March 17th, 1890 - The Voyager

The bags under my eyes have got space when you bottom out
(To pack your things and make a break for the door)
One day the things you love are gonna put you in the ground
(But I'm planning on running 'til I can't anymore)

Zelda was early. She came armed with textbooks from the library, two of them piled next to her, and she was early.

But she looked better than she had last time. Her hair was more-recently braided, less likely to escape. The ink on her hands was a little more faded, the bags under her eyes a little reduced. Saving J. Alfred Darrow was still the main project of her week, but in giving her the weekend, he had inadvertently given her some time to recover - and so, she was early, sitting on a crate, and fidgeting with his wand.

She heard him approach. Zelda looked up, and found her pulse kicking up. How many times did she have to see him before she stopped having that reaction, before they could just start having the normal interactions she wanted? He didn't care anymore, he had made that abundantly clear with his silence - and still.

Zelda had been all prepped to say Mr. Darrow, and instead found herself at a loss - his full name felt unnatural. "Good morning," she said instead, "Are you ready?"

If she could do this - if they could do this - then maybe it was possible to break the curse where it had launched onto him. But for now, the sun was shining despite the March weather, it was pleasant for London, and she was ready to work to break a curse.

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AMAZING set by MJ

The weekend may have been restful for Zelda, but for Alfred it had been anything but. With the brief but notable exception of his outing with Charity yesterday, the three days since he'd last seen her had been characterized by a lingering sense of dread and a feeling of restlessness. He'd been planning to use the weekend to get his mind onto something other than the curse, but instead he'd picked up a habit of glancing at his palm every few minutes to see if any mysterious blue swirls had appeared recently. Every time he looked and saw nothing but skin he told himself he was being stupid — he had lived his life normally while cursed since early January, after all, so it wasn't as though things he did normally were likely triggers — but whatever he told himself, he would catch himself checking again five or ten minutes later. He'd even gotten up once or twice during the middle of the night, ostensibly to use the bathroom but really just to have an excuse to turn a light on and wash his hands and see that they were still as clean as when he'd gone to bed.

So no, he wasn't particularly ready — but it wasn't as though more time was going to make him any more ready, so there wasn't any point in bringing it up, he didn't think. "As I'll ever be," he answered, resisting the urge to check one of his palms again. He couldn't let Zelda catch him being paranoid; what would she think of him? She wouldn't let him help with the ship anymore, that was certain, and since this was the only thing preventing him from just sitting around at home checking his palms and waiting to die, he wasn't going to let that happen.

"Where do you want to start?" he asked, surveying the Voyager from the pier. She looked so innocent from here.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda picked up her textbooks and stood up. "Can you take me on a walkthrough of the Voyager?" she asked. This was a dangerous question, and one that she would not have asked had it not been important - this could save her a lot of time.

Besides, the more excuses they had to spend time together, the more she could keep an eye on him. Zelda didn't think there would be any signifiers to the curse before it kicked in, but if there were - then she was going to catch them. She had not given up on saving him, although she might not be able to - and she could not try if she wasn't near him.

But she could really, really use his help regardless.

She owed him somewhat of an explanation, but she was self-conscious about "My current best plan is to try to tie the curse to a specific part of the boat. But I don't know what part is - the least essential, of the cursed areas."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred frowned at her explanation. He could understand where she was coming from, he supposed, but it was the sort of answer that would have made any sailor frown; there wasn't a single space on the ship that wasn't essential. When one's career was sailing off and being isolated on the open ocean for weeks or months at a time, every bit of space counted — particularly since expansion charms, the typical magical solution for such problems, were generally not well trusted by sailors. One failed expansion charm could blow out the side of a ship and see her sunk in ten minutes — Alfred had a flat-out ban on them on the Voyager, and most captains did the same. As a result, they had to use all the space they had in the good old fashioned Muggle way — by shoving things into every nook and cranny. There were rooms, for instance, built all the way into the forward prow of the ship, with the walls slanting in from both sides the further from the door one went.

"That, ah, might be difficult," he said hesitantly. He didn't want to be argumentative when he was trying to help her, but if any area of the Voyager remained cursed in the long-term, it would seriously impact her ability to do anything useful underway. "It's all... pretty essential. Especially the areas the chest was in," he continued, shaking his head. The midships cargo hold, the hallways right in the midst of the Voyager on every level, the main deck, his cabin — it wasn't as though they could just do without any of those. His cabin could maybe be set aside, but that wasn't ideal. The cabin was more than just a place to sleep, after all — if it was just that, he could have easily switched to any bunk on the ship. But it was also an office, and it was where difficult decisions were made, where sailors were disciplined, where navigational briefs were held... a captain couldn't very well go underway without a space to do those sorts of things.

Although, he reflected, if they couldn't get the curse out of the Voyager the problem of how to deal with the loss of the cabin would not be his problem, because that would mean they couldn't get the curse out of him, either. Even if it didn't kill him in the next few weeks, he couldn't set sail like this, with it hanging over his head. Alfred knew what it was like to lose a captain, and he wouldn't do that to his crew.

"But, ah... yeah. We can start there," he conceded, with an almost sheepish shrug.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda nodded. "I have - um, that's the first step," she said. If Alfred wasn't emotionally invested in his boat this would all be significantly easier; she would have just sunk it in the Thames and called it a day. It certainly would have been faster. Of course, she could not tell Alfred that. If he knew that she was acting against the general wisdom of the field, then he could probably guess why.

"There's something I want to do that would - alleviate that. I just need the curse to be contained before I can try."

At least, if this was going to torture her, she could get creative about it. Scrappy. It would make a good story some day, especially once this taught her how to break his curse. But they had to make it through it first, and she couldn't do that if he dropped dead on her.

Zelda walked onto the Voyager, textbooks tucked to her chest. Once they were on the deck she turned to him. This was, again, his territory - although she had a sort of loyalty to it after all the time she had spent on it. Maybe, finally, she was getting it - the Voyager kept fighting her, but she had respect for it anyways.

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred followed her up the brow to the main deck of the Voyager. As he climbed he took a deep breath in, smelling the water and the old wood and the hemp lines. Being docked here in the Thames wasn't as good, in this regard, as being in a proper seaside port, but it was something, and he was paying attention to these things, now that it might be the last time he experienced them. There was a brief pang in his chest, like he'd swallowed something the wrong way, but it passed quickly and he attributed it to getting a disguised whiff of some putrid fish — which, with the near-constant presence of fishermen in this area, wasn't exactly unusual.

"Do you want to go through the whole ship, or just the parts the chest was?" he asked when they'd stopped. The second seemed to make more sense to him, given what he knew of the situation, but they'd also more or less already done that when he had been here weeks ago. He could walk her through it again if it would help, but there couldn't possibly be anything new to learn between the cargo hold and his cabin, could there?

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"The curse was spreading for a while before I could contain it," Zelda explained, "So if we could go through the whole ship - I think that would be helpful." She was not trying to waste his time just so she could keep an eye on him - especially because time was so important here. But they had to be thorough, and that meant checking every nook and cranny on the ship.

That they had at least kissed for several minutes in multiple rooms of the boat was not lost on Zelda; she was not particularly excited for the shameful part of the tour. Well - at least Alfred was over her, so only one of them would be a little miserable about that.

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AMAZING set by MJ

That made sense, he supposed, but it wasn't great news for the Voyager. Hopefully if they discovered trace amounts of the curse elsewhere on the ship during this little tour, they would at least be easy for her to remove. She did say that she'd been able to consolidate some of the cursed areas already, hadn't she? So if the curse was smaller, or weaker, in those areas, maybe it would be easy to just get it out entirely.

"Alright — bow to stern it is," he said, trying to make his voice sound at least a little cheerful. If he was gloomy the entire time they went about this, it was going to get old very quickly, he thought. He could at least pretend, for a while, not to be worried. Besides, under other circumstances, this would have been something he would have loved to do. He loved the Voyager, and he knew every bit of her. He would have gladly given a tour to anyone, and talked their ear off as he went — and of course he'd always wanted to do this for Zelda. He just hadn't imagined it quite like this: with the two of them not having spoken in months and her only here because the Ministry had tasked her to be. With him potentially dying.

Nevermind that. He could just pretend, for a few moments, that this was just about the Voyager. "Come on," he called, heading down the nearest ladderwell and wending his way to the front of the boat, pausing occasionally to see that she was following. By the time he stopped at the forewardmost part of the ship, he felt a little winded, which was unusual — but he had been lying around in his flat doing nothing for a month, so maybe that had something to do with it.

"I'll just walk you through it, alright? I'll tell you what we're passing as we go, and you tell me if we need to stop and investigate anything," he told her. Then he began the tour, leading her through crew berthing rooms, storage lockers, the anchor house, the armory, the galley, the forward cargo hold, the mess hall. Every once in a while that hitch would come in his chest again, but he ignored it — until, suddenly, it caught hold of him and didn't dissipate. It felt like something was pressing his lungs, keeping them from reaching their full capacity — his breath was shallower than it should have been. They'd gone lower on the ship as he'd walked her through it; maybe the air down here was stale, for some reason? Maybe something perishable had been left onboard and he was catching the effects of it?

"Everything alright so far?" he asked Zelda, wondering if she'd noticed anything, or if it was just him.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda followed along with the tour, making mental notes as they progressed. She was actually enjoying learning the official names of the rooms she had poked into over the past few weeks; if she ignored the curse, this could almost be fun. A year ago, she would have been absolutely delighted to be getting a tour of the Voyager from him. (A year ago, Zelda realized with a pang, she would have thought that this was romantic.)

Her brow furrowed at Alfred's question. "Everything seems normal to me," she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. She shifted the books against her chest; she wished now that she had set them down somewhere, but it was far too late in their tour for her to move them, and now she was stuck.

"Have you noticed anything?"

Maybe she had just gotten too used to the curse in the past few weeks?

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

She hadn't noticed. Alfred tried to shake the feeling off. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was just being paranoid, after the weekend that he'd had. Maybe he was only noticing the difference in the air down here because he knew the ship, and it wasn't as profound as he thought it was.

"Just seems a little stuffier than usual, I guess," he said with a shrug. It was probably nothing. If she hadn't noticed, it couldn't be anything to do with the curse, anyway. Figuring out where the curse was and how it had attached to the various parts of the Voyager was literally her job, at the moment, so he had to presume that she had all of that under control. Besides, they hadn't passed by anything yet that would have had any reason to come in contact with the chest, unless whoever smuggled it on board had taken a very indirect route to the cargo hold.

Alfred turned and continued through the halls, hoping that getting away from this particular hallway would alleviate whatever it was that was making his lungs feel this way. As he moved towards midships, however, it only seemed to be getting worse, and soon he was feeling as though he might need to stop and catch his breath, even though they were just walking down a straight hallway. He glanced back at Zelda, who still didn't seem to have even noticed. How could she not have noticed? The air was unbearably thick here; even when he managed to catch a breath it seemed like it wasn't really going anywhere.

Alfred turned back towards the hallway ahead of them and reached up to muss his hair (one of many nervous habits), then saw something out of the corner of his eye that made him suddenly stop. Oh. That was why she hadn't noticed, because it very likely had nothing to do with the air down here at all and everything to do with the blue mark that had appeared on his palm. This was it. He was dying. This was what it felt like. How long had the mark been there? How much longer did he have? He didn't know how quickly it escalated, and already he was feeling like if the breathing situation got much worse he was doomed. It might only be minutes away now — maybe seconds, even.

"Zelda," he said, forgetting the flimsy courtesies he'd been trying to use for her sake as he turned to face her. He didn't have time for Miss Fisk now. He didn't know if he had time to explain, or to say anything at all, and he didn't want to waste what might very well be his last breath trying. Instead he met her eyes for a just a moment, leaned in, and kissed her.

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   Jupiter Smith, Zelda Darrow

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

There was something about the look in his eyes, but the thought fled away from her as soon as Alfred kissed her. Zelda leaned up into it, her heart hammering against the inside of her ribs. She reached out with her free hand and tangled her fingers in his shirt. If she hadn't been so shocked by it - nothing Alfred had done in ages had indicated that he was ever going to kiss her again - she could have kept kissing him for longer, minutes probably. But Zelda pulled away, her eyebrows pulling together quizzically. She kept her hold on the fabric of his shirt.

"Alfred," she said, because if he was calling her by first name and kissing her on the Voyager then she could certainly dispense with Mr. Darrow. If she had not been so thrown off, she probably would have been relieved - kissing on boats was in the realm of normal for them, or had been, once. "What's -?"

There was something off; there had been that look in his eye. But Zelda could not pull it together yet, had not come to the natural and terrible conclusion - had not taken the leap to look down at his hands.

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   Jupiter Smith

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AMAZING set by MJ

Kissing her had probably been a terrible idea, although it was the only thing he wanted to spend his dying moment doing. With so little air in his lungs already, though, having his lips up against hers made him feel like he was drowning. He couldn't focus on her or the kiss; his head was spinning and he felt a little dizzy. If she hadn't pulled back, he would have had to — that or pass out, which seemed equally likely. As soon as the kiss ended he put a hand out against the nearest bulkhead to steady himself. That was one benefit of the narrow hallways on ships like this; there was always something easily in reach to hold on to, if the waves swelled too much and threw you off balance. Or if you were cursed and trying to keep yourself from falling over for the last two minutes of your life.

"I can't — breathe," he managed, nearly gasping for air now. Between the too-short kiss and three measly words, he was spent. He couldn't explain further. He moved the hand he wasn't using to support himself up to lightly brush against the hand she had at his shirt, then splayed his fingers out so she could clearly see his palm. She'd know what it meant.

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   Jupiter Smith

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

No.

She said as much out loud: "No."

Zelda saw the mark on his palm and was reacting before she was really thinking; the library textbooks tumbled out of her arms and onto the floor. She pulled out her wand with the now-free hand, her other fingers still tangled in the fabric of his shirt. No. She flicked her wand and said the bubble-head charm - the only spell she could immediately think of that may provide Alfred with a steady stream of oxygen.

She was not a healer - even full curse-breakers did not save people from death like this. Ari would be more useful now than she was by far, and she was just operating off of instinct - instinct that had her right on the verge of tears.

"You cannot leave me," Zelda said. He could not die and leave her here; he could not die at all. She was supposed to have more time to figure this out.

She had to get them out of the Voyager. She had to get them to an actual healer. She could not be alone with Alfred when he died; there was no possible way she could save him here.

She wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could and apparated them out of the bowels of the ship with a pop.

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ