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It started with the bodies in the water. The water, otherwise muddied with silt, running red.
The blood of men he once called brothers spreading to the shore, where he stood paralysed, watching. Watching the bobbing heads thrash, crumple and scatter in bits of pink matter before disappearing under the surface.
Until the bodies made their way back up, to float. Simply to float. The heads cratered and ruined and sunken where he would never seek. He never had to see the faces again once the bodies appeared.
Something to be grateful for, he supposed.
It was always early morning when he would see her hands. Her small small hands, bound. Her mother’s body already blown back to lay strewn behind where her daughter still stood, rooted to the ground, trying to remain still but unable to control the trembling of her tiny body. Her ruddy cheeks were wet and her screams were high pitched.
Audrey Underhill’s screams were his waking call during his time on the island. Every daybreak, a clock striking.
And then her hands.
He could never place the precise moment when the change happened, but the small girl hands would come unbound and black ink would smear across her little fingernails, swallowing her hands and trailing up her bare arms.
He would lift his eyes and there she was.
His youngest sister. Just as she was, then. A dropped pamphlet at her feet in the sand, crinkled and ink smudged from her eagerness.
Flint he never saw, only heard. That haughty, contemptuous tone. So disdainful. So confident in Billy’s utter irrelevance.
It took time for him to come around to Flint’s side of things. To the truth that Flint was always going to win.
That he, and his hollow futile rage, his play-acting at being a tyrant’s equal, never stood a chance.
It was in the jungle when Madi would appear. Across a clearing, on her knees, surrounded by earth and wood and dirt. Knife to her throat. Disembodied steel.
It sliced nonetheless.
Yet she remained upright, the blood dripping down. She stared at him, steady. No flinching, no concern for the blood. For her own end.
She simply stared, eyes glowing fierce and watching. Seeing him exactly as he was.
The others, they didn’t look at him like that. The others were shocked, disappointed. Terrified, pleading.
She was calm. She was unafraid.
And then. And then. And then…
In the distance beyond her, just a silhouette. A black nothing that darkened any beam of sun that dared reach past the canopy. Leaning heavily on one side to compensate for the lost limb.
He never saw his face–only the shadow. The black void of a man.
He was watching. Searching. Hunting.
He would find just what he was looking for one day.
He lost track of time soon after he washed up. The relentless march of the phantoms charted the passing of the day, from dawn to murky noon to gathering dusk to the black of night.
With only ghosts to note the passage of time, he could never determine how long before she first appeared.
His daily fishing was accompanied by the symphony of the slow breaking apart of the Walrus, the crackling of the fire before she was swallowed by the water. Nothing but another wreck taken by the merciless sea.
The moaning of the men under the water crept to a crescendo after sundown as he roasted his catch over the flames.
Until the night they stopped.
He’d acclimated so thoroughly to the sound that the silence felt unnatural, distant. It took long moments of surfacing from the depths before he became aware that the emptiness beyond the fire had taken on a different quality.
In the place of that ceaseless emptiness, she appeared.
The dark hair curled past her shoulders contrasted against the palest skin, luminous like a true spectre under moonlight, and the sweetest smile.
Abigail Ashe.
She was only mildly abashed to be caught staring that first time. The flames licked at the vision of her, her gaze darting away.
But she always lifted her eyes again to find his, the way she had that night. Even with his purposeful turning away, in favour of carrying on with his duties. The way he always turned away from the possibilities that seemingly existed beyond his chosen horizon.
Possibilities that could have unfurled had he decided to let them. To look and linger and allow something new to grow–something good. Perhaps not pure, but good even so.
But no. He stood, turned and left that table with white knuckles.
Though not before one last look across to her.
And she gifted him that close-lipped smile. Still uncertain, shy.
Even so, trying. Hoping.
Hoping, in spite of what she’d seen. The dress she wore likely covered the lingering evidence of the conditions under which she’d lived in captivity for weeks. The things men just like him had done to her.
Perhaps raised welts circled her tiny wrists, matching his own. Those old scars he kept hidden under leather strips.
He’d discarded them at some point during his time on the island, and so she became a witness. His own time spent in chains exposed to her.
He did not mind. Preferred it, in fact.
To be bared to her. He wanted her to see.
Here, this island his grave, there was no need for evasion, or looking away. Not when you lived with only remembered ghosts.
Slowly the feeling sunk in, that she could see him. She could see him as he was, and she forgave him.
She saw the mangled pieces of what he used to be, and everything he had become since.
All of that exposed, and still with that secret smile just for him. The warmth of it hitting him like a pistol shot flaying his chest open to find a heart somehow still beating underneath, in spite of his best efforts.
When she sat across from him, the only sounds he could recall hearing were the lapping of the water and the small creatures coming alive after dark in the jungle.
It was the only peace he found on that godforsaken island.
He lost many nights–many blackened meals–to that smile. The only sweetness he’d tasted in ages, since long before rebellion and familiar bodies found hanging.
Undeserved yet she returned each night after.
And then there came the night the vision changed. She changed.
Her smile, interrupted.
It was a ship. He could hear it cutting through the calm of the night before he spotted its distant lights, the lanterns of the first watch floating like stars.
He did not recall much of what followed, just that she was gone, and he was alone again.
One of the sailors spotted his fire, and thus ended his exile. It was only when the ship dropped anchor at Port Royal that his reality sank in.
She was not coming back. His only comfort, the only reason to lift one foot in front of the other. To reach evening, when she would sit across from him, in hope and absolution.
Months passed reaching the bottom of countless bottles. He did not track the number of beatings endured when recognition flickered in the eyes of some drunkard and the familiar refrain of crew killer sounded.
Eventually on a day like any other, he woke up on the beach, sluggish and weak. He watched the ships in the harbour for a time until he heard his voice.
Gates.
He wanted to know what the fuck Billy was doing with himself. This is what he fought a war for? This?
He went on like that for some time, exasperated and loving. When he went quiet for long enough, Billy understood.
There was always chatter of crews seeking new men. It took some time before the right one came along–the one Gates approved. Leaning in and saying, yes, lad, that’s the one with a hand on Billy’s shoulder.
The ship was nothing special, but the thought of pushing his body to its limits again, the familiarity of it, appealed now.
And the ship regularly anchored in a port he'd never been, yet just the sound of it spoken aloud sparked something sharp and alive behind his ribs.
It would be his first time in Savannah.