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Captain Flint shut the cabin door behind himself as the Walrus left a British settlement burning in its wake. Miranda Hamilton stood in the corner, unblinking and unmoving, her face contorted with the righteous fury that had brought about her eternal absence, or what should have been one. But here she was nonetheless, swaying with the ship and watching Flint with anguished eyes, the hole in her forehead stark against her pale skin.
What disturbed Flint most was her silence. It was false and perverse. His Miranda, even in their darkest hours, had always made her thoughts known to him, in love and in anger. This Miranda, whatever this aberrant facsimile was, choked the cabin with her refusal to speak, despite Flint’s desperate yearning to hear anything from her at all. Flint longed for her to lash out at him in anger, to curse his name, to confirm what he already knew in his bones to be true, that everything was his fault. But this Miranda, as she did in life, refused to grant him such a self-indulgent flagellation. Instead, as always, he was met only with the omnipresent creaking of wood and the stare of a dead woman. Still cloaked by the scent of the destruction he had wrought in her name, James Flint could not muster the courage to meet Miranda’s gaze.
When he lost Thomas, Flint had almost gone mad with the relentlessness of such a palpable absence. It wasn’t until he found his every waking moment haunted by Miranda’s uncanny apparition that he realized it had been a mercy. Thomas had died alone, made unknowable to Flint by thousands of miles of separation, while Miranda had met her end mere feet away from him, her final moments playing on the back of his eyelids every time he found himself foolish enough to close them.
She, like her death, refused to leave him, instead becoming a lingering, creeping constant tangled in the threads of his consciousness. As time continued to forge an ever expanding canyon between Flint and the Miranda of flesh and blood, this Miranda had evolved. At first manifesting as only a familiar shadow in the periphery of his vision, now she appeared to him grotesque and whole, an unflinching testament to his greatest failings and an unwavering reminder that the two people he had loved most were now lost to him forever.
A sudden knock on the door momentarily shifted Flint's focus away from his waking misery as his quartermaster confidently burst into the room before he could muster a response. Silver was still unsteady on his new wooden leg, a reminder that Flint was not the only one to have lost something on that fateful day in Charles Town, although Silver’s sacrifice had made him indispensable to the crew and more dangerous than Flint had ever aniticpated. As Flint looked expectantly at the man in front of him, Miranda shifted, making her first movement since Flint had entered the cabin some minutes ago. Her head tilted to the side, emphasizing the bullet wound in the middle of her skull, as her sharp, dark gaze focused squarely on Silver.
“Captain,” Silver started, completely unaware that he had the attention of two people instead of one, “the crew is not satisfied with the haul from the raids on the settlements. They want something more substantial. I suggest that we temporarily divert our focus to take a ship or two before we return to seeking retribution against colonial governors."
Flint could not help the flare of anger that rose within himself in response to such a sentiment. He resented any attempts to sway him from his single minded goal, especially as the reminder of what had been taken from him moved to stand right behind Silver, close enough that his quartermaster would have felt her breath on his neck if she were still able to breath. For a moment, as Miranda turned to gaze at Flint over Silver’s shoulder, she looked as she had the day he met her before the illusion broke and she once more became a frozen testament to the brutality of her final moment. For the first time that day, Flint met her eyes.
“Absolutely not,” he snarled, “I made a promise about what was to become of men who continued to hang pirates and I intend to keep it.”
“And you can keep it,” Silver reasoned, “but first you must appease the crew. The last thing we need is another mutiny.”
Flint let out an empty, humorless laugh, “That was then, before I killed Lord Governor Ashe, before I razed Charles Town to the ground. They will follow me because they know what I am capable of.”
“They know that you are ruthless, but they also know that you are unwell. Anyone with eyes can see it,” Silver replied, his voice raised.
“How dare you,” Flint growled as Miranda stepped away from Silver and began to pace in the corner of his vision, “I know what’s best for this crew and what’s best for this crew is to strike terror into the hearts of the men who would wish to brand them as monsters. You can initiate a battle of wills between us if that is what you desire, but I promise you that you will not like the outcome.”
Flint had said it with enough finality that Silver nodded tersely and turned to leave, though Flint was sure that would not be the end of it. As the door slammed, Flint once more found himself alone except for the restless presence of the woman that only he could see.
“That one is going to be trouble,” Flint murmured, not sure if he was speaking to himself or to the ghost.
Miranda Hamilton opened her mouth but did not speak.