#my eyes hurt and my brain goes brr but im not manic so thats a plus

[lupismaris]

The Opening Act of Spring- a Black Sails Fic. Chapter 1.

The Silverflinthamilton modern au that I’ve been drawing for over a year (where Flint owns a gay bar) is being written! Set five-ish years after a modern canon which will be somewhat told through flashbacks and exposition.

(Chapter one of idk how many but until more is written it’s going to live entirely on tumblr. )

Somewhere in the Village, Silver was counting Rolex and Cartier wristwatches, drop diamond earrings, plated gold layered necklaces, and birkins that were made to look well worn. He was counting, and noting the clear bell-like tone of the glass ware as it clinked together- crystal, the real stuff with the faintest etchings, but understated enough to look like it belonged in an effortless rooftop lounge. He didn’t usually enjoy rooftops, the only way out was the elevator unless he wanted to make an outfit change and that was usually too much work, and most rooftops only had one reserved for the restaurant, bar, or lounge. It was poor design for emergencies, poorer still for anyone looking to make a clean exit.

“Oh, enough already.”

Silver blinked and the room around him hummed loudly, violently, back to life, the carefully selected sounds of glassware and certain voices drowned out by a wave of noise.

Rackham sat across the small marble topped table, dressed neatly in a silk shirt that was unbuttoned nearly to the navel, tight high wasted trousers that made him seem even taller than he already was, and an assortment of jewelry that Silver knew half belonged to his sister. The exasperated look on his face, and the amusement that couldn’t be hidden behind his rose tinted glasses, made Silver smile.

“Sorry. Old habits.”

“I didn’t invite you here specifically for a job. This is called drinks, aperitif even- its what normal people do,” Rackham waved a hand and Silver watched the way his gold bangles caught the soft light of the room, accented further by the late afternoon sun. “No need to case the joint, cause if you get caught lifting anything worth less than 20k I’m not covering for you.”

Silver rolled his eyes. “As if I’d settle for anything less than that. You know me better, Jack.”

“Well I’d like to think so but your last few jobs have me a trifle concerned, sweetums.”

Their second round of drinks were delivered, Rackham flashing the waiter a smile and placing an order for an assortment of small plates. Silver wasn’t particularly hungry, not that he had eaten, it was more that the sudden summons to Manhattan had gone from generally positive to somewhat suspicious, once Rackham had started suggesting things that weren’t entirely business. And that suspicious feeling left his stomach a little too uneasy for overpriced appetizers with colorful garnishes.

But Rackham seemed unbothered by the tension in Silver’s shoulders.

“Is this a critique then? I thought I was being invited as a glorified house guest. At least that’s how my sister makes it sound. Not like I’m much good in your fashion designer games now am I?” He asked, taking up his glass. “Unless you want to truss me up like a prized poodle in whatever your newest designs are.”

“I can hear the note of condescension and it is unappreciated you fuck. Honest business is honest business and your sister and I happen to be doing very well for ourselves, thank you very much. Two of our designs are in this room alone,” Rackham said, and while his posture remained relaxed and unbothered, the knife like edge to his words made Silver smile brightly.

“Oh don’t twist up your thong, if you’re going to insult my skill it’s only fair I take a dig at yours don’t you think?”

“No. Because my skill has rogue fashion studios in Paris and now Manhattan,” Rackham says flatly. “That are giving the design houses a legitimate challenge and strong arming our way into fashion week. You, sir, are back to swindling old men for their investment portfolios or old women for their opera jewels. Things you have long since out grown.”

The noise of the room shifted again, as Silver sat back in his seat and scowled. “So this is a critique.”

“Would you prefer round one of an intervention?”

“Not really.”

Rackham sighed and set his drink down, propping his elbows on the table. “Look- you are, without risk of inflating your ego, the smartest man I know. I hate it, believe me. And you are wasting your time and talent on jobs that are going to get you caught. Your sister knows this. I know this. Even Chaz knows this-”

“Oh for fucks sake-”

“Ah let me finish- It’s been what, five years now? Six? Since the big one- since the glory that was our shared retirement.” Rackham spread his hands wide as if that simple gesture could, somehow by some miracle, encompass everything that had happened in the short, harrowing year that lead up to their so called retirement. “And you have not managed to retire.”

“No- no that’s not true. I did retire. I did. And it was awful. Okay?” Silver argued. “It was the worst fucking thing I’ve ever done. I mean my god you think people actually enjoy just laying around on a beach all day? I just-”

“You didn’t have to actually retire you idiot but you were supposed to find something else to do other than this-” Rackham waved at Silver, again as if the simple gesture could encompass everything that was his current state. “You could have done just about anything, conned your way into, I dunno, vineyard ownership, art collecting, travel writing solely for the sake of writing, writing bad romance novels for sexless married straight people, romance novels for the queers, literally anything-”

“I tried- and it was all just-” Silver sighed, giving up on an answer and instead sipping his whiskey cocktail. It was easier than trying to explain the fact that somehow, in that short, impossible year, he’d finally become someone real, someone tangible, and now he couldn’t be anyone else. And that at least, by being a con man, he was staying true to himself in the one way he knew how.

Rackham sat back in his seat again and pushed his glasses up on his head, tussling his carefully mismanaged curly mullet.  “I know. Its not easy, finding a new life to lead. It took all of us time to find the people we were before it all happened. To find the people we wanted to be in the ashes the were left behind. I can… only imagine it’s much harder for you.”

Wasn’t that a laughable notion. A truth of course, Silver conceded, but a laughable one.

Everyone had lost something that year, you don’t go into a con of that level without taking risks. You don’t challenge men of that stature, companies of that wealth, collections of that value, without putting everything you value on the line.

But everyone else had walked away with something, someone. Some semblance of themselves.

Everyone but Silver.

“Your letter had said this was about a job,” Silver said finally. A letter. An actual letter too, on nice paper with a letter head and a wax seal and everything because Rackham was, if nothing else, authentic to the core and spared no detail, even in gently bribing a friend, nae, colleague, into what was starting to feel a little bit like a trap, though Silver couldn’t put his finger on why. “Does Max know about it?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t summon her brother without consulting her first. I like my dick well enough were it is thanks.”

“What Job?”

Rackham smiled and shook his head. “That’s not what this is. This is aperitif, drinks, catching up, remember?”

“We don’t do that, Jack.”

“We never had the opportunity.”

“Hardly have to start now.”

“I disagree.” He tilted his head. “By the way, what name is it you’re using these days.”

Ah.

That was why it was starting to feel like a trap.

The amusement had faded from Rackham’s eyes. He was watching Silver like a Cat, the way he used to in the Islands all those years ago, when he was hoping to catch Silver’s tell, catch his bluff. The faintest, thoughtless smile hung at the corners of his lips, accented by his curled mustache.

Silver held his gaze and said nothing.

“Mmm. That’s what I thought.”

“Jack-”

“Still using the name he gave you.”

Rackham’s smile grew as he sipped his drink, something golden like sunlight as it swirled around it’s coupe glass. Silver fought for calm, keeping his face impassive as he watching Rackham scan the room like any diner would.

“I chose the name, thank you.”

“Oh pish posh, you chose it, he chose it, tomato, tomahto. We all know the truth, Silver.”

Rackham fixed him with a hard look, arm hooked over the back of his chair and a cold light in his eyes.

“He’s the one who pinned you with that name like the tag on a fucking corpse. You’ve worn a hundred names in this life and the last, and whats it matter now? Oh nothing, just that your own personal god gave meaning to the empty promises you made the day you tried to rob him blind.”

There was a knife on the table. Sharp. Cerated. But that would be more than the moment deserved, even if the curdled taste on Silvers tongue demanded a bitter iron accompaniment. He could get up and walk away, that was the civil thing to do, and they were now civil people, feral things made clean and tame in the eyes of the well mannered world, or so his sister would remind him every so often during their calls.

But the hard look in Rackham’s eyes softened and he set aside his drink, reaching across the table for Silver’s hand. Silver stared at it for a moment before reaching to take it.

“You’re not the only one sour about the fact you got stuck. I’m just sorry yours…”

“Went up in smoke?” Silver offered with a tired smile.

Rackham laughed softly. “Well yes, but then faking one’s death is a pretty clean way out of the game. It was kind of you, offering him such a way out, when he didn’t deserve it.”

The uneasy feeling that had twisted Silver’s stomach up into knots was starting to reach his chest, twisting and churning it like the old sea before a storm. Silver pulled his hand away and sipped his drink, giving the waiter a moment to drop off the small plates Rackham had ordered.

The lounge, with the reflections in the glass of nearby buildings, felt a bit untethered to Silver, crowded and empty depending on where you looked, people coming and going in large groups and small. The decor was clean and simple, well placed greenery taking the place of abstract art, and two art deco inspired bars placed at opposite ends of the rooftop to give a sense of wide open space. Among the movement and the noise, it was easy to feel like one’s eyes were playing tricks, and with his nerves on edge, Silver felt like he was seeing ghosts in the corner of his eyes. He knew it was just the conversation, summoning them, that he wasn’t seeing old allies and enemies amongst the Manhattan socialites on a Tuesday evening.

He knew Rackham wouldn’t risk him like that.

Didn’t he?

“That isn’t fair to him,” Silver said once the waiter had left, Rackham glancing up from his plate. “To Flint-”

The rest quietly disappeared, exchanged to the Spanish government for a very lucrative payout (was it the total value? No but near enough that everyone would land on their feet, made sweeter by what they cleared out from Woodes’ investments), which then of course had been divided up into the appropriate accounts via wire so that, ideally, no one would ever have to see each other ever again.

The mention of the name alone shifted the air in the room, only for Silver of course No one else had any reason to notice the delicate way he uttered the single syllable. He wasn’t even sure if he was still using the name these days.

Their names had never fully gone public, during The Con. Sure they’d all been in the Islands, engaged in various events and jobs for The Guthrie Shipping Company, now out of business permanently, but records were lost, names smudged, burned, deleted, hard-drives wiped, the usual clean up that needs to be done after a dozen deaths, a minor workers rebellion, and the disappearance of 5 million in Spanish gold.

A portion of the gold had been seized on a private flight out of Nassau, in the luggage of one Woodes Rogers, who even five years later was still claiming he was framed, despite a plethora of evidence linking him and other English investors to various aspects of the Con.

It had after all been a very hectic year, a bit of time apart was in order.

They were meant to scatter.

Except Max and Anne and Jack and Charles, the Rangers as they had affectionately become known, who wandered off to Europe, to rusticate in Italy if Silver remembered correctly. Of course they were destined to stay together, the world now their oyster to bend to their mighty wills, and Silver was, truly, glad for them. No one quite deserved a soft and joyful ending, free of blood and non-consenting bondage, quite like his sister and her lover, and her lover’s men. Italy had become France, once the plan for their “Rogue Fashion House” as Jack called it, had come to fruition. Max and Jack each worked on the designs, Jack tailored them almost entirely himself and Max acted as head model. It was art for Art’s sake, they didn’t need the money (They’d swindled a few wealthy tourists and retirees on their Italian tour, and they were comfortable), they just wanted the magazines frothing at the bit, club kids and fashion week hipsters wearing their designs instead of Dior.

To disrupt and irritate and make their name stick.  A bit of glory all their own.

Silver could support that.

Rackham tilted his head, toothpick from one of the plates between his teeth. “Don’t do that. Don’t go giving the man grace when you already gave him a miracle. Christ above Silver I’ll start wondering about that bleeding old heart of yours next.”

Silver smiled wryly. “Nothing to worry about there. That’s cold and hollow and tired. And done with, thank you very much.”

“Oh is that so?”

“Yes. I don’t have it in me and I’d like it if you’d just left it alone, I can smell the meddling,” Silver warned him, “I’m not interested. If I was  I’d have gone to London and looked him up.”

“London?” Rackham frowned.

“Yeah. London. Or I dunno, maybe he went to Scotland, he’d probably be much happier up that way. He could go on for hours about how much he hated England but with-” Silver shook his head. The ghost was in the corner of his eye again, not quite the man he once knew but unnerving all the same.

His Flint had worn his hair short near the end, shaved clean cut in a military style with a haunted, gaunt look to his face. Still handsome, still the kind of man to hold the room’s attention and breath in the palm of his hand without so much as a spoken word, all he needed was a look. But the darkness that had come to live inside them both had graced Flint’s shoulders like a mantle, well worn, well loved, regal in it’s weight and grief and echoing in every facet of his body.

Silver cleared his throat. “With his husband being alive I’m sure he’d want to go home, pick up the pieces of their old lives and everything. I figured they made their way back to the UK once he broke him out of the hospital. I let him. That’s why it’s not fair, to say he didn’t deserve such a way out,” he clarified, as Rackham listened. “He didn’t- I was supposed to meet him. Once he’d found his husband and gotten him safely home.”

“… you chose not to.”

“It was never formally arranged.” Silver shrugged and sipped his drink. The whiskey had lost it’s flavor, only the burn remained. “When I showed him the file, all the evidence that his husband was alive in that facility, after all these years- he didn’t wait to make a plan, Jack. He left. That night with what few essentials he could pack and a kiss goodbye.”

There was a look in Rackham’s eye now, as Silver explained, that seemed almost pitying. There were few things Silver hated as much as pity.

“He left for one airport. I left for another. By the time he was in Austria I was on my way to New Zealand with a new phone number that only Max had and everything else burned and scrapped completely. Put the little I had into secured storage.”

Rackham sighed. “Fucking hell, John.”

“It was for the best.”

“Oh is that what you’ve been telling yourself?”

“Fuck you-”

“Yes yes, fuck me, you’re a good enough lay. The point stands, you made a choice, again. And you’re living with the fallout. Well maybe not living.”

“I am. And I’d like to keep doing that if it’s all the same to you.”

Rackham shook his head. “It’s not. And it’s not to your sister. We both came to the decision to call you and ask you here, not just for a job, which there is one I promise though that will be discussed once we are all together. So you have to stay long enough for that to happen no matter how sick of me you get,” he smiled sweetly and Silver considered the risks of punching him. Fighting Anne later was never worth it. Throwing a drink? No that came with public reaction. “Look I can see you debating your exit and whether or not you can subtly fillet me with that knife, but before you do, can I please just say my piece and then it will rest, for good, and I’ll not bring it up again?”

Silver held his gaze for a moment, looking for a tell, a bluff, anything.

The trouble was Rackham was as good a card shark as Silver.

There was nothing.

“Fine.”

“Thank you.” Rackham picked up his drink again and sat back in his seat, sipping at it as he looked Silver over for a moment. “Now. I am grateful that you told me your side of things in a very adorable attempt to try and, for whatever reason be it delirium or lingering feelings, give some grace to Flint and the fact that while you have been drifting aimlessly from con to con and mark to mark, he and his impeccably well dressed trophy husband have been living out their quaint little fairy tail.”

“Is this going to be a long final piece?”

“Hush. Now where was I-”

“The fairy tale.” Silver gritted out.

The ghost was sitting in the corner of his right eye now. Sitting there by the bar, not fluttering in and out, just sitting. It wasn’t Flint, just a man with similar red hair, longer of course, heavier built, but the fucked up wiring in Silver’s fucked up brain so desperately wanted it to be a ghost, so desperately wanted it to be Flint. Not for any good reason.

They had nothing to say to each other.

“Yes the fairy tale. You’ve gone to the ends of the proverbial earth because you, god forbid, fell in love with the worst possible man you could have fallen in love with, and we’ve forgiven you for that, and you give him this miracle, yes? You do this because you love him. You give him the impossible, his husband, who was dead. And instead of living out this fairy tale with him and his husband who, if I may, is a specimen, you commit yourself to a-” Rackham paused for a moment, sipping his drink as he mulled over the words.

“Life of my own?”

Rackham scoffed. “A mockery of one but fine, a life of your own, without even having a conversation. Fine. I’d be a bit allergic to such a conversation too but what I don’t understand, is why that bastard, with all the shit he’s done in his life, get’s the fairy tale.”

“Because he does. And that’s how it needed to be. If he didn’t things wouldn’t have ended. You know that, Jack.” Silver finished his drink. “The con would have gone on for ever, the gold would have become another treasure, another smugglers business to bring down, another union uprising, you know it would have gone on-”

“And so you bring him down with his Achilles heel and condemn yourself to purgatory. How noble for a man who claimed to never have morals.”

“Your point, Jack. If you please.”

“The point is, I have two reasons for you being back in Manhattan. The first is a very selfish cause, the job. The second,” Rackham waved a hand with a easy smile, “let’s call a spiteful settling of the scales.”

“The fuck are you talking about-”

The ghost.

The ghost in the corner of his eye.

Silver felt his blood run cold and his heart drop, a lead weight into the pit of his empty stomach. He sat, still as a man possibly could with fear clawing it’s way up his throat like a caged animal desperate for air.

Rackham watched him, carefully, sipping his cocktail. “Do you know why I picked this spot? It’s a new place, just opened a couple weeks ago and still very precious, hard to get a table. The dream of a whiz kid from the Bronx so I’m told, incredibly talented, next to no formal training, just a devotion and ambition. And of course,” a tilt of the head towards the bar, “the right sympathetic ear with a very sexy bank account. Takes a bit of digging online to find the investors, they prefer privacy, not to overshadow the stars they patron-”

“Jack-” Silver’s voice barely registered over the echoing noise of the lounge.

The ghost was moving, greeting someone at the bar, someone in a chef’s coat.

“But if you do go digging, if it interested you, you’d find one Lord Thomas Hamilton,” Rackham said looking Silver over. “He’s a devoted patron of well deserving cases it seems. Especially now that he’s got his old man’s money on top of whatever share Flint still has in the vault.”

There was a knife in his hand. Silver didn’t remember reaching for it, the cerated dinner knife clutched in a white knuckle grip so that the blade was parallel with his wrist, sharp edge outward. But holding it, solid and real and sure, was a comfort all the same. Even if the ghost was just some man with red hair.

The room felt impossibly small, suffocating, the sound muted save for Rackham’s voice. His hands rested on his lap, knife in the right, the left clutching tightly at his left knee, that ached with an old, vengeful pain.

“They’re not in the UK, Silver. They spent six months there I think, long enough to get the paperwork resolved for the inheritance and make sure the Lady Barlow was comfortable situated in her new digs. She’s doing well by the way. But once Thomas Hamilton was cleared from the hospital? Flint brought him back to New York far as I can tell, before finding a quiet spot up in New England for a time to weather the worst of it. But they tell me it was only a year or so before they were settling down in the City properly.”

“They- they Tell you?” Silver forced himself to ask.

Rackham nodded. “Considering Flint hunted us down the moment he realized you’d flown the fucking coop?Yeah. They tell us quite a bit these days. We kept our mouths shut in the beginning, other than to tell him you were alive. Had a feeling if we didn’t do that he’d topple back into the old ways over night, but what can you do hmm? Anyway, He let it go once the trail went cold. You did the job rather neatly, for what it’s worth.”

The terror, the grief, or whatever feelings Silver was forced to withstand in that moment must have shown on his face. Rackham sighed, and sipped his drink, his smile soft and indulgent around the rim of his coupe glass.

“What was that you were saying before? Your heart being cold and hollow? Sounds a bit like that grave you should have put him in when you had the chance, don’t you think?” he asked softly. “Before love snared you like the rest of us?”

Again the ghost was moving in the corner of his vision, talking to the person in the chef’s coat, shaking his hand, turning away from the bar to face the room- cold icy panic filled Silver to the core. Everything left unsaid, every goodbye rehearsed in hotel bathrooms at 3 in the morning, every broken apology, every canceled phone call from burner cells and hotel lobby phones- everything began to echo through his mind with the urgency of a siren.

And the grief.

Oh the grief.

He felt like he was drown all over again.

“He hasn’t spotted you yet,” Rackham said, confirming the fear. “But he’s close. He’s scanned the room twice, glanced this way with a curious look but I think that’s cause of me. He won’t acknowledge me in public without his husband though. In truth, I wasn’t sure he’d be here tonight but it was as good a chance as any.”

“Jack please-” Silver was willing to beg. He’d never begged before, but this seemed like a good enough reason to start.

“You have a clear path to the exit and the elevator, with what should be enough cover once the kitchen door opens. I’ve been watching them, they have a rhythm.” He pulled a card out from his wallet and passed it to Silver. “I know you have a room but this is the hotel suite your Sister booked for you. It’s closer to us but not so much so that he’ll find you with that irritatingly smart brain of his.”

Silver took the card and pocketed it. He’d only arrived the night before, checked in to a little boutique hotel by Grand Central to keep his head down. But whatever Max had planned was what he’d do, he was too worried about Flint right now to argue with her, and she had probably planned for this anyhow.

 “Take a deep breath and count to ten,” Rackham said firmly. “On ten, get up and walk calmly for the exit. Calmly, do you understand me?”

Silver nodded.

“If he follows you I’ll do what I can to slow him down. He’s not going to catch you. I promise you John.”

Silver knew Rackham’s word was good.

All tricks and lies and charm aside, he knew that to be true.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

“From 10. Starting now.”

Silver inhaled all the way to five and exhaled from five to ten, at which point he smiled and thanked Jack for the drinks, made a quick excuse about having to run. He got up from the table, placing the knife back with the rest of the silverware, and made sure to turn his back to the bar. Rackham grabbed his hand briefly, giving it a quick squeeze.

“Run, Rabbit,” Rackham said with a wink, and Silver made for the exit.

They timed it well enough, Silver headed for the door just as a wave of orders came out from the kitchen. The floor was confused for a moment, a chaotic dances of servers in white aprons and newly arriving diners trying to get to their tables and other patrons flagging someone down for their bill. Silver did his best to weave in and out of the various moving bodies, keeping his head down and eyes on the door, wondering to himself if this was how Orpheus had felt in that fateful challenge.

Fuck if that wasn’t proof he was still in hell over it all, ruined to the day he finally died by the secret romantic that Flint had been. There he was terrified of facing Flint again for the first time in over five years and he was thinking of Orpheus and Eurydice.

What a joke.

Just a few more tables to clear, and the hostess stand, and then Silver would be free, able to disappear around the corner and into the crowds of millions below, reveling in the springtime evening. He’d be free, he told himself, as he carefully sidestepped around a waitress who nearly dropped a tray on him.

“God I’m sorry sir, you good?” the waitress asked as she steadied herself, already taking a few steps away.

“I’m alright, I’m alright,” Silver assured her, only to find himself looking back at Rackham, and in turn, the bar where his ghost had been standing.

His ghost who was staring right at him, as if he too was looking a dead man in the eye.

Flint was wearing white.

It was Flint, of course, a bit older. He’d grown his hair back, it was falling in loose waves across his shoulders even with the more pronounced widows peak. There was more gray in it now, bright streaks of it along the temples and woven into it like starlight, combed into his beard and mustache that he still wore thick and well groomed the way he had when Silver had kissed him goodbye. Silver’s skin prickled with the phantom touch of it, the way it had felt to be kissed by him, the tickle of his beard along his skin. He’d filled out at long last it was easy to see even at this distance, his soft barrel chested torso, broad shoulders no longer weighed down with an impossible weight. He was dressed in simple, elegant clothes- a cleanly pressed button down and well fitted suit pants, leather loafers, a bit of jewelry that caught the light, all subtle and understated the way he always had been.

But what nearly broken Silver, what nearly kept his feet from moving and let him be caught? The silliest thing of all really.

Silver could hardly remember a time the man wore anything that wasn’t a mourning color.

He heard Rackham’s voice, a loud overly smarmy greeting as he moved to join Flint at the bar and intercept him before he could catch up to Silver and that served to force Silver’s feet to start moving again. He didn’t wait to watch as Flint no doubt shoved his way past Rackham, with whatever niceties or lack there of he could muster in his anger. He cleared the hostess stand and rounded the corner, nearly sprinting as best as he could on his prosthetic for the elevators as everything he’d fought to keep down for so many years tore its way back up his throat. He had to wonder what scars it would leave, whether it would match the rest of his collection.

“Silver!” came Flint’s voice from behind him. “Will you- Silver stop!”

A moment of divine providence, the elevator was waiting. A kind couple, clearly on a date, held the doors for him and Silver slipped inside with a bright smile and a sweet note of thanks. He pressed himself against the back wall and took a slow breath.

“Sir? Elevator?” the couple asked, still holding the door.

Silver lifted his head to see Flint standing there on the other side of the open door, arms limp at his sides.

His hands were shaking.

“No,” Flint said with a polite smile, “No sorry I realize I forgot my phone, I’ll get the next one, thank you.” He bowed his head and backed away so the doors could close, the couple turning to each other to continue their conversation.

It took a moment for the doors to chime and close, and all the while they waited, Silver was pinned under the fierce, familiar deep sea gaze he’d come to love. He could only hope his own expression was empty, impassive maybe, cold, quiet, anything besides what he was actually feeling. He was a con man for fucks sake he should be able to manage in moments like this.

But Flint looked the way he had the day they said goodbye, without knowing it was going to be goodbye. The day he’d learned that Thomas was alive, and had been all those long years, kept from him just out of reach. Haunted, with a new kind of rage brewing beneath the surface of the sea.

And Silver felt himself beginning the grieving processes all over again as the doors closed and his Captain disappeared from view.