“Clearly I didn’t,” The words were spat out before he could think, “Or this – none of this – would be a fucking issue right now.” If he had done his best he wouldn’t have gotten sucked in on the mad scheme to begin with. He didn’t even know why he was telling Flint all of this, when the best he could hope for was the man getting incensed enough to storm back to the Walrus and demand his fucking job back – rendering Silver useless in the process, no doubt.
There was nothing to gain in revealing failures to this man – but at the same time he honestly couldn’t tell any longer if the crew was so much to lose. They were hardly good men – not that Silver himself could boast any better now – and as it stood the only real value they offered was in the value they gave to Silver, which was a terrible thing he always had to fight and lie and cheat and steal to maintain. It was that, or pity, and that was not a medicine he intended to swallow any time soon.
“I see two paths before me,” He shifted, managing to contain a grimace as the ache in his leg spiked all the way to his hip with the motion, going quiet a moment as he forced himself to breathe through it – making it look like it was for effect rather than adjustment to the searing light in his fucking skull. “Either I lie, and claim repairs for the ship under the wing and prayer of hope that nobody questions why we were in a position to be hounded by 24-pounders in the first place – or, I wash my hands of all this and play the same card as you. And right now that latter idea is looking mighty appealing.”
The Walrus maintained itself in Nassau under the bullshit premise that everyone aboard that ship was now a merchant for ‘His Majesty’ through the ordinance of one Woodes Rogers. So long as that remained true, there was no hard feelings apparently. Of course any act of piracy done by those who now bore those pardons meant hanging without trial, and no pirate ship was packing 24-pound guns anywhere in this area.
Some of mister majesty’s frigates, however….
Silver sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. It had been foolish for any man to think the Walrus capable of taking that damn ship, regardless of the wealth of the prize aboard her he should have deterred the men better, rather than letting the damn quartermaster rile them up. If he’d tried harder in that moment none of them would be in this position now, and some part of him honestly hated how easy and tempting it still was to run off and abandon them all to their twisted fates.
“Or alternatively,” The words seemed to fight their way past the grit of his teeth, his reluctance was so great, “I could do both.”
Ocean Archive 