#hal gates

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED

He doesn't know I'm coming, does he?

Cregg. I brought him over with me, you know. We served together under Avery when we was kids. He was my first bunkmate. For years, he went on about how he'd got this… huge… stash hidden away. And I should live to survive him because one day I will be a rich man. As you know, we lost him on the Pembroke. So I open his locker and what do I find? 12 pesos, a busted pocket watch, and a letter with instructions to deliver it to his sister in New York. Lying sack of shit, was Mr. Cregg. So I bought the boys a round with the pesos, traded the pocket watch for a bit of tail, and spent two weeks that winter in New York, trying to deliver that fucking letter to his sister. Looked high and low. Never found her. So on the way home, I waited till we were in open water and I could see no land in any direction, and I dropped it over the side. Returned to the sea. There are no legacies in this life, are there? No monuments. No… history. Just the water. It pays us and then it claims us. Swallows us whole. As if we'd never been here at all.

s01e08 — VIII.

I told you of my grandfather who raised me. A fisherman in Padstow. Well, in his youth he was a deckhand on a privateer off the coast of Massachusetts. And one night he was alone on the late watch at anchor in the Boston Harbor when he sees this man climbing out of the water and onto his ship. A stranger. The stranger approaches my grandfather and asks him for a little rum. Man said that he'd fled his fishing trawler. Accused of killing another man. And when asked his name, the man simply replied… Mr. Flint. This stranger, he never said whether he was guilty of the killing or why he chose that ship or where he was bound, he just… just sat there. Eventually, he asked my grandfather for a little more rum from below. My grandfather went off to fetch it, but when he returned… the man was gone. My grandfather was in Boston for a month after that. Never heard a word about a killing or a fugitive at large. It was as if the sea had conjured that man out of nothing and then taken him back for some unknowable purpose. When I first met Mr. Gates and he asked me my name… I feared the man I was about to create. I feared that someone born of such dark things would consume me were I not careful. And I was determined only to wear him for a while and then dispose of him when his purpose was complete. And I thought of that story. Am I ready to let him go? Truth is… every day I've worn that name I've hated him a little more. I've been ready to return him to the sea for a long time.