Raju frowns down at Francis’ face, aware of the grip on his wrist, the pressure. Hickey’s captivity, a detail noted and put to one side. More important just now, cutting a little deeper: Francis certainly thinks it was Little who died then, the man Raju can remember meeting, walking down the steps and seeing him, a man troubled and guilty and frightened and entirely alive. But Raju was prepared for this, and is determined not to trip over it more than the once. He only keeps frowning for a moment, gauging Francis’ expression, then lets his gaze slip away. Keep going, even when it will cut deeper. Forward. He isn’t going to back away from whatever’s still waiting in the dark, not now.

“Strong enough to shed your vices, desperate only that the men who depended on you might live. You were noble.” They’re facts and Raju recites them that way as he looks at his wrist, clutched in the doomed captain’s remaining hand. They aren’t compliments. What Raju goes on with might make it obvious why. “So what is your penance for? You don’t owe anything for strength, or health, or luck. Is that all you were so anxious to tell me earlier? That when faced with horrors you conducted yourself with nothing but nobility and decency?”

If it is then Raju will have to find a way to apologise, find some words that will walk back the disdain hinted in the cold tone of his voice. But instinct says that there’s more here, something Francis needs to say. Something that he wants to say even if he’ll writhe this way and that to avoid it, even if he needs someone else to dig it out. Soft reassurances and admiring words won’t do it, even if they would be right, even if one hundred others would have given up before leading men through half of what Francis has told him. There could be guilt in only surviving too, if that guilt couldn’t be turned toward something else, but Raju doesn’t think that’s all he’s seen. The guilt that’d been trying to come out of Francis needs a sharper edge.