Singillatim

Who: The Terrors and Erebites
What: Crozier tells all
Where: Crozier and Raju's cabin
When: ~October~
Warnings: #JustTerrorThings

Lying by omission is still lying.

Lying by omission was never a qualm Francis Crozier had. It was a choice he made over and over again as captain of Terror and then expedition commander, to withhold information for the good of the crew, to preserve their morale and help keep that little flame of hope still burning, but each and every time without fail the good-intentioned lie turned sour and haunting. It was never a lesson well-learned despite this, and the habit continued even when the truth was so obvious and the omission almost an insult to the intelligence and the personal tragedies of the men he survived.

Lying by omission is still lying, and with the arrival of one more in the their party - his second, his confidant and one he'd usually make complicit in those lies - Crozier slowly came to realize that this attempt to preserve did more harm than it ever did good. The decision to relinquish whatever control he still held over their collective narrative wasn't an easy one, but it was correct and just. It wasn't his story, even if it felt like he carried the weight of it on his own all those lonely years. That couldn't be further from the reality of what his men faced day-to-day as living ghosts now.

He was alive, and they had died. He couldn't keep lying to them. They deserved so much more than Crozier's craven attempt to protect them from what they already knew to be the truth.

( Your Captain would like to speak. )