mind. She never explicitly says yes, even when a month passes, and then a month and a half. And she never brings it up to Puffy, even when she and Niki go on more dates; first at places in town, then out of town. First for a night, then for a day, then for a weekend at a time.
Sally won’t dare bring it up; not when she sees how happy Puffy is when she announces that she and Niki are officially together. She’s practically beaming, bouncing with excitement. They go out to dinner to celebrate and Sally has to push down the awful feeling she can sense rising in her chest.
Sally won’t dare mention it, not when Puffy wears the boots Niki got her as a birthday gift every day. The little things sting, in ways they certainly shouldn’t– Niki gifts Puffy a new pair of boots for her birthday. And Sally observes as Puffy wears them every single day, and as Niki begins to occasionally sleep at their house sometimes. She has breakfast with them in the morning, and Sally consistently averts her gaze.
It is ten months after their shipwreck– on a beach much like the one where they’d met years ago– that it becomes dreadfully clear that this avoidance of discussion cannot continue. It can’t keep going on.
Beneath them the sand is cold, and above them the moon is a waning crescent tonight, nearly full. It doesn’t provide much light, and yet… its shimmer still reflects over the sea. (If they look for it, they can locate Ursa Major.)
The silence between them is thick, layered. Inside their small rental house, Niki peacefully sleeps. Puffy is likely thinking about her, as she seems to do a lot these days. Sally is working on accepting that as it is.
After all– if Puffy is beginning to move on, it would do her good to follow suit, wouldn’t it?
Maybe she isn’t just beginning, though. Maybe she already has, and just hasn’t said it out loud. Sally has kept that thought locked in her mind, as if that will somehow prevent it from becoming reality.
But like all other things, the silence doesn’t last forever.
“You like this life, don’t you?”
Puffy is snapped out of her little trance. Her eyes flutter around the scene; they dart around, from the sparkling sea to the brightest star in the sky to a seagull silently moving above them.
It seems Puffy is searching for an answer that her friend will like, until it becomes clear to her that she cannot find one. So her gaze falls to the sand and she admits, quietly: “Yes, I do. I like it a lot.”
“Do you think…” Sally pauses, and bats away a few very determined tears, “Truthfully, do you think they’re still alive?”
“I don’t know. Do you think they are?”
“I want to believe they are.”
“You want to believe they are,” Puffy repeats. “I’m not asking you what you believe. I’m asking what you think. I’m asking what logic tells you, not what emotions do.”
“Is that what this is about? Logic?” Sally looks at her friend, built up resentment (towards who, she doesn’t know for sure) revealing itself in her words, “You think they couldn’t have survived this long, so you’ve given up searching?”
There is no immediate reply. Puffy locks their gazes, and it becomes apparent that her eyes gleam with betrayal in a way that makes Sally half-regret her words, but she refuses to take them back. They’ve been simmering in the back of her mind for months, and if saying them will cause an argument, then… well, brutal honesty is better than amiable lies, right?
“And you’re so caught up in finding them that you refuse to make connections with anyone else?” Puffy snaps. “You don’t think about how lonely your searching has made you?”
Sally dips her chin. Her stare falls to the sand in front of her, and a lie slips past her teeth: “I’m not lonely.”
Puffy sees right through it. With a scoff, she turns her head away. “You spend all your nights alone in our house, and you don’t talk to anyone regularly but me. You’re not oblivious to it, you’re just in denial.”
“I won’t abandon our captain,” Sally pulls her knees up to her chest. “I won’t give up the life we were meant to have.”
“Then you’ll be forever seeking something you’ll never have, don’t you understand that?” Puffy’s words cut through the silence of the night. “Let’s say we find our captain. What then? We act like nothing ever happened? Because I can’t do that. I like what I have here, and I’m telling you right now that I’d rather keep it.”
There is a weight behind Sally’s eyes, and she purses her lips so the tears don’t fall. She works to keep her breaths silent, to push back every sniffle that wants to be heard.
The reply is short. The defeated words come between quivering breaths. “Fine. Then this is when we part.”
For a moment it looks like Puffy is going to argue, she certainly takes a deep breath in like she’s preparing to, but then… she doesn’t. The rebuttal never arrives, just a single, soft word: “Fine.”
Sally leaves two days later, pushing away memories from the previous nights that reek of silent sobs and tear-stained pillows. She embraces Puffy, as tight as she ever has before, but she cannot hold eye contact.
As she moves towards the coast, she thinks about what will happen to her bedroom. None of her belongings are in that room; maybe Niki will move in. Maybe she’ll pick up a button off the ground and throw it out, without a second thought. It would make sense for Niki to move in, after all. Their residence is closer to the bakery than hers, and now there’s an extra room available.
When she reaches a coastal town, one she has visited before but not any time recently, she finds a man strumming his guitar on a cobblestone street corner. It is the same song her captain used to sing. But this is certainly not her captain– though his face may be obscured by the hair that hangs down in front of it (he’s looking at his guitar, focusing on the notes rather than the profit), neither his voice nor his stature resemble her captain. In fact, he’s as far as he can possibly be: his wings, a rich dark brown which shines in the tangerine rays of sunset, drag on the floor despite being held high above his shoulders.
Still, Sally leaves some coins in his guitar case. The clinks catch his attention, and he kindly mutters some surprised thanks. She smiles, warmer than the early autumn air that surrounds them, and she moves on her way.
The home she rents for a month and a half is nothing special at all. It will keep her warm in the coming months, and its walls stand undecorated, impersonal enough to leave her alone with her thoughts.
More than anything, she reflects on that final confrontation. She thinks of nights spent alone at her kitchen table, counting the minutes to the second since her friend had left. She thinks of the unconnected, offhanded comments Puffy had made– one about the young man who worked at the deli two blocks, another about one of Niki’s coworkers, another about this great bar that had just opened– and puts together that they were not so unrelated.
So she comes to a resolution: she will take walks, and she will commit herself to a new route every few times. Of course, nothing special happens the first few nights. She catches no one’s eye, and no one catches hers.
Every night, she is by her lonesome, only a single set of boots cracking along the cobblestone road. On her ninth night in town, she cries on the curb about it.
If Puffy were here, if anyone she’s ever known was here– they’d tell her to persist. If there is anything she can convince herself to do, it is persist. So she leaves her home every day (or something like it), and whereas yesterday she took a left, this time when she passes the shrine to Prime she will take a right.
On her sixteenth walk– nearly halfway through her stay, she acknowledges as the street-lanterns flicker on and remind her of another day dwindling away– a familiar voice bounces on the street and echoes through the night.
It’s the man with the guitar once again. Though this time he plays an unfamiliar tune– it’s much less soft, but much more ecstatic. Giddy excitement rings alongside carefree strums. His chin is up and he grins at the onlookers that refuse to cheer him on; that’s likely how he notices Sally is there at all.
“Hey! You!” The man yells enthusiastically as his wild strumming barely slows. Just a little, his wings rise from the sidewalk. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? I think I’ve seen you before!”
Upon hearing him speak a full sentence, Sally can pinpoint both how drunk he is (because his words are slurred, though not to an incomprehensible degree) and, more importantly in her opinion, an unfamiliar accent. An accent that’s not native to this area.
Fine. Sally will humor him. “Yes, briefly.”
“You left some coins in my guitar case!” His eyes shine as he recalls the small memory. “I appreciated that a lot, and it’s a great thing I found you so I could thank you properly. I’m quite shy, you know, and you’re quite pretty, so it caught me off guard a little. Just to be honest.”
Sally raises an amused eyebrow at the man’s rambles. “Your voice is lovely. It certainly deserves much more than a few coins from my pocket.”
The man’s eyes widen, and his jaw drops. “That is the most wonderful thing anyone’s ever said to me! I think I’ll hold on to that one for the next time we see each other! Because we will see each other again, won’t we? Because it would be such a disappointment if you just disappeared one day.”
Sally considers it. She won’t stay here long, but she doesn’t wish to let him down. He’s too endearing for that.
So she fibs (just a little white lie): “Yes, I’m sure we will.”
“Fantastic!” The man suddenly stops his strumming completely. “If you want my name– it’s Wilbur. For future reference.”
“For future reference,” she chuckles. “Alright. I’m Sally.”
Wilbur smiles at her, eyes squinted and nose scrunched up in the brightest way Sally has ever seen, and she walks back home with a newfound spring in her step.
Sally spends the next day thinking about the song he had been singing. The two lines of lyrics she’d picked up cling to her mind, repeating over and over again– it’s the lamp posts who guide our paths, because the moon can't get in.
Maybe one day, she will be able to hear the stories which built that song note by note. Maybe one day she’ll let go of the lamp posts’ guidance herself, and she’ll go back out to sea and the only guidance in reach will be from the stars. Of course, that can only be done once she finds her captain. And her captain can only be found if she continues searching.
But the question remains unanswered: what then?
She doesn’t know the answer then, or when she goes on her next four walks, or when she decides to go into the bar she’s been restraining herself from walking through the door of. Even on a Tuesday night there are folks in every corner of the room, all chatting away in their own little universes.
Often, Sally wonders what everyone’s little universe is like. Sometimes she fears that theirs is far superior, but it’s never a feeling she dwells on. If you give her a clear night sky, she can locate Ursa Major. It’s a vital part of her little universe, and that is not something others can say.
Of course, there is one little universe that catches her eye, once again. The man with the guitar, lacking his guitar. The instrument seems to be at the very center of Wilbur’s little universe (at least, the parts that Sally has seen thus far)– the image of him without it makes her a little curious, in all honesty.
Her necklaces jingle as she approaches and subsequently plants herself in the barstool to Wilbur’s left. At first he seems bothered by it– if his frustrated huff is anything to go by– but when his gaze lands on the face his eyes widen, flashing with recognition and then immediate embarrassment.
For a moment Wilbur stares at her from his seat beside her at the bar. His brows are furrowed and his lips are tightly pursed as if desperately trying (and failing) to recall something.
(As he agonizes over that, the bartender takes Sally’s order. She orders something lamely non-alcoholic, because she intends to walk home alone tonight. That, and she has no decent drinking pals. So she’ll save herself the humiliation entirely, thanks.)
Sally looks back at him with a mostly blank face, though a smile tugs at the corners of her lips. “Do you remember my name?”
Wilbur’s expression does not change. In fact, now he’s brought up a finger to his lips as he ponders this. “I can’t put my finger on it. But don’t tell me.”
Sally shrugs and smiles behind her glass as she sips her drink. “Three guesses?”
“No, fuck no. I swear I know it, I couldn’t possibly forget,” Wilbur says (which makes Sally remember his small confession from their prior meeting, which makes her heart twirl but she tries to let it not show on her face). “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to keep thinking about it, Wilbur,” Sally grins. “It’s not a trick question.”
“I know it isn’t, because you know mine. I don’t tell everyone my name, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” Sally nods slowly, playfully skeptic. “With a voice like that, you’d think everyone would be going after you.”
Wilbur pauses, desperately attempting to hold his dignity intact. He crashes and burns, of course, so he breaks his intent stare. With a nervous laugh and sarcasm that lacks any real malice, he agrees, “Yeah. Women just throw themselves at me.”
Sally snickers, but like him, there's no real malice hidden in it. “And what do you think of them? Do they ever have a chance of reaching your golden standard?”
“Of course they do,” Wilbur shrugs. He takes a sip of his own drink, and immediately adds. “But not you.”
“Not me?”
“Nope,” he pops the P, “Your hair is too long. Too orange. Reminds me of a salmon.”
Sally laughs at that; not because it’s particularly funny, but because she’s gotten that exact comment before. The irony draws a laugh out of her, soft and warm.
When she’s finished laughing for a few seconds, she replies: “Mm-hmm, and your accent is funny.”
Wilbur raises an intrigued eyebrow. “So you can locate where someone’s from based on accent alone?” He raises his drink to his lips again. “Impressive.”
“So I take it I'm correct in assuming you’re not from here?” A nod. “Where are you from, then?”
“It’s not relevant,” he shrugs, and his wings subconsciously follow the gesture. “But yeah, it’s a little far. Travelling isn’t really my style, so- I’m just trying to make a little life here. I assume you’re in a similar boat?”
Sally shrugs. “You could say that, I guess. But this town isn’t ideal for settling, that’s why travelers just pass through.”
“So you’re a wanderer, huh? That’s why I only saw you here, like… what, a week ago?”
“Yup. Been travelling for years now.”
“All alone?”
Sally hesitates. Her gaze falls to the ground. Around her, nothing stops; the bartender still loudly shakes her cups of ice, and the customers sitting at booths by the wall still laughs heartily across the room, and a waitress still uses her hip to open the door from the back and carrying a tray of unfamiliar food in each of her hands, and the lights still flicker overhead.
(You’ll be forever seeking something you’ll never have, don’t you understand that?)
No, nothing stops. But momentarily, it certainly feels like it.
Of course, a moment doesn't last forever, and so Sally raises her head again and replies: “Hopefully not for much longer.”
So they talk. Wilbur speaks (very highly) of his father, who sports striking wings but also a simple green striped bucket hat he bought at a marketplace far before his son was born. From there Wilbur reveals his habit of talking at length about those he cares about– it starts with his father’s best friend who gave him a love for stories instead of practical fighting skills, and it next moves to his own friend who is currently off attempting to be a more successful business man when his last venture (a scam which he bought into) fell through, and it keeps going with a little dirty kid he met under a hill who swore excessively and refused to eat beef because “Prime asks that he is kind to the cows.”
They spoke until half the bar filed out the door and into the night. Of course Sally shares her own anecdotes– like when she witnessed Tubbo try and throw a rock at a seagull, or when Jordan brought her an orange tabby cat because it matched her hair, or when Puffy tried to open a wine bottle with a shovel and smashed the bottom of it.
And then they bid sweet farewells, but not before Wilbur made eye contact with Sally and asked if she was free next Friday at this same bar.
“It’s live music night,” Wilbur had said, “And I have the gut feeling you’re a mighty fine dancer.”
“Then your gut feeling is wrong,” Sally had chuckled in reply, “I got two left feet.”
“Don’t sell yourself short! You only got two left feet if you believe you got two left feet.”
Sally pauses. The bottom of her glass softly clinks against the counter as she picks up her drink. “Fine, music man. Friday.”
And so Friday arrives, and they dance. They dip and they twirl and they part; then they come together again, over and over and over as if it’s never quite right. (In fact, they’re the only ones on the dance floor, because it is evidently quite hard to control a twenty-foot wingspan while happily dancing. Duly noted.)
The next Friday, Wilbur brings his guitar and sings a happy song Sally has never heard before, and later tells her about the inspiration for it. Flight training with his father, he says. Jumping out of a tree set with a preparatory pile of leaves just below it, seeing the sky from above and feeling the air in his lungs. It’s a wonderful story.
The next Friday, Wilbur drops by Sally’s apartment. He admits his astonishment at the lack of decoration– to combat it, he leaves his watch and a page of his songbook on the fireplace mantel when he leaves that same night.
The next Friday, Sally says that she must leave. She tells him that she had only meant to stay for a month and a half, and she’s only ignored that deadline because of him. When she tells him that her things will be ready to go by morning, she thinks of her captain. And when Wilbur leaves that night, she thinks of never seeing him again, and she cries.
The morning after that, Wilbur is at her door, offering another option.
The next Friday, Sally is settling into Wilbur’s apartment. He shows Sally her own separate bedroom, and he tells her this apartment is not meant to be permanent. He’d much rather have a house out in the country– somewhere that he can fly freely– but his music doesn’t help with that goal.
Sally promises that he’ll get there someday. She does not include herself in this promise– not out loud. It is such a far cry from where she imagined she would be, the words themselves pinch her heart.
Three Fridays later, Sally tells Wilbur the tale of her captain. He vaguely recognizes it, as a sort of party story his father enjoyed reciting. Of course, he didn’t believe the captain who stole the sparkles from the sky was real, nor that he just happened to stumble upon his crewmate. Inevitably, he had to ask for the end of the story.
Sally does not give him an answer until two Fridays later. For the first time, she says it out loud: her captain is dead, and he will not return. She turns away from Wilbur then, and she buries her face in her hands like it’ll make that fact false.
Because things were good for so many Fridays, and now Sally is simply crashing down from that high. She cannot bear to look Wilbur in the eyes when she cries, so she keeps her gaze fixed on the floor. If she moved at all, the floorboard beneath the living room sofa would creak and whine, as it always does. But it remains silent.
Wilbur only has one piece of advice– once healing begins, it does not stop. A lack of a high point doesn’t mean a lack of progress; it means progress has simply slowed down.
That next morning, Sally comes to two very important conclusions. One: Wilbur will never be able to replace her captain. He will never give her the life she has always pictured for herself. Perhaps before, such a truth would cause Sally’s ribs to constrict in on her lungs, but it doesn’t. And that is because of the second conclusion: Wilbur is not supposed to be a replacement. He is supposed to be something new.
From then on, Sally includes herself in the promise. She keeps her promise as she looks at that city one final time, and she keeps it when they move to a mountainous region, made up of cliffs and populated largely by mountain goats. She keeps it when she flies with Wilbur for the first time, absolutely petrified and still shaking fifteen minutes later. She keeps it when she gifts him a new guitar for their first anniversary and a son for their second. She keeps it when she knits a new sweater for Fundy and takes her son for his first berry-picking trip. She keeps it when she takes up Niki’s offer and visits one of her sibling’s grand projects– Niki adores Fundy even if he’s just a moody toddler, meanwhile Wilbur and Eret seem to hit it off. The latter also gets along quite well with Fundy; they gift him a pair of boots for his second birthday.
Yes, Sally keeps that promise. She sticks to it until the day her family decides to swing by the coast to buy some fish. When she sees those eyes, and their familiar shimmer, a weight drops in her chest.
The captain’s son is alive, and he is coming to stay with her temporarily. She can only find it in herself to gawk at him initially, so for a proper reintroduction she sits in the rocking chair on her front porch.
He isn’t a tiny kid anymore. No, he is a teenager now, and far too scraggly for his own good. (How could she let this happen?) He moves about wobbly, like his limbs are new and he is still adjusting to them. His hair is unkempt, dirty, and his green button-up is tattered.
And yet, his eyes are not a flicker dimmer than the last time she had seen them. They are analytical, critical, but they still shine. It is familiar. So when they fall into their long overdue embrace (five years, to be exact), the tears that prick at her eyes are those of pride.
They sit on the porch and they talk. Tubbo found Tommy the first day after the wreck (what a character that child is, no wonder Wilbur is so fond of him) and together they traveled around. They stayed on the coast, pickpocketing whoever they could. A means of survival, nothing more. That was Tommy’s rationalization of it, anyway; it would go against Prime’s wishes to steal from others just for fun.
Tubbo confesses that he waited near the site of the wreck for weeks. He refused to change out of his wine-stained shirt even when Tommy brought him another one, and he cried when he had to finally leave empty-handed.
No evidence, is the part that sticks. Nothing– not a watch, or a belt, or a jacket. Nothing at all.
Sally tells him her story, too. She found Puffy her third day, and they searched for him. It sounds silly when she tells it– searching made sense just after the fact, when their only contact was Stacy and her dogs (“Page, like a page of a book,” she would say), but it sounds more naïve with each month that passes. It sounds foolish of her to push away Niki the same way she cut off the child they looked after for a night when neither meant any harm at all. It sounds stupid when Sally tells the story that way.
And yet… she feels a familiar pull, a long-lost guilt. She’s slipping, and she’s overthinking, and she wants to go find her captain. If Tubbo is alive, then Jordan certainly is too. So– she needs to go find him. Who would she be if she didn’t?
And that is exactly what she confesses to Wilbur in the letter she leaves: she is foolish, and she is stupid, but she is loyal to her captain. She loves Tubbo like she does her own son, so she will bring back his father.
It feels like a relapse for her search to start anew, but this time is different. This time it is not founded on blind hope. It is progress towards a reunion.
She trusts that Wilbur can care for them all. Tommy and Tubbo will be a handful combined with Fundy, but he is competent, and he has friends of his own– Eret and Niki will help in any way they can.
Puffy will think she’s stupid for giving up a perfectly good life; and Sally will admit that she’s right. But that’s okay. It’s worth it. As Sally leaves through her back door, she takes note of Ursa Major, and she commits herself to finally bringing a happy ending to this tale.