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shinonFandom: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Characters: Linebeck
Word count: ~2100
Warnings: Vaguely Unsettling Vibes.
Notes:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
genprompt_bingo - "Sunrise / Sunset." Postgame.
Alone at sea, a good sense of time was an asset. How long to sunrise? When did the tides change? What were the constellations up to, at this latitude, at this time of year? Could you outrun the other guy? Okay, but could you outrun the other guy if you pushed the boilers as hard as they'd go? How long to burn through this much fuel? You brought enough fuel, didn't you? - It was this, among other things, that had kept Linebeck alive so long.
So it was weird the way, on foggy evenings like this, all that instinctual knowledge seemed to evaporate. But hey - backup plan - another of his lifesaving abilities was, be the first to notice when something's weird, and leave immediately. No more ghost ships for this salty dog! No more Ocean Kings and cursed temples! No more of this heavy purple-gray vapor stealing across the surface of the ocean, where an hour before he could've sworn there was nothing!
Except - what had he been doing an hour ago? How long was an hour?
Okay, he decided, This is a certified weird thing, I don't need to know any more, and bravely and conclusively brought the wheel around. Full steam away from whatever is going on here -
The engine coughed wetly. A sinister yellowish miasma issued from the smokestack and, heavier than air, started to puddle around the pilothouse. Linebeck stared, his hand frozen to the wheel. Something went bang against the inside of the chimney, and the smoking stopped. But the existing smudgy mass of it didn't disperse. It lingered on the roof, hunched and watchful.
The engine fire must have died. He could feel under his feet the sad deficiency in bumping and rattling - Not enough pressure in the boilers, he thought, We're just coasting now.
And then he thought, Who's "we?"
He looked at the fog lying dense over the ocean. He looked at the ominous cloud lying dense above him. Aloud he said, "Well! This is the last time I buy fuel from that guy." With a razor-thin and only slightly tremulous smile he inched his way toward the engine room access, eyes locked on the weird smoke-creature all the while. Creature? No, no, nothing so dangerous as that. "If you're thinking about extruding any tentacles," he said - and his voice sounded dead and without resonance in this too-close atmosphere - "then don't. I - I run a tight ship here and I don't allow... extrusions."
It didn't react. Why would it react? It wasn't alive. He scrambled for the door.
The air was clear below. Which was weird - if that smoke was smoke, and it was as heavy as all that, there should be more of it down here than up - y'know what, never mind. Linebeck shoved all such unpleasant speculations aside and approached the furnace, where behind the grate a single feeble ember glowed. He'd definitely put in more wood than that. It definitely shouldn't have burned down this fast. He went aft, whipped the tarp off his emergency stockpile, and - this wasn't right, either. A double row of neatly split and stacked logs, got that, but he was sure it'd been a triple row. And that the firewood he'd paid for hadn't had this oily black bark, and the branches hadn't corkscrewed.
And this stuff was riddled with knots, yellow knots, like -
He threw the tarp back over them and took a large step away, shaking fingers clasped behind his back.
He couldn't remember exactly when or where he'd laid in this supply. Had it been before the Ocean King? And how long ago was that? Tetra said she'd spent a couple of weeks inside his dream, although her crew said it was just a few minutes. Linebeck had already been there when she and the kid arrived, but how much longer? Was it on the order of real-world days? Jolene - or the dream-version of Jolene, probably - in there she'd said she had been chasing him a hundred years. But he was pretty sure they'd only - ahem - parted ways three or four years ago. And he didn't think he could've been living in a pocket dimension for ninety-seven subjective years without noticing that the seasons never changed, and it was never full night, and the moon was always the exact same slice of waning gibbous.
He did remember he'd been burning coal while he was in there. So maybe he used up everything he had aboard before. Where would he have restocked? Would it have survived the ship sinking, and would it have come back out with him?
Had anything in there been physically real at all, and actually, had he watched this ship sink?
This was getting nowhere fast. The Great Sea was a weird place. Creepy stuff happened, and you didn't need to know how or why. Steeling himself, he twitched the tarp back off the woodpile. As long as it burned, who cared if the stuff was haunted? He did not make eye contact with any of the weird yellow whorls in the wood. He wished he had a much longer set of tongs. He fed one of the least squiggly-looking rounds into the fire - it caught almost too quickly, with a hiss and a greasy flare. He jumped back. Anyone would have. He gave serious consideration to a panicked scramble back onto the deck, but on the other hand, that smoke-beast - not that it was a beast -
Traditionally, sailing alone had its downsides. He could never know the exact status of everything on his ship at any given moment; he could only be in one place at a time. But right now? Right now that was just fine by him. If he could've contrived to be in even fewer places, he would have.
While he didn't look at the fire too closely, and also refrained from going above - he pretended he was studying the pressure gauges, but the markings on them had stopped making any sense to him - there was an uneasy prickling at the back of his neck.
Used to be that was a sure sign of danger. Nowadays it was usually just Sparkles hanging around, about to rip into him for something or other, songs in the key of "stop making Link do all the dirty work" or "why are you so old," so he'd learned to write it off. Life at close quarters, right? What could you do?
But - no. Ciela wasn't from this world, and she'd stayed with old Grandpa Fishbones. There wasn't anyone else here, that was the point. The kids had gone off a-plundering, or whatever adolescent pirates did, and the S. S. Linebeck was whole and sound and his alone, as it should be. Everyone who'd wound up in the Ocean King's domain was accounted for. Elsewhere.
So who else...?
He didn't turn around. "I don't -" he said, but his throat closed off and wouldn't let him finish the thought. Whatever the thought had been. He coughed, adjusted his scarf, and tried without success to project a little more authority: "I don't take kindly to stowaways. I'm going to turn around on the count of three, and I want to see you with your hands up, or - uh - or - or else it'll go - really badly for you!" Inspiration seized him. He shoved a hand into the inside pocket of his coat and mimed as if he was holding a gun in there. "I'm a dangerous man and I don't suggest you test my patience. I mean it! I'm turning around. One... two..." There was no sound of someone breaking out of hiding behind him. The feeling of being watched only intensified. "Two and a half..." So did the feeling that he was acting like an idiot. "Two and three quarters." If there really was a stowaway, the longer he dithered like this, the higher the odds they'd walk up and hit him over the head and hijack his precious ship. Goddesses, please let there not be a stowaway.
No. Please let it be nothing worse than that.
Before his nerve completely deserted him, he spun around, yelling, "Yah!" in a fierce and piratical manner. Element of surprise. He hadn't even counted to three yet.
His pulse thudded in his temples. He swept his gaze over the engine room. Nothing had moved. No one was here.
"Forget it," he said, and in his hurry to get above almost brained himself on the hatch.
The weird globby smoke thing was nowhere in evidence now - maybe it had dropped off the side. It only went to show: any problem you ignored for long enough was bound to go away eventually.
But the fog had gotten thicker. He looked off to the east. To the extent his vision could even pierce through that dim soupy blanket, the sea beneath it seemed abnormally calm. But, hey, that was probably in his favor. Who said all bizarre disturbances in the natural order had to be bad? As the engine started building up steam again he brought the wheel a few points north, to keep the rising sun over his shoulder -
No. No, hang on, the sun wasn't rising. He'd gone below right around sunset. And yeah, fine, he'd very briefly frozen up - or make that "paused to consider his options" - but his options hadn't taken nine hours of considering.
Right?
Okay. So. Either he'd totally lost all sense of time - a possibility he was not going to look at any closer, thankyouverymuch - or that wasn't the coming dawn. Some kind of illusion. Some weird particulate aloft. Or maybe it was his sense of direction that was fouled up. He consulted his compass, and -
Couldn't read that either.
The needle hung dead. The cardinal directions were marked in squiggly unfamiliar glyphs, shapes he forgot as soon as he took his eyes off them.
He was very cold.
"You know..." he said to no one. "You know what this is?" This sudden sense of relief almost cut the knees out from under him, and he laughed, maybe a touch frantically. "This is a dream! That's why I can't read. I'm not cursed, I'm not haunted, there's no evil fairy doing weird stuff - I'm asleep. Everything's as it should be in the waking world. I'm in my cabin, minding my own business, sailing along for the next big score. So, thanks for the show, but I'll be waking up right" - he snapped his fingers - "now."
Snap. "Now."
"Okay, very funny, how about" - snap - "now."
Still no change. He tried snapping again, but his hand trembled, and his fingers made no sound.
"Fine," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, "have it your way, I'll - I'll wake up whenever I wake up."
And the ship chugged placidly forward into the fog. It left a too-smooth, too-straight wake on the glassy surface of the water, before the fog behind erased that too.
He was being watched. He needed to get his back up against something. A defensible position, or a hiding place. He tied the wheel into position - it took him an uncharacteristic three tries - and braced himself against the side of the bridge. If anything was coming, he'd see it.
But if he did see it, what good would that do?
It was fine. It was fine. It was... probably a dream. And if it wasn't a dream, the sun would burn all this fog off eventually. All he had to do, either way, was wait.
He still had a chilly certainty that he wasn't alone here. He still had the feeling of somebody's eyes on the back of his neck. He wedged himself harder against the solid timber.
"Just a bad dream," he muttered. And then his mouth went dry. Supposing it was a dream. Did that actually make it any safer?
Bellum lived in dreams. From inside the Ocean King's mind he'd made the Ghost Ship, and dragged more people into that otherworld and drained their life. And Ciela and the kid had dealt with Bellum, but -
The fog swirled around Linebeck's ankles. He thought, What if they missed a spot? What if there was something left of him, hiding in your brain, and it hitchhiked out on you?
What then?
The tingling at the base of his skull was getting worse. Slowly, almost without wanting to, he raised a hand, starting to reach back. Someone else's eyes. It felt like someone else's eyes were on him. He pushed aside the collar of his coat, and -
jerked his hand away just before making contact. No. No, he didn't want to know what was back there. Just vertebrae, probably.
He'd wait for daylight. Whenever that was.
Characters: Linebeck
Word count: ~2100
Warnings: Vaguely Unsettling Vibes.
Notes:
genprompt_bingo - "Sunrise / Sunset." Postgame.Alone at sea, a good sense of time was an asset. How long to sunrise? When did the tides change? What were the constellations up to, at this latitude, at this time of year? Could you outrun the other guy? Okay, but could you outrun the other guy if you pushed the boilers as hard as they'd go? How long to burn through this much fuel? You brought enough fuel, didn't you? - It was this, among other things, that had kept Linebeck alive so long.
So it was weird the way, on foggy evenings like this, all that instinctual knowledge seemed to evaporate. But hey - backup plan - another of his lifesaving abilities was, be the first to notice when something's weird, and leave immediately. No more ghost ships for this salty dog! No more Ocean Kings and cursed temples! No more of this heavy purple-gray vapor stealing across the surface of the ocean, where an hour before he could've sworn there was nothing!
Except - what had he been doing an hour ago? How long was an hour?
Okay, he decided, This is a certified weird thing, I don't need to know any more, and bravely and conclusively brought the wheel around. Full steam away from whatever is going on here -
The engine coughed wetly. A sinister yellowish miasma issued from the smokestack and, heavier than air, started to puddle around the pilothouse. Linebeck stared, his hand frozen to the wheel. Something went bang against the inside of the chimney, and the smoking stopped. But the existing smudgy mass of it didn't disperse. It lingered on the roof, hunched and watchful.
The engine fire must have died. He could feel under his feet the sad deficiency in bumping and rattling - Not enough pressure in the boilers, he thought, We're just coasting now.
And then he thought, Who's "we?"
He looked at the fog lying dense over the ocean. He looked at the ominous cloud lying dense above him. Aloud he said, "Well! This is the last time I buy fuel from that guy." With a razor-thin and only slightly tremulous smile he inched his way toward the engine room access, eyes locked on the weird smoke-creature all the while. Creature? No, no, nothing so dangerous as that. "If you're thinking about extruding any tentacles," he said - and his voice sounded dead and without resonance in this too-close atmosphere - "then don't. I - I run a tight ship here and I don't allow... extrusions."
It didn't react. Why would it react? It wasn't alive. He scrambled for the door.
The air was clear below. Which was weird - if that smoke was smoke, and it was as heavy as all that, there should be more of it down here than up - y'know what, never mind. Linebeck shoved all such unpleasant speculations aside and approached the furnace, where behind the grate a single feeble ember glowed. He'd definitely put in more wood than that. It definitely shouldn't have burned down this fast. He went aft, whipped the tarp off his emergency stockpile, and - this wasn't right, either. A double row of neatly split and stacked logs, got that, but he was sure it'd been a triple row. And that the firewood he'd paid for hadn't had this oily black bark, and the branches hadn't corkscrewed.
And this stuff was riddled with knots, yellow knots, like -
He threw the tarp back over them and took a large step away, shaking fingers clasped behind his back.
He couldn't remember exactly when or where he'd laid in this supply. Had it been before the Ocean King? And how long ago was that? Tetra said she'd spent a couple of weeks inside his dream, although her crew said it was just a few minutes. Linebeck had already been there when she and the kid arrived, but how much longer? Was it on the order of real-world days? Jolene - or the dream-version of Jolene, probably - in there she'd said she had been chasing him a hundred years. But he was pretty sure they'd only - ahem - parted ways three or four years ago. And he didn't think he could've been living in a pocket dimension for ninety-seven subjective years without noticing that the seasons never changed, and it was never full night, and the moon was always the exact same slice of waning gibbous.
He did remember he'd been burning coal while he was in there. So maybe he used up everything he had aboard before. Where would he have restocked? Would it have survived the ship sinking, and would it have come back out with him?
Had anything in there been physically real at all, and actually, had he watched this ship sink?
This was getting nowhere fast. The Great Sea was a weird place. Creepy stuff happened, and you didn't need to know how or why. Steeling himself, he twitched the tarp back off the woodpile. As long as it burned, who cared if the stuff was haunted? He did not make eye contact with any of the weird yellow whorls in the wood. He wished he had a much longer set of tongs. He fed one of the least squiggly-looking rounds into the fire - it caught almost too quickly, with a hiss and a greasy flare. He jumped back. Anyone would have. He gave serious consideration to a panicked scramble back onto the deck, but on the other hand, that smoke-beast - not that it was a beast -
Traditionally, sailing alone had its downsides. He could never know the exact status of everything on his ship at any given moment; he could only be in one place at a time. But right now? Right now that was just fine by him. If he could've contrived to be in even fewer places, he would have.
While he didn't look at the fire too closely, and also refrained from going above - he pretended he was studying the pressure gauges, but the markings on them had stopped making any sense to him - there was an uneasy prickling at the back of his neck.
Used to be that was a sure sign of danger. Nowadays it was usually just Sparkles hanging around, about to rip into him for something or other, songs in the key of "stop making Link do all the dirty work" or "why are you so old," so he'd learned to write it off. Life at close quarters, right? What could you do?
But - no. Ciela wasn't from this world, and she'd stayed with old Grandpa Fishbones. There wasn't anyone else here, that was the point. The kids had gone off a-plundering, or whatever adolescent pirates did, and the S. S. Linebeck was whole and sound and his alone, as it should be. Everyone who'd wound up in the Ocean King's domain was accounted for. Elsewhere.
So who else...?
He didn't turn around. "I don't -" he said, but his throat closed off and wouldn't let him finish the thought. Whatever the thought had been. He coughed, adjusted his scarf, and tried without success to project a little more authority: "I don't take kindly to stowaways. I'm going to turn around on the count of three, and I want to see you with your hands up, or - uh - or - or else it'll go - really badly for you!" Inspiration seized him. He shoved a hand into the inside pocket of his coat and mimed as if he was holding a gun in there. "I'm a dangerous man and I don't suggest you test my patience. I mean it! I'm turning around. One... two..." There was no sound of someone breaking out of hiding behind him. The feeling of being watched only intensified. "Two and a half..." So did the feeling that he was acting like an idiot. "Two and three quarters." If there really was a stowaway, the longer he dithered like this, the higher the odds they'd walk up and hit him over the head and hijack his precious ship. Goddesses, please let there not be a stowaway.
No. Please let it be nothing worse than that.
Before his nerve completely deserted him, he spun around, yelling, "Yah!" in a fierce and piratical manner. Element of surprise. He hadn't even counted to three yet.
His pulse thudded in his temples. He swept his gaze over the engine room. Nothing had moved. No one was here.
"Forget it," he said, and in his hurry to get above almost brained himself on the hatch.
The weird globby smoke thing was nowhere in evidence now - maybe it had dropped off the side. It only went to show: any problem you ignored for long enough was bound to go away eventually.
But the fog had gotten thicker. He looked off to the east. To the extent his vision could even pierce through that dim soupy blanket, the sea beneath it seemed abnormally calm. But, hey, that was probably in his favor. Who said all bizarre disturbances in the natural order had to be bad? As the engine started building up steam again he brought the wheel a few points north, to keep the rising sun over his shoulder -
No. No, hang on, the sun wasn't rising. He'd gone below right around sunset. And yeah, fine, he'd very briefly frozen up - or make that "paused to consider his options" - but his options hadn't taken nine hours of considering.
Right?
Okay. So. Either he'd totally lost all sense of time - a possibility he was not going to look at any closer, thankyouverymuch - or that wasn't the coming dawn. Some kind of illusion. Some weird particulate aloft. Or maybe it was his sense of direction that was fouled up. He consulted his compass, and -
Couldn't read that either.
The needle hung dead. The cardinal directions were marked in squiggly unfamiliar glyphs, shapes he forgot as soon as he took his eyes off them.
He was very cold.
"You know..." he said to no one. "You know what this is?" This sudden sense of relief almost cut the knees out from under him, and he laughed, maybe a touch frantically. "This is a dream! That's why I can't read. I'm not cursed, I'm not haunted, there's no evil fairy doing weird stuff - I'm asleep. Everything's as it should be in the waking world. I'm in my cabin, minding my own business, sailing along for the next big score. So, thanks for the show, but I'll be waking up right" - he snapped his fingers - "now."
Snap. "Now."
"Okay, very funny, how about" - snap - "now."
Still no change. He tried snapping again, but his hand trembled, and his fingers made no sound.
"Fine," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, "have it your way, I'll - I'll wake up whenever I wake up."
And the ship chugged placidly forward into the fog. It left a too-smooth, too-straight wake on the glassy surface of the water, before the fog behind erased that too.
He was being watched. He needed to get his back up against something. A defensible position, or a hiding place. He tied the wheel into position - it took him an uncharacteristic three tries - and braced himself against the side of the bridge. If anything was coming, he'd see it.
But if he did see it, what good would that do?
It was fine. It was fine. It was... probably a dream. And if it wasn't a dream, the sun would burn all this fog off eventually. All he had to do, either way, was wait.
He still had a chilly certainty that he wasn't alone here. He still had the feeling of somebody's eyes on the back of his neck. He wedged himself harder against the solid timber.
"Just a bad dream," he muttered. And then his mouth went dry. Supposing it was a dream. Did that actually make it any safer?
Bellum lived in dreams. From inside the Ocean King's mind he'd made the Ghost Ship, and dragged more people into that otherworld and drained their life. And Ciela and the kid had dealt with Bellum, but -
The fog swirled around Linebeck's ankles. He thought, What if they missed a spot? What if there was something left of him, hiding in your brain, and it hitchhiked out on you?
What then?
The tingling at the base of his skull was getting worse. Slowly, almost without wanting to, he raised a hand, starting to reach back. Someone else's eyes. It felt like someone else's eyes were on him. He pushed aside the collar of his coat, and -
jerked his hand away just before making contact. No. No, he didn't want to know what was back there. Just vertebrae, probably.
He'd wait for daylight. Whenever that was.
