#askouatrp

“Oh, darling.  Don’t take your smile from me so soon?”

Other days you are quite insufferable. But yes. You certainly liven up eternity.

What can I say? I enjoy keeping a certain former naval officer on his toes. And you, Liam, make the insufferable actually sufferable.

Is this about that "the going rate for sons" thing? Because that is my magnum opus. I will never top that level of angst.

Weeellllllll it was about Milah and Liam meeting in the underworld and Liam originally being standoffish and rude because oh he’s a pirate? Running off with married women? And you were his partner in crime, weren’t you? Encouraging his darkness and bringing him further down that road -- 

But Milah keeps coming back to the pub because there’s only so many days one can look into hopeless, little faces without drowning one’s self in gut-rot rum (and she won’t go to the Blind Witch’s place -- not after the rumours after one of her charges wasn’t at the crosswalk one morning) and she talks at Liam about Killian because she’s hurting, miserable, and angry and wants to rile Liam in turn -- and he bears it all with this oppressively judgemental silence. 

And one night it’s dead (bahaha) in the pub save for a few lost souls, and Milah’s having a particularly bad day -- she’s not even trying to antagonise him. He looks up at the stragglers ready to shout last call, and he sees a young lad at a table looking kind of lost and alone, and he he has a flash of recognition -- a sailor, not much older than himself at the time, who had just taken up on Silver’s ship not few weeks before...

And he looks back at the woman hunched over his bar, blankly staring at her finger running the rim of her glass and he is just flooded with shame at his self-righteousness and just --

“I’m glad he found someone who loved him”

And Milah snaps out of her daze and looks up at him in confusion -- like she almost has to re-register who the hell he is because it was so sudden. But she holds his eyes, and flashes him a sad smile.

And it escalates from there -- tentative storytelling...more raucous storytelling (slightly exaggerated? ‘That couldn’t possibly...’ ‘Oh really? Wanna bet?’ enter the bet box), gentle shoulder squeezes on bad days, having stale peanuts lobbed at the back of his head when he’s fussing over his meticulously lined up glasses on good ones.

And when she talks about Killian, it’s so vivid that he can nearly see him again and he feels this swell of affection blooming in his empty chest. And after a few decades that swell starts to expand -- she talks about her son and he smiles, she doodles on his bar napkins and puts them back into the stack without him seeing, and when he finds them he shakes his head and grins. She nearly inhales her drink as he tells Embarrassing Tales of Killian’s Youth, and her laugh has him beaming. She flat-out decks a newcomer who strolls in like he owns the place and starts harassing her, and he’s damned impressed -- and it punches him in the face nearly as hard that he’s half infatuated.

But Liam’s an old hand at swallowing his emotions in order to be sure he’s able to take care of the people he loves. Right?

Right.

...