Chapter Text
Long, long ago, on a no-name island in the middle of nowhere that nobody important would remember, there lived two lads with dreams (delusions) of grandeur.
Misty, watercolor memories that have blurred together in a mix of pale pastels and vivid hues. Racing each other down the docks, trudging stubbornly side-by-side in the waning surf to see what had washed ashore during high tide, practicing sword-fighting with too-short sticks…
(A fair-haired boy born “on the wrong side of the blanket” and a dark-haired boy born “on the wrong side of the warfront.” As if either of them had asked to be born here (of all places! at all times!) in the first place.)
A summer-soaked dawn found them lying like lazy starfish on the sunbathed back of a beached boulder, their windswept bangs sticking to the stone bed beneath them. Laying right side up and upside down, pressed cheek-to-cheek so they could easily point out fading constellations to the other’s spying eyes.
(If in case the salt water that they sometimes had to rub away from their faces wasn’t completely brine. A trade secret between them and the seagulls.)
“Mark my words, Plums. Me and you? We’re gonna run this world.” The vertically-challenged boy announced, ready and raring to live his life to its fullest and daring anybody to question his right to it. Flooded in the first light of daybreak, it was the easiest thing in the world to believe that dream could come to life.
“Tell me something I don’t know, Peaches.” He’d replied, the (mutinous) words too slow and too sweet to pass for anything except sincere, earning a sunny smile and a freckled nose fondly pressed to the curve of his jaw.
(His heart skipping beats like the stones they’d skip across the asshole innkeeper’s private koi pond when nobody was watching.)
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Getting ready, getting out of there, getting a spot with a trading company…
Breaking through the Devil’s Shroud, ‘discovering’ the Sea of Thieves…it was only the beginning. The beginning of an end to an era, some could say.
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They’ve made port at an up and coming outpost, the ship’s cargo fully unloaded and the place’s tavern officially crawling with sea rovers. One of them is a little too deep into his tankard when the band strikes up an unfamiliar, jaunty tune.
“Oh! This is my jam!”
“Wha-waitwhatareyoudoing-“
Cut footloose and fancy-free, he hops to his feet, a hand still entangled in his partner’s, whose dragging heels scrape the wooden floors.
“C’mon, give it a whirl! It'll be fun.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Uh duh. That’s how words work, Plums.”
“And my two left feet ain’t nearly so cooperative. Your toes are gonna pay for this.”
“Pssh. Let me worry about my toes.”
“Well, if you insist.”
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What a merry little dance you led on.
(The Well of Fate refuses to run dry. Its flames sought after by unsavory sorts. Within that lay a once in a lifetime opportunity.)
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A dark-haired ferryman docks his vessel at a deserted beacon, anticipating his fair-haired partner to relieve him of duty so that he may take his turn upon the living’s shores.
No one comes. The sun sets sail beyond the beautifully unbroken horizon, the moon takes her seat in the star-studded sky, and the ghostly galleon vanishes into the mists at the stroke of midnight like it was never there to begin with. A fluke?
One can hope, yet the second respite proves fruitless, too. And you know what they say about shame, fools, and third times.
(The on-call captain coincidentally catches sight of himself in a crooked vanity. He’d wheeze a mirthless laugh at the simian-reshaped features he finds there, had he a heart light enough for it. Alas, the graveyard shift from beyond the pale has already taken its toll.)
When next it comes time to make port in the sunlit world, the fogbound ferry is silently steered further towards blackened, blighted waters.
(Make a monkey out of me, will you?)
It returns to the Sea of the Damned with a treasure chest aboard, the contents still-beating inside and the corresponding barrel key curiously unaccounted for.
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A duo were drafted to do this dead end job.
Yet here he is, armed with everlasting life and everlasting overtime.
Third time’s the charm. Shame on the both of us.
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You see, there is a lovely little place that will come to be called Dagger Tooth. Jagged rock formations reach for the cloud-covered skyline, two out of three docks lay in utter disrepair, and- oh, right. A teensy-tiny small bay on the west side whose gaping maw is now home to several newly sinking ships.
(“Temper, temper, dearest.”)
(“What have you done?”)
(“Nothing that wasn’t within my right.”)
(“‘Within your right? Within your right?!’ You’ve left them for dead! Damned-”)
(“Yes, yes, I am the Ferryman of the Damned. Me, myself, and I. So long as it is so, nothing and no one of yours is secured safe passage through paths of mine.”)
Not even the caved-in corner of his skull, the pinkish-purple eyeball hanging by a string of congealing viscera, can puncture the bloodthirsty exhilaration bubbling beneath the bruised cage of his ribs while he dancingly darts down the dilapidated docks to his thrice-damned ferry.
An alsatian hound made up of naught but bone and black magic bays at the bow, front legs braced so she can have a look-see over the starboard side with her empty eye sockets.
“Look alive, Sharkbait!” The ferrier cackles in his mad dash for the ladder, a heartless sound that could curdle blood and chill bone. The heavy footfalls violently eating up distance behind him would be of a similar sentiment, if the other living legend wasn’t as of yet so unused to walking with a simian’s stride. (Haha, let’s see how well you dance now with two left hand-feet-)
Predictably, it doesn’t take much more than a well-placed stomp to finally topple the docks.
Unpredictably, the Pirate King plummets to the bottom of the bay the instant he hits the water.
…The drenched Ferryman takes the unforeseen opportunity to scurry up unharassed onto the deck of his ship, halved line of sight gone to peering through a spyglass, primed to pinpoint that stone-hearted scum sucking bilgerat who better not dare to be dead -
Wait.
Waaaait.
(Funny bit of phrasing, that. Stone-hearted. The same that sea witch used- ohhhh.)
(No matter how far they skip, stones sink all the same.)
On the distant shoreline, something distinctly half drowned and human-shaped drags itself out. It’s loudly met by a lively group of like-minded, bedraggled specimens that help haul its waterlogged fair-haired hide the rest of the way.
(Ah, his patsy-pals are still alive. Fitting. Cockroaches aren’t meant to keel over so easily.)
“Oooh, that’s interesting.” The Ferryman snickers and snorts the aside to Sharkbait, who as always proves herself a willing ear given that she is scratched well enough behind one. “Hope he enjoys eternity. We’ve earned plenty of it.”
The looming fog rolls in closer. Featureless, luminous, and undeniably claustrophobic. The dead grasping for their dues, yet happiness remains the prerogative of the living.
Nonetheless, the sated Ferryman turns his back, waltzing over to the damaged wheel standing at the vessel’s stern. A loose eyeball is plucked and flung overboard on his way there, wordless. Sharkbait, the good dog that she is, knows better than to try and fetch an unwanted thing.
He adjusts the floating sails with an unnecessary flourish, course-correcting as he has done countless times before, stiff extremities bending in the bitter cold full of lost (causes) souls. Going back (beyond salvation) beyond the veil.
“On our next vacation,” He muses aloud to her when he takes the wheel, almost drowned out by the encroaching, deafening silence only the Sea of the Damned can manage. “let’s go somewhere nicer.”
(The Well of Fate blazes in its brazier below deck, ancient flames flickering.)
(The Dead Man’s Chest drums a heartbroken beat from the captain’s quarters.)
Sharkbait jumps to and fro, bony tail wagging until it goes flying off with a ‘ pop ’. The subsequent shrill “ clatter ” it makes when it hits the deck has her bolting off after it, pre-mortem fetching instincts in full swing.
The Ferryman barks a laugh.
It echoes harsh and haunting over the waves.
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It is said that the Ferryman’s doors are closed to those that breathe their last clad in the Pirate King’s colors.
The stowaways’ only salvation is somehow corralling or catching a skeleton mongrel cheerfully carrying around a miniature-lantern while the ship’s captain plays ill-fitting hurdy-gurdy music from an out-of-sight seat in the crow’s nest atop the ferry’s broken mast.
(The glowing X of his missing eye being the only thing marking the murky spot where he sits. The only thing giving away which direction he’s staring in. You’d be wise to keep close to the candlelight, when the feeling of being watched grows too dangerous to ignore.)
(Is that the glint of a spyglass? Or the scope of a gun?)
Everybody has a theory.
Nobody seems to know exactly why.
(Sharkbait loves meeting new people and he couldn’t keep saying no to that face.)