THE CHAPLAIN

They’d been here once before, albeit roles reversed. Once a towering frame filling a doorway, to keep a hunter’s justice from embedding itself between the eyes of a guilty quarry. Now a towering frame poised to enact their own watery retribution - quarry guilty of nothing but survival and subservience, this time - and a hunter too late to keep them apart.

But not too late to separate them. So he’d lunged. Tried to reign him in with an arm hooked around the throat and a warning glint of steel. A bloodless tranquilliser; once sanguine was spilled on either side, a whiff of it would have them at each other like wolves. The captain’s lot taking their leave wasn’t worth a bloodbath.

But there was no winning here, it seemed. With one appeased, another was set off. He’d hardly registered Laurents’ screech over the stun of its proximity, and the consequential wrench of his gut as a fist drove home. Mariah came away easily - the deckhand Roi had grappled having managed to slip away, given the opening. He doubled over the fist, the blow punching the air from his lungs for a hard-felt second.

Job done, he’d expected the chaplain to stop there. Perhaps that was why the blade clattered so easily to the deck, dislodged from loose fingers as the abdomen-cradling arm was jerked back and a bellicose bodyweight buckled him to a knee. That was where the compliance ceased. Mariah caught himself before he could be pushed any lower, the fizzle of some ancient ferocity escaping gnashed teeth in a growl, and he began to push back. A living built on bibles versus one built on bounties; it wasn’t the fated outcome of this that set him ill at ease, but the fact the dirk had escaped his periphery. He writhed one way and the other - half under the unyielding pressure of the priest on his back, half scouring for the discarded weapon. He glimpsed it too late to discourage what bloody respite it would orchestrate.

Wild eyes flared with something else and he made a sideward jerk, chaplain and all. The restrained dodge was too little too late it would seem, as the hold on him fell away and he caught the agonised wheeze. Immediately Mariah twisted aside and up, whirling to his unsolicited rescuer and clapping him hard across the head (not forcefully, but not at all kindly).

“Have you lost the fucking run of yourself?” he spat as he snatched for the wielding wrist to revoke the weapon, only to glance down and find it vacant. Only to turn back to the man crumpled on a knee and find the offending blade still lodged in his shoulder. His jaw tightened as he flashed one look about the chaos surrounding before he thrust the guard away from him and sidled to the chaplain once more.

“This may be a God given sign you should stick to scriptures, Laurie. This never seems to end well for you,” Mariah examined the wound with a judicious eye (he’d only the one) before dipping to the priest’s other side and beneath the good arm. With a soft urging of ‘up you get’ he hoisted him to his feet with weightless ease, though he did not do so too hastily.

“Don’t go jostling too much, now. It’s not going to be the most comfortable trek but I can promise you’ll have a nastier go of it if that thing comes out.” The sick-bay was of course, the imperative destination. But a glance about the deck, still fraught with clashing limbs, foretold the journey to the skirts of the fray would be a dicey one. The brow furrowed warily as he hauled the chaplain flush and steady to his side, and began to navigate him through the gaps. Tone perhaps the only unsharp thing to surround them, that moment.

“Stick to me, now. You’ll be grand. It’s not even that bad, alright? It isn’t that bad.”

He’d live, sure enough. But there was no telling what lasting damage such a scrape could leave him with until there was time for a closer look. He supposed the reassurance depended on one’s interpretation of ‘bad’.

———

What follows reaches the chaplain in bleary vignettes, as if he watches the fray of their landfall reach him through a pinhole. There’s a thrumming in the ears. Blood rushing through the drum of them in a deafening march. Blood blooming from his back. In a moment of flagging lucidity, or perhaps animal instinct, the chaplain paws for his shoulder. Seems an attempt to seize the knife’s handle and take it out— out! But weakness, or a flash of better sense, overcomes him. He abandons the gesture, arm dropping limply to his side as he hunches into himself. As he gleans, in a faraway manner, that the bounty hunter’s standing over him in an absurd echo of a night over a decade past and tin-typed into his memory. This presence all too familiar to his instincts would be enough to upend him, only this time the bounty hunter doesn’t strike. Instead he hoists him, secures him to his side, and carries him onward.

Laurie. Had he his wits about him, he’d take a higher name in vain for this one:  Laurie. When had they started with the nicknames, then? The two of them. When had wariness turned to such easy friendship? And when had it curdled? Ah, that’s right. The chaplain had remembered himself. The holy-man with a divine intervention all his own, the whole of it summing up to hubris. The  fool with the swinging fist. Bastard with the blade in his back. “Sh-shut,” he manages, just barely. The passion that seeps through the wheeze communicates enough: shut your bloody mouth. Maybe it’s one of life’s many little miracles that he’s too shellshocked, too tongue-tied by pain, to prattle off even one of the obscenities that come to mind.

Stick to me, now, Mariah says — and there’s almost a divine comedy to it; he wonders if the fifth circle felt as such to Dante: bodies reeling about the deck in blind wrath. The sound of it, the fury, a far-off gunshot, the blood. 

He’s aware of this as they descend to the lower decks and toward the sickbay, his own hands clutching at his breast as though that might staunch what dampens his back.

He’s aware of Mariah’s arm as it bears his weight — how it presses up ‘round his middle. Feels as though he’s falling into it with the hazy notion that he may never stop falling. Aware of a glimpse of Jonathan as they near the sickbay. Then, as his vision tunnels, he’s aware of little more.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐔𝐍𝐅𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑 | 𝐄𝐌𝐌𝐀-𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐄 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐃

[ @sweetsunflora​ ]

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇 | 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐑 𝐓𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐓

 [ @seraphsaint ]

She had an idea––an awful, symbolic, idea: to sit in the hollow, empty, turtle shell of Philippa’s life, and take on the full scope of her actions. To burden herself with the gravity of death. Of murder. She had not just killed flesh and blood, but hope and dreams…Thoughts and ideas that will never come into being again. When she opens the cabin door, she intends to drown in the context of the life she ended.

Her hands run over bedsheets, unmade and cold. A bed left in a rush, meant to be tidied later upon returning. There is a small bookshelf in the corner and a writing desk close by. Emma approaches it to find a journal, closed but page marked by fountain pen. She almost opens it, almost breaches into the mind that is here no more but another thing catches her eye first. A peaking corner of a portrait just underneath the leather bound diary, and before she can even pull it out; before she can see the whole picture, Emma knows it is her own work. The noblewoman’s face––made with her own strokes, her own hand––half-smiles in burning irony. And it feels like a mocking, the universe’s mocking. The naturalist’s features twist, wrought iron mangled by this new blow. Her chest heaves, up and down, and the ugly lines on her face deepening. Suddenly, a scream claws out her throat and she is no longer human but hurricane, tearing through books and blankets and journals. She howls, and keeps grabbing and ruining, because that’s all her stupid hands can do. All they know how to do.

Suddenly, Laurents is in front of her and she stands in the middle of unholy debris. There is wetness on her face, running down in streaks. When did she start crying? “Laurents––This isn’t––I can explain.” But she chokes on her excuses. “––I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I don’t know why––W-Why did I do that? I’m so sorry.” She sinks to the floor, holding herself. As if that will keep the shattered pieces of her together.

———

She stands in the middle of unholy debris, and in the immediacy of it— before reason, before action, before anything else, Laurents only wonders how he never saw the naturalist in such a light. In such a violence. A shrike. He enters the room in a daze and can only blanch at the nest she’s made of its tatters and the prey she’s made of him, thorn through the heart. Several heartbeats of stillness follow. In the end, he finds it’s not the outburst itself that pierces his chest, it’s the remnants. 

It’s the book that lies by her left shoe (one of several), with its pages gutted through. Its cover torn. A hardback of his own innermost collection, graphite marks in the margins. A book lent to Pippa in a moment alone some time ago, and left to her care since. It feels like being rent open. 

fatherfoxhound​.

———

When the good doctor draws him in, feeling pangs deep in his chest and splinters through every sinew of his limbs; the same way a glass might shatter upon the floor and send its shards to the kitchen’s farthest corners, finding the nooks even the home itself had forgotten existed. Perhaps his body has always built houses in this way; erected shelves to store grief, hearths where others warm up, dens for visitors to slough off their worries.

Perhaps his bones have just been creaking timbers for some time now, his shoulders a sagging roof.

He slopes into Jonathan and winds one arm for purchase— fingers twisting into the back of his shirt. Thinks he might weep, if he could. Let tears stain the doctor’s shoulder; but nothing comes, eyes dry as some long neglected attic. “I know I… I shouldn’t— crumble for such reasons,” he utters even as meaning escapes him. Shouldn’t he? he thinks. He, who is meant to channel meaning from such things. To guide others toward it. Folding, now, or starting to; for the same things he believes a chaplain’s meant to prop others up through.

“I don’t know how to make meaning out of this,” a broken, single-syllabled chuckle leaks from his throat as he holds the doctor tightly in turn. I don’t know what else to do. He could say the very same; and so they simply stand over an empty bed, the same, but different.

they were past the point of simple sadness; they were past the point of tears and choked sobs. they were somewhere else, somewhere crafted for those of their professions — the caregivers, the heart-tenders. the hollowed, hallowed souls. jonathan’s hand curled at the back of laurents’ neck, a refusal to let go, a desperate clutch. an anchor for them both, a moment of selfish intent. come, friend, let us be broken things for a moment. let us put down the weight of care and hold each other up. 

perhaps beauty did not exist everywhere. perhaps they had to make it themselves. perhaps that was their great charge. but another time, another time. this time, this now, this moment, jonathan simply held laurents. i don’t know what else to do turning into at least i can do this. 

“you don’t have to,” he finally said, the words crafting themselves, pulling from what jonathan would like another to turn to him and say. you do not have to be brave right now. his voice catching with the same raw break, the two men mirrors of one another. ( can a reflection be a witness? can a reflection be a comfort? ) “you don’t have to make meaning out of it.”

“Roi has easily overtaken his guard, pinning them to the side of the boat. Before he can hurl them into the water, Mariah throws himself onto his back, pinning the steward’s neck into the crook of his elbow. A flash of silver in his free palm - but then Laurents is on him, twisting their arm back until the knife drops to the ground with a clatter, and drives his fist into the mercenary’s gut, allowing Roi the chance to break free.” ( —landfall )

(cw; violence, knives, injury)  There are a few moments, rare ones, when signifier and signified become one; where the word meant to grasp the feeling does so seamlessly it transcends translation. This is one of them, he thinks. So, this is anger. Sure, he'd settled his history with the bounty hunter in the common mess nights earlier, but he'd yet to settle the flintlock spark to it. The searing flash that accompanied the memory. It's a directionless anger, this one. One that started long before the mutiny, long before even setting foot aboard the Promethean. But perhaps the starting point doesn't matter at all, and it's only the peak that remains. Here is the peak of the chaplain's anger (the bottom a far sight below):

"Stay back from him—!" in a splintered snarl as his closed fist finds its next mark— this time a hook up under the Mariah's ribs, knuckles driving forth until he hears the wind wrench from him. It's a sensation like no other, even now. The blunt force. The blow. The give beneath his hand as the man yields to it. He could savor it, maybe, in all the ways he knows he shouldn't. As if man's hands were made for this. As if his were— four and a half fingers that curl into a fist with the same ease they handle a horsehair bow. As if the grips for war and music aren't even so far apart. Are just two faces of the same feeling.

The knife Mariah flashed for warning's sake has clattered to the deck— has gone skidding out of reach in the fray. Come to rest by the boot of Roi's staggered guard. The chaplain's mind is elsewhere. On the bounty hunter, first— On the recollection of that arm 'round Roi's neck that's still stirs his heart to boiling.

It's enough to blind him to all else as he wrests the hunter's offending arm behind his back, and holds him there even after Roi's taken his break for freedom. It’s already over, but he presses on. Forces him lower and lower— as if he aims to drive Mariah's chin straight into the deck.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐂𝐇 𝐈 𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐄

𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐯𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 | 𝐚 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 ( 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ; 𝐜𝐰: 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 )

It's never easy, but it goes like this.

The chaplain stands before the crew, bundled to the teeth in wool layers but freezing to the bone just the same. What lies beyond the mortal coil is again reeled up to earth, made tangible – no longer an abstract thought to reckon with in chapel but a face among them. In this case, three faces, now. Two lost to some unknown expanse, the third the only near to them, still. So — just the one coffin, just the one. Body sewn in a canvas shroud and weighted to ensure her sinking. The chaplain’s orating, though he's not entirely sure from where he comes, nor to what end he travels. What is there to say to them? To those they've left behind?

To us, death is just this, he could say. Not the sweeping movement that is witnessing it, but simply this: a person fails to reappear. what lies beyond is one thing, but this, this is what is real to us they've left behind. An exit, as if just off stage left. One that begins and begins and begins; a distance that gathers weight until, finally, death becomes it.

But, all the same, he's orating. already down some different thread. trying to follow it as far as it will take him until his fingers grow too frostbitten to keep hold, and then— he'll slip, maybe. if he's unlucky. For now he clings to it. Lets images of the lost run over his bleary eyes as Pippa, Pantea, Vladya all linger in the air among them. Their memory the hearth kept lit by the hands of other people; now it’s to the living to share and bear the flame.

"—you've seen the temporary fire, and the eternal fire," he supposes Dante a fitting passage, here, if you mold the words in all the right places. "You've reached the place past which I cannot see." I, him, them, us, this time. Words penned as imparted from creator to creation now turned on end, on end. A great unmaking. A gesture of sending, of spiriting back, for the departed. A steadying for those who remain. "—from now on, let your pleasure be your guide. You're past the steep and past the narrow paths. Look at the sun rays that shine upon your brow. Among them, you can rest," he pauses a moment, to swallow that which threatens to freeze in his throat. "—You can walk. And at the coming of those those eyes that, weeping, send you to my side, Await no further word or sign. You are free, erect, and whole. You are crowned," his breath escapes as a tremulous fog, "and mitered over yourself.”

Raw, red fingers crease his notes in on themselves as he lifts his gaze now to the gathering. "There's little to be said to soothe wounds such as this. Little to find as far as meaning when we're pressed this close to the glass. But a good friend once told me," his eyes seek Jon in the crowd — note him where he stands with Ephraim and the others under guard "you don't have to make meaning out of it, not just now," gives his head a small shake as he searches the somber faces. "Perhaps it's enough to have dreamed. To have loved with the whole soul's might. To have known them at all."

And here's the part where he means to say their names. Pantea Mazandarani, Vladimir Yamatov, Philippa Stanley: he knows them front to back, but he chokes on the last syllables.

Thankfully, someone sees it coming miles off. The ice master, Ephraim: A sailor with the years on him to know when a man's near to gaping like a gutless fish. The chaplain notices this when his own, faltering voice— the thickened silence it's been bleeding into— is gradually overtaken by another. Tones sliding over one another until his permits to melt away entirely, relieved by the ice master's baritone:

Of all the comrades that e'er I had, They are sorry for my going away,

And something curious happens then. In the growing lull, another. The caulker, Laszlo, straightening unsteadily at the flanks of the crowd to carry it on so it won't stand lonesome. A tone more like the creaking timbers than the billowing sail, but it'll do, he reckons. It'll do.

And all the sweethearts that e'er I had They would wish me one more day to stay,

It catches on, then, among the other caulkers. The deckhands, a boatswain, an able seaman or two. Catches faster, now, until standing at the gathering's other flank, the cartographer Sohrab rounds it out with her husky hum. The chaplain's chapped lips purse shut, bleary eyes crinkling; a certain gratitude in the quiet, weary slope of his shoulders as he leaves the rest to them:

Mariah felt it coming (what he lacked in visual he tended to compensate for in visceral). Call it foresight, call it vigilance - call it a lifetime of catching the preliminary spark in the eye before catching the fist in the palm. But the palm made no start to deflect, nor retaliate. It curled around a piece of errant cutlery as the offended’s eyes met the offender’s, and as the chaplain pounced the spoon arced sideward with a calculated flick of the wrist.

With the shrill clatter of metal on wood, the blow’s fateful landing was deafened to all but the mess hall’s two stragglers. The hunter’s head snapped back with a sharp grunt, a hand catching the table in time to keep from being keeled from the bench altogether. And then it snapped forward again, the grunt stalled into something hushed and hoarse as the other hand came up to shelter the face from further injury. Hell knew it’d seen enough in recent years.

“Fuck me- Did God guide your hand on that one, too?” he grit out after a moment, brows scrunched as the tending wrist withdrew bloody. He touched his tongue to his lower lip and grimaced, before levelling with the ordained pugilist over raw knuckles. There was a weary rime in the eyes but no fire - he didn’t share in his pugnacity. He conceded to it, even. A step toward them being even.

“If that’s what divine justice looks like, I might’ve found a better calling with the clergy.”

———

The chaplain’s chest heaves, several staccato breaths rattling through it as the moment surges in to them then passes. Knuckles throbbing with a pointed ache, blooming red from the point of contact, only to blanch white as his strangling grip flexes on the edge of the table while he’s still half standing. Still half stretched over it to close the distance. 

This close, he gets a better look at him. At the man he’s remembered in so many of the ways a chaplain shouldn’t. ‘Forgive,’ he’d preached over the years— only to whisper, ‘to a fault,’ to himself in the night. Leo wants to be angry. Needs to be. So he is, he is. The simmer and sear of it wells from the gut. Washes through every muscle, laps up his throat until it brims at his flushed cheeks. Feels like an unfurling. Like if he lets the tide of it rise, the skin and bones of him will only grow in kind to hold it, until his stooped frame’s gotten far too big for the room. 

And then his eyes fall to the errant silverware. Cast aside to, of all things, cover his tracks— buy him that moment so desperately needed; that moment of sheer fury. For once ( and this he notes belatedly, ) he doesn’t dread who might’ve seen it. Or what they’d think. Doesn’t wonder whether God can forgive a set of scraped knuckles. Only feels that heady wash of feeling as it flows, and brims, and then slowly, slowly— ebbs.

This close, he gets a better look at him. The hunter’s milky eye and knotted scar tissue, the curls that'd earlier served so well to hide the halved ear. The one he had dealt him fifteen-odd years ago. This close, he can see the strangest thing: beneath the veneer of the face he remembers from that night lies no devil. No monster like the one he’d constructed in his young mind, then. Just a man. Just the face of the friend he’d been making through these long seaborne months. The quips had rolled off his shoulders earlier. Now, the tension follows. Slowly, slowly, Leo sinks back down on to the bench. Hands slipping from their clutch on the table to sprawl on its surface as he gauges their budding bruising. As he avoids his friend’s eyes.

At some point, he’s speaking before he quite knows what to say. “...I’d lay awake, back then,” scarcely a murmur, Adams’ apple bobbing dryly in his throat. “—Imagining what I’d do to you.” A dark admission. One he thought he’d never make. Certainly not like this. “You had no name to me, then.” No story, either. No wee siblings who’d waited up for a letter and the coins of aid it’d bring. No parallels to draw, to weigh what he would’ve done for Mathilda in his shoes. What he had done for her once with bloody, hound-scarred hands. “And then once, just the once,” weary of the gnarled grudge, “I wondered whether we might’ve been friends, had things been different. Asked the Lord, even,” Now, when the chaplain lifts his stare to the bounty hunter, his lips tremble. Purse. As if without the pressure of a clenched jaw, he just might unravel into half mad laughter. Into half mad mirth.

The chaplain would call it a miracle he made it through the service, if he could recall the details at all— less a service than tragedy’s latest triptych, paint strokes just so. Three lives rendered in oils that time might never dry. It’s as if the event seeps from him with each passing second that displaces it; growing hazier and hazier until he can’t even recall the words that’d left his own mouth on the main deck mere minutes prior— just the fog. Can only recall the sight and sound of his own breath. The icy clouds it formed before his face when he’d moved his leaden jaw. Can only recall the cold-strained breathing of the scores that stood there to watch. The fog. Escaping in puffs from scores of chapped and sorrow-pursed mouths. The fog, and faces hazing in and out of it.

At first, his feet take him through the lower deck before he entirely realizes where he’s going. As the cabin nears, so does the intention crystallizing in his chest. This must be the place. If grief's built a house in him, this must be the place to cut its timbers down.

He pushes through the door before he’s certain what he plans to do on the other side of it. Sit on the edge of her cot, maybe. Sit on the edge of her cot and turn her coat over in his hands.

The last thing Laurents expects is to find someone already there. He freezes in the doorway, voice escaping in a startled crackle. 

( continued from here / chaplain’s quarters / event: the neverending night)

rude, to enter anyone’s rooms without their permission, but eli had had a notion of surprising the man with– well, a silly thing really, too absurd to deserve the title of sweet, but he’d found the book during a routine tidying of the cartography room, tucked under the leg of a chair as balance, and knew it would be much better use in the hands of his friend. a history of maritime animals, it said, emblazoned across the cover, with a small golden monkey reaching up from one corner as if to help flip open the pages. and oh, in times like these, if something could be found– something could be given– that may offer a spark of happiness, of escape? 

what a shame it would be, to waste another moment withholding it.

elias had knocked once and gotten no response, so he’d thought: the coast is clear. it would take only a few moments to deposit the book on laurents’ desk, a surprise for whenever he returned. so elias had crept in. seen no form in the bed, and breathed a sigh of relief (his task suddenly made easier.) then he’d seen the bottles.

he doesn’t know why he’d picked the vial up. as if touch could gift him more answers, or rather: change the answers that he already had, that were all too abundantly clear. lost in the texture of it, the color, he doesn’t notice when the chaplain enters the room, but there isn’t much shock left in him to jump– so he reacts little apart from a turn of the head in his friend’s direction, the half-sighed admission of his ignorance. 

normally, this would be the point when elias would step towards him, offer a word of comfort, a soothing hand. but nothing about this moment between them is normal, and in the roiling anxiety of his gut– he hesitates. moves back, in fact, a half step, fingers curling around the bottle, his other hand holding him steady on the desk to his side. flinches further at the chaplain’s response. meets the other’s too-raw honesty with his own.

“and who was meant to know, laurents?” he says, similarly sharp as his friend’s own tone. “who do you even allow to know you?”

———

Who was meant to know. The chaplain, of all things, winces. Like he’s been abraded. Like the sea’s salt-sting has crowded the scrapes. Who do you even allow— And which to dread more with such a question, the echo or the answer?

In the end, he can’t leave the lad to silence. God knows he’s practiced enough of that.

“I—” but the answer lodges in his throat halfway up. Adams’ apple bobbing dryly. Catching. Choking. It smarts that the steward steps back from him, away from him. Smarts more to realize his own instinct has forced the same. A half-step combined to make the distance whole. Leo shakes his head. A gesture that comes out as nearly unnatural— a jerk of the chin as if led by a string. 

His eyes turn the chapel upside down better than his arms, or indeed any of his lackeys ever could. The dark slant of them goes under the cushions, muddy the upholstery with the scorn they’re spitting. They graze the candleholders, drink in the flame, and then breeze indifferently to the heaped books, the rifling papers, the cranium luster of this place.

When the Captain’s pupils trace back to the priest, they’re sneering. Sprouted teeth, sprouted a newly minted contempt. Quite the fall from the good graces of the Benedictines, no? I bet you’re having a grand time, away from the safety and luxury you sacrificed so much to ensure.

❝ Always do, Father. Comfort’s my natural state—haven’t you seen? ❞ He remains stock-still. Feet rooted, they now point westward, heels at treacherous ease on the planks. On his thigh, his fingers begin to drum a broken pace. ❝ I do imagine you’ve picked the wrong benefactor, Laurents dear. Sohrab is wedged deeper in my head than you can imagine, and even if they weren’t, they’d still have sold you for an ashtray. Let us see you walk your chalks, now. What’s this bit I’m hearing, about you having worked at Salpêtrière? ❞  

———

Haven’t you seen? He doesn’t miss a beat when he replies, “I suppose I have,” though there’s nothing akin to comfort in this. Not for the stock-stillness of him, nor the way his fingers drum their faltering march. It speaks to his own paranoia, perhaps— his own gnawing unease in all things— that he anticipates the words that follow before they’re spoken.

Is he surprised for it? No, no. At the end of it, he only wishes the cartographer had at least cashed in on a nicer ashtray. ( But there’s no accounting for taste, he supposes. )

Laurents is quiet for a laden pause. Looking on at him. Salpêtrière. He thinks he could well shudder at the name alone. Some feeling twitching up his spine— “Call it for what it is,” he says. “The dumping ground.” The bitterness is evident in the way he speaks the common nickname thickly. They call it that, in the nooks and crannies of London he’s from. The dumping ground for women branded “hysterical.” The Grand Confinement. 

“I did work there,” he confirmed. “On a visiting basis, from time to time over the years. Originally.... in search of someone, but then I stayed, to help if I could.” The conclusion he’d reached goes without saying; it weighs his words like lead: I rarely could.

Least of all, the one he’d gone in search of. 

He must’ve been just a boy of eleven, then— when the idea had first seated. A boy watching a nun be carted off. Sister Agnes, whose hand had turned the pages of his sheet music and guided his own the first time he’d handled a violin. Sister Agnes, blessings rained in the form of music lessons. She had a breakdown, Sister Laurents had murmured as the east London crowds swallowed all sight of her, hand firm ‘round his shoulder to hold him fast where they stood at the Home’s gates. As if he might run in pursuit of the carriage had she not. It happens to people. Vaguely remembers having thought, will it happen to you? Will it happen to me? Remembers being too young to wrap his brain around it. Around the foolishness of it all. That she’d been no hysteric. That that had been no treatment. 

Needless to say, he’d found the place himself a decade or so later. Twenty-one, Twenty-two, maybe. Just ordained and knocking at the doors of Salpêtrière. Looking, because he’d been told ‘the women in our care tend to live out their natural lives here’. Looking, because he had yet to learn hers had ended a few years shy of natural. He’d learned at the gates. He’d entered anyway. Remained a recurring visitor until just a few years ago. After all, for every Sister Agnes, there were countless others. After all, he’d thought he might could help.

elias rises from the chair.

nods, several times, even as he’s not sure what he’s agreeing to, what he’s signing up for. what he’s signing away. not that it exactly matters. the chaplain’s face is so soft in exhaustion; elias thinks he would agree to about anything, right about now. throw his books in the sea, revoke all alliances to poetry, to love, to beauty and its gods? surely, certainly. anything, if it might stall this moment, might keep leonard’s face like that, not yet hardened with consciousness. not yet taut with the truth.

“well, if you’re sure,” he says, awkward. “anyway, i should let you go. i should let you sleep.”

he would like to kiss the back of his hand a final time, make an invocation of it, a farewell with some ceremony to it. but elias knows not to touch him. doesn’t move any half-step closer into the chaplain’s orbit, for fear of the temptation to do so. fear of what touch does to him, has always done, the great catalyst of it; thinks laurents could level him with a fingertip to the wrist right about now, exhausted as he is. could have him sinking down, crawling in beside him. let me stay here. let us sleep. why leave at all? why not forget? why go out into the cold, when there is warmth here, and friendship, and safety, and the rock of the ship, and another’s breath going quiet as they slip into the realm of the unknowing?

he takes a step back, nods again. slips out the doorway, and somehow manages to not pause on the sill. to not look back, one last time.