[closed]

[katabasis]

WHO: Sofia Teresa Oyanguren & James Flint
WHAT: Familiar faces in brand new places
WHEN: Early Wintermarch
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: N/A, will add if necessary

Leading the project office of a nonexistent navy for an at-best tattered organization in the wake of a military defeat may not spell legitimacy to much of anyone, but it's certainly the closest thing thing Flint's known to honest work in years. A decade. A lifetime. If he considers the prospect for too long - what it looks like, the shape of the work as some heavy article of clothing wrapped strangle tight about him -, it begins to feel as ill-suited as it must to Charles Vane.

So he opts not to. There's enough work to be done both over the table and under it that the last thing he needs is to turn over what any of feels like. If that had been the winning argument of the day, he wouldn't be here. The Archon might be dead. They'd never have left the Nocen Sea to begin with and Nascere would be no closer to determining its own future. They might all be dead, their feelings with them. Instead, think on this: that in the months since they've arrived, they've somehow made their way from an infestation in the Kirkwall Harbor, to the controlling voices of an office in the Gallows. It's an unbelievable amount of leverage in return for next to nothing.

He can work with this, is what Flint is thinking after a full morning of excavation on the mountain of paperwork Araceli had been keeping. As he stands now near the Gallows' ferry landing, waiting for the jolly boat from the Walrus to arrive with a chest of papers and chart books, his attention is consumed enough by the work on hand that for a moment he doesn't recognize the woman stepping from ferry.

Had he, he might have found the opportunity to disappear back into the jumble of bodies along the slip. At the very least, he might have shifted back into the shadow of the stairs leading down here. Instead, he's right there at the water's edge, cutting some impossible to miss figure there just apart from the crowd waiting to load onto the ferry in the steely gray winter afternoon as he meets Lady Oyanguren's eye.

The man now called Captain Flint goes very still.