the wolfhound

when: immediately after the plot drop, a skirmish where: main deck  with: @wolfhoundings

“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.

It’s enough to blind him to the knife’s new keeper: the guard that surges back in to the fray, not to return the blade to a fellow mutineer but to sheath it in the belligerent chaplain. In the flurry of limbs and intention, the man’s swing is thrown. ( A slight but saving grace. The difference between maim and mortal. ) Instead of severing artery, the sailor slashes a mad arc aside of it— thrusting toward the shoulders of Leo’s coat: burrowing through wool, through vest and broadcloth, until it splits his shirt. Until, slowed, it sheaths partway into him. The chaplain’s cry is ground to dust between his clenching teeth— only a spitting, choked heave, hold breaking on Mariah breaks as he buckles, knee cracking to the deck.

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.”

l : deck / t : middle of the night / e : post mutiny / p : @wolfhoundings

it’s almost scandulously easy to find a cap to fit over his head and tuck his hair away, the curl of it near as distinctive as his name, then to find a sheet of canvas large enough to use paint made of coal and saltwater to splat vague shapes akin to mould or blood stains on the front. when it reaches night, they pull it onto the deck and are half-way through tying one end when they hear footsteps from the other side of the ship approach. its a matter of seconds to climb high up enough into the rigging to be completely unrecognisable, and even mostly hidden, before they realise just who is walking towards them.

sure, they hadn’t talked much onboard, but that’s cause the dynamic was completely off, but right now - this was perfect. they lean forwards, whisper loud enough for his voice to carry “catch me!”, then wait half a second before letting gravity take them, flipping over once to - hopefully - land square in mariah’s arms.

It’s almost muscle memory, this. The frigid wind carried the tail-end of the call and stopped the passer-by dead in his tracks, thrown first by the déjà vu before the half-sighted gaze shot up, catching the careening acrobat some crucial seconds before his arms did. Pivot, square, brace; a reflex too clean in its execution to testify as anything short of rehearsed.

The lanky figure folded into his waiting arms, clenched teeth crushing any exclamation he might have had into a laboured grunt as he swiftly righted himself before the abrupt weight could strike them both down. Even with all the indisputable familiarity in this rather peculiar circumstance, it did admittedly did take the bounty hunter a few seconds of scrutiny in the low light to recognise the face masked behind the tipped cap.

“You could’ve broken your neck,” he admonished them flatly, though the lazy alleviation of his brow betrayed the glint of levity. He stared them out for one ungiving second, then two. Three. And then his arms went limp, to let the rigger meet the end of their fateful trajectory before his intervention. He’d accomplished his deed of gentility for the day - his hands were cold. He thrust them into his pockets and straightened, canting his head back to let a querying eye rake up the upward stretch of rigging. The spider’s shadowy web.

when: the mutiny where: main deck with: @wolfhoundings

Over the years, the cartographer has brought countless dogs to heel. What was one more deadeye? The deck was split down the middle, those returning from their jaunt across the eyes at odds with those who’d held down the frozen fort, and as the chaos cleared, the now Captain Estrada was at the fore of it. The cartographer, among others, poised just by his shoulder like a carrion bird.

Sohrab scanned the faces corralled loosely against the railing, looking for— ah, there. Mr. Devine, she’d told Estrada and Voronin just a quarter-hour earlier, Is a keen shot, and one I’d wager we’d do well with on our side. So she’d aimed to scoop him from the fray when the moment presented itself. Here it was, now.

She hones in on the bounty hunter, Mariah, as he stands in bewilderment; prodding at the chaplain’s elbow as though the poor sod might fill him in on the details he’d missed while away. He receives no answer, of course, because the chaplain is frozen to the deck, vacant stare affixed to the professor and the still-warm body he carries. Miss Stanley, she notes, face darkening. What a fucking shame. Almost feels sorry for it all— and would. If she hadn’t seen it coming. Not in this exact shape, of course ( could’ve been brown hair instead of red. could’ve been black. sandy blonde. ) but the heart of it’s the same. One of them was bound to end up dead of this. More. It’s one reason things had to change, she justifies ( among others, of course. )

In a subtle beckon, the cartographer catches the hunter’s attention, and calls him to her side. Here, boy.

They’ve been here before, he thinks. Not on the ship and not like this; not with stakes higher than the serrated roofs skirting London’s alleyways and a shattered kneecap of some pretentious windbag being the most nefarious thing she could ask of him. Not with the Queen’s own loyalists on the business end of the barrel.

The form is different but the call isn’t unfamiliar. A feeding hand from the impending shadow of the man behind it all. The one behind the man behind it all.

Because it was always men who enacted the problems, wasn’t it? Boisterous and big in their presences as they were. The machinated calculation to their lumbering - he found - often came from a puppeteer’s precision; a thousand unseeable strings wound around fingers, innocuously splayed in their shadow. He’d know. He felt a phantasmal pull as such a shadow beckoned to him. He realised grievously that he mustn't have severed all of his own.

Leonard, his now cold companion says. Funny thing is, Leo never gave him that name. 

No, he’d had it already— East London, 1829. Each 15 years younger and frothing like hounds. In hindsight, it’s a dreadful sort of comedy that it took them two-odd months to see it; that they’d nearly mounted some precarious peak of friendship in the process. Though, age does wonders in changing the face of man and mountain; bullet wounds and crooked noses do, too.

“You—” The bounty hunter’s face blanches, and his former quarry balks.

The chaplain’s collar might be starched and his shirts smell of parchment, but that alone’s never made his spaces sacred, nor his hands holy things ( it’s the faith in the higher thing that does. ) Now, they only make for costume as his eyes track Mariah’s towards the scarred hands folded on the table. Leonard’s eyes darken to coals with recognition, then catch fire with something else.  

It’s a strange little blessing that the rescue preparations have emptied out the common mess. That they’re alone enough only God is privy to the thing that happens next:

The chaplain puts his faith in something lower. In the four-fingered right hand that forms a hasty fist. He lunges across the table for Mariah, and as the elephant splits the room, Leonard’s knuckles split his lip. 

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.

when: during/immediately after the salvage crew returns where: lower decks whom: closed for @wolfhoundings

There are words being said, of that she is sure. Marcus declaring the change of power; that he is in and Malachy is out. A proclamation of the ship’s new course–one that points north, and will continue to do so; as long as she has anything to say about. But as important as those words are, they simply become noise. Language is stripped into meaningless syllables outside the bubble Mariah and Violet find themselves locked in. Nothing else exists but them; the whole world distilled into two pairs of steel blue eyes. They say no meaningless words, not even a whisper, for there is no need. All that needs to be said is communicated in miniscule movements on their features.

Do not move, The line between Violet’s brows say firmly––almost as threatening as the musket in her hand. The musket aimed for his head. Don’t make me kill another friend, Mariah––the clenching of her jaw yells. Don’t fucking do it.

Off the ice with its prospect of unfathomable demise and onto the Promethean with its much more explicit one. He’d been the last to relinquish hold on his arms; not out of any bullheaded inclination, but the jarring recognition of the face at the other end of the barrel he’d been met with. The very same one that had claimed - with that sly spark in the eyes and incorrigible manner of one not accustomed to taking no’s for answers - that he was to help her with a cake when he was back. To bolster crew morale and build on his own competence. You know, for your retirement.

The cheeky devil. He’d almost smiled.

Now, he looked for a quiver in her brow. It held the fortitude of a killer; funny he’d not noticed before. He looked down the barrel and saw a ghost inside the black muzzle. Their new regent spieled on but he couldn’t hear; not over the drawn echo of a phantom gunshot pressing in on his eardrums. Reverberating in his skull as surely as one cold drop of metal once had.

But overcoming the impossible does something to the inner ego, surely. In evading the absolute. Man hinged on what he thinks he knows, only to be unhinged. Where was the line, then? Was it here? Two inches higher and one to the left of the last one he’d toed? Are you feeling lucky? the slow tilt of his head asked, brow hitched above a dead eye. Apart from that, too still. A coiled spring fit to snap; a hound braced to lunge. He trusted she shared in his own facial fluency. Try. Try, and pray to God you have better luck than the last.

One second. Two. No shots rang out. Three. Four. Five. Dowling vanished down the stairway. Six. Seven. “What’s all this then, eh?” he murmured too softly, brows arched impassively and the sunken eyes narrow beneath them. Eight, nine, ten. The coronation was complete without a hitch; all trigger fingers loosened. 

An arm shot out.

he notices the man falter, as he moves to sit– the unmistakeable reaction that signals that surprising sort of pain, of a body not yet aware of its new limits– but doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stop him. lets the man have his pride for a moment longer, because:

casimir is used to this type of man (because it’s always a man, isn’t it)– the unflinching sort. tough down to their egos, which are in turn so easily bruised. it’s the worst type of patient to have but he likes to think he’s a fair hand at working with them by now. knows at least that it’s best for all to play along at the beginning, as long as no physical toll is taken in the process. building a rapport now will only make it easier to restrain him later on, if he tries anything truly rash.

“i appreciate your attitude. very… level-headed, of you, to see it that way. however, there will be adjustments to be made, with the change in your depth perception. you won’t realise how much your sight has changed, until you find yourself already fallen on your ass– or worse, into traffic– so you need to take it slow. no rushing out the door, understand?” 

he leans forward, clasping his hands together in front of him, and gives the man his most stern look. “to be honest, monsieur, that face of yours is one of the greatest achievements of my career. i won’t have you ruining it on my own watch. however…” he pulls away, bringing a cigarette case from his pocket, lights one between his lips. once it’s lit he removes it and flips it so that the non-burning end is toward the other man, ready to be handed over– but stops with it just out of reach. “if you promise to be good, to take the proper time on bedrest and not flee this ward the moment i look away, you can have all the cigarettes in the world. and a bit of company too, if you’ll have me. if not…” he shrugs. the smoke curls up between them like a spirit. “let’s just say i have my own set of keys to this room. and i’m not afraid to use them.”

without waiting for the response, he leans over the patient and puts the cigarette in his mouth himself. resettles brings out his little notepad and pencil again. “you can call me toussaint. now, how does the eye feel? where does the numbness start, and where does it end?”

“Better blind than dead, non? My nephew will have fashioned a pirate patch within the week.” It was a morbid optimism, but there was only so sanguine one could get with a sanguine-stained face.

The doctor leaned in and Mariah’s eye rolled over to meet him. It could be noted, then, in spite of his ceaseless observation about the room in the lull he had an unabating habit of watching one’s eyes when the lips were in motion. Honed sharp not by whetstone but over time, as nature formed icicles - a thaw that would weep in the sun and freeze anew at a point. Somnolent but restive all the same; an unflagging pointedness juxtaposed to a dulled manner. A paradox of a person, he was keen to mean only what he meant to at his own convenience. His eye narrowed a fraction as he searched Toussaint through the tobacco haze. Having walked life in mirrors and smoke, that meagre veil hindered him none.

His unwarranted suspicion, he imagined, was rooted in one of two things. Firstly (albeit the less likely of his notions), the doctor had a sore history of seeing patients pumped full of lead and then still spry enough to pull a runner once he turned his head. Alternatively (and almost certainly, given the secondmost sentiment the surgeon relayed on him), he’d just poured a fortune in hours into a hundred-to-one stake and wouldn’t see his gamble cowp before he cashed in.

They had a common interest there, at least. “Your condescension is much appreciated, docteur. However I didn’t walk myself this far just for the change of scenery,” he assured him, brows arched just mildly enough to cave the deadpan without sacrifice to his credence. As the surgeon reached past his raw and waiting knuckles to put the cigarette between the lips himself, they curled with levity. “Though your tiles are very lovely.”

Pacified, he settled warily. Toussaint posed an inquiry over the eye and he finally averted his gaze. Let fatigue weigh it into his lap. Begrudgingly, reeled himself back into the senses he’d done his best to disregard. There was little room for wit when it felt like an amateur percussion band had chosen his skull to practice on.

“Hot. Cold,” he mused lowly. The strange coldness had stuck with him. The unfeeling feeling. The fiery ice that congealed on every limb, staved only by motion. It ruptured only when he’d stopped; then he’d felt all too much. He took a drag to rinse the blood that still clung to his throat. “Fucked.” He cracked his good one to steal a furtive glance at the notebook, on the off-chance his succinct account had been conveyed into it verbatim. The numbness, he hadn’t the clarity to pinpoint.

Is this what we’ve come to? “Not entirely,” he protests with a slight and crooked grin despite himself. “Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down,” He recites in brief demonstration. “—There’s no end to verses that speak to desolation, but I don’t claim to know it firsthand,” he insists as he dips his head toward the hunter. Not like you might. “I believe— of course I believe— but I’m not so prideful I can’t admit that studying is far stretch different from seeing. I’m not so fool as to claim I understand the grand design of it, yet,” The things you must’ve seen. Laurents tries to restrain the airy bubble welling his his chest, half set to bursting. “Consider it gathering data.”

It’s a strange curiosity. A morbid one. Born, of course, from being on the wrong end of the experience once. How the fox look down the hound’s sights? Mariah sets his mismatched stare on him and Laurents meets it without hesitance. Hangs on to every word and compares it in the half light to what he thinks he knows. 

Mariah gives him such a clear mirror in that moment, that Laurents mistakes it for a window. Misses the moment of recognition entirely. He only cants his head to the side, carried off by the remark enough to give a snort; so desperate for one normal back and forth in a time where they’re all either up against a wall or balancing on a precipice. ( Doesn’t even realize that the only push needed in their own case is the absentminded way he removes his gloves from his nine-and-a-half fingers, and folds his hands atop the table. )

The thing is, chaplain and bounty hunter— corvid and hound they each are aside, Mariah’s always been too easy to talk to. The sort of presence that piques you because it’s a whisper of something you can’t place. Yet.

“Pull something?” He snorts amicably before volleying his own offhanded teasing back. “At least I’m using the muscle.”

(cw: violence)

Whatever wry riposte expected from the bounty hunter (for never, not once, had he passed up the opportunity to take a jab at his unlikely companion) didn’t come. Didn’t die in his throat, because it hadn’t even the chance to formulate by the time he caught sight of those hands. Laurents’ jibe went into one ragged ear and out the other, because already it was deafened by the age-old and bloody resonance of rabid breaths and gnashing teeth.

He looked at the hands for a moment longer and then he looked up at Laurents’ face. Smiling, still; so mild and meek that it hadn’t matched the mug of any reprobate in his register, and the dent in his nose so appearingly intrinsic that Mariah had not ever paused to wonder how it had gotten there. He stared back at Laurents. Then took that image of him and overlaid it, dreadfully, with another in his mind’s eye. He pulled the brow further down, contorted that smile into a gap-toothed scowl. He tried to fathom what those placid features looked like drenched in blood and rancour and those coaly eyes set ablaze.

He’d put crooks in a dozen noses, during his short time freelancing as a hired scourge. It was not the deed that stuck with him, but the uncannily ferocious retaliation. The hot wash of blood down his collar as those punched teeth had managed to close down on his ear and tear. Consequently, he need not look at the hands again. He knew too well where that ring-finger had gone after that.

Please, call me Laurents. Laurents, with his pristine slate. But it wasn’t the Laurents he knew.

Already, he’d been silent too long. Already, he’d let his eyes linger on the puzzle pieces that could build the bloody picture the chaplain was familiar with. An elephant big enough to split the room at the seams. That stoical countenance had blanched beneath the gravity of it all, jaw clenched. And then, slowly, he worked his features back into moderation. Something had dislodged beneath the mask, however- Impassivity wasn’t sitting right on them.

( @wolfhoundings​ / l’hôtel dieu hospital, paris, france / sometime in 1941 )

toussaint has always wondered if the architects of the hotel dieu didn’t have a little flair for the dramatic. if they hadn’t chosen the coldly white stone flooring and drafty, wide hallways in expectation of moments just like this one, lurid as a scene plucked from a penny dreadful: a lone man, front darkened with blood, stumbling through their front doors. moving in utter silence, so much so that no one moves to stop him until he’s halfway down the hall to the doctor, open-mouthed orderlies watching him march by like it’s any other tuesday afternoon.

later there’d be whispers: can’t believe he was still upright, let alone walking. what a fright. what a living nightmare. but toussaint works in the realm of everyday nightmares, takes a horror and pulls it apart– takes a horror and puts it back together. so when he sees the man he doesn’t scream, doesn’t even falter, passing his cup of canteen tea back to his colleague, wordless apart from, perhaps– though he’d never admit it, considering the clearly inappropriate levity of such a gesture– a little knowing wink in his co-worker’s direction. then, like a shutter snapping over a window: he goes to work.

several hours later a nurse grabs casimir, between operations, so he’s already waiting by the man’s bedside when he comes to. he hears the stirring, the tell-tale rustle of hospital sheets, but doesn’t react until he’s finished what he’s writing on the little notebook he carries in his pocket. then, with a polite smile, he looks up.

“you know, i don’t normally greet my patients when they wake up. then again, patients normally pay for their treatment upfront. i half suspect the nurses sent me here as a safeguard, in case you try to book it sans chèque.” he caps his pen, tucks it and the notebook away. “it’s all been quite the novel experience.”

“i’m afraid we couldn’t salvage the eye. not entirely. we will have to run tests…” and it is such a smooth transition as to be nearly imperceptible, this switch from bedside visitor to surgeon, that sharp sort of curiosity that can’t entirely pass for goodwill. the look that is unmistakably examining. “how do you feel?”

It wasn’t the smattering of blood on his sleeves he was met with that perturbed him (he was no stranger). It wasn’t even the voice, the echo of an anchor he’d snatched against a sanguinary riptide made too lucid, too soon. It wasn’t that he spoke for his ears rather than into the fissured cheekbone, close enough to ghost a breath in some macabre pastiche of intimacy; but the fact his intonation was as placid with a scalpel several inches deep in someone’s face as it was making smiling smalltalk. And so fresh off the operating table, Mariah couldn’t be sure whether it was the phantom ache of being put under such an implement or if the surgeon’s scrutiny was simply that cutting.

Novel, he’d said. Mariah arched his brow as much as the pull of bandage would allow, parted his lips to taste that first breath on his tongue, before he impelled it into motion. “Right,” he murmured after a moment, gruff with the early strain of a smoker and the toll of a harrowing few hours. He didn’t squirm under the look but he did not sit at ease, despite the indolent tilt of the head. “Well, it would appear that my latest chèque blew up in my face and Charon took my pocket change for bribes. The bastard drives a hard bargain.”

His lips twitched with what was almost a grin, lost with the gritting of teeth when he pushed himself to sit. The head felt heavier than it ever had, funnily enough- With the blast he thought it might have lost some weight. It hung back between his shoulderblades until he was upright and then snapped forward into his waiting hands, nails wordlessly curling into the red fringes of gauze. It took a moment before everything still tender and loose settled back in his skull, and only then did he spare a hand in wearied beckons. Then, with more becoming solemnity: “If you- If you’ve got a figure and a pen, I’ll sort you something.”

He held his head until he was half-certain his shoulders would manage as the man spoke of his eye. He parted scarred fingers enough to fix him with a look, the hooded survivor behind them unabatingly stark in the shadow, as his lips curled almost imperceptibly behind his raw knuckles. “Fair collateral for a ferry back across the Styx, is it not?” It could have been worse, was the undertone. Dreadful and obvious a notion as it was.

His hands fell into his lap and his spine caved forward with the splitting weight they shouldered. “Mieux que jamais; would you pass me my cigarettes? Or would you say I’m too young to prescribe my own medication?” Whether he obliged or not, Mariah watched Toussaint from the corner of his eye all the while. The incising look had not been lost to him and in spite of the good nature he returned him, his own stare was fortified. Respectfully, he’d had his fill of being vivisected for one day.

when: prior to the rescue party’s departure where: the common mess with: @wolfhoundings

Amidst the all the chaos, it’s a miracle one’s able to stand still at all. The preparations for an excursion on the ice have just begun, but the chaplain can only prepare to watch them leave. To receive what remains of them.  Of the party they will embark to retrieve. 

Christ, Pippa. Jon. Ayla. All of you- 

Laurents can only stare into the whorls of a mess table’s wood grain in hopes for something like hypnosis. To think of them out there, in pursuit of a rendezvous with the things that defy all creation, is hardly bearable. Thankfully he needn’t bear the thoughts alone for the moment. Mr. Devine sits across from him, back pushed up toward the wall; a bounty hunter that, in time, has become an utterly unexpected acquaintance. Perhaps even a friend - in the same way corvids oft accompany hounds ( a curious inquisition. )

The chaplain’s still layered in his greatcoat and gloves ( for it was only a few minutes previous that he was stumbling toward the starboard railing, staring out into the pitch darkness as if it might reveal to him some sign of his friends and crewmates. ) Now, he temples his gloved fingers on the table before him and furrows his brow. “—I mean,” he picks up where their aimless chatter had left off, a usual pastime. “In all your travels, have you encountered anything like this?” This desperation. Whether he means the phenomena or the people charging toward it is unclear. It’s more a hollow, untethered remark than anything. He snorts in exasperation, because prior to Mariah joining him at the table, he’d already bowed his head and exhausted all his prayers.

“Here I thought I’d no wits left to lose.”

“Is this what we’ve come to?” The enduring furrow to the bounty hunter’s brow lapsed with incredulity, gaze wedged up toward Laurents from the unperturbed surface of his untouched drink. Throughout the past several weeks, the way it rippled in the tankard with the boat’s swaying had brought him nothing but malaise. But now, with the glacial chokehold of the Promethean that had ground the whole operation to an impasse - he was beginning to find the stillness was worse.

This was what they’d come to. Clergymen turning to vagrants and woodknots for wisdom they couldn’t find in holy writ. Was that to say God themself hadn’t neither experienced nor foreseen a likewise phenomenon? Hadn’t relayed some crucial parable to their chroniclers, in preparation for the day it would be chanced upon by the chaplain of a doomed voyage? If he was optimistic (and, pray, inebriated), Mariah might have taken the impalpable cloud before one blind eye and deluded the outline of an omniscient companion, sitting at the lefthand edge of the table. Cloudy head in their cloudy hands, an arm’s length from the alcohol, despondent.

The illusion only made for as long as he kept his good one on Laurents, but Mariah had never put too much faith in things he couldn’t see head-on. Things he couldn’t look right into and scrape every morsel from the inside to out. Anything except gun barrels. At this point, he’d tend to take them at their word.

“In trying to outrun what they think is inevitable, I’ve seen people do some baffling things,” he indulged him after a moment, arms folded across his chest as his head canted languidly toward his shoulder. “When they believe they’re dead, that their story is done and dusted... The rest comes as an inconsequential fucking afterword.”

The sort of afterword he meant, of course, was raw and unrehearsed. Those who’d had time to prepare theirs in sanctuary and reflection - who reviewed their lives not out of forsaken necessity, but because they were content with the tale they’d told - were not the sort that had bounties on their heads. To bare one’s soul in its worst and its best, cracked open and bleeding over cobblestone for all to see...

It was freedom in a sense. Catharsis. A double-edged thing, for why did those self-imposed confinements exist if not to protect themselves? The dead didn’t need shields, because weapons meant nothing. The ice walkers had abandoned their inhibitions because if it was death they were to face, death would be the one with déjà vu.

“I’ve also seen mortal minds snap trying to wrap around things much bigger than themselves. Inevitability, infinity… So do watch you don’t pull something, Laurents,” Mariah’s head fell to the other side. Something must have caught his lips on the way, because one corner had snagged into a wolfish smile by the time he slumped his shoulders into the wall.

♢ ALL ABOARD ! —

The HMS PROMETHEAN welcomes MARIAH DEVINE as the wolfhound. They are 38 & cis-male and might be painted as such. They come here as military. Their specific occupation is that of bounty hunter. When you strike up an acquaintance, address them as he/him. Their deeds on land precede their arrival — people say they are known to be competent, insightful & vigilant but jaded, sardonic & ruthless when the tide turns. Their purpose aboard falls in line with access to major ports throughout the voyage in pursuit of bounties.