Chapter Text
The hammock swayed gently with the tide.
Cole worked the sodden end of his unlit cigar between his teeth, waiting for sleep to take pity and claim him. The sound of the shuffling and snoring off the rest of the crew packed into the hold did little to soothe him.
Six months aboard The Drunken Knave, and he still couldn't name half the bastards sleeping in their own filth around him. Couldn't tell you the captain's name, either. Just that he had a voice like gravel and a temper that flared quickest when coin was involved.
Not that he was complaining. The Knave had kept him fed, paid him square, and the rum wasn't complete piss. But he'd only signed on for a quick run after fever took one of their deckhands, and that contract was wearing thin.
Cole shifted his weight. The revolver tucked into his waistband bit into his gut with familiar reproach. He reached down, adjusted it, felt the cold metal through sweat-damp linen. His hand lingered there longer than necessary, fingers tracing the familiar shape before easing the weapon back to a more forgiving angle.
Red Water Enclave wasn’t the best port to disembark. Docks stained the color of old rust, salt-cracked pilings jutting up like broken teeth. The kind of port where everything smelled like fish guts and cheap incense meant to hide worse decay. But it was busy, and busy meant ships. Ships meant captains looking for a hand.
He'd been through it before. Once? Twice? He remembered a tavern with a crooked sign. A woman with silver rings on every finger. A fight that spilled into the street and ended when someone's head cracked against a mooring post with a sound like splitting fruit.
He couldn't recall which side he'd been on. Couldn't recall if he'd thrown a punch or simply stepped over the body on his way back to whatever ship had claimed him then. It’s name sounded as stupid as The Drunken Knave will surely sound, once it’s swept away from his conscious thought.
Cole rolled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, worrying it like a thought he refused to finish. He'd picked it up in San Merrow weeks back, traded two hours of watch duty for the privilege of never lighting it. Never planned to, either. If he did, then he'd have to start thinking about the next one. He had no appetite for any of it.
He preferred his thinking kept short. The next port. The next ship. The next stretch of water he would pretend not to recognize as he passed over it again.
He was getting old. Which meant he was still and would always be the right age to be a seaman. Life was as simple as the sea permitted it to be, brutal when it wanted, generous when it felt like it, and utterly indifferent either way. The same and never identical enough to demand memory.
He could’ve been anyone, the same or someone else, and he would still be a seaman. The name barely mattered. Same hands, same back bent to the same work. So he was and would remain Cole Cassidy, the man with enough rope burns scoring his palms to chart a course by. And he would leave at the next port with his meager possessions thrown over his shoulder and the only thing of value he still carried tucked into his trousers. With the certainty that the sea would take him back, the way it always did, without questions, without ceremony, without ever asking him to be more than what he already was.
If only the matters of men were as the sea taught him they were. Small and unimportant. Lost in the scorching sunlight and the thunder of a rainy night. All the same tales, spoken once and told again, and again until the details became unrecognizable but were still the same.
Cole had seen it in every port, arguments that outlived the men who started them and that he never stayed long enough to know the end of.
The sea took no interest in who they'd been ashore, who had wronged them, who they'd failed.
Still, sometimes, especially tonight, when the land was next in sight, the thoughts crept back in. Just enough to remind him that he was still a man, and not entirely made of salt and motion yet.
He shifted the cigar again and waited for dawn.
Sleep would come. Weight down by morning and quickly shaken with a coo and a caw.
The Drunken Knave made port at dawn, sliding into Red Water Enclave with all the grace of a drunk finding his bed. The docks were already alive with the morning's business.
Cole was packed before the anchor hit water.
He stood on deck while the crew made ready, watching the port resolve itself from gray shapes into detail. A cargo ship was unloading fish three berths down, and the smell hit him before he could see the silvered bodies being shoveled into carts.
The gangplank dropped with a hollow thud.
Cole adjusted the sack on his shoulder, worked the cigar to the other side of his mouth, and walked.
No one called after him.
No one asked where he was going or when he'd be back. No one clasped his shoulder or wished him fair winds
His boots hit the dock with a solid sound, wood worn smooth by a thousand other boots, a thousand other departures just like this one. He just walked.
Past the longshoremen hauling crates. Past a woman mending nets with fingers that moved faster than thought. Past a dog sleeping in a patch of sun, ribs showing through mangy fur. It opened one eye as he passed, decided he wasn't worth the energy of interest, and went back to sleep.
The hunt for a new berth could wait. Most captains didn’t start looking for hands until the day’s business was done. For now, Cole followed the pull of hunger.
The tavern was a roaring knot of voices and bodies. He shouldered his way to the bar, ordered an ale, and let his gaze wander. Looking for a distraction. A good one. Preferably one that came with a clean bed and a door that locked.
He found it soon enough.
She stood close, blue-eyed and watching him like she already knew the answer to a question she hadn’t asked yet. She spoke his language. Hands first, brushing his arm, his wrist, lingering just long enough to make the offer clear. It didn’t take much. When she reached for him, curled her fingers around his hand and tugged, it was easy to let himself be led upstairs, away from the noise.
Her love was cheap and pretty. She called him "traveler" like trouble waiting for a victim. And spoke of dreams of the calm sea and a black sky, places she'd never been but could taste in the stories men left behind with their coin.
And even though Cole knew he didn’t have a lot to give he delved into her fantasy. He fed it to her willingly, shaping it with a dirty mouth and a sailor’s instinct for invention. He gave her memories of another hemisphere he no longer had any use for. Of lights in the night like threads of gold. The smell of mornings far, so far away, it felt like the edge of the world. Places that existed now only because he said they did.
He gave her gentler versions of the taste of blood that the rum couldn’t quite wash down. Keep all the wickedness next to the cigar he had yet to light.
She listened with her head tilted, eyes half-lidded, as if she could already see what he described. It was a reverie endeavor.Things that held little meaning to her as it did to Cole when the next horizon arose.
He knew she heard him for what he was, a phony, staging the music for her entertainment in return for his own. Choosing momentarily to believe Cole was as kind as he was to her in this very moment. Not because it was true but because it made her work easier.
When it was over, the quiet settled in without ceremony. She slept easily, curled on her side, already drifting somewhere else. Somewhere better, probably. Somewhere with golden lights and mornings that smelled like the edge of the world.
Cole dressed in the dark. Boots. Belt. Revolver checked and settled back into place. The cigar went back between his teeth. He left coins on the table. More than she'd asked for. Not out of generosity, he just didn't want to carry the weight.
He was already wishing to be back at sea soon, leaving the now behind for the never without looking back.
Throwing himself into the unknown he most certainly knew from way back then. Picking the captain that paid the most and demanded the least. Sail north or east, south or west. Whichever direction didn’t carry the name of where he came from. Toward nothing.
A merchant vessel called The Iris, squat and sturdy. The captain was a woman with gray streaks in her hair and hands that bore the same rope burns as his own. She looked him over once, asked three questions, and hired him on the spot.
By the time evening rolled around, The Drunken Knave was already gone, sailed out on the afternoon tide with a fresh hand to replace him. Someone else to fill his hammock and work his watch and never quite learn the captain's name.
Cole stood on the deck of The Iris as the anchor lifted. The sails caught wind, and the ship began its slow pull away from Red Water Enclave.
The same work, under a different flag.
That was fine by Cole.
He worked the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and watched Red Water fade into the distance until it was just another smudge of gray on the coastline. Just another port in a long line of ports that all looked the same if you squinted hard enough.
The revolver pressed against his side. His hands found the ropes without thinking. The wind picked up. The sails snapped and filled. The Iris cut through the water with the steady indifference of a vessel that had made this journey a hundred times before and would make it a hundred times again. The salt air filled his lungs.
Somewhere behind him, a life he'd never claimed waited for him to return.
Somewhere ahead, another port waited to forget him.
Cole Cassidy stood between them, belonging to neither, claimed by the water and the endless repetition of departure.
And he was fine with that too.
Everything was better than the worst. Than what Overwatch had been at its best.
You couldn't wash blood with blood.
A seaman, much as a dog, was better left to its wandering than on a leash.