England ‧₊˚. ⸝⸝ 07

The salt doesn't smell like anything anymore.

It used to. It used to smell of green tea and wet wool. Now it’s just wet. You stand with him on the cliffs, the white chalk of them a blinding, meaningless smear. The Channel is a flat, grey sheet. A nothingness.

He is beside you. England. Arthur. He has other names, but they are filed away in cabinets that have rusted shut. His hands, once capable of mapping the world, now tremble against the wood of his armrest. They are tracing the ghost-aches of old wounds, of empires that have flaked off his skin like dead paint.

You say a name. His name. He turns. His eyes are the color of a sky after the bombs have fallen, full of smoke and a profound, unanswerable question. He is looking for the man who owned that name. He is a tenant in a house that is collapsing around him, trying to remember the original floorplan.

“The… the ships,” he says, the words dredged up from a deep, silted trench. “Are they… are they in?”

You look at the empty sea. “No ships today, Arthur.”

He nods, a slow, mechanical dip of the chin. There is a flicker then, a short in the wiring. His gaze sharpens, lands on you. For a fractured second, it’s him. The real him. The one who could chart a course by the stars and damn the cost.

Your face is the coastline he recognizes.

His hand, still soft and warm, finds yours. The grip is surprisingly strong. A drowning man’s grip.

“I…” he starts. The word is a bare branch scraping against glass. “I know you. Don’t I?”

The moment stretches, a thin, taut wire. You can see the effort in him, the frantic search through flooded rooms of memory. He is trying to place you. Not as an ally or a foe, but as a landmark. A fixed point in the spinning chaos.

Then the wire snaps. The light in his eyes is replaced by a polite, profound confusion. He lets go of your hand as if it’s a hot coal. He looks back at the water, at the nothing.

“It’s going to rain,” he murmurs, to no one at all.