A drop.
Another one.
Clear and ringing, water dripped into a tiny pool on the wood.
Billy scraped his eyes open. Timber.
Only a trace of light. The ceiling of the hold.
Not his hold. The ship heeled over slightly and a fallen water cask rolled over the floor with a mellow, dull sound.
Bones ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth to feel the sticky dryness.
The last thing he remembered was the excruciating pain in his back, the dark transparency of water closing in over his head, firm pressure of the mass on his chest.
He made an attempt to move around to get the blood moving, but something cracked in his nape. Puzzled, he gaped to gasp for air, and almost got insensible, taking a deep breath. The ribs tightened around the lungs, restricting his ability to fill them in.
He inhaled again, trying to breathe through the piercing ache that twined round him like chains. It was unbearable, a thousand daggers piercing his chest incessantly.
The daggers.
Billy tried to lift his hands off his stomach only to find something unwonted weighting them down.
Conquering the raging pain in the neck, he lifted his head to look down on himself. Shackled.
With a thud his skull fell back. The Scarborough.
A vicious headache ringing his head, in league with giddiness and qualm.
Better be dead than with the Navy again.
"Is it really?" a pure voice cut through the drip-drop.
Billy screwed his head around, sensing his heart pace up.
She sat a few feet away, hugging her knees pressed to her chest. The hair was a mess, and she looked at him phlegmatically.
His mouth dropped open when he saw the dark purple bruise on her neck.
"It doesn't hurt, Billy," she twittered, giving him a heartfelt smile. "However, how is your leg?"
Gazing back at his body he saw nothing out of whack about his leg. What…?
"They shinned you when dragging aboard."
She was drenched through, the skin on her palms rent, and she ruined the breeches gripping at the fabric with her bloodied hands, the raw flesh on her elbows – just below the rolled sleeves – a sight painful to behold.
Was it all for naught? Did she fall when I did? Did the Walrus manage to break away? Did she not? Why is she here? Why isn't she in irons? They must've taken a shine to her… Was it all for naught?
Bones unstuck his dry lips to formulate another question but a tide of alarm fitted over her face and she looked away.
He followed her glance and somehow it facilitated his ear – he heard footsteps approaching.
Billy turned to her again, but she wasn't there.
In mere panic he was spinning his head around, searching the hold. She wasn't there.
His jaw flexed, and he closed his eyes again. Don't be dead.
To say they treated him flippantly would be an understatement of the most critical sort. Recoil wasn't the world to express what he felt either.
No wonder that when they sat him – hamstrung and steaming - facing Hume, the conversation simply wouldn't jell. And when it came to giving response to the captain's questions there were only two options for Billy to weigh – 'Fuck you' and spitting in the man's face. He hadn't seen her anymore, but there was a steady assurance she was around.
Hume learned quite fast it would take some strong measures to extort at least something from Bones, and Bones learned he'd have it hard stealing his way out of the whole mess when something rigid came in contact with his skull and he opened his eyes several hours later to see the celeste sky.
He would never know how much trouble they had stripping his hulky body and then trying to slip the leather vest onto him, not that knowing of their ado would sooth his mind – the leather was tighter than it was probably supposed to be.
Three days of broiling, plummeting in and out of consciousness and his chest constricted to the point he couldn't even take a small breath.
Bones tried to send impulses to his limbs to get them stirring, but they wouldn't respond. He only needed some lunges. And to draw blood. Preferably the blood of the people with more authority and money than sense and talent, who'd precipitated one too many problems upon his head and who'd annulled him once and were doing it again. The people he'd been waging a war against for years... Better be dead.
"You've been waging a war against death for many more years."
Sprawled on sticky sand, he slowly turned his head. She sat right next to him.
He hadn't heard her approach. The soldiers that guarded him were having a good slack rather far away, but paid her no mind whatsoever. That was alarming. And her advocating for 'Choose life' campaign.
"I never said I will to die. I don't fear death, and that's quite another matter," she reasoned.
It took him a minute or two of perusal to comprehend it. Her palms were bleeding again (or still), and she looked like a drowned rat, and it was highly unlikely she had had a morning swim. Days had passed and nothing about her changed. Sporting her inherent accoutrements – from the little wrinkle to the growing bruise – Galloway lodged her chin in the curve of her palm. She was a product of his inflamed imagination. He conjured her up.
Billy shut his eyes and opened them again, but she didn't vanish that time. He was going ape.
If she was an apparition, he thought, chances were he could control her, and Bones strained everything he believed was to be strained to administer a hallucination and ordered her to straighten her spine and sit tall.
Galloway didn't move.
It was either he had taken a good measure of her and knew she wouldn't obey thanks to her love affair with contumacy, or it wasn't him to initiate the company, but her.
Bones realised that at that moment when he was grasping at straws, damn near on his last legs, the girl wouldn't be the first choice of a person to call up. And her whole entity was too detailed. There were pieces of information he didn't deem critical and wouldn't have taken notice of: her neatly trimmed nails and dainty fingers, no rings, a callus on the middle digit of the right hand, the chapped lips and the note of her voice… She was dead.
Oh, God.
"God is a lie created to console us in a moment of distress. You will have to implement a change to witness it. He's not doing it for you."
She brought a draught of latent. Still cushioning her face in her hand, she stared at him and seeing incomprehension paint his features added, "It's not going to last long, but after…"
Billy parted his lips to let out a wheeze.
"Just hold fast, Billy, all right?"
That grated on him. She clearly didn't know what she was talking about. The feeling when you get frantic to break free and know you're about to bellow out loud but you don't and suddenly there's a revulsion to life and you believe you'd rather be dead than experience that…
Maybe she did know that feeling after all.
It was the last time she visited him.
In defiance to all Flint's expectations, Galloway didn't intent to reduce their interaction to zero. It wouldn't have worked anyways, especially with Silver who didn't take long to prove the futility of trying to nullify him. There was still some sort of communication between the ousted ones and herself; not much but enough to exhibit she didn't genuinely care about appearing questionable in the eyes of the crew. It took her a lot not to intervene in what Silver later would christen as 'enforcing the policy of ingratiating oneself within the crew, serving as a punching bag to reveal the intestine strife, feuds and intricacies of the given community'. And Flint would watch her sitting there, with her head reclined upon her hand, monitoring John letting the pirates kick the shit out of him in a holy cause. And James knew that she, inversely to John, would never take the beating ex gratia to attain anything. A stranded little animal, no sustenance, absolutely incongruous to the scrapheap of a pirate vessel, she adhered to the principles.
He'd seen her a couple of times: in his past life.
She bursts in the parlour, a jaunty creature, and spending a couple of seconds at most on a curtsy, greeting the present company, rushes to her father. In a voice so very high-pitched she goes to chirrup something to Faulkner in a tempo nonperceptible to the human ear. Not ill-mannered, but rather easily excited – a trait commonly found in children. Someone complements on her dress, her attention switches for a second and Galloway cheekily agrees with the statement. Not really curious about the guests.
"She cares a great deal about her dresses, but if you put a sack on her she won't know the difference, as long as it's not constraining."
Always afoot. Alluding to the books McGraw himself has only read recently.
"She's turning nine next month. Mighty proud of it. The number must have some sacred meaning to her," her father laughs.
The tell-tale glow of her skin was now gone. More than ten years had passed, and she was different. More watchful and less ballistic – the signs of growing up. Still quite reckless and keen – something gifted by nature. Occasionally poetic roll of the eyes slipping into an askance look. The mindset - a mystery. Uncustomary not irksome for the pirates. And just a rational measure of customary distrust to the said pirates.
Out of all people aboard only two seemed to have problem with her.
She didn't consider either Vincent or Dufresne to be her issue for not much could be done about them. But, as if watching John getting thrashed was somehow not hard enough, there was Randall, who wasn't really facilitating it for Galloway. He came up with a new idea of spitting into the bowls, and that tactics was hard to contend against.
And, torn into two, she would spend the waking hours trying to unravel another addlement.
"You fucked the dairy goat?"
Galloway wrinkled her nose. She eyed Flint sitting not far from her as if to consult with him on the issue.
The harpy of a man who found people so utterly stupid and ignorant and downright sore to deal with at times. Where was the esteem coming from?
Maybe it was his thinly-veiled concern for her that was displayed the moment the inbound merchant ship from Kingston appeared on the horizon, and Flint took her elbow.
"You, stay here," he walked her to Silver resting on the aft deck. "And that," he pointed at the pistol, "you'd better hide it."
"I believe you did advise him against it," she said calmly, seeing Dufresne encourage the crew before the hunting.
"I did," the captain returned surly.
"He could've known better…"
"Are you rooting for the only person who wants and will clear you out of the ship when we reach Nassau?"
"No."
Silver pursed his lips.
"Men in these waters are hard men," said Flint watching the deck of the merchant vessel. "They don't fear ships. They don't fear guns. They don't fear swords."
Galloway licked her lips.
"Then what do they fear?" John sifted on his feet, a lock of curls leaking from behind his ear.
The girl looked at the men. Did she fear ships? If she had, she wouldn't have been aboard one. Did she fear guns? Had she, she wouldn't have been holding one. Did she fear swords? Does a dagger count? What did she fear? Did she fear pain? Death? Hell? Loss?
Living. Something that magically and artistically encompassed all of the above.
The English must have understood the imminent death was not so imminent and resorted to their arms. The Walrus crew were retreating back to the Man o' war.
Galloway was biting her lower lip mercilessly, breath getting sharper.
Her hand moved by itself.
Much to her surprise, and Silver's, if anything, she shot, killing a sailor who had pulled his cutlass at one of her crew. The fact she didn't miss the aim seemed to be outstanding.
John jerked the gun from her shaky fingers when she lowered it and expressed no ambition to move.
She hadn't missed and now couldn't conclude it was something to be happy or sad about.
Meantime, Dufresne was failing at delivering orders, a special thanks to De Groot who was frustrating him. But Flint's commands were followed, that could merely mean one and only thing – he was the captain again. Gal swallowed with difficulty.