we see the same stars

when he was young, when the only frame of reference he possessed was an overactive imagination, his mama’s bedtime stories, and roi’s tall tales of the sea, cyrus used to close his eyes and create imaginary cities--they almost always rose up on some forgotten coast, with long stretches of soft sand to directly contrast england’s rocky shores that required boots, that froze over when the winter came, always buildings made of old stone rose up into sky, playfully taunting him with their vague notion of history, of containing something for him to uncover for himself. the streets teemed with people, eager to share their tales with him, eager to show him the treasures they kept close to their chests--always, he could feel the breeze of the far off desert he could never see but knew sat beyond his line of sight, of the constant sea like a heartbeat. 

he woke up with an ache in his chest every time, the longing for the imagined that plagues every child--but it never stopped him from sprinting down the stairs, where he would collide with his mama’s legs, where she would ask him without fail where he went last night. 

he tries to think of what he would tell her now, but he just keeps producing thoughts that are only half formed, severed of any connective tissue that might give them sense, might make them something he could hope to articulate. almost, but not quite. old, maybe not in a strictly chronological way. eden, but the snake keeps turning into fruit and speaking in a language that can’t be understood. off-axis. 

so this, he thinks as he jots each one in a neatly ordered list in the corner of the parchment he’d managed to charm out of the hotel manager, as though they are important pieces of information to be referred to later on in his research instead of nonsense, is the the undiscovered country. hotels with attendants but without guests that can be seen, streets without people, stores and bars with solitary keepers and without patrons--and the sea, constant as the heart in his chest. 

he huffs out a breath and shakes his head, before he sets the pen down and starts pulling at the roll of bread he’d been offered when he entered, inexplicably warm even though it has been sitting untouched on a plate for at least an hour now. it’s the first time he’s looked up from his work in just as long, and he can feel color rush to his cheeks when he notices that he is no longer the hotel lobby’s solitary occupant--that there’s a strong chance someone may have been watching him sigh and scribble like a madman. 

“as far as i can tell,” he says, as he clears his throat and sets the roll back on the plate. “there isn’t a single map to be found anywhere on this entire island. you can find silk and beads and enough grog to put you to sleep, but cartography is apparently where the line gets drawn.” he worries his bottom lip between his teeth, shrugs his shoulders. “you haven’t seen one, have you? or talked to anyone who has any sense of where we are in fuckin’ space? i can’t make sense of any of it.”

his best friend, his brother, his partner in crime, his partner, turns. a cold wind passes and the chill wrests his breath away from him, freezing it before he can draw it into his lungs. cyrus looks - looks something near unrecognisable. the youth, the life, the curiosity, the hope, the dreaming - the things that made cyrus, the ephemeral that built his bones and inspired roi -

‘ atua - ‘ god. cyrus looks so tired. he looks like he’s about to start shaking, skin paper-thin and lined with shadows. what are they doing here? they’re supposed to be on their way to the south, to the warmth, to the green, to home.

still, though, still, it’s cyrus. the way the smile crooks the sides of his face, the hint of teeth and tilt of his head. and it shouldn’t hurt, but nor should it be such a surprising relief that cyrus promises to stay, stay with me, i haven’t confessed, i don’t know how to confess, i need you by my side for the rest of time. it’s a breath in, it’s a promise, it’s a promise.

but cyrus’ continues and starts to choke on that breath, his hands clenching at his sides. how dare they, these voices, these spectres, how dare they try and take cyrus away from him. how dare they tempt him, make his eyes tear up, make his sleep so poor.

they sound like mama and roi cannot help the half-step forwards, one hand reaching up to cup cyrus’ face, brush his thumb underneath their eyes. it feels like his heart is breaking and he doesn’t know why. they’re in me now and it cracks, shatters.

( they’re standing in a house, empty, labyrinth. there’s a sheet over the mirror, sun-bleached, age-worn. they reach up, pull it away, the white flashes across their eyes.

the mirror breaks. )

roi steps forward, his other hand coming to also cradle cyrus’ face. ‘ you can’t go. you can’t go where i can’t follow, you can’t. i can’t let you, i can’t do this if you’re not there. your mama is back home, she’s not out here. we’ve got to make it, cyrus. we’re going to aotearoa, remember? the warmth and the green  you can’t go taupuhi ‘

---

roi reaches for him, and his first instinct--or perhaps its one of those who lingers inside of him, pulling at his veins and muscles like the strings of a marionette--is to move, to beg roi to stay away out of the fear that his bones, the thin layer of flesh that covers him so poorly here and now, will not be enough to contain them. you are everything, you foolish bastard, i’m not going to be the reason you fall into this darkness, the reason you never get to go home again. if i am the sea, you must remain the lighthouse. reason, rationality, these things that cyrus has built his life on--they put strength into his spine, but they are useless in the face of roi’s tender touch, the sweeping of a thumb underneath each of his eyes, where he knows that colors of bruising are swept with all the care of an artist’s brush. 

he does not collapse into his best friend’s arms, but its damn close--he digs his fingers into the fabric of roi’s shirt, shakes his head and does his best to swallow down the sobs that threaten to rip through him. he’s safe--even at the ends of the fucking world, the man in front of him makes him feel as if they could be back in kent, embracing after another of roi’s tenures at sea, ready to split a couple of nicked pastries between them. how could he have been so incredibly fucking dull, so willfully blind to what was directly in front of his own eyes, for all the learning he’s devoted his life to? 

“i don’t--i won’t--” he exhales slowly and shakes his head. “i hated when you were away at sea without me, roi--i’m not going through that again. it’s you and me against everyone else--and it always will be--so get that thought out of your mind. i don’t care if i have to fight every bloody ghost on this wretched stretch of earth.” he tightens his grip before releasing, before meeting his best friend’s eyes and smiling--a small thing, a fragile bird still hesitant to flap its once broken wings, meant only to be held in roi’s own hands. 

all her heart now rested on the island; all her heart now beat in time with the haunt. thud, thud — a, lone. ( and what if they all died there, and she remained near to the ship? what if they all died, and she was caught in this expanse of nothingness? she bit her cheek so hard at the thought, she tasted the sharp metal tang of blood. ) this haunting was memory as much as it was fear. 

cyrus harper looked at no one and asked, can you hear it? jules was still learning to ignore its call; sometimes, she could mistake the whisper of another as the sound of settling ice. but she had followed him off ship knowing he might listen. she had followed him here knowing he meant for others to listen too. 

she did not, could not, answer his question. he was not asking it of her, she knew. cyrus harper walked on the ice, and she knew he would make himself a part of it. and so she did the only thing she could think of, a sudden spur of desperate rebellion — she grabbed him by the back of his collar, yanking him toward the direction of the ship, nearly pulling him straight off his feet. she proceeded to drag him. 

let this thing try to take him. 

“you haven’t finished your work yet, harper,” she barked. there was more to the words than anger. she clutched him still, dragging and dragging him to the hms promethean once more, uncaring about the red crack of her knuckles or the howl of the wind. “i don’t give one single shit what it sounds like out there. you don’t get to go until i give you permission, you hear me?”

---

the quartermaster’s movements are sudden enough that he doesn’t have time to step forward, out of the reach of her hand before her fingers hook into the collar of his shirt and begin pulling him in the opposite direction. he registers the fact that she might plausibly be the first person to have touched him, to have brushed their fingers against his skin, since they ventured out onto the island in search of the boatswain only through a haze--the thought is there, solemn as a tombstone, only after they let lose a shriek that threatens to shatter the bones of his skull and his jaw at the contact. 

he manages to stop stumbling after her like a pup that has yet to grow into paws that are too big for its body, and wrench himself free of her grip. “you wouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief, master rowland, to see me gone? finally, out of your line of sight and mind? don’t lie to me--not here, and not now, when truth is nothing more than a pompous abstraction, the hubris of the dead and dying who have no control over what is happening to them.” its perhaps cruel--but at this moment, standing here on the ice that was once as restless and devoid of care for the wants of men as the woman in front of him, he finds that perhaps cruelty is all he has left inside of him. maybe now she will be proud of the man she sees before her--maybe now she will look at him and see a worthy sailor instead of a boy. 

———

Pantea is gone, six more have left and a rescue follows. But for some time now, the cartographer has been sitting on the edge of this cot, brushing through her unbound hair. It borders improper back home, to do something of vanity in the wake of a loss— but already she is dressed down ( finer coat swapped for a black shawl and face bare of makeup,) and it is the one ritual she cannot let go. The gesture lies so closely beside the one once reserved for Pantea, it’s almost like touching her. Sohrab’s hair is so long that if her eyes remain closed, the sensation becomes so distant by the time she reaches the splitting ends that the tresses could pass for someone else’s.

It’s like this that Cyrus walks in on her. Tradition, time-weathered habit, is what sends her hands flitting— abandoning the brush to tug the shawl up over her head for propriety’s sake.

“Well, you were reading all the right books,” She snorts with a derisive turn of the chin. A sharp jerk of the head that says leave me— before catching herself. Before interrogating the way she bristles. Then the why of it. Because he is speaking their language to her in aboard the vessel of a crown that’s long demanded she leave it behind. The words fall like a flurry of birds from his mouth, sure— but in this moment, they are no less comforting in their flight. He is hurting just as she is, for reasons akin to hers. And she pushes him. Why does she ground her heels and push him?

Sohrab tries something new. “…The only black you have?” Her arm strains through the gesture like a hinge against rust, but she pats the cot beside her. Then she lifts the corner of her shawl, a gesture like a raven’s wing unfurling, as if to spirit him under it.

“Here, then. Share mine, for now.” she grunts softly, averting her eyes as if it’s only a favor and not something she needs just as well. It’s a thin disguise for the ego’s sake; a fencepost could see through it. “And books can’t teach you everything, you know,” a suggestion thinly veiled as a statement. “You should listen to your elders.” Ask me, tell me, what you need to, she says without saying.

---

“i don’t have any elders to listen to.” he says quietly, as he comes to sit by her side, to take comfort in the small corner of her black shawl that she offers to him--tries to tamp down the sharp pang of shame that shoots up his spine to his heart like a spike. it isn’t his fault, he reminds himself, that he was born torn tether--and besides, he’s been trying to make up for it ever since, trying to follow the call of his blood down the roseline, buried in sand. he speaks his mother’s language clumsily, he knows, but he speaks it without shame--and surely that must count for all of the other things he’s never had. 

“my mama was a servant to a rich indian girl, she left persia when she was barely out of childhood--i never met my grandparents, aunts or uncles. she met my father in india, and then she gave up her religion too--she doesn’t know i have her old copy of the quran, at home.” he does not meet sohrab’s eyes--he knows that she probably thinks him foolish, for holding onto such things in a world that will never accept him for them. after all, he’s pretty sure she married an englishman of her own--got a proper english education that allowed her to come here as an academic in her own right, instead of as someone’s page boy. instead he fixes his eyes on the dim glow of a lit lantern, the false, poor man’s sunlight that emanates from it. for that is all he has ever been able to claim for himself without stealing, without fighting tooth and nail-- the poor man’s version of everything. 

the departure team are packing. malachy has sent him out of the chambers for fussing, no matter that roimata merely wanted to ensure the safety and the best for the captain whilst he went off - though why he thought he had to lead this party personally -

his thoughts were bordering on mutinous, so he clamped down on them, stepped up onto the deck for air, consciously commanding his jaw to unclench, his worry to unspool like thread cut and turned loose - but there’s a snag and a catch and it knots together and cyrus is walking on the ice and a shout half-leaves his lips as he starts forward, one arm outstretched, but cyrus’ voice carries and roi stumbles to a stop behind the other.

‘ cyrus? ‘ he asks instead, half-afraid for any answer.

he’s afraid to reach out the rest of the way, to rest a hand on the shoulder of the boy he once knew so well - this trip and twisted and perverted even the ocean itself and it’s something sick that has crawled its way into all of their lungs, into their blood, their hearts.

‘ you want to leave? ‘ is all he can ask instead.

---

“roi,” he says on an exhale of breath, as he turns to face the other man. the sight of him, tall against the night sky, as though he could simply reach a hand up and rearrange the stars into constellations only the two of them could understand, makes cyrus feel suddenly aware of everything, all at once--how long it has been since he slept, how hard every muscle in his body has worked just to keep him in control, to compensate for the exhaustion that now sits on his shoulders like stone, the distance he has protectively put between himself and the only person that has ever resembled home in his eyes. his body feels liable to shatter on the ice, to spider and fissure until the ghosts begin leaking through the cracks, begin looking for something bigger and stronger to contain them. 

“roi,” he says again and smiles, shakes his head. is this how sailors feel, speaking of their beloved port of call? just a few more days now and i’ll come to dock at roimata again--the waters are warm and calm, the shore is green and grows wild--there is no more beautiful point on this entire globe than roimata, i think i will live my life and die there, if he will have me. “i’m not going anywhere without you, you fool.” he wants to close the distance between them with a sprint, collapse into his best friend, the arms of his axis--but they hold him where he is. 

he glances at his feet, worries his bottom lip between his teeth. just a while longer, yeah? and then i’ll figure this out--i’ll figure out how to tell you that i’m right shit at all of this, but i’m pretty sure it’s only ever been you for me. i’ll tell you how sorry i am that it’s taken me so bloody long to figure out that you’ve always been my true north. when i’m sure that they’ll be my words. when i’m sure that they won’t hurt you through me. 

just please, please don’t be in love with someone else until then, roimata. wait for me just a while longer--like all of the times i’ve waited for the sea to bring you back to me. 

perhaps it’s a different kind of haunting - to be left in silence whilst everyone around you begins to be surrounding by the things that you were once privy to. it feels heavier, emptier, loss a thing she knows as intimately as her own breath, her own being. perhaps it is her, at this point, her self nothing more than a shell of hollow ringing desires and empty endless horizons.

do they haunt him in the same way they followed her? promises and blood stained fingers and guilt she swallowed for every glimpse of sunlight and alongside every ashy meal? does she care?

she does, for some reason, some how, she finds that she does

he looks at her and she still cannot bring herself to look at him. look at them, two bright shining beacons of promise, relegated to burning out amongst the ice.

turn tameless and she cannot help but laugh at this, a dry bark before the amusement is suffocated - as though the ghosts that had haunted her had been tamed. sated perhaps, glutted on her distress and devoured on her energy, rendering her listless and exhausted. she knows, that if she turns her head, she will see that same look on cyrus’ face, but still, there’s a difference.

all they did was make her sleep, endlessly, exhausted. they don’t seem to let cyrus rest.

‘ lived like what, cyrus? haunted? dogged by my own conscious and bad choices or by loss and the festering of a loved one or by some fucking ring that decided it wanted to make spooky noises and make me dream of drowning in sand or ocean? ‘ her words grow cutting, violent, at the end, before her whole body sags, head curved in a mockery of penance. ‘ i tried to warn you. i’m ‘ she pauses, before the word is ripped out bloody and gasping - ‘ i’m sorry. that i failed. ‘

---

through the cacophony inside of his mind, the howling laughter that fills up every space of his skull and threatens to push, to smash the barrier of bone and release itself into his bloodstream, to force him out of his body like an old coat, something useless against the cold--he manages to wrap his fingers around the thought. “so, there’s a reason, then--” he says it slowly, through gritted teeth, as though each syllable were a delicate fragment of ancient pottery with a stark black grecian drawing of something horrible, something that could only be studied and understood for what it was once it was reunited into a whole.

“a ring--” theseus ties the red string to his belt. this is his starting point. this will lead him out of the darkness. ali baba, mama says in his memory--her voice barely a whisper that slides between the other voices in his mind like a tendril of smoke, walks up to the cave of the forty thieves and speaks the magic words. “you have a ring, that makes noise and causes you to dream of drowning--in sand and in water.” open sesame, says ali baba. i will return with the head of the minotaur. says theseus. so they both walk into the darkness.

“that could be it--a reason for all of this.” he looks at her, even though she will not turn her head and meet his eyes. “don’t you see? maybe we could put a stop to all of this and save ourselves--its a common theme in so much folklore--” he gets to his feet, begins pacing as he tries to catch his thoughts, flighty winged things that are almost impossible to discern from the others that have rooted inside of him, let alone to pin to the table like specimens. “once the wrong is righted, then the world will correct itself. in the arabian nights--ali baba only takes what he needs from the cave, and he is allowed to live, to keep what he has taken. but cassim--he takes too much, he is killed by the thieves.” he drags his hands through his hair, worries his bottom lip between his teeth. “perseus’s grandfather tried to kill his mother while she was pregnant with him, and he was the one that killed him--the wrong was righted, and perseus became the king.” 

GO, they howl. 

He thinks of Cerberus, with its many heads, mouths filled with teeth snapping at the same time, pulling in opposite directions in an effort to separate one from the other. Ouroboros, the snake fated to forever cannibalize himself. Everything contained within the fragile cage of bone, the worn canvas covering of skin. 

GO, CYRUS HARPER. 

MOVE FORWARD. 

He exhales, his breath a slow moving plume of smoke. He steps forward, the ice does not make sound beneath the sole of his boot. Or perhaps it does, perhaps it shatters like glass and he does not hear it--perhaps he walks on water now, supported by thousands of spectral hands Yes, he thinks. He can feel their fingers wrapping around the slender bone of his ankle, trying to pull him down--Ouroboros, Euryidce’s eyes fall to the ground, before she places her foot in the center of the circle. Before it closes like a snare. 

COME TO US CYRUS HARPER. 

It sounds almost like a song now. 

COME, they sing. COME, COME, COME. DON’T YOU HEAR THE DRUMMING? 

He steps forward again, another time. Ariadne follows the red string to the center of the labyrinth where her brother, where the monster sits in darkness. Persephone sings to Cerberus. Ouroboros. So the end is always self made. 

COME HOME. بیا خانه.

“Can you hear it?” He says quietly, without turning his head to look at the person who stands a few feet behind him. “Sometimes, I swear it sounds like mama. Calling after me.” He closes his eyes, for a fraction of a second, for the length of an eternity--who can be sure, who can find it in themselves to care? Ouroboros, he bites down hard on the tail and swallows. 

“They want me to go. To leave.”

silence is an echoing hollow thing, chasm and consuming, for all a life spent in her own thoughts of death and discovery, it is those that end up betraying her - nights spent asleep but thought awake and unable to move but for the terror of knowing that something was at the end of her bed. she had sought the dead and their whispers and their secrets and perhaps their hauntings were inevitable.

it has been easier and different on this ship - the nightmare shared amongst others somewhat easier to bear, and she hasn’t seen the ring in months. perhaps she will still die out here, perhaps it will be an easier death.

it does not mean that the invisible scars and the intangible threads used to stitch herself back up do not hurt, ache in this miserable cold, in those shadowing her footsteps and demanding why they do not show them the sun, for her inability to say that the sun is a echoing hollow thing, hungry and unsatisfied.

but it seems as though her shadow has surpassed her, slipped beneath her feet and tried to feast on false warmth, yet to turn accusing eyes towards her but she can tell.

she can see the weight of the darkness press down, knows what sleepless nights and the hauntings of the dead do to your posture. she hopes he hasn’t got the ring in a pocket, hopes he will get better, but he doesn’t, and now that something near the worst has come to pass she does not know how she can help.

it’s the moanings of the wind that draw her out to the deck, some long crushed maternal instinct that leads her eyes to the huddled form of cyrus, some utter exhaustion that brings her to his side, sits down next to him, staring out with blank eyes to the blank horizon.

‘ oh. ‘ the silence draws out again as she processes. the captain - repurcussions, threats, warnings. ‘ are you saying that there’s what’s haunting me and what’s haunting you? ‘ even if the captain had found out, what would he be able to do? but if the shadows in the ice are different to those in the sands, will it be her salvation or damnation?

/ / / 

BEWARE THE ONE WHO UNEARTHS. BEWARE CYRUS HARPER. BEWARE THE ONE THAT UNEARTHS, BEWARE HER GHOSTS. 

they are louder, now that she sits down next to him. perhaps they ache to call out to one of their own, to howl loud enough that their voices will be heard through his own mouth, in the same way they had pulled so unnaturally the vocal chords of the boatswain that day on the island. perhaps they simply mean to remind him of the red string that ties the two of them together, the way it has wrapped itself around both of their necks, that one wrong move by either one of them will tighten it around the other. perhaps they simply scream in an effort to make themselves heard, over the wind. 

it does not matter, it still feels like millions of hands are pushing at the fissures of his skull. lijin still does not meet his gaze. 

keep your questions simple, mister harper. that way i can answer them in more detail. defend your position like an academic--what evidence do you have that your eyes still belong to you? can you say with any kind of absolute certainty that your mind is more than a razed, unsettled churchyard? do you not see for yourself, imposter, little boy who has to bite down hard on the impulse to curl into the nearest body like a babe in search of a mother, that you speak and your teeth are slick with dust, with blood and sand? 

BEWARE THE ONE THAT UNEARTHS. HER GHOSTS TURN RESTLESS. BEWARE, LEST YOU BECOME ANOTHER DOOMED TO FOLLOW HER. 

“i don’t know what i’m saying.” he says on an exhale, with a quick shrug of one shoulder. “i don’t know what haunts you--i don’t know what haunts me, i just know that it’s never quiet.” he bites down hard on his bottom lip, turns to meet her gaze. he knows, without ever having seen it, that his face is drawn, as though someone had smudged charcoal along the bones of his cheeks, his jaw. “beware the one that unearths--that’s what the boatswain said to me. he was dead. he was dead and he told me that her ghosts would turn tameless, and i haven’t been alone inside of my own head since.” 

———

Upon returning to the cartography room from taking a meal in the mess, the cartographer is rather horrified to see the state of the place. A small puddle of ink, seeping more easily than she recalls blood does when taking to good linens. 

“You don’t understand?” Sohrab replies in clipped tones when Cyrus opens with that admission. “What is there to understand? You’ve ruined a perfectly good map.” It’s a two-pronged statement. The first is admonishment. The second is something quite new: the cartographer has never called one of his maps Good before.

That aside, it’s entirely blunt. It’s only once Sohrab notices the bleariness swimming in the lad’s eyes that the scowl softens. If only the slightest bit ( a singular crease in that trifold brow loosens. )  She sucks her teeth, a sharp and perfunctory sound. “Come now, up. Up!” The cartographer takes no time in sliding the chair Cyrus occupies a stride back from the table ( it’s almost alarming, how little resistance the young man’s weight affords them. Muscled as if a sack of flour at most. ) With a curt flick of the wrist she beckons him to his feet and then after her, stepping forward to survey the damage. 

“Well, luckily the expedition already has a cartographer,” An utterance as the paper is peeled up by a sodden corner to be examined between their fingernails. Then a beat, as she realizes the sorrow-stricken implication of his last remark. Ah, of course. it’s not about a map, it’s about his map. The details of which were lost in part to fading memory and now in full with the ruining of his record. “-That is to say, they may have some notes lying about.” She takes her time perusing what’s left of his work. Sprinkling hints as to a means of replication that may be negotiated, were he willing to lend his labor. “–some site specific studies… in need of organizing, so that the official draft can be more easily… cross-referenced. Should an aspiring cartographer find themselves, well, in need of good practice.”

/ / /

it dawns on him slowly, that he wants to be angry with her. 

he wants to take her map in his hands and tear it to pieces, watch as they flutter like bird feathers to the ground before treading purposefully over them--as if to call attention to the fact that it did not require a university education, an office in a white marble building, a pitiful acolyte who doesn’t know any better, for him to put his work underneath his heel. 

don’t you get it? he would snarl. she would gape at him he’s sure--when did the boy grow falcon’s wings? when did he learn their fearsome call, that wolf’s howl that does not belong in the mouth of the bird? he would snap his newly grown beak, look at her with his yellow hunter’s eyes, and say don’t you understand yet that none of this matters? 

you thought the frontier could be contained, forced into submission and inside of borders made of stark black lines on paper? i’m here to tell you, cartographer, that the frontier is so much bigger than we are capable of understanding--the frontier flays the flesh from your bones and takes root inside of you, makes your pathetic body that is barely capable of containing the terror inside of you part of it. 

we go forth, we push boundaries, we discover, not because god has granted us the grace to do so. we go forth because the frontier has decided to spit us back out instead of swallowing us whole. 

he wants to be angry--but anger would involve an explanation. anger would involve trying to translate a language that he has only learned through having his jaw forced open, and having each word shoved down his throat until he spat them back up like bile. anger would involve admitting that he was not smart enough to keep himself alive. 

because he isn’t, is he? logic would dictate that one who shares his body with so many dead must count himself among them. 

“thank you.” he says after clearing his throat, dragging a hand through his hair in an effort to bring himself back to the present, to remind himself of his own physicality. ‘but that won’t be necessary. my hands--” he shakes his head as he spares a glance down at them, bloodied with black ink. “clearly aren’t steady enough at the moment, and accuracy should be prized above all else. especially here, and now, when it seems to be in such short supply.” 

here, he thinks, as he drags his thumb across his temple in an effort to soothe the phantom ache that always seems to be lingering there, as we come to the ends of knowledge itself. it leaves a black mark that disappears into his hairline. 

cyrus hesitates for a long moment, hidden in the shadows of the doorway to sohrab’s cabin.

what exactly does he mean to say? that his mama never taught him the words for grief, for loss, and that speaking them in english seems to strip them of all relevant feeling, all emotional resonance? that pantea was kind to him when she did not have to be, and she deserves to be mourned for in the manner of the home she never got to see? does he mean to ask if there is some sort of map that will chart a course from knowing to not knowing? from being so alive that it pains you, makes the heart in your chest beat wildly and with the erratic melody of the ward drum into being haunted? from dreaming into the unknown country of nightmare? 

will he ask her, with his shaking hands and his frightened rabbit eyes, how to plead in his mother’s tongue for the ghost of a friend to leave him alone? to go to her rest instead of adding her voice to the chorus of anguished howls that do not cease inside of his mind? 

he bites down hard on his bottom lip, wrings his hands as he steps forward into the doorway, into one of the small pools of golden lantern light that now serve as the only source of illumination onboard. he has no answers--fear has dulled the sharp edges of his academic mind, narrowed the scope of his focus to only seeking out comfort where it can be found, if it can be found, and keeping himself alive. everything else seems trivial, or belongs to a future that seems absurd to hope for. 

-

everything, from his skyward ambitions to his teeth sinking into his lip, strikes her as despairingly young. but not naive, no, not in the soft-bellied way most youth who can afford it are cloistered from the world can only dream of grand things that are within reach the moment they leave their castles and ramparts. he’s stomached derision and whatever indignity those lower on the totem pole are bound to suffer – and loneliness. she does not know which of the two is more unbearable, but it is their lot to know both - children of immigrants, shuttered from their motherland and forced to make a home in a land crueler than kind.

“it is a shame,” she sighs,” that your beauty is wasted in company who do not appreciate it.” his fiery mettle, his clear ambition – younger than she, and yet she did not even possess the same candor when she was left alone and set adrift, lost in her own grief, lost in her own loss. the boy is bright, even in his burning shame when he realizes he spoke too freely. but his passion eclipses all that stands in its sight, and she would much rather stand ablaze in it than claim comfort in tepid talk. “i think you’ll outdo them all, cyrus. perhaps even the captain. the desperation that lands most men in the navy, i’m sure, can only get someone so far without your kind of fervor, darling. you’ll have your own vessel one day – perhaps you’ll have several. perhaps you will be too good for any of this.”

she laughs, and it chimes like a church bell, near forlorn. “i will never scold you for speaking, darling. no such thing as ‘speaking out of turn’, the phrase was invented by those who long to hoard the conversation.” she flicks a curled strand from her face, even if doing so would reveal the faraway film in her gaze. “no. i was born in london – my parents spoke of persia often. sometimes fondly, sometimes as if it were a comrade that has betrayed them. i think i’d like to see what it’s like, even if only for a day.”

---

“beauty?” he speaks the word carefully, slowly, as though it’s in a language that he’s never spoken before. it sits heavy on his tongue, and he finds that he cannot swallow it, make any effort at internalizing--he finds that more than anything he wants to spit it back out, tell her that he cannot possibly speak this with any fluency, that it would be better if he did not utter anything at all about that which he does not understand. “i’m not--” he flushes bright red, he knows, can feel the way that heat pools just underneath the surface of his skin like blood underneath a bruise. “beauty belongs to people like the steward, who sees it in everything. you’re beautiful--not that--i don’t mean to be too forward. i just mean that i’m--not. really beautiful, that is.” 

he doesn’t really know what prompts her to keep going, to tell him that he could be better than even captain dowling himself--she wines and dines with men better than he is every day, men who have books on shelves with their names in embossed, who have money enough to make the world unfurl before them like ribbon, men who bare battle scars and medals on their chests. he has a careful hand to make lines on a map, he’s impatient and damn near incapable of keeping his mouth shut when it matters--nothing, in comparison. “you sound like roi--my best mate. he’s always saying things like that, but he’s the best sailor i’ve ever seen in my lifetime, like--like he was born and has always known that he should be at sea. i’d be happy just to serve underneath him, be left to my maps and my journals.” 

would roi say that he was beautiful, like she had? if he were another sailor on leave, onboard a merchant vessel in the middle of the mediterranean, would roi have looked at him with heat in his eyes across a crowded room? why does it suddenly matter to him? 

he clears his throat and ducks his head, rubs a hand absently across the back of his neck. “for a while mama wouldn’t tell me anything--said we were better off where we were. but then i kept stealing every book i could get my hands on, begging her to teach me to speak it like she did, and she started to tell me stories, teach me bits and pieces. roi and i--we’re going as soon as we get back from all of this. first to persia, then to new zealand, where he’s from. i’ve been charting the course, in my spare time.” 

he pushes the piece of parchment  towards her, shrugs his shoulders again. “you could toss the commander by the wayside, come with us. or bring him--though i can’t imagine he’d appreciate sharing a vessel with the two of us, being in a position as he is.”

-

he still feels landsick, as though the ground ought to be swaying beneath his feet, as though the brick walls and wooden floors are too solid, too steadfast and mud-caked instead of stained with splintering ice. but for all its steadiness, it brings it’s own joy, own comfort, it’s own longing - for once roimata dreams not of the ocean but of the land, or perhaps not of the land but of another.

he swallows that thought, and the heat that comes with it, blames the blush on his cheeks on the alcohol swimming in their systems - no matter that it will take a few more to get him truly drunk, but he’s approaching it, he can tell, in the way that he doesn’t mind the way that cyrus looks at him ( but he’s never minded that, has he? not since they were kids and sprawled out across the floor, not since cyrus taught him his letters and now, perhaps, he even welcomes it, perhaps, now, he feels like basking in it.

( he dreams, and sometimes he understands why sailors make homes on land - but knows that he’d never have to compromise on the ocean in his veins when it’s cyrus by his side )

he relaxes further, something boneless and indecent, when cyrus fully leans against him, feels the point of his spine unravel to bear his guts, heart and all. he sinks into the feeling, lets it bubble over his head, breathes once deeply when cyrus curls fully into his neck. wordless, he reaches out, takes the bottle, downs near enough the rest of it.

’ i’ll teach you. ‘ i’ll protect you, he nearly says, knows that it comes too close to the romance novels that they’ve sometimes read, as they snark and tease and get engrossed in the twists of the pulp. ‘ anyway, you know so many things in that pr- in that big head of yours, won’t be but a voyage before you’re ready to become a first mate. ‘ he flicks the back of cyrus’ head gently, pretends that the stammer was a drunken hiccup.

---

i’ll teach you, he’d said, in the same way that cyrus had spoken the same words a thousand odd times since they’d met as boys. i’ll teach you your letters, i’ll teach you how to ask where i am in persian, so my mama will smile when she sees you, and you’ll always know where i am. i’ll teach you where my home is on this map, if you teach me where yours is, and one day we’ll spool the red string far enough to connect the two. 

never once has cyrus thought about kissing the words from his best friend’s mouth. never once has he heard those words and thought about how surely, there was no more romantic sentiment in the entirety of the english language--or of any language in which words could be strung together. i’ll teach you, roi says, and all cyrus can hear is i will hold the earth between my hands and slice it like a peach for you--together we will suck it dry of secrets. 

fuck, he is drunk. 

that is the only explanation for the sudden impulse that shoots through him like quicksilver, that gallops to the tips of his fingers and makes them itch to trace the line of roi’s cupid’s bow when he speaks the words, the only thing that could possibly explain the hummingbird that swallows his heart whole and flutters behind his breastbone impatiently. it tries to communicate something to him--nips at the muscle between ribs to try and shout it, to force his body to contort in the right direction, towards some kind of true north. he cannot parse it. 

cyrus harper is one of the only languages that he does not speak--he suspects that only roi has ever maintained a kind of fluency. 

teach me how to speak of you, so that when you aren’t here i can hold a conversation with you, pretend that i am not irrevocably solitary without you. 

“you’ve got saltwater where your blood should be, roi--i’ll never be as good as you are. mama says persia has deserts--i think i have sand inside of me if anything.” he shrugs his shoulders, steals the bottle from where it’s clutched white-knuckled in roi’s hand. “i’ll fall off the side because i was ranting and raving about marco polo being allowed to write anything he wanted, and how we all just decided to accept it as gospel, and you’ll have to dive in after me.” 

the threat was slipped into a coat pocket and lay there all morning and afternoon, five scribbled lines on a slip of parchment, separated from shaw’s skin by two thin layers of cotton and nothing else, yet innocuous enough in size to go unnoticed all the while. it’s still warm from his own body heat when he discovers it, intimate as a lover’s pillowcase, having spent half the day pressed a few inches below his heart.

the discovery in question happens before dinner, and so elias doesn’t get the chance to open it until he’s settling down to eat. when he recognizes the note for what it is, he’s for once glad to be seated alone, to not have to explain why he blanches down to his toes. so it’s with a sense of dread that, only moments later after bringing his heart back to a normal tempo, elias notices cyrus approaching him, and an even greater relief when the sailor mistakes the paper in his hands for his work— a relief, to not have to repeat the words back to his friend, conjure them, cruel and crude, into the air between the two men, and in doing so make the threat real, like a curse that needs a human tongue to speak it to life.

“and a good evening to you as well, harper.” he says, tucking the paper back into his trousers pocket, careful not to move too quickly. careful to keep the shake in his hand, in his voice, imperceptible. he sends the other sailor his best intimation of a warm smile. “oh, don’t give me that,” he says, tracking cyrus’s movements, the hands pressing to his eyes. while the other sailor’s voice is teasing, there is something drawn about his face, around the lips and eyes, that makes elias wonder what’s haunting his friend tonight. a dozen options come to mind easily, but whether it’s in kindness or cowardice, eli choses to play along instead of pressing.

“surely there are a few redeeming qualities between the lot of them?” (he means to make a joke of it, don’t tell me one or two of them aren’t pretty enough to look at, at very least? you don’t need to be smart to have eyes, right? but then the note rises in his mind, one particularly lewd accusation playing like a record stuck on a loop, needle gauging into vinyl, nails against skin— so he changes tac.) “at least they seem— polite. nice enough, yeah? anyway, don’t let anyone hear you invoking the name of byron around here quite so lackadaisically,” he picks up a piece of bread and starts to tear it, methodically, to bits. “you should have witnessed the tongue-lashing i heard aimed at one of the younger seamen the other day, for daring to quote shelley in the presence of un français tragique. the poor fellow looked on the edge of tears by the end of it.”

/ / / 

“you’d probably think the angel of death, bringing you notice of your impending doom had some redeeming qualities about him, shaw.” cyrus drawls, with a roll of his eyes. “you’d sigh to me about how dreamy the black voids in his skull face are, how shiny his scythe was, and then you’d make me read the poem you inevitably wrote about it.” he grins wolfishly, despite the fact that the action makes the muscles in his face feel ancient somehow, withered and unused--has it really been that long since he smiled, since his face was set in something other than the mask of careful neutrality, designed to keep the horrors that now keep residence behind his eyes from view? he wonders if it shows, somehow--if his eyes now have lines at the corners, despite the fact that he remains only twenty four years of age. if the dark shadows that sweep underneath his eyes have begun to seep like watercolor to his cheekbones, to the corners of his mouth to paint him gaunt, hollowed out. he’s been avoiding looking glasses--since the boatswain had come to him on the island. 

there’s a poem in that--he thinks. or maybe a tale of horror that would make mary shelley shiver and tuck the book underneath her sofa. the young man, kept awake at night by the wailing of the damned and dead. the young man, afraid to meet the eyes of his own reflection, for fear of what he might see. the young man, half hollowed out, staggers before his friend and speaks as though nothing had passed between them. 

“at any rate--i don’t like that we’re turning around on the word of some half-frozen, half-starved frenchman. you don’t think someone like that would say just about anything, to see the safe shores of his homeland again?” he tears at the piece of bread in his hand with more force than is necessary, shrugs his shoulders. he’ll go back to kent now, keep peering into the windows of buildings he’ll never get let into, with only his head full of ghosts to show for the effort--it doesn’t quite feel like a fair trade-off, to give up everything on the word of someone he hadn’t even known existed until weeks ago. “the passage is out there, just a little bit further, and we’ll never lay eyes on it!” 

he sighs and shakes his head, does his best to puppet his features into a smile again. “bloody hell, i think you’re rubbing off on me in the wrong ways, mate. as for byron and shelley i don’t give a rat’s ass about either of them--it’s all pale imitation of better stuff from other corners of the world, isn’t it? i’ve read lines by medieval persian poets that would make keats crawl underneath his covers and never emerge again. hebrew poetry as well, right--in the 13th century, the rabbi yehuda al-harizi once wrote--’if the son of amram had seen the face of my beloved, his ringlets, and his gloriously beautiful face blushing while imbibing alcohol, he would not have written in his Torah ‘...and with a man’” cyrus smirks, chuckles to himself. “i’d like to see wordsworth beat that.”