so umm
“crackheaded head canons: shilo is wick and i thought alexa vega was the one singing in the trailer: the comic”
also what is pacing and how do i use it
lyrics courtesy of streetcornerspade
The ship is swayed, heave ho, heave ho,
on the dark and stormy blue,
and I had fifed the captain’s might
as he pulled out the pews.
She’s singing again.
She sings once in awhile, not often, but when she remembers a little girl carried by a ship, rocking on a turbulent, endless ocean that didn’t seem to go anywhere.
She thinks of the little girl curled forlornly in the corner, head hung and skinny arms wrapped around her knees, black hair that didn’t belong to her a curtain between her and a frightening new world. How the sea captain had once stood in the doorway of her room, remarking on the dark circles beneath her eyes, but she had had those marks for years, years before she had stepped foot on that ship.
“You haven’t slept, heave ho,” he said,
“In many suns and moons.”
The girl lifted her head, smiling weakly, half-heartedly reassuring the man. He was a nice man. She didn’t know him very well, but he looked after her in his spare time. But her attention soon strayed, gazing listlessly at her knees.
“Oh I will sleep when we reach shore.”
He urged her to get ready for bed, handing her her nightwear and shooing her off in the direction of the bed as he left.
She gazed at the nightie in her hands, the nightie that had served her faithfully for so many years, a nightie that might’ve once been a part of her mother’s own nightgown. Like her hair, her eyes, her face, even her father’s love.
She was not whole. For all that she was free, she had never been whole.
She dressed, extinguishing the tiny flame in the lantern, and crawled into bed. For a moment she felt suffocated, like she had her own hands wrapped around her throat, unyielding and merciless.
She never wanted to sleep on the ship. Or anywhere, really. Sometimes, she thought she would never sleep again.
In all my dreams, I drown.
She didn’t have dreams. She had nightmares.
She left that city. But some things would never leave her.
In the early days, when she woke to tears stuck dry on her face, she would wonder if she had never went to the opera, if her dad and Mag would still be alive today. It wasn’t her fault, not really. Never, her dad would say. But it didn’t stop her from seeing the blood pouring out of Mag’s empty eyes and her dad’s cooling body, filling the space until she was pulled down under.
We died, we died because of you. Why should you escape, the voices screamed, lowering to a deafening whisper when she was awake.
Some days she had wondered if it was a mistake to leave that city. Maybe she should’ve stayed, let the Largo siblings — who were enraged that their father had willed the entire empire to a mere slip of a girl that was certainly no Largo — hunt her down and secure their riches. She would’ve died there one way or another, but this new life, this escape was killing her, too.
She didn’t know it, but she would die that night.
Then, the ship sunk. It sunk one night, swallowed by black water, not raging but frothing and eddying.
She had entered Hell.
It’s a funny place. Not ha-ha funny, but ironically funny. It sucks the humanity out of you, but it leaves you your memories if it thinks they’ll help keep you twisted, twisting you up more. There’s no escape unless you make up your own, climbing and clawing through the earth until you break through to the surface, and even then you don’t stop until you’re completely out or you could get pulled back in.
Others try. She doesn’t.
Nathan Wallace must be down here. He loved her mother, loved her, but he’s killed so, so many people.
She used to search for her father. She never does find him.
What she got instead was hair of her own, a new wardrobe, and a new name.
OH MAN SOMEONE WROTE SHILO IS WICK FIC YESSSSS
You, good sir or madam, are great.
your comic is awesome. i couldn't not write shilo=wick fic for it.