My kind of pirates.

The following is an excerpt from an unnamed story I actually started a few years ago, forgot about and when I found it again, couldn't help but laugh out loud. Rereading it made me want to start up again, so here's a piece of the story from way back when, newly refined:

“That's not realistic,” Danny informs me almost accusingly the next day back in Central Park.

“What? Normals can't throw like that?” I question, shielding the sun from my eyes and squinting at the distant place the baseball I’ve just thrown landed.

“Definitely not,” he laughs, following the ball at a normal, human rate.

Vera giggles behind me as Danny tosses the ball back underhand. It arches perfectly and falls right into Vera's waiting hands.

“Well,” I scoff, crossing my arms. “What about that? Normals don't have aim like that.”

“Sure they do,” a voice rings through the park. A pretty voice. A pirate voice. “They're called men.”

Danny smiles in recognition, and I turn to see a man, slightly shorter than Danny, with messy black hair and blonde tips and wide, blue eyes.

“James, I thought you'd never make it,” Danny remarks when he finally joins the three of us back near the bench Vera has situated herself on.

The man, no younger than Danny, shrugs. “You told me I didn't want to miss this. Here I am, not missing this.”

“Way to invite everyone to watch me fail,” I tease as Vera drops the baseball in my hands.

“You'll pick it up faster than either of these goons did,” James chuckles knowingly.
He too has a beautiful, sing-song laugh, but it’s still nothing like Danny's. Nothing around here is quite like Danny.

“Toss it softly. And do it underhand,” Danny commands, backing away from me.

I nod, pull my arm back, only slightly, and then pull forward to let the ball go. It shoots to Danny's chest, where his hands snatch up and catch it.

He shakes his head in disappointment, laughing anyway. “James, could you—”
James is at my side in a second, not because of his superhuman speed, but because of how close he’d already stood to me.

“Let me help you,” he insists with one arm around my waist.

He extends the other the length of mine and grips my hand. I can feel Vera tense up behind me as James helps me delicately take the baseball from Danny. I try to shoot her a mental apology, but I realize too late that she can’t hear me, and Danny hides his amusement at my mistake well.

James spends the next five minutes teaching me how to throw a ball underhand without sending it flying into space and another five doing the same with overhand.
Once all three are satisfied that I’ve mastered the skill, we move on to keeping at a human pace and pretending to be tired after running.

Simple catch in the park morphs into a long day of training, and we only get to spend the first part of it out in the open, fresh air of Central Park. The rest, we spend in the gym in the basement level of the Hospital.

The gym is mostly underground with a tall ceiling and small windows at the top of the walls that, from outside, are virtually on the ground. The floor is cold concrete, but mostly covered in thin, spongy blue mats that has all kinds of equipment on it: treadmills, elliptical machines, exercise bikes, dumbbells, punching bags, bench presses, weight sleds, multi-colored exercise balls and more.

It’s there that I learn how strong I really am and how to control it, how to confuse a dragon, slay a vampire, de-wolf a werewolf—whatever that means—and defend myself against wizards and witches. I also learn how to use self-control to keep myself from impulsively shouting out the answer to questions any normal human being would ask and not be expected to know the answer to.

Vera teaches me how to appear as if I were asleep, James teaches me how to eat and drink without really doing it and Danny teaches me how to use my eyes to put humans into the trance that all pirates used to get what they wanted.

The last part takes the longest, but it’s the most important of all, and after two hours, I finally catch the hang of it.

By seven that night, we’re out of the Hospital and driving somewhere in James' blue Ferrari California through the crowded streets of New York City.

“That was incredible,” Danny babbles on as he sits in the back seat next to me. “I have never seen any pirate, in all of my hundred and fifty years, pick anything up that fast. Air—most of your training only took one day.”

I laugh my pretty laugh and smile a smile I knew could take a Normal's breath away. “Thank you very much, sir.”

He shakes his head and turns to the window with a smile. He does that a lot: smiling. And he should keep doing it. It’s a good look on him. “I can't believe it.”

The Ferrari shoots past a road sign letting drivers know they’re getting closer to JFK International Airport. My eyebrows pull together.

“Where are we going?” I question, leaning forward and holding on to the shoulders of the driver's seat.

“It's a surprise,” James whispers.

I sit back. “Why can't you just tell me? Once I get in there, I'm just gonna find out, anyway.”

“Not if we knock you out,” Danny chuckles.

I turn to stare at him. “You can't do that.” I lean forward once again.
“Vera, he can't do that, can he?”

Vera laughs and shakes her head. “Of course he can't.”

I smile and lean back once more. It’s not far, considering the California is a pretty small car. “I knew it. Nice try, Danny.”

— an unnamed work in progress.