Chapter Text
Silver should be dead.
Silver had been dead. Flint had felt him return.
He rubbed his beard and stared at Silver’s restless sleeping form.
He could not wrap his head around it. Not only had another like him found his way into the Walrus but Flint had had no inkling of it.
This must be his first time, then.
Was Flint relieved? Elated? His natural state was always suspicion. He knew from the others that only warriors were ever chosen and Silver was most assuredly not that. Then again that could simply be one of the many lies he put forward. Regardless, Silver would be much more confused than him when he woke up. Flint had to consider what he would do then. He wondered if Silver had realised it yet, in his convalescent state.
Why wasn’t he healing then? It had been two days but the fever had only just broken tonight.
In fairness, Flint had never lost a full limb before, with the exception of his finger, once. It had grown back. Excruciatingly so.
Silver’s lower leg was not growing back. He had checked multiple times. It wasn’t even healing that quickly or that well. Was it this slow, in the beginning? He could no longer recall.
The others would be coming for him soon. Flint groaned. They could choose to just leave Flint to it as well, depending on their current engagements. This was not a preferable alternative.
Nevertheless, Silver could only prove to be even more useful going forward now and Flint could not disregard that.
“No.” Silver pulled the blanket off his left leg. “No, no, no, no, no... NO!” He unwrapped the bloodied bandages from his stump. He probed and prodded his wound, ignoring the once sickening wet sound of his flesh and gritting his teeth through the pain. Tears streamed down his face.
Pain was unpleasant, of course, but not new. The lack of his lower leg, on the other hand, was very new.
He had lost consciousness around the panicked thought that when he came to, he would be stuck on a ship at sea, surrounded by easily riled up, superstitious pirates, with a newly grown leg he had no reasonable way of explaining.
Now, he was truly afraid. The kind of fear he hadn’t felt in many, many years. How could this have happened? How could he be done? It had been, what, two hundred years? Andy was thousands of years old! He could not be up so soon.
Wait, he had returned. The fog in his brain was slowly clearing. He had returned. He also remembered feeling the bright ember of the presence of another in his mind, someone he could not single out, at the very edge of his cognisance. This in itself was not unusual. They were all of them connected.
Excluding this uncommon outlier, it was identical to the other times—the deep suffocating darkness and the familiar nausea permeated by the relief of returning from it.
Why wasn’t he healing, then? Should he have not come back? Was the presence meant to replace him?
Should Silver be dead?
Andy looked across the tavern table at Nicky and Joe. Joe raised his eyebrow. Nicky smiled, knowingly.
Well, that was intriguing.