Tag: ursula

She is thirteen when she goes to the open sea for the first time; it’s not as grand as she had dreamed of, but it’s a start.

After living a decade in a port city, she knows better than to romanticize piracy. If she ever ends up on a pirate ship it won’t be as a pirate, which means some other way.

Proper merchant ships want nothing to do with a teenage girl, even if she can do arithmetic and read and write and speak fluently in two languages, passably in three. The merchant ships that would be willing to take her on aren’t the kind she wants to go on.

But the fishermen know her, are reluctantly fond of her, and they take her on. One moonless night, with the open water calm and glassy, she feels the gentle rocking of the ocean and knows she’s headed in the right direction.

—

For the next three years she comes home smelling of brine and fish guts, much to her family’s dismay. Well, the fish guts part–everyone in the inn smells like the ocean.

She doesn’t mind it–the same way she doesn’t mind the callouses forming on her hands, the strengthening of her arms, her skin becoming sun-tanned and salt-roughened–they’re all just little pieces of the larger picture. She’s still headed in the right direction.

But she’s not a child anymore. She shouldn’t still hold on to her naive dreams about going on a great journey when all she’s done is the same back and forth trips in fishing boats, never more than a few leagues away from the shore.

If anything, though, it’s as if the past few years have only honed that wish, applied the pressure of practical experience as a way to concentrate it. Hardening it into a diamond, or polishing it into a pearl.

She’s ready, she knows it. She just needs that chance, to turn opportunity into adventure.

~

A/N: More of the Ursula fic!

Even witches were girls once, young and bright and full of hope.

—

She remembers when they moved to the capital. She was little then, and only vaguely understood that there had been an accident and Father passed away.

Small villages were not kind to single mothers, especially ones who refused to remarry. Large cities, especially ports by the sea, had greater opportunities for a woman with two small daughters.

To her mother, the relocation was made out of necessity; to Ursula, it was a chance for adventure.

Adventures don’t always have happy endings.

—

She grows up on the coast, doesn’t miss the forest where she was born. Her world is the smell of ocean spray, the crash of waves. She spends her days running around the docks, jumping from ship to ship and getting yelled at in all sorts of languages.

They live in a room of the inn her mother works at. It caters to sailors on leave, an endless rotation of men more used to the sea than land.

It’s interesting enough to listen to their stories at night, when Ursula’s not quite ready to sleep yet, but she doesn’t want to hear about their journeys.

She wants to have one of her own.

~

A/N: … I kind of wanted to do something like the Maleficent movie except for Ursula but then I blanked on the specifics. I may return to this in the future…