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“Yeah, something fucked up definitely happened here.”
When the East India Company had dangled the offer of the wreck of a five-years-missing ship in front of Felix, they’d neglected to mention that he’d have to be working with a partner on the inspection, and they’d certainly neglected to mention that the partner would be more brawn than brains, at least on the surface. He has a hand buried in his red hair, brown eyes wide where they appear over the deck. Sylvain Gautier, he’d said on the long row out from the shore to the shell of the Obra Dinn.
“A keen observation,” Felix snaps in return, surveying the boards around him. He’d asked his superior, curious, what might be waiting for him after five years of nothing, no word, no stirring of rumor. Nothing good had been the reply, and indeed it looks like nothing good is here. “I see now why they recommended you.”
“High resilience,” Sylvain offers, easily. “How many people did they say were on the ship? Sixty?”
The fact that he says the correct number makes Felix suspect he remembered perfectly. “Sixty,” he confirms. “And not a hint of a body. Not surprising, I suppose, after all this time.”
“It’s kind of surprising.” Sylvain hauls himself up fully onto the deck, all six foot something of him. He’s broad, the laces of his shirt undone slightly to emphasize it. Felix deliberately doesn’t notice anything further. “Sure, it’s been a while, but it isn’t like the coast is crawling with predators. There should be something left. From what I heard, the ship just showed up, it didn’t drift in from anywhere. Spooky,” he concludes, too cheerily.
Felix frowns, pulls out the pocket watch he’d received in the letter from Manuela Casagranda, the ship’s surgeon, along with the strangely barren logbook. He’s the farthest thing from superstitious but he swears it shakes with some kind of restless energy, like being out on the ship, sharing the same air, awakens something inside it.
“Wow, they gave you all the tools, huh?” Sylvain says, sparing Felix a teasing elbow to the ribs. “The Company really doesn’t respect me.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Felix offers, absent-mindedly. He’s busy flipping the logbook to one of the few pages with any information, a sketch of the crew signed by the artist. Ignatz Victor. “This ship was carrying some important royalty. The Company wanted their best on it. Be flattered.”
“Well, I’m certainly flattered now. You don’t seem the type to compliment easily,” Sylvain says. He’s definitely more perceptive than he looks. And Felix isn’t lying, his superior had indicated that this was a fairly delicate mission. There must be more to Sylvain than the surface.
“Treasure it then,” Felix replies, pointing to a strange cutout section of the sketch. “That’s them, the Nabateans.”
“I think I’ve heard of Nabatea but I don’t know much about it.” Sylvain is leaning entirely too close to him, examining the sketch. Maybe he needs glasses, maybe he’s too vain to wear them. Felix supposes he could ask but he doesn’t. “Are their names in the roster?”
Felix nods, flipping the page back to the list of doomed souls. “There,” he says, directing a finger again to the names labeled with the relevant country. “Seiros, Cethleann, Cichol and Sothis.”
“Hmm,” Sylvain says. His breath hits Felix’s ear, then his hand claps him on the shoulder. It’s entirely too much contact, and Felix flinches away but Sylvain seems unfazed. “They look important. They sound important. Therefore what happened to them must also be important.”
“Quite,” Felix agrees. The pocket watch shakes in his hand. He leads them into the ship.
//
“Fuck.”
Sylvain is turning out to be quite profane as they pop back from the memory of the captain, Dimitri Blaiddyd, putting a bullet in his own skull. Felix can’t say he’s untroubled by the situation himself, not only the suicide they had borne witness to but also the supernatural sensation of moving through time, between snapshot of memory and the stillness of reality, afloat on a mass grave off the coast of Fodlan. As if one death wasn’t horrifying enough, too, the captain had been next to one body, others visible the longer Felix and Sylvain moved incorporeally around the room in the captain’s final moment.
“Fuck,” Felix repeats, running a hand through his long hair, pulled back in as practical a ponytail as he can manage. “What the hell happened here?”
“Well, we’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out,” Sylvain offers, and something in his voice makes Felix turn around. There, in the chair that had sat not a moment ago as empty as a ghost, slumps the body of the captain. Not that he’s easy to identify positively, but the splatter of rotting brain where his head used to be gives him away.
“Take this,” Felix says, suddenly realizing the pocket watch is rattling and steaming in his hand. He’s not scared, not exactly, but he’s not ashamed to admit he’s shaken. Sylvain does. Their fingers brush. Felix barely has the wherewithal to notice, other than to recognize a lifeline in this slowly gathering sea of death.
Felix writes down the details of Dimitri’s death in the logbook, sinking in the face of the unbelievable back into the familiarity of work routine. Trauma and tragedy still require documentation. Sylvain clicks down on the lid of the stopwatch and… it’s impossible to describe in the realm of the comprehensible, the believable. A ghost pours out, a wraith made of smoke, whirling over their heads and settling in the bed next to the captain’s chair to shape the withered version of a body they’ve already seen. Felix looks to Sylvain, looking right back at him, eyes wide on both ends.
“It wants us to look,” Sylvain says, as Felix in the same breath says, “We need to find out more.” Sylvain nods, opening the stopwatch.
//
Identifying the victims gets harder, both mentally and practically, as the memories get more confused, as the details get fuzzier and people’s last moments contain less helpful information. It feels ghoulish to think about it that way, clinical, as if their memories are nothing but puzzle pieces to complete one hideous picture.
After the crew lock away the mermaids, strange aquatic beasts with glowing stones at their hearts, Sylvain snaps the pocket watch shut again with an air of finality. It’s vibrating again, Felix can see it between his fingers even as he jots down the result of what they’d seen, but Sylvain doesn’t move to trigger another spirit.
“That was messed up,” Sylvain says, which is an understatement. “That they brought those things on board and in the end the only one to kill someone was another person.”
“I think they called her Annie,” Felix says by way of reply, unable to actually remedy the situation. He flips to the roster again. “There’s an Anna and an Annette listed in here, I’m not sure who this is.”
Sylvain is close to him again, looking over his shoulder. Felix can feel the tremors of the watch in his hand through the air between them. “I think it’s Anna,” he says. “Annette was the fourth mate, she’d be wearing a uniform. The one they called Annie wasn’t.” So definitely smarter than he lets on. Like he hears Felix’s thought, Sylvain scrubs his empty hand through that red, red hair and adds, “I mean, just a guess.”
Smart enough not to let it on then, too. “I think you’re right,” Felix agrees. He marks Anna off. “Looks like Shamir was the only Dagdan on the ship, and that language we heard was Dagdan. I guess she was the one to…”
“Kill Anna,” Sylvain finishes. His voice is bitter now, hand still in his hair and tugging at it. “I think I’ve had enough of this for today.”
Felix frowns. He supposes the light filtering in from the above decks has been dimming for a while. It’s nearly dark. “We can’t leave the ship like this,” he says.
Sylvain shrugs. “I’m fine with staying here, but I don’t think I can take another one of these memories. We can start tomorrow earlier since we don’t have to row out, finish everything up, haul ourselves back and have our initial report on Byleth’s desk the morning of the day after tomorrow.”
Felix considers this for a moment. On one hand, nothing sounds worse than spending the night in a boat filled with bodies, more bodies surely undiscovered until the pocket watch of fate determines the timing is right to reveal them. On the other hand, there actually is one thing worse, which is leaving that same ship alone for anyone curious and stupid enough to find. “I suppose you have a point,” he says, clipped. “Anywhere you can think of where we haven’t found any damn corpses yet?”
“Look around for me,” Sylvain says. “I’ll haul up the rowboat so it’s not sitting in the water overnight.”
//
Felix finds a cabin with a couple beds that don’t look slept in, the least of their worries, or like someone died there — not yet at least. Sylvain returns from lugging up the rowboat on his own, a testament to the brawn Felix had noted earlier, with the oilskin they’d packed with supplies should the assessment take longer than anticipated. It’s chilly but not unbearable. The sounds of creaking wood surround them as they eat a completely unremarkable meal of hardtack and some sort of dried jerky, which Felix can at least appreciate.
“So,” Sylvain says, which does not surprise Felix in the slightest — Sylvain seems like a talker. “Are you a lifer?”
Felix snorts a little at that, undignified maybe but Sylvain chuckles wanly. “You could say that,” he says, not sure why he does exactly. “My father worked for the Company his entire life. My brother started off as a Junior Inspector before…” Sylvain doesn’t look like he’s going to press Felix, which somehow makes him want to spit it out more. “Before the Duscur.”
Recognition lights Sylvain’s eyes for a moment, but he still doesn’t look hungry for more information. “I heard about that,” he says softly. “I didn’t know you knew people there.”
Felix shrugs. “It was a long time ago now,” he says. “What about you?”
“More like a drifter,” Sylvain says, easily. “I’m all about the ocean so this was a natural pit stop.”
“Are you a sailor?” Felix asks.
“I have been.” His smile is easy, but Felix knows a closed door when he hits his nose against it. But maybe it’s not completely shut after all because Sylvain adds, “My brother used to be a sailor too.”
“Oh?”
“Yep,” Sylvain says, popping the “p”. “He really knew how to tie a knot.”
What a strange thing to say. Felix decides to return the favor and not press him on it. “So what is it about the sea you like so much?”
“Same thing as everyone else,” Sylvain explains, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The freedom. Out there you can reinvent yourself however you want. If you don’t like who you are, just go somewhere else and be someone else.”
Felix scoffs. “Not everyone feels the need to run away from their own personality,” he says, without thinking, before realizing it’s far too harsh. Sylvain takes it in stride.
“Fair enough,” he says. He smiles so easily, on this ship populated by nothing but ghosts and them and a trembling pocket watch. It’s strangely enthralling. “I do though.”
“Fair enough,” Felix echoes. The hardtack is brutal on his jaw and he rubs at it as though that might help the ache. “So how long have you been with the Company then?”
Sylvain shrugs. “Maybe two years? Time flies when you’re having fun.”
Felix frowns. “Only two years? And they sent you out to do this assessment?”
“Hah, ouch,” Sylvain replies, and his gesture when he clutches at his chest in mock pain is lightheartedly dramatic but Felix can’t shake the feeling that something in his voice betrays more below the surface. Seems like the overall theme of Sylvain so far. “Guess they wanted their two best-looking inspectors in case there’s press.”
The tips of Felix’s ears go pink. It’s nothing he can help. “Hmmph,” he says, tossing the last inedible bite of biscuit out the slot posing as a window in their cabin into the ocean below them, setting his head back on the pillow. The logbook where he’s stashed it under the extra cushioning pokes him nevertheless. “Flattery will not get you a more glowing write-up from me.”
Sylvain chuckles. It’s a nice sound, especially nice in the sea grave they’re floating in. Felix hears him shifting around, stubbornly doesn’t look at him to verify the assumption that he’s searching for the least uncomfortable position on the wooden slats. “Whatever you say,” he says at last. “Good night, Felix.”
//
The next morning goes downhill rather quickly. It starts off poorly, waking up unclean and surrounded by bodies just outside the walls of their tiny oasis and with nothing but more hardtack to sate their hunger. It worsens as they walk backwards through time in pieces, last gasps and screams and the existential terror of simple people learning that there is more on this earth than they could imagine. It drops right off as they flash back to the Obra Dinn after watching the grayscale last moments of the man from the boats, bringing the mermaids back to the ship.
Sylvain stumbles back from the pocket watch, in Felix’s hand this time, letting the logbook hit the deck unceremoniously. “Fuck,” he says, yet again, but with more feeling this time. His breathing is uneven.
“Something’s wrong,” Felix says. It’s not a question, not even a hypothesis. He picks up the logbook, scribbles in the details (second mate, shot by unknown attacker — unknown Nabatean), and flips back to the roster of names. The second mate…
“Bless me, Felix for I have sinned,” Sylvain says, and he’s laughing as he says it but it’s not the pleasant sound of the previous night. It’s sick, malformed. “I’ve lied a bit by omission.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Felix spits. He’s nervous, put off guard by the disturbance of Sylvain’s cool. He’s seemed so even-keeled so far, a pillar of normalcy to lean against admit the complete unreality around them.
“Only by omission,” he says again. “It’s true my brother was a sailor, and it’s true I’ve been with the Company for about two years. It’s true this is an important assessment.”
Fear dawns on Felix, putting two and two blindly together. “Your brother—”
“Miklan Gautier,” Sylvain says, and the first name rings familiar. “He used a false name to get where he got. No one on the seas would give Miklan Gautier the time of fucking day, much less make him the second mate of a ship carrying royalty.”
“But they might take Miklan Nichols,” Felix says. He’s heard whispers of Miklan Gautier, uncaught and seemingly uncatchable serial mutineer. Even on this trip, Sylvain has silently watched his brother slaughter an innocent passenger, frame one of the Nabateans and leave them to the fate that should have been his, and he’s just watched him be shot to death while returning to the ship from a deviation into nothing good. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier, when we saw him kill Ms. Macneary?”
Sylvain shrugs. It’s a miserable little gesture. “I guess my self-control isn’t as good as I was hoping. Sorry for that.”
“None of that,” Felix snaps. “So, if you knew your brother was on this ship, and the Company must have known from the manifesto…”
“Who knows what their motivations are?” He straightens up a little, rolling the sleeve of his shirt back up where it slid below his elbow. His forearms are freckled, tan in the deep way a sailor’s are. With how much he’s noticing about Sylvain, Felix has the sudden and strange desire to see him after this nightmare is over, when his perception isn’t weighed endlessly down by the sludge of the work they’re here for. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
Felix lets that go. He presses the lid of the pocket watch. They see more of the terrible last hours of Miklan Gautier’s life, which also end up being the last of the snapshots the mysterious watch can provide them.
//
“Ever think about how easy these people’s families would have this job?”
Sylvain’s voice is tight, like canvas over a frame, painting a picture of someone who’s spent too long visiting and revisiting death and murder and tragedy to puzzle out some strange, supernatural, incomplete game of who’s who. The Bargain, a section of the logbook close to the end, is still blank, inaccessible no matter how long they scour the ship. One more otherworldly rule in the mystifying and grave game they’re playing.
“The faces we’re having so much trouble matching to names are second nature to someone out there,” he continues. “Someone who’ll probably end up fined based on what happened here. That’s how they’ll find out that their loved one is dead or disappeared, from a bill.”
“Your pockets will certainly be lighter,” Felix acknowledges. His patience is growing thin, not with Sylvain exactly who stubbornly maintains human compassion even while on Company business, but with this seemingly endless rotation through memory after memory, a frustratingly small list of entries on the roster unmarked by certain death. They’re huddled across from each other under one of the only awnings on the main deck without bones or the smell of rot overpowering, rain falling just to the side of them, blowing their way on occasion with the sea breeze. Time is ticking.
Sylvain laughs at that, somewhat surprising Felix, who had known immediately that he’d been too cruel. “You know,” he says, wiping a stray raindrop from the crinkling corner of his eye, “I suppose you’re right.” He looks at the logbook, upside down for him where it sits in Felix’s hands, and furrows his brow, drawing a wrinkle through his forehead. Then he points at the face Felix is staring, fruitlessly, at. “I think that one is Raphael,” he says. “I remember him from the memory below deck. Which means…”
“The other one is Caspar,” Felix finishes, all in a rush. “The last of the seamen.”
It’s like Sylvain has dropped a wrapped gift in his lap. For a moment, a very stupid moment, Felix wants to shake his hand or clap him on the shoulder or kiss him. Something irresponsible, some kind of connection to drag them out of the fog. He doesn’t. Instead he notes Raphael and Caspar’s names next to the deaths he’d already jotted down. The roster is filled.
“So, that’s it,” Felix says. Mechanically, he closes the logbook, slides the pen into the leather loop it’s meant for. Sylvain looks at him for a moment, half in disbelief. The rain lashes down on them. It’s hard to believe they’ve been here for less than forty-eight hours, time dilating around them as they move back and forth in time and space and other dimensions they don’t fully understand. “We’ve done it.”
There’s another quiet moment, between them and them only, before Sylvain straightens up again, squaring his shoulders. “I don’t know about you,” he says, and the grin is back on his face, the mesmerizing one, otherworldly in an all-too-pleasant contrast to the phantasmagorical swirl of fear around them, “but after we get this damned rowboat back to Fodlan I could use a fucking drink.”
//
Byleth’s final report goes out. Miklan’s estate, which means Sylvain at this point, is fined one hundred gold, the highest out of anyone in the crew thanks to his exceptional villainy. He ends up finding Felix in the Company offices to complain to him about it, which is just the first of many times they find each other, bonded first by an experience they can’t speak of to anyone else and the questions remaining, then by more, so much more that one year later when someone knocks in the middle of the night at Felix’s door Sylvain is in the library when he returns with the mystifying package.
“Who was that?” Sylvain asks, closing the book he had been reading, taking off the eyeglasses he had eventually started wearing once Felix started hounding him about his squinting.
“Not sure,” Felix says. “It’s from Manuela.”
The color leaves Sylvain’s face a bit, washed out more by the light of the fire. “Manuela?” he repeats. He’s not asking because he’s forgotten, Felix is sure of that.
“It could be the end.” It is, no could be about it. A package, heavy with rain and meaning, delivered in the middle of the night by a stranger who vanishes the way he came… there’s no other possibility. “We could find out what happened in The Bargain.”
Sylvain stands then, and it only takes a few steps to bring him to Felix’s side, where he’s been for the better part of the last year. Where he belongs, Felix feels more and more as he spends more time there. He places his hands, warm and freckled and strong, over Felix’s where they clutch white-knuckled at the oilcloth around what feels like the logbook, and something else. “Is that what you want?” he asks, like he already knows the answer. Felix nods anyway. “Right,” Sylvain says. “Then let’s open it.”