Chapter Text
The North Atlantic is a scold.
A fucking harpy bitch.
She seeks out Will's shortcomings and spits them back at him with salt-spray scorn. She scrapes at his tender keel. She plucks at his newly-tied lines, waiting for them to fail, while she rocks her familiars, her terns and black-capped gulls, backwards and forwards on her endless lap. Even when she allows Will below deck, to sink into something too sepulchral to be called sleep, still she snarls at him from beyond the bulkhead, furrowing the whale-grey sheets of her fathomless bed.
But, for Will, this is a relief. To be mindless, to be unmanned; to only have to survive her, instead of what the very thought of Hannibal does to him, is a respite. To be worked until he can only collapse, bruised and shaken, onto his narrow coffin of a bunk, is the only way to stop himself from noticing how vast it is, how filled it is with a shape that is not there, and that he cannot put his arms around.
Despite the pain, despite the peril, despite the witching of a few of his hairs to white, Will is voyaging now. He has, at last, momentum.
And he has a key; a key that was hidden in a hole, in a well, in a desert. Unmarked. Unremarkable. It could unlock anywhere.
He wears it chained around his neck, safe from brine or bitch. It has a fob attached. A fetish. It is a bit of bone, perhaps, drilled through and attached to the key with a twist of silver wire. A macabre trinket for a key to No Where, one might suppose.
But Will has hunted, and Will knows antler when he sees it. And he has always been good with maps. So Will has given up on waiting for a god-damned invitation, possibly one written in someone else's blood, and he has pointed the great serpent of his desire, his adoration, his sweet, lover's wrath, towards a curving branch of forgotten islands.
The Sarvia Archipelago. The Place of the Broken Antlers.
And so the weeks pass.
The harpy bitch keeps Will true to her, she keeps him duteous and frigid, right up until the morning that the coastal fog is speared through with jostling, Norwegian pines, with close-slotted houses painted in the colours of a staid and economical rainbow, with an immortally old mariner on a pier, who shoulders a fishing net and waves down through the ages at the beautiful, battered boat gliding by.
In the crowded, commercial Skaggerak, the ocean lets him go. By the time he has been bullied by ferries through the Great Belt, Will belongs once more to the world of men and monsters.
Or, in truth, he belongs to one man, one monster.
Will has finally found his way home.