Chapter seventeen - I'm a goner

i am genuinely sorry for this lol

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Gerard cried. He grabbed at my shoulders, body shaking and breath tearing from his throat in gasps, white skin even paler than usual and his ordinarily sturdy jacket crumpling as he folded in on himself. And he cried. He was distraught.

The thin night air swirled coldly in my lungs, and a horrible sense of dissociation suffocated my veins. I felt numb.

Gerard, meanwhile, seemed to be feeling everything at once. In his state of utter distress, he barely even bothered to stifle his cries. It was close to early morning, but the stars were still up, so it couldn't have been later than dawn. Gerard had woken me when he hadn't known who else to go to– he had a fearsome reputation to uphold, but since he knew I already viewed him as a pathetic, irritating lump, he didn't seem to mind me seeing him at his lowest.

And this most certainly was his lowest. His body was wracked with tremors, and his dark hair was plastered to his forehead with cold sweat. He avoided my gaze, but I watched him ceaselessly, and when our eyes finally locked, he looked weaker than I'd ever seen him. Well, I'm not sure I had ever seen him look truly weak before at all. All his defences had been battered down, and his cynical façade had been snapped in two.

Not unlike Ryan's neck.

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The body hung from the rafters by a coarse length of rope, knotted deftly with the skills of an experienced pirate, but with the strange elegance that Ryan put into everything he did, that could only suggest that the man's life had been taken by his own hands.

His face was blanched white, and the glowing colour that always rose in his cheeks on fresh mornings had been bitten away by the slice of the rope around his throat.

Ryan was dead.

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A note scrawled on a torn page of Gerard's sketching paper was clutched in Gerard's hands when I carried myself back up to the deck.

"He told them," Gerard rasped, pressing his back against the cold rails of the deck. "He was the one who helped the Hangmen escape, and he was the one who told them our course."

I sank down next to the shell of a man that had once been Gerard. "Why?" I asked, almost inaudibly.

"Money," Gerard laughed, without a hint of mirth. "He just did it for silver."

I sought consoling words, but none arose. My mouth was dry, and I struggled to breathe in the stifling night air. Despite my personal feelings towards him, I knew Ryan had always been a loyal and forgiving man.

"Why would he betray us?" Gerard whispered, voicing my thoughts. "How could he? We were so close to getting what we wanted."

I watched the dead and desolate black ocean over the rails of the ship, having turned to kneel at the edge of the deck to face away from Gerard. Confusion and the weight of a hundred questions bore on my shoulders, all my thoughts fighting to surface, but pushing me down to drown in the process.

"What made him do it?" Gerard asked, his tone rising as tears seared his eyes and the aching of loss pinched at his throat. "What could have brought him to kill himself?"

A slow breath dragged its way out of my chest and past my dry lips. "Guilt," I said. That was all it could be, I was sure– and if not, at least the lie would probably be of some consolation to Gerard. "He thought he could go through with it, but he couldn't," I reinstated.

Ineffably consuming guilt, I supposed miserably, was a fairly good explanation for Ryan's suicide– but what I couldn't understand was how he'd managed to bring himself to betray and practically wish death upon the man he loved. If he'd even really loved Gerard. Gerard had certainly been convinced so.

I kept these thoughts quiet, not wanting to cause Gerard further distress. He was a ruin without the added worry that he was never even really cared for.

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We docked at the next port we passed, and Dewees carried the bundle that was Ryan's body to shore. We followed in the ship's rowboats, and watched resolutely from the sea coast as James built the skeleton of a fire with dead branches, and set Ryan's limp form alight on top of it.

Gerard remained unnervingly calm throughout the whole ordeal. Since his breakdown last night he had not spoken, nor eaten, nor had he moved at all except when Dewees led him into a rowboat. He didn't even cry as he watched the strong boy he had cared for be consumed by the flames and reduced to nothing but ash.

I stared bluntly as Ryan disappeared from the earth and the last intact part of Gerard's heart went with him– yet still, in a sight I was almost scared witnessing, even through this, Gerard did not break. He remained silent, the ghost of a spark still lingering in his eyes. But I could see the violence crashing through his blood and his mind, and I knew it wouldn't be long before it burned up and spilled over– and much sooner than we could prepare for.

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I'd thought it impossible for the stability of our lives on the ship to deteriorate even further, but as usual, I'd underestimated God, or karma, or Davey Jones, or whatever deity currently had control of the universe.

Somebody up there really must have hated me.

The Aurora attacked three days after Ryan's death. It was hellish. And the thing was, even though all my battles were now fought on the side of the Freighter's crew, and all our thoughts were shared, the captain still had yet to tell me exactly why the Aurora were so intent on slaughtering us all. I knew why we hated them– they took Gerard's brother. But what did they have against us? Surely they knew what they had done, and, if they had any common sense, would want to stay away?

Worthless and curious questions bubbled up in my mind, but now was not a time for thinking. Now was only a time for fighting. And that I did, along with every trained man on the ship– except for the most skilled of all.

Gerard sat on the floor, leaning against the mast, and stared into the nothingness between his sagging form and the vicious battle taking place a stone's throw away. I stopped, mid-fight, and skidded towards him, halting only to stab an enemy fighter in the neck. I knelt hastily beside him and shook him by the shoulders, checked his hands for ropes or chains, but found him perfectly conscious and free to move.

But yet again, to my dismay, his mind was elsewhere, far away from the lethal battleground in which his body had been set down. Daggers rang with a sharp metal screech, shrapnel hailed through the thick and smothering air, and I defended myself and what was left of Gerard with frantic slices of my sword at everyone who crossed our path.

Gerard was heavy. Heavier now than he had been when I'd had to help him to his room after half falling asleep on me. Now, he might as well have been unconscious. Or dead. He could barely walk for himself, but I'd be damned if I was going to carry him straight through the middle of a fight. I batted at his arm, trying to coax some sense into him, to no avail. So I dragged him across the side of the deck and supported him with my one arm, and flailed my sword in the direction of the Aurora's men with my other hand.

It was an honest-to-god miracle that neither of us died. And it was an even more spectacular phenomenon that nobody followed when I stumbled through Gerard's cabin door with him hanging off my shoulders. But what shocked me the most was the look of absolute panic in the man's eyes as soon as the door was shut; Gerard had never so much as flinched before in the face of death– and now he was a child, pleading me to keep the Aurora out with glistening, fearful eyes. In that moment I couldn't do anything but agree.

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this is probably gonna be my last update before i go on retreat. bye bye, wifi. hello veganism, stargazing with my ipswich buddies, notebooks and cRAFTING. (literally. not in the dan and phil sense.)

love you.

xoxo