light_mischief | [come sail away] ic inbox (season 1)

In her dreams, a girl obliterated paces the ocean floor. A ghost is a memory not yet reckoned with. The person who used to live here will never come up for air again.

Darcy's rest is patchy, but more than she's been getting. She sees his shape as she drifts in and out of consciousness, a sign she's being watched over, and the familiar sounds of weaponry being cleaned blurs here and home. For a moment she expects to see Avery and Kael cleaning their guns, discussing underworld politics and upcoming investigations while they think she's still asleep. But the room is silent but for the sound of sliding mechanisms, and the dead mostly remain where they are buried.

She pulls the blanket tighter, trying to blink away the bleariness, watching him for a moment without drawing attention to herself.

He's at it for longer than he might admit before he notices he's being watched, falling into the habit and focusing his attention solely on the task at hand. It's the same as doing a crossword puzzle or reading an airport paperback, and the repetitive, familiar habit manages to soothe him.

He does notice, eventually, though, and he tilts his head so that his empty eye sockets can meet her gaze. "Just in case," he says, although he knows she doesn't need any explanation.

"Just in case," she repeats.

Darcy sits herself up, rolling out her stiff neck and shoulders.

"I didn't just come here to nap. We should probably talk about what we learned at the party, get the story straight before too much else happens."

Skulduggery sighs. "We don't have to," he grumbles. Nonetheless, he sets his gun aside, settling with his arms on his knees. "But we should. Hm. Do you want to start, or shall I?"

Back home it wasn't all punching ghosts. Some of the dead had specific banes and powers that had to be worked around: dealing with a ghost out in a parking lot was much different to trying to move on a poltergeist entrenched in a haunted house. So it's fairly natural for her to launch right into it.

"I'll go first: I can't stab him."

She starts with, because hey, someone needs to state the obvious.

"Whatever he is, he isn't... tied to his form. He can change it, including how solid it is, and there's no lungs or anything internal. Maybe, or it could be he's too strong and I couldn't drown him yet."

She scrunches her face up as she tries to recall the conversation.

"He said a lot of edgy shit I didn't really pay attention to. It was all 'muahaha, I like evil people, I want to be entertained'. You know, bullshit. But... He offered me a bargain, when my sword was stuck in him, and I can't work it out."

To be fair to her, she did stab him. It just didn't have any effect. Skulduggery obviously isn't going to be the one to point that out, and anyway, the fact still remains that the form the captain wears now is apparently indestructible.

Well, not indestructible. He'd very clearly let himself be injured, and that wound hadn't regenerated as quickly as the others had. He doesn't know if more catastrophic damage would've done the trick. Maybe he should have tried, instead of... what the hell he decided to do.

"For what his word is worth, he said that was his form. 'Inasmuch as anything can be.' So either we need to find his weakness in this form, or somehow put him in another, more vulnerable one." Not that he likes that idea. It relies a lot more on rules from his reality than he'd prefer, and it also relies on some kind of host.

"...So, I should probably mention that his head was... darkness." Admitting that you recklessly stuck your hand into a cosmic headwound is best ripped off like a bandaid, apparently.

"And you trust him on that?"

It was a genuine question, albeit tinged heavily with her own disbelief. She admittedly wasn't a fan of the plan either; back home they had several centuries of ghost lore and information from other Krewes in case of particularly powerful ghosts. Here, what, were they going to spend hours seeing if he had a counting compulsion? Was repelled by bullets made of lead from a stained glass window? Was allergic to bananas?

But she settles in to listen when Skulduggery brings up the head wound.

"I saw Clarke crack his head open, and then... Honestly, I didn't look too hard at what you were doing, I didn't want to get puke on my suit."

"Yeah, I... Hm." Skulduggery has the good sense to seem embarrassed by the admission, tapping his feet in an arrhythmic beat. "I trust what he's told me is the truth, only because we don't have another option. It's not like I can ask Friday -- she's just a construct of his. It's the same as talking to his answering machine."

As to what he saw... "Maybe I should've been more careful, but he said it probably wouldn't hurt, and. Well, it didn't." He lifts the offending hand and wiggles his fingers. "Every phalanx accounted for. I... just sort of..." He mimes again with his fingers, "Wiggled them around a little."

He doesn't know how to explain it at all, but he tries vaguely anyway. "When I... touched it? I suppose? ...It affected my vision. Everything was this bright white, except for the people. And the captain."

"Please-" Darcy brought a hand to her mouth, "less wiggling."

She's seen some gross shit in her time, and while her mind may have hardened, her stomach had not. Even if the inside of his head was darkness and void and not... brain. Ugh. At least the ship hasn't had maggots anywhere aboard it yet.

"Okay- say more, what do you mean 'except for the people'?"

"What? It wasn't like there was anything in there." He shrugs, though, willing to oblige if only to keep his room vomit free a little longer. "Well -- the objects, all of the walls, everything was... white. But the people, they all... They were just..."

He waves his hands in a circle, like that's going to help him describe it, and finally settles on, "They were like... multicolored mosaics. I can't describe the colors. It was... all of them. He said the colors represented emotions, and the whole of the aura constituted our souls."

He pauses, then adds, "The captain himself was just... darkness. I have no clue as to why, or what that means, but it was the third... no, fourth most unsettling thing about the situation."

"That's worse- you get how that's worse, right?" she snaps, but drops the subject as soon as Skulduggery does.

"Huh."

Darcy briefly envisions herself as a swirling blue void, and decides not to actually ask if she looked sadder than everyone else in the room. Some things you suspect don't need confirmation.

"But the captain... was just dark. That's weird."

Darcy scrunches her face up.

"If my Geist was here, I could actually do something with that. Emotions were kind of his thing. Are kind of his thing."

He doesn't, actually, get how it's worse, but he's definitely not going to push the subject!

"To be honest, I think it's the one thing that makes sense about him. Of course a man obsessed with collecting human emotion is devoid of any himself." Unless it's the other way around, but considering he hadn't dipped his fingers into a puddle of gouache...

"And if that's the case, then maybe that's precisely the reason why your Geist isn't here." Because if he was, then of course they'd have a new edge on the captain, possibly more than he'd be willing to test at a dinner party.

There were probably a number of reasons that her Geist wasn't here. Not least of all because of the comfort it brought her; the torture at the party wouldn't have been torture if he was there to keep her steady.

"So... he wants our emotions. That's not really all that surprising. Fuck, back home we had to deal with plenty of ghosts who just wanted to feel something for the last time. But obviously we can't just give him our emotions. If he's been taking them for however long he's been running this thing, it obviously doesn't work. He's still empty."

Darcy trailed her fingers up and down the flat of the blade, calling to memory the Captain's blood on the metal surface. Idly she hoped that tide-cutter had gotten a taste for it.

"I wonder if something happened to him. You wouldn't... pick this for yourself, would you?"

"No," Skulduggery quickly replies, a knee-jerk reaction more than an honest response. After a beat, he repeats the word more firmly, a little more sure of himself. "No. I don't think so. Even when my family was killed, even after Serpine killed me, I... I just wanted revenge. I didn't want... all of this."

But, of course, he had wanted power. He'd needed power. He'd needed to be able to crush the people in his way. Even when he'd forgotten who his rage was supposed to be for, he'd wanted to be stronger. Every mountain has a summit.

"It's not always about choice, though. Sometimes, things... escalate. You don't notice what's happening until it's already too late to stop it."

She listens intently, a growing sense of concern unable to be masked on her face.

"What... do you mean?"

It's a non-sequitur, she doesn't understand why he'd connect himself to the Captain like this, and she doesn't like the vague shapes her mind is grasping at to fill in the gap.

"I- what? You're nothing like the Captain, of course you wouldn't want this."

"No, no. Of course I wouldn't." He doesn't like boats, for one thing. Doesn't like water at all. "I'm only saying, if he was a man to begin with, he might not have started down this path with all of this in mind."

He really, really doesn't know. All the information is out there -- but he keeps making stupid mistakes, asking the wrong questions, never pressing hard enough. Like he's afraid of some kind of consequence.

"I'm nothing like the captain," he adds. It feels necessary to point out -- and he doesn't like that necessity. "I would never trap people for my own entertainment."

"Well, good."

There's... something here. Some tension, some evasiveness that she feels deep in her gut. Like picking up on subtle tells before someone's about to strike, something instinctive. And because she knows him, knows he's slippery and doesn't like saying things bluntly. But she's got nothing to actually pin him on, and like always Darcy wishes she was more clever. If it were the other way around, Skulduggery would've found some way in and flayed her open by now, pulling secrets like teeth from her. She hated feeling like she wasn't on the same footing as the people around her.

"What reason would anyone have to do this? Even if he didn't think it would end up like this exactly, I can't... understand it."

"Neither can I." At least he's sure of that. "I thought the whole point was to drive us mad and then kill us to harvest the energy. But that's not it at all."

If it was, he would have poisoned the lobster or encouraged somebody to set fire to the room. He would have killed Darcy, taken something from her. Maybe give them a display of his ability to reanimate their corpses after being torn apart.

"I have no idea what he's doing," Skulduggery admits. "I genuinely thought he would have done something to us at the dinner. I thought..." He tilts his head, remembering something Darcy had said just a minute ago. "You said he offered you a bargain, right? What kind of bargain?"

"Once he had my sword stuck in him, he... asked what it was worth to me. Why I should get it back. I offered... a week of solitary confinement, and all he wanted was for me to beg and say please. And don't get me wrong, it fucking sucked, but I don't get it. Why wouldn't he take the thing that would hurt me more?"

"Who knows," Skulduggery groans, tilting his head back briefly towards the ceiling. "Maybe he thought begging would be worse? Maybe... instant gratification?" That one feels a little more realistic, at least.

"You being stuck in your room all week would have been boring. Having you beg in front of everybody for your sword back was more fun. It could be as simple as that." That's been the only standard that's held true so far, anyway.

"It's not a fucking holiday, and it wouldn't have been boring for him. Have you been locked somewhere with only your own thoughts for a week? It's fucking hell. So either-"

Darcy's indignation at the idea of her own suffering being boring simmered down a little.

"Either he's not as omnipotent on the ship as we think he is, or he doesn't want to just see us relive shit we've already been through."

He leans heavily on his elbows, rolling both options over. "If it were about repeating trauma, then it would stand to reason that no two excursions going forward will be the same." At least that would mean they'd be less likely to be forced to kill one another.

"He can travel around the ship, be anywhere he wants whenever he wants, but maybe that's it. He'd have to be near you to enjoy the fruits of your torment." He thinks that over a little more and realizes, well, obviously. There's already one thing Skulduggery knows about the ship that the captain seemingly doesn't...

He stands abruptly and goes over to the dresser, pulling open the third drawer to reveal the pictures, his second gun, the ammunition and, tucked neatly away beside his holsters, the lei he'd been given at the muster drill.

"He didn't know about this," he says, lifting the thing up between his fingers. Not bringing it out of the drawer, though -- the paranoia's set in deep, unfortunately, but maybe right now caution is best.

She nods along with what he's saying, and then when he seems to... fiddle with something in the drawer without taking it out, she stands up from the couch to get a look at it.

"Okay- I'm going to ask about why you have a bunch of us in your drawer in a bit, but what do you mean he didn't know about this? I thought Friday gave them to us, why wouldn't he...?"

He tilts his head very slightly upward, his own way of rolling his eyes. But she's right, the pictures can wait.

"When I first spoke to him, I was asking about the resurrection process. I was convinced it had something to do with the leis, you see -- maybe they bound our spirits, somehow, or otherwise kept us impervious to actual death. But when I asked about them, he didn't know what I was talking about."

He doesn't answer her trailing question, because frankly, he doesn't know. "I don't remember anything special about it at the time."

She gives him a small bump on the arm with her elbow, because fuck you Skulduggery don't roll your orbitals at her.

Still, Darcy had barely paid attention to her lei when she first got it. She was too fuming with outrage to even entertain looking at it, and now seeing it again was... weird. Had there always been lotus seeds on them? And what about the white disks?

Failing any other method of investigation, she leans into the drawer and attempts to put one of the white disks between her teeth.

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