scourgeofpiracy | (no subject)

(no subject)

He has a room, above the bar, but he's out of it as much as he is in at present. Either working on the Pearl or, as now, just walking the lakeside and trying to pretend it's a real shoreline, and it's salt water he smells, not fresh.

Sometimes it even almost works.

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"I've been in and out for... perhaps a year or more. More recently, just in... a few months, that."

"Do you like it here?"

She likes to find that out.

"It's not a bad place. Though I think I liked it better when I was free to leave."

She has to laug hat that.

"Aye, well, I should like it better that way too."

Or, rather, if she were free to leave for a place she could go and come back from easily.

"Have you ever visited other worlds?" he asks, curious.

"A few. I was born in London, but I've been to--at least one other London, that wasn't my own, and to two or three other worlds. I liked them better than England, really," she says after a moment.

"I always feel badly admitting that."

"I don't think you should", he says thoughtfully. "It's really not so different from moving to another country, except in scale."

"I think it's the feeling of how you should be loyal to King and Country," she laughs.

But then, she is.

Just...different King, different Country, than that she was born to.

"Should be? Perhaps. But when did the whole world do what they 'should'?"

"Never. Only ever what it had to," she says, reasonably, and bends to pick a stone and send it skipping across the lake.

"And sometimes... circumstances change, and what one has to do changes with them."

"Aye. Be it kind or cruel, we all do what we must, though."

It's simple, really.

It always, she thinks, a bit ruefully, has been simple.

That doesn't make it easy.

"And sometimes you can't tell which."

"You can very rarely tell with any certainty", he agrees quietly. "And sometimes it's harder still."

"But that's life, isn't it? Or maybe something more," she muses. "I'm not sure it's so different should you die. Not in this place, anyway."

"This place removes all kinds of certainties", he says wryly. "Before death and after."

"It makes you wonder if there really were any to start with."

"Perhaps there weren't. It's an uncomfortable thought, that."

"Really? I don't know," she muses.

"There's probably one or two, really. But it leaves a great deal of room for hope, if little is set in stone."

"For hope, perhaps. But for other things besides."

"What else do you need?"

"I meant there are other things than hope that may fill the space, if nothing is set in stone."

"True," she admits.

"Too easily true, really."

"But then, I suppose... it's for each of us to face as we can."

"I like to think that hope's more prevalent, though."

"It's certainly hard to kill beyond redemption."