singillatim | bad luck, old sport

"Francis!" Raju goes to his knees beside the darker shape he can see crumpled over the floor, the last of that particular awareness of his body, of the threats, not falling away but narrowing, changing, and as the knife clatters to the wood behind him the last of the fire over it goes out. Raju doesn't notice. He rolls the body — Francis — over, straightening it out enough to hold his hand in front of the mouth, hoping to feel breath.

If one of the wolves had gotten to him, Raju would have noticed. So of course he isn't dead. But when he fell, probably jarring his ribs awfully, he hadn't screamed. And he'd mentioned a headache, hadn't he? If that had meant something worse than just a headache...

"If I could just see," Raju mutters, frustrated, and then raises his voice a little and makes it brisk, patting at Francis' cheek. His other hand grips the man's arm, a little more tightly than he realises. "Francis. Wake up now. There's still too much to do, you can't sleep."

His body's finally hit its limit. He's taken beatings before - metaphorical, literal - survived poisons and illnesses and starvation, an attack by an actual god-like being, having his hand amputated, but Francis Crozier is only human. It's all been too much, and he's so, so tired.

He groans softly as his cheek is tapped. He's alive, conscious enough to respond in the smallest of capacities, but any more than that is asking for far too much. If he had the wherewithal to apologize to Raju he would.

"Cold," he whispers, voice so faint that if there were any other noise he wouldn't be heard.

Raju’s eyebrows pull together at the sound of that voice. Only a moment ago Francis had been running though every rough step must have pained him, had been pulling Raju to safety, saving his life— but a moment ago they were being chased by wolves. When a man is running to keep his life, he might do all sorts of things you hadn’t expected him to before. But Francis sounds so weak now.

Raju takes a bracing breath, straightening his back. Cold. That should be the first thing. A fire to warm Francis up, and allow Raju to take a real look at him. He’ll take care of that first, and everything else will follow from there. There’s the fireplace in the room just to his right filled with a few ancient looking logs and ashes, and that will be enough to start with.

Tinder first. There’s an old newspaper nearby— further from town, this cabin might be less picked over than the ones closer — and Raju grabs it, then digs the quartz and the head of some old hammer, small but good enough to spark, out from the pocket in the blanket over Francis’ chest, then moves over to the fireplace with them. He crumples the newspaper and tears it roughly, more concerned with being quick than thorough, and watches his hands try to mimic the movements that remind him of Seetha now, of remembering the way she’d used to light the stove before meals, the way he’d used to sit and watch and talk to her. But the smooth way he’d been able to do it when he’d practiced before is gone; his hands aren’t steady enough for anything that precise. They’re shaking again, or shaking still, he’d thought that had stopped but he can’t get a single damned spark.

He looks over his shoulder, frowning, jaw clenched. It’s too dark yet, he can’t see Francis from here, and the man’s voice had been so quiet before. At this rate if he says anything else at all, needs anything, Raju isn’t going to hear it.

Damn it all. This first, then. Francis will need to be closer to the fireplace eventually anyway. Raju tosses the useless quartz and steel on the ground and walks back over, crouching behind Francis’ head.

“I’m going to drag you now,” Raju tells him matter of factly, not sure if his words are even being heard, saying them anyway. “It’s probably going to hurt.” He takes a breath for more, an apology waiting behind his teeth, but hesitates before it comes out. It doesn’t do anyone any good, does it, apologizing for something that he’s still going to do.

Still, he hesitates.

Then he moves, sliding his arms under Francis’ shoulders and hooking his elbows around Francis’ armpits, and goes backward in a crouch. It isn’t far. He’ll be able to settle Francis where he needs him in a moment, in a few seconds, and then Raju will be able to hear if anything happens, and then he can figure out how to get on with things.

There’s not much else Crozier can do but lie there and keep himself from succumbing completely to the overwhelming urge to sleep. He’s not overly warm, and he can tell he’s indoors, which is enough to reassure his struggling brain that he isn’t dying of hypothermia.

But the exhaustion, the exhaustion and agony —- he barely even makes a noise when he’s dragged across the dusty floor of the cabin, despite being twisted and moved and feeling his broken ribs get pushed and pulled. It’s not just the sort of tired in mind and body, but his soul is worn and ragged.

It occurs to him that it would be so easy - and welcome - to just let himself slip away. It wouldn’t be fair to Raju after how hard he’s fought for him, but it’s tempting. His mind begins to wander, slipping away from the present and bringing him back to that silent tent in the mutineers’ abandoned camp.

“They all died. They all died, every single one of them…”

Time is important, still, but for a moment Raju doesn't do anything but look at him, the frown starting in his eyebrows and shifting to his mouth, confusion fading into worry. The pain surely hasn't gone, but there hadn't been a noise. And now this.

But he can worry while doing what Francis needs him to. He moves himself over to the quartz and steel, picks them up to hold them over the fireplace, tries to strike one against the other and scowls at his shaking hands.

He glances over at Francis, needing to split his focus to something other than his failure, needing to check on him, to know:

"Francis," he tries. It's not as if he couldn't guess it, that there's some kind of shadow in this man's past. Irishman sailing with the British navy, but living long enough in a frozen place where nothing grows that he'd need to learn from the people living there. And he must have spent years living in close quarters on those ships, but wouldn't stay in the Hall during that storm, the Hall where the majority of the food and firewood and preparation was going into, and wouldn't say why. There was always something there. It was never Raju's main worry the times that they'd talked, and wasn't any of his business. Is Francis telling him now, for some reason? Or has he forgotten it isn't happening? "Do you know where you are?"

He knows where he is, but his answer comes after a pregnant pause. "Milton," he whispers, "I know where I am. Milton, somewhere south."

Crozier grimaces as he hears Raju trying to light a fire, pain in his chest throbbing now that his body's started to settle into the hardwood floor.

"Jopson, Little, Goodsir...Gibson, Hickey -- I know them, Raju. I know them. They were a part of my crew, my men."

Raju's frown at his hands, for a moment, is more confused than frustrated. Then he places the rest of the names, the ones he knows, and understanding takes the place of the frown.

"I thought there were an odd number of navy men about." It's hard to make the kind of light comment he usually would, and his smile tells the strain. But despite Francis' answer, Raju isn't confident that Francis does know where they are, not entirely, and the first thing Francis had said after collapsing was how cold he was, and Raju's damned hands still won't work. And of course the... the thing which doesn't bear thinking about is gone from his knife, and gone now that he'd use it on purpose, if he only knew how.

He moves his hands, tries to brace them against the side of the fireplace and the floor. He'll try it this way. And he'll try to keep Francis talking; it's important again, if he wants to try to keep the man's mind here, with him. But a man who's dazed like this might share any number of things that he wouldn't if he were healthy and feeling well, and Francis is a friend, and there's nothing that Raju has to take from anyone that they wouldn't give, here. Not knowledge or anything else.

But it's hard to keep a man talking without pushing to know more. He'll try.

"You're their... captain? Did you tell me your rank, when we met?"

He wouldn’t have given him his rank, even when he did finally think to give him his name. But in his current state he can’t quite remember, and he furrows his brow as he stares up into a cobweb-laced ceiling.

“No,” he finally answers, voice sounding faint. “No, I’m their captain no longer. They’re dead, all dead. I don’t know why they live here, but where I’m from they’ve been dead for years.”

Raju’s eyes are wide, his efforts at the quartz and steel forgotten. He remembers it, knowing he was dying. Knowing that everything was going to be— He remembers the clumsy heaviness weighting more and more inside his limbs, the road against his cheek, arms around him, spending the moments before his eyelids became too heavy to lift looking up at a dear face, looking up past it at the sky.

He remembers knowing everything was going to be over soon. He remembers the feeling in his chest when he’d sat down, dropped down, while the man he’d spent the evening torturing laughed. The feeling of something escaping out of him and something forbidden taking its place there. Something open and light.

And then the arms around him. And the curve of Akhtar’s cheek.

And then the snow, the cold. Another chance; not a gift, but a reminder. What he should have remembered, inside him again now. And then one of the first few souls to greet him here had said, Still not convinced we’re not all dead, and it had been ridiculous, he couldn’t be, he couldn’t afford it, he can’t afford it, but there’s the… the thing that happens inside him now, the fire, and odd dreams are one thing but it’s true, isn’t it, that this isn’t anything that could happen in the world, not the living world, and Francis isn’t fanciful and he isn’t stupid and in this state he couldn’t lie, and they’d needed Raju, they still need him, and he’d thrown that away. He had let that go, let it lift away from him, and he’d been so…

His eyes are on Francis still, expression horrified, the stone and steel biting into the tight grip of his hands. He swallows.

He had been relieved. He had been so relieved, so grateful, to be able to just… To do what? To run to whom? For whom?

He had been grateful for the chance to die, grateful to do it in Akhtar’s arms. Grateful. And not for the sake of everyone else, who needed him. If they’re all dead here, if Raju is dead, what's still left of his family will be waiting by the river for him forever. There’s a weakness inside of him, and he’d given into it. For whose sake? For what?

Pain flares around Raju’s wrist and he gives his arm a sharp shake, reflexively trying to put out the fire that’s started there, then brings his arm closer to unwrap the cord from around his wrist with hurried, shaking fingers. The fire is on the pendant and growing from that side, and he picks at the cord from the other, and in a second he’s unwinding Seetha’s pendant away from him and throwing it into the fireplace.

For an instant he watches the fire catch onto the newspaper and begin to grow there, chest heaving, then he realises what he’s thrown away and scrambles to find it, closing one hand over the pendant and running the other over the cord to put out the flame.

He closes his eyes, breathing hard, and tries to remember words, phrases, snatches of the prayer fresh in his mind from the long night after he’d discovered the damned impossible fire in the first place. The fresh memory still carries with it some echoed reassurance, calm, and when he opens his eyes and his hand there are only embers glowing here and there over the cord, likely only visible because it’s dark.

Alright.

The idea is ridiculous, anyway. Francis is… confused. It’s alright. He’ll convince Francis that it’s alright.

“I know things are… strange right now.” His fingers are running over the pendant trying to wipe the burned spot away while he looks down at their efforts. The beginnings of a fire crackle very quietly next to him. His voice is distant and hard. But Francis isn’t well; Raju takes a bracing breath and tries, half-successfully, to soften the sound of it. “But this isn’t some… afterlife. They’re here, and we’re here. You’re here.

“Look,” Raju adds, looking at Francis again as the point occurs to him, voice insistent now, thumb moving over the pendant restlessly and then letting go of it as his hand reaches out to grasp at Francis' shoulder. Surely there's something useful here; what Raju remembers isn't conclusive, is a coincidence that set next to the impossibilities in this place ends up looking like something it's not. This will help. "You remember coming here, don't you? What were you doing before that? You weren't dying, if you were dead then you would remember it. I'm certain that once you're feeling better, your memories of your men will become clearer too. It's alright. You don't have to worry about it now."

Edited (nitpicking) 2024-02-24 03:11 (UTC)

There's some flailing beside him, the red-hot glow of a burst of flames, and Raju is...

Raju is distracted, in the sort of way that Francis Crozier has been distracted his entire life. There's a great swell of gravity sudden bearing down upon his friend, but between the dead-weight in his limbs and the pain in his chest there's little more he can do for him other than stare in silent worry.

He's barely blinked at the sudden fire started by Raju's hand. Once you've seen a man's soul devoured, a burst of flame by a man's hand seems so much smaller a miracle than it should be.

Glowing embers start to die and Raju turns his attention back on him. He smiles, a frail thing, and picks up a heavy hand to attempt to grasp his friend's arm in return. He fails, but hopefully the gesture was clear. He's here, he's trying for his friend's sake.

"No, no," he whispers fiercely. "I'm not dead. I survived. Don't you see, Raju? Don't you see that survival is my penance?"

If only he could die.

He continues to ramble on, pained but mind clear and sharp.

"Thomas Jopson, Edward Little, Harry Goodsir, William Gibson, and the man who calls himself Cornelius Hickey all perished some time ago in the Arctic Circle. Some of them apparently know of their deaths, and some were taken days or even weeks before. What most of them don't know is I was the only one who survived." He tries to swallow a painful lump in his throat. "129 men set sail from England to find a northwest passage to China, and 128 men died. I don't know why they're here now, Raju, I don't understand it -- I saw their corpses, I held their bodies, I ate --

He ate from them.

"The Aurora chose them and then chose me, and I can't make heads or tails of it. And worse...worse is the horror of it happening all over again."

Raju sees Francis trying to raise his hand, sees him failing, and on top of his tight, insistent smile Raju's eyebrows twitch closer together. It keeps surprising him, how badly Francis is doing now. He moves his hand to catch Francis' as it falls, one hand holding there, the pendant pressing between their palms, and the other on his shoulder still.

As Francis goes on, the worry on Raju's face deepens into something else. Raju's breathing is just a little faster than it should be, his grip a little tighter, the line of his jaw is tight. But Francis insists that he survived, too, and it's an inch of stable footing on crumbling ground, but it doesn't make sense. There's so much sitting behind everything Francis says, too many threads to follow when Raju can only take one at a time. There'd been so much between the words that Little had spoken, too, but Raju hadn't needed to see what waited there, then.

Survival is my penance and the man who calls himself Cornelius Hickey, and I ate --

Sort out what's important. It isn't easy to tell; too much at once to guess at any of it. There's the feeling of a hand in his — there's something isolated about this place, for all there's so many of them trapped here, or maybe that's only when set against the life he'd led for a while, those last few months in Delhi, but a shoulder in the grip of one of his hands now, and a hand held in the other, the place where the fire burned him hurting at the touch, but not enough to matter — and there's straightening Francis out. A healthy man finds it easier to clear his mind, and once Francis' mind is clear, the things he has to say will start making sense again.

"Here, ah—" Raju twists for a second to look behind him. He'll have to move the logs a little to make sure the little fire in there doesn't die, but he doesn't want to move his hands yet. "We'll move you closer, where I am, and I'll make sure it's warm. Then I'll find something to wrap your ribs with. Then everything will seem more clear. How can you owe penance for what your men don't even remember? I am sorry about them, Francis. The ones who died. But there... there has to be an explanation. If some of them are here, surely, there's... there's something you're missing. It'll be easier to remember more detail once you're well."

Bless him. Bless him, he doesn't see it yet. Crozier has to let it go, this attempt at a confession, this -- this rambling of an old fool who wishes for death daily. He squeezes Raju's hand and tries to nod.

"Once I'm well," he repeats, because it's all he can think to do. Drop it, don't say another word, Francis Crozier, it's too much too soon. He blinks, his eyes overbright and shimmering, and tries to nod.

"Tend to the fire."

Raju doesn't, for a moment. Raju only looks at him, frowning. The beginnings of a fire behind him doesn't cast its light very strongly, or far, but as it flickers he can see Francis' eyes shimmering. Francis should believe, see all this the same way Raju sees it. It's... better, if he does.

And Raju does need to tend to the fire.

Raju doesn't, for a moment again. His grip is firm around Francis' hand and his frown is unsettled, unsatisfied. Then he turns, hands slipping away from him, and pushes a log closer to the flames, pushing another to nudge some pieces of curling, crumbling newspaper closer to the wood. There's more wood somewhere else in this cabin, he thinks distantly. Shelves, chairs, things ready to be broken down. He should make some kind of torch, go and look for them.

He glances at the darkness behind himself, not really trying to see into it. His thumb worries over the surface of the pendant. His gaze roams behind them, then settles onto Francis' face again. Raju can't see his expression, quite, part of his face in shadow. He can see the light shining over Francis' eyes.

"It won't happen again here," he tries, firmly. "Your man, the Lieutenant. Little. He said there was a mutiny. What would happen if someone tried to mutiny here? This isn't an expedition, we aren't on the ocean. There aren't any ships. What is there to take control over? A collection of ruined log houses? Let them have them. Do what they will."

It isn't too terribly cold inside the cabin, and he's weary enough that he thinks sleep won't allude him for very long. Sleep. To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream.

Oof. Quoting Hamlet in his own brain, a sure sign that he's too overwrought for any clear thinking.

"It isn't mutiny that worries me," he tells him quietly, a thoughtful pause interrupted by the howling of a wolf somewhere off in the hills. He lets the echo wash over them both, hissing softly under his breath as he attempts to move himself.

"Someone dear gave you that." The pendant. Raju clutches it so tightly Crozier fears it may turn into a diamond.

Raju frowns at Francis for a second and then blinks down at his hand, looking a little surprised as the motion of his thumb slows to a stop. He hadn't realised he'd been holding it this tightly, still rubbing at its surface like this, not in any conscious way. "Ah, yes. Sort of. I think I might have— I think it might be burnt, but I can't see."

Then he glances away from it, notices Francis trying to move and makes a quiet, surprised noise, moving himself closer and more out of the way of the fire to put a hand high on Francis' back. The other hovers, still holding the pendant, unsure where to put itself that pushing Francis even gently in any direction wouldn't make the pain in his ribs worse. He settles on a shoulder.

"Here, closer to the fire. It'll be warmer soon. And don't think I didn't realise you're trying to distract me. What is it that worries you, if not mutiny? You should know something like it worries your Lieutenant a great deal, at least if his manner over the food supply during that storm is any clue. People becoming... agitated, I think, was the word he used."

Sort of. A scorched pendant gripped so hard that it might as well be a piece of him.

"Am I that transparent?" he says, hissing as he feels one of the broken shards inside his delicate innards shifting around. "No, I'm trying to ground us, Raju. I'm trying --"

He's not the only one feeling helpless here.

He shakes his head gently and lets Raju position him a little closer to the fire. "Mutiny implies authority, a collective. There's nothing like that here. There's nothing to mutiny against."

"Exactly." Raju sits on his knees to look Francis over once he's moved, unsatisfied. Nothing even to put his head on, nothing between Francis and the ground except the blanket, Raju's coat, wrapped around him, and without stripping himself naked that's the only thing that Raju has to give. He'll have to look for something Francis can lay on when he looks for something to tear apart to wrap his ribs, but he hasn't gotten to the bottom of this yet. It should be enough, maybe, that Francis is willing to put aside the idea of this being a place which, along with everything else, houses dead men, but it hadn't been enough for Francis, though he'd been willing to pretend. And a pretence isn't enough for Raju, not here and now. Raju had been... distracted by personal matters, memories, thoughts that shouldn't have effected his judgement the way that they had. Of course those men can't be dead, if they're still living here. So he should have been able to listen.

"There's no authority to rebel against, no ship to get lost on." The hand still resting on Francis' shoulder gives a gentle squeeze, and Raju smiles. He should have responded this way earlier; it might be too late now to really settle Francis' mind. But now that Raju himself is thinking more clearly again he can try to reassure, can succeed at it this time. "So what is it you think is happening again?"

The pain dulls to an ache once he settles, though his hand travels down to rest gently, protectively against his ribs.

He shouldn’t have let his mind wander. He said too much, unburdened himself too soon. “How uncomfortable are you with the supernatural? Did you believe in anything before you came? Ghosts, monsters, gods on earth?”

Crozier used to be terrified of banshees as a young boy, but other than that little Irish myth God and religion had always been such a far-away concept. And then he’d met Silna and the creature.

Raju’s eyes are on Francis’ hand when he asks the question, on his ribs. The hopefully-reassuring smile is still on his face while he’s thinking frustrated thoughts about gauze and what to wrap those ribs with instead, and having to walk away to do it, and when Francis asks about the supernatural Raju’s smile doesn’t change. It’s a short walk from hale and healthy dead men to ghosts, monsters, gods walking on earth in living flesh. If he hesitates, it’s only to decide on the right way to answer.

Honestly, he decides. As close as he can come to honesty without making Francis put away whatever it is that’s eating at him, without putting those tears in the man’s eyes again. Making a man cry who’s older, who’s in pain, who’s been kinder to Raju than he needed to be, Raju will lie if he has to to avoid that. But at this point it probably wouldn’t be convincing if he tried it.

“I believe in what I see,” Raju says, the closest he can get to a truth which applies both at home and here, in this awful, impossible place. Then a hint at a frown comes over his face, a thoughtful one, because he can’t help but try to put pieces together even when he’s mostly certain the puzzle will be full of hallucinations and nonsense, can’t help but murmur it out loud: “Hickey mentioned gods, too. I think he said he’d seen them.”

Crozier doesn’t keep the disgust from his face at the mention of Hickey. Hickey has a head start; he was been spreading his poison months before he’d been pulled to Milton to draw out the venom.

“I was the same. Skeptical, cautious. Not prone to hysterics or superstition - uncommon for a sailor, but I was too numb for faith and bitter towards the intangible. Providence means little when your ship’s frozen in and your supplies are dwindling.”

He pauses to catch his breath, hand gripping the sealskin tunic a little tighter as he struggles.

“I don’t know if what we saw was a god,” he says, gaze distant. “What it wasn’t isn’t enough to tell us what it was. They called it tuunbaq, and it was as clever as a man in the shape of a bear. It had an human face. It walked on two legs. It…took the souls of my men, devoured them.”

It hurts to say it out loud, it hurts knowing the list of the dead exists in his head alone. And Raju…he can’t account for how this level-headed man will react now to his ghost story.

“There are a great many things to fear in this world. Mutiny, Hickey, gods and monsters —- but more plainly, the cold, the sickness, the madness. I fear the madness.”

The disgust on Francis' face puts confusion on Raju's, for a moment. But it's not as if his topic doesn't match; disgust at having been so skeptical, maybe, or sharing that remembered bitterness of a ship full of men whose wellbeing was his to care for with no way in his power to care for them at all. That would be enough to put disgust on anyone's face, no matter how long it's been.

Francis' hand grips the shirt over his ribs more tightly and Raju's hand over Francis' shoulder tightens a little in sympathy. It stays that way as Francis goes on.

If this had been before, if he'd met this man in Delhi, or at home, that would have been easy to dismiss. Hardship can do strange things to even a strong and structured mind. But here, here and now, what Raju has heard has to go into that in-between place inside his mind where everything that he's observed and written down and struggled to make sense of has to go, the place which says wait, you have to wait to understand it and you don't have the full picture yet, you have to wait.

And Raju is still, now, prepared for a strange story. It's only the way that Francis says it, the thought, the possibility there that he's carved out for something else. Hickey had said gods and been sure, and it had been easy to disbelieve. Francis had said he couldn't tell enough to know, and that's... that's more difficult to turn away from. Devouring souls is impossible, easy to place as a desperate mind's explanation for the unexplainable, for whatever it was that had killed at least most of Francis' men. But what exactly had done it, what it is that those dead men had seen— Francis leaves more room for the unknown there, and something about that makes it worse.

Raju's frown is troubled now. But he'd said, if only to himself, that he could listen to whatever impossibilities he hears now, for the sake of a good man carrying this unknown burden, and he can. Raju doesn't have to believe it, or even understand it. Not right now. It takes him a moment to remind himself, and then put the questions in the thing away.

What he does have to do is get to the centre of this, to what pains Francis this way. Raju can't do much, ultimately, for the man's ribs, but maybe he can do a little for his heart, or his mind.

"Madness," Raju decides as he looks solemnly down at Francis, voice quiet in respect for the weight of the story, no matter what some unknown parts of him might be thinking about its contents. "You don't mean the kind which drives men to see the unexplainable, do you. You're afraid of something else."

“Madness,” repeats Crozier. “I mean the kind that causes men to beg for death. The sort of madness that drives a man to set himself and a tent of people alight in the name of mercy. Madness leads to splintering and acting on desperation.”

Another piece of the story out in the open, another misfortune to fit into the sequence of events. He’d been certain of their doom at that point, but as a man reborn he’d become the quietly resolute captain they’d needed. It was never realistic though, his optimism and hope. It was just what was needed at the time.

“Our ships were trapped in a frozen sea, our stores were poisoned, and we were being hunted by a creature I still don’t completely understand. We were worse off than this, but it doesn’t take much before the mind goes.”

He glances up into Raju’s face, meeting intense eyes with soft, blue ones that seem tired from the inside-out.

Raju's expression is tight, held still with something troubled underneath it, pinching at its edges; Francis' expression is mostly tired. And no wonder.

He can't reassure Francis, can he, that all of that won't happen again. In his own strength of will, Raju's always had an unmoving faith. He can't afford to make room for anything else. But he can't answer for everyone living here, or everyone who will be, or what other impossible, terrible things might happen here, or what any of those unknown people here might be driven to. He can control himself. And that's all.

To the centre. Raju isn't certain that they've reached it yet. He isn't certain, either, if they should. Going forward might — will — hurt Francis, but stopping had hurt him, too.

Forward, then. A little of the tension in Raju's face smooths out. Digging far enough to hurt is something he knows how to do.

"'Survival is my penance,'" Raju quotes, still quiet, hand still on Francis' shoulder, looking down at Francis' pain and his tired eyes. "That's what you said. Is it your madness that you're afraid of, Francis? You must have been desperate, too."

Christ, it's as though he sees right through him. If he weren't so hurt or so cold it wouldn't be as difficult as it is to hold back a whimper. The Netsilik never asked him about it directly; they didn't need to, they knew what became of them all, the scattered artifacts and bleaching, corpses with carved-up legs and arms. They didn't know how they fell so far, but they didn't need to know.

"I was only mad once," he admits softly. "Desperate for the bottle. Nearly died because of it while others were dreaming of roasted meats and carrots. I purged it from myself, emerged clean -- a better man, a better captain. I stayed sane while others lost their minds, I remained healthy while everyone else became ill."

He'd pickled himself, is what he did. Scurvy couldn't touch him because his liver was already struggling with all goddamn else.

"I was desperate for them to live. I pushed them beyond their limits and kept my belief even as they were walking corpses that I could somehow bring them to salvation."

He turns now, ignoring the sharp pain, grasping for Raju's wrist and holding so fast he can feel the faint thrum of his pulse under his thumb. "I outlived every single one of them, Raju. I found their corpses and encampments after -- after I escaped Hickey's captivity. Little was the last to die, and he did so in my arms."

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.

bad luck, old sport

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cw idealizing dying (I think?) also this is embarrassingly long but Raju has a lot of feelings

cw: mentions of suicide, cannibalism (also never apologize for writing a lot!!! <3)

<3

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CW self immolation

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cw awh yeah cannibalism time

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cw just more cannibalism from here on out

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cw: suicide

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