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Years had passed by.
Centuries.
There were days when he wondered why he had been cursed to walk the Earth for an eternity until someone took his head in a Game that had been around for longer than he could imagine. He wondered why he had not died on that fateful day on the seas, on a ship had not been his own.
He had never asked for immortality.
He never wanted eternity.
Lying under the stars, on grass that was green and soft beneath him, he couldn't quite image how his life had turned out to become something out of the tales told to frighten young children in the night. It was like something out of the pirate tales that continued to grate on his nerves.
"James?"
Her voice was soft, barely above a whisper, and lost to the gentle breeze just as easily. When he did not reply straight away, she repeated her words. "James? What's the matter?"
He turned on his side, looking down her the woman who lay next to him. Her eyes barely hid the concern that she felt. He brushed her cheek with one hand, letting it linger. "It's nothing," he told her.
She pushed herself up on to her elbows, and looked at him like a parent catching a child in a lie. It was not far from the truth, if only for age differences rather than roles. Samantha had been his first teacher in the Game, and had lived since the eleventh century. Once, he might have balked at being taught anything by a woman - but she was the second woman to have taught him something. Perhaps more than the woman who had preceded her.
The corners of her lips twitched up into the hint of a smile. "I was not born yesterday," she told him, tracing the outline of his hand. "And I know that something is bothering you. I just want to know why you look so sad."
When he first met her, she was living alone on an island in the Caribbean, with no one but herself for company. He had not know what he was - he barely knew he was alive. His only memories were of his final dying moments about the Flying Dutchman before infinite black. He must have died a hundred times over in the inky black of the ocean before he washed up on land, on her beach. She taught him what he was, about the Game that played on around them, and that if one lived long enough, death was nothing more than a beginning.
He had been a master swordsman, the best in the Royal Navy; she bested him every time they dueled in the first few months. Then she taught him her tricks, taught him skills that he had never dreamed of, and admitted defeat with a grace that opponents so rarely ever offered. She took him in as her student, and after years of training, when she had nothing left to teach him, she let him go out into a world that was a new to him then as it had ever been.
He lost track of her as he played the Game, as it had been meant to be played. He played a part in history - in many histories - always the soldier, even though time had tainted the appeal of the role. Eventually he settled on the role of a scholar, picking apart military battles of old and writing the texts for the future. When their paths crossed again, in the early twenty-first century, Samantha was a doctor with her own practice in Wales.
She invited him to stay, and he had yet to leave, finding solace in the calm and content life she had carved for herself, and for those that knew her.
Elizabeth had been his one great love; a love that had not been returned.
Samantha offered a companionship that had no limitations, and no boundaries place on it. She had told him once that she loved him, but forever was a very long time for anyone to stay together. She never asked for commitment, and he found himself giving it over willingly, and finding it returned.
She was very much like Elizabeth - strong, determined, and self-aware. A fighter. But her compassion for others and her simple joy for each passing day set her apart from anyone he had ever known.
She wanted to see what the future held, and when he felt his own world start to crumble at the edges, he held firm to her enthusiasm, letting it bolster him against despair.
He sighed wearily, letting his hand slip through her hair. While not short by the standards of the time, when he had been a boy, hair as short as her own would have been unseemly on a woman. The times had changed.
Under his touch, she scowled, but it had no real base anger. She knew he wasn't going to tell her what was bothering him; he knew she wouldn't press the issue once he clammed up.
"You can be infuriating," she muttered, falling back to the ground and avoiding his eyes.
It stirred a memory.
"Oh, James." She sighed, her white lab coat caught in the wind. It was an afternoon in the middle of autumn, and he had dropped in on her clinic. 'Just in the neighbourhood,' he had told her, to her chagrin.
He smiled, somewhat enigmatically, admiring her from where he stood.
"Don't give me that look."
"And what look would that be?" His tone was mild, but his eyes sparkled with amusement.
"That look," she told him. "That totally disarming, totally infuriatingly charming look. The one that will make me agree to anything."
He raised an eyebrow.
Her scowl only deepened.
He laughed, and it had been the first time he had truly laughed - earnestly - in a number of years.
She shook her head, and beckoned him inside. "I have something for you."
That something had turned out to be a great gift indeed. A possession he had long since believed lost to time or the sea.
The case was exquisitely made, and she remarked that she had a number of friends who were in the antiques market, and she had asked them to keep an eye out for a particular item - should it ever surface. When it did, she had a case specially crafted, not knowing when she would next see James to be able to deliver it. When he turned up in Wales, she moved the case to her clinic, where he would most likely turn up.
The inside of the box was velvet, dark royal blue and held its prize gently but with pride. But all of that pale in comparison to the prize; the true gift.
"There is a family of swordsmiths," she told him, as he turned his old blade over in his hands, "that have been in the business since around the time that we first met. This turned up in one of their museum collections, and I recognised it from the stories that you used to tell. Of a perfect sword, handmade and gifted to you when you were in the Royal Navy."
Words had failed him.
The sword never left his side.
He lay back down, following her lead and gazed up once more at the stars. She curled around, leaning her head on his shoulder and watched his chest rise and fall with each breath. He wrapped one arm around her. "Tell me a story," he told her.
It was an old ruse; from the moment he met her, she had told him tales of her life, and what she had seen. He used it to distract her mostly. These days, however, she had been more than prepared to combat his distractions.
"I always tell the tales," she told him, though it was not a complaint. "I think it only fair that you tell me one every now and then."
"Oh?"
She turned her head and looked up into his face. "Tell me a story, James."
And he did.
It was a story about a time long past; of the end of days of the pirates and the battles that were waged on the high seas. Of creatures and ghost ships, and of love that conquered all.
Or so the story was told.