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He is etched in illness and ill-temper in equal measure. His crew obeys his silence; directed with little more than a twitch to an eyebrow, a slowborn sneer crawling over his face like death's pallor over the corpses occasionally left behind in his line of work. Lean, tattooed fingers stretch their hot weather aches out, tap out slow tempos like work songs from mines long since collapsed.
A man who does not smile. A man who does not seem to feel.
[You are a doctor; like you always wanted to be. Like father. Like Opa. Like your mother's father's best friend who visits when the candles are lit and the bells sound in bright mornings.]
Lean and cruel as a Northern cliff-face; whipcord muscle and a chest that nearly looks concave; as if nothing dwells within it, like it's been empty as long as he can remember, maybe even longer. He tongues an eerily sharp tooth, he drinks liquor that stings the eyes of anyone not him or his ilk. Skin etched with ink shifts with the lithe ease of a feline as he moves- as he walks and leans and chuckles deep within that graveyard ribcage he carries on his spine like ornament or armament, it's impossible to tell which.
The ink barely hides the pale patched left behind by survival; scars carved by the teasing touch of death itself, carved into the skin he wears like a plaguemaster's cloak; a hunter's hat from a fairytale city covering hair dark as pineneedle overgrowth and thick as a lynx's pelt.
In the right light, his eyes glint amber even as they flicker grey- a hungry bobcat, a stalking leopard. The click of bootheels on the ground or the floor or the openness of his beloved theatre like untrimmed claws on ruin-stone.
[You have always been made of love; so much so you've grown sick of it, ill by it. It was love that contracted the near death disease and it was love that made you follow black plumage and it was love that made you gouge mourner's memorials so deep into the cells of your skin that even if you COULD die you'd never forget the feeling. It is love that makes you cruel, oh how you are drenched in it like blood or snow melt or a little girl's tears as she screams for her big brother.]
He is a thing that haunts shadows, something to whisper about behind hands with nervous glances to and fro and hither and yon.
[He is and always will be a lost little boy, teartracks frozen and wrapped in a stolen coat.]
He is flanked by equal disdain, either side- men decorated in scars of a different flavor with their eyes covered just enough to hide their intentions. Walking embodiments of blunt force trauma and baseline cruelty as they are never more than a few inches from their captain's right and left sides and always hungry to follow orders that bloodslick their knuckles and line their pockets with whatever means they desire for the evening or the next forty-five minutes of amusement.
[They love you, maybe more than you love them- they look at you and still see that scared little boy who offered them come home with him, as he held the bear-mink's paw and walked with wobbly and short steps. As he exhaled steam and didn't smile much with his strange eyes and patchwork body so full of violence and silence in equal measure. They look at you and that is what they see even as they scrape up what's left of you after a bender, even as they hold you down when you thrash and scream from nightmares that hurt to much to name.]
A hundred hearts, still twitching and beating. A hundred lives bundled together in a box like so many packed corpses and he delivered them with the smile he almost never wore; crooked and unappealing, sarcastic and knife sharp and showing too many teeth like a threat. A learned expression, a mimicked and taught reaction that infected a little boy dressed in a death vest as he walked into a building he never expected to leave. Ready to die before he experienced finding a favorite food or his first kiss or the smell of the sea near lands that never froze over- where the air was always warm and the cold could never grip tight to lungs to crush the breathe from them in a gusted snowdrift.
[You see him in the mirror, you hear him in your laugh. You taste the way his words settle on your tongue and hate how much of you reflects him- he drenches your existence like whorehouse perfume, he poisons any well of gentleness you find like a dead snake trapped once upon a loosened brick. You wear his smile and you know it so you make sure you never do; or at least make sure you never show all your teeth when you do.
One day, you will- when you face the dark, when you face defeat that rips everything from your inked hands made lean by starvation in so many definitions it makes your head spin.
But for now, you do not smile.]
Sometimes, a laugh slips free- vicious and cruel and sharp it slides out from between his ribs like a razorblade, like the ooze of infection. Haunting and lovely and cruel and cold, he wears many adjectives seemingly without a care. He drinks, he smirks, he gleans knowledge from even the tiniest motions of the heart- the flick of eyes away from his unnerving ones, the trembling bob of a throat in a nervous swallow. He watches and he knows and he reacts like a man who holds all the cards always does-
Cocky. Arrogant. Vindictive. Cruel.
A finger under another's chin, amber and grey eyes glinting in low light as he watches the shudder of veins and the shiver of connective tissue from the way muscles tense.
"..Shachi. Penguin."
"Aye Cap'n."
"...How do I feel about liars."
"That they're useful, if they're good."
"Pfft, that's the catch though, innit Pen."
A smile with just enough teeth to wonder if he eats the ones who disappoints him, "...This is a bad one. Handle it, the both of you."
And he leans back; and he drinks, he smirks, and he learns everything anyone could need to know by watching the way a human heart beats.
[You carry them home- each leaning on a shoulder and waxing idiotic about "how you've fuckin' grown all up!" in your ears before they snicker and sniffle and you roll poltergeist eyes as you keep them steady.
You aren't some... creature in the half light, some kind of soulless revenant or fireside horror story- not to them, never to them. And when Bepo meets you at the loading way and grumbles softly, you let him curl over you slightly to rub his face against your hat, in your hair, against your cheek.
And you laugh- and it doesn't sound like a ghost laughs in your place.]
There will be whispers in every dock they leave behind. There will be rumors and exaggeration in every port they weather a storm in-
Whispered tales of the man wearing Death on his hands; the amber eyed king of deals who can do or get anything... for the right price.
[You keep your old rosary under your pillow. You keep a worn hymnal in your desk drawer.]
They'll whisper, while Northern winds wail outside, that he's the king of the underworld; the one who Fell when the world was still new and clean and white and pure.
[You still speak your mother tongue; it still tastes like brimstone and forgefire.]