[ dagger thane 🗡 d4m, fin. ]

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The sharp autumn air bites at little Dagger's skin, his lips pale and peeling, fingers calloused with dirty nails.

He stands there, silent.

For a moment, the sound of ocean waves smacking against his father's wooden boat is the only thing he can hear. The endless sea around him seems to cease to exist, his father's voice drowning out to a faintly audible whisper. Dagger's mind is frozen in thought, a cog stuck in the machinations of his own head.

His head slightly turned, he cups his raw and bleeding cheek, feeling his heart beating through his face. He winces, the sea-salt air stinging as it kisses his open wound.

Josiah Thane was not known as a kind man, only a hardened one. His steely grey eyes and sailor's tongue. Perhaps that's to be expected of someone who lived through the war as a teenager, not old enough to have but not young enough to be able to forget. Having a child in the middle of it all with a woman whose his spark with faded out a long ago just meant more mouths to feed.

A man like that is bound to have some anger pooling under his tense surface.

Dagger has seen that anger before, felt it, been the pearl of his ire. He's been cut by his bladed words a thousand times, their serrated edges rusted in age. But this was a lightning bolt straight to his engine of a heart, internal circuits fried and left wondering.

"Don't fucking cry," his father's words cut through the choppy waters. Josiah twists the metal band on his finger, wiping away the blood with his shirt. He reaches over, Dagger flinches, pulling at his son's chin and forcing their eyes to meet. The tears weren't there before, but they well up and he blinks them away.

"You're a man now, take it on the chin."

He pulls away.

"Go get the next net."

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He's taken over his father's boat.

The passing of the torch was the closest thing he'd gotten to an 'I love you'. It must have meant something.

In that moment, he became more like his father. Bitter at the world around him, bitter that at seventeen he got his first taste of affection and it was like poison in his mouth.

Perhaps that's just the cruel cycle at work, from one son to the other, a generational wound.

And Archer was twelve now, old enough to wake up when night still shrouded the sky and haul hundreds of pounds of fish and crab, and bleed from fishing hooks sticking the skin at the end of hips fingertips. It was age Dagger was when he became his father's boat hand.

His younger brother reminded him a lot of himself, starry-eyed, and holding his breath as he sees the ocean for the first time in all it's vast and imposing glory. 

What a fool.

"It'll fade," he says, coldly, watching him with a quiet, resentful gaze that mirrored his father, "That feeling inside your chest."

He stretches a net between his fingers, pulling out the knots and tossing it over the side of the wooden hull. 

"This is all that there is—this boat, the fish and the stars. That's where the ocean ends for us, nothing more."