#r.graves|33

[devils-pirate-crew]

Dawson's shift at the wheel goes by with little issue. He hands the wheel off to Nico shortly after 17:00, then resolves to immediately go find something to eat.

The Voices begin to speak to him as he heads below deck, a cacophony of quiet, whispered, unintelligible questions, weights pressing down on his head, his neck, his shoulders, growing stiff and uncomfortable. "What do you want?" he asks again to them. No response. Please just ask your questions. Please.

The pilot's mate enters the small dining hall, head down, and walks to where a small group is sitting - the same sailors from earlier.

"Dawson!" Erik Haula pats the seat next to him, scooting over to make room. Dawson flops down into the seat, looking up to catch Vitek's eye.

The cook, tending to a large pot, nods, scooping up two bowls of soup and heading over, taking the other seat available. He slides one bowl to Dawson, along with a few pucks of hard bread; Dawson nods in appreciation, dunking the bread in the broth and chewing on it. Sea turtle. Figures, given the point of the journey they're at. "Good?" Vitek asks, with the charismatic smile that you're not going to say no to, even if there are literal maggots in the food.

"Great, VV," Dawson offers back, appreciative, as he turns back to his plate. Vitek, too, stirs his soup, waiting for it to cool down as he listens to the group talk.

" - So there we were, facing off against the Crown Jewel! One of the Royal Navy's best! And our ship was so much smaller, less crew, fewer cannons, everything. But Captain Landeskog had an idea." Ryan Graves's eyes twinkle as he tells the story he's told many times before. "He told us that we'd have to trust him completely for this to work - that he'd turn Frostbite around and go straight to pass Crown Jewel on her starboard side. And none of us bought into it - we all thought we were signing our death warrants - but we believed in him. The captain took the wheel as the storm only got worse, and we turned hard around. Crown Jewel was so surprised, her sailors didn't have time to load the cannons, and we sailed right past them! By the time she turned, we were half a league away. We pulled out a victory without firing a single shot!"

Luke Hughes drums his fingers on his wooden glass. "What happened to Frostbite?" he asks, voice deadpan.

Gravy splutters. "That - I'm sure they're doing well," he defends, crossing his arms.

Yegor Sharangovich grins over his soup-drenched puck of hardtack. "Sure they are."

Gravy only rolls his eyes as Haulzy speaks up. "I've met those guys on a number of occasions," the elder pirate muses. "If they went down, we would have heard by now."

Dawson nods, lifting his bowl to his lips to take a long sip. "Remember when Phoenix was sunk by Hunter?"

"Hah," Haula grins. "Back when you were still in the Navy, eh, Mercy?"

To that, the pilot's mate only shrugs. "Only proves my point," he agrees. "Word travels fast." He consciously ignores how his shoulders ache, how the Voices get louder and louder in the peripherals of his hearing. If they ask their questions, speak what they want to, it'll ease up. If they won't, well, he'll just have to live with it until they do.

[devils-pirate-crew]

The pounding doesn't answer. Sometimes it doesn't. That's okay enough, Dawson supposes. It'll linger, then.

He considers, for a split-second, talking to Johnny about it, then decides absolutely the fuck not. Even if the headache gets stronger, even if the pain begins firing down his spine, into his shoulders and his hands, he'll live. He always does.

"Speak, damn it," Dawson mutters to himself (and the Voice lurking), opening the door. "You want something. What is it?"

It was noon when they took the measurements, so it must be close to Dawson's shift at the wheel by now. He should get up onto the deck, then. So deciding, Dawson pulls himself up from the stool, wiping his hands on his pants, then heads to open the door -

"Dawson!" A lean figure approaches the pilot's room, tricorne on his head pointing left. "Great to see you. Hey, look, do you want to help me run some cutlass drills with the rest of the sailors? I need one more person; we're at an odd number right now. Jesper's already working with the gunner crew..."

Dawson pauses, looking at the open expression of the Master-at-Arms. "My shift at the wheel is coming up soon," he deflects.

"I'll ask Sevo to stay longer?"

"Because you don't want him to kick your ass when it's demonstration time?"

"What?" Jack splutters, reaching up to pull the (admittedly kind of stupid) tricorne down further over his mess of hair. "No! I'm so much better than he is! That's why I'm in charge of combat!"

In fact, Dawson is reasonably sure that at least three other crew members were more "in charge" of combat than Jack - Nico, Jesper, and probably Sevo too (sure, he was the sail-master, but it was clear that he had more experience than Jack in this area). But, you know, he's not going to argue with the guy whose job it is to teach swordsmanship and lead the melee fighters into battle. Feels like a bad idea to him.

So Dawson just grins. "Fine," he agrees, biting his tongue to suppress a chuckle at Jack's expense, and follows the master-at-arms up to the deck, where a couple of crew members already wait. Underneath them, the ship rocks, cannons going off with loud booms - the gunners practicing on the open sea. Dawson tries to school his expression not to flinch at the sounds - it doesn't help how the pounding of the Voice in his skull is slowly creeping down his neck as well.

Gravy's the first to notice them, waving from where he's got Shango at wooden-cutlass-point on a mast of the ship. "Hey," he hums, dropping his fake sword, deadpan as usual. "I think I won."

Shango grins, rubbing his throat where Gravy's sword had been. "He won," the other sailor agrees.

A few feet away, Haula's giving Luke encouraging tips as their swords clash, pointing out footwork errors. "Watch your front foot," the veteran cautions.

"Jack's here," Luke mutters in reply, letting his cutlass fall to his side and pulling Haula to face his brother.

Jack claps to get their attention. "Good to see you've been practicing without me," he begins. "Today, I wanted to work with you on rope combat. Dawson agreed to help me demonstrate." So saying, the master-at-arms picks up another wooden cutlass, climbing up onto the rigging of the ship while the other sailors watch.

Dawson has the feeling that there's a target painted right on top of his head, with the way that Jack instructs him to scamper around and defend him coming down from above (and the way he's pretty bad at doing that).

It's going to be a long day, isn't it?

[devils-pirate-crew]

The table descends into a silence for a few minutes. Nobody seems to want to discuss the Navy for, well, obvious reasons. Haula picks the conversation up again. "Have I told you guys the story of Holy Roller's inaugural voyage?"

"You used to sail on Holy Roller?" Luke perks up at that, raising an eyebrow. "You were part of the original crew?"

"Yep," Haula grins, leaning back and stretching his arms. "Tuna too. He never told you?"

"Not really," Shango muses. Dawson considers it and shakes his head as well. The gunner was experienced, and it was clear he'd been on ships before Jersey Devil, but he never really talked about his past adventures, always preferring to stay in the present with a smile on his face. And yeah. Dawson gets that. A little too well, in fact.

He wonders how Riley and Jessica are doing back home. If he penned a letter and sent it, would it make it across the ocean? Would they know how to read it? Were they even still in London? With his thoughts, the Voices whisper louder, unintelligibly in his ears, of regrets and things left unsaid, the pressure on his shoulders increasingly painful.

"Mercy." Gravy's voice shakes him - he blinks twice, looking at the older pirate with a shaky smile. "You alright? Dougie hasn't killed you with his sextant?"

"Yeah, I'm good," he nods. "Can I head out now?" Without waiting for a response, Dawson power-walks out of the dining hall. He closes the door, not listening to the further conversation.

Vitek catches Gravy's eye as the young pilot's mate makes his escape. "Is he alright?" the cook whispers.

"He looked a little... lost," Ryan chooses his words carefully, shrugging; at some of the concerned glances from his fellow pirates, he quickly recovers. "He's probably just thinking of what he's got to do later."

Luke nods, agreeing. "Mercy's always like that. Out there," he gestures dismissively with a hand. "Like Dougie. Guess that's what makes a good pilot."

Vitek stands, collecting the plates from the sailor crew. "The pilots need you to be rested for the night shift," he reminds them. "Not chatting up a storm. Go, now. I'll leave something for you to pick up when you wake."

Meanwhile, Dawson moves through the ship, making a beeline for a small storage room. Hopefully, he doesn't bump into Akira - or anyone else, really - on the way there. He has no idea what he'd say if confronted with Johnny right now. Luckily, he makes it without much fanfare, sliding inside and slamming the door shut.

What he's not expecting, however, is a chicken to squawk angrily at him from one of the shelves. "What the fuck?" Dawson mumbles, seizing the hen by her middle to get her to calm down. She kicks at him until he catches her feet and holds them in place. "I thought we were out. Vitek said he used the last of you a week ago. The fuck are you doing here?"

The hen chirps at him, quite severely miffed at her new position, unable to do much of anything but tilt her head angrily at him. Dawson slides down to sit on the floor, shifting the chicken in his arms until she's resting securely on his lap. With one hand, he keeps her in place; his other hand runs through her feathers lightly.

"What do you want to know?" he quietly asks the Voices, which swirl around him, still whispering to each other in tongues he can't decipher. "I'll tell you anything. You know that already... Just ask what you want, say anything, give me a sign..."