First off, if you find yourself here without reading the first 17 chapters, I really recommend going back and checking those out. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere - we'll still be here when you get back. :)
Sorry for the long wait. Been trying to exist in this capitalistic society we live in and that takes time, and I joined a choir and that takes time, and winter has arrived where I live and that takes time while I try and make up for the happiness and energy the darkness takes. But at the end of the day we make time for what's important for us, and Ghost kept showing up in my dreams and staring me down for not resolving the conflict I had put him in. So.
Here we are, together again. And winter will end and the sun will come back and until it does, there are warm cups of tea and blankets to share with friends (or not to share with friends, blankets to steal and keep and hoard like precious things, like currency, like love). May your hot water kettle never run empty, may you have enough mugs for everyone and may the changing leaves fill you with the wonder of renewal, of resiliency, rather than the dread of the upcoming white. May you always remember that the trees are no less trees and are no less alive simply for the fact of their bare branches. They are concentrating on surviving; it's okay for us to do the same.
Peace and love and someone to keep you warm at night. A heartbeat for a pillow and breath as a lullaby. I love you all, I missed you. Take these words forward as you find your own song to sing you to sleep.
*****
I couldn't move for a long time, my stomach tied in knots so bad I found it impossible to pull my body from its tightly bound position. The Captain, the Captain, always binding me as he wished and I hated it, hated to feel this way for him, hated it because I knew he would be feeling so much worse and I had no way of making it better.
Eventually I managed to pull myself upright. How had this all gone so wrong? My body was falling to pieces; I was dead, I was dying once more, I was so close to being alive again and that was the one thing I could no longer be. I found myself in need of distraction, of company. Of return. And so I turned to the one place where there was always work, hard, repetitive work. I knew I would find no quarter there. I knew I might be able to recover some sense of myself.
What I did not expect to find as I turned the corner to enter the mess was the Captain.
He sat with his head in his hands across from the slight frame of Natch. His body set mine on fire, turned me to ice. He looked so tired, so.
I won't explain it. I can't describe him in such a state, could barely look and see him there, watched him not move at all as Natch reached out and placed his hand on his arm. Ached to be that touch, that comfort. Had I done that to him? Was this what truth looked like, lashed across the back of the man I loved?
I hated myself. I hated the things I had been and I hated the things I had become even more.
The Captain had his back to the door and so he did not immediately know that I had entered the room. Natch, however, saw me nearly at once. He drew back from the Captain as if afraid to be seen touching him, his mouth snapping shut and his body language shutting down. The Captain stiffened before him.
I froze, understanding that they must have been speaking of me. "I can go," I told them quietly.
The Captain rose, his eyes nowhere near my form. Without saying a word, without looking at me once, he turned and left the room. His body never came within six inches of mine.
I leaned against the door, unable to watch him go. Shaking.
"Gods, Ghost." Natch sat where the Captain had left him, eyes wide. "What the hell were you thinking?"
I couldn't do this, not now. I moved into the room and entered the kitchen, wanting to find onions, potatoes, anything I could destroy, to lose myself in tasks that had no real meaning. No beginning and no end. Cookie crossed his arms and frowned at my form as I hunted for knives.
"It's one thing to keep your past from him. You're entitled to that. But you know the way we talk about the King, you know the stories. Christ, Ghost. You've got to know what we say. What he's said, probably to you. And he doesn't know how much of it is true, doesn't know what you've done and what you haven't." He paused at the doorway. "Gods.
I
don't know what you might have done."
I ignored him. "Where are your knives?"
Cookie shook his head and leaned back against the counter.
"You do know what they say about you, right? The stories they tell, the men you've killed, the women." There was a brief pause. "The children."
I wanted him to shut up, never wanted to hear his voice again. Of course I knew what they said of me; I had heard the stories, had lived most of them myself. Had starred in many of them, in one way or another. Had been one of those very children of which he spoke. Of
course
I knew what they said; I had often been the first to have to hear it. "Give me the fucking knives," I snarled at Cookie.
"Think not," he replied calmly. I slammed a cabinet door and Natch flinched.
I pressed my head to the polished wood, hoping perhaps to press my frustration into the grain. "The stories are for shit," I told the cabinet. "The stories are stories. I am who I am and he should know that."
I wanted him to know that. But the stories weren't just stories and he should know that too - he had probably seen some of those stories born under Dreyfus, had perhaps taken his own starring role in some. I thought of him in my brother's hands and nearly ripped a cabinet's door from it's hinges.
"Ghost, you fucked up," Natch told me. My stomach roared, my chest, my lungs. "You should have told him this to begin with. God, it looks like you're using him just to get to the fucking - "
I turned my eyes to him and watched as he drew back. Good. He should be afraid of me. All of these land boys should be afraid of me. Why had I tempered the things that I was, why had I kept myself contained for their sakes? Hidden my past, my nature, the shadow of my names. Let them quake before me; let them die in my wake if they couldn't keep up. "Do you truly believe," I told Natch now, letting my voice be seawater, feeling the way it left my body like mist, "that I need help to find my revenge? That I,
I
, need something so paltry, so insignificant, as a ship to travel through this world?"
Better, he had wanted me to be. Better, I had wanted me to be. This was better. This was safer. Let my body turn to nothing but storms and white-capped waves if the Captain would not have me. I could not feel pain as a thousand crashing atoms of salt and a million churning molecules of water. I could not be turned away as the everlasting sea. Before me, Natch shrunk back, fear in his eyes and his body shaking.
"Lad." I turned and crashed up against the rock that was Alan. I barely noticed as Natch scrambled from the room, released from my attention, fear making his exist clumsy and fast. "My vegetables."
I felt a bump at my feet and looked down to see onions, displaced from their homes as the ship listed under the sudden wind that had come to be at my side. I watched impassively as they tapped at my legs in silent entreaty. Tap, tap. Tap.
"Lad," Alan said again.
I sighed and concentrated on the wind. Soon I felt it lessen, knew the ship to be righting. Knew my world was not so easily fixed.
"The Captain is everything," I told the onions. My voice was shaking. Everything was shaking. "The Captain is the only thing I care about."
"My boy." Cookie laid a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see his hand holding out a knife. "I know."
I bent down to pick up the onion, took the knife, and went to work.
***
I served the food that night for dinner as I had so many other times. The ship was tense; they might not know exactly what was happening, but they could tell something was wrong.
They were nobodies. I stood in the kitchen and waited for my Captain.
I could not eat, my stomach hurt so bad. Instead I sat in the kitchen, my eyes tight against the counter top.
It was a long meal.
I wiled the time away with daydreams, fervent wishes that I had been born a different being, that I had never been the King, never taken onto my father's ship and made the things that I was but as soon as I thought it I took it back because then I would not have met my Captain, and then I wished that I had never been born at all, that I had died like so many other children in the hold of that dark ship, that I had drowned at sea in my birth but that had the same result and so I could not wish it, not truly, for perhaps the Captain would be better without me but I, I could not imagine a world where I had never been given the chance to be with him.
Chance, opportunity. Fate. I had never been given an option of who to be. I moved past wishes and turned sour; I cursed the turnings that I called fate, I cursed prophecies and fathers and family and the sea, I cursed my wretched inclination towards the taciturn and every part of me that I could think to pick apart from the rest.
In the end, none of it mattered, because the Captain did not come to dinner.
Dinner ended in it's own time, my body vibrating with unresolved tension. As the men filtered from the room I moved about, cleaning up and clearing spaces with the energy I carried. Most men left quickly, unwilling to tempt the things that I might be. It was a decision that did not register to me in that moment; of course they would leave. Of course they would fear me. Had I not wanted this, cultivated this so many times in so many places? I carried pain so close to my chest it puffed from my nostrils and soured the air.
As I stacked the last of the bowls, I noticed Natch and Sneg standing in conference. I paid them only the briefest moment of attention, and only then because they had not run like the others, before turning my back and returning the to comforting closed space the kitchen provided.
I was surprised when Natch walked up to the counter. No, not surprised, for I did not have the capacity for surprise at that time, so filled was I with other things. But I would have been lying if I said I had expected it. Natch might not be afraid of ghosts, but he had certainly learned to fear the sea. I ignored him and continued with the dishes.
"Ghost."
The dishes stacked neatly, satisfactorily. Behind me, I could hear Natch shift. "Ghost."
