Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but b y some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!” 

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail. 

---

Ahab aches.

His leg has long added a constant, thrumming background of pain to his life, now dull and muted, now agonizing and throbbing, perpetually present. The doctors had said, when he'd returned to shore after being so dismasted, they’d said it was a miracle he’d survived at all, what with all the bloodloss and the likelihood of infection; a miracle that he was able to walk on it at all, after spending so long restrained, lashed to his own bunk for weeks as his muscles atrophied and his mind unraveled, unable to exercise or stretch or massage or soothe his searing severed nerves and raw, tender skin, his living limbs rotting right alongside the dead one. Those first few weeks and months of recovery were vital, the doctors said, vital to the healing process of the severed limb. They'd told him he would never walk without pain again. A miracle, they’d reiterated, a miracle he could even stand to put weight on it at all.

Ahab does not feel miraculous now.

He aches, his living and his dead leg, his muscles and bones, phantom pain and physical, body and soul; Ahab aches. 

Fedallah won't speak to him, hasn't in weeks. He just stares at Ahab blankly from across the weather deck, some inscrutable specter of despair never-endingly writ upon his face. Pip remains in Ahab's cabin, and Ahab cannot bear to look at him, cannot bear to look that boy in his eyes and see mirrored in them all his own pain and madness, see mirrored in Pip the suffering from the way they had both been abandoned, had both been failed, cannot bear to look at Pip and feel his own purpose keeling up inside him, wringing him out, rendering him helpless once more, even as he knows the way he is again failing Pip now. 

And Starbuck...

Ahab aches. 

He had, briefly—unwisely, it now felt—shared some of that with Starbuck. That ceaseless aching within him. Spoken of the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, the measureless sobbing and the foolish desperation with which he had for so long clung to his fury and his chase, and Starbuck...

Starbuck had stolen away.

Ahab found he couldn't blame him.

And so he aches. He stands at his pivot hole and stares out at the sea and he aches. 

In the morning the sun will dawn upon that whale’s inexorable spout, that hump like a snow-hill, and for the next three days he will chase that haunted whale across the horizon till one of them spouts black blood, and all will collapse, and the great shroud of the sea will roll on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

But perhaps not this time. Perhaps...

Ahab aches.

He stands alone at his pivot hole and stares out at the sea and he aches. Darkness falls around him, though he does not yet return to his nightly place in the cabin-scuttle at the stern. There is a stillness on the Pequod ; her deck is empty now, save for her captain and his shadow Fedallah. Fedallah is at the bow, not looking at Ahab. Above them, a lone sailor stands at the masthead, keeping watch. 

The stillness is broken by soft footsteps, approaching Ahab from behind. He does not move to acknowledge them, but instead gives a weary, sorrow-filled sigh, and in that sigh there did seem contained all the immeasurable, fathomless depths of his anguish, all his aching, all his fatigue that had for years been piled tirelessly upon his wrinkled brow.

“What is it,” he says, empty.

“Captain,” comes Starbuck's voice from behind Ahab, quiet like the waves that lap against the Pequod's side. 

“What is it, Starbuck?”

Starbuck releases a long, drawn breath, like a wound up line, pulled taut, finally slacking. “I... I am sorry.”

Ahab blinks. Frowns. “What.”

Starbuck steps forward, takes his place at Ahab's side and watches him carefully. His voice is cautious, seeking. “I am sorry,” he continues. “For leaving thee, earlier today. I was...I became too frightened. Too frustrated, even, to listen, and I let my frustration overtake my actions. But thou wert trying to tell me something, and I did not listen. I left. I am sorry.”

Ahab doesn't look at Starbuck, casting his eyes downward. “Hast listened to my mad ravings enough times. I should have known better than to expect thee to wish to listen more.” At any other time, such words might have sounded bitter, resentful, but right now they just ring sorrowful. “Needst not apologize.” 

Brow furrowing, Starbuck shakes his head. “No. I was wrong. I should have...I am here now. I wish to listen to thee now.” There is a cautious shame coloring his voice, and he looks down. “Thou wert like burning sunshine to behold, then; I was…afraid to look, for fear it should hurt my eyes.” He raises his eyes again. “But I will not look away again.”

“Burn thee I very well might,” Ahab sighs. 

“I will not turn away, my Captain,” comes the staid reply. “Not again. Speak to me. Please.”

Ahab's knuckles curl around the bulwarks against which he leans. “There is nothing I can say to thee that thou wouldst like to hear.”

“Say it anyway.”

Ahab remains quiet, eyes still fixed on the glassy black waves. A breeze wafts up from the sea before him, brushing through Ahab's hair before dying again.

Starbuck seems wrestling with himself, wary to push. There is a hesitation in his gaze and voice, a caution, as though he were engaging with a wounded, cornered thing. Ahab resents the way it makes him feel.

“Captain,” Starbuck manages to say, “ Ahab . Whatever thou wert trying to tell me. What thou wantedst to tell me. I should like to hear it now.” He presses on, that quiet courage of his welling up within him. “Thou spokest of thy life at sea, of thy years as captain. Thy wife and child, thy home upon Nantucket, and mild days of sun and sky. I want to know why thou wouldst forsake those things. I want to know more of the inscrutable thing of which thou speakest, that causes thee to keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming thyself on all the time, as thou saidst. I want to know why thou clingest to thy chase for this whale, even when thou admitest that in thy own natural, proper heart, thou wouldst not want it. I wish to know why , my Captain; I implore thee. Wilt thou tell me?”

Ahab purses his lips, and something in the wrinkles on his face shifts. An exhaustion seeps from his eyes. 

Starbuck reaches to place a hand on the bulwarks beside where Ahab’s clench the rail. He leans forward and gazes up at Ahab, trying to catch his eyes. “I am sorry I did not ask sooner.”

Ahab's eyes quiver.

“Please, Ahab. Speak to me.”

“Is that really what thou wantest? Or wilt thou turn from me again when the truth becomes too unsettling?” He makes little effort to hide the bruised resentment that now worms its way into his voice.

Starbuck’s face pinches like that of a stricken animal, a scolded dog. “I will not, Ahab. I will not turn from thee again. I will listen. I swear it.”

Ahab looks down at his hands, at Starbuck's hand resting beside them.

“What can I say, Starbuck? What can I say that thou wilt understand? That anyone would understand? 

“Thou turnedst away before, and thou wert right to. More demon than man, have I become. In vain have I tried to explain myself, but I understand now that I am beyond such understanding. 

“Why do I cling to this chase, thou asketh? What else have I to cling to? What else has not shaken off wicked Ahab's hands, as soon as he deigned to grab on? Clinging to the chase? Rather shackled to it, shackled by all the things to which I cannot cling. There's naught left within or without me but this.”

Starbuck sucks in a breath. “That is not—”

“Do not pretend to me that is not true, Starbuck. Thou wert not there, but thou knowest, about when all my boats were stove around me and that wretched whale tore my body apart. Thou didst not see it, but thou knowest the way my officers turned upon me as though I were a rabid animal afterwards, straitjacketing me to my own bed like some wild thing to be tamed, to be broken . They thought me mad, then. More demon than man.

“For weeks did I sway in my bunk to the mad rockings of the gales, for weeks was I denied even so much as the freedom to move my own limbs — the ones remaining, at least. For weeks did all my comrades rebuke and shun and fear me in my hours of need, in my cries of pain. They pulled me bleeding and broken from the maw of that horrid monster and flung me straight into the jaws of their own fears, with teeth twice as sharp and twice as violent to my body and soul.

“They boasted it, know’st that? When we returned to shore. My officers boasted how they had tamed the madness within me, how they had domesticated and conquered the dark creature, the demon, I had become. 

“Thou saw’st, then, our godly shipowners upon land, and how quickly they decided to ship me off again, once I had returned. Thou foundest me when my leg did snap beneath me on shore and speared my abdomen, nearly taking my life, and later, when the doctors bade me weeks to recover from the depth of the wound; and thou saw’st, next, how our owners, both of whom have sailed with me in past, both of whom have depended on me to bring them home safely and profitably, decided once more to send me out anyway. 

“Do not presume to tell me I have not been abandoned by thy God and his people, the very same God thou hast spent this voyage beseeching me to heed. 

“He and He alone has placed me on this path. He brought this violence upon me; He has forsaken me. I am naught but His attendant, and this chase was woven for me long ago.”

There is shock, at first; Starbuck had not expected such honesty, such immediate and thorough candor, ask for it though he had. He tries to control the reflexive upset edging into his tone, the automatic reaction. “That—” He breathes in sharply, cutting himself off. Listen, he promised he would listen. “Captain. To claim that — that God should want this for thee, I don't—”

“Thou askedst me why. This is why.” Ahab laughs, a short, jagged thing. “Thou hast long believed me damned, and that is like to be true. Thy God has damned me, abandoned me, to this. There is naught for me but this.”

“Ahab…”

“But never thee mind all that. Thou shalt be spared the horrors; thou shalt lower not when I do. Hast nothing to fear.”

“Thou art not damned by Fate , Ahab," Starbuck says, straining to keep his voice steady, “or God. Thou still hast a choice, in all this. Thou still mayest turn around. We needn't lower for him all.”

“Choice.” Ahab looks down again, something approximating a chuckle escaping his breath. “A comforting fable. One in which I have long ceased believing.”

Starbuck bites down another kneejerk objection. He sighs and looks away, opening and closing his mouth in search. He is trying — in vain, it feels — to understand. “Why sayest thou such things? Didst not start this whole quest by thy choice? Thou certainly madest it seem so, when first thou ratified the purpose of thy chase. Certainly claimedst so, that day upon the quarter deck. Dost really think thyself so devoid of the ability to choose, that thou mayest not give the surest order a captain has rights to give, of what direction his ship may turn?”

“Choose? I did not choose to be dismasted,” Ahab says through gritted teeth. “I did not choose to be abandoned by God and man alike. I did not choose forty years of a lonely whaleman's life, bound by blood and sweat to this ship like another of her braces, her planks more my home than any berth upon land. I did not choose to be on this voyage—I could not even walk unassisted at the start of it, for my injury, could not have boarded her myself even if I wanted to. I did not choose to be looked at with pity and disdain and fear and danger. I did not choose to be brought into this world with a halter round my neck, alone, with no mother nor father to care for me; did not choose to walk this world alone, shunned by gods and men alike; did not choose for God to turn me round and round His world like the windlass in such twisted and blighted ways for the whole of my life, subject to whatever suffering He felt fit to throw my way. I did not choose this.”

Starbuck falters. “That—That may be so, Captain; there may be some things that thou didst not choose, but there are other things within thy control.” It sounds somewhat ridiculous, even to him, in the face of all Ahab had just said. “Not all is within our grasp — that ability remains only for God alone — but some things are. Even now.”

Ahab's lip trembles, jaw clenched. He does not answer but for a disdainful huff. 

“Thou choosest thy own way, Ahab. Even then, forging thy quest. Even now, clinging to it. Thou choosest to speak with me, here and now. Thou choosest to attempt to spare me from the dangers of chasing that whale. Thou... thou choosest to care for that boy, that Pip, who—”

Ahab flinches nearly imperceptibly at that, and cuts Starbuck off. “What art thou getting at, Starbuck?”

“Thou art not as devoid of choice as thou thinkest,” Starbuck says, nearly begging. “We cannot choose all that happens to us. But we may choose how we proceed from it. It is never too late to choose the next step we take. To choose something new.” 

Ahab huffs at the platitude. He turns his head away from Starbuck, seemingly having run out of arguments, though still filled with the spirit of resistance to Starbuck’s attempts to reach him. To that end, he says, “Pretty words. They do little for me.”

Starbuck's frustration, kept so long in check throughout this conversation, finally bubbles over, now spilling into his voice. “Why dost thou insist on prolonging thy own suffering? Why must thou resist any attempts to help thee?”

“I never asked for thy help, Starbuck.” Ahab's voice is still calm, but it is edged too with irritation, giving into the argument. “Thou tookest that mantle upon thyself. Thinkest thyself a martyr, then? Flailing thyself upon the noble sword of thy quest, to save me from myself, from my own madness? To save our crew from my tyranny? How very magnanimous of thee.”

“Must thee resent every person who dares to care for thee? Must thee deride and undermine any endeavor to do so? Thou speakest of abandonment, and yet hast abandoned thyself!”

“ ‘Carest’ thou about me, truly, or simply thy guilty conscience? Simply appeasing thy God, who looks down upon blasphemous old me with hatred and damnation? Carest thou about me? Or simply fearest thou that He will drag thee down with me? Hast spoken of naught this whole voyage but thy God and thy shipowners and thy blasphemy and thy profit.”

“Of course I care about thee, old man!” Starbuck shouts. Immediately after, he deflates, arms hanging lifelessly by his sides, hands curled into fists. “Of course I do,” he says, hardly above a whisper. “I would not be here if I did not.”

Ahab's eyes are still downcast, and his brow furrows inward, a more fragile, wounded look shadowing his face. He squints his eyes shut and exhales heavily. Hands still gripping the bulwarks, he does not reply. The quiet stretches like a chasm, like a cresting wave swelling between them, pushing them apart. Ahab trembles ever so slightly in the wind, as though something within him might burst, as though the breeze itself could rattle him apart, if it hit him just right.

Starbuck breathes out, helplessly, after the long silence, his hands still hanging at his sides. “I’m sorry. If thou wishest me leave,” he says with a world-weary sigh, “I shall leave.”

Ahab looks over at Starbuck then, turning his head to him, for the first time all night. Starbuck's breath catches in his throat. His expression is neutral, but Ahab looks at him with a heaviness rivaling the sun, and Starbuck feels now the weight of that gaze and all that must be sitting behind it pressing in upon his chest, suffocating him, crushing him. 

“Or, i—if thou wishest me stay, my Captain,” he manages with a quiet voice, “then I shall stay.”

Ahab's eyes flit down. Starbuck’s courage flickers like a candle in the wind, but he has always been a brave man. A stubborn one. It flickers, but does not blow out.

“I…I am sorry,” Starbuck says, again. “I do not know what words to say. What I have said in the past…I see that it has hurt thee. I admit I have been…blind to that hurt; I let my prejudgments get the better of me, and I… I apologize. I do not know how to make all of this right. I am lost for what to do.” Ever brave Starbuck steps close to his Captain and reaches out a trepidatious hand, broadcasting his movements. When Ahab doesn’t pull away, Starbuck’s hand lands on his arm. “But I wish to help. I do. I care, truly, for thee. And so… I am here.”

For a long moment they stand, breathing slowly. Starbuck once again tries to catch Ahab's downcast gaze, though he still averts his eyes. “I am sorry that...that all of those things have been done to thee. Thou didst not deserve it.” He squeezes Ahab's arm. “But it does not define thee.”

Ahab turns his gaze to where Starbuck's hand rests against his arm, lips curled into a slight frown. His breaths come slow, tired. 

“We shall see,” he says, finally. 

Starbuck will take the small victory.

Ahab turns back to face the water, Starbuck’s hand falling back to his side. “Get some rest, Mr. Starbuck.” There's a promise in his tone, an understanding: this conversation is not over, yet.

Still, Starbuck hesitates. “I will return, Captain. Tomorrow,” he says, not a question, but a vow.

“If thou wishest,” says Ahab, sighing lightly, not a question, but a confirmation. 

“I do.”

“Good-night, Starbuck.”

Starbuck nods, slowly. “Good-night, Captain.”

He reaches out to Ahab one last time, hand brushing against his arm, before turning and walking away. 

For the first time in...since all of this began, Starbuck thinks he might understand his captain, at least in some small, dim way. And that that understanding may well be the start to saving him.

The next morning, they find the White Whale.