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my prompt - flint/silver and "forgetting"
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He was still called John, here. Captain Silver by some, of course, when he was needed, but once back ashore, it was always John. And then, rarely.
Madi knew, he suspected, and might listen if he told her some or all of what he had been called before. Had this peace healed enough to suffer another lie, he might have tried. Instead, he raised his head only at the agreed-upon sound.
There had been a time before this, he knew, before he trailed along after his own life like a length of damp rope. If the others remembered, they gave no sign but their wariness. That served him fine. Reinvention had always been his preferred path to survival. His shadow was renowned for its long memory — and with reason — but it was long like a book. He could close it when he needed to.
But far from here, memory was an iron vice. No matter how much earth John layered over his own recollection, the weight and hurt and wants of what he had once been would struggle fruitlessly in someone else’s mind. In this life or the next, neither could be rid of it.
He threw down his pen. The inkwell toppled, seeping its ruinous path through the paper’s center. He didn’t bother to right it. The damage was done; the map was useless, anyway. God help him, he remembered everything — his fingers locked around the pistol, every word they’d spoken, the birds — just not where they’d been standing. Seizing his crutch, he stumped away from the desk, the room, the house, all of it, all of it until the island’s cliffside edge stopped his steps.
