#variations.

maybe you're avoiding the subject, but it's hard not to look at flint before you, this great man, asking for your counsel, and think of how far you've come. since you were a thief pulling off this last great score, cocky and overconfident, and ending up on your knees with james flint's gun in your mouth, thinking, well, that's it because how is there a way out, always a way out, if you can't even speak? and how you'd saved your own life afterwards, that silver tongue tasting of gunpowder and metal, talk-talk-talking your way into a job and out of a shallow grave that, let's be honest, they'd probably have made you dig yourself.

what kind of person does this make me, and it's the last thing you'd expect of him, the last question you'd expect him to ask you, and that's when you realize -- oh. he cares what they think of him, this poor man. stories are nothing, stories are what you use to twist your way out of trouble, time and time again, and yet here he is, caring about the stories being told. the ones that make him a monster, a menace, a threat to decent men and women everywhere. that must be it, the source of that worry. what else could it be? certainly not something so juvenile as conscience.

weakness, vulnerability, it does not come naturally to you -- no, that's not true. it comes far too naturally to you, 'john silver', and thus your weaknesses must be kept under closer guard than ever, lock-and-keyed somewhere in the white teeth of your ribcage.

still. your pretenses have lowered, enough that flint has noticed. and that is not supposed to happen. "i hope that's not concern i hear, captain." why? because then you'd have to face the terrifying truth: that the captain, the tyrant, is himself only a man? the truth is that it's been an adjustment, sleeping, just as much as everything has been an adjustment for a man with only one leg. you're still gripped by the phantom pains, at night -- they feel more real, then, in the dark. and the nightmares, well. the nightmares are nothing new.

(you'd rather lose your remaining leg than tell the truth, right now.)

you might have found that question funny, once -- another man, another name, another life. as for now, you eye flint carefully, to see what he's giving away in that salt-roughened voice. ( you and he have gotten too good at reading each other. another reason you should have taken the offer from vane's man and disappeared, led the crew of the walrus to their deaths and 'john silver' with them. but here, inexplicably, you are. everyone marvel at the one-legged quartermaster -- it's a good thing you detect no pity in flint's voice, or you think you might lunge for his throat even sickly from blood loss, and the generously-termed 'amputation'. )

you'd earned the question by flinching minutely when flint stepped close to the bed someone had made up for you in the window seat of the captain's cabin, reaching for a knife that was no longer there. in your defense, you were still half-drowsy -- still are, as a matter of fact. it's sometime still before sunrise, far as you can tell, and flint's eyes glint tawny in the pale darkness.

the claim is on your lips, i didn't know who you were for a moment, but it's a lie, and a bad one. you didn't flinch from some spectre or some half-imagined past trauma -- you were aware it was flint, reaching for you, that made you tense. because the man before you does nothing without a motive. least of all something involving you. the transactionality of your relationship with him had once been so straightforward, and the fact that it seems so elusive now can hardly be blamed on your weariness.