01 | 🕐 | audio

[mirrortouch]

[ It's not something that really ever becomes routine, it doesn't matter how often he wakes up someplace strange and uncharted. The voice on the line sounds about as scattered as he feels. ]

My name is Will Graham, it's- [ He's pulling back his sleeve to look for a watch that's not there. ] I don't have the time. I don't- I don't have the time.

[ Hang on, don't get too lost. ]

It's not clear to me exactly where I am, but- [ a dry laugh ] you probably already knew that. This isn't even my phone. But you probably knew that too.

[ He's missing details. He's missing plenty. His voice trails off for a short while before he can get his bearings enough to speak again, and even then it's almost unconsciously. ] I don't know. I don't know.

[ It's as if the fact that he has no idea sparks him back into the present. His voice grows more composed, if somewhat cracked. ] So if you're hearing this, if anyone is hearing this - [ is anyone hearing this? ] - any singular indication will be key.

[ Another beat. ]

I feel as though I've strayed a long, long way from home.

[ The air goes dead, and then so does the line. ]

Comments

[shakenandlimp]

We haven't any money; the barge works backward to my experiences. There is an excess of everything. I have never known us have to ration so long as the barge was sailing.

Prohibition of what? [He orders them both Brandy.]

[mirrortouch]

That hardly seems sustainable.

[ Right, 1800's. He wouldn't have a clue. Will gives him a nod of thanks for the order, scratching idly at his chin as he explains. ]

There was a strict outlaw of alcoholic beverages. It lasted a whole of about ten years before the country realized there was really no point to it. People will do what people will do.

[shakenandlimp]

Nothing here is sustainable. A vessel this size cannot carry enough fresh water for two hundred souls to bathe and drink their fill for months on end; I would not give it two weeks, as often as everyone here bathes. We put into port perhaps once every two or three months and yet there is always fresh fruit, exotic fruit. This place is unnatural. Money ain't the half of it.

[He toasts to this confusion, and takes a hearty drink of his own brandy.]

You surprise me, Mister Graham; I would expect two years without ardent spirits would set a country into a revolution that would put the frogs to shame.

[mirrortouch]

Yes, well. It wasn't my revolution.

[ Will swills his own drink, sipping and sighing at the burn on the way down. ]

Half of the occupants here are supposed to be dead, according to who you listen to. [ Flying space prison. He keeps repeating that but he's still not over the fact. ] This barge is bizarre at best, impossible at worst [ which does frighten him more than he gives it credit for ] and - well, I suppose it rings true that little makes sense here otherwise.

[ He raises his drink, a belated toast to Bush's, and watches the brandy in the glass. ]

This is the first normalcy I've had the pleasure of experiencing since showing up here.

[ A pause. ]

And I'm drinking with a 19th century naval captain.

[shakenandlimp]

You will have less chance to get acquainted with sea officers from my day than I have had to get used to Americans from the distant future: there are only the three of us. We are pretty outnumbered.

But more than half the ship's complement died before arrival. I am not the only warden who came here after his death.

[mirrortouch]

I'm imagining an overwhelming feeling of homesickness from your start here.

[ If it's difficult for Will to get used to, well -

He pauses to sip at his drink, eyebrows furrowing as a question sits poised at the tip of his tongue. ]

And you remember dying?

[shakenandlimp]

It was quick-- I don't know if I had time to feel much. But yes, for all intents and purposes, I do. I remember the moment I knew I would.

[mirrortouch]

A visceral instinct.

[ It's almost a confirmation, but if his seeing Abigail alive and well on this ship wasn't, well. He's not sure what would be. ]

I remember my own as though a dream, similarly quick, though not necessarily painless.

[ He steals a glance over at Bush. ]

In this moment you felt. Did you accept your death?

[shakenandlimp]

I don't think I had time to accept it or not. I knew it was happening. Nothing more than that.

Now I accept it. Probably lost a hundred of men, but we stopped Quiot's siege train, once and for all, and le Havre is independent a while longer.

[mirrortouch]

Plenty of time to reflect upon it here in the quiet of the barge?

[ That's almost poking fun, though more at the ship itself than at Bush. ]

Sounds like it was quite the memorable fight.

[shakenandlimp]

Oh, yes. One any survivors'll never see the like of again.

It was the barges carrying the gun powder, you see. At least fifty tons, though likely it was closer to a hundred. A shot was fired into one of the magazines.

There is probably nothing left of the horses, his troops, the field battery... the town they were anchored by...

Just wreckage floating down the Seine.

Pardon me, I don't mean to be so gloomy. I'm not bitter about it, you see, but I wish I could have lived to the end of the war.

[mirrortouch]

[ He doesn't think of Bush's war, he doesn't think of gunpowder treason and plot; he thinks instead of back home, his own tidy little war that he's been fighting. His own tidy little war that was cut so riotously short with its sidestep here onto the barge, with three little bullets that had stopped him so dead in his tracks. ]

Wouldn't anybody?

There's a feeling of finality that would have come with it, a closure. Without access to that, there's just instead left behind that - chasm, the overpowering sensation of the unfinished just at bay.