Once, a long time ago, Tevinter had also left its mark on a stony island in the southern Amaranthine. Upon its abandonment—those Ancient Age magisters more concerned with some business on the mainland than in keeping this choke point into the Waking Sea secure for the future—, it fell the spirits, and to the weather, and to eventually to whomever might see some use in the jagged slab of rock. Some time previous, that was the Qunari. And then it was the Felicisima Armada. Today, Estwatch is still ostensibly in the custody of that second one, although anyone with sense knows that the pirates of the South Thedas seas remain united largely by tradition more so than they are by discipline or even convenience. Maker only knows how true the Accords still hold here, in the aftermath of the Breach.
Little Llomerryn is a town clinging to the base of the fort the Qunari abandoned there on the island. Nestled amidst black stone and grasping scrub, it paints a somewhat less than luxurious image in comparison to what common knowledge suggests must be the white beaches and balmy weather of its older sister only a few leagues north at the point of the Rivaini peninsula. But when viewed through a spyglass from a distance point of anchorage, there is something strikingly familiar about its arrangement. Maybe, Flint mused privately, all Tevinter ports fallen in the hands of no good rotten pirates and gone to seed eventually come to resemble the place like this one. Like Nasceretown, and other similar northern ports of ill-repute.
At some point, they'll have to attend to Llomerryn proper and see if the theory holds. In the meantime—
He tips his attention from the spyglass' eyepiece. Slants his gaze toward the taffrail flag post, the black banner flying in the headwind, and then carefully replaces the glass to his eye. A brief study of the fort's upper battlements commences. There is a Qunari cannon up there. They are presently beyond its range (he thinks; this, assuming it isn't simply for decoration), but should they wish to pass into the port of Little Llomerryn, they will need to chance running in under it. While the Black should guarantee safe passage, he is very aware of the fact that Hercinia with her notorious pirate hunters is only a short distance removed from here, and that anyone in the world can stick a bit of dark fabric off their ship's stern and pretend to be something they're not.
Lowering the glass, he passes it sideways to where John is stood beside him at the Walrus' port side rail.
A twitch of humor crosses John's expression, where he leans his weight against the rail. Upright, habitual lean slight enough to go unobserved by the men passing below or dangling above, John accepts the glass. Taps it against one scarred palm before lifting it to his eye.
He too marks the cannon. The glass swings to mark out the overturned anthill of activity on the beach; every island is the same in this respect, John knows. Crews posting on the sand, quartermasters selling off goods, captains dividing spoils, the rhythms will all be the same.
"Ask me again once we've walked the beach," John decides. "Right now, I'm still holding the possibilities awaiting us in my mind."
In the short stretch of time spent close to land, John had gained back a little weight. The lingering signs of hard recovery disappear, more or less, beneath the sun-bleached blue of his coat and the glint of jewelry at his throat, the rings on his fingers. The men have strung line to and fro on the deck, so John's travels are less fraught. He has mastered the skill of setting his weight into the boot and not flinching at the pain of it. The wear of the past months are masked, not invisible, but so far, it has all been enough for the men of the Walrus.
The trouble is that the mask and pantomime will have to be enough on that beach too, and in the taverns and on the street beyond them.
A performance. A pretending.
John straightens, body turning to reset his weight over one elbow as his posture opens back towards Flint.
"Have we much reputation to trade on here?"
A consideration of their starting point, of how they might find the stage set for them in this new ecosystem.
Some flexion in the line of Flint's face suggests the answer is likely complicated—some equation he has privately calculated before this moment and felt the results were less than satisfactory, but ultimately preferable to the available alternatives. While some weeks ago and in entirely different latitudes, he'd made a perfectly confident argument for this to the likes of Jack Rackham
—('Charles Vane is in the hands of the Tevinter Governor, if he isn't dead already. Are you seriously suggesting that our best course of action is to run in the opposite direction?'
'It's not our best option. It's the only one.')—
that doesn't make the prospect uncomplicated. Just necessary; and necessary to have appeared certain in the moment.
A performance, if you will. Pretending.
"I suspect they've heard of us," Flint says, squinting against the glint of the sun off the surface dark water. Without the glass, he can't actually still make out the gun overlooking the bay, but he can study the prospect in his mind's eye well enough. "What I can't say is whether that's to our advantage. My understanding is that the Felicisima Armada has enjoyed a particular understanding with most Southern ports. It's entirely possible they're less than appreciative of the work we've done along the northern coastline."
Pirate raids on costal north Antiva and Tevinter settlements are likely to have had a somewhat cooling effect on certain relationships even in the south. But on the plus side:
"I doubt that gun is functional," even if someone is harboring enough resentment to point it at them.
"I assume if we were truly unwelcome, they'd have at least threatened it whether it was working or not."
Small blessings.
With a little room between himself and the throbbing pain spiking up his leg, John is better able to consider the shifting sands waiting for them. Contemplate what it will require to navigate.
"When last I was here, I was no one."
So if they've heard anything of him, it is what the Walrus and Flint have made of him.
Long John Silver, and the work of his peg leg. Captain James Flint, and the butchery he'd wrought in the months of retribution for Miranda Hamilton, to say nothing of what came before.
It's not nothing. But it may not necessarily serve to rally anyone to their cause.
"But it's been long enough that I imagine whatever open tab I might have left has been wiped clean," he says, like a joke. Elbow leaning hard on the wooden rail, eyes moving between Flint's face and the shoreline. "I've an idea of which establishments we might want to cultivate some impressions in. It might serve us to remain on the beach, and let some of the men act as our ears for tonight."
three days for this workplace comedy bullshit tag smh
'When last you were here?', he doesn't repeat directly back at him, though from the angle and elevation of Flint's brow as his attention is abruptly torn from that gun on the old fort's battlements it would seem to be a near thing.
Instead, given a faint pivot of boot toe and hip against the rail, he just looks at him—pointedly expectant.
Now? lives in the answering slant of John's mouth, half a smile rising to meet the narrowing application of Flint's attention.
Even as mangled as he is, as deadened as whatever part of his interior self that lives attuned to the pulse of magic flowing within every ingrained facet of the world around him, John still feels the hammer-clang of power that lives in James Flint. Maybe it is less a feeling and more an echo, a memory of what John knows to dwell in a place even if pain scorched the nerve endings into ash.
Does he grieve the absence of it?
John still has no answer. The half-smile masks that tangle of contemplation as much as it offers a rejoinder, telegraphs some real, wry humor.
"A decade ago, give or take," is part of an answer. "I doubt I'm recognizable. I was younger."
Stood on two legs.
"I didn't stay long," as an offering, a fraction more than scraps to hang on the bones of his past. "Just enough to find myself pointed in the direction of more legitimate work. Though I'd imagine the landscape hasn't shifted far past the point of familiarity."
"Uh huh," he says, the broadest possible rejoinder. His eyebrows retain their elevation for so long a beat that they're in fact still stuck in the direction of Flint's hairline as he blinks slowly back to the harbor mouth, the looming face of the fortress wall and the cluster of buildings clinging to its dirty black hems.
"I wasn't aware there was such a thing to be found in Estwatch," has the tenor of a sidelong look even if one doesn't actually materialize. John fucking Silver.
But that's neither here nor there, and Now? is not an invalid sentiment. So:
"We'll be after the names of the powers on the island. I want to see our way in front of any presently in residence by this time tomorrow." Should playing the eyes and ears game prove unsuitable slow going, he has an alternative approach in mind.
But while this is not dissimilar to Flint's integration into Nascere, they are not operating from his same position. The Walrus has a history. Flint comes wielding a sort of influence, albeit influence waning the further they stray from its beach of origin.
Perhaps they can make something of it overnight.
As John shifts his weight, resettling the dig of crutch at the join of his shoulder, he considers the inevitable way forward:
"I know where we should start, and whose name we should hope has currency," is the more relevant point, followed by the glancing humor of: "With the right amount of flattery, she'll point us in the direction of whosoever wields the most influence, or the Antivan shipping company most recently mourning the loss of cook and cargo."
Here, a sort of answer as to how a man might emerge from Estwatch to set foot aboard a legitimately run ship.
This is not how he imagined this conversation at the rail overlooking the mouth of Estwatch's mean little harbor to go. If there are questions—obviously; Flint can think of ten offhand—, then he reserves them. There will be a more convenient hour in which to ask them, and they have considerable work to do if they're to take advantage of what little leverage suddenly materializing without warning or patience out of the Amaranthine is likely to afford them.
It will be best to act quickly and decisively here while the street (or whatever they call it here; the fort's yard, maybe, or something even less generous what with what constitutes as the pirate haven spilling out of the decrepit fortress' jagged mouth like so much ———) is still reeling from the abruptness of their presence. Striking while the guard is lowered is, generally, a time honored tactic.
"Okay," is not a question. But if it sounds like ten questions, offhand, to be pressed at an aforementioned moment of convenience, then he can't be blamed. A man only has so much restraint to his name.
"I assume you can handle that accounting. Take three men with you. I'll see to carving out a place on the beach."
The politics of that will likely be messier in the sweat and blood sense.
A more convenient hour comes in the depth of night, the beach approaching what passes for quiet in a place like Estwatch. Crews camped around fires, conversation and shouts and all other murmuration telegraphing the night's activity drifting on the breeze as John Silver makes his way across the sand.
The captain's tent is easily identifiable. The skeleton of what has been constructed to elevate and expand the space already taking shape beneath the stretch of bone-bleached canvas. As John winds his way toward it, he is waylaid once, twice, three times by the clusters of Walrus crew to hear requests for this, that and the other. (A fuck tent, a stipend for rum, a pig to roast while they occupy this strip of sand.) Their voices follow him up the raised step of the captain's pavilion. John's eyes sweep over what's been dredged up from the Walrus' hold and plunked down, disorganized and haphazard.
"I left Oates," he says, in lieu of greeting. "I'd like to know who comes and goes in the tavern."
It's not necessarily the name they need, but there are more players than just—
"Zhivka is the one we need to see first. She'll be able to point us to which captains will find our cause most appealing," comes as John eases his way into a seat. Ignores the pain throbbing in his thigh. "The men have requested a pig to roast, by the way."
What is not immediately visible is the crew that had been chased off this scrap of sand so the tent could be pitched and the Walrus crew made something like comfortable. It hadn't, actually, come to blows (which is preferable), but had involved a great deal of metaphorical snarling and teeth gnashing and pissing on things to see it done. But presently: the tent, a miniature of the ship's black flag fluttering limply from one of its stays, and more furniture than is strictly required lugged up out of the ship's hold to populate the space under the canvas. It makes for a neat little battlefield office, comprised of a desk and chairs and a bed that's made to easily go to pieces; a tatty rug woven out of old line; a sea chest which doesn't contain anything valuable and another which does. And, naturally, Flint himself.
He is sat at the desk with the ship's ledger laid open to one side and the logbook under his hand. From the looks of things, he has been engaged in some hasty accounting of stores and crew and what is required to see the Walrus' victuals restored to the level that might allow them to raise anchor and be away at a moment's notice. An old, well rewarded habit of the Tevinter Navy—to not sleep until a ship's water casks have been refilled.
He continues writing as Silver ducks in out of the gloom and into the lamplit square of the tent.
"The men," he says, pen nib scratching ksht-ksht across the page. "Can make do with what they have until the stores have been replenished."
Lifting his attention and the pen both, dipping the latter into the waiting inkwell— "I don't suppose sending a runner to find Zhivka tonight would be welcome."
"I've talked them out of eating the goat," is a murmured aside. Maybe more for John than Flint, a marker of one point of success within the day. One thing to stack opposite the weakness in his body and the nagging awareness of the absence within himself.
To the question at hand—
John's hand tips in the air between them, casting shadows along the canvas.
"We could," to the tune of I wouldn't. "I'd prefer we send a runner who knows how to operate with some discretion, to find her and tell us tomorrow which crews Zhivka was consorting with this evening."
His hand falls to his thigh, fingers applying five points of pressure to the pain rising from the muscle. He had been sent off with dressing, poultice, with Howell armed with the best the Maroons could offer. The feverish heat clinging to the severed end of his leg had been gone, but has crept back, lingers in the doorway.
Everything is harder at sea. On land, the pain will ease.
"We should send a few men to loiter at the campfires as well. Listen to the talk," John continues, eyes falling to the parchment, the gleam of ink left in the wake of Flint's pen. "See who's worth approaching first of those assembled here."
It's not his favorite answer if the lowering of his brow and the muscle that works briefly in at Flint's cheek is any indication. His spare hand rising, knuckles absently scuffed along the bristling underside of his chin. It somehow feels like a mistake to wait. More so, given how no one has come down the sand of their own volition to investigate the arrival of a strange northern ship. Logically, there are different ships in the bay every day. Instinctively—
The impulse towards urgency takes a moment to swallow. He nods to the spare chair, wicking the pen nib off the edge of the inkwell so his hand might return to the logbook.
No, not an answer John thought would be favorably received. But within the newness of their understanding, the stretch of their partnership, there is some latitude for it. For John, and his roundabout approach.
Here, at least, they can be certain John knows what he's doing.
"Joji, to see to Zhivka. Froom, Crisp, Oates and Levi to observe the happenings fireside."
If asked, John might offer up an accounting of who is managing the other tasks within the camp. Muldoon cursing over a cook pot. Singleton organizing the raising of their tents. Dooley, Nelson and Turk arguing over the likelihood of a fuck tent, which surely falls alongside the aspirations of a pig to roast.
"What else?" should be anyone else?
But it is a minor tug at the flex of muscle in Flint's jaw, the tension in his body. What else like a lance, to draw out the inclination towards movement John knows to be held there.
He doesn't give a shit about what's being done around the camp. No one yet is either spoiling for a fight or making any real effort to go crawling further up the beachhead in search of cunt. That will, he thinks, hold for the next ten to twelve hours—the seriousness of this venture suitable to check the company's stupidity for at least that long if no longer. Evening, he'd said, when it comes to he and John getting in front of who they need to get in front of. But it would be helpful if there were a more immediate sense of reaction to tide the rest over.
Maybe they will need a pig. And a consultation with the local Madame.
He scratches two notes in the logbook, and only momentarily delays answering the question out to him by doing so. A deft series of marks, partially made to keep his attention here rather than allowing himself to look gloomily out from his desk to where the lantern light paints long shadows of men across the sand as they see to propping up the camp.
"My concern," he says. "Is that we not undermine the urgency of our purpose by waiting too patiently on a beach."
Point taken, weighed in John's head as he looks outwards from his seat here to the bustle of men there.
Maybe John should have let them get the goat up on a spit. He'd been thinking of the cost, the goat was newly bought and it would be far too hasty, but—
Well, the decision had been made. And they would need to square with this perception regardless.
"We might leave DeGroot to corral them, and go up into the tavern ourselves," is only half a suggestion. John is thinking too of what Billy had said, of how John had been dispatched to speak on Flint's behalf. He sees little reason not to allow Billy's craftsmanship to benefit them here.
"There's only one chance at a first impression," John says slowly, less concerned about the men's understanding of any potential delays and the lay of the land here. "We'll have an easier time if we make the most of our reputations."
The tip of his head in Flint's direction, the raise of brows, telegraphs: I know you know this. John is speaking aloud for his own benefit, the way a runner might stretch a muscle before a footrace. In the wake of these words, what John will eventually say to the men begins to form.
He doesn't say Obviously, because that doesn't seem saying either. Instead, Flint sets the pen aside and reaches for the scrap of cloth beside the page. He wipes a blotch of ink from the side of his thumb, attention fixed on Silver still.
(Part of him would have preferred for this business of clearing a place on the beach to be a little bloodier. It might have made an impression more likely to stick.)
"Do you still have that book? The list of pardoned names?"
"Of course," is amended to: "Not on my person in this exact moment, unless my chest made it ashore."
Which leads him to the question of where it might have been set. Where did the men see fit to stow him, now that they'd landed on the shore?
But even as that uncertainty wedges like a splinter under a fingernail, John's eyes lok steadily back at Flint. The tent in comparably big, but not so big that it sets a great distance between where John is seated and Flint's desk.
The turn of his hand over the battered chair arm invites: Go on.
It's possible it has come ashore. Likely, even. And if it didn't, it's no difficult thing to cut out to the ship at anchor to fetch the thing, however odd invoking that ledger might seem.
"It would seem ready emphasis that what is true in the North could be made true here without much difficulty."
Their reputations are one thing. But how potent is the effect of those here in the south, far from the Nocen Sea and the pillaging they've done up and down the Tevinter coastline. To say nothing of the fact that Amaranthine pirates are fat, and comfortable, and have been so for Ages thanks to the Accord. If they cannot be goaded forward on the basis of what is good—an unlikely prospect in any place like Estwatch—, then a warning might serve:
Here is what it looks like when a sovereign nation decides it has finished with the likes of pirates. When will the Merchant Princes, half of them allied with Tevinter, decide to come ashore here with a book of their own?
A book, filled with names. A handful of pardons. A score of pirates dangling from the gallows.
Yes, these are powerful motivators. In John's mouth, each of them will take on a foreboding, menacing beyond even what the governor sat in Nassau had intended them to be.
"I'll have it fetched," bears no particular promise of when, though certainly it must occur before the pair of them wade into the quagmire of pirate politics waiting for them in this place.
But it prompts some turn of thought in John's head. This late, more or less concealed from the eyes of their crew and any others passing on the beach, the exertion of the day has begun to make itself known on his face, the lines of his body, the lay of his palm over his left thigh. The fever is gone, but certain discomforts remain; John prefers the burn of overuse in his right to the untouchable, phantom flares of pain in his left, but he has no more choice in this matter.
"Are we intending to make this case together?" he asks, considering the possible approaches alongside the impatience in Flint's face, the need for action that will find no other outlet but seeing to the collection of allies to their cause.
It's a simple answer, as direct as his attention on Silver sat there in that chair is. It has been a long day, but surely this is a possibility that has been accounted for. There is expectation there in the slant of his features; his eye does not fall to the shape of John Silver's leg.
Not so long ago, gathered around a map aboard the Walrus, Billy had made his own propositions about how they might move forward.
Billy is holding the efforts in Nascere together, and cannot propose any such thing now. John turns the concept over in his head all the same. Does it matter, if they speak with one voice? If Flint is seen, rather than shadowed?
"It's occurred to me that you've some experience with walking into an island of pirates and gathering them to a cause."
This is a piece of information he'd had, long before Flint had put it into any greater context.
"Between us the work may go easier."
It should go easier, or else what is John of use for?
He considers this a moment, something shaded in the line of his brow. Perhaps Flint is thinking also of Billy on Nascere, of ghost stories, and reputations. Or maybe he is thinking of something else—some matter whose relation to this moment is almost entirely one of sentimentality, and otherwise of no practical alignment.
(A tent on a beach bears no relation to a study in a fine Minrathous house, but given the right arrangement of chairs and certain attitudes occasionally, the mind does wander in directions otherwise unprompted.)
"Be that as it may," he says. "I think it would be best for us to be seen as not entirely shoulder to shoulder in this."
How much of Billy's handiwork has clung to John Silver?
Enough, surely. Sailors talk. Word carries. Even now, the Walrus men must be speaking even now, conversation scattering like seeds in the wind. Flint, a cannonball in his hand and blood in his beard. John Silver, expression dark with anger and knuckles white around the handle of a tankard, a corpse at his foot. There is some utility in these stories, something that could be traded on.
But that is a secondary contemplation when set alongside—
"How great of a division do you think would benefit us?"
It's a delicate thing, presenting division to the island and maintaining unity among the men. Unless the men were included, along with the cadre of strangers they will be seeking to sway.
There is an itch to say his hand on the table, fetch the discarded pen and smooth the lay of the tripped feathers at its end. He doesn't do that. Instead, Flint hooks his elbows on the arms of the high backed chair dragged out of the Walrus' cabin and up the beach, and lays one hand over the other where he might idly twist the hammered silver ring round his finger.
"Billy was right about one thing. There is power in a ghost story, and we would do well to use it to our advantage. But I've never walked here. I'm no spirit for for haunting Estwatch, and if they know my name then it's by professional reputation. Intimidating, maybe, but hardly the kind of thing that moves men to take up arms."
The ring is squarish, plain. If he wears it for a few more years, the edges may well go soft from being habitually manhandled.
"Less a division," he says, "So much as a show of rank. You walk in there knowing a handful of names, ready to put them in that book, and with one of Nascere's pirate kings at your heel—who in the South would argue with that man?"
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no subject
Little Llomerryn is a town clinging to the base of the fort the Qunari abandoned there on the island. Nestled amidst black stone and grasping scrub, it paints a somewhat less than luxurious image in comparison to what common knowledge suggests must be the white beaches and balmy weather of its older sister only a few leagues north at the point of the Rivaini peninsula. But when viewed through a spyglass from a distance point of anchorage, there is something strikingly familiar about its arrangement. Maybe, Flint mused privately, all Tevinter ports fallen in the hands of no good rotten pirates and gone to seed eventually come to resemble the place like this one. Like Nasceretown, and other similar northern ports of ill-repute.
At some point, they'll have to attend to Llomerryn proper and see if the theory holds. In the meantime—
He tips his attention from the spyglass' eyepiece. Slants his gaze toward the taffrail flag post, the black banner flying in the headwind, and then carefully replaces the glass to his eye. A brief study of the fort's upper battlements commences. There is a Qunari cannon up there. They are presently beyond its range (he thinks; this, assuming it isn't simply for decoration), but should they wish to pass into the port of Little Llomerryn, they will need to chance running in under it. While the Black should guarantee safe passage, he is very aware of the fact that Hercinia with her notorious pirate hunters is only a short distance removed from here, and that anyone in the world can stick a bit of dark fabric off their ship's stern and pretend to be something they're not.
Lowering the glass, he passes it sideways to where John is stood beside him at the Walrus' port side rail.
"Are we having second thoughts yet?"
no subject
A twitch of humor crosses John's expression, where he leans his weight against the rail. Upright, habitual lean slight enough to go unobserved by the men passing below or dangling above, John accepts the glass. Taps it against one scarred palm before lifting it to his eye.
He too marks the cannon. The glass swings to mark out the overturned anthill of activity on the beach; every island is the same in this respect, John knows. Crews posting on the sand, quartermasters selling off goods, captains dividing spoils, the rhythms will all be the same.
"Ask me again once we've walked the beach," John decides. "Right now, I'm still holding the possibilities awaiting us in my mind."
In the short stretch of time spent close to land, John had gained back a little weight. The lingering signs of hard recovery disappear, more or less, beneath the sun-bleached blue of his coat and the glint of jewelry at his throat, the rings on his fingers. The men have strung line to and fro on the deck, so John's travels are less fraught. He has mastered the skill of setting his weight into the boot and not flinching at the pain of it. The wear of the past months are masked, not invisible, but so far, it has all been enough for the men of the Walrus.
The trouble is that the mask and pantomime will have to be enough on that beach too, and in the taverns and on the street beyond them.
A performance. A pretending.
John straightens, body turning to reset his weight over one elbow as his posture opens back towards Flint.
"Have we much reputation to trade on here?"
A consideration of their starting point, of how they might find the stage set for them in this new ecosystem.
no subject
—('Charles Vane is in the hands of the Tevinter Governor, if he isn't dead already. Are you seriously suggesting that our best course of action is to run in the opposite direction?'
'It's not our best option. It's the only one.')—
that doesn't make the prospect uncomplicated. Just necessary; and necessary to have appeared certain in the moment.
A performance, if you will. Pretending.
"I suspect they've heard of us," Flint says, squinting against the glint of the sun off the surface dark water. Without the glass, he can't actually still make out the gun overlooking the bay, but he can study the prospect in his mind's eye well enough. "What I can't say is whether that's to our advantage. My understanding is that the Felicisima Armada has enjoyed a particular understanding with most Southern ports. It's entirely possible they're less than appreciative of the work we've done along the northern coastline."
Pirate raids on costal north Antiva and Tevinter settlements are likely to have had a somewhat cooling effect on certain relationships even in the south. But on the plus side:
"I doubt that gun is functional," even if someone is harboring enough resentment to point it at them.
Probably.
no subject
Small blessings.
With a little room between himself and the throbbing pain spiking up his leg, John is better able to consider the shifting sands waiting for them. Contemplate what it will require to navigate.
"When last I was here, I was no one."
So if they've heard anything of him, it is what the Walrus and Flint have made of him.
Long John Silver, and the work of his peg leg. Captain James Flint, and the butchery he'd wrought in the months of retribution for Miranda Hamilton, to say nothing of what came before.
It's not nothing. But it may not necessarily serve to rally anyone to their cause.
"But it's been long enough that I imagine whatever open tab I might have left has been wiped clean," he says, like a joke. Elbow leaning hard on the wooden rail, eyes moving between Flint's face and the shoreline. "I've an idea of which establishments we might want to cultivate some impressions in. It might serve us to remain on the beach, and let some of the men act as our ears for tonight."
three days for this workplace comedy bullshit tag smh
Instead, given a faint pivot of boot toe and hip against the rail, he just looks at him—pointedly expectant.
thrilled to receive, my favrit
Even as mangled as he is, as deadened as whatever part of his interior self that lives attuned to the pulse of magic flowing within every ingrained facet of the world around him, John still feels the hammer-clang of power that lives in James Flint. Maybe it is less a feeling and more an echo, a memory of what John knows to dwell in a place even if pain scorched the nerve endings into ash.
Does he grieve the absence of it?
John still has no answer. The half-smile masks that tangle of contemplation as much as it offers a rejoinder, telegraphs some real, wry humor.
"A decade ago, give or take," is part of an answer. "I doubt I'm recognizable. I was younger."
Stood on two legs.
"I didn't stay long," as an offering, a fraction more than scraps to hang on the bones of his past. "Just enough to find myself pointed in the direction of more legitimate work. Though I'd imagine the landscape hasn't shifted far past the point of familiarity."
no subject
"I wasn't aware there was such a thing to be found in Estwatch," has the tenor of a sidelong look even if one doesn't actually materialize. John fucking Silver.
But that's neither here nor there, and Now? is not an invalid sentiment. So:
"We'll be after the names of the powers on the island. I want to see our way in front of any presently in residence by this time tomorrow." Should playing the eyes and ears game prove unsuitable slow going, he has an alternative approach in mind.
no subject
But while this is not dissimilar to Flint's integration into Nascere, they are not operating from his same position. The Walrus has a history. Flint comes wielding a sort of influence, albeit influence waning the further they stray from its beach of origin.
Perhaps they can make something of it overnight.
As John shifts his weight, resettling the dig of crutch at the join of his shoulder, he considers the inevitable way forward:
"I know where we should start, and whose name we should hope has currency," is the more relevant point, followed by the glancing humor of: "With the right amount of flattery, she'll point us in the direction of whosoever wields the most influence, or the Antivan shipping company most recently mourning the loss of cook and cargo."
Here, a sort of answer as to how a man might emerge from Estwatch to set foot aboard a legitimately run ship.
no subject
It will be best to act quickly and decisively here while the street (or whatever they call it here; the fort's yard, maybe, or something even less generous what with what constitutes as the pirate haven spilling out of the decrepit fortress' jagged mouth like so much ———) is still reeling from the abruptness of their presence. Striking while the guard is lowered is, generally, a time honored tactic.
"Okay," is not a question. But if it sounds like ten questions, offhand, to be pressed at an aforementioned moment of convenience, then he can't be blamed. A man only has so much restraint to his name.
"I assume you can handle that accounting. Take three men with you. I'll see to carving out a place on the beach."
The politics of that will likely be messier in the sweat and blood sense.
slides minor timeskip across the table
The captain's tent is easily identifiable. The skeleton of what has been constructed to elevate and expand the space already taking shape beneath the stretch of bone-bleached canvas. As John winds his way toward it, he is waylaid once, twice, three times by the clusters of Walrus crew to hear requests for this, that and the other. (A fuck tent, a stipend for rum, a pig to roast while they occupy this strip of sand.) Their voices follow him up the raised step of the captain's pavilion. John's eyes sweep over what's been dredged up from the Walrus' hold and plunked down, disorganized and haphazard.
"I left Oates," he says, in lieu of greeting. "I'd like to know who comes and goes in the tavern."
It's not necessarily the name they need, but there are more players than just—
"Zhivka is the one we need to see first. She'll be able to point us to which captains will find our cause most appealing," comes as John eases his way into a seat. Ignores the pain throbbing in his thigh. "The men have requested a pig to roast, by the way."
#rememberwhen
He is sat at the desk with the ship's ledger laid open to one side and the logbook under his hand. From the looks of things, he has been engaged in some hasty accounting of stores and crew and what is required to see the Walrus' victuals restored to the level that might allow them to raise anchor and be away at a moment's notice. An old, well rewarded habit of the Tevinter Navy—to not sleep until a ship's water casks have been refilled.
He continues writing as Silver ducks in out of the gloom and into the lamplit square of the tent.
"The men," he says, pen nib scratching ksht-ksht across the page. "Can make do with what they have until the stores have been replenished."
Lifting his attention and the pen both, dipping the latter into the waiting inkwell— "I don't suppose sending a runner to find Zhivka tonight would be welcome."
eyyyyyy i was meditating abt this recently
To the question at hand—
John's hand tips in the air between them, casting shadows along the canvas.
"We could," to the tune of I wouldn't. "I'd prefer we send a runner who knows how to operate with some discretion, to find her and tell us tomorrow which crews Zhivka was consorting with this evening."
His hand falls to his thigh, fingers applying five points of pressure to the pain rising from the muscle. He had been sent off with dressing, poultice, with Howell armed with the best the Maroons could offer. The feverish heat clinging to the severed end of his leg had been gone, but has crept back, lingers in the doorway.
Everything is harder at sea. On land, the pain will ease.
"We should send a few men to loiter at the campfires as well. Listen to the talk," John continues, eyes falling to the parchment, the gleam of ink left in the wake of Flint's pen. "See who's worth approaching first of those assembled here."
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The impulse towards urgency takes a moment to swallow. He nods to the spare chair, wicking the pen nib off the edge of the inkwell so his hand might return to the logbook.
"Which men?"
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Here, at least, they can be certain John knows what he's doing.
"Joji, to see to Zhivka. Froom, Crisp, Oates and Levi to observe the happenings fireside."
If asked, John might offer up an accounting of who is managing the other tasks within the camp. Muldoon cursing over a cook pot. Singleton organizing the raising of their tents. Dooley, Nelson and Turk arguing over the likelihood of a fuck tent, which surely falls alongside the aspirations of a pig to roast.
"What else?" should be anyone else?
But it is a minor tug at the flex of muscle in Flint's jaw, the tension in his body. What else like a lance, to draw out the inclination towards movement John knows to be held there.
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Maybe they will need a pig. And a consultation with the local Madame.
He scratches two notes in the logbook, and only momentarily delays answering the question out to him by doing so. A deft series of marks, partially made to keep his attention here rather than allowing himself to look gloomily out from his desk to where the lantern light paints long shadows of men across the sand as they see to propping up the camp.
"My concern," he says. "Is that we not undermine the urgency of our purpose by waiting too patiently on a beach."
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Maybe John should have let them get the goat up on a spit. He'd been thinking of the cost, the goat was newly bought and it would be far too hasty, but—
Well, the decision had been made. And they would need to square with this perception regardless.
"We might leave DeGroot to corral them, and go up into the tavern ourselves," is only half a suggestion. John is thinking too of what Billy had said, of how John had been dispatched to speak on Flint's behalf. He sees little reason not to allow Billy's craftsmanship to benefit them here.
"There's only one chance at a first impression," John says slowly, less concerned about the men's understanding of any potential delays and the lay of the land here. "We'll have an easier time if we make the most of our reputations."
The tip of his head in Flint's direction, the raise of brows, telegraphs: I know you know this. John is speaking aloud for his own benefit, the way a runner might stretch a muscle before a footrace. In the wake of these words, what John will eventually say to the men begins to form.
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(Part of him would have preferred for this business of clearing a place on the beach to be a little bloodier. It might have made an impression more likely to stick.)
"Do you still have that book? The list of pardoned names?"
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Which leads him to the question of where it might have been set. Where did the men see fit to stow him, now that they'd landed on the shore?
But even as that uncertainty wedges like a splinter under a fingernail, John's eyes lok steadily back at Flint. The tent in comparably big, but not so big that it sets a great distance between where John is seated and Flint's desk.
The turn of his hand over the battered chair arm invites: Go on.
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"It would seem ready emphasis that what is true in the North could be made true here without much difficulty."
Their reputations are one thing. But how potent is the effect of those here in the south, far from the Nocen Sea and the pillaging they've done up and down the Tevinter coastline. To say nothing of the fact that Amaranthine pirates are fat, and comfortable, and have been so for Ages thanks to the Accord. If they cannot be goaded forward on the basis of what is good—an unlikely prospect in any place like Estwatch—, then a warning might serve:
Here is what it looks like when a sovereign nation decides it has finished with the likes of pirates. When will the Merchant Princes, half of them allied with Tevinter, decide to come ashore here with a book of their own?
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Yes, these are powerful motivators. In John's mouth, each of them will take on a foreboding, menacing beyond even what the governor sat in Nassau had intended them to be.
"I'll have it fetched," bears no particular promise of when, though certainly it must occur before the pair of them wade into the quagmire of pirate politics waiting for them in this place.
But it prompts some turn of thought in John's head. This late, more or less concealed from the eyes of their crew and any others passing on the beach, the exertion of the day has begun to make itself known on his face, the lines of his body, the lay of his palm over his left thigh. The fever is gone, but certain discomforts remain; John prefers the burn of overuse in his right to the untouchable, phantom flares of pain in his left, but he has no more choice in this matter.
"Are we intending to make this case together?" he asks, considering the possible approaches alongside the impatience in Flint's face, the need for action that will find no other outlet but seeing to the collection of allies to their cause.
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It's a simple answer, as direct as his attention on Silver sat there in that chair is. It has been a long day, but surely this is a possibility that has been accounted for. There is expectation there in the slant of his features; his eye does not fall to the shape of John Silver's leg.
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Billy is holding the efforts in Nascere together, and cannot propose any such thing now. John turns the concept over in his head all the same. Does it matter, if they speak with one voice? If Flint is seen, rather than shadowed?
"It's occurred to me that you've some experience with walking into an island of pirates and gathering them to a cause."
This is a piece of information he'd had, long before Flint had put it into any greater context.
"Between us the work may go easier."
It should go easier, or else what is John of use for?
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(A tent on a beach bears no relation to a study in a fine Minrathous house, but given the right arrangement of chairs and certain attitudes occasionally, the mind does wander in directions otherwise unprompted.)
"Be that as it may," he says. "I think it would be best for us to be seen as not entirely shoulder to shoulder in this."
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Enough, surely. Sailors talk. Word carries. Even now, the Walrus men must be speaking even now, conversation scattering like seeds in the wind. Flint, a cannonball in his hand and blood in his beard. John Silver, expression dark with anger and knuckles white around the handle of a tankard, a corpse at his foot. There is some utility in these stories, something that could be traded on.
But that is a secondary contemplation when set alongside—
"How great of a division do you think would benefit us?"
It's a delicate thing, presenting division to the island and maintaining unity among the men. Unless the men were included, along with the cadre of strangers they will be seeking to sway.
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"Billy was right about one thing. There is power in a ghost story, and we would do well to use it to our advantage. But I've never walked here. I'm no spirit for for haunting Estwatch, and if they know my name then it's by professional reputation. Intimidating, maybe, but hardly the kind of thing that moves men to take up arms."
The ring is squarish, plain. If he wears it for a few more years, the edges may well go soft from being habitually manhandled.
"Less a division," he says, "So much as a show of rank. You walk in there knowing a handful of names, ready to put them in that book, and with one of Nascere's pirate kings at your heel—who in the South would argue with that man?"
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tfw shenanigans morphs into "ok, but a duel"
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