Pirate!England x Reader: Bookworm Ch. 1

CHAPTER ONE: The Book Is Fake

The concept of pirates had always been a source of fascination for you. The life of lawlessness and terror and robbery had most certainly become romanticized over the years; example: The Pirates of the Caribbean movies. However much you despised the evils done regularly by real pirates, the sexy, romanticized pirates in stories more than made up for the horrors you experienced at the hands of reality.

And that was one reason among many that you decided that working in the library was the perfect job for you.

Where else could you get away with reading to your heart's content on break, or between those who came to the desk for check-out? Granted, you had tried an actual book shop with a private owner, but the environment was disastrous at best, and terrifyingly dangerous at worst, so that hadn't lasted very long. But in the library, you had fond childhood memories of browsing through the shelves, seeking for the most interesting titles with the most intriguing summaries to consume and feed your active imagination. Not all of them were "pirate books," but a good few were, and you could confidently direct small children, teens, and adults alike to various authors with the best suited style for the audience.

There was one day, however, that working at the library sculpted the rest of your future, forever.

A person swathed in baggy pants and an enormous hoodie entered the library and approached your desk. You couldn't tell just from looking the gender of the person, not even from the way the person walked or the shape of the body beneath the bagginess. The androgynous figure said, in a voice that could either be low for a girl or rather high for a guy, "I'd like to donate this book to the library, please."

A tad surprised, you took the rather large book with a soft smile. "Will that be all? And may I ask what genre it belongs to and which author wrote it?" You'd done the exact same thing with other library customers before, and you knew the protocol. Usually, the librarians wanted people to wait for a donation drive so they could do everything all at once, but they'd finally trusted you to try it for yourself.

"It's a sort of biography, I suppose," the person said hesitantly. "It's about a pirate named Captain Arthur Ignatius Kirkland. It's still an enthralling read, if you'll take my recommendation."

Normally, you wouldn't go for any sort of biography, due to your intense love of the fictional world, but it was about a pirate? One you'd never heard of before? Impossible. You had done some research about pirates in your spare time, though you rarely delved too deep. Still, you could confidently say you knew the names of at least MOST of the most famous (or infamous, as the case usually is) pirates there were to be found. Maybe this was one of the more obscure ones?... Smiling kindly, if a bit condescendingly, you said, "Are you sure it's a biography? I don't see the author's name anywhere in or on the book..." You leafed through the first couple blank pages, searching for a table of contents, but the stranger gently, forcefully closed the book, narrowly missing your fingers.

The person coughed nervously, uncomfortably, and you found yourself watching the shadow beneath the deep hood suspiciously. "Ah, I'm not too sure about it, actually. I just don't want the darn thing to be taking up space in my living room anymore... You might need to read it, then, if you want to figure out what it really is..."

Sighing and you gazed down at the intricately designed leather cover, you replied, "Look, if this is some kind of prank..." But when you looked back up, the person was gone. Startled, you immediately peeked over the edge of the desk as a precautionary measure, and finding nothing, you looked all about the immediate area. All those that were there hadn't seemed to have noticed that an androgynous being appeared and disappeared within the last five minutes, leaving you with a book about a pirate...

You looked at the book with a suspicious glare. It wasn't heavy enough to be hiding something like a bomb, but you waved through the pages quickly just to be safe. You could never be quite sure with someone so suspicious... There didn't appear to be anything wrong with it. To the contrary! It was as if it had come straight from the printing company's machines. If a little dusty, you noted. Glancing around, you knew that you wouldn't be needed for a while. Older people with picky tastes and parents with squirrely children took longer than most other patrons to choose their literature, so you allowed yourself to sit down and take a cleansing breath.

And with that, you opened the cover, a door to a world of adventure.

The wind blew across the deck with the sweet yet salty air of the sea, you read. For once, the air was gentle and warm - so different from the winds he knew that harassed the English Isles. You could almost feel the wind the book described brush across your skin with the gentle insistence of a lover, and you could vaguely see the shape of this man in your mind's eye. Soon enough, you allowed your imagination to take you away, to the deck of a pirate ship - a place that you knew as intimately as your own bedroom.

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The captain stood on deck, gazing out into the sea with a small frown marring his features. His rather bushy eyebrows settled into a furrow above his eyes, a startling green as deep as the jade ring on his right hand. He knew that something was coming; he could feel it deeply within his bones.

Most importantly, he could feel a presence nearby, so close he close almost touch it. It was a subtle warmth in the air next to him, an energy that electrified the space like a lightning storm. Perhaps it was a storm that had him so unsettled? No, it was something more, much more.

Leaving his men to attend to their duties, the captain Arthur Kirkland retired to his cabin, telling his first mate softly that unless it was urgent, he did not wish to be disturbed. And with that, he locked the door to his cabin, hurrying over to the the windows to draw the curtains shut. With the room darkened thusly, Arthur removed a black book from a secret compartment in his gorgeous mahogany desk, and flipped it open to a seemingly random page. Flipping a few pages here and there, the pirate finally fell upon the page he was searching for. Muttering softly under his breath, he took a silver mirror off the desk's surface and dropped it on his large, rather royal bed. The mirror began to glow a soft blue light, and it became the only source of light in the cabin. When his muttering ceased, so did the light.

With a small smirk of satisfaction, the pirate pushed aside the curtains and closed his eyes briefly to locate the presence... THERE! Holding aloft the mirror, he turned around and gazed past his reflection to the far corner of the room... Where he saw a girl, a beautiful young woman... with [e/c] eyes that were as intriguing as her focused and curious expression were adorable. Not that he'd ever say that out loud, to anyone at any time. And there she was, in the strangest outfit he'd ever seen. But her skin was seemed soft to the touch, and her [h/c] hair was begging for his roughened fingers to stroke...

"Who are you?"
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"Who are you?"

It was a strong whisper that felt like it was breathed directly into your ear, sending shivers down your unsuspecting spine.

"Excuse me, [Y/n]? I'd like to check out, now."

Your eyes snapped away from the book, and it felt as if a thread had been cut somewhere deep inside yourself, the same as it did every time you had to tear yourself away from a book when you were so deeply consumed by it's imagery. Working on autopilot, you helped the older woman check out, your thoughts still consumed by what you had just "witnessed." The girl in the book had sounded so much like yourself (and yet not - she couldn't be nearly as homely as you thought you might be at this moment in time) that you had almost started to put your own face into the image in the mirror. Surely this woman must be much prettier and hypnotizing for such a pirate to be captivated so deeply by her beauty alone, rather than trying to discover what all she was and why she was there...

After completing that task and sending off the woman with an automatic smile that didn't reach your eyes, your gaze dropped down to the book. "Definitely fiction," you muttered to yourself softly. How could that androgynous person have mistaken the book for a biography, of all things? The thought was preposterous!

"[Y/n], your shift is over... Hey, is that a new book?"

You looked over to your superior with a sigh. "Yep, somebody was trying to pass it off as a biography, but it's actually a fantasy about a pirate..."

"Pirate? Don't you love pirate books?" she asked with a soft smile.

"Normally, yes. But this one is weird. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet," you replied with a shrug.

The older librarian thought for a moment, before leaning in conspiratorially. "Hey, if you want, I'll let you take this one home. If you like it, you can keep it. But if you don't you can enter it into the system, you can bury it in the shelves so you never have to see it again. How does that sound, hm?"

Wide-eyed, you nodded readily enough. And so, with the strange book tucked under one arm, you made your way home, pondering on the book and the circumstances of its arrival into your life...