THE VOLCANIC.

———

As he drifts through the port, he finds each step forward sends him further back. Finds himself thinking of the strangest things. Like how the groan of the dock’s planks underfoot sings a wholly different pitch back home. Like how when he and Hetty dangled their spindly legs off the side of it when they were small, and leaned over just to the tipping point, they could glimpse minnows schooling round posts whose wood was woolly with algae. Blinking in and out of creation as the sun caught their silvery scales, only to be whirled off by the current of the next collier ship cruising into port, bringing with it that coal-stench and chalky lungfuls of air. 

This is how they must’ve felt, Ephraim thinks. Those minnows. Scattered from their schools by slow goliaths moving in the dark behind them, beneath them, around them— whose pull they’re only aware of once it’s swept them into its current. 

As the Promethean’s shape blurs in the haze behind him and the town, once more, sharpens ahead, he’s acutely aware of his own crew’s absence. And yet he can’t stop the pull of Siren’s Sorrow. How its current drags him in.

 Somehow, the back of Teo’s head, the shape of his slumped shoulders at a far table, appears to him as a mooring line. Ephraim drifts in and takes his seat. Accepts the tankard and drinks deeply for one, two minutes— so that the room falls away and leaves only space for his enjoyment. When the glass clinks back to the table, the room rushes back in.

“Seems we have,” he finally says, turning his chair so his good ear’s to Teo. Notes how unthinkingly he’d sat down with the other icemaster to his right side, the one Mal or Jules or Jaya always covered in the field. When had he started trusting him so implicitly? Or had it been a slow thing, growing while their shared attentions were on the unnatural ice. “I can’t either, but then again, I couldn’t’ve imagined half of what we’ve seen.” He remarks, lips twitching as if to attempt a smile, but flagging before the mark.

“Your shipmate,” Nyima. He leaves the name unspoken, for it doesn’t feel like his to speak, not when his crewmate was the one pulled the trigger. Means to express his condolences, but the only thing that comes close to grasping it is “Sorry’s not enough.”

your shipmate. what a simple, silly phrase to speak --- what a limiting way to summarize nyima. ( yet a phrase he would say himself. what use were words made of gold and silver? what use was saying her name aloud here, in the place that would keep her body? ) teo took the words ephraim offered, and it was the first time, out of all the crew of the promethean, that he believed them. strange, wasn’t it? that sorrow might bring this too, this inkling of something he might call trust one day. 

“no, it isn’t,” teo returned. not a clip of anger to the words, just simple truth. what use was saying sorry aloud here, in the place that killed her, that demanded blood for blood? 

“when the promethean sails on, will you be onboard?”  will you sail to the ends of the world with them, or will you stay here instead? or, or, will you choose something else entirely? 

( the siren’s sorrow / evening, landfall / OPEN )

in a lone corner booth, tucked away, katja stares into a whiskey pool. the edges of their fingernails drag up and down the glass—the only indication that they are still connected to a body. the person trapped in the amber reflection is not someone they recognize, but perhaps this is what happens when you kill an innocent. maybe this is your punishment, your cain’s mark: to become a stranger unto yourself. a weak, regretful, echo of who you once were. 

from somewhere across the room a loud thud breaks the settled tavern buzz. it’s probably someone setting down a box, or moving a chair, but in their ears a musket is firing a killing shot. katja flinches—fingers tightening over glass, jaw tensing. they exhale as emma’s cries and tristan’s howls wash over the musket sound; as their vision becomes filled with blood blooming over a working woman’s dress. then a feeling stronger than grief—the unnamed, unholy, love child of guilt and regret—threatens to overwhelm their eyes. so, they pinch the bridge of their nose, blocking out the rest of the world with closed and tightened eyes. 

 a shift in the air occurs, a new presence sensed, even with shut eyes. without looking up the thief says: “go away. booth is full.”

teo ignored them, as he sat in the booth across from the murderer. it could be done now, he thought for a moment. how easily it could be finished. but how unsatisfying it would be, to plunge knife into belly, to spill blood and then find his own life forfeited. revenge was a thing of passion, yes, a dance with careful steps and gentle brushes; it was not something he could take alone. so he sat, across from them, imagining the expression they made at the loud explosion of bullet and powder. 

“do you know what it is she asked me, once?” the world was them, just the two. “‘ teodoro, can you be content with us being your home? ’ i could not imagine it, a home in the shape of a person. could not imagine the heartbreak that comes with loving a thing made of flesh and blood.” i can now. you know i can now, you made it so. “you must know what you started, when you killed her.”  

—

“i’ve never killed anyone–the only time i’ve ever tried was on that island, when christian, that thing–” he shakes his head and picks up his glass, throws back what remains in it. it burns on the way down his throat, still tender from howling and wailing as her blood had drained into his hands, still coated in a mixture of seawater and bile. he welcomes the pain for what it is, a distraction from the larger wound, from the transformation that is occurring inside of him–this rearranging of meat and bones, forming of canine teeth that teodoro has now come to him to finalize, to congratulate without knowing it. this making of prey into something dangerous, into a new kind of predator. 

“it doesn’t matter, my hands are steady–will be steady. we will kill for this, teo. we will kill for this, and for everything that came before it.” he turns his head to meet the man’s eyes properly, perhaps for the first time without the fear of what he might see in them–the hunger for survival that the icemaster wore so proudly, that made him dangerous to those foolishly trying to keep hierarchy and order in a place, in a situation, where such things should have been the first torn apart and used for kindling. tristan looks at him now and hopes that such a thing is reflected in himself–he looks at the man in front of him and prays that teo will teach him how this is done, how the dog makes himself into wolf. 

“i owe you an apology, i think–you were right about them, and i was blind to it.” he shakes his head, drags his hands through his hair. “it cost us nyima–and i can’t change that, i can’t fix it, but i can fix the way we’ve been doing things. the way i’ve been doing things. we can take instead of waiting for them to give like fucking stray animals on the street.” he exhales slowly, worries his bottom lip between his teeth. “but i need you with me to do it–one last time. we put these english fucks in the ground where they belong and we can wait to die or go home–whatever comes first.” 

“i will be the hand, if you tell me where it is i should strike.” perhaps there was a reason he was this way after all, perhaps it had all been for this --- turning himself into this dull and dark creature so that they would not have to feel it. but then he looked at tristan, met the man’s gaze, and he knew that was not true after all. this was not some noble cause, and he could not pretend it was. there was tristan, his teeth just as sharp, his eyes just as hollowed; there was tristan with raised hackles. 

( the story of creation always came with the story of a fall. ) 

teodoro wanted to say: you owe me nothing. he wanted to say: i know what you are, what you can be, and i am sorry for it, for this mess of us. but he did not, for the truth was --- tristan might not owe him anything, but he owed nyima. they each did. they owed a dead woman further death. if the world cannot experience her kindness, let it experience the full fury of existence without her. 

the ice had come for them, the ice had abandoned them. the ice had shed itself of their pain and their loss, and the ice had given way to something else --- all with little influence from the ice masters. the title felt like something of a stranger here; it fit on teo’s shoulders more like memory than truth, for they had entered a new world. a strange world. one that he could not worry about or ponder on. there was only this: the surviving. there was only this: what comes next now that my feet have found land once more. 

and so he sat in the little tavern, his head tipped low in a grief fire had not fully burned away, glancing up only at the approach of a pair of steps that had become familiar to him. ( although he usually only heard them swallowed by snow, gliding on the frozen surface. they were expected. )

“seems we’ve served our purpose then.” he slid a drink to ephraim and offered a seat. teo had never been one for company, but he had heard what the other man did in those moments before nyima was shot --- and while teo guessed it had little to do with the agathe crew, he respected it all the same. for there was us and there was them, but ephraim was carefully walking the space between. “i can’t imagine another freeze.”

when / after landfall where / siren’s sorrows with / open to everyone! 

his first thought is that the drink could be poisoned. 

it could be enchanted somehow, like they all said the water on the island might be. it could be shit that they brew in the basement of this place, that will burn his throat on the way down, or make him so drunk that he can’t see straight, that he’ll stumble down the narrow street from this eerie as fuck tavern and straight into the open and waiting arms of the ocean. 

his second thought is that the ocean would more than likely spit him back out–tristan, who would willingly give himself over to the sea in all of the ways odysseus could not, is cursed with the reverse of his winnowing oar. he carries the thing across his shoulders, he walks always outwards towards the coastline, but he is never able to drown. 

the third thought, and hopefully the final one for some time, is that he hopes it does each and every one of those things. 

he throws it back and coughs–it burns, but he barely registers it as something that hurts, that causes pain. the whole of his being is a thing that hurts–every pain that he has so willingly swallowed down like they were sweet, sacramental wine, is alive inside of him and howling. he slams it down and drags his hands over his face, and of course–of-fucking-course, he hears footsteps echo from somewhere behind him. because everywhere he goes now is apparently hollowed out in some way, a void that swallows sound and people in equal measure. he groans, growls, lets some sort of guttural noise rise from the pit of his stomach, and he does not turn around. 

“unless you’re here to hand over a pistol and the location of the fucking mutinous translator, criminal, whatever the fuck they are to you–turn around and leave.”

teodoro had never felt it before now --- never felt that twisting thing that all the agathe crew had inside of them, that maggot of rot in their roots, how it drew their feet under sand and under ice, how it tangled them all together. he had never felt himself as part; he had not even realized that he had picked a piece of each of them, pulling part of their flesh and making a new body for himself. a new teodoro, formed from the mess of the others. he felt it now. he felt them now, each of the agathe crew. 

( he even carried nyima with him. the ash of her in his lungs. )

he did not need to guess where to find tristan. he knew. he would be able to feel the man’s heartbeat from across the world, a beat trying so hard to suffocate itself. a shadow as sinister as le silencieux and just as hungry for death. 

teo took the seat next to tristan. 

“i have never killed for someone else before. not without being paid.” survival. that should be his focus, his care. that should be the thing that consumed him still. yet with the explosion of a gun, of a wound, he felt himself change. it should have been the silent one to kill her, the silent one or nothing at all. “we will kill for this, non?” 

let them be the monsters they were named as. 

– It’s not that she has nothing to say to him. No, the silence that settles––envelops them in their own world, mutiny forgotten and unimportant; it comes because she has too much to say to him. And she doesn’t know where to start. 

An untrained observer would think: how much could she possibly have to voice? Aside from the blanket apology she has given to every other survivor, what does she owe him? Does he care for a special reparation? Did he even blink at her disappearance? Does he even care at all, or was the sentiment all spent when their one night was over? 

But she knows better than to believe his stoicism. She’s already seen it, his attachment, his rare smile; the heart underneath the stone. She’s touched it, held the beating organ in her hands. Those confessions couldn’t have meant nothing. You cannot dissect and peer into someone and pretend like they are just another person. She knows this for sure: to him, her leaving wasn’t just painful, but a betrayal of unspeakable depth; accentuated by the fact that she didn’t even say a word before embarking on her doomed mission. 

And yet, she does not wince or look away. There is a fear buried deep; that if she does, he will decide she is unworthy and disappear––just like she did to him. But if she keeps her eyes locked in his, maybe he will stay long enough for her to make a case; maybe she can win him back. “C'est une honte. Yours is a good one. A lot of heart went into it.” A smile is attempted, but it doesn’t last long before the edges of her lips are falling again. “…Are you angry?”

“Teodoro, please. Sit next to me. I don’t want to be at war with you.”

he waited. 

it was her move --- her chance to put the pick to the ice, to make the first crack spill into something more. ice into diamond. and if she had looked away, if she had chosen the path of some wilted flower, he would have made his move too: he would have accepted that she had died on the island, that the thing that returned in her place was pale and bleak, that she had always been someone cruel and weak. 

she did not look away. she was smiling, and then she wasn’t; she was flickering, and then she was solid.

“i do not know what i am.” ( we are already at war, do you not see? we have been at war with one another since the beginning, and yet still, even still, even now, even here, i would turn my weapon anywhere to keep you living and foolish. what have you done to me? what have you done, poisonous flower? ) “angry, angry is too tame a word. do you think a letter may do away with that? shall we sit around together and read it? did you write of love, i wonder? ‘love is the most convoluted, maddening, beautiful, simple thing in all the universe.’” he mocked her now, rolled out the words he remembered, turned them into a ridicule of the truth they had found within them that night. “‘i am glad i could know you. i am glad i could expose the flesh of you so that i might eat it raw.’ is that what makes you lubrique? it seems you did not let me know you at all.” 

a moment of silence, of nothing. a moment with the death around them. 

—

“oh teodoro, are you asking me if i fell from heaven? and all the while you look at me as if certain i’ve crawled up from hell. voilà, le compromis: i’m an earthly thing, no more, no less, which means– however far i’ve slipped, you can slip too. case in point: we’re here together, now, aren’t we? même si tu me tutoie, mon chérie. so you’ve survived your own undoing, same as me, but for what– an empty title. a welcome home you may not live to receive. and all the while we will both drink the same watered-down wine, tonight, and sleep in similarly hard beds.”

he brings his free hand up as he speaks, ghosts it along teodoro’s shoulder and down the lapel of his coat, flattening and fixing the fabric in place. it’s curiously intimate for how precise a gesture, turning the fold of the collar so it lies just so. 

then he places his hand over teo’s throat.

“but to answer your question, here’s another: can you ever truly be better than me, if you have to ask first?” casimir holds him there, but doesn’t press. draws the fingers down until they hit base of the man’s neck, where they become a claw, hooking into the divots of his collarbones like the handle of a drawer, as casimir draws the man closer to him. leads him in until the length of his arm is pressed between their chests like a noose, like a cross. “and is it really a loss, if you choose it for yourself?”

who would win --- the one who gave the first touch of threat, or the one who pushed him to the point of it? what was winning, here of all places, them of all people? yet teodoro felt himself victorious, felt the heat of it under casimir’s palms. even as the man’s words settled in him --- not as flames, not as heat, but as rock made glass. we are burned, fragile things. 

oh, oh. this was what it was like. he remembered now. this was what it was like to feel alive with hate at something human; this was what it was like to choose someone to unmake, not for grand reason or design but for his own selfish want of seeing a man cut open. 

teodoro rested his hands over casimir’s own, would have pressed them down to draw his own blood just to prove he would not flinch at the sight of red. 

“so it is settled then.” there was something of an apocalypse to his voice, a shaking and dreaded thing. ( no acknowledgement to the words casimir spoke beyond this: you have found the beginnings of a weakness to me, you have found that dreaded thing even i do not wish to acknowledge. all men must fall, all men must die. ) a decision reached, a goal set, however small, however washed away under the tide of the hms promethean, but there all the same, there for teodoro to know. quietly, “one day, i wonder if i will see you unrestrained.”

                                                      ⁎⁎⁎                                                      

❝ Seen a lot of that, in your heyday? Taking the trip both ways? ❞ The tone courses unassuming behind them. Nonthreatening, too: why ruin a nice afternoon? The other man looks like he’s ready to tear into a slab of meat. Teeth long sharpened, animal calculation; predatory waiting, ticked according to season. Lonan himself, for all his bedroom tastes, was absolutely not too keen to offer his own body as punching bag. Maybe as a friendly favour, who knows? A little prelude. But not just waste it like that, on the first sod he’d been asked to guard with.

Even in the gallows’ humor, Lan can still hear the tell. On with it. Like him, the soldier had the restrained energy, barely swimming underneath skin, of someone who had seen too much bloodshed and had taken part in too little. It was bad for a man’s head, this limp-dick witnessing. Made one want to lead the show themselves. The deckhand strongly favored the approach, as far as these things went; he just didn’t want to be the dancing partner.

He screwed his eyes up at the ice-master: their ice-master. Ephraim himself, God bless the idiot, God stay his sorry hand, was somewhere at the other end of the brig. He hoped whoever guarded him was quieter; less bloodless, less jittery.

He props up on the ground, crouches straighter. ❝ Nah, mate. I think if anyone’s gonna come back alive, it’s that fox-head. Quite the piece. I wish someone else might’ve bitten it, instead of her, but then—it’s not as if I had a horse in it. The likes of her and the likes of us don’t mix. Heard Estrada bagged her, though. Gotta say, hats off to him: he’s taking it rather well, all told. I’m not that fond of any woman in my past, but I still wouldn’t wanna ram the needle through their nose, y’know? ❞ 

“i’ve seen it enough.”

it was a question teo had often wondered: when the silent one wore their faces, did those they belonged to feel it in the distance, from whichever land they now resided? did the captain of the agathe feel his body as the silent one led the others away, some twisted piper of shadows and sinking? something of regret and thrill in the crook of his finger. would the girl feel the needle through her nose if she was to wake? was it better to be alive in such a half-held, distant way or to never feel again? 

“his sentiment’s clouding him then.” it was the only statement he’d allow himself to the other, this new knowledge tucked somewhere deep. another connection of the new captain, another piece of a much bigger thread. “bagging her is easy. he ought to burn her and scatter her ashes --- it’s the only way of making sure she stays the way she should stay. ces gens n'apprennent pas.” 

—

ah, and there it is        white-hot, flash flood, thunderous crack of lightning splitting the sky and cannon fire tearing across ramparts and armadas        rage, luxuriant as bourdeaux aged to cellar perfection, savage as a slaughterhouse floor. how long has it been, a mere handful of days? time slips from his fingertips, into numbness and laudanum and wine, tempered by the wide awake sobriety of feeling nothing, being nothing, subsumed into a spiralling ouroboros of grief and corrosive self-loathing. he is awake now, more viscerally, violently awake than he has been since pantea walked across the ice into the arms of le silencieux and he stood, and he stood, and he just fucking stood there.

from the icemaster, the most mercurial and volatile of his folk, he had expected the rote consolations and mouthfuls of baited apology. we told you, we told you what horrors would transpire, and you did not believe. he could have swallowed pity, would have borne it like a cross and stigmata pierced through blood-slick palms. and then foltier speaks and the remnants of his sanity ignite. he confesses: it is a pleasure to burn.

“of course i want to fucking kill it.”  fury lights up his face, blinding against the weathered valleys and ridges of sleeplessness.  “i want to kill it, and anyone foolish enough to step foot into its goddamn kingdom like some sacrificial lamb.”  a ship of fools, martyrs and damned, drowning men, this is what they are. this is what is left of them. a feast for carrion. but hugo? hugo, with the gaunt hollows of mourning, the ravenous pit of tantalus anguish that eats and eats at him day and night and is never sated, is festering decay, fit only for dirt and grave worms. he may be for the dead already, but he will not go easily. let the silent one tear him by the bone, by mask from flesh, skin him of every life and guise and fragmented veneer until there is nothing left. he will not go gently. 

“you would beg after everything it has done to you? your people? where is your pride? your rage? don’t you want to kill this fucking beast and dance gavottes on its grave? or will you lie belly up and let it devour you, too? you might as well join them. go, and let the thing that butchered and ate all your friends put you out of your mercy.”

the fury awakened him, shot past the terror of nothingness and dragged him back to the present. to the now. to the feeling of standing here, on the ship, in the arctic, in front of another. “they are dead --- do you not see it? do you not understand yet? those you would kill for stepping foot in its kingdom, they have already joined it. they’ll raise the flag of le silencieux and rejoice as it follows them to the rest of us.” would le silencieux wear emma’s face as it returned to the ship, he wondered? would it choose pantea instead? would there be an army of them, an army of faces, an army of memories to confront them?

what would hurt them in the sweetest way? 

hugo asked: where is your pride? hugo asked: will you lie belly up and let it devour you? hugo did not ask: how did you live so long, in that place, in its home? 

“i would beg for us to cut ties with anyone not on this ship now, before they have the chance to return to do its work. i would beg for us to protect ourselves. if i believed we could kill the creature, i would walk to it with dynamite in hand. i would shove a fuse between its ribs and light. but it is a thing unkillable, commandant; it would raise itself again like the rest of the sorry, dead faces it wears.” 

lower deck; near private cabins / open to: everyone ig do whateVER u want with this

“so, what d’you reckon? how long until captaincy shifts back around?” the coin flips up and down kane’s hand, balanced over his knuckles; a family heirloom, believe it or not, he’s neglected it, though, it‘s filthy now, lost all it‘s shine. he’d throw it away but his fingers are so used to the weight of it, kane wouldn’t be able to pull the trick with a different one. 

his fist closes around the piece of metal. kane cracks a grin at the other. leans back against the wall, arms crossed in front of him, ignores the weight of the knife stuck into his belt. perhaps it risky, to go about without a gun—everyone seems to have emptied out the armory. but then he doesn’t really stick his nose out of his cabin these days, unless he absolutely has to. even now, there’s about ten steps separating him from the safe haven of his quarters. “nobody’s stupid enough to think there isn’t going to be pushback. dowling has way too many hounds ‘round here. miracle, that none of them haven’t tried anything yet.”

“must everything out of your mouth be stupidité totale?” there was enough exasperation present within the words that it let teo forget, for a moment, all the threats that breathed just outside. “what if i am one of those hounds? what if i strangle you right here as signal to the rest? you give a challenge, you must be ready to accept the answer, non?” 

of all the problems haunting them, the title of the captain seemed most frivolous. it had never been a matter of loyalty; it did not matter if it had been malachy dowling or marcus estrada who extended a hand to the agathe survivors. what mattered was that someone led this ship who could keep them alive. teodoro knew the fragile state of captains --- he knew they were the sweetest dessert to the creature that hunted the ship. he also knew the man in the hall, kane, would not see that. he followed a different sort of god. 

Where: The cartography room because I apparently am too scared to write starters anywhere else in the ship. Emma haunts this place now. When: A few days after the Hunters’ return. Whom: Open to the Agathe survivors.

(tw blood, tw violence) Day has returned, rays of menial warmth filtering in through the windows of an empty cartography room. No one wants to be out in the open right now, and that suits her just fine. She keeps waiting for someone, a guard of some sort, to call her out and force her into a room; but they seem to sense that she is too broken to cause trouble. Too haunted to do human things such as make a fuss. 

She watches the sea outside, fracturing and thawing; a white porcelain temper tantrum over a tablecloth of navy vastness. In her hands is a love letter of the final sort. Her former last words. She promised Pasha that they would do it together––destroy them with whiskey, fire, and laughter. She promised a great many things.

Emma thinks of the sun again; how she should be grateful for its presence. It does bring comfort after all, doesn’t it? Illuminates the shadows and demeans menacing figures into harmless objects; monsters into coat hangers. Demons into plain branches. 

In truth, it doesn’t matter to her if the sun has deigned to take up its post once more. Even if the light should dip below the horizon and come up again a hundred times, it wouldn’t even matter because what is the point? She closes her eyes and she sees Pippa’s–No, Philippa’s–face. She does not deserve to even think of that shorthand, a nickname reserved for those who hold utmost fondness for the recently passed. Passed. Like she floated away, down a river. Like Emma didn’t bash her head in with a jagged rock until the water turned red, even in the utter darkness. She can still feel Phillipa’s blood on her cheeks. 

The naturalist (does she even deserve that title now?) forces her eyes open and is met with a too bright room. She wants to cry, weep for everything she has lost and done, but all she can manage is a sniffle––a sharp intake of breath. A creek of wood sounds, a giving way of floorboards to signify a new presence. She should smile because it is a familiar face; the only family she has on this ship, but all she can offer is a neutral glance as greeting. 

“You were never supposed to find out, you know. No one was.” She plays with the love letter between her fingers, eyes meeting paper instead of person. “I always planned to make it home to you but…I made letters just in case. Do you want to hear yours?” 

here was the eulogy that teodoro had begun to imagine himself giving: emma-rose hartfield is dead. ( he stands on the shore somewhere, and perhaps it is france but perhaps it does not matter. ) emma-rose is dead, and i have never imagined her as a dead thing before. what happens when you give a live thing your secrets? what happens when you give a live thing your trust, and it stops living? do you ever get those things back? ( he stands on the shore somewhere, and there are people or perhaps there are not. ) emma-rose hartfield is dead, and most of the world will never know of her. and i will have to accept that i will stand on this shore and i will look at the warm summer sky and i will think of her and not a single person on the pier around me will understand why i walk to the edge of the dock and think about jumping in.

here was the answer he imagined someone speaking to him: teodoro, you have survived the arctic, you have survived the sea --- why would you jump in? why do you think the only place you’ll find this vibrant, life-lit woman is in the black of the water?

they said that emma had come back alive, but he did not fully believe it. he traced the places he had last seen her --- the common mess, the hallways of the promethean, and, finally, the cartography room. even as he came to a halt in the doorway, even as she spoke, he did not fully believe it was her. they were in a place where the dead did not find rest; they were in a place where ghosts passed freely. why should she return to any of them?

“no,” he answered. but he did not leave. he thought of the silent one, he thought of what it would mean for it to wear someone’s face. he thought of her facing it. he stood in the doorway and did not say anything else. a ghost would hear him; a ghost would know.  

WHEN  — ｡ ‘✧ 1845. 2nd august. WHERE  —  ｡ ‘✧ the ship’s brig. OPEN TO —  ｡ ‘✧ everyone aboard.

The edge of the musket digs into his ribs. That’s really the only thing wrong with recent events. By the fourth hour of guard duty, again since they’re all undermanned, it’s unpleasant enough to considering ditching his post. Ditch his rifle, too, why not? One might upstage a whole mutiny just to catch a break. What with the wailing, the whimpering, and now the intimate hard-on of a musket in his thigh, sleep doesn’t stand a chance. The deckhand twists again inside his blanket. Why insist upon the gun at all? It’s not as if he couldn’t tear out someone’s ear, needs must. Or, even better, say boo and watch them scatter off. Everyone aboard is hanging by a thread. Lonan doesn’t really take any pleasure in shaking it up, tugging until it breaks      but if it earns him some rest, then so be it.

Honest to hell, this entire thing makes him think back on the neverending night. Good times, all told. At least in unholy darkness you can count on one thing, just the one, but it’s damn near foolproof: sleep. Now the world had woken up again, with all its rable-rousing, childish painting of devils. These people and their revolutions, Gods, how ready they always go at it.

The shadow shifts, torso rising from the floorboards. His feet are pushed into other wall of the corridor, hands pillowed under his head. When he changes position, they arch like rope hinges ready to recoil and tap into the teak. Self-piteous, his gaze cuts to the person he is supposed to:

❝ Five guineas Dowling won’t last a day alive. ❞

how quickly things shifted. one moment on the agathe, the next on the promethean. one moment resting firmly in the them category, the next pulled into the us. and now teodoro had been assigned to a guard post, as if the past had long been left behind --- and now teodoro moved within it, once more shedding title and ship for a chance. he could be an englishman again; he could be crew of the new captain. he could stand here beside another and claim the role of guard. he had done it many times before. 

( the old chant of survival had begun to change its pretty tune. he did not recognize this new song, but it carried the same haunting cry as the dead agathe captain begging them to the sea. )

to the bet then: if the mutineers were smarter than their predecessor, his companion would be proven right. but that was the heart of his following to estrada’s side --- if the mutineers were smarter. if they were not, did any of this matter? they would each be dead and gone soon.

“i’ll take that bet.” he did not know enough about the new captain to deem if he was ready to take on all the title would entail; he took a chance. “of course, it depends on your definition of alive. if he dies and comes back, it counts for me.” 

———

Ephraim turned his head to level his stare to Teo ( the bruise from the ship’s earlier lurch already giving way to a lidding of one swelling eye ). Watches him from beneath a furrowed brow. His tone thaws just enough to sustain a flicker of empathy. “Foltier.” Pull yourself together. 

He plants a palm on his shoulder as if to ground him. “I know Hell’s just chewed you up and spit you out, but think this through with me,” don’t lose sight of the truths your training taught you. “It doesn’t matter now if we’re two or two-hundred miles from safe water: the leads have closed up and we are here in them.” 

He points with purpose to the frost flowers that filigree the ice beneath their boots. “Even if it lasts just to the horizon, we couldn’t forge our own leads if we tried. This pack’s too thick to penetrate. What would you have us do? Waste a mound of our blasting supply— which I remind you is finite— on scrounging up slush?”

there was a hand at his shoulder. there was a knife at his throat. there was a threat in his shadow. we are here in them. they were already lost. they had been since they first sailed north. 

“ah, so you’ve written off the possibility of an afterlife completely? why am i not surprised…” his mouth twists into something unpleasant, as if in reaction to a bitter taste. something gone spoiled. “it is the coward’s way, after all, to bend so soon to resignation. to not dare imagine a reality where horror and holiness may equally exist.” 

he puts down his empty glass on the table behind him, even as the gesture feels– ill-advised, dangerous, to free his hands when they’re already itching towards teodoro. towards his neck, and the wringing thereof, if he’s being specific. “oh, foltier. you are a little lost thing, aren’t you? cornering near-strangers in empty rooms, to beg of them answers as to your own desires?” he picks at a loose splinter on the table, the very image of boredom, and sighs. “it’s not my job to explain your own mind to you. however,” a pause, for effect– “i was raised on the virtues of charity, so: let’s start with what you think you want. tell me, and i’ll tell you how far from the mark you’ve landed.”

“i believe in god, do not doubt that. but i believe in his wrath, not the forgiveness of an afterlife.” he did not want to be pulled into an intellectual debate; he did not care for it --- did not care about it. it would reveal more of himself than he wanted. so he cut himself off there, looked at casimir steadily. he thought of smiling as the man continued, of cupping his cheek gently and saying --- you absolute fool, you stupid man, you have not seen the place where horror and holiness meet as i have.  

but teo did not. 

For someone fluent in so many tongues, such laconic syntax shouldn’t have thrown the ambassador for as much of a loop as it did. There he’d been at the railing - though with the blackness that had swallowed all else, it felt more like the edge of their world. The Promethean, seized by the ice, no longer rocked beneath them. Dead in the water. The black sky, dead too. The black sea, dead. If he strained his ear, he could still hear it turning in its grave.

Pasha felt a weight on his shoulder and turned his head from the abyss. The sparse lamplight flickered across skeletal fingers, to remind him there were still things other than him in this blackness. To remind him his eyes were still open. And the question their owner posed froze his blood in the veins quicker than their venerer congealed the black waves beneath them.

It was just as vital to read the intention behind an inquiry as it was to understand the words that composed them (merde, had politicians equipped him), but even with the descending dark that should have adapted him to see better in such obscure conditions, Pasha still found himself unable to see into Teodoro. To comprehend. The same way one could be versed in Spanish and French, and grasp only some lexicon of the Catalans who settled in colonial Algeria. The way their Castilian cadence didn’t match the dialect they spoke. The way Teo’s softness didn’t match his crushing hold. The way his fingernails poised like the blunt teeth of vicelike jaws, or the spine of a blade anchored to the shoulder, bite edge cocked to the throat. Pasha regarded it from the corner of his eye. It was no Romance language, to be sure.

He’d never been an exceptional liar but he got by with selective truths. Teodoro had sacrificed unambiguity for intimidation and given him the crucial legroom to maintain his face. To interpret to his whim and reply with truth in his eyes, rather than scrabble some shoddy facsimile under pressure. Did you know? he asked.

Did you know so many would go on this excursion? Did you know they would be gone before dawn? Did you know that dawn wouldn’t come? Did you know she would take your face in her hands, look you in the eye, and lie?

“I didn’t,” was his answer, eyes silvered with sincerity. It tasted sweet as it left his lips, but the aftertaste stung the back of his throat and he felt his gut churn. It occurred to him, belatedly, that he would have rather been condemned to choke on it. He glanced back into the abyss to hide the grimace from his inquisitor. “Would it make any difference? There are things you’d be better pursuing than explanations, Teodoro. Things that still have breath in their bodies.”

i didn’t. two words, meant to free the ambassador. two words, meant to loosen teo’s grip and set them as allies again. would it make any difference? this question, tipped on its head: would it make any difference what pasha said, when teo had already raised him as the sacrifice? 

teo did not drop his hand, instead bringing his other up to grip pasha’s opposite shoulder. how easy it would be to lift the silvertongue over the edge of the ship, to watch him fall to ice, to see his skull cracked and spilled; how easy it would be for teodoro to make himself fully alone. would it make any difference? would he feel the loss of pasha as something new, or would it blur in with the rest of the agathe crew? would it make any difference? teo had never learned how to mourn.