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COWT - Clash Of the Writing Titans/Chronicles Of Words and Trials
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Published:
2020-03-28
Completed:
2020-03-28
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7,740
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3/3
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4
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40
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One Thousand Years Of Regrets

Chapter 2: One Thousand Years Of Loneliness

Chapter Text

John Silver wakes up and the first thing he notices is— he’s utterly alone.

That’s uncommon. He searches almost blindly with his hands on his left and his right, expecting to find Madi and James’ bodies next to his own, even though he’s sure he hasn’t seen them as he woke up. He wonders where they went. He thought Madi would sleep for at least one month after the things she’s done and had to endure while they were at sea. This was her first long sail, and it took its toll on him and James too – he’d have expected Madi to be broken by it, at least for a few days. If she left – together with James, too – that probably didn’t happen.

He pulls himself up on both arms, sitting with his shoulders against the headboard of the bed. The room is slightly different than what he remembers from last night. Perhaps he drank too much? And yet he doesn’t remember drinking at all.

He wonders where Madi and James’ clothes could be. They were soiled with dirt, sweat and blood, heavy with sea salt, torn apart for the great part – it’s uncommon that they would wear them again to go out and about Nassau. He would’ve expected them to leave them on the floor, where they scattered them last night after they torn them off one another in the last surge of true strength that powered their bodies to allow themselves one last furious intercourse fueled by the excitement of the sea, before they fell asleep.

It happens all the time – whenever they come back from a long sail, they need to reconnect physically to one another as it’s almost impossible to do on a ship, and so they claw at each other, and they bite each other, and they kiss each other as though they wanted to eat each other alive, and then they fuck like they were possessed by demons, and only then they feel like they can fall asleep, and they do, and when they wake up the next day they’re still spent but satisfied, and Madi lets herself go to the tenderness she usually hides so well, and James offers him one of those smiles he could die for, and everything feels perfect. And for one single moment, before the sea starts calling them back, John feels perfectly at peace and content with their little room in Max’s tavern. And he doesn’t ache for anything else.

He didn’t imagine starting this day like this, honestly he feels a little betrayed that Madi and James chose to wake up before him and walk out without waiting for him. He’s going to find them and he’s going to make them pay for this – he doesn’t know how exactly, yet. It will probably be a very silly way. He needs time to think about it.

He slides off the bed and reaches out for his peg leg, placing it underneath his knee. He buckles it around his thigh and stands up, searching for a pair of pants. He can’t find his own but there are clean ones on the drawer and he puts them on. Then he searches for his jacket, knowing there are some money from their last prize hidden in one of the folds he stitched in the lining, money he could use to buy himself some breakfast downstairs before he goes out and searches for his lovers – provided they’re not already there waiting for him – but the jacket too is gone.

He frowns, deeply concerned, at this point. Something’s not right, here. It was already pretty unbelievable that Madi and James could leave this room without waking him up first, but that they did that taking away all his clothes and money, too, that’s simply preposterous and he won’t believe it. Something else must be going on.

He grabs a shirt from inside the creaking closet and the new black boots that seem to have been left at the foot of the bed specifically for him, and he ventures outside the room.

No doubt that this is Max’s tavern, he would recognize it even after ten thousand years of sleep. The same structure, the same wood, the same decorations, the same spaces. And yet there’s something off. Little details – the smell, for example. Too clean. There’s no alcohol in the air, its crisp accent completely snuffed out by what seems like a weird mix of incense and cooked food.

Only last night, when he stepped foot into this place, there were a hundred men gargling on beer, spitting on the floor, spilling their drinks on the table. The people he sees now from the banister upstairs seem much more quiet than those he’s used to see around here. Not necessarily rich or educated, but somehow – tamed, perhaps? They laugh with their full voices, sure, and some of them is drinking, but most of them aren’t. Some of them eat meat, some of them drink milk, some other have some fruit. Most of them simply sit around the various tables, talking or playing cards. Some of them exchange goods and receive money for them.

Surprised and frankly quite confused, he stops halfway towards the stairs and places both hands on the banister, standing there as he looks down and tries to make sense of what he’s seeing – with scarce to no results.

“Ah, you’ve finally woken up from your deep, deep slumber, your highness.”

John turns in the general direction of Jack Rackham’s voice, a voice he heard very recently and that yet sounds very, very different than the one he remembers. There’s a mocking, disdainful undertone to it that he can’t quite justify. Therefore, he frowns in disappointment.

“Jack,” he says, “What is going on in here? Have you seen Madi and James?”

“I’m sorry— who?”

John frowns even deeper. “Are you joking?”

“I most certainly am not,” Rackham frowns too, getting closer, “And it seems like you aren’t either, which is most worrying. Do you have any idea, even the faintest one, of how you got here?”

“Yes,” John replies, “Don’t treat me like an infant, Rackham, you know I hate it. We docked yesterday and we took our usual room here. Speaking of which, my money’s gone— you don’t happen to have any idea where my jacket went, do you?”

Rackham blinks a few times, looking intently at him, as though he didn’t know what to do with him. “Alright, I am officially forbidding you from ever sitting on that cliff all day without a hat. Clearly, the sun got to your head. You’ve gone mad.”

John frowns deeply, sharing Rackham’s confusion. “The cliff? What cliff?”

“The one you can spend weeks at a time sitting on, on the Maroon Island, waiting for that poor girl to realize what a mistake she made by kicking you out of her life and come back to you,” the man rolls his eyes and starts walking off, with John immediately trailing after him, “Your innocent delusion must’ve turned into something far darker, judging from what you just said.”

“I don’t understand— how are you saying I ended up here, then?”

“We found you unconscious and completely naked on that cliff,” Rackham snorts and starts climbing the stairs down, slightly slowing down his pace to wait for John to follow, “My Quartermaster saw you with the glass as we were about to leave. As I am apparently too pure of a heart to let you die of dehydration as you deserve, we circled back and gathered you, but no one felt particularly inclined to pass through a forest full of traps to get you to the camp, so we sailed you back here.” Rackham concludes his tale sitting down at one of the few empty tables and gesturing for a girl to bring him two beers.

John swallows, sitting opposite to him. “This makes no sense…” he says confusedly, “I haven’t been on that island in years.”

“You haven’t been off that island in years, perhaps,” Rackham frowns and places a couple coins on the palm of the girl waiting, and then pushes one of the beers towards John, “Drink. It’ll clear your head.”

John gladly accepts the suggestion, but he doesn’t feel any more clearheaded than he was before after a few sips. “I clearly remember docking here last night,” he mumbles, “Madi and James were with me. We went upstairs—”

“Silver, that girl hasn’t come out of her camp in years,” Rackham says, deeply frowning, “And if by James you mean Captain Flint, he too has been off the charts since you heroically stopped the war before it could happen.”

That forces John to pause for a minute. He swallows one last sip of beer and then puts down the glass, staring in horror at the man sitting in front of him. “What do you mean I stopped the war?”

“You conveniently forgot that?”

“No, I didn’t do it,” John insists, his forehead covering in a light film of perspiration, “I wanted to, but James convinced me not to.”

“On the contrary, my friend,” Rackham sighs, “He wanted the war and you convinced him to stop wanting it. I’m sure if you pay him a visit in Savannah Captain Flint will be happy to tell you the tale of how you betrayed us all to keep a wife that didn't even want you back after all was said and done.” Rackham takes another sip of beer and then speaks with a little less urgency, casting John a glance that holds no contempt. “I say it with no animosity, John,” he says, “As you can see, I survived.”

John’s first instinct is to panic. This is not how it went at all, so either Rackham’s playing some stupid joke on him, but John wouldn’t be able to say why, or this isn’t his life as he knew it. He must’ve drank, last night, even if he doesn’t remember, and this surely is alcohol-induced. A fucking alcohol-induced nightmare.

“So I… I sent him to Savannah,” he whispers, looking down. He chose not to tell James— when James convinced him what they wanted could still be done, when they saved Madi and made it possible, he swore to himself he would never tell James what he had found out in Savannah. That Thomas Hamilton was still alive. That it would’ve taken something as simple as a trip to Georgia to reunite with him. He never said a word because— because he knew that after the war was over, if James had known that there would’ve been a chance, even the slightest, to meet Hamilton again, he would’ve left. Wouldn’t left them. Would’ve left him.

“Why do you seem so surprised?” Rackham frowns, evidently worried, “Christ, are you sure you’re alright? I thought one good night of sleep would’ve fixed you, but apparently…”

“I’m fine,” John shakes his head. If this is a nightmare, there’s no other way to come out of it that isn’t walking the path it suggests him, to see it through. “What happened then?”

“You can’t truly be expecting me to tell you the whole thing right from the start.”

“You’re a storyteller, don’t you?” John says, “You love to tell your stories.”

“Precisely. Mine. Not yours.”

“You’ll make an exception for an old friend.”

Rackham sighs and rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says, “Even though there’s not much to say. But if I do this, you promise me you’ll stay away from that island, and that fucking cliff. Believe it or not, John Silver still has friends, here. You should keep that in mind.”

“Fine,” John nods, “I will.” He doesn’t tell him that this promise will be over the moment he wakes up on the other side, in a world where he battles with guilt but lives in happiness with the people he loves.

“…alright, then,” Rackham relaxes against the back of the chair, recollecting his thoughts, “When you came back from the forest in Skeleton Island you and Flint were alone. The men you had with you, the man he had with him, all dead. You never explained how or why. Some of us pressed for answers, none was given, we moved on. The cache wasn’t with you, you never revealed where it’s hidden. You always said you didn’t know, and Flint… he was silent. Not as though he wouldn’t speak. As though he couldn’t. And when I asked you about it, you said you had killed him.”

“I said what?” John holds his breath, looking up at him.

“You had killed him,” Rackham shrugs, “He was clearly alive, obviously. I chose to believe that was some coded message only the two of you could understand. Wouldn’t have been the first time. He was restless but silent all the way back to Nassau. Sometimes he looked at you and then he marched to the Captain’s quarters, and you’d follow him, and we’d hear yelling from inside, the two of you fighting. He sounded beyond himself with rage at times, and then pleading, somehow. You always talked to him in the same way. Soothing. In a low voice. No one could hear your words. He cried, sometimes. It wasn’t pretty.”

John covers his face with both hands, trying to picture himself inflicting James that kind of pain. Inflicting it to himself. It sounds impossible – ungodly. No wonder it could only have happened in a nightmare.

“Then what?”

“Then, when we came back here, you started preparations. You got him to Pensacola, then from there you trusted him to Mr. Morgan, that he could see him to Savannah. He fought you one last time – at least that’s what you said when you got back. And we haven’t seen nor heard from him since.”

Unexpectedly, John finds himself sobbing. He tries to keep it hidden – it would be ridiculous to let all of this out. He pictures himself accompanying James on that last trip. He pictures himself saying goodbye. How could he have done something like that? How could he deprive himself of his own soul, the man who shaped him into who he is today?

“John,” Jack leans into him, his voice letting out some of his worry, “John, are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yes,” John answers immediately, shaking his head and wiping his eyes, “Go on. Tell me everything.”

“There’s not much left to say,” Rackham leans back against the chair once more, “You went back to the Maroons. No one knows exactly what happened between you and the girl, you understandably don’t talk much about it. What we all know is that you’ve been on that island ever since, constantly spending your time sitting on that cliff, sometimes fishing. You come by here, every now and then, but it’s become rarer and rarer each month. What’s left of you…” he sighs, “Is a legend. Long John Silver still lives in people’s memories. They still fear him. But everyone who knew you knows they’ve got nothing to fear anymore, right? Whatever was, whatever caused that…” the man actually lets himself go to a nostalgic smile, “That moment of grace we all lived, when our shadows intertwined and we walked as one man behind that stupid, stupid ideal… that’s dead. And unlike the Captain Flint and Long John Silver of old, it won’t be coming back to life.”

Rackham’s voice fades away into the chattering of the tavern’s customers, and John lets that noise fill his head, losing himself in that constant buzzing.

This hurts more than he ever thought possible. For a second he entertains the idea that this might be his reality, that perhaps this isn’t a dream and all that he remembers and believes he has done was the dream instead, that he really stopped the war from happening, let James go to Savannah, lost Madi forever, and when he concentrates on that all he feels is void, and the weight of one thousand years of loneliness falling upon him, crushing him to the ground.

“John,” Jack calls him, and this time he reaches out for him and squeezes his shoulder, “Do you need me to call someone for you?”

John shakes his head.

“Do you want to come with us, then?” Jack tries, in his voice an expectation that can only mean that he has thought many times about asking him this and never did it anyway, “We’re about to sail again. Anne wouldn’t mind. We’re still missing a cook.”

John can’t help but laugh, even though his laughter sounds broken. He still shakes his head, though.

“Do you want to go back to your room, then?” Jack tries one last time, sighing deeply, “Rest a while?”

This time, John nods.