Chapter Text
With Blythe aboard, Chuck and Betty finally retired in Pan. The Captain saw no sign of the mechanic or her cats, and decided that was probably for the best. Instead he hired on some junior mechanic he could properly train. Someone who didn’t have bad habits quite yet. But Percival was not the crewman Emory had hoped for. He was a captain in his own right, and being demoted down like he been would be hard for anyone. It didn’t help that he was the only one loyal to the Empire, and at least once the Captain had to get Minty to pull him and Greene apart after a fight broke out between them. The nail in the coffin, however, was the man’s religious beliefs. He was a part of the New Sequence. That was typically regarded as quaint when a passenger held the beliefs, but it was just one more thing to cause friction between Blythe and the crew. Despite this, when he parted at the Albion transit relay, it was with respect and affection.
At seventy-three, Tabitha met her handsome stranger. A man from the Empyrean with a cane and grey hair. Whenever they docked there, he was waiting. At seventy-six, she retired, and a year later she married him. Stainrod took her place as First Mate.
Emory had begun to carry a handkerchief with him. Not just one of his rags, but an actual handkerchief. He wouldn’t, of course, have bought it himself, but it had been a gift from Tabby the last time they’d stopped at the Empyrean. Her husband, evidently, was very into fiber crafts, and he favored embroidery. The cloth even had “Cover Your Cough” stitched into it. The Captain didn’t really know how old he should claim to be with the strange passage of time around hours, but according to the Albion date, he might have been fifty-four.
He looked in the mirror in his cabin and smiled. He looked good for fifty-four. Really good. Completely in one piece. His beard was thicker than it had ever been, some grey hair was sprinkled by his chin and mustache, and it looked good. Or he thought it did anyways. Then he bent over, coughing, wheezing, gasping for breath between each bodily convulsion. He stood, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, and smiled ruefully at his reflection. He looked good. He didn’t feel good. But there was never any blood, only thick phlegm, and aside from the cough he had no symptoms. Minty had even made him some powder he was supposed to inhale, but he found it only made him cough harder and worse.
As he stepped out of his cabin, he was caught by the Old Devil and more or less dragged back into it by his arm. Emory geared himself for a conversation they’d had many times since he first started coughing.
“Before you get started on me, devil, you already know the answer.”
“You said you had twenty years if you were lucky. This isn’t luck, Emory.” His eyes had already begun to blaze with indignation. “This is neglect.”
“What’s a doctor gonna do for me? Tell me I’m dying, and to waste away in retirement. But I’m not dying. I’m just coughing.”
“If this engine began to sputter, would you put it off for fear of someone telling you it was broken beyond repair? Or would you fix it?”
“Oh for--”
“Why won’t you take care of yourself?” The old devil had taken the Captain’s hands in his own and stared pleadingly into his eyes. “If a doctor tells you you’re dying or you should retire, would that change anything? Or would you resume your duties as Captain regardless? And what if they can help you more than Minty can? Would you suffer needlessly?”
The Captain wasn’t afraid of dying, but he didn’t want to know his deadline either. It was difficult for him to explain, so at some point he stopped trying to.
“Our time like this together is already short. Why are you cutting it shorter?”
An idea sparked in the Captain’s mind, something he had been meaning to address for years but never really found a way to do it, and he lifted the old devil’s hands to his lips.
“Do you still plan on looking for me in the Blue Kingdom?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And if I weren’t there, would you still want to serve that judgement? Or am I your primary motivation?”
The old devil hesitated. He hadn’t considered another option.
“Old devil, I want you to let go of me when I die. I want to just be another drop in your bucket. Be free of me. I will go to the doctor, but you have to promise me that you will live your life for yourself. Not chasing the ghost of a dead man.”
The devil frowned at their entwined fingers. He knew part of why he was as fiercely attached to the man as he was was because of their limited time and if they’d had boundless years, he wouldn’t be half as devoted as he was now. But to keep the Captain with him after death... He’d rather been planning on that.
“Shortly after I’d joined your crew, while I was digging that grave, you asked me if I’d known any devil to either elevate the lifespan of a man or to die with the one they loved, and I did not answer. I did not answer if I had known any devil who would do that if they could. I had. I had known devils to do that, and for the most part, it ended poorly. As you would predict. A long life is a lonely one even with someone you love. It can be tortuous for the person elevated if their only motivation was the affection of a singular devil. I would not do that to you. February might do well with such a lifespan, but you...” The old devil sighed. “I could keep you by my side after your death. I could do the work I loved.”
“Then if you choose that, do it for the work you love. But be ready to let me go.”
“You have the clearest soul of any sane man I have ever met.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, as the devil leaned forward to press a kiss to his forehead.
The first doctor they stopped by had prescribed him laudanum and morphine. The Captain laughed, and went to see Tabitha’s doctor at the Empyrean. The woman listened to him breathe, looked at the phlegm that came out of him, and sat him down for a long conversation. Whatever she said, he didn’t repeat. He just stopped by the apothecary for a mix of herbs to make into a tea to help with the symptoms.
He stood next to the devil looking over the edge into the broken sky with the packet in hand. “Stainrod’s a smart kid. Well they ain’t a kid anymore. They’d make a decent captain if they wanted to be one, I think.”
The devil took the man’s hand in his own.
“But I know if they’re gonna be a captain, they need their own ship. Something more like them. The old girl is my engine, and I always thought I’d go down with her, but it looks like she’ll outlast me. But...” He squeezed the devil’s hand. “She’s just an engine. She only matters because I give meaning to her. When I’m gone, what meaning will she have? Better as a memory than a burden...”
“Then plan for her end. You still have time to decide what should be done. Perhaps you can plan for both of your ends. Where do you want your body to be put to rest when you die, Emory?” The devil knew then. He knew the Captain’s cough would be with him until the end.
“Rest? I won’t be needing rest when I’m dead. Did you folks think I was joking when I said to turn me into a bad taxidermy to scare the life out of pirates? Or if that was too grim to stick me in the forward cannon and shoot me at one of them Ministry Monitors if they show up around here?” He chuckled, and when he thought the devil was genuinely considering honoring those requests, he shook his hand and the devil’s in it. “I don’t care what you do with my corpse. If a grave is important for you folks, then put me somewhere accessible. Make it easy to get to. And if Stainrod wants to scrap the engine, then all I want you to do is take the front emblem off and use it as my grave marker.”
“And until then?”
“I’m here for you.” He leaned against the devil’s side.
“The dying man is comforting his near-immortal companion...”
“I ain’t dead yet. But... I could use a hug.”
Wrapped in the old devil’s arms, the Captain found it almost easy to breathe. It would take almost a decade for his body to give in and let go, and even then, it was in the arms of his devil.
-----
The Captain’s body was put to rest on the outskirts of Caduceus. The old devil dug the grave himself while Minty and the new captain, Stainrod, prepared the man’s body and wrapped him in his old crocheted blanket. He was buried in the sweater Minty had so loved, but by then he had completed their own, and they found it as a gift from him to be all the more precious. Until it accidentally caught on fire and they realized that a material object didn’t really matter all that much when they’d had Emory influence so much of their young life. He was still alive and present when it happened.
The funeral was a quiet affair with the remaining living crew either traveling or sending regards. Tabitha and her husband, elderly and unable to travel, sent instead a single rose snapped from her body and wrapped in gauze. The Scholar, February now, hung in the background but did not say much. And when it was all done, when the front emblem had been taken from the engine and the crew had boarded, the old devil remained behind.
He needed to think. Caduceus was the place to do that, and even if Emory was not truly in his grave, the small monument still offered a connection and a place to collect himself. He wasn’t there for long before the idleness of thinking began to eat at him. The irritation of being out of the loop. The desperation for gossip. An old rebellion began to rise in him the longer he remained. An indignation towards the Judgements. The Sapphir’d King commanded the realm of the dead, but why did things have to die? Was there a genuine need for it, or was it some prideful matter that the rest of the Chain was coerced into believing? He wrote a letter, and shortly after an engine took him to Pan.
Minty was waiting for him with a burning grin. He followed them through the dark streets of Winter’s Reside to the far end of the docks where a very familiar engine waited.
“The Oh No was Emory McArthur’s locomotive, but I think we can give her new life.” They pounded on the bronzewood. “Something... brassy.”
“Are you to be the captain then, Minty?” He raised a brow and grinned.
“Not if I can help it.” They laughed. “I want to be a doctor. I can’t do that with all the nonsense of being a captain. Besides... having [REDACTED] at the helm gives it a bit more... chutzpah.”
The old devil shivered and grinned wildly at hearing his name spoken so freely and without malice. The very engine seemed to shudder with it. “Perhaps it does. She’ll need a new name. She’s not Emory’s engine anymore... What say you to the Defiant Kindness ?”
“I think... I think the Captain would have liked that quite a bit...”
“Then we have work to do.”