Whumptober Day 3
The sun is low, the sea becalmed, when the captain sends his men to the prow to retrieve his recalcitrant sailor. Three of them climb down across the figurehead, guarded by lines around their waists, and begin hacking apart the ropes tethering Sterling to the figurehead. The young sailor sags bonelessly in their grips. Seawater drips from his tattered clothes, his tangled hair, his swollen, distended fingers and feet. When they dump him on deck at the captain’s feet, he doesn’t even twitch.
The captain rolls him over with a booted nudge, exposing the sunburned face and cracked, dehydrated lips. The sailor remains unresponsive.
“Take him below, let the sawbones at him,” he orders.
Belowdecks, the sailors tasked with carrying Sterling to the ship’s doctor heave him onto the narrow pallet and shoulder their way back up onto deck, leaving the unconscious sailor in the doctor’s care. He, knowing that the boy’s stint at the figurehead was up today, is prepared. He settles next to the pallet and starts by dripping water in between Sterling’s lips, slow enough that he won’t choke. Getting some water in him is the highest priority. After several minutes of slow, steady attempts at rehydrating him, the doctor turns his attention to the boy’s hurts.
He takes Sterling’s wrist, and sets the swollen, purpling fingers across his knee. A pair of tweezers and an impatient tug of the lamp later, the doctor starts picking rope fibers out of the torn, ragged grooves in his flesh. The young sailor stirs, revived a little by the meager amount of water he was able to ingest, and moans.
“That’s it, lad, come on back,” Horace murmurs. He doesn’t look up from his task. When he’s cleaned Sterling’s wrist of rope fibers, he wraps it in damp strips of bandaging, and repeats the process on his other wrist.
Sterling’s skin, flushed with sunburn and chapped by wind, continues to grow hotter as the doctor works. He shakes, minute trembles that run the course of his frame, and mumbles incoherently, or tries to twitch away from the doctor’s ministration. Horace soothes him with a hand on his brow or a string of meaningless words, but shock has set in, and by the time the doctor finishes dressing the tears where the rope crisscrossed his body, Sterling’s skin, formerly clammy and icily chilled, has begun to burn with fever.
As the doctor works, he notes, with grieved and resigned eyes, marks on Sterling’s body too old to have been inflicted during, or even soon before, his stint on the figurehead. Bruising, bone-deep in some places, purple and green and yellow and red. Scars, some white with age, some more lividly recent, a few reopened and weeping red and silent pain. And all of them inflicted with chillingly precise intent, carved marks of power and magic and hate.
Sterling flinches harshly as the doctor passes a rag dipped in soothing, cleansing balm across one of the reopened marks, and the young sailor twists his head away, scrabbling in unconscious delirium at the edge of the pallet.
“Pl’s, ls, nnn,” it’s just incoherent croaking from a voice scraped raw by days of dehydration and relentless punishment. But the doctor knows desperation when he hears it. The boy is terrified.
“It’s alright, lad, this isn’t being done to hurt you,” he murmurs, swiping gently at the open scar. He clears the crusted blood and sea-salt away, and then lays a fresh rag, dipped in more of the cleansing balm, across the mark.
Sterling mumbles as the doctor works, eyes roaming restlessly under salt-crusted eyelids. His lips crack and bleed, and he twitches every time the doctor touches one of his marks. Finally, the doctor finishes tending to the open sores and wounds across his body, and takes a rag, wet with some of the ship’s precious store of fresh water, to clean his face. He swipes his thumb carefully across Sterling’s eyelids, clearing away the sea-spray crusting them shut, and cleans away the salt and blood across the rest of his face. Sterling whimpers softly, reedy breaths coming hoarse and waterlogged. The doctor places a palm across his chest, feeling the labored rise and fall of it, and listening to the rattle in his lungs.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” he tells the young sailor softly. “Let’s see if we can’t just keep you on this side of the veil. Nothing good’s waiting on the other side, not with what you’ve been sacrificed to.”
He tries a cup of water, and this time Sterling drinks, still unconsciously but able to take the slow, careful sips Horace allows him. When the cup is emptied the doctor sets Sterling’s head down, only for the young sailor to lean into his hand.
“‘ter,” he breathes. “P…et,”
Horace sits heavily. He strokes the windburned cheek with one thumb, lowering his own head into his other hand to catch the tears slipping from his eyes. “Oh, lad,” he chokes out after a few moments. “I’m not Peter.”
Sterling hums uncertainly. His eyes drift open for the first time, glazed brightly with fever. “Peter,” he croaks, twisting to look for the one he calls. “Pe… eter,”
The doctor wipes his eyes and forces tearing grief aside. “He’s not here,” he says gently. “Try to rest, lad, you need it.”
Sterling’s eyes finally find Horace, but without much recognition. His lips work on the word for a moment before he rasps, “Whh, where,”
“Just above,” the doctor lies, past a throat tight enough to choke him. “He’ll be down later, don’t you worry. Rest, now, so you can see him when he comes.”
“…'kay,” Sterling breathes after a moment. His eyes slip shut, and he relaxes with a shudder. “…see’m?” he inquires softly.
Horace keeps his grief silent, as he watches through the night over Sterling’s fever, and reassures his patient every time he slips close enough to the surface of waking that Peter is coming, soon. The lies come easily, after a while, but leave guilt-edged imprints in his heart, which he stores in careful remembrance with all the other pieces of misery and hate that fuel his mission aboard this ship. On the day of his reckoning, he’ll unleash it all, but until then, he sits in the dark and musty berth belowdecks, and tends to his captain’s latest atrocity with lies that are far kinder than the truth.
