“Could not have been easy coming here. Must have taken great strength.” [ for surgeon!abigail ]

“You speak as though you left me any choice but this life I am now bound to,” Abigail’s soft tones had died in the same fires that stole away all she had ever known. The words were clipped as they were cold, leaving no doubt that whatever strength she had found had not come from kind places.

Tapping her fingers idly against the table, her gaze finally lifted to meet his, unafraid and calm in a den of pirates when not so long ago, the mere sight of an ill dressed man could have filled her entire being with terror. “I suppose I could have died – that certainly would have been a cleaner end to the Charlestown chapter of your career, I am sure.”

Soft lips curved into a smile that held the echoes of her past life – falsely pretty, an expression meant to placate older gentlemen when her words were too rash, reminding them she was little more than a silly girl who knew nothing of what she spoke of. Yet there was something sharp and brittle in the corners of her lips, as if poison welled in the corners and lay in wait for the prime opportunity to strike.

“My refusal to perish could be strength – or it could simply be stubbornness. My father was a notoriously stubborn man,” The tapping stopped, and she did not yield in that moment, nor did she shy away from bringing up her father to this man in particular. If anything, it seemed a bald faced challenge – a test, though of what only she could tell. “So I imagine I would come by it honestly, if that were the case.”

She leaned back, surveying the room behind him, the sounds of men as they ate and drank, enjoying their time ashore, providing ample ambiance to what could have been a volatile conversation. Yet her body language was at ease, as if whatever she and Flint were discussing happened to be as light as the laughter rising from a nearby gambling table, or the disjointed singing at the bar courtesy of several sailors having enjoyed a bit too much of their gold in rum.

“Personally I don’t attribute my return here to strength, Mr. Flint, so much as opportunity. Considering the reputation I now carry, honest work in my field is rather difficult to come by – at least in any lasting sense. All it would take is one fool to recognize me, and I’d be back to the gallows.” She wondered if he even knew what they said about her, or if she had been as unremarkable to him as every other innocent who had suffered his wrath that day. In the end she supposed it didn’t matter. His remorse or lack thereof would change nothing. “It seemed to me the wisest course to take. If I am to live my life this way I might as well come to the place that started it all and make them pay for it.”

Here, she laughed, as if only just realizing the other meaning those words could carry. “In gold, of course. I still have to eat, after all, and I find there’s little profit to be made in vengeance. I can’t remember who taught me that, but I do recall it to be a rather unforgettable lesson.” Her expression held no innocence – there was no question where she picked up that particular bit of wisdom, after all.

“There is suffering too terrible to name.” [ for abigail, while they’re sailing to charlestown :’) ]

{ Hamilton Starters }

His words stir something, almost like a memory. There is no name for it, none that she can conjure. Being on this ship has caused her to see many things in different ways, to take chances she never would have dared to consider before. There was something – liberating – about being able to speak one’s mind, to ask questions that were perhaps too bold for polite company, and know that it would not be seen in a scandalous light.

Lines could still be crossed – there were always lines that could be crossed – but here, on this ship, Abigail could test the true limits of curiosity without fearing the loss of something intangible like a reputation or a good name. It wasn’t proper, perhaps – but what was proper among pirates?

“Is that why you became a pirate?” While her nerve remained strong enough, Abigail pushed on, “To escape suffering – or to cause it in turn?” She did not ask this to be cruel – rather, she wanted to understand more about the man Mrs Hamilton – or rather, Miss Barlow – had turned to in her hour of need. The man who had hunted down the Hamiltons – the man whose name was synonymous with so many terrible things, who in turn was both so terribly sad and kind despite his reputation.

Nothing Left To Lose

@intolerablexsacrifice continued from [x]

Her words had been deliberate – conversation was too difficult for her now, not to choose exactly the right things to say in the hopes of concluding it quickly. All she truly desired was some means of silencing the thoughts in her mind, and though a part of her thought perhaps talking to someone might help exorcise them as surely as writing did, in the end those words would die on her throat and fill her mouth with ash.

So when he asked her where her certainty came from, she did not wish to answer. She feared the truth would die on her tongue, but looking at him – knowing the danger in him was still as real as the violence inside her mind – she found she was not afraid to air the shadows between them.

“Because it wouldn’t gain you anything. There’s no purpose – no vengeance to be found in hurting me. Even if you were to do it – all you could do, would be to assault me physically. I have nothing that you could burn or destroy that has any value to me any longer. Everything that used to matter, you either exposed or ruined. All that’s left is my body, and my life. And they don’t mean enough to you, or England, or anyone, for you to bother breaking.”

“I’m still struggling to believe any of this is real.” [ for author abigail! ]

{ Profound & Emotional | Always Accepting }

The book beneath his hand was of course familiar to her – she had an intimate awareness of the covers designed to house her writings, having such a defining role in their production as she did. The moment she had seen it laid upon the table, Abigail had known there would be questions – curiosities – from the man who starred so prominently in that particular tale.

She had never considered the possibility that he might read them – not because she considered him an unlearned man, for she had seen the books that had lined his cabin with her own eyes and known many of them to be of academic importance to a more philosophical crowd of men – but because she had not considered stories such as these to hold any interest to a man who lived them, and whose taste in literature seemed so advanced beyond what she would ever be capable of producing.

What was more, she had never believed they would meet again, least of all under these circumstances. She didn’t fully know the truth of his retirement, only that it was clear to her that it had done something to bring a softness out in him she had never seen before. It left her in a strange position, for though she knew he was bound to start asking these questions – she still had no easy answers to offer.

“What is real about it?” Turning this around was perhaps the only hope she had of explaining anything to one of the few people alive in this world, who would know that her tales were not woven from imagination – not entirely. “All stories are just that, are they not? Embellishments and lies – even when they tell an honest truth, they must be made dishonest to tell it.”

Indeed – that particular book was the most honest retelling of the events of Charlestown she had ever written. Even now, the demons exorcised onto those pages left her raw. They still screamed inside of her, but their power had waned since she had granted them voices upon those pages.

The names were all different. Of the people and the ships, of the town and even of smaller things, like the streets. Yet it was the same story as her own – a girl stolen away by monsters, who later discovers the monster had been the one beside her all her life. Whose whispers had made her afraid, and whose crimes cost a town everything. It was one of the very, very few stories where the character most resembling Barlow died, and the only time – in any of her stories – that character died in so haunting and tragic a manner as the truthful one.

The tale built a sympathy for pirates that made it one of her less popular works. She was glad of it, for it meant few people sent letters to her pseudonym inquiring of it. Few people shining light on the demons that bled through those pages, strongest when they rose unexpectedly back to the ink in her well, demanding she bleed them out again, to poison another story.

“If that story bothers you, I’ve written others that tell different truths.” She offered quietly, thinking of one of her more popular works, which had become a short series about a mercenary who could not forgive the death of a mother any more than she could forgive the destruction of a town. Or perhaps the tales in which a woman holds her temper and metes out justice against all who had done her wrong.

Both of those stories were lies formed of wishful thinking, and the demons in them were mere shades of what came out in stories that held closer to the truth – but those demons were just as real. For there was a part of her that wished for the strength of the mercenary who breathed out her anger and loss in every violent action – a part of her that dreamed of a world where Barlow was alive and those who spread their lies were punished for it.

But neither world or woman was real. Neither of those stories would ever be as compelling as the ones about Captain Redbeard, nor any as haunting and painful as the time he tried to stop being a pirate, only to remember why he became one in the first place. He was a man of truth – a man who accepted there was darkness in the world and chose to face it, to defeat it where he could – but never lie about where it came from, or who spread it.

He had turned to liars in the hopes of becoming one himself – a man claiming to repent so that he may know peace – and that betrayal of himself was what cost him so dearly, even as it woke other characters to the reality he so often told them was there. Those who speak the most loudly, the most angrily of monsters – tend to be shrouding the fact that they, themselves, are the beasts one should fear above all others.

“It is but one truth as I see it. That doesn’t make it real to anyone but me.” She concluded softly, folding her hands in her lap to keep from fidgeting with them. “I am – sorry,” She added, feeling compelled to acknowledge the one demon they both shared, a woman whose kindness had been an impossible strength. A woman who, when finally pushed beyond the edge of her patience, was so cruelly and abruptly silenced by her own death, in a house where civilization dictated she ought to have been safe from such awful violence. “If the echoes of it are too true for you, as well. I cannot promise not to write of it again, if that is – why you are here.”

It burned inside of her, the need to keep that woman’s story alive even if all she knew of her was the last. There were times when Abigail felt as though she could not breathe for the sounds of the monsters inside of her were so cacophonous a riot, and if she did not let them scream, then surely the one who would start would be she. And she knew – she knew what happened to people who screamed at their demons no one else could see – so when those days hit, she would pick up her quill, and pour them into the ink. Until the day those demons were finally quiet, she could not promise anyone, not even him that she would, or even could, stop telling their stories.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” [ for author!Abigail B) ]

{ Hamilton Starters | Accepting }

The rhythmic scratching of her quill came to a halt, the ink drying in the wake of her consideration toward his words. It was always this way now, feeling as though conversation was trapped somewhere inside of her, locked beneath the screams that still bubbled inside of her throat. As though if she were to risk parting her lips and let any sound escape at all, she must be certain to have the right words and only them – for to linger, to let noise froth itself forward she risked the wave of raw horror breaking past behind each syllable.

It was an unbearable existence at times like these, when an answer was expected and the art of conversation was believed to be something one did not forget after learning it the once. With care, she set her pen into its hold, fingers reaching for dust to aid the ink in drying as though these meticulous and methodical actions could bring to bear a storm too great for one soul alone to carry.

“It is where I feel safe,” She offered him the truth, though there were more things she could say, to clarify it. Simplicity in times of great internal chaos was, perhaps, the mortar upon which the dam within her was built. “The more that I write, the quieter it gets inside of me.”

Finally, she looked over at him, once more allowing herself to see the man the pirate had become. It was strange – unnerving, even – to see in him the return of a softness she could feel slipping from her own grasp with every passing day. The good of the world was returning for him – and she hoped it would continue to treat him kindly. She did not begrudge him, though she did hope she could learn from him some means of strength, some capacity to hold on to the light that seemed to be growing dimmer with every nightmarish memory.

“It is too loud, still, for me to stop.” That she feared it may never again grow quiet, she had not the power or will to admit.