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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.

Chapter Text

It is early morning when they spot Moby Dick, when Ahab and Tashtego both sing out for him simultaneously from aloft — Tashtego from the main masthead, Ahab from the basket Starbuck hoists for him into the air.

When Ahab is lowered back down to the deck, he and Starbuck exchange a glance. Starbuck is reaching for him already, brow furrowed, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, but Ahab steals away before he can say anything. The captain calls a “Stay on board, Mr. Starbuck, and keep the ship” over his shoulder as he climbs into his boat, Fedallah already at the bow.

“Captain!” Starbuck shouts after him, but the boats are already lowering, and the chase is already begun.

Starbuck can do nothing but watch. Watch as Ahab, and Stubb, and Flask, and all their assembled crew, chase Moby Dick’s wide spout and snow-capped hump through the horizon; watch as the whale breaches his whole magnificent marbleized form before submerging out of sight; watch as his captain and crew wait with bated breath for the whale to show himself again. 

Starbuck watches. The white sea-fowl that had followed Moby Dick and his pursuers now flutter frantically into the air, towards Ahab’s boat, and all of a sudden the whale breaches again, his glittering mouth yawning beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb, and it is only Ahab’s quick, deft steering that whirls the whaleboat aside in time to avoid the whale’s crushing jaws. 

Then the distance and the chaos of the waves and the wind and the spray make it difficult to make out what comes next. There is splashing and shouting and crying. Starbuck hears a great, terrible crashing sound, louder than anything he’s ever heard, like a thousand trees snapping and falling to some horrific, crushing weight, and when the spray clears Ahab’s boat has been snapped between the White Whale's jaws, and captain and crew now lay floundering in the churning waves around them. Moby Dick thrusts his great white head up and down in the water nearby, sending waves and spray higher and higher into the air. 

“Square the yards!” Starbuck cries, climbing a shroud to gain better sight of the scene. “Helmsman, sail down the whale!” he calls to the helmsman — one of his oarsmen, also spared from the chase, by way of Starbuck and his boat having been ordained not to lower. The Pequod lurches as she turns toward the carnage, where Moby Dick now swims ever-contracting circles around Ahab and his crew; the other boats, though nearby, dare not approach closer, for fear of agitating Moby Dick to bring his wrath upon Ahab and his crew in the water, and for fear of becoming caught themselves in the whirling eddies the whale creates.

Ahab calls up from where he struggles to stay afloat. “Sail on the—” A crashing wave overtakes him, cutting him off. He struggles to the surface again, riding the crest of another oncoming wave. “Sail on the whale! Drive him off!”

The Pequod cuts her way through the contracting circle, separating Moby Dick from Ahab. Starbuck runs across the deck, eyes searching wildly, as Ahab and all his crew are pulled into Stubb’s boat. The mastheads above him continue to descry all the ensuing events, and Starbuck’s gut twists with every successive peril. 

For a time, Ahab lays limp in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, briefly yielding to his body’s anguish. From deep within him, nameless wails peal out, as desolate sounds from out ravines. Starbuck can hear him from the ship. 

Still, Ahab does not relent. Now double-banked, two men at each oar, Stubb’s boat chases down the whale, who flees from them with as yet unseen speed and power. Soon enough, Ahab gives the order to return to the Pequod , and she picks up her straggling crew, then continues to sail hard down the wake of the whale. 

Ahab does not look at Starbuck when he climbs back onto deck, hair and clothes plastered flat to his skin with the seawater, stalking past him to the binnacle watch to mark the hour. He is restless, agitated, determined and defiant and so full of furious life, so much a departure from the exhausted, desperate man with whom Starbuck had spoken the night before. “Set the stun-sails,” he calls, “crowd all sail, and carry on, dead to leeward! Where’s the doubloon now; d’ye see him?” 

The day wears on like so, with all silent but for the occasional order from Ahab — now to raise a sail still higher, now to spread one still wider, now to call out the position of the whale. The Captain paces back and forth, passing by the wreckage of his stove boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed, broken bow to shattered stern. Finally, he pauses before it, and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over Ahab’s face there now stole such an added gloom as this.

Starbuck attempts to make his way to him, to reach out for him, but ere he does, Stubb advances, perhaps intending to demonstrate his own unabated courage, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain’s mind. Eyeing the wreck, Stubb exclaims,“The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir! Ha! Ha!”

“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man! Did I not know thee brave as fearless fire, and as mechanical, I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”

“Aye, sir,” says Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.”

“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright, not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling hint. Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” He turns his back on both the officers. “Cold, cold—I shiver! How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!”

“Ahab!” Starbuck calls after him, but Ahab has already moved to mark the hour on the binnacle watch again. 

The day is now nearly done, only the hem of its golden robe still rustling. Soon, it is almost dark, but the lookout men still remain at the mastheads.

“Can’t see the spout now, sir; too dark,” cries a voice from the air.

“How heading when last seen?”

“As before, sir—straight to leeward.”

“Good! He will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! Keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the foremast head, and see it manned till morning.” Then, advancing towards the doubloon in the mainmast, he cries, “Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it, but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead, and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now! The deck is thine, sir!”

And so saying, he places himself halfway within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, resolves to stand there till dawn, except to occasionally rouse himself to see how the night wears on.

Chapter Text

Starbuck wrings his hands and tugs at his clothing and bites worryingly at his lower lip, standing at the ship’s bow. He had thought, on the previous night, when he and Ahab had stood together at the quarter-deck and spoken of pain and promises, that perhaps he might have…gotten through to Ahab, in some way. At the very least, Ahab had surely gotten through to him — he always had; Ahab had always possessed that maddening ability to reach deep within Starbuck and blast away all reason, all will, all else. But Starbuck had thought…he’d thought there might have been something else, this time. Ahab had always been many things, stubborn chiefly among them, but Starbuck was beginning to realize how much his own stubbornness, his own obstinate single-mindedness had also been hanging over this voyage like a shroud, a fog that had clouded his vision for so long — for all his life — that it had rendered him unable to discern it. But it was beginning to lift, and he’d thought…he’d thought. 

His stomach churns with the events of the past day. The White Whale, finally revealing himself, just as Starbuck had begun to feel there might be some way out of this, just as Ahab and he had begun to have some kind of proper conversation, some genuine communication — well. It is hard not to read that as some sort of omen. The Whale had swum for Ahab immediately, as if he’d known his pursuer, had snapped Ahab’s boat like it was nothing, had left him struggling amidst the wild waves and then effortlessly escaped with naught a scratch upon his scarred, snow-white hide.

Starbuck shivers in the wind. He turns to face astern, where Ahab still stands slumped in his scuttle and the helmsman still steadfastly steers the ship eastward next to him. Standing there so still, so solid, he appears made of stone, made of wood, a misplaced figurehead tacked onto the rear of the ship, hat swung low over his brow.

Steeling himself, Starbuck makes his way aft. Ahab sees him coming, and he steps out from the cabin-scuttle towards Starbuck, making the briefest of nods in his direction before walking past him to return to his usual perch upon the quarterdeck. Starbuck sighs, and follows, follows.

It feels much like the first night, Ahab with his ivory leg bored into his pivot-hole, staring out at the night-drenched sea, one hand curled loosely around a shroud as he keeps his gaze away from desperate, ever-faithful Starbuck at his side.

After a long, helpless silence, Starbuck moves to speak. “Captain?”

“Starbuck.”

Well. What is there for him to say? 

The night is cloudless, and the starlight and moonlight catch on the gossamer strands of gray threaded through Ahab’s dark hair, his beard, gilding them silver. Both hair and beard had grown some, the past several weeks, as Ahab had spent less and less time below decks, given less and less regard to the care and upkeep of his own self, and now his silver-spun hair curls like crashing waves over the wrinkled landscape of his forehead. 

Ahab had asked Starbuck, yesterday afternoon — before he’d treacherously left his captain behind, left him standing at the bulwarks like a bride left at the altar with his hollow, desperate aching — to brush that old hair aside. He’d asked Starbuck to brush it out from his tired brow, to stand close to him and let him gaze into his eyes. Better than to gaze into sea or sky, Ahab had said, better than to gaze upon God. 

Starbuck had willingly obeyed, then. He longs to do the same now. His fingers twitch at his sides with the need for it.

Ahab tilts his head to the side, a curious, melancholy, almost wistful expression on his face. “It would appear,” he says, unprompted, “that I cannot swim.”

Starbuck’s entire face twists. “Wh-what?”

“I hadn’t since…since it happened. Till today. It would almost be humorous, were it not such evidence of my own foolishness. How often are we knocked into the sea during a whale hunt? Our boats stove, or knocked about, or capsized, or however way of tossing us into the water? How many times has such a thing happened to me? It happened to thee, our very first lowering on this passage, I remember. Yet not once, on this voyage, did such accidents occur on my whaleboat. Not once this voyage, across the whole of the ocean, have I had cause to bear myself up in the water with the strength of my own body, my own limbs. 

“Until today.

“Before now it did not occur to me that I should have any issue with it.

“It seems obvious now. Foolish. Ridiculous. How could I have not thought of it? What sort of whaleship’s captain does not expect to swim? What sort of maimed man expects that he can, without proof of it? Of course it should be difficult. Nigh impossible. The strain of such violently churning water on my wounded limb, the weight of the ivory of my leg…My own body rendered helpless yet again.”

Starbuck does not know how to respond. He knows not what to make of this admission of weakness. This Ahab — quiet, curious, skirting the edge of vulnerability — is difficult to reconcile with the man who twice today chased down his own death, and twice survived it. And he is terrified of what this admitted inability could mean for Ahab, in the coming days. 

Starbuck thinks long and hard about his next words. He knows if he pushes wrong, if he seems to be challenging Ahab’s capability, his agency, the Captain would shut down, and they would get nowhere. He purses his lips, considering. 

“Wilt…wilt thou put thyself through that again, Ahab?”

“It would appear so,” he says, still looking away. 

“But… why ?”

No response.

“Captain, I—I am trying to understand. I am trying . But I cannot. I cannot understand why thou wouldst want this for thyself.”

“I do not.”

“Then why? Thou art as capable as thou ever hast been. Why, all of a sudden, in this, believest thou otherwise?”

“If I am not capable of this, I am not capable of anything else.”

Starbuck blinks several times, brow furrowing. He licks his lips.  “What?”

Ahab leans forward on his elbows against the bulwarks, contemplative. “Thou saidst it thyself. He is only a whale. A ‘dumb brute,’ I believe were thy words?

“I cannot take up arms against this world. Against all the men who have done me harm. Against that inscrutable malice sinewing through us all, hate it though I do. 

“And I have tried. God above, have I tried, Starbuck. 

“But I can take up arms against that whale. Be it agent or principle. I can wreak my hate upon him. He who engendered all this anguish. He who still now evades retribution for it. 

“And if I cannot, Starbuck? If thou tellest me, as thou dost now, as thou so long hast, that I cannot fight him? That any such attempt is doomed to fail, that I am not even capable of this one, simple task, of this most straightforward of feats for our vocation, to merely strike a fin? Thou tellest me I, giving all of my power and all of my might, cannot even accomplish that?” Ahab laughs, ducking his head, hair falling into his eyes, hands folded in front of him. “Then what else is there for me? What else can I do?”

“Why must thou fight at all?” Ahab scoffs, but Starbuck persists. “Thou hast been hurt, yes. Thou hast been wronged. Horribly. But is there no other way? No other course of action? Thou say’st there is naught else left for thee, but that cannot… that is not true. I know it is not. There are people around thee who care, Captain. This whole crew — gladly and readily have they followed thee into Hell, into death, into this waking nightmare; so surely have they pledged thee their loyalty and respect. Is it so absurd to think that they might also follow thee into life? That they might follow thee home?”

Ahab runs his hands through his grayed hair, head still bowed. Starbuck wishes he could see his face.

“Ahab…” Starbuck steps closer again, reaches cautiously for his captain, hand hovering close, though not touching. “There are those of us who care greatly for thee. Who wish to see thee well. It is not a question of capability, Ahab, of whether thou art capable of—of fighting this whale. Thou hast already shown thyself capable of far more than enough, having faced him twice now — once today, and once years ago — and lived to tell of it, and that is far more than many can say. Needst thou prove any further? To whom? To thyself? Surely that is not worth all this anguish. 

“I do not…I do not ask thee to cease this chase because I think thee an incapable man. Nay, Ahab, that could not be further from the truth,” he says, honestly. “I ask this because I see what it is doing to thee. That it is harming thee, and aye, in doing so, harming all us on this ship, all us caught around thee. For thou canst not harm thyself without harming those around thee.”

“Is that why thou triedst to kill me?”

Starbuck’s face whitens like a ghost. A chasm opens up beneath him, and his stomach plummets. 

“That night,” Ahab continues. “After the squall that lit our masts ablaze with white. After the whole of the crew nearly turned against me, at thy words. When you stood in my cabin and held my own musket to my door.” There is no blame, no accusation in Ahab’s voice, only a quiet, sorrowful curiosity.

Starbuck’s voice comes out choked, blanched. Like a line is cinching around his throat. “You knew ?”

“I was awake, aye.” Ahab looks down at his hands again, turning them over before his eyes.

“Why didn’t you stop me?” Starbuck breathes, incredulous, horrified. His blood freezes in his veins; his breath freezes in his lungs. That night had been among the worst of his life. Knowing how close he had come. Regretting both the action — the sin — he did not take and the fact that he almost did. He steps back from Ahab involuntarily, breathing labored. “How-how could you trust me with the line, with thy very life , as you did after? How can you even bear to look at me? How can you speak so lightly of this?”

“You could not do it,” Ahab says, soft, angerless, factual. “You had every chance to, but did not.” He looks up now, up at the cloudless sky dappled with stars. They seem to reflect back to him all the aching that spilled and spilled from his soul, as they themselves were reflected in the dark glassy waters below, in the deep, stormy gray of his eyes. “Why thou didst not, I shall never know, Starbuck,” he says, “but I listened. I know exactly the location of the line thou wilt not cross.” He chuckles, an aborted, flimsy thing, that dies as soon as it escapes his lips. “Thou consideredst even restraining me again, then, and decidedst against it. I know precisely what thou wouldst not do. More than I can say for most other men.”

“I—I am so, so sorry. I was…God, Ahab, I—”

“Be easy, Starbuck,” Ahab says, tilting his head to the side. “I did the same to thee—worse, even: I held that musket to thy face—and with far less reason and far less justification. I blame thee not for it. Thou wert only doing what thou thoughtest right. Protecting thy life, thy crew. Thine owners’ interests. Thy faith.” His eyes are still fixed on the sea below him. “If anything, I only wonder what stopped thee.”

“ Ahab ,” Starbuck breathes. “Ahab.” He looks away in shame. “Ahab, I—”

He waits for Ahab to speak. To condemn him, to lash out in anger, in betrayal, in anything . But the Captain simply keeps his gaze on the glassy black sea, his breaths calm, his shoulders hunched. 

“Of course I could not,” Starbuck says, desperate to be believed. “God, Ahab, I—that I even considered it, I—never will I be free of regret for that. Such a thought should never have crossed my mind. Never will I repent enough for that. I am endlessly sorry, Ahab, I—”

“Avast, Starbuck,” Ahab says with a weary sigh. “I do not need thy apology, nor thy repentance. The wrongs I have done thee far outweigh anything thou couldst do. Hast every reason to despise me, to fear me.”

Starbuck is shaking his head, heartache filling the space in his lungs and his throat. “ Ahab . I—No. I am sorry. God, Ahab, I am so sorry. That was wrong ; I was wrong. I have harmed thee. In more ways than one, it seems. God above, I—I wish to make it right. I am sorry . Whether or not thou thinkest I was correct, I still harmed thee. And for that, I am sorry.”

Starbuck’s throat tightens, and when he next speaks, his voice is heavy with the need to be heard, the need for Ahab to understand the sincerity with which he means his words.

“And I — I am sorry that—that I made thee believe I cared not for thee, that I cared only for profit, for the shipowners, for…” He sighs. “For God. It…it is true, that I believe…believed? In the…in the heresy of this chase. I will not deny that. But I do not wish this to stop merely because of that. I wish it over because I can see how it is hurting thee, and, aye, thereby all the rest of us. I do not wish to see thee so consumed. I do care for thee, Captain. Even as I was…frustrated and angry and furious with thee. And frightened, yes. Still I cared, and still I care.

“I — I cannot bear to watch thee go through this. I wish for it to stop. I wish for thee to no longer be consumed by this waking nightmare. Forget the owners and the profits; forget blasphemy; forget all of that. I care not for any of it anymore. All I wish is for us to return home.

“I have no ability to save thee. I wish for thee to save thyself.”

The look with which Ahab meets Starbuck’s eyes is enough to make him gasp. It is an unmoored, tetherless thing, a look like a falling star, knocked from whatever ineffable orbit in which it had so stably spent its life, with his brow creased tightly and lips parted slightly. Its gravity draws Starbuck in even closer, close enough that his arm unwittingly brushes his Captain’s, close enough that he can see the starlight bouncing off the dark gray of his eyes, close enough that he could easily reach up to brush aside Ahab’s graying hairs from his eyes if he wished.

Cautiously, slowly, he does. Raises his hand to the side of Ahab’s head, waits to give him the chance to pull away. Ahab reacts not, only follows the motion of Starbuck’s hands with soft, half-lidded, almost curious eyes. So Starbuck continues. Smooths Ahab’s hair aside from his forehead, hand lingering on his temple, fingers curling in his soft silvered hair. 

Ahab neither retreats from the touch nor presses closer into it, but he shifts nonetheless, eyes falling shut and his whole form settling down like dust, like relaxing wood, a soft exhale escaping his lips.

Without opening his eyes, Ahab whispers, “I am tired, Starbuck.”

Starbuck’s heart squeezes. “I know.”

“I have been tired for a long time.”

“Oh, Ahab. I know. I know.”

A breeze picks up off the sea again, rustling through their hair and clothes. Starbuck’s hand still cups the side of Ahab’s head, fingers threaded through his hair.

“There is an aching within me, Starbuck,” he murmurs, eyes still fastened shut. “For so long there has been an aching within me. I know not what to do with all of it. 

“It started long before my leg. Though that certainly made it worse. I am always in pain. Now in my body as well as my soul. There has not been a single step I have taken since that has not shot my body through with pain. They said I would never walk without pain again; know’st that, Starbuck?” The last sentence trips from Ahab’s mouth with something like a quiet chuckle. Starbuck brushes his thumb over his temple. “Never again,” Ahab breathes.

“I am riddled with hurt.” Ahab draws in a slow, long breath. “With incurable scars and wounds inside and out. 

“Time was, I could rely on this body. I could trust it. To keep me safe. Keep me working. Keep me useful.”

Starbuck’s other hand has found its way to rest on Ahab’s. He doesn’t remember putting it there, but his fingers curl around his Captain’s nonetheless, thumb brushing back and forth across the back of his rough, weathered hand, smoothing over the tiny, curly hairs there.

“And then it wasn’t,” Ahab continues. “For a brief time, it was not useful. And…and what they did to me then…” Ahab inhales sharply, a tightness in the back of his throat.

“I do not know what else this body is good for,” he sighs into the darkness. 

“Oh, Ahab .”

“Thou wert there. Before this voyage. Thou foundest me, when my ivory leg snapped beneath me, and so pierced my skin, so as to almost kill me. Every day, man, I still fear such a thing reoccurring — cannot trust my own leg, nay, my own body, to hold me upright. Cannot trust this world not to punish me if it can’t.”

“Wilt thou then, perhaps, allow me to bear some of that weight?” Starbuck asks, voice gentle, thick with an anguished hope. “Wilt thou trust me to hold thee up, when thy body cannot?”

Ahab turns his face into Starbuck’s palm. He opens his eyes, looking sidelong at Starbuck’s hand there on his cheek, something endlessly yearning and yet mournful in his gaze. 

“Is that truly what thou wantest?” he whispers. “To bear up such an old and wicked and scarred body and soul as mine?”

“It is,” Starbuck says. 

A melancholy, tight-lipped smile falls open on Ahab’s face, so small Starbuck would not have seen it, were it not for their closeness. For a long while Ahab stands there, heavily lidded eyes gazing at Starbuck’s hand, wrinkled brow pinched tight with some fathomless longing. 

Then he turns his face reluctantly from Starbuck’s hand, looking back out at the sea. And the smile slips from his lips. 

“Ahab?”

Ahab looks down at their still-joined hands, resting on the bulwarks, and sighs, slowly. “Aye, Starbuck. Perhaps I could yet be convinced to allow such a thing,” he murmurs. 

Ahab slides his hand away then, folding it back into himself.

Despair churns in Starbuck’s stomach. He would wait for his Captain forever if that was what it took, would stand by his side night after night for the rest of his life if that was what Ahab needed to pull himself away from his damning chase, but they are running out of time. Moby Dick is already here, has already been found, his chase already begun. “But not tonight?” he says, a concession more than a question.

Ahab’s eyes squint shut again, brow furrowed with that ageless aching. “I’m sorry.”

Starbuck looks away. He sighs, a quiet, withered thing.

“Good-night then, my Captain.”

Ahab stares at the sea.

Chapter Text

The next day, Ahab needs to be helped onto the deck, supported up by Starbuck’s steady arms, his ivory leg snapped beneath him, unable to stand on his own. 

Moby Dick had made himself known that morning not with his spout, but with his whole, marbleized form, breaching into the air near the ship, dazzling foam piled up around him, a glorious act of fury and defiance. Ahab had taken the challenge in stride, deigned to meet it head on, forehead-to-forehead.

Starbuck had reached for him again, before he lowered. Grabbed him by the wrist. “ Captain . Captain, please. Please, stop this. Let me hold this for thee, please. Do not give it to him.”

Ahab had looked down at Starbuck’s hand, curled round his arm, lips slightly parted. From behind him, standing in the bows of Ahab’s whaleboat, Fedallah watched, brow creasing up and breath holding suspended with something like hope. 

And then Moby Dick had breached again, and the Captain stole away.

“Mr. Starbuck,” he’d called again, “the ship is thine—keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”

Moby Dick had turned on all three boats then with unprecedented might and speed. Heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, he was intent only on annihilating each and every single plank from which those boats had been made. Skillfully, the boats had managed to elude him, but in the fury and frenzy, Moby Dick had tightly entangled the lines of the three harpoons within his hide, and had drawn himself aside as if to rally up momentum for a charge.

Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line, and then was rapidly hauling it in again, hoping to untangle some of its snarls, but as he did, a massive coil of loose harpoons and lances, with all their deadly sharp barbs and points, came crashing towards Ahab’s boat. He seized the boat knife and reached within the rays of steel, cutting through its threatening blades. 

As he was doing this, Moby Dick had taken the time to rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines, and by so doing, dragged Stubb and Flask’s boats towards himself, dashing them against each other and stoving them both before diving down into the sea. 

While the two crews were circling in the waters, reaching out after the line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture; while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; while Stubb was lustily singing out for someone to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line was flung into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils, Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it spinning into the air, till it fell again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave. The Whale had then swum about the destroyed remnants of the three stove boats, dashing with his flukes any broken bit of the boat that dared float his way, seemingly reveling in the destruction, though making no further moves to attack his now incapacitated pursuers.

Ahab had clung to half of his broken boat, then, till the Pequod , as before, sailed by to pick up her floating crew, and whatever fragments of boats and oars and tubs she could. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen anyone. 

Ahab is now helped onto the deck, hanging upon Starbuck’s shoulder. His ivory leg had snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter, and he clings now to Starbuck, who has one arm around his back and the other braced against his chest.

“Aye, Starbuck,” Ahab murmurs against him, “‘tis sweet to lean sometimes. Would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”

Starbuck grips his Captain more tightly. He looks down upon him now, face close to his, and musters up all his hope and all his courage and all his care, built up over the long and unforgiving toils of this voyage, and all the voyages before, where he’d sailed with Ahab as mate and friend, and all the other unspoken of and unacknowledged emotions that swirled and twisted in his gut like a growing typhoon, and funnels it all into his next words. “Look at this, Ahab, look at thy work. Look at what it has done to thee, what he has done to thee. We can stop this now. Thou canst keep leaning, Ahab, leaning on me. For as long as thou shouldst have need of it. I shall bear thy weight up.” Starbuck lifts his hand from Ahab’s chest to his face and curls around his chin and cheek, fingers brushing along his beard. “It is alright, Captain. It can be over now.”

Old Ahab smiles at that, eyelids fluttering shut. He shudders out a tired laugh. “...Aye, Starbuck. Aye. ‘Tis sweet to lean. And I am so very weary.” He is weary, indeed; and ‘tis sweet to lean, indeed; and Starbuck’s arms are strong and sturdy beneath his weight; and Starbuck’s eyes are the color of springtime in Nantucket, her fields the softest shade of green; and ‘tis sweet to lean, and to gaze upon that springtime promise in his eyes; and that is better, isn’t it? better than to gaze into sea or sky, better than to endlessly throw himself against God?

Ahab shifts his weight, and Starbuck moves with him to keep his hold, chest swelling with longing and hope and faith.

“No bones broken, then, sir?” Stubb says, stepping out from the wreckage of his boat on the deck. Starbuck’s hand drops quickly to Ahab’s arm. 

“Aye, Stubb. And all splintered to pieces, it would seem,” Ahab says, nodding at the wrecks. “But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. The White Whale did not graze Ahab in his own proper self.”

“A miracle, that,” Starbuck says, brow furrowing. 

“I put good work into that leg,” murmurs the carpenter, and to that Ahab barks a short laugh. 

“Thou wilt have to bear me out and craft me a new one,” he replies. Then, to Starbuck, “Give me something for a cane — there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the boat’s crews; down the spare boats and rig them, and set to repairing the old ones; let us see what this wild venture has finally left us with.”

Starbuck gingerly lets Ahab pull away from him, supporting himself on a broken lance as he begins to summon the crews, taking stock of what they have left. 

“C-Captain,” Starbuck says, hope and fear warring in his chest, in his throat, “does this mean that we—”

“Surely I have not seen him yet,” Ahab mutters to himself, suddenly nervous, casting long glances up and down the deck. 

“Captain?”

A thick, vicious horror begins to crack open across Ahab’s face. The air is seized with it, like some poisonous gas seeping out from the rotting despair that now quickly overtakes his previously hopeful demeanor. “Missing — it cannot be — quick! Call them all! All hands! Muster them all!”

Ahab’s fear then appears true: upon mustering the whole of the ship’s company, Fedallah is not there. 

“The Parsee!” cries Stubb. “He must have been caught in—”

“The black vomit wrench thee! Run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle — find him — not gone — not gone!” Ahab staggers with his makeshift cane across the deck, a wild and horrid desolation in his face. “Fedallah!” 

But quickly, again the crew returns to him with the tidings that Fedallah was nowhere to be found. Ahab’s whole mind now seems rattling apart, panic and grief alike seizing hold of his every thought and word and step. 

“Aye, sir,” says Stubb, “caught among the tangles of your line — I thought I saw him dragging under.”

“My line! My line? Gone?—Gone? What means that little word? What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry?” His speech is rapid and disjointed, incoherent, jumping quickly from one subject to the next. “The harpoon, too!—Toss over the litter there—d’ye see it?—The forged iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no—blistered fool! This hand did dart it!—’Tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—All hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! The irons, the irons!—Hoist the royals higher—A pull on all the sheets!—Helm there! Steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe, and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”

“Captain!” cries Starbuck, trying to step in front of his frantic pacing path, to calm his wild and weeping anguish. “Captain, stop this madness!”

Ahab seems not to hear Starbuck, seems not to even see him. “Gone, gone, not gone —he cannot be—!”

“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself!” Starbuck shouts. “Never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—”

Ahab rounds himself violently towards Starbuck with sudden clarity, nearly stumbling into him with his tempestuous fury, seizing Starbuck’s collar with his free hand, eyes enraged. “ His name is Fedallah! ” he bellows, furious as raging fire, before just as suddenly releasing Starbuck and staggering back, clutching at his forehead, tugging at his hair, a crucifixion nailed across his face. “His name was Fedallah,” he whispers. A wretched sob grasps him by the throat. He limps falteringly away from Starbuck, still clutching his head, still murmuring Fedallah’s name to himself. “Gone, gone, not gone—”

Starbuck tries, tries, he tries to compose himself, his voice shaking with a depthless anguish. “Thy leg has been snatched once more from thee. Thy — Fedallah is gone, one man already dead, killed in thine own line. All good angels are mobbing thee with warnings—what more wouldst thou have?” He follows, follows, Ahab’s stricken stumbling. “Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Lunacy, absurdity, impiety to hunt him more!”

“Starbuck,” Ahab says, a helpless, sardonic sob stealing out from his chest, head turning to Starbuck over his shoulder, “of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. Ever since these past nights upon the quarterdeck, with one another’s company. But in this matter of the whale, Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. As thou obeyest mine.” 

Ahab turns from him, then, eyes squinted shut, squeezing out tears. Starbuck reaches to grab him — “Captain Ahab—!” and he jerks his arm violently away.

“Don’t! Do not. Do not, please,” he sobs, staggering away with his haphazard cane. He disappears into the cabin-scuttle, down below deck, away from Starbuck, away from the dying sun, away from every soft-spoken and gentle-touched hint at a renewal and revival and refuge that had slowly been nurtured between them for the past two days and nights, away from all hope of an end to this rotting damned chase, all hope that Starbuck may live to see his wife and child again, may live to see his Captain well again, and Starbuck collapses to his knees on the deck.

Chapter Text

“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.”

Ahab stalks his stateroom, muttering Fedallah’s name to himself.

“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”

The carpenter had made him a new leg, wooden this time, from the broken keel of his wrecked whaleboat. He limps about his cabin on it now. 

For the preceding few weeks, he had spurned this cabin, spending nearly every hour above deck, scouring the sea for his prize, never seeking repose in his bed, only occasionally stopping to rest at his perch in the scuttle. The cabin remained devoid of her captain.

Now he shuts himself up in his stateroom and limps and limps and limps on his dead, wooden limb.

“And when I am so gone before, then ere thou canst follow, I must still appear to thee, to pilot thee still.”

He is not used to the weight of this new leg, the sensation of it, the strange, alien wood and not his familiar solid bone. He is not used to the way it feels to walk on, the sound it makes when it hits the wooden floor beneath him, the way the pain of this leg sits in his body and bones. Ahab is always aching, always hurting, but his whalebone leg was a familiar pain. This one is new.

“Hemp only can kill thee.” 

Pip had looked afraid, when Ahab had entered the cabin that he had for so long avoided, that had for so long been Pip’s refuge, Ahab stumbling then with only his splintered leg and makeshift cane to keep himself up, muttering madly about a prophecy and a hearse and a dead man and gone, gone, not gone, not gone, he cannot be gone and Pip was a child, Pip was a child and he was afraid and he didn’t know what to do or what to say and could never be expected to and so he’d left, he’d left, because what else could he do? and so Ahab paces his room alone muttering to himself alone about a prophecy and a hearse and a dead friend gone.

“Thou must still appear to me, still, still,” he chokes, “ere I can follow thee. Ere I can follow thee into death. Where art thou now, my Fedallah, my pilot? Where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? And all this time, tonight, I will be sailing away from thee, wherever thou didst sink to. Where art thou? Where? To be seen again? Where?”

Fedallah died for him. Fedallah died because of him. Fedallah had told him this would happen. Had warned him and he did not listen. Fedallah died because of him. 

And now Ahab is meant to follow.

He takes solace in the fact that he will see him again. That he must, before he dies. What he’d once taken as a pledge of his inevitable survival, Fedallah’s wild prophecies the tangible proof that he should encounter the whale and yet live to tell of it, he now understood for what they were: warnings. Promises of his demise. How could he have been so blind? So myopic? How could he not have understood? Losing Fedallah had seemed impossible to him; it was not an option, never even conceivable to him, that he should lose his dearest and oldest friend, the man he had known and loved, in one definition of the word or another, for more than half his life. So the idea that he should die before Ahab was to him nothing but another pledge of his own survival, just as far-fetched and fantastical as the other prophecies Fedallah had given surrounding Ahab’s death. And that shortsightedness, that inability to envision even the mere possibility of losing Fedallah, had cost him his life. Fedallah died because of him.

The black sea heaves beneath Ahab and his ship, and his breathing heaves with it, hoarse and ragged with his anguished sobs. 

There comes a knock at Ahab’s door. 

Nathaniel Starbuck was many things. 

A whaleman, an officer, a first mate. A father and a husband. Brave, courageous, stalwart and steady. A staid, steadfast man. A good and pious Quaker. Reliable. Kind to his crew. A man to whom courage was not a sentiment, but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand. And a Starbuck.

Born with a name and a family legacy that fated him to a whaler’s life, a whaler’s death, Nathaniel bore that name like he bore the deaths of his kin, like a yoke over his back, like chains shackled to his ankles, like a line around his neck. He bore his name alongside the weighty memories of his father’s and his brothers’ and countless other family members’ deaths to their gory glorious profession that so ensnared them all. He wore his name like a promise. A threat. A prophecy. A grave already dug, and waiting. 

He was a father and a husband, though he feels much like neither now. A man who loved his wife and son so ardently it ached a hole through his chest, who yearned so dearly to return to them, and was yet incapable of what it would take to make that so. 

He was a brave man, a courageous man, though he feels much like the opposite, now, all his staid steadfastness ripped to pieces by the biting winds of Ahab’s enraged and mighty terrors. 

He was a good and pious Quaker, though he feels much like anything but; he knows that he disobeys his God in obeying his Captain, in his complicity with this awful quest, in aiding Ahab’s heretic vengeance. Knows, too, in spite of all his attempts to bury this knowledge deep, of the burning, tempestuous, blasphemous feelings that swirl within his gut, that pound against his ribcage with the beating of his heart, feelings which he refuses to name but whose existence he can nonetheless no longer deny or pretend away. He no longer has it within him to lie to himself, to lie that the complex mess of want and fear and distrust and desire and care and frustration and love that churned within him was anything but the ugly, sinful thing it was. 

After all, his Captain had always possessed that maddening ability to reach deep within Starbuck, to blast away all reason, all will, all else. All his piety, all his bravery, all his courage, all his certainty of the way the world turned and his place within it — all these, within Starbuck, blazed away in the face of Ahab’s wild, burning sunshine. Ungodly, godlike Ahab had — knowingly or not, Starbuck was not sure — clamped a vise around Starbuck’s desperate heart, had tied a line around his longing throat, and Starbuck had no knife with which to cut it. His Captain had ripped his God right out from his chest. 

And he was, of course, a Starbuck.

When he’d first sailed with Captain Ahab, years and years ago, it was not because the Captain had chosen him specifically. Nay, rather, the then-owners of the Pequod — old men who had done their time at sea, and who presided over her from land with watchful eyes and pockets to fill — had signed him on as third mate for the mere fact of his name, his family line: another Starbuck, steady and reliable and a vigorous, prolific whaler like all the rest of his kin. 

There was a mutual working respect between him and the Captain, though little else, at first; Starbuck had always thought Ahab a little stubborn, a little reckless, a little blasphemous, and Ahab had probably always thought Starbuck a little pretentious, a little straitlaced, a little overly pious. But something like a begrudging friendship — at least, Starbuck thought — had formed between them, stumbling out of the Pequod ’s solid hull somewhere in between storms and whalehunts and forecastle fights and all the rest. They’d been on many voyages together since then. 

Through all this, Starbuck had always thought Ahab a good — if complicated — man. A good captain. A good friend, when such a thing had sprouted between them. Others agreed — Ahab had long been sung in Nantucket as a good, if moody, captain; a wondrous old man, they’d called him. A good captain to his crew, they’d said. 

And then. After Ahab lost his leg. After returning home from that voyage. After Starbuck had seen him, seen the hollow haunted look in his eyes. After Starbuck had found him, that night, lying prone on the ground, his ivory limb having snapped in half beneath him, and staked itself into his abdomen, nearly killing him. After Starbuck pulled him up, propping him against his shoulder, covered in Ahab’s blood, and brought him limping to a doctor. How he’d borne up Ahab’s body, supported the old man’s weight against him, held him close and upright and helped him walk just as he had done today, when Ahab’s leg had snapped again. 

After all this. The Pequod ’s present owners, Bildad and Peleg, having waited too long and grown too impatient to keep her so harbored any longer, began making preparations for her next voyage. Ahab had scarcely recovered from the loss of his leg, and had then just experienced this newfound disabling injury atop it, but still, still, still, the owners began commissioning the Pequod for her next voyage imminently. Starbuck’s name had landed on the list — he was the only of his line yet available at the time, and they were quick to choose him for their impending enterprise. Readily had he agreed, for many reasons, chiefly among them his concern for Ahab, and beneath that even, a simple desire to sail with his friend again. 

He could not say, now, whether he would change that choice, if given the chance. 

Starbuck had wondered, many times on this voyage, why he had been placed here. Why his God or Fate or whatever it may be decided to cast him in this role, upon this ship, and yet leave him so utterly without tools or aids to help him. He’d felt, so clearly and so deeply, from the beginning, ever since that day on the quarter-deck when Ahab had so hypnotized and magnetized the crew to his purpose, that something was acutely, profoundly wrong. But he hadn’t the words nor the mechanisms to oppose it. The wild watery loneliness of his life did not offer him any tool, any assistance in the face of Ahab’s own desolate solitude and remoteness. Far too late did Nathaniel Starbuck realize that breaking through the Captain’s isolation required shattering his own as well, his own self-imposed loneliness and distance from his world, his family, his Pagan, blasphemous crew, and all the others with whom his piety and pale skin refused to allow him to engage. Far too late was it that he tried assuaging Ahab’s heartache by baring his own, an attempt which, were it perhaps made earlier, might well have saved them both. 

And indeed, he had tried. Oh, how he’d tried.

But of course it was to end like this. Of course all his efforts, all his struggling, all his flailing himself against the hurricane of his Captain’s will should amount to nothing. 

Nathaniel Starbuck was many things, after all, but chiefly, principally, the first thing he had ever been was a Starbuck. He lived like one — years and years of sea and storms and sorrow, his name shackled to his back like a death toll. And he would die like one.

He is kneeling on the weather-deck, now, the night around him crisp and buzzing. He is shivering and clinging to himself. The wind is cold and yet caressing around him, abrasive and yet adoring, as it cups his cheeks and runs through his hair and kisses his eyelids closed and knocks the breath out from his lungs.

Who are you, Mr. Starbuck? it speaks, it sings. Who are you to outrun your family’s legacy? Who are you to pretend that your name destines you for anything but a watery grave?

There is a boat-knife, lying on the deck. Left there after the fury and the frenzy of the day, after all the repairs and inventories and preparations had paused for the night. It glints in the faint starlight, long and sharp, meant to cut hemp and blubber and flesh and bone. 

There comes a knock at Ahab’s door.

Ahab does not respond to the gentle rapping at his stateroom door, but Starbuck lets himself in anyway, with a pale and stricken face. The cabin-lamp swings wildly from its ceiling chain with the rocking ship, casting long and withering shadows across the tiny room, whose curved hull walls seem to press in around the both of them, smothering, suffocating. The pallid yellow light glints faintly off the blade held in Starbuck’s hand, arm hanging limply at the mate’s side.

Ahab ceases his pacing, then. His eyes lock onto the knife with an inscrutable expression, body still half-turned from his first mate. Several emotions flicker past his face — surprise, confusion, anger, sorrow — landing on some kind of bleak resignation.

“Come to finish the job, then?” Ahab says, flatly. 

Starbuck’s face somehow manages to grow more sullen, his already sunken eyes lidding further, the wrinkles beneath them furrowing further, thin mouth parting with some lurid, ashen aching. “No, Captain.” 

He raises the knife slowly, holding it by the blade, handle stretched out in offering towards Ahab.

Ahab frowns, every wrinkle on his weary face curling inward. “Canst not even do the deed thyself, then. Dost not want to bear the weight of that sin thyself, but wishest me sully my own hands with it instead? What’s one more sin on old Ahab’s record?

“Desirest me to fall upon that sword myself? To honorably and willfully wrench myself from this life, to send myself straight to perdition’s flames, rather than taking the long, roundabout way, as I am now? Knowest thou that thy God has long fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. But I suppose this lesser sin is preferable to thee?”

A sharp pain shoots itself across the mate’s pale face. “No, no, no, Captain, no—” he says, voice unsteady and faltering, and only now does Ahab realize how much he is shaking; how tightly the hand holding the knife grips its blade, so as to even slightly pierce his palm; how deeply Starbuck’s usual painstakingly-maintained composure is crumbling apart before him. His voice is rattled through with panic, hysteria. “Thou mistakest me, my Captain, I — please, take this, take this and with it take — I cannot watch this. I cannot watch thee do this to thyself. I could not bear it, I cannot bear the sight, cannot endure to watch thee lose thyself. I cannot bear to lose thee. 

“But I cannot stop thee. I have no power to. Indeed, it seems, my prior efforts were but further fuel for thy harm — I never — I never saw it, could not see the harm I did thee, for all my foolish inability to believe myself capable of it. But I cannot stop you. And I cannot hurt you further. I cannot watch this happen, would not survive it, but I cannot stop it. So take this blade. Take this knife, and with it, take my life — it is already thine.”

Through all this, a growing horror dawns upon Ahab’s face, like a morning sun dawning upon the bloody remnants of battle, and he turns to face Starbuck more fully, his prior, more chronic terror and grief now replaced with an acute, concentrated panic. “What? Art mad? Hast lost thy mind? I’m not going to kill thee!”

“Am I mad? Am I mad? Thou art bringing thyself and all of us to death — how could I endure this without madness?” More insistently now does Starbuck push the handle of the boat-knife towards Ahab, whose hands raise defensively in response. He steps backward, and Starbuck presses forward, crowding into his space, eyes blown wide, rimmed with tears. “I cannot let this happen, but I cannot stop this from happening. I cannot watch you die !” The tears now spill from the corners of his eyes, and still, still, still does he hold out the handle of that knife. “Take it! Take my life; you already have it.”

“No, no—! Starbuck, what awful thing possesses thee to—”

At Ahab’s further refusal, and Starbuck’s continually mounting panic and desperation, his own face cracking open with sobs that now course unfettered through him, Starbuck turns the blade upon himself, pressing it against the skin of his own neck.

“Don’t—! Starbuck!” comes Ahab’s strangled cry, and Starbuck repeats his plea—“Please, Ahab — I cannot; I cannot abide this, cannot stand to watch—” and the knife ever so lightly splits the skin at his neck, tiny pinpricks of blood collecting on its silvery edge; and there is shouting and yelling and reaching as Ahab grabs frantically for Starbuck’s arm, for his wrist, for the knife in his hand reflecting the light of the swaying lamp; and their eyes are locked as Ahab wrestles for control; and the knife is knocked from Starbuck’s hand and clatters to the floor; and then they are both on the floor, Ahab pressing Starbuck down, pinned hands and nicked skin and bruises and tears and Ahab shouts with his hands firmly planted on Starbuck’s arms, “I’m not going to kill you!” and Starbuck cries, “You already are , you madman!” and then all is silent, and still.

“You already are,” Starbuck repeats in a whisper. His back is against the floor, tears still spilling from his eyes. 

Ahab’s brow furrows, eyes crinkling in an anguished confusion. His and Starbuck’s desperate panting fill the cramped, quiet stateroom as he pins Starbuck down. The knife had landed a few feet away on the floor — Ahab had knocked it as far as he could. He looks now between Starbuck’s eyes and the droplets of blood along his neck, pain writing itself further into his face with every breath he takes.

Ahab pinches his forehead further. He pulls away from where he leans over Starbuck and sits kneeled on the floor, between Starbuck and the blade, hands still cautiously extended should Starbuck reach for it again. With a devastated wrinkle of his brow, he says, oh so quietly, voice quivering like first snow, “I don’t understand.”

In the stillness of the room, still charged with the energy of its former violence, a disbelieving, one-note laugh escapes Starbuck’s throat. He looks over at Ahab incredulously, head lifted off the floor.

Ahab shakes his head, repeats himself: “I don’t understand.” He opens and closes his mouth, worries at his lips. “Thou wilt not lower for the whale. Thou wilt be safe here, aboard the ship. This danger is not thine. I have no aims to harm thee, or for harm to come to thee. I-I deeply regret the harm I have caused thee in the past.”

Starbuck thuds his head back against the wooden floorboards. He laughs desperately in earnest now, breathless chest shaking as he squints his eyes shut and cries and laughs and cries. “How could you possibly think you are only harming yourself?”

He shifts, and Ahab flinches violently toward him, blocking between Starbuck and the knife, but Starbuck just grasps at his own hair, tugging desperately. “Do—do you really think we are all escaping this? That I will escape this? Do you think yourself the only man on this ship? Do you really believe simply keeping us here will spare us from the disaster?” Starbuck sits up now, gaze boring straight into Ahab’s with something new in his eyes, full of rage and sadness at the same time. 

Ahab shakes his head in bafflement. “I do not—I do not half understand thee. All we know of the White Whale—his victims are solely his assailants. Thou wilt be safe—”

“This is not about me , old fool!” And at that, Ahab’s confusion only deepens further. 

“Art thou not—”

“Thinkest thyself an island, Captain? Isolated wholly from all other men, surrounded by nothing but the sea? Dost think that if thou shouldst sink to its unsounded depths, thou wouldst touch nothing but its waves as it collapses around thee? Thou art not an island, Captain! Thou art like this ship, like all of us on this ship; thou art enveloped in lines and hemp and spars which connect thee to all around thee. One line cannot snap without straining all the rest. Thou canst not simply — simply throw thy life to hell without dragging down those tied to thee — and all us on this ship are tied to thee! Thy pain ripples outward. 

“Even if, by some miracle, the rest of us survive this, thinkest thou that thy death alone would be free from consequence?”

Ahab huffs out a breath. “Thou wouldst be fine , Starbuck. This ship would be fine. At the very least grant me the decency enough not to pretend otherwise to me now; do not pretend thou—”

“Foolish old man! How canst thou not see what is right in front of thee? What has been right in front of thee? I am here, I am here , begging thee to save thyself, or else to take my life! For else this will destroy me anyway. Thy life is tied to mine, Ahab. It has been all along. I am begging thee. How canst thou see me now, right in front of thee, and still believe thyself so separate? So isolated?”

“I—” Ahab sucks in a breath. “I don’t—” He sighs, shrinking into himself, defeated, and turns his head away, eyes growing glassy and hollow. “What wouldst thou have me do, Starbuck?”

“Hast not listened these past nights, these past months ? Cease this chase, Captain! Cease this madness and turn this ship away! If carest thou at all about those of us who care for thee, let us home . Before thou destroyest thyself, and in so doing destroy all the rest of us. Save those of us still left.”

“Those who care for me? I killed my friend , Starbuck,” Ahab spits. “What right have I to entreat that care from another? To ask for such companionship? I killed the man who cared for me.”

“All the more reason to heed me! There are more of us who care for thee. This mad chase does harm others, already has — stop before it harms any more!”

Ahab shakes his head, grinding his teeth. He speaks through tears sliding down his face. “No. No . I killed my friend; it is my right to die as well. It is my charge to follow him. My fate to see him again. Tomorrow will that prophecy be fulfilled — it must be so — he will go before me, and pilot me into that end. It is what I deserve; it is what I owe ; and it is Fate’s will, and it will happen whether we—whether I —will it or not. Thou wilt be fine — I am not putting thee into that peril. I, though, I do not — I killed my friend .”

“Then kill another!” says Starbuck, quickly managing to seize the knife again, holding its handle out once more toward Ahab. “That is what you are doing. That is where this path will lead.”

All of the anger bleeds out from Ahab’s face, shifting instead to despair. His heavy breaths come shaky, slow, dry sobs shuddering out from his chest, and he stares at Starbuck despondently, terrified, unable to move or speak. The silence rocks back and forth between them with the rocking of the ship, the heavy pewter lamp.

Then Ahab sinks back off his knees, sitting fully on the floor with his legs curled into himself, his face in his hands, clawing at his hair. He shakes his head back and forth, crying quietly. “I killed him, Starbuck,” he whispers. “I killed him. How can anything else matter? How can there be anything else left?” 

A desperate “ Oh ” escapes unbidden from Starbuck’s chest, more an expelling of air than a word, unintentional. 

Ahab keeps whispering to himself — “What else is there? What else can I do? What else do I deserve than this? How can I stop now?”

Slowly, cautiously, Starbuck raises himself to his knees. He winces slightly — a bruise on his right leg, formed when the two of them had wrestled for the knife and tumbled to the floor, flares in pain, making itself known, but he keeps moving. Starbuck leans forward now, reaching to curl his hands around Ahab’s wrists and pry them gently from his face. 

“Ahab,” he says, and something in his voice makes Ahab raise his eyes to his. “Ahab. There is yet more for thee. There always has been. There are others of us who need you here, still. I need you, Ahab. Thy family needs you—” Ahab huffs a cynical snort at that, but Starbuck presses on, “That boy needs you, Captain. He needs you here. Great God, if for nothing else, Ahab, stay for him. Stay for him. For me. Please . Please.”

Ahab’s breaths come shaky. “I don’t…” He swallows the tears in his throat, and tries again, squinting his eyes shut. “For all I have done, I deserve the catastrophe coming. I killed my friend. I owe him that much.

“My whole life has been bringing me to this. I — I have caused and suffered endless pain. How am I meant to believe I was ever meant for anything other than sorrow? That I was ever fit for any role but the tragic trope for which I have rehearsed all my life?

“Everything I have done, everything that I have had done unto me, it was only ever leading to this. I have been playing this part all my life. I deserve this.” 

“If penance is what you seek, Captain, then find it amongst the living,” Starbuck says, voice firm and certain, hands still curled gently around Ahab’s. “Thou wilt not find it trying to appease the dead. If penance is what you seek, then make it right by the good you bring to others. Thou wilt not find it here.” Starbuck lowers his eyes and squeezes Ahab’s hands. “Not in this, Ahab, this place of horrors.” He returns his gaze to Ahab’s, and Ahab watches back, eyes unmoving. “What good, what value, do you think thy demise would bring?” Starbuck entreats. “What wrong do you think it would right? What justice would be served? What would it bring but more pain?”

Ahab presses his eyes shut. His shaking, withering breaths continue. For long, unfolded moments, stretched out like a line from mast to reaching mast, Starbuck kneels before him, holding fast to Ahab’s hands, holding his gaze fast to Ahab’s face, holding fast to his own conviction. 

Ahab’s brow curls up, tears slipping from beneath his eyelids. He trembles as though stricken by some unseen wind. 

Slowly, Starbuck pulls away. Ahab opens his eyes, watching his movements carefully, as Starbuck picks up the knife again. He looks down at it, turning it over in his hands.

“Whatever thou mayest believe,” Starbuck says, “thou dost not deserve this. These horrors.” Once more he holds the handle toward Ahab. “Neither do we.

“But you bring them upon us nonetheless. 

“If thou art to do this, if thou aim’st to continue on thy doomed path, then take this blade from me now. Take my life with it now. Face directly the fallout of thy actions — do not look away from them. Own thy consequences.

“If this is truly what you want, then so be it. I could never stop you.”

Ahab’s eyes flit back and forth between the knife and Starbuck’s face. He purses his lips, looks away, shakes his head, countless thoughts and feelings warring openly upon his face as he opens and closes and opens and closes his mouth, searching and searching and searching for something — a sign, his pilot, anything — to push him forward. To give him an excuse. Another argument. Another denial. 

He finds none. 

Starbuck’s hand remains steady, holding the blade out to his Captain. He had entered this conversation in a panicked frenzy, acting on disjointed, distraught desperation, but a calm, unswerving determination steals across his form now. He keeps his eyes stably on Ahab, gaze firm and unbreaking as an oath.

Then Ahab begins to reach toward him. Eyes lidded and downcast. 

Starbuck sucks in a breath. He presses his eyes shut, tears slipping out, still holding the knife steady, though his lip trembles with acquiescence, acceptance. And he waits. 

Let it never be said he did not try. 

And then a hand, soft as morning sunshine, lands on the side of his neck. Starbuck blinks his eyes open in surprise — Ahab has his hand on Starbuck’s neck, thumb brushing gently, barely touching, at the edge of the cut across his throat. It’s a shallow cut, a thin line barely sliced into the skin, the blood mostly dried, but for the anguish and repentance slashed across Ahab’s face you would have thought it the deadliest laceration. Ahab leans closer, his free hand finding its place on the other side of Starbuck’s neck, tracing a finger just under the wound. His lips fold into a faint frown. 

He raises his eyes to Starbuck’s, then. Starbuck inhales sharply, breath catching in his throat like a hanged man, and he lowers his hands to the floor. His grip on the knife loosens. Ahab’s face is one of anguished remorse, grief and guilt spilling from his every breath.

Ahab makes as if to speak, then decides against it, averting his glance. Pulling away from Starbuck, he reaches behind him into some drawer and procures a small cloth. He returns to his knees in front of Starbuck, raising the cloth to his neck, and begins dabbing gently at the cut. Starbuck’s heart clenches in his chest. 

Ahab keeps his eyes on the cut, not meeting Starbuck’s. Shame has written itself across his weary brow, his trembling frown, his aching eyes, and his world seems narrowed to focus on this one simple task, quietly and almost ritually tending the ill-begotten wound. 

This done, Ahab pulls away again, moving as though fragile, as though his limbs were made from glass. He keeps his hands to himself, his gaze to the floor, the cloth resting folded in his lap.

Starbuck’s breath seeps slowly from his chest, calming down like waves in the wake of a storm. He sets aside the knife. Careful not to touch or startle him, he approaches Ahab and sits beside him on the hard wooden floor, their backs against the stateroom couch. 

Ahab is still shaking beside him, shivering almost imperceptibly. His eyes are glassy and vacant, still reddened from tears; his breaths are still jagged as mountaintops; his heavy, ageless sorrow still seeps from him like ink through water; but he is still alive. God above, he is still alive. 

Starbuck turns his gaze above, an exhale falling from his lungs like rainfall. He closes his eyes. 

Outside, the night heaves on.

Chapter Text

The morning of the third day dawns fair and fresh, the sails wide and billowing, the wind strong and driving, the sea vast and rolling. Though gliding swiftly through the rocking waves, the Pequod remains silent, her deck and her crew waking to life in the morning sunshine wordless and restless. Her many hands and legs shuffle about her mutely, tending to this line and that sail with scarcely a word exchanged among them.  She is a quiet ship, an apprehensive one, as the dawn rises on her in her ceaseless chase, her stunsails spread wide like the wings of an albatross.

Morning light tumbles into the cabin stateroom like gushing water, slowly illuminating the Captain and his mate, still curled in on themselves on the floor. They had scarce moved through the night, seemed as rooted to the floor as Ahab’s bolted-down desk and chair, two more bits of furniture adorning the cabin of a ghost. 

Starbuck wakes to Ahab shifting in the pale yellow morning, having dozed off in spite of himself some hours prior. The Captain uncurls his clenched spine and sits up straighter, eyes ringed with sleeplessness as he stares blankly at the wall—Starbuck doubts he’d slept at all. His breathing is harsh, forced, as though dragged up from his throat by some exhausted hand.

Starbuck hesitates. 

He wants to speak. He wants Ahab to speak. He wants to stand. He wants to take Ahab’s hand and help him up. He wants to climb to the deck with him and trim the sails and take the helm and beat to windward against the eastern wind and turn their ivory ship toward home. He wants to speak. He wants to scream. He wants to take Ahab’s hand and never let it go. He wants he wants he wants.

“Captain?” he finally manages.

Another long, forceful breath expels itself from Ahab’s chest. He turns his head towards Starbuck, eyes still cast to the floor.

Starbuck wants him to speak. He wants Ahab to look at him. He wants to grab his hand. He wants Ahab to grab his hand. He wants he wants.

Slowly, face twinging in pain as he puts weight on his wooden leg, still sore after spending the night curled up on the floor, Ahab pulls himself to his feet. He stands for several moments, swaying slightly with the ship’s motions, and here in this tiny, confined cabin, Ahab’s whole high, broad form, sculpted from bronze and tempered in flames, seems at the moment delicate.

Starbuck rises beside him and looks up at his face, still trying to catch his eyes. Ahab casts a tired glance to him, holds his gaze for a long, weighty moment. 

He looks away again, then, and makes his slow way out of the cabin. He holds the door open for Starbuck behind him.

When Ahab’s solid, thudding step is heard on deck again, shattering the silence of the crashing waves and surging sails, the entire crew — hanging from the rigging and the shrouds scouring the waves for the White Whale or busying themselves on deck working at repairs — all stop, and turn, and watch. 

Ahab sets his jaw. He makes his way deliberately toward the mainmast, stands himself by the doubloon, gazes wearily out at the sea. Starbuck follows, follows, takes his place as ever by his Captain’s side. 

“‘Tis a lovely day again,” Ahab murmurs to Starbuck. The wind rushes through his hair, blowing the curls back from his weary face. 

“That it is,” Starbuck replies. He longs to take Ahab’s hand. His own stay curled carefully at his sides, trembling in the wind.

Ahab turns to look over his shoulder, calling to the helmsman, “Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going.”

“Captain?” Starbuck questions, worry threading his face and voice. “Shall—shall we turn the ship?”

“How the wild winds blow about me now; they whip about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to,” he muses quietly to himself. “A vile wind, that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and now comes blowing here as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there.”

“Captain?”

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels ; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity,” Ahab snarls, still speaking lowly and bitterly to himself. “God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness, and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”

Starbuck steps forward, placing himself in front of Ahab fully. “ Captain ,” he says, firm but not unkind. Ahab’s eyes snap to focus, rising quickly to meet his. “Captain,” Starbuck asks, “what shall we do?”

Ahab inhales sharply, remembering himself. He looks back at the sea, eyes distant. “We’ve oversailed him,” he says. “We must have. Nothing seen yet, and noon at hand. We’ve oversailed him; it must be so. He’s chasing me now, not I, him —that’s bad.” Ahab casts his gaze across the ship, to the helm, the half-repaired whaleboats, the dozens of lookouts hanging in the rigging. His eyes return to Starbuck’s, brow ever so slightly pinched, guilty. “We’ll have to turn around anyhow.”

“And then?” 

Ahab’s eyes slip from Starbuck’s again, and Starbuck says, more insistently, “And then , Captain?”

Ahab pinches his brow. His eyes crinkle with pain, distant and unfocused, and a frown curls at the edge of his barely parted lips. Seconds stretch into yawning caverns, each deliberate breath Ahab takes pulling time apart like paper.

He lifts his eyes to Starbuck’s, holding his gaze for a long, trembling moment, and then gives the barest of nods.

The order is given; the silent, expectant sailors spring to action and life; they flock to the braces and swing the yards around and the helmsman veers the ship westward. The braced Pequod now sails hard on the breeze, rechurning the foam in her own white wake. Ahab himself stands still by the mainmast, rooted as another superfluous mast beside it. 

“Against the wind he steers us,” murmurs Starbuck to himself, coiling the main-brace around the rail with his eyes still on Ahab across the deck. “But to what end? For the open jaw, or for home? And if to home, will the wind yet allow it?”

Ahab himself remains firmly planted beside his mainmast. While his ship and crew steer him westward — towards his prize? towards his escape? towards his doom? towards home? — he leans with his hand braced against it, murmuring quietly to himself. 

“Forehead to forehead I now march towards thee, this third time, Moby Dick. But for what, I cannot say — shalt thou let me pass? Shall I let thee pass? Shall my life be thine, regardless? Shall we together meet our doom by the very course with which we aim to avoid it? The sails shake! How I shake with them.

“Let me look around now here at the sea; there’s yet time for that for me. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter.

“But goodbye, goodbye, old mast, should I need say it. What’s this?—green? Aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the difference, now, between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven, this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers.”

Leaning forward with a weary sigh, Ahab rests his forehead against his arm.

A whole hour now passes, gold-beaten out to ages, with the crew in enchanted silence. Time itself holds long breaths with keen suspense, and still the silent ship sails on.

At last, some three points off the weather bow, Tashtego’s melodic voice from aloft descries the spout again, followed by a thunderous chorus of cries from the collective ship. At the same time, Ahab’s eyes lock onto the spout from the deck, and for a moment the world stops breathing.

Ahab stands. 

Ahab stands alone at his quarterdeck and—

Ahab stands alone at his quarterdeck and stares out at the spout and he aches.

There is Ahab. There is the whale. That inexorable spout, rising boldly into the air like an executioner’s sword, glinting in the light of the sun. There is the aching in Ahab’s leg and in his body and in his tired, bleeding, beating heart, his weary, bruised and battered soul. There is grief and rage and the bitter want of vengeance, of justice, coating his tongue and clogging his throat with weighty lead. There is Ahab, aching. There is the whale. 

Ahab stands alone and—

And Starbuck.

And there is Starbuck. 

Near him, beside him, always beside him, with all his quiet courage and solid steadiness, with all his unwavering loyalty and unyielding faith in spite of everything, shaking ever so slightly in the eastward wind, breathing heavily, mouth pressed into a thin line and eyes boring into Ahab with a desperation and hope far fiercer than any ache. 

Ahab’s eyes catch on the fading cut on his neck, nearly indistinguishable now amongst his pale freckled skin.

Ahab sets his jaw. Ducks his head, casts his shadowed eyes to the deck, looks away from Starbuck, and his unflinching eyes, and his unflinching devotion, and the cut on his neck, away from the sea and the sun and the whale and that awful, haunted spout that had so long ago severed his bleeding body right out from his soul. He looks away. He closes his eyes.

His crewmen hang from aloft like the rigging itself, like part of the Pequod herself, swaying gently with the wind and the rocking of the ship, all eyes on Ahab. They wait with bated breath, and the Pequod herself seems holding her breath with them, her hull rising up a cresting wave to hang suspended in the frozen moment. 

Eyes still downcast, Ahab speaks to the deck, too quiet to be heard over the wind and the waves, “Alright.”

Some unseen line jerks Starbuck forward, eyes bright and mouth ajar and brow furrowed. He steps toward Ahab involuntarily, like a broken stage direction — he’d rehearsed this all before, hadn’t he? a billion years before? but this wasn’t how it went; these weren’t the lines he knew; this was something new — his breath tugged sharply from his lungs with the pull of that same line towards his Captain.

“Alright, Starbuck,” Ahab exhales, more audible this time. “Alright.” He turns his head toward the middle deck, eyes still down to the floor, voice now billowing up to the men in the rigging like air filling their sails, “Lower not for him. We chase the White Whale no more — we have survived enough.”

He turns to Starbuck again, hand slightly outstretched, expression heavy and somber. “For this third time, it seems, my soul’s ship will not start upon this voyage, Starbuck.” 

Automatically, Starbuck clasps Ahab’s hand in answer, some deep-buried hope just barely beginning to crack through his face. Their eyes fasten, Ahab’s unspilled tears the glue. The Captain nods again, subtly, for Starbuck’s eyes alone, and Starbuck’s face cracks open further into a disbelieving exhale, lips opening into something that could almost be called a smile.

“Aye, sir. Thou wilt have it so,” Starbuck breathes.

“Mr. Starbuck, keep the ship;” Ahab says, dropping his eyes, “thou know’st what to do.”

Before any can react, then, Ahab rounds toward the stern, the wood of his leg striking violently against the deck. He keeps his eyes to the ground, even as Starbuck (ever faithful, ever loyal Starbuck) begins to reach for him, that small seed of a longing smile still sprouting open on his face; even as the Pequod and all her crew suddenly swell again with breath and wind and life, starting as if from a long, enchanted sleep; even as Starbuck (ever pragmatic, ever steadfast Starbuck) returns to his senses and remembers his duties and begins to call orders to the animated crew; even as the White Whale spouts again, closer to the ship now, and again, still closer — still Ahab roots his eyes to the deck and stalks to his stern looking away looking away walking away running away and

The whale breaches. 

He is nearly upon the ship now, scarcely some yards off the port stern. He rains seafoam over her bulwarks, pulling the sea skyward with him, spray showering down over Ahab on the deck staring glass-eyed up at him. The whale flaunts his whole towering form over the ship. His crooked, rolled jaw. His scratched and scarred skin. His eye, wide and black and hollow and deep and endless as the sea on a moonless night. The tangle of lines and lances and harpoons and— 

Oh.

Such a sight. Such a horrific, gruesome sight, such as Ahab has never seen before. Such a sight as he in that instant knows he will now never stop seeing, a sight he will see over and over and over again, carved bloodily into his memory and into his nightmares and into the skin of the back of his eyelids for the rest of his life.

Lashed round and round to the White Whale’s back, pinioned in the turns and tangles in which, during the past night, Moby Dick had reeled the lines around himself, Fedallah’s half-torn body rises from the sea on full display against the body of the whale. The long, white turns of his tattered turban are frayed to shreds, the remnants of his mangled aracqchin underneath; his skin, once the gentle light brown of tide-loved sand, has gone mottled and gray, distorted and blotched with drowned purple and blue; his distended eyes, once warm and dark and seeing, always seeing, are turned full and sightless upon old Ahab.

And the whale is submerged again, dragging the lines and Fedallah down with him. 

The life slips from Ahab’s face. He sucks in a sudden breath and numbly stumbles forward toward the whale, towards his friend, muttering to himself again: “Aye. Aye, Fedallah; I see thee now—” His staggering steps bump him up against the bulwarks. “Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this is the hearse that thou didst promise.” 

Someone is calling his name. He cannot hear them above the sound of spray. Of Fedallah’s voice, whispering prophecies and warnings into his ear. 

“And the second, then—where is the second hearse—?”

Moby Dick breaches again, further off now, flashing his gleaming marbleized form and Fedallah lashed to it, the whale’s empty void of an eye still gazing coldly upon the ship and her Captain, taunting him. Ahab swears he’s grinning at him, grinning with that scrolled jaw of his, his wicked, crooked smile. Jeering at him. Mocking him. 

Fedallah , Ahab tries to say, though nothing comes out. Give him back , he tries to scream, though saltwater cakes his tongue. Give him back.

Someone calls his name again.

His breath has been snatched from his throat. There is a dead friend in his eyes and saltwater in his lungs and prophecies in his ears, there is a hearse beneath his feet — of course, of course, the ship, the second hearse; its wood could only be American — and there is someone is calling his name, and there Starbuck is in the corner of his vision, hand outstretched in an aborted attempt to reach for him, to offer comfort, but what on Earth could he possibly say? and Fedallah’s mangled body is stitched into Ahab’s eyelids, and there is saltwater in his lungs and blood on his hands and a hearse beneath his feet and he turns away, away, turns away — “The deck is thine, Mr. Starbuck,” he somehow manages — and clenches his eyes and stumbles to the cabin scuttle and down the stairs and into his cabin and shuts himself up alone with that bloody ocean in his lungs.

Beneath him, above him, around him, the Pequod rolls. She cradles her Captain alone in his cabin, alone in her gut, Jonah in the belly of the beast, as her many hands and legs work her rope and wood and sail above. The ribs of his ship like the ribs of the whale curl around him like loving, caging hands; he makes no effort to fight the suffocation of the bones that have swallowed him. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just.  

Above him, the ship’s many hands and arms and legs point her hull toward home.

There in her gut, in his hearse, the God-fugitive shivers, alone, alone.

Chapter Text

It is hours before Starbuck comes to him. 

He’s worried, of course; God , of course he’s worried. His mind swirls with it; his heart thuds loudly against his throat with it; if he’s not careful his feet start unbiddenly taking him back toward the scuttle to descend the stairs to the cabin for it, for the need to find him, be with him, sit with him, talk with him, be with him. But before that there is much to take care of. There are orders to give and damages to assess, there are whaleboats to mend and injuries to tend, there is an entire crew still drunk on the madness of the chase and the confusion of its closure to assuage, and so it is hours before Starbuck is able to break away, to leave the deck in the hands of the other officers, to descend into the cabin and check in on Ahab.

Starbuck opens the door to Ahab’s stateroom cautiously, without knocking. He takes a step in, slow and careful. 

Ahab is sitting on the corner of his couch. He is curled in on himself, elbows on his knees and head in his hands and fingers clenched tight in his hair. He is motionless as a dead thing. 

Starbuck has never seen him look so small in his life.

He takes another step into Ahab’s stateroom. The quiet, careful tap of his heel rings out like a gunshot against the corpse-silence of the cabin, and he tries not to flinch with each thunderous further step he takes. He lowers himself gently as possible onto the couch beside Ahab, careful not to touch or crowd him. 

Starbuck tries to reach for him then, slowly and deliberately, and Ahab flinches away so violently the couch shakes. He shakes his head, and Starbuck catches glimpses of desperate, terrified eyes.

“I—I am not going to harm thee,” he says on instinct, very visibly retracting his hands. “I won’t.”

Ahab’s posture shrinks even further around himself, face disappearing into the wrinkles of his sleeves.

And they sit, without speaking. 

Minutes or hours roll by beneath them alongside the rolling waves. Ungodly, godlike Ahab, larger-than-life Ahab, so full of furious fire and life and energy and weighty, vivacious presence Ahab sits collapsed in on himself like a withered fern, deflated and depleted of all his burning light. For once there is no pretense; for once there is no mask, no carefully constructed persona painstakingly maintained under years of binding scrutiny; there is only Ahab, aching. 

Starbuck sits with him, as the night turns. 

He does not mind. He can wait. For as long as it takes. They have time now. The danger is over. 

He breathes in. And out.

In the quiet of the creaking ship and curling waves, God only knows how long after Starbuck first stepped into the room, Ahab speaks. It takes Starbuck a moment to process that he’d spoken, against the quiet; Ahab had barely managed to eke out the whispered question over his ship’s sighings and moanings: “What do you want ?”

Starbuck tilts his head, looks over at his Captain, still curled on himself. 

“What do you want?” he says again, still bent over himself, not raising his head to look at Starbuck. His voice is quiet and hoarse, his sentences coming out pained, effortful. “You’re safe. We are returning home. You will see your family again. What more could you possibly want.”

Starbuck feels a pang in his chest. “Nothing,” he says, truthfully.

More waves rock beneath them.

“Thank you,” Starbuck adds eventually, voice gentle.

“What?”

“For turning around. For saving us.”

Without uncurling himself, Ahab shifts, huffs a cynical laugh. “Don’t thank me for taking my knife from thy throat. I caused the peril I ‘saved’ thee from.”

Starbuck shakes his head. “ Thank you . I know this was not easy. I know what this meant to thee. Thank you.”

Ahab snorts again, but does not argue further. He turns his body away, curling further into the corner of the couch.

The night passes mostly in silence. Starbuck longs to press closer to Ahab, to reach for him again, to touch him, but he sits and waits in silence with him instead. It is only Ahab’s breathing, tedious and shaky and only occasionally loud enough to be heard over the crashing of the waves, that tells Starbuck he is still alive.

When morning begins to slip its uninvited way into the room, Starbuck inhales an audible, weary sigh. He looks over at unmoving Ahab again, eyes heavy with sleeplessness and sorrow. 

“Ahab,” he says with a soft voice, “I should return to the deck soon.” He hesitates. “I…do not wish to leave thee alone, if…”

Ahab gives a noncommittal huff. Starbuck wavers again, calculating. “When…when didst thou last eat?”

The noise that Ahab makes would at any other time have been called a laugh. Starbuck gives a small hum in kind. “I’ll bring something, in a moment.”

He stands, groaning lightly as his bones creak in protest, and enters the main cabin, leaving Ahab’s stateroom door slightly ajar. The cabin is empty — expected, for the hour — and so Starbuck quickly puts together a small plate from Fleece’s pantry and brings it to the stateroom, setting the plate gently on Ahab’s desk.

He looks back over at Ahab, who sits now hunched on his knees and looking down at his hands, and notes with small relief that he has at least uncurled his spine some. “I’ll have Fleece prepare some proper meal for thee, and leave it at the door.” He pauses, then adds, “I will be back. As soon as I can.”

The next few days pass like this. Ahab remains in his cabin, too shaken and grieving and furious and too exhausted to face his crew again, to face the sun again. He sits on his couch or lays staring at the ceiling in his bed or, occasionally, paces about his stateroom like a hunted thing. Starbuck joins him when he can, hesitant to leave him alone for too long. 

On what Ahab thinks is the second day, the feeling of festering, of rotting away, in his own body is finally enough to overtake the sheer weight of his grief, and after eating what he can stomach of the meal Fleece had left him that morning, Ahab manages to gather enough energy to clean and care for himself some small amount.

Ahab enters his bedroom and closes the door behind him. He peels off his waistcoat and shirt, both filthy with sweat and saltwater and the layers of grief and grime that had been baked into them over the course of the last few days. Then, leaning against his bunk, he reaches down to unbuckle the harness to his leg, hissing in pain as the leather rubs against the skin beneath. He’d left the prosthetic on for days straight — poor practice at the best of times, but particularly now: after the intensity of three days of chase and the atrophy of sitting unmoving for days more in its aftermath, the severed stump of his leg aches with a raw, stinging vengeance. The scar and the skin around it is puffy and irritated, and the nerves and muscles beneath it thrum with a built up agony that his mind is only just now beginning to process.

Sitting down properly on his bed, Ahab removes the last of his clothes and casts them to the side. He’s not sure any amount of washing will rid them of the taint of his grief, but that is a problem for later. Cautiously, he runs his fingers along the rough scar on his leg, assessing the pain.

Fedallah had helped him with it, before. Would remind him to do his massages, would take Ahab’s leg in his own hands and do it for him, on the days when Ahab could not bring himself to. On days he could, Fedallah would offer to help anyways, his strong, wrinkled hands both firm and gentle against Ahab’s aggrieved nerves. He’d been the one to teach Ahab how to do them in the first place, on shore after that damned voyage, taught him how to prepare the scarred area first with gentler touches, working the way up to firmer massages, soothing the nerves and muscles. Though Fedallah’s own leg injury was different, a chronic pain from a decades-old wound in his right leg that had never healed quite right, Fedallah had been well familiar with the process of easing the pain. Well familiar with the need to be reminded, to be encouraged, to do it. To be reminded that just because the pain was permanent did not mean it should not be softened.

Ahab has not attended to his leg in weeks. Longer, probably. When he had actually slept, he’d left the prosthetic on (also poor practice at the best of times, but a habit he’d never in the history of his injury quite been able to shake). He’d spent days and days standing for hours upon the deck without moving, forever seeking his hated foe of the deep. And Fedallah — Fedallah hadn’t spoken to him in — God knows how long. 

So the leg had gone neglected.

Now the months and months of poor care and soreness and disregarded anguish come bubbling up, and they flood over Ahab as though from a broken dam, bursting up from the gnarled stump of his leg, the pain rolling through him in waves, and he sits on his bunk gripping the bedpost in one hand and he shakes and he shakes and he shakes and he shakes.

When he finds himself able to breathe again, Ahab rises slowly, shakily, balancing on his one remaining leg. He breathes deeply for several moments. Closes his eyes. 

It is quite a strange feeling, he thinks as he dips a cloth into his small washbasin — one of the few privileges afforded a whaleship captain — quite a strange feeling to have survived himself. To persist in a body that should have already died. It is strange, strange, he thinks, as he takes the wet cloth and scrubs it against the skin of something well past expiring, his body like rotting fruit exhaling beneath the weight of its own moldy skin. He stands on his remaining leg as he slowly and methodically washes himself over, unable to shake the feeling of being already dead, of his own body slowly decomposing beneath his skin like the corpse that it is. He’s certain if he cut himself open now he’d find nothing but dead, decaying flesh inside. 

Is he so certain he did not die? So certain his skin now is anything more than a flimsy mask, hiding the putrefying, decaying rot beneath? He thinks of flensing the whales they hunt, their blubber peeled back to reveal blood and viscera, the flesh violently snapped at and devoured by vicious sharks, and he scrubs harder. He thinks of rotting fruit and scrubs harder. He thinks of Fedallah’s bloated, bloodied corpse, dead two days and no burial but the waves, exposed to the salt and sea and sky and rotting beneath it for a full day and night, and he scrubs harder. He thinks of own his decomposing body — dead two days and no burial in sight, left exposed to rot and rot and rot — and he scrubs harder, and he scrubs harder, and he

A sudden knock on his stateroom door outside the bedroom jolts his thoughts. He flinches, breathing heavily. Ahab hears Starbuck step into his stateroom outside and call his name softly. 

He looks down at himself and finds the skin on his stomach scrubbed completely raw, a deep, angry red blossoming against the brown skin around it, the blood vessels near the surface burst open. His body and hands shake. Ahab casts the cloth aside, willing his breathing to slow. 

“A moment,” he manages to call to Starbuck through the door. 

He dresses in fresh clothes and reattaches his leg, ignoring the sparks of pain that lick up and down his thigh from every touch and brush of fabric and leather against his skin.

Ahab exits his bedroom to find Starbuck standing near his desk, watching the Pequod ’s wake out her stern window. His first mate turns his head to him, eyes brightening subtly the way they have for the past few days whenever they land on Ahab still here, still alive, still unharmed. 

“Captain,” Starbuck says. 

Ahab nods in response. The energy he has available to him to speak is in limited supply lately; he is conservative with its use.

Unfazed, Starbuck turns to face him fully, taking a step toward him. “How art thou, today?” comes the by now expected question. 

Ahab never knows how to answer this. He thinks on it, breathing in and out slowly, before replying, “I am here.”

Starbuck nods. Ahab isn’t sure if he’s grateful or upset that Starbuck doesn’t press further. Most of the time, he does, gently trying to tug more out of Ahab, more about how he’s feeling, what he wants, how Starbuck can help, with varying levels of success. Little changes; Ahab cycles between answers. I am tired. I am here. I miss my friend. I am tired. 

“Captain,” Starbuck continues instead, “the mastheads have spotted the Rachel once more on the horizon. I intend to hail her again, to offer our assistance, if she will accept it after our prior transgression.” 

It is kind of him, Ahab thinks, to refer to Ahab’s callous refusal of the Rachel’s request as “ours.” “Why hast thou not?”

“Because thou art still our Captain,” Starbuck says, simply. “May we hail her to board? We have seaworthy whaleboats enough to assist her in her search for her missing crew.”

Ahab frowns, leaning back against the wall to take some weight off his leg. Starbuck could very well have given the order himself; there was no reason other than principle for him to ask for Ahab’s command, here. He recognizes the chance being offered to him, and he almost resents it. 

Peter had failed Christ three times, or so it is said. Had been given three chances, had denied and betrayed his Lord at each one. Three betrayals, three subsequent affirmations to earn forgiveness. 

Starbuck has offered him a thousand chances, Ahab feels, a thousand and more over the long stretch of this damned voyage, and he has yet failed every but one — and even that was arguable. Ahab had denied him and betrayed him and refused him and dismayed him. And yet still more chances came. He wonders at the limit of Starbuck’s patience, his forgiveness, at how Starbuck can stand to look at him and offer chance after chance at redemption with more tolerance and grace than the Savior Himself. 

Here he is now, holding one out to Ahab without even mentioning it: a chance to right this wrong, a chance to cleanse this sin. 

Ahab drops his eyes from Starbuck’s; he cannot hold that forgiving gaze. He wonders how many trials of repentance he will need to earn it. 

He nods his head. “Do as thou wilt. Ask Captain Gardiner not for forgiveness; only extend to him my most sorrowful apologies.”

Starbuck nods in response. “Aye, Captain. Thank you.”

Another habit of Starbuck’s that Ahab is still puzzling over—this regular extension of gratitude. He ducks his head again in acknowledgment of Starbuck’s farewell (accompanied, as always, by his promise to return soon) and puzzles over the problem of how one whom he had wronged so deeply should desire to treat him so kindly. Gratitude and grace both offered openly to him in equal measure. 

He does not remember having ever been treated in such a way. 

And so the days pass. 

As the world above returns to normalcy and he can comfortably leave the deck in the hands of Stubb and Flask, Starbuck spends more and more time with Ahab. The ordinary watch schedule above has mostly been reinstated, though Starbuck foregoes his own watches more often than not. He enters Ahab’s cabin quietly and carefully; he sits across the couch from him, miles and miles of cushion stretching between them; he brings the Captain meals and gently reminds him to eat and asks how he’s faring. In the early days their conversations are sparse at best. The few fragmented sentences and words Starbuck manages to coax from the Captain he keeps tucked against his chest like treasure, revering them for the small victories they are. They fall asleep on the couch, curled in opposite directions across from each other, wake to aggravated spines and crackling bones. Sometimes Ahab has the wherewithal to make it to his bunk, and Starbuck will sit beside him then, on the chair at the head of his bed or on the floor beside it, guardian angel-like in his steadfast, watchful gaze.

Ahab eats little, speaks less. Time blurs together for him, its passage marked not by the days or the waves or the cycles of light and dark that pass by his cabin windows, but by his first mate’s quiet comings and goings. Ahab cannot tell if he more awaits Starbuck’s arrivals or his departures. If he dreads more the silence of his solitude or that of Starbuck’s company.

Starbuck comes and goes, quiet and gentle and caring and forgiving and everything, everything, everything Ahab does not deserve. Ahab survives in spite of himself. He sits on his couch or lays across his bed or paces his room and he survives, the damning evidence of a future dawning more upon him with each successive sunrise he lives to see. 

His dreams are filled with bloody memories and bloodier prophecies. He dreams the Whale devouring his leg, the thick blood that gushed from his stump, the officers that lashed him to his bunk. He dreams the Whale snapping his whalebone leg, dreams the Whale dragging Fedallah’s body down, snaring and snapping his neck in Ahab’s line. He dreams Fedallah’s body, torn in half, lashed to Moby Dick’s marbled form. He dreams Fedallah’s unfulfilled prophecy, the alternate final day of chase; Ahab dreams his own death, his ship sunk without him, his harpoon flung, his own line caught round his neck to pull him down. He dreams and dreams and dreams of death. 

Up above, the order is given to aid the Rachel in searching for her missing whaleboat, and the two ships comb the horizon to find her lost children. 

They never do.

And still Ahab survives. In spite of himself.

Chapter Text

“Wilt thou not come above deck?” Starbuck asks, sitting at Ahab’s desk as the captain paces his cabin. “Thy presence is missed. And the fresh air, the sun, the sea — thou mightest benefit from such things. It cannot be favorable to thee to be so secluded and cramped away for so long.”

Ahab shakes his head, restless energy radiating off him like solar flares. “I cannot.” 

Some days it is like this: all agitation and high energy and vigorous spirit, instead of Ahab’s gloomy and morose moods of despair. Starbuck can usually get more out of him at such times; they can hold what might almost pass for a normal conversation. 

“Why not?” he asks.

“I cannot,” Ahab repeats. “How can I face any of them again after everything? How can I face myself again?” Ahab’s energy is pervasive, contagious; it seeps into the cracks in the wooden floor beneath him and the salty air around him. Not quite angry, not quite explosive, but buzzing, charged, like ozone energizing the atmosphere before a storm. 

In comparison to the suffocating quiet, to the near-catatonic despondent moods Ahab has been victim to, times like these constitute what might be called a good day. The grief was a funny thing, like that. 

“Believest thou that thy crew thinks lesser of thee?”

Ahab’s creep towards progress was slow, was painful, was agonizing, was repetitive and frustrating and meticulous and slow , but it was progress. It was encouraging.

“I would be a fool to think otherwise,” Ahab grumbles. Starbuck moves to interject, but Ahab continues, “In either case, I cannot. I cannot bring myself to.”

“Not now, then,” says ever tenacious Starbuck, unwilling to give up entirely. Ahab hums noncommittally. 

“And what of thee? Art content to spend thine hours watching me waste away in here? How long wilt thou be satisfied with locking thyself away below?”

“For as long as thou art,” comes Starbuck’s measured reply. Where once he might have taken such proddings from Ahab as heated, intentional provocations, and thus taken offense to them, he has come to understand them for what they are: a line of defense, of sorts, a testing of the waters.

“Hm. Thou mightest well wither away completely, were that the case.”

“Then may we wither here.” Starbuck’s tone is light, though his expression betrays seriousness. “Is that what thou desirest?”

Ahab shoots him a look. “I desire none of this.”

“What dost thou want?”

“There is nothing left for me, Starbuck. What does it matter what I want? There is naught left for me.”

“Why sayest thou that?

“That — my chase became my purpose. It became everything I was. That has been taken from me, and so there is nothing left of me.” Ahab’s temperament, too, shifts slightly to sternness, his pacing less erratic, more intentional.

“I do not believe that to be true.”

“Is it not? My purpose has been robbed from me. My fate denied. Even the right to die following my friend, as honor and fate should dictate, has been denied to me.”

“That is not thy fate , and it never was. Why wantest thou to believe that? Dost want this to be thy fate? A destiny of a horrid death? Why want for such a dreadful purpose?”

“It is not want , Starbuck.”

“Thou sayest that, but—”

“Does a fish want to swim? Does he choose to? Does a man choose to breathe? No. He does so because it is in his nature. Because it is what his body was made for, what he was molded to do. He could not do otherwise if he wished it, nor would he think to. My body was molded for one purpose alone.”

“This is not thy nature , Ahab.”

“Is it not? Thou know’st what that name means. What it fates me to. The wicked king.”

“Thy name does not define thee, nor thy fate.”

Ahab chuckles, then. “Does it not? Are we not both shackled by our names, Mr. Starbuck?”

Starbuck falls quiet.

“Didst not choose thy family name, didst thou. Didst not choose this whaleman’s life, didst thou.”

Quietly, Starbuck replies, “No. I did not.”

“Did not our names bring us both here? Bring us both to this?” Ahab huffs another dry laugh. “I did not choose my nature. I did not choose to swim, to breathe, to hunt, to chase. I did not choose to ache.”

Ahab rakes a hand through his hair, expression muted. 

Sighing wearily, Starbuck looks away. “Aye, Captain,” he says, “I did not choose the life of a whaler. I did not choose what my family bred itself for.” He leans forward on his knees, looking up at Ahab from the chair. “My son fancies weaving. Didst thou know that?”

Ahab frowns, brow furrowing. He ceases his pacing to look sidelong over at Starbuck.

Smiling almost wistfully to himself, Starbuck continues, “He quite enjoys it. Took to it naturally. He’s expressed an interest in many things, over the years — likes to work with his hands, he does — but regularly he returns to this.” He clasps his hands. “When he was born, Mary and I were delighted. And terrified. All the men of my family have perished in this line of work. I prayed to God that something else yet awaited him. Something other than this life, this death. I did not want this for him, for my Mary, for us. 

“We did not raise him as I was raised.” He raises his gaze to Ahab again. “Whatever he does, whatever he becomes, it will be his choice. Because of mine. Because of Mary’s and my choice.

“Thou art not beholden to thy name, or to thy nature, Ahab.”

Ahab looks away again, gazing instead out the window. Neither of them speaks for a long while, rocking with the ship and the waves.

“Perhaps not,” Ahab says at last. “But that singular purpose consumed me nonetheless. It became all that I was. I know not what I am without it.”

“That is something we may discover, then.” Ahab hums in disbelief. “There is yet more for thee, my Captain, I swear it. More to discover and to become.” 

Starbuck stands then, moving to join Ahab by the window. Reluctantly, Ahab turns his stubborn, weary gaze to Starbuck’s, tired gray eyes boring into his. Starbuck holds steady, reaches out to brush Ahab’s arm with his hand, keeping his eyes full on Ahab. 

Ahab swallows, frowns, looks away. Gazes back out the window, the sunlight catching on the dark gray of his eyes and turning them a warm golden-brown. Starbuck steps closer to him, following the path of his gaze out the stern window, down the Pequod ’s white wake.

“Captain,” he starts, voice sticking in his throat, “I am — endlessly sorry. For thy loss, for all thy losses. I mean this as truthfully as I can: I know loss well; I understand the havoc that grief can wreak upon a soul. We both do.

“But there is more, Captain, I promise. There are people around who love thee, and who care for thee. Find purpose in that. Pip does — that boy loves you, Ahab; he does.”

Ahab scoffs and shakes his head. “Aye, and I have abandoned him. Failed him in the worst way I could.”

“Then make that right. There is still the chance for it. He still needs thee.”

“How can I? The longer I have waited, the worse my betrayal. How long has it been? How can I even speak to him now?”

“It is not too late, Ahab. It never will be too late to make it right.”

Ahab shakes his head, but doesn’t press further.

“And thy family — thy wife, thy son; they love thee, they care for thee—”

Ahab does truly laugh at that, a dismal thing. “We are not—” Another mirthless half-chuckle. “She does not love me. We did not marry for —” He shakes his head. “I married Lily to protect her. That is all. The child is not mine. She was with child before we married; I did it to keep her safe from the shame, the ostracization, of bearing a child out of wedlock. I married her to keep her safe. We are not —” He hesitates, but continues anyway — he might as well, by this point. “We are not — in love . Neither of us — we carry no affection of that sort for each other. Nor anyone of the other’s sex.”

For a moment Ahab wonders if he’s truly gone too far this time, finally crossed some unseen line of too much sin for Starbuck to stand — as it is, his first mate is averting his eyes, clearly attempting to think of some diplomatic approach to his reply, subtle color touching his cheeks. 

But no, it seems; it is no such thing. Starbuck absently folds and unfolds his hands and says, with no small amount of awkwardness, “Well. Be that as it may, she still cares for thee. She must.” Before Ahab can protest again, he continues, “I’ve seen her with thee, Captain. I’ve seen how she is with thee, and her concern for thee in thy injury. She may not be — in love with thee, but she certainly loves thee. Carest thou for her, dost thou not?”

Ahab sighs, reluctantly. “Of course I do.”

“As she must for thee,” Starbuck insists. “And the boy — even if he is not of thy blood, thou art the only father he knows. Of course he sees thee as such. Of course there is love within him for thee.”

Ahab shakes his head. “Some father I have been. I’ve scarcely seen him.”

Starbuck gives a small scoff, hands outstretched. “Such is the fatherhood of whalemen. Thinkest thou that I have been blessed with ample time with my son?”

“That boy has only known me for the brief period I was ashore after last voyage. He was born while I was away, and only knew me for the time I returned, in my horrid injury and my recovery. I was hardly myself. I barely spoke to him. He likely does not even remember my face, let alone—”

“ Ahab ,” Starbuck pushes, with an almost humorous exasperation, and Ahab stops to turn to him. “Ahab. My point is, thy family cares . There are people who care — Pip, thy family, myself. There is yet more for thee in this world. May we agree on that, or shall we continue to argue on the semantics of every relationship in thy life?”

Ahab huffs, also nearly humorously, in response, looking away again. He relents, though, and does not argue further.

“ Thank you.”

“Hm.”

The ship’s bell clangs above them on deck, eight bells: the end of the afternoon watch. Starbuck casts his glance over his shoulder, a mild irritation coloring his expression, and he sputters a sigh. 

Ahab huffs again. He nods in Starbuck’s direction. “Go on, then.”

Starbuck sighs again and reluctantly makes his way toward the door. “I’ll see thee soon. After the dog-watch.”

“If you like,” Ahab says. 

“Be well, Captain.” And Starbuck is gone.

Ahab tugs his hair.

For everything that has happened, for everything Starbuck has seen, it is still a rare sight to find Ahab crying. It is not entirely unprecedented; there were times throughout the whole of the voyage when tears would touch Ahab’s eyes, would slide gently and nobly down his weathered cheeks, would fall so sweetly into the sea below. But it was still a rare thing, and even more so in these past weeks, where the Captain seemed trying his best to keep his fragile self from fracturing entirely, holding himself together through either his restless, argumentative energy or his more melancholy, unspeaking moods. Both different forms of armor in their own right, Starbuck was coming to understand.

So it comes as no small surprise when, during one of Ahab’s worse days, the captain sitting wordless and motionless scrunched in around himself, Starbuck hears Ahab’s breath hitch with an unmistakeable sniffle, followed by several more, barely escaping his suffocating throat. 

“Captain?”

Ahab sucks in a violent breath, audibly wrestling with his tears for control of his lungs. “ Don’t ,” he hisses, breath cutting short as he chokes off another cry.

“Oh, Captain, I—”

“Don’t. Don’t—come near to me. Don’t look at me.”

Starbuck hesitates, hand wavering in an aborted attempt to reach out to his Captain. 

“Dont look at me.”

“Oh, Ahab. I’m not…I—”

“Don’t come closer. Please.”

“I won’t. I won’t. But—I will also—I will not look away, Captain. I promised thee that. I promised I would not look away from thee.”

Ahab tries to respond, but another sob bubbles up through his throat and seizes his voice, cutting him off. He curls even more tightly around himself, one hand fisting in his hair and the other clamping down over his mouth, shoving the sound down. Starbuck’s heart twists in his chest, pulling his lungs tight shut. 

“Oh, Captain, oh, my Captain. It—it’s alright. It’s alright if — if thou need’st this. I am here.”

Ahab shakes his head, the hand still curled in his hair being yanked around with it. His breathing is heavy and labored, still suppressing his cries deep within his chest. 

“Oh, Ahab. Ahab, Ahab, it—it’s alright. It’s alright; thou canst cry.” Ahab shakes his head again at that, but Starbuck persists, a desperate, pained concern coloring the edge of his voice. “I’m here, Ahab. It’s alright. I will not leave. I will not look away.” He swallows. “I am not — I’m not going to harm thee.”

Ahab’s breath catches again. He presses the heel of his hands into his eyes, his whole body shaking with the strain of holding himself back. 

And, God, Starbuck is not a violent man, but in moments like this — watching Ahab shake and shudder, watching him twist and contort his body and lungs into something unrecognizable, something utterly and categorically un-Ahab — in moments like this, Starbuck thinks of Ahab’s former mates, on Ahab’s previous voyage, and what they did to him, and what they forced him through, and how they responded to a man in pain; and, God, Starbuck is not a violent man, but in moments like this, he thinks of those officers, whoever they were, and something inside of him burns. 

“It’s alright,” Starbuck says again, helpless. “I’m here. I’m here. Thou dost not have to hide it. Just…let thyself be. It’s alright.”

Ahab chokes down another sob, and Starbuck wishes he could do something, anything else. But Ahab hides from his gaze, recoils from his touch. So Starbuck can only speak, offer meaningless platitudes, tears pricking his own eyes as he tries desperately to keep them out of his voice. 

“It’s alright, Ahab. I’m here. I’m here. Thou art safe here.”

In short, staccato bursts, in shallow gasps and in between bouts of forced silence, Ahab cries.

“How art thou today, my Captain?” comes the familiar question again. 

Ahab tilts his head back, casting his gaze up to the ceiling, breathing long and low. How is he? He has gotten no better at answering, in the time that has elapsed (two weeks? Likely more. The days are lengthening fully into languid summer). He is tired, weary. He is furious, angry. He is full of grief and rage and pain. He is numb and dazed, the time passing before him like murky waters. He wants to fling himself into the sea. He wants to take a whaleboat and strike out on his own and find that fucking whale and end it once and for all. He wants his friend back. He wants to take every cursed crew member on this ship who shunned and spurned and rejected Fedallah for the crime of his skin and his headscarf and shake them till they beg for forgiveness. He wants to beg for Fedallah’s forgiveness. He wants to find the men who restrained him after the White Whale took his leg and hurt them. He wants to hurt someone. He wants to hurt himself. He is furious and exhausted and numb all at once. He is aching, aching, aching. 

“I am…alive,” he says, finally. “Against all efforts to the contrary, it would seem.”

Starbuck moves to join him on his couch, sitting near but not touching. This is not a good day. “That’s good.”

Ahab seems unconvinced.

Cautiously, Starbuck presses, “...Is it not?”

Ahab takes more long, slow breaths. “It is…strange. A strange feeling. Having outlived one’s own self.” 

Starbuck frowns. “I…I am afraid I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

More drawn out breathing. Starbuck looks down at his hands, searching for words. He raises his gaze to Ahab again. “Captain, I…” He sighs. “I know none of this has been easy. I know that there is much troubling thee. I do not ask after thy well-being merely for the sake of asking; I truly wish to know, and to help. But I… am at a loss as to how.”

“As am I, it seems.”

“Thou art still in pain.”

“I am always in pain, Starbuck.”

“How can I alleviate it?” Ahab breathes long and slow. “At the very least, let me bear witness to it, please. As before. If nothing else, speak to me.”

There is another stretch of quiet, before Ahab replies. “Nothing has changed,” he says. “Thou know’st it all. What ails me has remained the same.”

“I know broad strokes of it, perhaps. But not the finer shape of it.”

“I know not how to speak of it.” Had Ahab more energy, he might be of a mind to grow frustrated. They have had, it seems, countless variations of this conversation. He doesn’t know how Starbuck has the patience for it, and is certain he must, sooner or later, become too irritated to continue. A part of him hopes that happens. Wants to push and prod at and frustrate Starbuck until it does.

“Speak it anyway,” Starbuck says again.

Ahab leans his head back to the ceiling again. “I am tired. I miss my friend, my friend whom I killed. My leg aches. My body aches. My soul aches. I want that accursed whale dead. I see it every night, in my dreams. I see Fedallah every night — nay, every time I close my eyes. His mangled body. It is all I can see now, when I think of him. I see his ruined body, and I see the whale, and I see those men, my officers, looming over me, faces shrouded in shadows — I cannot even remember their faces now, just their bodies hovering over me, just their hands and their arms pinning me down — I see them every night; I see—” Ahab shuts his mouth, lips curling into a frown.

“...Yes?” Starbuck pushes gently, eyes wide and intent on Ahab. Ahab shakes his head vigorously. 

“There is too much. I cannot speak of it all,” he says, voice rough, still shaking his head.

“Some of it, then. It does not have to be all. Some is still better than none.”

The ship rocks beneath them; the quiet crowds in around them. Starbuck keeps his eyes on Ahab, face pinched, expectant. Ahab doesn’t speak.

The moments pass. Starbuck’s body sinks, deflating slightly, and he releases an extended sigh. Ahab shuts his eyes against the noise and waits for Starbuck to give up. Waits for the familiar tapping of Starbuck’s footsteps out the door, for his soft, sad farewell, his forlorn promise of return. Waits for this to end how it always ends.

“The—The Parsee,” Starbuck says, instead. Ahab’s eyes snap open, staring straight in front of him. “Fedallah,” Starbuck corrects himself. “He…he was thy friend?”

Brow furrowing, Ahab turns to meet Starbuck’s eyes. Starbuck’s expression is curious, confused, though not unkind. 

Still, Ahab knows well how little Starbuck thought of Fedallah — though he’d likely not admit it — how little nearly anyone on board thought of him. Ahab’s “evil shadow,” Starbuck had called him. “Devil in disguise,” “gamboge ghost” and “phantom,” “creature” and even “ghost-devil” — all monikers the crew had given him. “Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?” Mr. Flask had asked his colleague Stubb. “You’ll know it before long, Flask,” had been the cruel reply. Fedallah had blithely ignored it all, had not bothered to dignify that childish foolishness with a response. He and Ahab would laugh about it, together in the retreat of Ahab’s cabin, Fedallah’s hand on Ahab’s shoulder and Ahab’s legs across his lap, laughing about the casual cruelty and the senseless stupidity of these white men and their fears. 

And Starbuck had been a part of that. In spite of everything else about him. In spite of his kindness and his patience and his piety and his goodness . He had been a part of it.

Ahab studies Starbuck’s gaze, his whole self aching. 

“Thou calledst him my ‘evil shadow,’” he says, not bothering to hide the wounded edge in his voice. 

“...Aye,” Starbuck says. Shame colors his cheeks and his voice.

“All of ye did. All of ye hated and shunned him, and treated him cruelly. Called him wicked things. He never did aught to any of ye.”

“Aye,” he says again. “We did.” Starbuck swallows. “I’m sorry.” He keeps his eyes on Ahab. “Both for thy loss and for…I am sorry.”

“Hmm.”

Starbuck looks between Ahab and his hands in his lap. A small part of Ahab admits some level of satisfaction at seeing Starbuck’s shame, at seeing him fully appreciate the realization of his crudeness. A larger part of him stings with the desire that Fedallah should be there to see it too.

Starbuck ventures carefully again. “Fedallah,” he says, and doesn’t that name sound so strange in his mouth? The accent misplaced, the vowels all wrong. “He was thy friend?”

Ahab nods slightly, heart clenching in his chest. “Aye, Starbuck. He was my friend.” 

Starbuck unconsciously leans barely closer, eyes wide, as if to say, “Go on.”

Sighing, Ahab drops his eyes then, wilting. “Friend, brother, lover. He has been all of these to me at one point or another.” He curls further into himself. “There are no words in any language to describe to thee what he was to me.”

After a long silence, Starbuck asks, “What was he like? What was he really like?”

Ahab opens his mouth to answer, but his tongue feels coated in lead. “He was…” He closes and opens it again some times, shaking his head, his eyes far, far off. “God, Starbuck, he was — he was everything.” His chest twists; his heart churns inside it; he ducks his head and shakes it again. “I can’t.”

“That’s alright,” Starbuck comforts in that gentle voice. “I’m sorry.”

“I cannot speak of any of it, Starbuck. How can I? How can I when there is so much? One crack and the dam will crumble and everything will escape. There is — Fedallah and there is this cursed leg and the aching and pain, and there is the whale, and there is this whole awful voyage and there was the one before it and there was the whale then, and there was the leg and the officers and the straitjacket, and there is fifty-and-more long years of a lonely, lonely life, filled with the desolation of solitude, and it is all woven so close together that if I pull but one loose string all will unravel and it will fall apart and I cannot .” Ahab realizes his fists are clenched, nails digging into his palms, and he flexes his hands out, wincing at the soreness in his fingers. 

“Why not?” Starbuck says, quiet, so quiet, and so gentle, voice like waves smoothing down the stones they beat against.

“I will break. I’m already all aleak as it is. I already have been for so long.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“What — of course it is.”

“Sometimes things must break — sometimes we must break — to make it right. To set the bones straight, so they may heal properly.”

Ahab taps his wooden leg — still not yet replaced with his preferred ivory — against the floor emphatically. “These wounds of mine are beyond healing.”

“Not all of them.” 

“And to break them again, to open them again,” Ahab continues over him, “I could not. I could not bear that. I am barely held together as it is. I’d shatter. I’d unravel.”

“Then let thee shatter, my Captain. I will be here to catch the pieces.”

Ahab is quiet.

“What art thou afraid of?”

It is several moments before Ahab replies, his voice shaky, barely audible. “Thou know’st what.”

“Oh, Ahab .” 

“Never in my life, Starbuck, never once in my life have I felt so wholly, entirely helpless as those long weeks I spent, imprisoned in my own bed. When they pinned me down for my screams of pain and lashed me up like a stricken sail, when neither my screams nor pleas nor silence were enough to spare me from their fear of me, when I saw them looming over me with that — that strait-jacked they’d made — they’d had to have made it themselves; we had no such article aboard the ship; they must have made it from spare sailcloth; they spent time and dedication and effort to plan such a thing, to execute it, and not once did they think to stop — and I have never—” He sucks in a breath, composing himself slightly.

“Never, never in my life have I felt such all-encompassing, all-conquering powerlessness, as I did then. I had never felt such a thing before and I have never since.”

Ahab’s voice is shaking. It is hoarse, rough, harsh on the edges of words. And quiet.

“I refuse. I refuse to allow that. To allow myself to feel so completely, utterly helpless .” He breathes shakily, cracks in his lungs forming sharp creaks in his breath. “Ever. Ever again.”

Starbuck turns to face Ahab fully on the couch now, stern and resolute, chest aching. “Ahab.” He musters all his honesty and loyalty, pushing it into his words, his face, trying to convey the sheer weight of how desperately he means this. “I swear to thee, on my life, I will not harm thee. I will not allow harm to come to thee. Nothing like that horrid imprisonment will ever happen to thee again. God as my witness, my Captain, I will not harm thee. Thou canst trust me.” 

He reaches his hand to Ahab then, slowly but unwaveringly, to gently turn Ahab’s face to his, forcing him to meet his eyes. “Thou art safe , here,” he promises. “Safe here in this place, with me. If nowhere else, at least here. Thou art safe. Safe to unravel. Let this be thy sanctuary.”

Ahab’s expression is unreadable, beneath the touch of Starbuck’s hand on his cheek, as he holds Starbuck’s unyielding gaze. The wrinkles around his eyes and forehead shift, folding and unfolding on themselves as he consciously breathes slowly in and out. Starbuck’s other hand comes to rest on his face, hands bracketing both Ahab’s cheeks now, gentle and firm and grounding.

“If thou need’st break,” Starbuck breathes into the space between them, “then let thyself break. I will witness it. I will help thee find the pieces.”

For long, quiet minutes, Ahab thinks, the minute expressions on his face shifting like tides. He looks down and away, cheek and beard brushing against Starbuck’s palms. 

“Perhaps,” he says eventually. “With time.”

Starbuck smiles then, a small and rare thing. One of his hands slides down to the side of Ahab’s neck, squeezes against his shoulder gently. “Then thou shalt have it. As much as thou need’st.”

Chapter Text

In time, the dam breaks. The thread unravels. The Captain shatters.

Starbuck sits in surprisingly peaceful quiet on the couch beside his captain, arm occasionally absently brushing his. It is early evening, the sky a deep inky blue, with just the barest hint of brightness still clinging to the western horizon, and a light rain falls on and off on the deck overhead.

Ahab is restless, on the couch next to Starbuck. He is making some effort to calm it, the only indication of his energy his fingers drumming against his thigh, but he is still clearly unsettled. His gaze is unfocused, hazing in and out on the logbooks resting on his desk across the room.

“I should—” Ahab starts, suddenly, before abruptly cutting himself off, pursing his lips.

Starbuck looks over at him, eyebrows curling with gentle concern. “Yes?”

Ahab’s eyes are still distant. “I should speak with him. Pip.” He parts his lips slightly, searching. “Shouldn’t I?”

Starbuck considers before answering. “I think that would benefit the both of ye.”

Ahab looks as though he wants to continue, but is unable to find the words. 

“I could…tell him? That thou wishest speak to him.”

“No. No. I must do it myself." He puts his head in his hands. “God, Starbuck, that poor boy. I took away the only sanctuary he had.”

Starbuck brushes his hand gently against Ahab’s arm. “I would not say that entirely. It is true, he misses thee, he needs thee. He was safe with thee. But he also has others on this ship looking out for him. I’ve seen the harpooners care for him greatly. He is safe with them, as well.

“Of course, he still needs thee. I’m sure he would be overjoyed to be near thee again. Thy support, thy love for him…it was healing to him. And he certainly would be delighted to have it again. But the damage is not irreparable.”

Ahab lifts his head slightly, eyes once again landing somewhere across the room. 

“I do not know what to do with myself,” he says, eventually. “I did not expect to find myself here. Alive, while he also lives.”

“Moby Dick?”

“One of us was to die. Or both. That I still breathe while he breathes, that I still live…I struggle to make sense of it. To believe it. I struggle to reconcile with the now indisputable fact of a life beyond it.” He tilts his head to the side. “And with thee.”

“With me?”

“Aye. Another unnassailable fact with which I am struggling to reconcile.” Starbuck watches him, green eyes soft. “I do not understand why thou art here. In all of this. I do not understand what to do with it.”

“Because I care,” Starbuck says quietly, certain and steadfast as ever. “Because I wish to see thee well. I wish to help in that. I wish for thee to allow me to.”

“Even with all thy insistences as such, it is still difficult to understand. ‘Tis a heavy load, these burdens I bear; why would anyone take such hardship willingly?”

“Burden me,” his first mate whispers. “I want thee to burden me.”

Frowning, Ahab runs a hand through his hair. When he breathes next it comes out slow, weary, a painstaking deflating. He is tired. He is aching. 

The minutes roll with the sea beneath them.

“I know,” Ahab says, finally.

Starbuck rests his hand on Ahab’s arm and his gaze on Ahab’s tired, tired eyes. He turns his body to face him more fully, and Ahab turns in kind, responding almost automatically, eyes still absent and unfocused.

“Captain,” Starbuck breathes, hardly a whisper. “Captain,” he says again, voice like a prayer, voice like a salve, voice like a shoreline. 

Ahab closes his eyes. Slowly, slowly, emboldened by his Captain’s reception of his touch, Starbuck’s hand makes its way up Ahab’s arm, curls gently around the side of his neck, before landing softly to cup his bearded jaw, thumb brushing along his rough, sea-worn cheek. Ahab’s brow pinches further, his whole body swaying into the touch like a tree sways in the wind, gentle and steady. Starbuck, too, shifts closer, pulled by his Captain’s gravity, and turns towards Ahab, his other hand coming up to brush the graying curls from Ahab’s forehead.

“Thou wilt be safe here. I will keep thee safe,” Starbuck promises. “I will not harm thee. I swear.”

Slowly, nearly imperceptibly, Ahab nods. 

“I will not harm thee,” Starbuck repeats. “Thou shouldst never have been touched with harm, with cruelty. These hands will only ever touch thee with kindness. I promise. These hands will only ever touch thee with gentleness, and with care. Thou deservest that.”

Ahab huffs a small chuckle at that, turning his face into the palm of Starbuck’s hand. His eyes are squinted shut. Tears begin to glimmer at their corners in the low light, and he pulls back as far as he can in Starbuck’s hold, shaking his head and wiping at his eyes.

Starbuck keeps his hands steady around Ahab’s face, unwavering. “It’s alright,” he says. “Don’t turn away.” His thumbs arc across Ahab cheeks, catching on the corners of his damp eyelashes, brushing at the beginnings of his tears. “It’s alright.”

Ahab trembles beneath the touch, eyes still pinched shut.

“Look at me?” Starbuck asks, gentler than snowdrops signaling spring, and in spite of himself, Ahab’s eyes flutter open, blinking against Starbuck’s fingers, flitting aimlessly for a bit as they orient themselves before landing on Starbuck’s springtime gaze.

For a brief flash, gone in an instant, Nathaniel smiles ever so softly, and he brushes his thumb again across Ahab’s cheek. “There.”

Like this, then, slowly, step by step, motion by small motion, they bend toward each other, slot against one another — Starbuck’s hand curling around the back of Ahab’s neck and Ahab leaning forward to rest his chin on Starbuck’s shoulder — till they are pressed chest-to-chest and cheek-to-cheek and Starbuck is honest-to-God holding his Captain and they both sigh against it, against each other, settling down into the embrace like old wood in familiar earth and they breathe . 

How long has Starbuck wanted this, he wonders. How long have they both needed this?

Ahab turns his face, hiding it into the crook of Starbuck’s shoulder and neck. Starbuck breathes in sharply and tightens the grip of his arms around Ahab. He is acutely aware of the deliberate, chosen trust being shown to him now. The choice to come apart in his arms. The choice to break, and the choice to, even broken, breathe. Each precious breath Ahab takes in Starbuck’s embrace is a treasured thing, and he holds them, holds Ahab, like the miracles they are.

“I’m here,” he whispers into the darkness. Ahab nods against his neck, breaths long and purposeful. “I’m here,” Starbuck promises again.

He does not know when it is that Ahab begins to cry, only that one moment, they are both quietly clinging to each other like lifelines, and the next, Ahab’s body starts to shake softly against his, his breaths catching on each other, stumbling out of his chest like waves, the next one invariably coming before the first has fully receded.

“Oh, Ahab—”

“I am tired ,” Ahab whispers, hands fisting in the back of Starbuck’s waistcoat as he sucks in a breath. “I am so, so tired.”

“I know. I know, my Captain, I know.”

“And furious .” Ahab sniffs again, gasping abruptly against it. “And—it  hurts. It all hurts so deeply.” He bites down his tears. 

“I know.” Starbuck clings to him tighter, turning his face into Ahab’s hair. “God, I know.”

There’s another forceful, angry sniff, and Ahab shoves his face tighter into Starbuck’s shoulder, holding his breath as fiercely as he holds fast to Starbuck, still trying valiantly to keep himself from crying. 

“It—it’s alright, Captain,” Starbuck says, unable to find any better words of comfort. “I’m here. It’s alright. For whatever thou needest.”

In starts and stops, in small bursts of shaking slightly and crying softly, punctuated by choked, aborted breaths, the cracks within Ahab begin to spread, fracturing outwards and widening with each successive breath, each suppressed tear, each gentle murmur of Starbuck’s voice and soft, sweeping motion of Starbuck’s hands across his back. And as dark clouds laden with rain sometimes wait days to slowly expel their heavy burdens, so too does Ahab’s sorrow slowly, and then rapidly, growing exponentially in volume and speed, expel out from him. And he sobs. 

Though he has little resolve left to try and stop himself from the oncoming deluge, he still, of course, makes some small attempt — he is who he is, after all. If he is going to fall to pieces in his first mate’s arms, he needs to know for certain he won’t be left that way. So, come the last minute warnings, last ditch tests, last chances for Starbuck to back out, to turn him away, to let him go his lonely way. Is this really what thou want’st and Wilt truly stay to bear these horrors and Do you really think any of this will matter?

Starbuck clings to him, still. Arms tight around his back, resolute in their embrace, face turned into his hair, certain and stalwart and steady as he has always, always been. It is, it is and I will and I do, I do, I do.

So, Ahab sobs. Thick, loud, ugly wails rip themselves from his chest like glass shattering out. Everything that has ever hurt him, every hand to ever strike him, every voice to ever condemn him, every god to ever damn him, all the weight and rage and anguish and ache from fifty-eight years in his body, his brown and broken and beaten body, all of it washes through him like tidal waves as he clings and clings and clings to his first mate’s wrinkled waistcoat.

Starbuck folds himself further around Ahab, protective and guarding. He doesn’t know when it starts, but he’s crying too, quiet tears trickling down his face as he holds his captain. He shifts as Ahab shifts, letting Ahab hunch further into himself and bury his face against Starbuck’s chest. In response, he tightens his arms around Ahab’s shoulders, presses his own face into the crown of his head, buried in Ahab’s hair. He doesn’t quite know what to do or what to say, still sweeping his hands gently across Ahab’s back, still murmuring whispers of whatever gentle words of comfort stream through his thoughts. “I’m here” and “It’s alright” and “Thou art safe” and “Oh, Ahab, oh, my Captain,” over and over and over again, as the night rolls on around them and Ahab shatters apart. He’s not sure if Ahab even hears any of it, but it’s the only thing he can think to do, so he keeps giving his whispered vows all the same.

And Ahab cries, and cries, and cries. And Starbuck holds him, and holds him, and holds him.

The night rolls on, minutes and hours and waves passing by. At times, Ahab’s sobbing slowly subsides for a while, waning gradually like the phases of the moon; he comes back to himself in small bits and pieces, quietly shivering instead of wailing or sobbing, head still bowed and buried in Starbuck’s chest. Sometimes he tries to speak. Half-formed sentences appear on the edge of his breath and die at his lips, attempts at reason or explanation or to regain some semblance of rationality, some pretense of normalcy. Starbuck will pull back slightly in those moments, looking down at him, giving him room.

“I don’t need an explanation from thee,” Starbuck says, after one of Ahab’s aborted statements. “Thou hast bared thy soul to me enough. Let thy grief be what it needs. I need nothing from thee but thy presence here, with me.” 

Ahab’s body shudders again, his arms loose around Starbuck’s waist. 

“I’m here, my Captain,” Starbuck murmurs again. “I’m here.”

Ahab’s weeping comes and goes. As the Pequod sails on through the night, it calms with time, Starbuck still whispering soft encouragement into Ahab’s hair. 

Once, Starbuck’s quiet murmurations of “oh, my captain”s and “my captain”s and his “oh, Ahab”s blur together in his tired mind, and he slips out an “oh, my Ahab.” He tenses subtly for a moment, uncertain, but Ahab either doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t seem to mind, so Starbuck settles again.

My Ahab, he thinks to himself again, face pressed into the thick tangle of Ahab’s curls. Nose and mouth brushing the top of his head. It is almost a kiss, and he doesn’t allow himself to explore that thought any further.

“Oh, Ahab,” he murmurs, lips and nose still pressed into Ahab’s scalp. Oh, my Ahab, he thinks, pulling his captain tighter to him.

Starbuck leans back against one arm of the couch, pulling Ahab with him. Both their bones will complain in the morning, he knows, but for now they settle against the soft cushions, curled around each other and tangled all together, holding each other in place, like coiled knots in the rigging. And he holds his crying Captain until dawn.

Chapter Text

For a half-second after Ahab wakes, he panics. The arms around him are tight — too tight, for a moment they are too tight and too close and restraining around him and for that brief half-second his heart rate jumps before he fully returns to consciousness and remembers where he is. Remembers that he is, in fact, safe. 

Ahab shifts and pulls away, extracting himself slowly as much as he can in those arms from where he’d been crumpled into Starbuck’s chest. His back protests with several loud cracks, and he rubs absently at his own cheek, where the rumpled fabric of Starbuck’s shirt and waistcoat had left a crisscrossing imprint in his skin. His eyes and throat sting. 

He’d about burned a hole through his throat, last night. With all his wailing and unfettered screaming. His tears had singed themselves through his eyes, had left a searing, fiery pain in their wake. His body had burned and burned and flooded and burned all around him, and he was scorched and drowned in his scalding sobs. The fire and the flood both had consumed him. 

And somehow, still, somehow, Ahab wakes now to a sun stubbornly rising. Somehow the sun is rising, out the stern window to the east. Heedless of its own impossibility. Staring proudly in defiance of Ahab’s disbelief.

Ahab swallows against the flames in his throat.

Starbuck stirs, then, hands curling instinctively to squeeze tighter around where they rest on Ahab’s arms. He blinks his eyes open and shifts as Ahab pulls away further, removing himself completely from Starbuck’s touch.

Ahab doesn’t look directly at Starbuck, as his first mate stretches and yawns, pops and cracks of his own rattling up his spine. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Starbuck blink several more times, reorienting himself, before settling again into a comfortable slouch, turning his attention fully toward Ahab. 

He should probably feel embarrassed, Ahab thinks, considering the circumstances. Considering the events of the preceding eight or so hours. He should feel embarrassed to be in Starbuck’s presence right now, under Starbuck’s careful eyes, after everything he’d allowed those eyes to see. Starbuck’s gaze is far too earnest, though, far too caring, for any sort of embarrassment or shame to stick. 

“Good morning, Captain,” Starbuck says, voice rough with sleep.

Ahab nods, still not looking directly at Starbuck, his gaze landing somewhere in the vicinity of Starbuck’s arm resting at his side.

“Good morning.”

It feels a little silly, exchanging these benign greetings as though they did not just spend the night like storm-battered sailors, clinging to each other like life rafts, dragged through perhaps the worst breakdown Ahab had ever endured in his life. As though Ahab did not just spend eight or so hours splintering to pieces in his first mate’s devoted embrace. Ahab sits apart from him now, trying to regain some semblance of stability, to mitigate the embarrassment, trying to quell the feeling of being adrift, unmoored, ungrounded. 

“How…how art thou feeling?” Starbuck asks.

Ahab considers. For several minutes, a quiet passes. 

“I don’t know,” he finally says. “I wish I had a better answer for thee.”

Starbuck nods, unfazed. “That’s alright.”

“My back hurts.”

Starbuck huffs, a small smile flickering across his face. “Quite.” He stretches again, groaning against another joint cracking in punctuation. “Yes, I think we rather upset our poor spines, there.”

Unable to respond further, Ahab just nods again. His bones ache, yes, and his leg, and his chest is aching fiercer, something in it raw and exposed and open like a freshly-flensed carcass. 

And he is tired. 

For once in his life, the weariness in his bones seems to outweigh their ache.

Starbuck is still looking at Ahab, green eyes still soft with sleep. He reaches his hand out to Ahab, unhesitant, squeezing his shoulder before splaying his fingers out along the top of Ahab’s back.

“Thou needst rest,” he says, not a question but an absolute. Ahab can only nod again. “Is… wouldst prefer I leave thee to thy space for the time being? Or shall I stay?”

After another long period of thought, Ahab says, slowly, “Go and attend to the deck.”

“Alright.” He squeezes Ahab’s shoulder again. “Thou…Thou wilt be alright alone? After last night?”

“Yes.”

Starbuck hesitates briefly, lingering beside Ahab, hand still softly resting on his back, fingers moving back and forth ever so slightly. After a long wait, Ahab finally raises his eyes to his, and Starbuck holds his gaze there, stern and steady, before a brief smile twitches up his lips again. He gives Ahab’s shoulder another squeeze and stands to leave, hand trailing slowly off his shoulder. And then he’s gone.

For what feels like hours, Ahab sits and stares at the wall. 

He should get some water, he thinks. He should stand up, stretch, move around. He should eat something. He should thank Starbuck. He should talk to Starbuck. He should talk to Pip. He should talk to — but Fedallah’s gone. 

He should thank Starbuck. He should go up on deck and grab Starbuck’s shoulders and look him in his eyes and thank him profusely, thank him for caring for him, for seeing him, for bearing witness to all his madness and fury and shameful, embarrassing weeping and still choosing to see it, to see him, thank Starbuck for seeing him, for saving him, for seeing him, for everything, God, everything. And then he probably should throw himself off the ship into the next gale they encounter. Or something of that kind.

Ahab shoves his face into his hands, groaning as his spine cracks miserably again. The whole thing was a little embarrassing, wasn’t it? Much more than a little. With Starbuck gone he can now fully appreciate the extent of it. Humiliating. Humbling. Shameful. To spend hours crying like a child — to allow another to witness that, to allow himself to be seen in such a state. Needing to be held and rocked and murmured to like an infant in its mother’s arms. The wailing — God, the whining — “it all hurts so deeply,” his own exaggerated voice mocks back to him in his head, and he even physically shudders, a little, at how horridly embarrassed it makes him feel. He rakes a hand down his face, heaves a tremendous — and perhaps, he admits, overdramatic — sigh.

Control kept Ahab alive. Even before the loss of his leg, before the whale and everything that came with it, before the forced restraint and the journey home and the ceaseless, searing pain in his stump, Ahab fought for control, had clawed his way bloodily to it, and clung to it as his defense. He knew well what it was to live without it — an orphaned child, a boy harpooner, a brown body, a mad maniacal cripple — and knew how deeply his survival depended on keeping it. He knew what this world did to bodies like his. 

So he was good at his job, damn good at it, and he made sure others knew it, made himself indispensable; so he fought tooth and nail to earn his peers’ respect, his white superiors’ respect; so he commanded that respect, wielded it deftly alongside his control and authority and charisma like the tools they were. With them, he kept his crews in line, capturing their hearts and minds, bending their bodies and souls to his captivating command. Starbuck was the same — another tool on his most recent quest, a chiefly important one, his loyalty key to ensuring Ahab’s security. For Ahab knew very intimately the stakes, knew the consequences his world would bring upon him should his grip slip. His officers had turned on him before. He had survived one mutiny before. His world had constrained and restrained him before, had cut off his command and his control and his voice, had wrested his hard-won respect and power from his grasp and bound his hands and left him helpless far too many times. It was not something he desired lightly, no frivolous luxury or greedy hunger; for Ahab, control was life and death.

He can hardly bear to think of himself now. Crumbling to pieces in his first mate’s arms. Abandoning his chase, in front of all his crew, after months and years of exclaiming of his own fortitude, his strength, his inevitable victory. Losing his dearest friend, all due to his own foolishness. Losing his leg, again and again, having it snapped beneath him for all to see it, for all to see his inability to stand upright on his own, without someone to prop him up. Turning from the fight and running, tail between his legs, leg snapped to splinters, mind mad and unraveled. More than shame, more than embarrassment, more than guilt, Ahab feels pitiful . Pathetic. Disgraced. Starbuck had peeled back his veneer of control and authority, his meticulously maintained facade, painstakingly constructed under a life of constant scrutiny, and stared directly in the face of what Ahab really was: broken, warped, scarred. Pitiful. Pathetic. Disgraced.

Ahab didn’t know how he could ever bear to look at Starbuck again. How he could ever face himself again. 

He notices his hands clenched in his hair, his knuckles tense and sore, and he releases them, letting out a pent-up breath. 

That was all more than a little dramatic, wasn’t it, he chastises himself. He forces his breathing back under control, slow and deliberate. He can almost hear Starbuck’s voice in his head, arguing against those thoughts of his own weakness. Starbuck had seen him broken, and had chosen to stay anyway. More than that, he had given Ahab the choice to break, given him the control over when and how it happened. It was a gift Ahab did not take lightly. Starbuck would not think him pathetic. 

For some reason, this is comforting to him. Even if he does not believe it himself.

He should get some water.

Chapter Text

When Starbuck returns, Ahab is laying sprawled across his stateroom couch, prosthetic leg resting on the floor with his other leg bent and planted against the cushion. He hears Starbuck knock and open the door, and he lifts his arm from where it had been thrown across his face.

“Oh, I did not mean to disturb thy rest,” Starbuck is saying, pausing in the doorway as Ahab starts to sit up. “Should I come back later?”

Ahab shakes his head, moving by habit to one side of the couch to make room for Starbuck. Starbuck hesitates a moment, before entering and taking his place beside his Captain. He smiles, subtly, warmly.

And, well. It is almost like nothing changed. It is like any number of Starbuck’s other visits, on Ahab’s calmer days. There is a content, almost peaceful quiet between them. A wordless shared company, steady and comforting. It is a serenity that seems incongruous with last night’s events (or, was it last night? has it been more days since then? has Starbuck already come and gone some times since then, sitting beside his disoriented Captain in gentle repose, expecting nothing from him?). Ahab’s thoughts are like a dissonant chord, out of tune with the gentle reality of the comforting presence beside him, the relaxed quiet between them. 

It is…pleasant. He does not know what to do with pleasant . Cannot quite puzzle out why he’s been granted it, what error in the laws and workings of the world must have occurred to allow him to experience pleasant . 

What is he doing here? Ahab wonders. What does he do from here? Last night he was fracturing, disintegrating. Last night his aches had conjured up a hurricane to drown him, to sweep him away, to open the sea up to swallow him. And Starbuck had seen it all. Now Starbuck returns to him like a man who has never feared a gale, like storms have never touched him, like he hadn’t seen last night’s sea riling up to take them both. Starbuck sits by Ahab’s side like a man who has never been afraid. Like last night, like these past weeks, these past years , had never happened, or did not faze him. How is Starbuck not afraid of him? After everything Ahab’s done? After loaded guns and pointed knives and gales and storms and lightning rods and compass needles and blood and bruises and tears and him ? How is Starbuck not afraid of him?

What is he doing here? Where does Ahab go from here? How does he go from a vengeful death quest to resting in quiet, pleasant company? How does Starbuck go from placing his own death in Ahab’s hands to sitting comfortably by his side?

There’s a part of Ahab that wants to deny himself this. 

It has been there all along, lashing out, snapping, growling, using every weapon at its disposal in its attempts to push Starbuck away, test his patience, hurt him enough to make him leave. It cannot accept the sweetness being shown to him. The kicked dog inside Ahab’s chest refuses to abide a kind hand, a gentle voice. 

Quiet now, he has to assuage it. Has to resist its wants, its itch to bite, to howl and scream and snarl at Starbuck for ever being foolish enough to think he could tame it. Ahab resists the urge to berate Starbuck for returning to care for him again and again, resists the urge to laugh at him for believing he could do anything to fix the broken, pathetic creature of Ahab he had seen.

“Thank you,” Ahab says instead. The kicked dog growls. 

Starbuck looks over at Ahab at the sudden speech. Then his eyes soften, his crow’s feet settling down into a warm contentment. “Oh. Oh, Ahab, of course.”

Ahab studies Starbuck cautiously, wary of himself, of what words his frightened, feral hound of a heart will supply him with now.

“I’m sorry,” he says, surprising himself. Starbuck tilts his head, gently curious. “I never… never properly apologized to thee. For everything I did.”

“Ahab…”

“I expressed regret, for having done such things. I expressed that they were hurtful, to thee. But I did not apologize. I am sorry. For putting thee in danger, throughout all of this. For not listening to thee, for dismissing thee and thy concerns, for—”  and he huffs a little at this “—for holding a gun to thy head. For nearly taking thy family from thee. And nearly taking thee from them. 

“I am sorry. I have wronged thee in many ways. Thou hast been kind to me, and I have harmed thee.”

Something funny plays on Starbuck’s face, in his eyes. “I…Thank you,” he decides. “Thou art forgiven.”

Ahab’s chest twists, the dog inside it prowling in circles warily like a creature hunted. “So easily?” 

“Of course,” Starbuck says, as if it were so simple. “I have hurt thee as well.”

“Most men would not tolerate a fraction of the harms I have brought upon thee.”

“I am not most men.”

“Evidently. But why should this be so? What have I done to earn such grace from thee? Such exceptional treatment? How can I have earned thy forgiveness having done nothing to right my wrongs?”

“Forgiveness is not earned, my Captain, not from me or from the Lord. It is given. I give it to thee freely.”

“But why ?”

Starbuck smiles oh, so sweetly, oh, so sadly at that. “We are friends, we have been friends, are we not? In any case, thou hast more than made things right for my satisfaction.”

“Why give such friendship and forgiveness to one who has hurt thee so? How can thy satisfaction be so easily attained?”

“I care for thee. Thou know’st this.”

The kicked dog is not convinced. Neither is Ahab. “Why? Why care so much?”

“Need I a reason to care for thee?” Starbuck says, still ever-calm, ever-gentle. There is not a tinge of frustration. This, in turn, frustrates Ahab.

“ Yes ,” the hound barks. “I have done nothing to earn this care. Or thy forgiveness. Why care so much for one who has done thee so little, who has injured thee so? Sayest thou that thou dost all these things out of care, yes, but why care for me at all?”

Horribly, Starbuck’s sweet smile softens. It is fiercely, maddeningly gentle. “Because I love thee, Captain.”

Ahab’s mind stops. 

The hound in his chest is frozen still, hunched low to the ground, haunches tense, hackles raised. He gives a hollow, not-quite-laugh of disbelief, shaking his head unthinkingly. “No you don’t.”

Starbuck blinks. His brow furrows. “Wh-pardon me?”

Ahab is still shaking his head, refusing to look at Starbuck. He repeats, emphatically, “No, you don’t.”

“ What ?” Starbuck gives an incredulous laugh of his own, bewildered. “You cannot just — say no to that—”

“ No ,” Ahab snarls. “You don’t. That is not you . You are not— that . Don’t just say that. No you—”

“ Quiet , Ahab,” Starbuck commands, not yelling, but voice stern and firm and uncompromising. “I did not follow thee into hell for thee to tell me no . I did not follow thee all over the globe into the jaws of death, begging thee to come home, for thee to deny my care for thee. I did not nearly lay my life down for thee, I did not put it in thy hands, I did not hold thee through the night as thou weptest, for thee to believe that I did not love thee.” 

“Starbuck—” Ahab protests, but Starbuck cuts him off. 

“ Enough .” 

Starbuck rises from the couch now, and moves to kneel on the floor before Ahab where he sits, forcing himself into Ahab’s vision, staring up at him with a sternness and defiance that is almost unnerving. 

“Doubt my affections one more time , Captain,” he says, eyes alight. 

Ahab stills, forehead wrinkled, eyes stricken. Starbuck stares right into him, in his gaze a fierceness so full it spares no room for denial. Somehow his hand has found Ahab’s wrist, curled gently around it. The softness of that touch, combined with the ferocity of Starbuck’s gaze…Ahab’s breath rattles in his lungs, strained and suffocated around the hound occupying his chest. 

He feels as though he might cry, again. Probably looks it, too, a thought that leadens his tongue and shackles his brain, preventing him from responding. He curls his eyebrows inward.

Starbuck’s face softens again, and he rubs his thumb slightly back and forth on Ahab’s wrist. “Oh, Ahab. My Captain.” He sighs, world-weary and warm and exasperated and fond all at the same time. “Of course I love you.” He squeezes Ahab’s wrist. “Of course I do.”

Ahab’s jaw clenches, eyes wet and quivering. 

Finally, the dog releases its hold on his tongue, on his throat. Slowly, slowly, he breathes deeply, before whispering into the warm cabin air, “I don’t understand.” (This is the second time, his memory supplies, that Starbuck has brought those words from him in this room, in a quiet, shaken whisper. The first, when Starbuck had begged Ahab to kill him, had wept that Ahab was killing him, had already killed him, would kill him. And now, as knightly Starbuck kneels before him, caresses his wrist, speaks of love.)

That sad, sweet smile returns again. Something in the back of Ahab’s mind notes that he cannot ever recall a time he’d seen Starbuck smile so often. 

“That’s alright,” Starbuck says, patting Ahab’s hand gently. 

The tension is cut, then, and Starbuck pulls away, hand sliding off Ahab’s arm. He rises, returning to his place on the couch some space away from Ahab. His gaze still remains warmly on his Captain, soft and sad and sweet and so sad and so sickly-sweet it makes Ahab’s stomach curl. He has to look away. Ahab frowns, brow pinched.

For a time there is quiet. For this, Ahab is grateful. His heart pounds, and he does not look at Starbuck.

Eventually, Starbuck speaks.

“Didst really not believe I loved thee?” Starbuck asks gently. “I’ve — all but said it many times, told thee how much there are people around thee who love thee, myself among them.”

Ahab lifts his chin, raising an eyebrow vaguely in Starbuck’s direction. “Thou wilt pardon my incredulity. If someone went about saying that Nathaniel Starbuck was an invert, that he confessed his love for a man, let alone a man such as I, he’d be locked up, the key thrown away, on account of certain madness.” He looks over at Starbuck from the corner of his eyes, who for his part has reddened slightly in his ears. “ If I have understood thy meaning correctly.”

Starbuck blinks and purses his lips. “Thou hast,” he confirms quietly.

Ahab looks away again. “Then thou wilt forgive me for my skepticism. Thou well might’st say next that thy son were another woman’s, that thy father were a bastard, thy mother a runaway vagabond. Thy family and thy piety precede thee, Starbuck. Thou mightest as well tell me that thou wert growing a third leg.”

Starbuck tilts his head back and forth, musing. “I…did not believe it myself at first,” he murmurs. “I refused to let myself believe it, to believe such a thing of myself. Tried to bury it, to ignore it, to convince myself it was anything else but what it was. But after a certain point it was no longer possible to continue lying to myself. I could not keep denying myself the truth.” He turns his head toward Ahab, though his eyes land somewhere on the cushion between them. “How I may feel about that , I am…still grappling with. But how I feel about thee, of that I am certain.” His eyes crinkle, then, into something almost like a smile. “I have scarce been more certain of anything in my life.” And his soft eyes meet Ahab’s.

Ahab watches Starbuck in return — or this strange, sweet, smiling creature that seems to have become Starbuck — confusion of several kinds rippling through his thoughts. Long-known understandings of how the world worked now sit upended in his head, temple tables turned on their sides. Some weeks ago, he was a collapsing star pulling everything in his orbit into his certain end with him. Some weeks ago, his Fedallah was alive, and Ahab could never have conceived of a world where he lived and Fedallah did not; some weeks ago, Ahab could never have conceived of a world where the whale lived and he did too; some weeks ago Ahab knew what he was, and he knew what Starbuck was (loyal, pious, devout, steadfast, devout, faithful, Quaker, pious, pious), and what places they occupied in the world (maniacal captain and obedient mate; blacksmith and blade; a hand and the tool it wielded; a god and the man it betrayed. A feral dog and the humanity it feared); and none of that adds up anymore; none of the reality he knows coincides with the reality before him now. Everything he once considered fundamental to how he knew the world worked is gone, had been eroded bit by bit, these past weeks, piece by piece, till nothing resembling familiarity remained.

So he studies Starbuck, curiously. Tries to reevaluate several things, with this new framework with which to view the world. This new set of laws which has been presented to him.

Starbuck has returned to sitting beside Ahab in comfortable — or, so he appears — silence. He looks at nothing in particular, seemingly content to return to the gentle, wordless quiet that has characterized many of his visits since starting their journey home. Ahab is left free to his own puzzling.

So , Ahab considers. Starbuck says he loves him.

It would take far too much, he knows, to make sense of that now. He does not have it in him to untangle all the whys and hows of what could make such a thing possible. And, well, as Starbuck had pointed out, how else was he meant to interpret how Starbuck treated him? What else could all that gentleness and care and grace and challenging and arguing and frustration and compassion and sweetness have been besides love, of some kind? So he takes that, for now, as fact. Contrary to all plausibility, Starbuck says he loves him.

Does Ahab love Starbuck ?

It is…a harder question to answer than might appear. ‘Love’ had always been a fairly nebulous thing to him, ill-defined and ill-qualified, and love of this particular kind — the more romantic type — was all the more elusive to distinguish. And, frankly, the thought of such feelings did not naturally occur to him often; he simply did not think of it, his mind on other things. There have been people in his life he loves, certainly; Starbuck had named them. He loves Lily, his young girl-wife and his friend, for all that differs them, cares for her in the way he expects he might care for a younger sister, if he had ever had one. He loves Pip, he knows, he knows , even as the gnawing shame carving a hole through his stomach refuses to let him act on it. He loves Fedallah, still, still. No amount of his guilt or his grief or his endless, endless regret at how the last months of their life together had played out could cloud the love he still feels for Fedallah, deep and full inside his chest and soul and everything he is. He loves them and he is certain of it.

But such instances were the exception, more than the rule. ‘Love,’ generally, was still difficult to pin down. Desire, especially of the more carnal variety, was rarely an active hunger for him, the way it seemed to be for most; he did not crave physical intimacy in the same way or with the same frequency as it seemed most did. He enjoyed the act of it, yes; there was pleasure to be found in the physical act, as well as the closeness of it. At different points throughout his life there had been a number of men with whom he had shared his touch, his bed. But rarely was it something he actively desired. Rarer still was the accompaniment of such intimacy — hungered for or not — with feelings of the romantic kind. It happened, for certain, but recognizing when was itself an additional act of rarity. Most of his relationships of any kind in this vein were fairly short-lived anyway — a simple byproduct of the transitory nature of his whaleman’s life, compounded with the necessary discretion of such relationships in the Christian world he lived in. 

All this to say, Ahab had never thought himself a terribly romantic person, even under the best of circumstances. It was not a woeful absence or a bitter avoidance, but simply a thing that did not often occur naturally to him or his thoughts, a thing that did not take great priority in his life. And all this, again, at the best of times.

And in recent years, well. He had been rather preoccupied.

That was all one thing. One half of the equation, of this question of love. Another, central to answering the puzzle at hand, was Starbuck himself. 

Does he love Starbuck ?

It is a little strange to even wrap his mind around the question itself. Starbuck was — many things. Ahab’s officer, first mate, subordinate, crewmate. Ahab’s — friend? They’d long had a working respect for each other, yes. At one point, he may have been of a mind to call them friends, though not particularly close ones; he was always sure Starbuck thought little of his attitudes and beliefs, and he never quite knew the amount which that had affected how much Starbuck actually liked him. And any inkling of goodwill Ahab might have once garnered in Starbuck’s mind, he had been quite certain in his assumption that he had utterly destroyed it over the course of this present voyage.

And Starbuck was, well. He was Starbuck . Devout, pious, white Nantucket Quaker Nathaniel Starbuck, embedded in and surrounded by that society of pious white Nantucket Quakers and his particular family of pious white Nantucket whalers and all the layers of expected behavior and beliefs that went with them. It would never have occurred to Ahab to think of him as a potential object of desire in any sense. 

So it is… a difficult question, to say the least. And not one Ahab ever would have even conceived possible before now. 

Starbuck is — many things. 

Is he Ahab’s friend? Ahab cares for him, certainly. Even clouded by his vengeance, he cared for him, though more often than not his hunt for that vengeance overrode it, as it consumed all things good and important to him. To accomplish that vengeance, Ahab had needed tools, and his crewmen — Starbuck chiefly among them — were to Ahab simply more tools he had at hand; Starbuck’s loyalty ensured the crew’s acquiescence, and so was something he had deliberately sought and secured. It was practical, necessary.

But even then, even through the fog of his monomania, Ahab’s care for Starbuck could still break through at times. When Starbuck had entreated him, what now feels like so long ago, to up the Burtons and break out the hold, in search of the leak that had sprung in the oil; when Ahab had refused, refused to halt their chase when so close to the prize he sought; when he’d pulled the musket and leveled it at Starbuck; when Starbuck, collected and calm even with a gun to the face, had leveled his own gaze straight back down the barrel, had told him let Ahab beware of Ahab ; when Ahab had acquiesced, relented, followed Starbuck up to the deck and agreed that he’d been right, that he was but too good a fellow, Ahab had meant it. He still trusted Starbuck, through his tunnel vision. He still cared for him. Had tried to save him, at the end. 

So Ahab cares for him. Trusts him, of course. He doesn’t know at what point in this journey that trust had become a certainty to him, but he knew it for what it was: he trusted Starbuck with his life. He’d put that life in Starbuck’s hands, readily. When he’d needed to be hoisted up into the rigging in the rope basket to search aloft for the whale, it was Starbuck to whom he’d given the line to lift him into the air — “Take the rope, sir — I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” It was Starbuck whom Ahab trusted to hold his body upright, when his leg had snapped beneath him in the wake of the second day of the chase. Ahab had trusted Starbuck with his life over and over again. With his life, with his ship, with his broken body, with everything.

And Starbuck has saved Ahab’s life now in a number of ways; of that, Ahab is certain. 

Even if he’d fought that Whale a third time and won — and he doesn’t know that he could have — all he could conceive of his life beyond that was bleak, desolate, unlivable. Even more so without his Fedallah in it. Starbuck had saved him then, and again after, and again and again and again, in a thousand little ways since then. Starbuck is kind. Deeply, deeply, unbelievably kind. These weeks have only served to strengthen that fact. Kind and loyal and brave, fierce and gentle and fiercely gentle, steady and level-headed and a rallying presence on the hunt, on the deck, through storms and spray and sunshine alike. 

And, well. Starbuck was by no means bad-looking. He was quietly handsome, in an objective sort of sense (though, frankly, ‘handsome’ was also somewhat tenuous in definition for Ahab; he knew Starbuck was considered to be such, by some) — soft, sage green eyes framed gently by crow’s feet; curly red hair, now threading through with strands of gray; thin but sturdy and strong frame. It was never something Ahab had had cause to think about before — again, the idea of Starbuck in such contexts would never have occurred to him. But he is handsome, yes. And kind and brave and fiercely gentle and all the rest.

So does that mean he loves Starbuck? Ahab doesn’t know. Perhaps on some level, it might be argued that he should — after everything Starbuck’s done for him — but Ahab is at least not so far gone as to think of his love as a payment owed, a debt incurred. 

Does he want to love Starbuck? 

Perhaps he does. Perhaps that can be something he chooses.

He wishes Fedallah were here. He wishes this always, but right now he wishes he could talk to someone about this, wishes he could talk to Fedallah, confide in his dearest friend. Fedallah would make fun of him, for certain. Really, Ahab? For him ? Oh, aziz, you know you can do better , he’d joke, half-smirk on his weathered cheeks and impish glint in his dark brown eyes. Ah, well. Far be it my place to judge your taste in men. Ahab can almost hear him. His throat tightens.

Ahab looks over at Starbuck again from the sides of his eyes. For his part, Starbuck is still sitting contently, hands folded gently in his lap, expression unassuming, looking at nothing in particular. Ahab runs his tongue against the back of his teeth, considering.

Starbuck is — Starbuck is. He is many things. Ahab’s first mate. Ahab’s…friend? Ahab’s friend. A man he’s known for years, sailed with for years, for more than a decade. The man who saved his life. The man who saved his life over and over and over again and did not ask for anything in return. He had hardly ever asked anything of Ahab besides for him to allow Starbuck to save him, or for him to save himself. Ahab cared for him. Trusted him, respected him. Starbuck holding him through the night was the safest he had felt in a long, long time. 

Perhaps that was love. Perhaps he could decide that was love. 

He could see that, he thinks. He could see himself choosing to love a man such as this.

He lets out a small sigh to himself. Turns his head to Starbuck fully.

“What do you want?” he asks. 

Starbuck blinks to attention, turning his head to Ahab curiously. His brow pinches in at the center, confused. “I… I want for thee to be well. I want thee to be happy, and I want to aid in that wellness.”

Ahab shakes his head, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, though keeping his eyes fixed upon Starbuck. “No. What do you want?”

Blinking again, Starbuck takes pause, mouth parted slightly.

“You,” he says next. “I want you.”

Ahab takes a long and slow breath, watching Starbuck intently. He needs certainty, now. More than ever. “And how?”

Starbuck buckles, then, gaze flitting away. “Thou know’st my meaning. Must I spell it out?”

“I want thee to say it.”

Starbuck glances back up at Ahab, who has the barest beginnings of a coy edge to his probing gaze, the tilt of his brows, the straight set of his jaw. 

“Thou art enjoying this far too much,” Starbuck accuses. Ahab’s expression does not falter, plausibly mirthless, even as Starbuck’s pinkens slightly. “I want — I want thee. I want to be near thee, to be with thee, to love thee and be loved by thee as — as lovers do.” At this, Starbuck’s face colors further. His eyes flit back and forth; he has trouble holding Ahab’s gaze.

“Hmm,” Ahab says, helpfully. Starbuck glowers. Ahab lifts his head, and says, “What of thy wife? Thy family?”

Starbuck’s expression warms and softens immediately at the mention of Mary, folding into a sincere smile. “Well—”

“Do not tell me ye two are as Lily and I,” Ahab continues over him, dry humor now making itself fully apparent in his voice. “I have heard enough surprises today.”

Starbuck chuckles abruptly at that. “No, no. Not — well. It is not quite the same.” Starbuck is looking down at his hands again.

Ahab raises his eyebrows.

“I—” He chuckles again. “It is complicated.” He turns his head towards Ahab, eyes low. “Do — do not share this with anyone.”

“Who would I tell?” Ahab deadpans, gesturing vaguely at the room around them.

Another short huff, a smile. “Fair enough.” One of his hands absently goes to his chest, fiddling lightly with the folds of the fabric there, at the shape of something nestled beneath it. “But no, no; it is not the same as with thee — I love Mary deeply. I always have, and always will. And she loves me. There is no doubt of either truth in me.

“Many years ago, now, she came to me with…with some concerns of hers. She was…” And Starbuck pauses, searching. “She professed that she had — begun to experience feelings of—of desire, or, or attraction of some sort. For another woman.” He glances up at Ahab, then quickly away again. “At the time it frightened her. I myself was — I did not know what to think. Or how to—to respond, to help her. She had no intentions then of — acting upon such thoughts, or anything of the sort, but was confessing them to me in desperation as something about which she was worried. Afraid. She didn’t know what to do, either.

“We spoke on it at length. I will spare thee the details of the discussion — it was several days — but the outcome of our conversations was that since — since that time, we have — she has been at liberty to…to pursue such feelings, as it were. It is an understanding between us. She has her Agnes ashore, as she has me upon the sea.” He smiles to himself, something privately fond in his gaze. “Like Lady Persephone, I return to her Hades when I can. It is springtime whenever I am with her.

“In-in any case, when we came to such decision — she had, ah, offered at the time. That—that if I should—should desire. Such things, similarly, then I would be free to — pursue them as well.” Starbuck’s gaze has been entirely averted from Ahab’s now. “Forgive me; I have…never spoken of these matters between Mary and I aloud, aside from with her. It is difficult.” Smiling faintly, he runs a hand through his hair. “But she said she would — that such arrangement could extend to me as well, if I had wanted. I—I said no, not at all; no, that would not be necessary. Truthfully, I was happy for her to have her other loves, as I had her, but I had no such wants for — she was the only woman for me.” He smiles, faintly, wistfully, then continues, a quiet yearning in his voice, “She still is.” 

After a small pause, Starbuck blinks and turns his head back towards Ahab. “In any case, well. That part is still true. Mary is still the woman I love.” He raises his eyes to his Captain’s, smiling lightly. 

There’s a faint fond, bemused curl to Ahab’s lips, as he watches Starbuck’s quiet recounting of himself and his beloved. It is sweet, to see Starbuck like this, to see how the mere mention of his Mary warms his whole demeanor, how clearly and wholly enamored he is with her.

“Well. Ye Starbucks are full of scandals, it seems.”

Starbuck shakes his head. “Hast hardly heard the half of it.” Ahab raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t pry further.

“Hmm. Well, that of thy wife.” Ahab’s countenance turns more serious again. “And what of thy God?”

Starbuck’s expression, too, darkens a touch. He purses his lips, still smiling faintly, more pained. “It…it is also complicated.” He looks down at his hands fully now, curling into himself slightly, shoulders raising. “As I said, I…” He sighs. “I am still…processing that.” His hand returns to his chest, picking again at the shape of the fabric. “I—it is different, coming to terms with the…the fact of such feelings within myself, than it was understanding and accepting such things within my Mary. She is — Mary is divine . She is lovely, she is good, she is all things good, and I have never had doubt of this. She is Divine, she is Divinity. Nothing she does or is could ever — could ever be wrong , or…” he trails off. “It was far, far easier for me to acknowledge her wholeness than it is to even begin to accept such things within myself.

“I do not know what God thinks of me right now. I do not know what He will think of me, if I should…” he trails off again. Sighs and shakes his head, righting himself. “But it is as I said. I could not pretend to myself any longer. I could not pretend I did not want what I wanted, did not feel what I felt.”

He returns his eyes to Ahab to find his Captain still watching him in return, just as resolved and firm as before. Something about the steadiness of Ahab’s gaze seems to calm him somewhat, and he breathes deeply, holding that fixed gaze, setting his jaw, before wonderfully, wonderfully, opening his face into a gentle, if unsteady smile once more.

Ahab is struggling, still, a little, to make sense of all this. Of the wave after wave of impossible confession and world-changing revelation. Some things make sense: he remembers his own wife and her lover’s friendship with Mary Starbuck, something he now thinks might perhaps have had at least a little to do with the shared experience between them, the joy and friendship to be found in their alikeness. He hadn’t interacted with her much himself, but she had always had a warmth, a kindness, a familiarity about her; she had a way of making others around her feel seen, acknowledged, even if only in passing. It does not surprise Ahab too much to learn that she might love some of her peers differently to most. Her arrangement with her husband — and Nathaniel’s unquestioning endorsement of it — is far stranger for Ahab to wrap his mind around, but given all he knows of Mary, and all he knows of Nathaniel — a man so fundamentally built from devotion and care, absolutely made of love and a fierce dedication to those he loves — Ahab can begin to reconcile with it. 

And — perhaps he can even make some iota of understanding around Starbuck’s care for him specifically. That Starbuck might love him is still a jarring concept, but at the same time, when held up against his behavior these past weeks — his kindness, his words, his touch — it makes some level of sense. The tenderness with which Starbuck has interacted with him sings of love; it is easy for Ahab to see that now, however improbable and strange it might seem to him. 

The gentle adoration in Starbuck’s eyes upon him right now certainly bears no other simpler explanation.

The rest, well. Ahab thinks he might need a good deal of time before the surprise subsides.

He is further surprised to find that this does not bother him much.

Cautiously, Starbuck stretches a hand out into the space between them, still holding Ahab’s gaze. 

Ahab tears his eyes from Starbuck’s, then, to look down at the offered hand. He considers for a long moment, all the same questions and confusions and curiosities from today’s conversations still swirling in his head. The frightened hound still quivering in his chest. 

Ignoring them, in spite of them, because of them, he takes Starbuck’s hand. 

Starbuck’s smile cracks open wider. His fingers slot between Ahab’s, hands cold to the touch despite the warm tropical air through which the Pequod sails, bony, protruding knuckles and calloused, rough fingers and firm skin and grip, and it is… a strange feeling. To be sitting next to Starbuck like this, holding his hand, while Starbuck smiles warmly and fondly at him like he is not defying his God and his nature to do so. It is sweet and puzzling and jarring and…and a little much, a little overwhelming, for Ahab’s mind already so overtaxed with surprises and revelations and trying to remember how to trust a kind touch again.

But it’s nice. It is nice.

“For — for a great deal of time, now,” Starbuck speaks, eyes flitting down to their joined hands, thumb brushing back and forth across the back of Ahab’s, gentle and cyclic as the sway of shoreline waves, “thou hast expressed…difficulty, with —  finding something left for thee. In the wake of — of all that thou hast endured, all that thou hast lost. From the very first night we spoke, thou expressed’st such a sentiment. And I — I know I have said such a thing many times, but it bears repeating, that I hope that thou canst find purpose and meaning in the people around thee. Let that be what is left for thee. Let thy life and the good thou mayest do in it be thy purpose, thy triumph. There is so much for thee. There is thy wife, thy family. There’s that boy, that thou hast so grown to care for. Even the memory of thy dear friend, that is still here for thee. 

“And…and me. If thou wilt have me.”

“‘ Have ’ thee, Starbuck?” 

In response, Starbuck only gives a small smile, nodding slightly, mouth and eyes crinkling up at the edges.

Ahab huffs a little at that and shakes his head, eyes pressing shut. He feels Starbuck squeeze his hand. 

God, is this his life now? Being held and cared for and protected while he falls apart, and still being seen and wanted and loved afterwards? Does he get to sit in quiet, pleasant company, holding Starbuck’s hand, seeing his miraculous, once-rare smile over and over again? Knowing that, for some reason, he seems to be the cause of it? He feels dazed, unsteady. 

Starbuck is sitting closer to him now, his arm brushing against Ahab’s, fingers still curled around his. Without thinking, Ahab has swayed closer into him as well, shoulder bumping up against his, and an airy chuckle escapes Starbuck’s mouth as he leans further against his Captain, dropping his head briefly onto his shoulder before lifting it again, knocking his temple gently against Ahab’s, squeezing his hand once more.

Ahab lets it happen, lets Starbuck sway into him, gravity tugging them toward each other. His heart feels numb in his chest, almost leaden. At the same time, he feels as though he could weep. All he can do is let it happen, is allow this strange and wonderful series of events to just happen to him as he observes it all passively, dazed and unmoored.

Starbuck has raised his head, is now looking up at Ahab with lovely, loving eyes. He reaches a hand to Ahab’s cheek, turning his face toward him gently, a line tugging him back to shore. Ahab’s gaze is caught in his, and he can’t find it in himself to look away.

Ahab swallows. 

The primal, panicked parts deep within him still hiss and recoil in fear of the sweetness being given to him, and he doesn't know how much he has it in him to quell them. He wants this, he thinks, he really does. He can admit that. He can admit the part of him that dares to want for the love he is shown, that dares to believe it is something worth wanting, something allowed having. And he can admit that he is afraid.  He also knows that whatever and whoever he might have been before is long gone, that he is a fraction of the man he once was, that the whale and the imprisonment and the loss of his friend had changed him irreversibly, carving out pieces of his body like a cancerous growth — his leg, his mind, his soul, his heart (because what was Fedallah if not his heart?). He’s not whole anymore. He won’t ever be again. He will never get those pieces of his body back. He doesn't know what is left of him, how much of him there even is left to love another. And Starbuck — Starbuck deserves to be loved with more than just what’s left of his unsteady heart. His fragmented soul. He deserves — more than just broken remains.

Seeing his disquiet, or perhaps sensing his fear, Starbuck shifts the hand on Ahab’s cheek, letting his thumb sweep across its wrinkled surface, brushing over the edges of his beard. He tucks a curl behind Ahab’s ear, then returns his hand to cup Ahab’s face fully, palm slotted perfectly against his cheek like it was molded to fit there. Starbuck caresses his cheek softly and sweetly, and it is unraveling him. 

Ahab is afraid. Ahab is afraid of the touch, the gentleness of it, of what kind of tender shattering it is doing to his battered body; he is afraid of himself, of his own love, and what it could mean, and what it could do, to him or to Starbuck; Ahab is afraid , but Starbuck, Starbuck. Starbuck is brave. Has always been brave. Far braver than Ahab, he thinks to himself. 

“Ahab,” Starbuck whispers into the quiet, his other hand coming up to the side of Ahab’s neck. Ahab blinks tightly a few times, eyes squinting shut before opening again. Something in him shivers. 

“I love you,” Starbuck says, like he’s never been afraid. 

True to his promise, Starbuck’s hands on Ahab are kind, gentle things. It’s doing something very messy to Ahab’s incomplete heart, his quivering lungs. 

Ahab’s hair is curling over his brow, on the edge of his eyes. He hadn’t noticed, but he sees Starbuck’s glance catch on it, watches as Starbuck raises the hand on his neck up gently, gently, and brushes the hair aside from that weary brow, lingering against his temple, before trailing down to cup his other cheek, gently, gently. Brave Starbuck holds Ahab’s face in his hands, ever so gently, ever so tenderly. Starbuck, Starbuck, ever brave Starbuck, brave and courageous and valiant and kind Starbuck brushes old Ahab’s hair aside and takes his face in his hands and whispers his name like a prayer of worship.

“Oh, Ahab,” Starbuck murmurs. 

His face is close, close, his eyelids fluttering, almost shut. The tip of his nose brushes Ahab’s; the air exhaled from his lungs rustles the hair of Ahab’s beard. “May I?” Starbuck breathes between them, and Ahab doesn’t trust himself to do anything but nod, barely.

And ever brave Starbuck kisses him.

He closes the gap between them, leans in, and presses the softest, softest kiss to Ahab’s lips. And God , if it isn’t the gentlest thing he’s felt in years, warm and soothing, certain and absolute even in its gentleness. Starbuck’s lips are chapped and warm, his hands cupping Ahab’s cheeks tender and delicate, his mustache and light stubble coarse against Ahab’s skin, tickling his nose and cheeks, close and warm and soft and soft and gentle and so, so achingly gentle, and Ahab’s breath is caught in his lungs, and he is drowning in the gentleness, in the sweetness, in the tenderness of it all, and there are soft, soft, gentle lips pressed to his and soft, soft, gentle hands around his face and warm breath filling his lungs and he feels like both a man drowning and a man tasting air for the first time in his life.

Ahab breaks from Starbuck’s lips with a jagged inhale like a man wounded, torn right from the very core of his injured soul. He is not above himself to admit how close it is to a sob. 

Starbuck’s face is still close to his, his breath still ghosting over Ahab’s lips and beard, his hands still steadfastly cupping his cheeks. Lips brushing against Ahab’s as he speaks, Starbuck murmurs Ahab’s name again, breathing it into the space between them, soft as an answered prayer. Ahab’s lungs catch again, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, and without thinking about it, he and Starbuck are leaning toward each other again, and Starbuck is kissing him again, more solidly this time, still soft and soft and gentle and yet firm and desperate at the same time, hands clasped around Ahab’s face, lips pressed insistently to his, steady and stable and certain as the tide. Ahab returns the kiss just as desperately, hands finding their way to Starbuck’s waist, leaning forward into Starbuck’s lips and squishing his nose into his cheek, clinging clinging clinging fiercely to this new and miraculous and precious and fragile thing that has saved him. The kiss stays chaste, undemanding, even in its desperation, warm, kind lips pressed to his for no purpose at all other than comfort, and care. 

Ahab is crying fully now, tears quietly slipping unbidden down his cheeks. He keeps his eyes squinted shut, even as Starbuck and he break apart again, even as Starbuck’s thumbs brush over his cheeks, wiping gently at the tears, even as Starbuck leans in again to press his lips as gentle as morning dew to his tears, kissing each one like stars, mustache and stubble scratching against Ahab’s weathered cheeks.  

Ahab doesn’t — remember how long it’s been since he’s kissed someone. Like this, at least; he and Fedallah often shared (or, well, they had ) familiar, affectionate kisses to the forehead and cheek and the like (which was partially borne from the Persian habit of cheek-kiss greetings, and mostly just from the nature of their love, their closeness: that was simply how they were. Always tender, always filled with steady, grounding affection). It had been a long time, though, since their companionship had really involved anything more than that, physically.

Aside from that, Ahab struggles to remember how long it’s been. Certainly, he has not since the loss of his leg. There was rather a lot more occupying him. And immediately before that voyage, there was the whole business with Lily, and rushing to secure their marriage and her safety before her accidental pregnancy was discovered, and all the planning and politics and parental permission, and the small ceremony at Meeting in front of all the gathered Friends and each other and God, and the moving out of the tiny thing he’d previously called his berth upon land into a larger house — a wedding gift for the both of them, it had been — to have more space for Lily and her lover Rose (living with them under the guise of housekeeper and companion for Lily, Ahab’s young girl-wife, all alone while her cannibal old husband shipped off to sea) and her coming child, and all the — well, everything else, that came with it. And before that, perhaps not too long before, maybe then there had been a lover. Some dark eyed man with warm hands and a kind smile, or something of that nature. But he doesn’t know exactly when. 

The point being, Ahab doesn’t remember the last time he’s kissed someone. 

Starbuck retreats slightly from pressing his scattered kisses across Ahab’s face, and Ahab opens his eyes to find Starbuck looking back up at him. He is still wonderfully, painfully close. The smile lines on the corners of his eyes crinkle and deepen, that glorious smile still tugging at his lips. All of it is dizzying.

Ahab huffs a little, collecting his thoughts, blinking a few times to clear out the tears. Closing his eyes again, brow pinched, he leans forward to knock his forehead against Starbuck’s, briefly bump their noses together, and just rest his head there against Starbuck. His hands are still slotted around Starbuck’s waist, and something about the shape of them there feels right, as natural as the weight of a lance in his hand, the grip of his Pequod ’s helm in his palms. He curls his fingers further into the fabric of Starbuck’s waistcoat, and Starbuck gives a quiet contented hum in response, hands sliding off Ahab’s cheeks to rest gently against his neck. 

“I love thee,” Starbuck says again, voice unassuming, unworried. As though that isn’t the most miraculous thing. As though it didn’t turn the whole world over anew. Ahab’s forehead pinches, his lips pursing. 

He is quite tired, he thinks. It has been a rather long day. 

He nudges Starbuck’s nose with his own again, once, before shifting to press a light, lingering kiss to the corner of his smiling mouth. He can feel Starbuck’s cheeks move beneath his lips, the smile widening, and God, for a moment, he swears, for a brief moment, ever so slightly, just the edge of his mouth cracking upward, he smiles back. 

Ahab pulls back again and returns to resting his forehead against Starbuck’s. And he stays that way, forehead to forehead, nose brushing Starbuck’s now and then, hands on Starbuck’s waist, Starbuck’s on his neck. And Ahab breathes. 

Chapter Text

It is two days later when Ahab leaves his private cabin for the first time since his chase ended. 

He does not go above deck, not yet; he still cannot bring himself to face his crew, nor his own mottled reflection in them, in all their varied feelings, their confusion and disappointment and anger and relief and happiness and whatever else, staring back at him. He cannot bear the thought of contending with their judgment (whether positive or negative) and their scrutiny and their eyes upon him again. 

But he’d asked Starbuck to let him know when the main cabin was empty — which, in truth, was nearly always; the cabin by all rights was the captain’s, was understood to be the captain’s, and the other denizens of the ship’s aft or steerage area (the mates, the harpooners, the shipkeepers, each with their own quarters in or near the main cabin) spent the vast majority of their time above decks, entering the cabin only at mealtimes, or to pass through it to their own quarters — but Ahab had asked Starbuck for the certainty anyways, just in case, just to be safe — and, more importantly, when the shipkeepers’ quarters, specifically, were empty, or when all of its usual residents were for certain spotted up on the weather deck. 

For it had been the shipkeepers’ quarters (the shipkeepers being the cook, the carpenter, the steward, the cabin boy, the blacksmith — those who were not assigned to the boats, and whose duty it was to man the ship while the boats were in pursuit), in the steerage of the ship, in which Fedallah had chosen to make his berth, after he and the rest of his and Ahab’s crew had revealed themselves for the first lowering. There had been one available bunk each in the harpooners’ and the shipkeepers’ quarters, and Ahab had offered the choice to him; Fedallah had opted for the latter, it being the larger room of the two.

So Ahab enters the room now, its three sets of double-bunks pressed up against the walls (two sets against the wall to Ahab’s left, the last across from the entrance on the opposite wall, all of them together forming a sort of inverted L shape), sea chests cramming what little available floor space they could, privacy curtains strung across the bunks swaying with the rocking ship. 

Fedallah’s bed was the bottom bunk in the set across from the door (he’d switched with the carpenter, Ahab thinks. Climbing into the top bunk every night would’ve been too hard on his disabled knee, and the carpenter was younger, with sturdy, strong legs; he hadn’t minded). His small trunk of belongings sits in the corner made by the bunk and the wall. 

Ahab makes his way over to it. He sets himself down on the edge of Fedallah’s bunk, hand brushing absently over the top of the chest.

He had been thinking about Fedallah, last night. He is always thinking about Fedallah, and the loss of him, and the grieving him, all of it always on his mind, weighing heavy inside his heart. But he had been thinking about him, last night. And Starbuck had prodded gently, in that careful, quiet, curious way of his, had kindly asked whether there might perhaps be some sort of way in which Ahab could — not alleviate the grief, necessarily, but —  engage with it. Face it, more wholly and directly, than he had thus far.

Ahab hadn’t responded then. Starbuck’s words had had an effect on him, though, had shifted the weight in Ahab’s chest. They were the catalyst he’d needed to do something he’d been meaning to do, something he’d needed to, for days now, but could never yet bring himself to face.

So now Ahab sits in the shipkeepers’ quarters on Fedallah’s bed, in front of Fedallah’s trunk, ready (or trying to convince himself he’s ready) to sort through Fedallah’s belongings. Because if not him, who would?

Fedallah hadn’t brought much with him on board the Pequod . The small trunk that sits in front of Ahab now hadn’t even been his, technically; it was one of Ahab’s older sea chests, back from before his captaining days, that he’d lent to Fedallah for this voyage. Ahab opens the wooden lid now, heart and lungs leaden inside his ribs. 

The contents are benign, unsurprising. Ahab takes them out carefully, turns them over in his hands, then replaces each item neatly and delicately. Some folded shirts, which he removes one by one, and gingerly folds again before returning. A long white cloth for a spare turban, in case something should happen to his usual one. There’s another, smaller wooden box inside the chest, ornately carved, with iron clasps and hinges; Ahab takes this out as well, his own coarse hands rough on the smooth surface. He’s already aware of its contents — technically the most precious things in here; Fedallah had taken great care and great expense to obtain them — but a casual observer might be surprised to find the box open to reveal its segmented interior, each small section containing pouches and jars of different spices: cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, black pepper, nutmeg, dried rose petals, and so on. One cavity is occupied by a metal strainer for steeping. At the very bottom of Fedallah’s chest, beside where the spice box had occupied, there’s a small stone mortar and pestle.

The smell of the spices hits Ahab as he opens the box, and with it so do decades of memories of Fedallah, of him and Fedallah, of Fedallah, Fedallah in Ahab’s tiny kitchen in his tiny home, grinding up the spices with a measured hand, boiling water over Ahab’s hearth, steeping it in the teapot he’d insisted they acquire (the very instant he’d found out Ahab hadn’t had one), pouring it steaming into mugs for the both of them (and chastising his lack of glass cups — how are we to tell if the tea is dark enough to our liking? — to which Ahab had replied in his still stumbling Farsi, do you think I can afford fine glassware? ); Fedallah in the galley of the Pequod , cajoling the cook (in those early years, it was another man, before Fleece, though Fleece had now been the Pequod ’s cook for two decades or so) into letting him borrow the space to boil water now and then; Fedallah coming into Ahab’s cabin with two cups in his hands and a glint in his eye and a tale on his tongue; Fedallah making him tea at sea and on shore and in his house and in his ship; Fedallah, and Fedallah, and Fedallah.

Ahab wrestles control over his breath again. He closes the lid and his eyes, gently, hand ghosting over its carved surface. He takes several long breaths, waiting for his lungs to settle, waiting for the smell of spices and the man who’d owned them to fade. 

God , how he misses him. God, how he aches to see Fedallah again, alive and whole and safe. To sit and drink tea with him. To gossip mindlessly with him. How he longs to throw his arms around him and bury his face against him and kiss the crown of his turbaned head and apologize over and over and over again till his voice runs hoarse. How ardently he misses him. 

Ahab latches the box again, his throat dry, before moving to replace it in Fedallah’s sea chest, gently moving the folded clothes to the side to return it to its corner, and—

Oh. 

There’s—?

A cord. A long, white, woven cord. Folded neatly in loops over itself, to avoid tangling. Six strands, braided together at the ends, forming small tassels.

Fedallah’s koshti? 

Ahab’s heart plummets like a stone in his chest as he takes the cord out, unwinding its coils without thinking, disbelieving. 

Why would— 

The koshti was sacred. It was one of the only things Fedallah still had from Persia, where he was born, where he was raised, where he’d fled decades and decades ago. His mother — a Mazdayasni like him, faithful follower of Zoroaster (Zartosht, Ahab corrects himself, Zartosht; the Greek name was the one he’d known, but the Persian name was the one Fedallah had told him) — had woven the woolen cord for him, had taught his sisters how to weave their own; a dastur had presented it to him, at his sedreh pushun, along with the sedreh itself, had pulled the long white undershirt (also woven by his mother) over Fedallah’s adolescent head, had looped the koshti around his waist once, twice, had shown him how to make the third and final loop, how to tie it closed and what to say. Fedallah had spoken of the ceremony to Ahab with fondness: his inductance into his faith, his family around him, hearth fire burning warm beside them. The koshti was sacred , always to be worn around his waist, untied and retied with prayers every day — a ritual that Fedallah still followed dutifully even as years and years and oceans and continents passed between him and his mother’s hands, his sisters’ laughs, his God’s fires. It was a protection; it was armor; it kept him safe from evil, so he’d said.  To not wear it was considered a sin, he’d explained, but beyond that, it was a sanctuary, to him.

Even in this world, far away from anything Fedallah had once called home, had once called right, in this whaleman’s world of violence and filth and blood, of dirt and grime and defiling fire and soiling the water and polluting the air and spurning so much of what Fedallah had once believed in — even as Fedallah embraced, by necessity, a way of life that his family and his peers would only ever recognize as sin, there were still parts of his faith Fedallah clung to, stubborn as evergreen branches as he was. Whispered prayers in the morning and evening, facing the sun. The sedreh and koshti he wore always, tucked safely under his outer clothes. The care with which he wrapped his turban, conscientious to catch any stray hairs that might fall. His particular insistence on how and when he washed his hands, his face, often to the annoyance or confusion of his peers. 

Ahab…never pretended to understand fully, Fedallah and his God. Ahab had already — always — had his own complicated feelings regarding his own God, the God he’d grown up with. They had spoken on it — on God, on Ahab’s God and Fedallah’s khodah, Ahab’s Christ and Fedallah’s Zartosht, on religion and rules and what they believed and what they didn’t and what was sin and were they sin? and did sin even matter and everything else — at length, many, many times over their years together. He had a respect for Fedallah’s faith, and a curiosity about it, in a distant sort of way (though he won’t pretend he was always the most sensitive about it, or about how seriously Fedallah seemed to observe it), but he hadn’t understood it, not really. That sort of piety and devotion had never been something Ahab was able to grasp. The contradiction between Fedallah’s loyal reverence for his faith, his stubborn adherence to it, and his (in his own words) blasphemy made little sense to Ahab.

But it was — it had been important to Fedallah. Ahab knows it was important to him. He knows the sacred clothing, the shirt and the belt, the sedreh and the koshti, he knows they were important to Fedallah. Last vestiges with which he’d clung to his home, his faith, his family. Protection against evil, against harm. The koshti was his armor. It was sin not to wear it; doing so would leave him unprotected from evil; some texts equated it to “running around naked;” he would be vulnerable and unsafe and exposed without it; and whatever else Fedallah did or did not believe, whether he thought removing it was a sin, however complicated thoughts he actually had on ‘sin’ and the concept of sin and what was right or not, this still mattered to him; so what was it doing here inside Fedallah’s trunk? What is it doing here now, being wrapped and unwrapped nervously and feverishly around Ahab’s hands, instead of coiled dutifully around Fedallah’s waist, wherever his torn body is now? 

Ahab’s hands shake, holding the koshti, coiling and uncoiling it around one of his palms. What is it doing here? Why had Fedallah removed it? 

It wasn’t like he could’ve forgotten. He wore it every day of his life. Performed the padyab-koshti every day, no matter the inconvenience, washing his hands and head and untying and retying the cord around him, sometimes multiple times a day, if he was able. He would not — forget . And he had only had the one (where could he have possibly acquired another?). So what is it doing here? Had Fedallah chosen to remove it, on his final fateful morning? Had he stopped wearing it days, weeks, months beforehand? Why? 

Did he take it off on the day he knew he was going to die?

Fedallah had known his fate, of course. He’d told it to Ahab before, more than once. Ahab had not believed him. Or did not listen. But Fedallah had long seen his own death rushing up to meet him.

Did he untie his koshti that morning, whispering prayers to himself in the dimness of the steerage, knowing, having seen, what was to come? Leaving the cord off because of it? Knowing that there was nothing, no armor or barrier, that could protect him now? Did he choose to die in sin? Unclean, impure, vulnerable and exposed to the dirt and rot and evil of the world, which in his torn and rotting death would quickly leap at the chance to overtake him? When he untied the cord from around his waist, when he looped it around over his hands and tucked it away in his trunk, instead of replacing it around himself as he should, what was he thinking? Feeling? Was he bitter and spiteful? Angry that it had not protected him the way it should have? Was he resigned, acquiescent? Knowing the end he had chosen, releasing the illusion or burden of halting it? Freeing his God from the responsibility of protecting him? Accepting the evil, the suffering, that would surely come to him? 

Ahab is clenching the koshti in his hand, fingers curled tight around the coils he’d wound round and round his palm. He doesn’t know. He will never know. He will never know that went through Fedallah’s mind when he unwrapped the cord for the last time, when he undid the last bind that tied him to his home. He will never know.

He should not be holding this. This precious, sacred thing. It should not be here. In his hands, in this trunk, on this cursed ship. It should be looped round Fedallah’s waist. Tied around him, protecting him, keeping him alive and whole and safe, keeping him alive ; it should be around his waist, and he should be here, and it should be on him, and he should be here . Ahab’s hands curl towards him, bringing the koshti close to his chest. 

God, Fedallah. God, how he misses Fedallah.

Ahab unwinds the koshti, slowly, from around his hand. Some part of him wants to wear it himself, to tie it around his own waist, to keep his Fedallah close to him, but something about that feels deeply, irrevocably wrong . Who is he, to don such a precious thing. Who is he, to lay claim to the armor of the man he’d killed. To wear the armor of a god whose faithful he had betrayed. What would Fedallah’s God think of him? What would Fedallah?

He doesn’t even know how to tie it properly, not really. He’d watched Fedallah do it hundreds of times, thousands of times, in dim evenings and early mornings, on ships and on shore, but never with the eyes of someone trying to learn. 

Perhaps not the waist. Perhaps he could loop it around his wrist, or into a necklace of some kind, some other way to keep it close, or…

Ahab sighs, wearily. He stretches the cord out to its full length and folds it in half over itself a couple times over, then drapes it over his neck, across his shoulders, tucking it beneath his outer layer so the ends dangle over his chest, between layers of fabric. Its gentle, nearly weightless pressure settles against him.

I’m sorry , Ahab prays to the sea beneath him. Then corrects himself, looking up instead at the sunshine that bursts into the room through the deck prism above him. I’m sorry if this is wrong. Condemn me for this transgression, not him.

Breathing heavily, Ahab returns his attention to the trunk. He gives everything one more visual glance over, smoothing out the top folded shirt in the stack, ensuring the box of spices is locked properly, before he sighs again, and closes the lid.

Lifting the chest with both hands, Ahab moves to stand. He walks with it gingerly toward the door, and into the small hall of the steerage, and —

And Pip? And Pip! And — Pip is in the hallway, having just descended the ladder from the main deck, and he startles, and Ahab startles, and Pip jumps, and shrinks back a bit, and he is afraid, and he is a child and he is afraid and Ahab is in front of him holding a dead man’s things, and Pip is shifting nervously and glancing around and backing away and turning to leave again, to run and run and run and run and Ahab says to him:

“Wait—”

and little Pip freezes.

He does not look at Ahab. His wide, hunted-prey eyes stare blankly at the floor as he stands perfectly still, and Ahab’s heart breaks . 

He’d wanted to — he’d wanted to talk to Pip. He knew he needed to. And he was planning to, eventually, to find him, to talk to him, to be there for him, he was planning to! God, please believe, he was planning to! but he hadn’t expected this, hadn’t prepared for this, hadn’t yet figured what he could possibly say to fix this. He hadn’t yet had time to figure out how he could even begin to help the child he’d so horribly hurt. He wasn’t — he wasn’t what Pip deserved. What Pip needed. How could he be certain he’d not hurt Pip again? How could Ahab soothe this poor boy, whom he had cut on his own shards, while he yet still remained so broken? Still so covered in those sharp, jagged edges from his own fracturing? 

But never mind that. He cannot let his broken heart and injured soul and grieving mind and whatever other such nonsense stay his hand and his tongue again, not here, not now; he’s already failed this boy before, and he cannot, he will not fail him now.

“Oh, lad,” he breathes, willing his voice steady, Fedallah’s trunk still heavy in his arms. “Oh, Pip. Brave little Pip.”

Trembling, Pip raises his eyes to Ahab, though his face is still turned to the floor, and his fragile, frightened gaze is a lance to Ahab’s heart. He fights his addled mind for something to say, to do, hands still clutching Fedallah’s chest, thoughts still racing with a thousand aches and fears and warnings and admonitions and he wrestles through them all. “Oh, Pip,” he says again, brow pinched, “come here. Come here to me, lad. I have kept thee away for far too long.” 

Pip does not move, keeps those wide, fearful brown eyes fixed upon him. They quiver, the beginnings of tears glinting in their corners. Oh . Oh, little Pip.

“And I am so, so sorry.”

God. How does he even begin to mend this?

The weight of his Fedallah’s chest is steady, firm in his hands. The touch of his Fedallah’s koshti is faint, light, but unmistakable, unignorable, against the back of his neck. The memory of his Fedallah is heavy in his heart. He is not ready for this.

“Here, lad,” Ahab says, eyes and voice softening to the boy in front of him, “allow me to make us some tea.” The words surprise him, but he does not allow himself to lose momentum. “I should like to speak with thee. Would that be alright?” 

Pip blinks, and his eyebrows furrow. He considers, hesitant. 

Ahab tries for a smile, even as he feels tears of his own begin to threaten. He makes a gesture with his head for Pip to follow him, and turns toward the rest of the main cabin. “Come,” he says, gently, and Pip does.

“One moment,” Ahab says, “allow me to put these where they belong.” He passes by the cabin-table, shifts the weight of Fedallah’s chest over to one arm so he can open door to his stateroom, and steps inside, conscious of Pip’s quiet, pattering footsteps behind him. Gently, he sets the trunk down atop the desk in his stateroom with a soft sigh, hands lingering on its surface. Pip hovers in the doorway.

Ahab opens the trunk and carefully removes the box of spices again, along with the mortar and pestle, then turns to face Pip, giving another of what he hopes is a comforting smile, and nods back toward the cabin-table. 

And, well. And next he’s put water to boil over the insulated stove, and next he’s standing over the open box of spices, trying not to let the smell overwhelm his memory again, deliberating — Fedallah had always been better at this than him; he had an intuition for the amounts and ratios of each spice and for scaling those for the number of people being served, and for which spices he liked better ground up versus which ones he put whole into the boiled water, an intuition which even throughout the years Ahab had never quite fully developed himself; it always tasted better when Fedallah made it — but next he’s selecting spices, the loose leaf black tea as the base and sticks of cinnamon and cardamom cloves and black peppercorns; and next he’s putting the cardamom and pepper and tea into the mortar and carefully grinding them together; and he is trying so very hard not to think of the ghosts of Fedallah’s hands over his, following his echoes of their movements, echo-of-an-echo, trying very hard not to think of how he would never taste Fedallah’s tea again, never ask him how to brew it right again, never hear Fedallah chastise him for his too-spicy or too-sweet or too-dark or too-light tea again. Fedallah’s ghost is all around him, permeating the room, in the hum of the water as it comes to a boil in the kettle and in the rough sound of stone against stone as Ahab grinds the spices together and in their scent wafting around them with the swaying of the ship and in the shaking of Ahab’s hands and the soft pressure of the koshti hanging over his neck.

As Ahab goes through the motions of preparing the tea, Pip follows him cautiously, a few steps behind, eyes wide and perceptive. He himself almost seems to echo Ahab’s movements, hands raising in a skittery, subdued mimicry of Ahab’s. 

Ahab finishes grinding the spices, goes to check on the water. Almost boiling. He pulls a teapot from the shelf (was this one Fedallah’s, too? Or purchased at his insistence at one point, years and years ago?), tosses the spices (both the ground and the whole) inside. Then he turns back toward Pip, leaning against the counter as he waits for the boil to finish.

“How—” Ahab starts, awkward. “How hast thou been? Art well? Are they taking good care of thee?”

Pip shifts, tilting his head back and forth and then nodding lightly.

“Good, good.” Ahab nods. “That’s good.”

The air is stiff with the stifling awkwardness; Ahab is deeply, wholly, blatantly unprepared to handle this conversation. He is not ready for this. 

The kettle begins to whistle behind him. Pip flinches slightly at the noise, and Ahab turns to quiet it swiftly, removing it from the heat and allowing it to settle, before pouring it still steaming into the teapot filled with spices. 

“We let this steep for a few minutes,” he finds himself saying, watching the liquid inside the teapot darken. He procures a set of mugs for the two of them.

“I…I am sorry,” he says again, to the air around him. Ahab turns his head toward Pip, who like his own shadow has quietly crept up behind him again, hovering. “I have treated thee unkindly. I deserted thee, as thou wert before deserted.”

“Where did ye go, sir?”

Ahab tilts his head at that. “I’m…afraid I do not understand.”

“Where did ye go? Were ye lost, as Pip was? Did ye drown?”

Ahab’s heart clenches. “Oh, lad. Aye, I think I was. I was quite lost. And thou shouldst not have had to suffer for it, though suffer thou didst; I feared harming thee with my presence worse than with my absence. More than that, I was selfish. I knew thy malady could cure mine. I believed my ivory heel upon the deck would be enough for thee, and would protect my own purpose from keeling up within me. By the time it did, by that time which I had given up that purpose, my malady returned to me in full force, with such devastation that I had not the faculties to think of anything but survival. And I could not help thee.

“Aye, I was lost. I don’t know if I drowned — or perhaps I did, but it happened so long ago that I had forgotten it. I had become accustomed to it. To being unable to breathe. I had forgotten that I once knew how. It has been years now, since that creature took my leg and I was drowning then, or since I was left to drown after — abandoned, as thou wert — in my own imprisoned horror afterwards. I was indeed lost, and drowning, and I could hardly even see it.”

“Did ye find him?”

“Find…Pip?”

“Yes. Have you seen Pip the coward? Did you see him when you were lost, when ye drowned like he did? He’s a little lad, a little Black lad, five feet high, looks cowardly.”

Ahab’s brow wrinkles, and he sets the mugs down, stepping slowly toward Pip. He lowers himself, kneeling in front of Pip to reach his eye level. Holding Pip’s gaze, Ahab reaches out his hands before him, allowing Pip to bridge the gap and take them. He curls his fingers around Pip’s. “No, lad. I did not find him. But I hope to, here, now that I have returned. I hope to find him now. Wilt thou help me, little one? Wilt thou help me find him?”

Pip is shaking his head. “No, sir, no; we’ve no room for cowards here; we mourn no cowards here. By the lord, we don’t pick them up when they jump; we desert them, as Stubb did once desert little Pip. Pip died a coward; if ye find Pip, tell him he’s a coward, and a runaway; he’s not like old Ahab, or Queequeg, who died game, who died game and are mourned right and return again. Ahab and Queequeg died to return again, but not Pip, Pip the coward, Pip who died a coward.”

“Oh, lad, oh Pip, oh, my child, whoever thou art, thou art not a coward, and neither is Pip,” Ahab urges, holding fast to Pip’s hands. “Pip did not deserve to drown, or to be deserted. By cruel Stubb or by myself. And I swear on my life, lad, I will not desert thee again. Thou vowed’st once to stay with me always, to not desert me, but it is I who should have vowed this to thee. My ailing made me selfish; it made me unfit and unable to aid thee. But Pip, I swear, I will not abandon thee again.”

“Pip the coward drowned, sir, Pip the coward could do naught for ye. You had held my hands before, as you do now, and I wished never to let them go. I wished to stay where ye were. But ye let my hands go. I only could hear ye walk over me, your ivory foot above on the deck. I could do naught.”

“There is nothing that thou need’st do for me, my boy,” Ahab avows. He raises a hand to Pip’s upper arm and gives a gentle squeeze. “No fault or shortcoming of thine is to blame for my absence from thee; the faults were mine alone.

“I said before that Ahab’s cabin would be thy home. I know it was, for some time. I am sorry for revoking that safety from thee; I…I had nowhere else I felt I could go. But it can be thy home again, if thou desirest; I open those doors to thee again. Thou mayest stay with me however much thou wouldst like. If — if even after all my failures, thou wishest to accept that, to accept the care I now offer, then it is thine. I am here. My care is thine; my cabin is thine; I am thine, in whatever way thou wishest me to be.”

Little Pip retracts the hand still held in Ahab’s, pulling it back to squeeze at his own side. He casts his eyes to the floor. “Pip jumped from a whaleboat,” he says. “Pip was afraid and jumped from the whaleboat. Pip was afraid and ran from the cabin. Pip is afraid and drowning.”

“There is nothing wrong with being afraid, lad,” Ahab says, the hand on Pip’s arm rubbing gently. “Thy fear does not make thee any less deserving of kindness. It does not make thee less deserving of safety. We shall find Pip again, and bring him back, as Ahab and Queequeg did come back.”

“Ahab and Queequeg were not cowards. Ahab and Queequeg were not afraid.”

“Everyone is afraid sometimes, my boy. It is not cowardly to fear. I cannot speak directly for Queequeg, but I can say for certain he, like all men, has been afraid.”

“Have you, sir?”

“Yes, lad. I am afraid of many things.” Ahab gives a small chuckle. “I sometimes think I have perhaps been afraid my whole life.”

Pip looks timidly up at Ahab. “Do you mean what you say?”

“Oh, Pip. Aye, I do; I speak the truth. I am very often afraid. I am afraid of many things. Even mad, thunderous old Ahab is afraid, little one.” He slides his hand down Pip’s arm to take his hand again, giving it another squeeze. “This world can be frightening. Our occupation within it even more so. It is alright to be afraid.

“I am here, in thy fears and in mine. I cannot promise to make them go away, or to make thee forget them, but let me soothe them, if I can, lad. Let me keep thee safe. I vow to be better to thee than I was.”

There are tears in Pip’s eyes, and he trembles like a little leaf. “Oh, captain, sir, oh sir,” he’s saying, voice unsteady, “I—I would like that very much, sir.” He sniffles. “I have been so very lonely, sir. The harpooneers — they are kind, they take care of me well. But I—” and he sniffs again, hiccuping, wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, “but I am so lonely. And frightened. All the time.”

Ahab could weep . He does, a little; tears prick at his eyes, too, and without fully thinking about it he opens his arms, saying “Oh, Pip , oh, my boy, come here, come here.” Pip leans forward into his waiting embrace, and then Ahab’s gathered the child up in his arms, still kneeling as he holds Pip close, letting him bury his little head into his shoulder as he wraps his arms around Ahab’s middle and sniffles against him. “Oh, Pip,” Ahab says, holding him tight and close and secure and safe, gently stroking across his shoulders. “I am here. I’m here.” 

He silently makes a note to himself, to thank the harpooners later, whenever he finds it in himself to haunt the deck again — to find them and thank them, thank them for taking care of this boy when he could not, for being there for Pip when Ahab had failed him, for being for Pip what Ahab himself could not be.

Pip calms, a little, and Ahab pulls back, patting him on the back and smiling fondly again at him. “My boy,” he says, warmly, and he can feel himself beaming. And he can’t resist the urge; he reaches out with a hand and ruffles it through Pip’s coily hair, just a bit, and Pip chirps out a surprised laugh. Ahab can feel his whole heart melt, dripping honey-sweet inside his chest.

He starts, then, suddenly, reminded of the tea still brewing in the pot. He rises quickly and removes the teapot’s lid, looks inside — alas! He lets out a brisk sigh: in their conversation, he had forgotten entirely to check on the tea and pour it out when ready; it is now far too oversteeped. Fedallah would scold him; what a waste of such valuable spices! I know, aziz, I know; I’m sorry. But thou canst hardly blame me for my distraction; look at this boy! Look at him.

Ahab turns his gaze back towards Pip, apologetic. “Thou wilt have to forgive me, lad; it appears I have quite ruined our tea. ‘Tis far too bitter in this state.” He lifts the pot, looking down at the dark, nearly opaque liquid inside, the spices still bobbing in the swaying water, before raising his gaze to Pip again. “Perhaps we can salvage some of the taste with sugar?” Ahab says to Pip with an almost impish smile. 

Pip’s eyes widen at the prospect. Sugar was a precious, rare commodity aboard, nearly always reserved for the Captain and his mates; the ordinary crewmen sweetened their coffee with molasses, if anything. It had probably been a long, long time since Pip had tasted anything so sweet. “N-no, sir; I couldn’t—”

Ahab raises a finger to his lips, still smiling. “Hush now; ‘twill just be for the two of us.”

He searches through Fleece’s galley for the sugar, pours the tea into two mugs for each of them, spoons a small amount of sugar into his, and pointedly quite a larger amount into the mug for Pip, winking at him as he stirs it in. He hands the mug over to Pip, who reaches out to take it with both hands, eyes still blown wide, bringing it closer to himself slowly and gingerly, as though it were the most precious thing. He looks into his reflection in the liquid, a dark, rich brown just like him, and then looks back up at Ahab, eyes still wide with that disbelieving wonder.

Ahab’s face softens, wrinkles folding open with such fondness. “Go on, then, lad.”

They each take a sip together, raising mugs to their lips and swallowing. Ahab resists the urge to grimace when he tastes his; indeed, it had steeped for far too long, and the sugar doesn’t really improve the taste so much as highlight the tea’s bitter strength in contrast to its own saccharine sweetness. He continues to drink, though, on some sort of principle, if nothing else. 

Pip, however, seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly; his face softens into a contented smile, eyes half-lidded, hands curled fully around the warm mug, letting the fragrant steam waft up into his nose. Ahab reaches an arm out to him again, and Pip shuffles toward him and leans into him, Ahab’s arm draped around his shoulder, Pip’s head pillowed against Ahab’s side. And, God, Pip is smiling. He’s still smiling. 

Ahab’s heart aches with fondness, with warmth, with a love so full it bursts from his chest. His heart aches with love for this boy tied to him by cords woven from his own heartstrings. Together, in the narrow galley, they sip Fedallah’s tea, and Ahab’s heart is full, and bursting, and full, and full, and full.

Chapter Text

Starbuck returns below deck that evening, slightly damp from the light tropical rain that has been drizzling over the Pequod for the past few hours. He makes a quick stop at his own quarters in the main cabin, peeling off his coat and running his hair through with a dry cloth, before stepping out into the cabin again and knocking softly on Ahab’s stateroom door.

He doesn’t get an immediate response, but that’s not so unusual; after waiting a couple seconds to ensure he was heard, he opens the door gently, and when he steps inside his heart just about stops in his chest.

Because oh , look at them. There’s Captain Ahab and Pip, sitting together on the couch, Pip curled up in Ahab’s lap, the Captain’s arms protective and warm around him. The boy’s eyes are closed, and his expression is softer, quieter, than Starbuck has seen it in — months, months. Since the violence Stubb had wrought upon him. Ahab is looking down at Pip, hand curled in his hair and stroking gently, a fondness and unfettered joy on his face the likes of which Starbuck has maybe never seen. And God, how dearly Starbuck loves him.

Ahab looks up when Starbuck walks in, eyes slow to tear away from the child sleeping peacefully in his lap, and he shifts carefully to move one of his hands and raise a finger to his lips. Starbuck is beaming ; he can feel it on his face like sunshine spilling forth from the clouds. He nods, taking care to step as quietly as possible further into the room.

Unfortunately, though, the gesture seems in vain; the small disturbance is still enough that little Pip stirs from where he lays, eyes blinking sleepily open as he looks up at Ahab, then over at Starbuck, then more curiously back to Ahab again, brows furrowed.

“It’s alright, lad,” Ahab says, voice so sweet and low, a little hoarse with his own tiredness. “He is here for me. Would—” but Ahab’s interrupted by Pip yawning, stretching his arms out from where he lays, and Ahab smiles wider. “Wouldst thou be alright with Mr. Starbuck here? Or wouldst prefer he leaves, for now?” He gives a glance up to Starbuck, who nods in understanding — he has no intentions of interrupting whatever the boy needs, here.

Pip blinks a few more times, then gives a noncommittal shrug and a hum, before yawning again. Ahab huffs out a small chuckle fondly. “Mm. Perhaps we should let thee get some rest, aye?”

“Maybe,” comes the sleepy, slurred reply.

Another soft chuckle. “Alright. Come on, now.”

Ahab shifts to stand, taking the boy with him, getting his steady arms beneath Pip’s legs and back to lift him up into the air. His eyes catch Starbuck’s again briefly, a low smile still warm on his face, and he turns to bring Pip toward the bedroom. Starbuck trails behind quietly, keeping a polite distance. 

He notices a small sea chest still sitting on Ahab’s stateroom desk — Fedallah’s, he realizes, remembering Ahab’s request to know when Fedallah’s former quarters would be empty. He is glad Ahab had been able to summon the courage to collect it.

Starbuck turns his attention back to Ahab and Pip, hovering behind them in the doorway to the bedroom as Ahab lays the child down gently on the bed. The Captain fusses about the blankets for a few moments, tucking him in. He then sits part of his weight on the edge of the bed, hand cupping the side of Pip’s head. “Get some rest, lad,” he murmurs. “I shall be in the next room?” And Starbuck’s heart melts just watching them.

Pip nods. “Mmhmm.”

“Alright. Good.”

He remains there for a moment longer, before leaning over to press a soft, fond kiss to Pip’s forehead. Pip hums in contentment, and Ahab smiles as he pulls away, squeezing Pip’s shoulder. He stands then, hand lingering on Pip’s shoulder till the last moment, as he turns to rejoin Starbuck in the stateroom. He closes the door gently behind him.

Ahab steps away from the bedroom towards Starbuck, eyes slowly rising to meet his, that cautious, gentle, blooming fondness still plain on his face, in the curl of his wrinkled brow, in the subtle turn of his lips as he moves further back into the stateroom. Starbuck is still gleaming — he can feel himself glowing with it — and he steps forward purposefully into Ahab’s space, hands coming up to bracket his cheeks, forehead coming to a gentle, grounding rest against his.

“Good evening, Captain,” he breathes. Ahab closes his eyes and lets out a long exhale against him, hands landing around Starbuck’s waist. Starbuck’s own hands fall to the space between Ahab’s neck and shoulders. “How art thou?”

Ahab considers for a moment, eyes low, expression calm. “I am…here,” he says. 

Starbuck hums in acknowledgment, brushing his thumbs back and forth along the nape of Ahab’s neck, catching on the bottom of his hair. “Good,” he says. “That’s good.”

Ahab nods, then flits his eyes up to meet Starbuck’s gaze. “And thou?”

“I am well, Captain,” he answers. 

And he is, truthfully. He is still worried, in so many ways, for his Captain, and for so many other things; he is still uncertain and distressed and hurt, from all the trauma that has befallen the both of them, from the ordeals they have gone through (they both nearly died, in multiple ways, at their own hands and at each other’s — and wasn’t that a deeply disturbing and strange thing to think about?); he is still wary of the future, still not entirely believing in the victory they have found; but he is well. There is hope. Time and tide flow wide, and the ebb and flow of both had somehow managed to bring him and his Captain here. He could yet have faith that the turn of the tides and the ticking of time would continue to carry the both of them through this.

Starbuck leans back to look at Ahab more fully, returning a hand to cup his cheek, fingers curling through his graying beard. He must look like a bit of a fool, but truly, he cannot stop himself from smiling. It is softer now — not the surprised, widened grin of when he’d first walked in, but something gentler and fonder, tugging up the edge of his lips — but still just as full of naked adoration for the man in front of him. God, how Starbuck loves and loves him. How endlessly blessed he is to have lived to see this; how blessed he is that Ahab has lived to see this.

He takes Ahab’s face in both his hands again and leans in toward him, eyelids falling shut, letting Ahab lean in further. Starbuck’s first kiss to his Captain’s lips now is gentle, tentative, caught in the barest, disbelieving breath, and then turning quickly to something steadfast, the firm press of his lips intentional, the touch of his fingers across Ahab’s cheeks reverent; he knows the man he pays worship to here. He kisses his Captain with a certainty that fills him, more than any doubts or questions or fears of the seas ahead; whatever harms or hurts still plague them, he is certain they will weather them. Ahab’s deliberate, insistent lips against his surely leave no room to believe otherwise. The Captain’s hands grow firmer around Starbuck’s waist, a feeling to which he is already rapidly becoming addicted: those glorious, weathered hands curled steady and steadfast on his waist, now holding him in place, now tugging him ever so slightly closer, a patient, firm strength hidden beneath their gentleness. Starbuck breaks and shifts to kiss him again, turning his head to press in closer, reveling in the feeling of his nose pressing into Ahab’s cheeks and Ahab’s beard rough against his chin and hands and Ahab’s lips full and warm against his and he kisses him again, against those gorgeous lips, worshipful, pouring as much fondness and adoration and tenderness as he can into every shift and movement of his lips on Ahab’s. His mind empties of everything but Ahab, Ahab, but loving Ahab, but pressing close to Ahab and holding Ahab’s face like a blossoming flower in his hands and kissing Ahab and kissing Ahab and God, trying as best he can to show Ahab just how much he loves him.

Starbuck breaks away from Ahab’s lips again, and Ahab lets out a breathless, quiet “ Starbuck ,” his eyebrows furrowed in and the smile lines round his eyes crinkling up. Standing up on his toes for more reach, Starbuck now presses slow, light kisses to Ahab’s cheeks, along his jaw and over his beard, at the corner of his mouth, his temple, his perpetually-wrinkled-and-furrowed forehead.

Ahab tugs Starbuck by the waist imperceptibly closer, breathes out another airy “ Starbuck ” again. “Starbuck.”

Starbuck pauses, tilts his head back — he is briefly worried he’s overstepped something, and his eyes meet Ahab’s, searching for discomfort or hesitation, but Ahab’s cheeks are still crinkled with smile lines, his lips still crooked up at the edges, so Starbuck relaxes. “Captain?” he replies, voice light and nearly as breathless. His hands fall once more to Ahab’s neck.

Ahab huffs out a disbelieving chuckle. “ Starbuck ,” he says again, and Lord if the way he’s saying Starbuck’s name isn’t doing something maddening to his mind, his steadily thudding heart. “Starbuck, Starbuck,” Ahab continues. “Sweet Starbuck. I do not half deserve thee. Thou art far too good to me.”

Starbuck’s smile softens, air audibly escaping his lungs in a soft oh . “Oh, Ahab —”

“I know; I know. It is thine own desire, thine own choice to be so. Though I cannot for the life of me understand it.”

“Needst thou understand it? To enjoy it?”

“No,” Ahab says, nodding, mouth still curled into that disbelieving smile, “but it puzzles me nonetheless. The riddle of it occupies me, constantly. I cannot unravel it.” Beneath his smile, there is a deeper, sterner expression. He is not unhappy or upset, but there is that shrewd, probing look in his eyes, well familiar to Starbuck over their years sailing together. Ever calculating, meticulous, painstakingly detailed Ahab was never known to abide an unanswered question, not one he’d set his mind to. 

Tilting his head sideways, Starbuck’s brow creases. “Is the fact of being loved truly so puzzling to thee?” 

The corner of Ahab’s mouth twitches up further, briefly. “‘Tis difficult to reconcile the reality of being treated so kindly, so sweetly, with the knowledge of how I once treated thee. I have wronged thee terribly, my sweet Starbuck. I have wronged many people deeply. I have both inflicted and suffered abundant anguish. It seems…unreasonable that the consequence of such a life would be this. The kind of man who could do such things — who did them — fairness and justice should dictate a far different treatment for that man, especially from the one who received such harm from him. It seems unreasonable to me that that man would be so sweetly loved, so kindly rewarded, for what he is.”

“You are more than the worst things you have done, Ahab,” Starbuck says quietly. “You are more than the man who did those things. You are more than who you were when you were at your worst.” Ahab studies him, eyes probing. “God above, I should hope that when it comes down to it, we are not judged solely upon the worst versions of ourselves. I should hope that the reality of justice is a kinder one. 

“Where would I be, if I were nothing but my worst mistakes? Wouldst thou still hold me like this now, if I were nothing more than the understanding I withheld from thee, the prejudice I showed thy dearest friend, the callousness with which I dismissed thy pain?” Ahab averts his eyes in acquiescence. “Why dost not thou treat thyself with the same grace? Why only judge thyself upon the worst, the most hurt, the most pained version of thee?”

Ahab’s expression is still, considering. Starbuck lowers his head, leans in to catch Ahab’s eyes. His hand finds Ahab’s cheek again. 

“Ahab,” Starbuck says, “my Captain. You are more than the man you were at your worst,” he repeats, gaze fixed and intent.

Ahab still does not respond, face steady but for a slight pinching inward of his brows, a slight narrowing of his eyes. Starbuck lets him contemplate, lets the gears behind his wrinkled brow turn, Ahab’s curious, dark eyes processing through his puzzle. Slowly, he turns his head into Starbuck’s hand on his cheek, closing his eyes and pressing a soft kiss to the inside of his palm, before turning back to look at him again, still pondering.

“Hmm,” he says, finally, unceremoniously. “I suppose there must be some truth to that.” He averts his eyes, still thinking. “For everyone,” he adds. 

Starbuck smiles fondly, a little sadly, up at him, endlessly endeared by his Captain. He brushes his hand through the side of Ahab’s hair, and leans up to kiss him on the cheek where his hand had just been. Ahab huffs, eyes falling closed and content. His forehead nudges forward to bump against Starbuck’s. 

“Oh Ahab,” Starbuck murmurs tenderly, exhaling a soft breath. “My Ahab.”

Ahab inhales sharply and opens his eyes then, attentive, searching. His brow pinches and he tilts his head back to look at Starbuck more fully.

Starbuck furrows his eyebrows. “Is something—”

“Fedallah called me that,” Ahab says, expression soft and unchanging.

“Oh,” says Starbuck. “ Oh . Oh, I-I’m very sorry; I didn’t—”

“No, no,” one of Ahab’s hands lifts from Starbuck’s waist in a placating gesture, “no; it — it is alright.”

“It’s of no consequence to me; I do not have to say it if it—”

“It is alright, Starbuck. ‘Tis not a problem,” he says, and continues with no small amount of awkwardness, “It — thou canst say it; it’s alright.”

“Are-are you sure?”

Ahab is nodding, eyes lowered. “Aye, aye, I am sure.” Starbuck watches him warily, unconvinced, and Ahab looks back up at him. “I am certain, Starbuck. It only — it caught me by surprise; that is all.”

Searching Ahab’s eyes, Starbuck gives a small nod. “Alright. If thou art certain.”

“I am,” Ahab affirms. He lands his hand on Starbuck’s shoulder, squeezing it. “Thank you for checking.” 

“Alright.” Starbuck nudges his head forward again, knocking it gently against Ahab’s. The Captain’s expression is still contemplative, distant, a little mournful; there is more explanation yet waiting in his gaze, so Starbuck tilts his head up, bumping Ahab’s nose with his, encouraging. He considers a little longer, lips pursed, and Starbuck takes Ahab’s hand, lacing his fingers through.

“It was…We had many words. For what we were. As I’ve said, we never had — there is no single word for him. For us. And the—the nature of our relationship changed many times.” It was true; they had called each other many things: my love, my friend, old man, aziz, azizam, jaanam, my friend, my love, my… 

“But over all that, I… I was his Ahab. He was my — my Fedallah. He was my Fedallah,” Ahab finishes, simply.

Starbuck runs his thumb back and forth across Ahab’s hand and listens, gaze gently fixed on Ahab. After a moment of quiet, he looks down at their hands, says softly, “He still is. He still is thine.” He gives Ahab’s hand a squeeze. “His memory is now thine. Thine to keep, and to hold. And to protect.”

There is another pause, and Starbuck returns his eyes to Ahab, whose head is bowed, eyes closed, creased and wrinkled, a melancholy, mournful smile touching the edge of his lips. Ahab swallows mutely, squeezes Starbuck’s hand holding his, his other hand reaching up to touch at something on his neck, thumb and forefinger rolling over a small cord of white that peeks out from under his shirt.

“Aye, Starbuck,” he whispers, a little hoarse. Nodding, he repeats, more firmly, “Aye.”

He opens his eyes again, small tears pooled at their corners, and gives a pinched smile. 

Starbuck smiles back up at him, bittersweet. He reaches and cups Ahab’s cheek with his other hand, and leans in, tilting his head up to kiss Ahab on the bridge of his nose, right over the forked scar that marks him there. Ahab’s posture settles, shoulders relaxing down, and he lets out a long, slow breath through his nose.

Ahab shifts his head forward, bumping Starbuck’s nose with his. The corner of Starbuck’s lips quirks up in response. Threading a hand through Ahab’s hair, he pulls Ahab closer towards him, leaning up to kiss him again, firm and steady on those full, gorgeous lips. Ahab squeezes his hand, his waist, tugs him closer and kisses him deeper, mouth parting slightly to envelop Starbuck’s, his beard scratching up against Starbuck’s chin. Starbuck can’t help but smile against Ahab’s mouth, breaking the kiss; he kisses him again, smile once more quickly overtaking it, and then he leans up to return to his prior pursuit, pressing slow, sweet kisses across Ahab’s face, lingering on each, taking his time to cover every inch of Ahab’s weary, weathered face, his wrinkled brow, his roughened cheeks, his scattered scars, his thick beard, his fallen-shut eyelids and the smile lines that frame them. 

“Oh, Ahab,” Starbuck murmurs between kisses, lips brushing across skin, across wrinkles and scars. “Oh, Ahab. Oh, my Ahab.” Another slow, deliberate kiss to the temple.

Ahab lets this continue, lets Starbuck keep kissing slowly over his face, whispering his name over and over like something holy, calling him his, while Ahab’s breath hitches and his eyes squint closed and tears threaten to form at their edges. He lets his disbelieving smile tug the sides of his mouth up, breathes deep and purposeful and steady.

Eventually, Starbuck slows, stops, pulls back, rests his forehead against Ahab’s. For a little while, Starbuck and Ahab simply stand, and breathe, swaying gently with the ship beneath them. 

Tugging on Starbuck’s hand, Ahab nods his head in the direction of the couch and he moves to sit — getting the weight off his legs; good Lord , had Starbuck forgotten how long they’d been standing there — and Starbuck, apologetic, lets himself be led.

They sit together there, hands still joined, arms pressed against one another. Starbuck drops his head onto Ahab’s shoulder, and Ahab’s head settles atop his. Starbuck smiles, squeezes Ahab’s hand, and closes his eyes.

And Ahab. 

Ahab is a little — dizzy. With everything. Dizzy, disoriented, aching, weary. Fedallah’s trunk is on the desk across from where he sits on the couch. Starbuck’s head is on his shoulder and his hand is in Ahab’s. Pip’s and Ahab’s mugs are left on his desk, together, next to Fedallah’s trunk. Ahab’s grief has torn a hole through him, a hole the size of Fedallah ripped right out from his chest. His grief from — everything else — is no less bloody. Ahab’s guilt gnaws on his ribs, chews through his stomach, devours him from the inside. His dreams are full of haunted memory, of his own body ripped apart, Fedallah’s body torn in half, Fedallah’s neck caught in Ahab’s harpoon line; his dreams are full of aborted prophecy, his neck caught in his own line, pulled down by the Whale to follow him down, to follow Fedallah still lashed to his side. Ahab’s whole life, his wild and wandering and lonely and full and furious life, sits piled on his chest, on his heavy, wrinkled brow, a weight so heavy it suffocates. Ahab’s body and mind and heart ache , and his ache is endless. And Starbuck’s head is on his shoulder, and his hand is in Ahab’s. And Fedallah’s koshti is around his neck. And Pip’s shoes are by the stateroom door. And all of it pains him so, so much.

Ahab aches. God, he aches. His body aches, his leg torn from him at the knee, and he will never walk without pain again. His chest aches, Fedallah’s absence searing a hole straight through his heart, and he will never love without pain again. He will never be what he was before. Every single bit of rage and pain and betrayal and grief he’d ever felt over his life still cling to his body, to his throat.

Ahab aches.

But there is a man he loves in his arms, warm and safe and gentle in a way he had forgotten he could know. And there is a child he loves sleeping in the next room, a child he loves and has sworn his life to protect sleeping soundly in the next room, soothed and at peace at last. And none of it fixes much; none of it fixes anything. But there is a man he loves in his arms, and a child he loves in the next room, and that is something.

It is everything.

End.