Tag: intolerablexsacrifice

✖ : Describe a way to make them uneasy or apprehensive. – for abigail!

{ Headcanon Requests }

Following the events of Charlestown, Abigail responds to matters around herself very differently. Prior to being kidnapped by Lowe, held in a dungeon by Vane, sailing with Flint and his crew, she was positively petrified of pirates and anyone who looked like they could be a pirate. 

Her father made them all out to be terrible, evil men who would burn, rape, and pillage anywhere they went – and that nobody was ever safe from their monstrous ways. That nobody could be, until all pirates were eradicated from the seas. 

Back then, all it took was being impoverished to unnerve Abigail, who in her sheltered life had little means or reason to recognize the differences between poor and dangerous when both were described in the same ugly terms and descriptions. 

Following her ordeal however, she began to look at her world more critically as much out of her newfound disillusionment as out of a need to survive. Depending on the course she chooses ( be it surgeon or author ) the things that unnerve her vastly differ. 

To the surgeon, blood and gore hold little sway over her, and men she recognizes as violent and controlling toward women are met with a wary eye and a waiting blade. What concerns the surgeon is being found out in her own acts of silent, brutal murder. Her brand of justice requires an answer sooner rather than later, and being confronted with suspicions about her work and method is far more likely to make her nervous than unwanted advances. 

Conversely, the author never obtained that same level of anger and hardness. She exorcises her demons every single day, and works hard to hold together the fabric of a world now torn, by weaving her narrative and hoping to find some semblance of peace. She does not fear death or pain – there is a horrible numbness within her that makes her face the threat of either with a cool, almost dissociative logic. 

She feels like a ghost in her own skin and is convinced any physical suffering she faces now is meaningless in the grand scheme of her story. She is too lost and depressed to care – that is not to say she seeks out pain, or that she wishes for death. It is simply that the threat of these things do not move her, and her utterly emotionless response to them tends to be eerie enough to protect her, in the end. 

She fears confrontations with her characters – is made most uneasy by the thought of discussing her inspirations with the men who inspired her in the first place. She is set on edge when asked about her thoughts and ambitions with her writing – in truth, talking about her works in general tends to bother her. She is losing her grip on the will and ability to converse with other people, losing herself to the world she is creating to supplant the one that she lives in, and the idea that she may be forced to face the reality of the men she has created is somewhat petrifying. 

۞: Are there any inner demons they can never seem to get rid of? What are they? – for silver!

{ Headcanon Requests }

Silver’s greatest fear throughout his time alongside Flint was that one day, the man would learn the truth of him – and all would be lost. Knowing himself as he did, Silver knew it would be more profitable for Flint to dispose of him than it would ever be to keeping him around – especially after he learned the truth of the man’s past. Although he weaponized that truth immediately, there was a small part of him that did so knowing full well that were their situations reversed, Flint would do the exact same. 

Silver never once deluded himself into thinking he had value to Flint in any capacities outside of that of tool. Once he as a tool ceased to be of any use to Flint, he would be discarded as Gates was. Considering the origins of their relationship, the idea of trusting Flint not to turn on him in the end was as mad to Silver as the fact Flint seemed to willfully allow himself to be lead by the nose at times. 

In truth, Silver believed that part of why he got away with the things he did was because Flint considered him valuable enough at the time to excuse it. So long as he maintained usefulness, he was untouchable – there was just no telling when that usefulness might slip, and for that reason, Silver never once allowed himself to offer Flint so much as a single hint to who he had been prior to becoming John Silver in the first place. 

Because even when he held Flint’s secrets in one hand, he knew those secrets would not destroy Flint the way his own secrets could be his complete undoing. Even once he knew Thomas Hamilton was alive, he had no guarantee he would be able to fully eradicate the threat Flint posed overall – because for as close as he got to Flint, as much as he hated to admit it, Flint in turn got close to him. 

In short, Silver’s greatest demon throughout the entire story was both himself and Flint, and when the tale reaches its conclusion, there is a possibility that both demons could be faced – but it is, in all honesty, incredibly unlikely either man would allow for it. 

♥ : Name one thing about the way their emotions work that they despise. – for thomas!

{ Headcanon Requests }

After his time in the plantation, Thomas comes to realize rather swiftly that things he thought he missed – things he truly believed would bring him comfort – proved instead to be stifling and difficult to maintain and manage. This built within him a well of frustration and bitterness to which he had no true outlet that felt quite right or suitable to the situation. 

He felt strangled by the expectation to be unchanged when in truth, he was nothing like what he used to be. And every time he felt himself grow frustrated with simple tasks that had once been methodical, natural parts of daily living, he was forcibly reminded of the fact there was no turning back the clock. 

He hated remembering as much as he hated being frustrated and bitter. It was a compounded anger, cyclical and damaging as a hurricane inside of him. Although in various verses he does learn to find means and manners of managing and healing ( or compartmentalizing ) it is an early point of disaster that lingers and has occasional moments of returning to the fore, leading to enormous blowouts if only because of how long it has been since he felt himself spinning apart again. 

♡ : Is there a certain scent that brings about nostalgia? If so, describe a memory this scent brings back. – for gates!

{ Headcanon Requests }

Hal is not the most sentimental person. Leading the kind of life he does, he has learned not to get overly attached to material matters and to focus instead on immediate survival as well as long term planning. He has a frugal nature, and works hard to maintain a lifestyle that will be sustainable once he reaches a point where he has to retire from seafaring. He even has some coin stashed away in various places, waiting for him to gather up when the time comes. 

The point he is at by the time our story starts is fairly close to the end of the road for Hal. He’s reached the point where he is ready to put an end to tromping around after younger men at sea, and set up shop somewhere. Legitimate business along the shore, be it a bar or an inn – maybe both, if he can swing it – but ultimately speaking, Hal does not want to go inland. 

The smell of the sea itself is home to him – the sound of the waves as well. When he can no longer smell the brine or hear the crash, he grows uncomfortable – doesn’t feel right inside without those particular sensory inputs. He feels half whole without them, which is part of why he has pushed his career so damn long – he wants to make certain he has enough money to settle in a port city, because anything else just wouldn’t be worth living.

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.” 

violence & weakness

intolerablexsacrifice:

~

When Gates questioned him, Flint simply gave him a look.

There was a deadness to the captain’s eyes; a lack of the wild spark that usually flared in him in the aftermath of violence, both during and after the inevitable speeches and justifications. Enough time had passed that his heart was no longer pounding in his chest, breath coming easily instead of in short pants. Blood had dried and crusted on the sleeves of his shirt, and lightly spattered the rest of him.

Gates’ hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Flint went without protest, desiring nothing more than to be away from the deck. It wasn’t the gore, or the stench of blood and emptied bowels. It was the men, and their eyes on him, and the constant ticking of his mind trying to calculate what they believed to be true about him at any given moment.

He closed the door behind himself, watching Gates’ back, eyes drifting over the Eye of Horus tattoo on the back of his quartermaster’s neck. Flint pulled his gaze away, felt himself start moving to find one of the bottles of rum stashed around the cabin, trusting Gates to procure tankards without being asked. He wiped his hands free of blood momentarily, ignoring how stained the rest of him was with it. His hands had thankfully stopped shaking long before he started pouring the rum.

That rigid posture all but collapsed when Flint finally sank to sit. One hand curled around the tankard, but his eyes were on Gates- watching, calculating, perhaps wondering if he should expect an argument to arise out of whatever conversation they were about to have. The fingers of his free hand fidgeted restlessly at his beard.

“Did you know the crew thought I was hunting poor prizes because I was too weak to do otherwise?”

Aye, something’s broken in him alright, Hal mused in the wake of that look, as if he needed it on top of the silence and the disengaged remark from earlier. Guiding the captain out of sight was as much for the sake of privacy as it was for the assurance that the crew would not pick up on anything more unusual than they already had. They were sniffing and itching for a sign of weakness they could exploit, and he’d be damned before he let them get it this easily. 

It was a habitual dance, then. Each of them going about the routine of drinking, neither one of them particularly game for a joyous bout of it and both completely aware that this was more an act of methodical familiarity than it was a desire they needed to slake. What came next would be dictated by Flint, and the stories he told between the words that fell from his lips. 

The collapse into the chair was a hint that this had every chance of ending amicably. That alone was what had Hal lounge easily enough, indicating in his own posture that nothing was amiss. He could tell he was being measured, even as he made no secret of the fact he was cataloguing every fidget shown and calculating an answer based on what Flint offered him.

Rather than answer the accusation, he drew up his tankard and drank – as if the question bore no significance to him, or perhaps as though he needed the strength of the drink to challenge it. Letting the question of which be Flint’s to mull over, he lowered the drink and huffed as if amused. “You can’t expect me to believe it’s gone on this long and you’ve only just picked up on it.” 

There were those among the crew who would never lay voice to something so ridiculous. Men who had been with Flint through thick and thin, who had been part of his crew when he began forging his name as the biggest earner in Nassau, a ruthless prize catcher with a crew as focused and unyielding as he. So long as they stood true, it had seemed Flint had no interest in assuaging anyone’s nerves or concerns. 

But it was strange, and even the loyal were beginning to question what had happened. When the best among them went into a slump this long, it generally meant he wasn’t the best anymore. With nothing to prove otherwise, it was no wonder the men who were newer to the crew were beginning to spread this kind of shit. 

“If you don’t like it, you might want to consider changing the game up,” He pointed out grimly. “These men want to be paid, and yes – yes – what we’re chasing will answer every prayer they’ve ever had chance to dream of, but if you’re going to hold it to your chest like this, if you want a crew to profit when that day comes, feeding them some bones along the way can’t possibly hurt.” 

The Challenge In Our Promises

@intolerablexsacrifice continued from [x]

Hal had known something was wrong from the very start, but he had seen no point in pressing the issue early on. Orchestrating the men in arranging the storage after such a lucrative prize took precedence, and by focusing on the work at hand it kept anyone’s attention off the fact that anything could be wrong in the wake of such a victory as this one. 

Now that everything was underway and time had worn itself on, Hal could no longer delay the inevitable. While he wasn’t entirely certain what he would find when he went to check on the captain, he would be lying if he claimed to expect anything even remotely like this. 

Looking at him now, Hal was struck by how fucking young this man truly was. It was easy to overlook sometimes – others it didn’t even register, because he carried the weight of the world so damn well that the chasm of experience between them seemed nonexistent. This though – it was hard to ignore it in a moment like this one. 

Locking the door was the first most logical step. The men didn’t need to know, or suspect for even a moment, that Flint couldn’t carry this. That there was anything broken in the man would only be fuel for dissent. It didn’t matter how good a strategist a man was aboard ships like these – weakness, perceived or otherwise, was exploited or it bred destruction. There was rarely any inbetween, for captains at any rate. Neither one of them could afford word to spread that Flint had lost track of himself this way.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” His words were gruff, his motions economical as he set about getting a wash basin set up. He did not approach the spot where Flint had cornered himself, trusting the man to uncoil on his own terms and knowing that approaching while he was in a state like this would only exacerbate the situation. 

Only once he had everything in order – including some spare clothes laid out – did he finally step into the man’s view. This could go one of two ways, from Hal’s experience. After a moment of ensuring Flint saw him, he stepped into striking distance fearlessly and crouched down, offering out a cloth without mockery or comment toward the man’s position just now. Instead, he spoke of business matters as though nothing at all was unusual at present.

“We’ve got ourselves a steady wind. Provided she keeps up, at this rate we should make Nassau in about three days. The men are righteously pleased with themselves, but not so much they won’t keep things running right amidst their celebrations.”  

“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.