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"My name is Karl", said one of the seagulls at Button's feet.
It took him a while to figure out which one had spoken. They always appeared in the hundreds, whenever he so much as put one toe over the threshold of Brecker's Bass.
Berthold Brecker, the owner of what labelled itself as a fish restaurant in some seaport Buttons had woken up in one day (he still hadn't managed to figure out its name, if it even had one), prided himself on cooking the largest selection of sea creatures in the entire Spanish colonies. Buttons prided himself on carrying said seafood out to his feathery friends each night before he went to sleep on one of the benches in the guest room. Urchins, to Brecker's great sorrow, were not exactly the preferred food of the local fishermen community and thus Buttons always had a feast to offer.
He liked the birds. One or two always stuck around for a midnight breeze shower or a moonlight bath and it was surprisingly fun to learn about which seagull enjoyed which economically disastrous sea creature the most. Buttons often thought that Brecker should just open his restaurant to gulls. They were much more appreciative of his culinary advances.
"Hey, down here!", screeched the seagull from before. Buttons took a step back, out of the silver cloud of hungry birds. His eyes settled on an animal a bit outside of the flock, the only one who wasn't busy ripping jelly fishes into shreddy fishes.
"Karl?", Buttons asked.
The seagull looked up to him.
"You can understand me? Cool!", he said. " No one ever understands me. I keep screaming and screaming but all the others care about is fish and all humans care about is... Well, it's not fish I think, but it's also not me, so it's useless either way."
He hopped over and landed on Button's right foot.
"I need your help", he said.
***
Of course, Buttons helped the bird.
Not half an hour later he followed Karl’s directions through the docks. They were still fairly busy, despite the setting sun that turned the cloudy sky into an 18th century interpretation of the trans pride flag. Nobody paid the man with the seagull on his head much notice, too busy with hauling fish off the boats before and getting their weirdest catches to Becker’s first.
“This morning I woke up next to my wife, Olivia”, said Karl who was enjoying the ride quite a bit. “And as I looked over to her I thought: ‘Dang, what a beautiful lady I married. I’m the luckiest bird in this world.’ It’s true because it rhymes. Go right!”
Buttons walked right.
“And ever since then, I had the undying, all-encompassing urge to prove to her how much her mere existence means to me. So I thought I’m gonna do the sensible thing here and get her a hat! Cool, right? Left!”
They turned again. Now Buttons was walking directly towards a ship, a bit off from the others. He didn’t even need to get closer to see that she hadn’t seen a single day on sea yet. Her sails were as white as snow, the paint on the bow was still drying. But she was a good ship, if maybe a bit too dramatic for his taste. The unicorn figurehead alone would probably work better than hissing a flag that said ‘please rob me, dear pirates’ in bright red letters and three exclamation marks, for good measure. Still, she was a good ship and not to blame for the faults of her designer.
“’Evenin’”, Buttons greeted her politely.
“This guy who had the ship built, he has hats”, Karl carried on. “Loads of it. Fuck knows what he wants with that many hats on a boat. Maybe he can use them as a lifeboat or something, if he ties them all together.”
It was slowly turning dark. All around them the people still on their ships or working on the docks started turning on their lanterns and torches. As Karl and Buttons walked closer, a single light lit up on the ship they were approaching as well. It was in what Buttons reckoned to be the captain’s quarters. Everything else stayed dark.
“He had lunch on deck today”, Karl continued his monologue. “When I joined him he kept thinking I wanted some of his salmon. Naturally, all I really wanted was one of his hats, but he couldn’t understand me. I did take some of that fish of course, but I can hardly bring that back to Olivia. It’s simply not enough to match her beauty, right?”
“A salmon?”, Buttons said pensively. “No, that might insult her, lad.”
“That’s precisely what I thought. So glad to have found a kindred spirit in this bleak world. Hold on! It must be somewhere around here.”
Karl started flying off but quickly returned to his old place on Buttons’ head.
“We might need to practice that some more”, he cheeped sheepishly. “I got stuck. In your hair.”
Buttons blindly reached upwards to untie his passenger.
“Oh yes, great, thank you, nope, just a bit to the left, you got great hair main, really sturdy. Also really dangerous for poor little birds. Yep, almost. Cool, got it, thanks!”
Finally free, Karl fluttered over to a few boxes, ducked underneath one, and returned shortly afterward with a sardine in his beak.
“Ffffor de hat”, he mumbled, hopping over to Buttons and dangling it in front of his knees.
“Hm?”
Karl dropped the sardine in a puddle.
“I want to buy a hat with that. From the guy on the ship. But I need you to do it because all he does when he sees me is give me even more fish which is not how a business transaction should go, I think. Speaking from very little experience to be quite honest with you.”
Buttons looked at the muddy sardine on the ground, then at the hopeful seagull next to it, and finally over to the ship containing the key to his fulfilling love life, and shrugged.
“Nah, I don’t need that.”
Karl didn’t even have time to fish the sardine out again before Buttons had already turned around and walked straight over to the gangway. He stared after him, watching as the man walked straight on board and then vanished below deck. Then he heard a loud scream. Karl cackled something only particularly rude seagulls could understand and swallowed the sardine whole. It tasted a bit stale. Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t traded it after all. He didn’t know if hats could become stale as well, but Olivia only deserved the best and freshest breed and he couldn’t have hoped to have gotten that in exchange for inferior goods.
***
“Run, Karl!”, Buttons shouted as he jumped straight over the ship’s rail onto the dock. “To the Bass!”
Karl took a few half-hearted steps toward the port.
“Seriously?”
He cackled and engaged his lift-off routine. Eyes? Working. Wings? Still in existence. Heart rate? Unknown, seagulls can’t count. He soared up.
“Sorry, couldn’t resist. Did you get it?”
Buttons came closer, lifting up a big, round fabric thing in his right hand.
“What do you reckon this is?”, he asked.
“King George’s toilet seat?”, Karl guessed. He loved guessing games. He played ‘What will the weather be like when we look outside’ with Olivia every morning. He always guessed snow. He wasn’t quite sure what snow actually was but he had heard a blond fisherman with a strange accent talk about it once and really wanted to see it ever since. And he had to make a right guess eventually, everything else just wouldn’t be fair, so he kept picking snow.
“No”, said Buttons and made a turn towards the town.
Karl thought about it some more.
“The 1634 copy of ‘A Winter’s Tale’?”
“That’s my hat!”, the man on the ship shouted. “Go after them, Lucius!”
“Ooh, that’s a hat. You got me a hat. Thank you!”
Buttons ducked behind some nets, struggling not to get the feathery headgear stuck between any cords. The sweeping brim was wider than his torso and stuck out left and right behind his hiding place, like purple ears.
“How many are after us?”
Karl landed on the mast of a small fishing boat and squinted.
“There’s the salmon guy. But I think he got stuck with his coat somewhere. Really fancy coat that, I wonder if Olivia would like it.”
“Nah”
“You’re right. Yellow isn’t her colour. Oh, and there’s a second guy. I think he’s running after us. Slow running. Very slow. Like veeeeeeery-”
Buttons shrugged
“That’s alright. We can slow run too. Enjoy the stars.”
He got up again, fought a short but ultimately victorious battle with a fishing hook that had literally been hooked by making the hat’s acquaintance, and started strolling down the docks, whistling an old tune of the sea. Karl landed back on his head, careful not to get tangled this time.
“Pretty hat”, he said. “I like the little bows.”
***
“Good Morning. My name is Captain Stede Bonnet and I would like to ask you- no, wait hold on, I can do that better. Tremble in fear, good Sir! I am the notorious Pirate Captain Stede Bonnet. And I demand my hat back!”
“You’re what?”, asked Berthold Brecker.
“My hat. I have reasons to believe that one of your employees stole my hat last night. I will let it slide this one time, but let me warn you. I am not to be trifled with. You better not let it happen again or you will feel my wrath.”
A moment of grave silence followed.
Buttons had sailed with many pirate captains over the years and seen even more. One of them had carried all his fingers in a necklace around her neck, to chew on them during raids. It calmed her, apparently. Another had only worn clothes in the colour of each morning’s sunrise and murdered half his crew in rage after an unfortunate hostage accident had dyed his last white shirt red, leaving nothing to match the clouds.
But Buttons had a gut feeling that no one would live up to the peculiar blond man who was standing in front of Brecker with crossed arms, no gun or rapier in sight, and half the size of the cook, but still unwaveringly self-confident. In another pirate captain that might have been seen as boldness. Not with this guy, though. Karl could probably take him out if he was really pissed off at him.
“Did you get that, Lucius? I thought that was quite good, didn’t you?”
“Yep, threatening a man with a knife as big as my arm while being completely unarmed. Absolutely wonderful, Captain, couldn’t have dreamed for a better morning”, said the young man in a striped shirt who had followed the Captain inside the restaurant, scribbling desultorily on a piece of parchment.
“It’s quite exciting, isn’t it?”, said the Captain.
Buttons sat up from the bench he had been sleeping on and yawned loud enough to disturb a family of flies feasting on some half-finished plates on the table next to him. No one paid him any notice, except Lucius whose eyes widened at his sight. He blindly tried to tuck on his Captain’s arm but missed. Buttons waved at him.
“I don’t have no hats”, said Becker and went to chopping off some octopus arms for the speciality of the day, fish noodles. “I just have catfish soup, jellyfish cake with fresh cherries on the side, oh, a nice salmon brawn-”
“No, just the hat, please”, said the Captain who had slowly turned a little green in the face. “Oh, what is it now, Lucius?”
Lucius, who had finally managed to get his bosses’ attention, just whimpered and pointed at Buttons. He had just started his matutinal teeth knifing routine and grinned as a greeting.
“Excellent, the perpetrator himself.”
The Captain strode over to the benches. Buttons rammed the knife in the nearest tabletop and stretched. His sleeping place always left him with terrible back pain.
“As you can see, stealing from me is never a good idea, young man. We have found you! Running is futile so please return my property to me the fastest way possible.”, said the Captain.
“Congratulations, Captain”, Buttons yawned. “I can’t give you your hat back, though. Olivia’s already got it.”
“Thank you! Wait, who’s Olivia?”
“Karl’s wife.”
“Oh, I see. And might I ask: Who is Karl?”
“The seagull who inquired after said hat the other day.”
“The seagull?”, asked Lucius from somewhere behind the Captain.
“Oh, yes, I think I remember him. Karl. I thought he wanted some of my salmon.”
“Yep, that’s him”, said Buttons. “Do you see my trousers anywhere?”
“They’re right next to me, hold on!”
There was a bit of shuffling as Lucius seemed to consider just throwing them across the room, but then he appeared behind the Captain and quickly passed them over.
“Thank you, I thought I left them somewhere in here.”
“Do you often walk around with no clothes on?”, asked Lucius, not exactly judgemental. More like the prospect made Buttons less threatening.
“It was a full moon yesterday”, said Buttons and wiggled one leg into the fabric.
Lucius looked like he might want to follow up on that but then just shrugged.
“Can we get back to my hat, please? And why a bird has it?”
The Captain seemed to get a bit impatient and Buttons couldn’t blame him. It was probably getting quite hot under that fancy blue coat of his. Especially since Brecker had just turned on the big oven and was now smoking up the kitchen.
“It is purple. Olivia loves purple. I also think Karl liked the bows?”
“But it’s way too big for her. She won’t be able to see.”
“No, Captain. They’re using it as a nest. They’re expecting eggs and they were looking for the perfect home for their little family.”
That was followed by a moment of silence in which Lucius, upon spotting yesterday’s axolotl sausage tried to move as far away from the tables as possible, Buttons finally managed to get into the second leg only to realise that he had put the trouser on the wrong way around, and the Captain’s face went through the ten stages of grieve and even discovered some new ones along the way.
“Eggs”, he finally said. “Oh well, If they’re already building a home there I can hardly take it away from them, can I?”, he finally said, sounding rather strained.
“Don’t worry, Captain, the hat wouldn’t have done you much good anyway”, Lucius, who had gone over to breathing as little as possible, tried to console him. “Remember the last five we tried? They didn’t even make it out of the port before they were gone.”
“True, the breeze on sea is quite stiff”, the Captain murmured. “Who would have thought? Maybe I should sew some straps on the hats.”
For a second he seemed a bit lost, now that his venture of the day had dissolved so unspectacularly. But then a new glimmer appeared in his gaze and he fixed his eyes on Buttons.
“But you did steal my hat!”, he shouted.
“Yes”, Buttons said warily.
“In fact, you were quite excellent at stealing my hat.”
Buttons shrugged.
“Don’t take it personally, but it wasn’t very hard, Captain.”
The Captain waved his hands as if to chase a pesky fly away.
“No no, don’t play yourself down like that. You were fast, you were stealthy, a perfect robbery, I would say. And I should know, I’ve read all about them.”
Buttons looked over to Lucius. The young man shook his head, clearly just as confused but his Captain’s mood swings.
“I could use a man like you on the Revenge. That’s my ship. You’ve already seen it, of course. I pay all my pirates a monthly salary, you get a nice spot to sleep on deck, we could even throw in some vacation days. My employees have been quite satisfied so far with the working conditions, haven’t they, Lucius?”
“Employee”, said Lucius. “I’m the only one.”
“Oh, shush!”
Buttons liked his bench and he liked his feathery friends behind the back door. But he also missed the sea. Maybe Karl would like some excursions as well. And the Captain, although very strange, didn’t seem like a horrible man.
He got up and walked over to him, extending one hand.
“Alright.”
“Really?”, the Captain asked, genuinely surprised. Buttons wondered how many times people had said no to him before. Probably everyone who valued their head attached firmly to their shoulders.
“I mean, wonderful, splendid. Welcome on board, Mr.-?”
“Buttons”, said Buttons and shook his hand.
“Mr. Buttons. Great. Are you writing all of this down, Lucius? Our first recruitment!”
“Yes, got it. Shall we?”, Lucius asked, already half out the door.
“Oh yes, of course, we should really be back in time for lunch”, said Stede.
“Bye, Becker”, Buttons shouted in the direction of the kitchen from which strange squeaky sounds drifted over into the guest room.
Nobody answered but he wasn’t terribly bothered.
“Are there actually seagulls building a nest in Stede’s hat?”, Lucius asked as they made their way down to the Revenge, their Captain striding ten paces ahead of them.
“Nah”, said Buttons. “I think Olivia just likes to rip the seams apart. Makes a funny sound.”
He smiled.
“But maybe they will, one day.”