Chapter Text
It is night in the busboat and naught stirs but the slow leeward tilt of the boat, rocking back and forth like a cradle adrift. It's quiet. Far quieter than any night in the City, the Great Lake only offering the rare slap of water against her hull. Mephistopheles grumbles nonetheless, a recent midnight snack of mermaid enough to keep it from waking the place, the engine idling in case of emergency.
Heathcliff shifts. He’s a big man on a boxed-in bus seat, or two to be precise, laying his legs across them. Closing his eyes, he sighs. Sleep. It eludes him. His cabin was of no help around the time of Dante’s dismissal, what with the horrid harrows awaiting him there and all - that blasted cabin reflects his mental state - but the bed certainly would have beaten this bivvy.
Things are on his mind, you see. Ever they are. And despite the ache in his body from a long day of lethal carnage on deck, despite the tumult in his head, and the red rim of sleep on his eyes - sleep is evading him. A heavy bootstep lifts his eye. Staying utterly still, managing his breath, he waits for the moment to act.
Bootstep, and silence.
She stands there, swaying, vulnerable to the subtle pitches of the ship. Her, of all sinners, standing without sea legs... Eyes fixed somewhere, it was impossible to tell from the great sheet of ginger hair that held her, the matted frizz of her locks making it quite hard indeed to tell much of her demeanor. Are her shoulders tense? Does her head hang? She looks a ghost.
Heathcliff forces a breath out of his nose, quietly as he can, to calm his nerves. The pregnant pause passes as she simply sways far enough to take another step. He makes no exceptional effort to watch her, keen to stay laying and at ease. Hearing her pass him, one slow step at a time, he finds his mouth dry. Yet the further she walks, the more she teeters on each step. Footsteps faltering, adrift in her wandering until the lake laps the boat enough to get her to stagger into the seats halfway down the aisle.
As if she were provoked, she suddenly snaps like the jaws of a crocodile. She brings fist after fist into the cushion with a pitchy growl, a genuine one-sided brawl, finished off with a jabbed knee. Huffing, shaking, all he can hear are the thumps.
And the trembling of her breath.
Ishmael isn’t okay. But that mad bitch is no responsibility of his - he has no fondness for her after their great spattings. Despite this, he finds himself peeking over a landscape of red velvet backrests, offering only his eyes to see what it was that is so amiss. He can see her confusedly looking about, facing the seat assailed and… what, trying to figure out where she stands? She looks away into the black of the Mephistopheles helmshield. She looks out the shadowed, moonless portside windows as well. Then, Heathcliff ducks.
A shift change on the night watch? Is that it? But he heard Gregor go to relieve the watch hours ago... This bloody idiot isn’t still going, is she? He hears bootsteps.
Closing his eyes, he waits, hearing her clomp closer again. His heartbeat knows better than to race at something like this at this point, but nonetheless it races - each step has an eternity between them. She must be exhausted.
No…. no. He isn’t going to stand idly by and watch a woman self-destruct before his eyes. He steels himself to stand, to find just the right moment to catch her attention, to bare his verbal teeth and get her to take some care of herself. So where was it? The desire to send her away with her tail between her legs? Where was the spit in his throat? Had he lost the vinegar in his tone? He opens his mouth to speak, but Ishmael staggers into his bench.
Its backrest, anyway. She has no real power left to keep herself from sliding down now, stumbling, knees buckling, fingers claw-gripped on the seat until every quaking muscle she had tensed gave up on her, and she lands like a dead fish on his legs.
Heathcliff expects her to… do something. He waits. Genuinely, he waits for her to start walloping him or scream at him for not being in his room. But all she gives him is silence.
His heart twists. Painfully so. This is not the Ishmael of the quick wit, with whom he had sparred and quarreled so. This is not the strategist, the voice of reason, the spitfire that she ought to be. With alien tenderness welling in his fingertips, a gentle hand of his reaches down to grasp her shoulder.
Ishmael looks up with one exposed eye. Very much still awake, though she looks like hell. He can’t be certain she isn’t fully delirious at this point, but there is a flicker in her eye. As if she is somehow expecting to see someone else, but that this would do. And maybe he no longer softens his expression as he once could. Perhaps his brow now stays knit. Maybe he cannot allow his heart to see the light of day like this. But nevertheless he can’t shake his own resolve: he can not sit idle.
He fits his hands under her shoulders and hauls her up, with no undue amounts of laborious and complaintive grumbles on her end. A paltry coltish kick here, half an elbow if you squinted.
“Off it.” Heathcliff huffs. He was a gentleman, once. He even takes a hand and releases the tension on her hair from the drag. See? Gentlemanly. “There. Go to sleep.”
He watches her eyes think, olivine and dull, flickering like lures. She’s stiff as a board. Frankly she has every right to be, it's not as if they are often kind to each other.
“I’m not carrying you to your room.”
He says. He wants to.
“Get up or sleep.”
He says. He hopes.
Is it with acceptance that she relaxes? Is it the waves gently rocking her, the Great Lake cradling its babe at long last? Or is it exhaustion? Pure and utter exhaustion, the sort most couldn’t ever imagine?
She relaxes. Just enough to meet his shape, and no more.
The lake is quiet. No cars, no horns, no guns, no screams. No fixers rushing, no sirens, no distant night clubs. Just the occasional burble of water, the percussion of a great watery prairie, the distant call of a gull. Below there may be beasts so worthy of a hunt, but here? Tonight? It is quiet.
The lake nudges the ship, and the ship heels to the side, tipping them just enough for Ishmael to tense and Heathcliff to cross his arms over her. When the ship settles, he finds her vying to look out a window, pupils narrowed and eyes quick. He makes his complaints and tucks his fingers into his harness.
“For fuck’s sake! Sleep.” He hisses.
He jiggers her about with his grip, as if to remind her of his existence. Has she no idea how she was turning heads lately? What is driving her so far into her madness? Inch by inch, she rests her head again.
And scoots upwards a little. Just jostling. Surely.
… Her hair really is a mess. He passes a thought on his way to solitary sleep, that someone really ought to care for her enough to pass their fingers through her hair for her. That is not for him to do, though. He can not rest his lips on her crown, for it is not for him to do so. He can not run his fingers through her hair, for she belongs to this sea foremost of all. He can not tuck her weary head under his jaw, to hide her away from this place even if just for a moment. But she does seem calmer in his arms. Calmer, not calm. The tempest within her is familiar, but it does not belong to him.
God, he misses her. He can not chance a tear.
Catherine. Her auburn hair, her fickle judgement, her cruel tongue…. How many times had he held her like this, soothing her through whatever retaliations she'd faced from the Heights? Do they face her still, and without him now to offer her comfort in the cold light of day? Cathy, too, deserves a hand, a kiss, and a belonging, doesn’t she? This sours him. Are there any who remain there now to offer her these things in his absence? His eyes burn into the nothing ahead of him. There better not be.
Yet his gut does not run cold with shame or anger at such thoughts, this time. It comes to him as a fleeting realization. Perhaps this, here, too, is a mote of salvation. Catherine vexed him so, her capriciousness as lovely as her curls, and when he turned her, he could not touch upon as to why. Yet, when he turns Ishmael, it was as simple as a swear and retort. When he looks upon her, stern at the stern, he recognizes a fabric of her spirit altogether too well. An obsession, unseen, just out of reach. Whatever it is that haunts her so, he must hope however flickeringly that she is not the same sort as he is.
This one moment of care would not heave his soul from the gallows, no - but can he admit to himself that there is promise in this difference? A betterment? Heathcliff can not turn a blind eye to a story he tenderly knows by heart, after all. To destroy oneself. The one thing he is good at. At least he could see it now.
The Mephistopheles slips into the wellmaking of a wave, tipping their seat, and neither budge.
Ishmael sighs. Not one of her heaving, scathing sighs, but more akin to the withering lilt of air rattling out of a corpse. She curls up her arms from their limp position, and her calloused fingertips brush against the scars thatching his arms. Hesitation, and then movement. Simply resting a hand on his elbow. Nothing more.
Her poor broken fingernails. Her palms scabbed from gripping ropes and chains. Her darting eyes finally flutter, bowing, until they knelt to the command of rest. She’d gut him if she knew he looked upon her so pityingly.
What he wouldn’t give to hold her weary head until she makes her way to sleep. He has regrets, you know. Ways in which he would better himself if he could. But it is awfully hard to be soft when you so often feel like prey. Like the hares of the heath gouging the eyes of weasels and sinking long teeth into foxes, it simply isn’t in his nurture to be vulnerable.
Heathcliff closes his eyes. Ishmael’s mane is warm padding between them, and no draft can chill him anymore. She smells like salt and leather… He will keep her safe. Just for now. Just until she gets back on her own two feet, he will allow himself this.
The weight of her atop him slows his heart, and slows his breathing, and slows his mind. Then, sleep.
Back in the typical bus part of the busboat, Yi Sang ducks his head below deck as he descends, his swift steps still as he feels the air is different here. He casts his overcast eyes over the seats until he realizes with a jolt that Heathcliff and Ishmael are still here. They must have been here for some hours, too, as they are both fast asleep.
Gingerly stepping on the rungs of the ladder down, placing each foot where he knew it would not creak, he feels his heart warm as he respectfully approaches. It makes him smile, seeing brutish old Heathcliff making way for Ishmael to lay on the seats, himself nearly falling off the side if it were not for how closely Ishmael had nosed into his neck, or how securely his half-crossed arms held her.
Yi Sang slouches his jacket off his shoulders, and upon looking back up from his hands, he notices a piercing black eye glaring back at him. It was a furious color, intense and hateful like a cornered dog - but to Yi Sang it is only a color. Black, like the sea at night. He lifts a finger and presses it to his own lips, shushing. Then, he mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key. It seems to be enough (though he summarily notes: the comedy is lost upon the man) and Heathcliff promptly closes his eye again. Yi Sang softly drapes his jacket over them.
Putting his hands in his dresspant pockets, he lingers until Heathcliff returns to stillness, and Yi Sang is careful to put his weight on his toes as he leaves. There is love, somewhere, in the hearts of these sinners. He’s always known it had to be out there.
In the morning, Yi Sang makes a prudent point to wake up before Gregor would end his watch. He swiftly pads down the hall of doors, hopping the velvet rope, hurrying past the doorframes before even Meursault and Faust wake up - the most punctual of the sinners. After all, it wouldn’t be a secret for his keeping if they were found by another in such a state, nor would either of them find their rest particularly restful should they come to their senses.
Yet, when he crests the first seat, he peeks over the backrest and finds his eyebrows raised. There lay Heathcliff, in much the same position, with his jacket atop him. Only it had been folded open on one side.
Ishmael’s.
It is then that he registers the sound of the lake guttering, the haul of a chain off the starboard side. Yi Sang scampers up to the upper deck, bleak grey-blues and a violet sea, the sky disemboweled upon the horizon with ropey orange clouds gilt with red. There stand Gregor and Ishmael in the dim cats’ light, shoulder to shoulder and hauling rhythmically upon Ishmael’s call to heave.
Perhaps he is relieved to see that even if he had failed to confirm his promise, he would have not needed to worry. However… he worries all the same. The day is up and about, and Ishmael’s couldn’t have possibly gotten more than a few hours of sleep. She looks every bit the mess she was when she slept. And yet, she is as wickedly competent as ever.
“Yi Sang!” She spits, voice clear and strong. “Stop gawking and PULL!”
He is strung into the act like a puppet, and finds himself hauling anchor with the others.