"Up she goes there she goes..."

Delia had followed Carla back closely, having decided that the thought of crossing alone once more was a silly one. She had been sufficiently reassured that Ezra would be fine in their absence, relieved that a deckhand was nearby to watch the man. It was odd, the thought of a fully-grown man needing someone to babysit him. Nevertheless, Delia was sure that this would be the worst of his injuries - everything seemed fine other than the obvious, and the doctor was confident that he would be back on his feet the following day.

"I should probably go and check on the Detective," Delia said to Carla as she left, knowing that the Captain would be preoccupied with her crew for the moment. "I shall be working on his arm for a while, I'd assume."

The walk back to the Captain's room was short. Delia knocked upon the door softly, awaiting a response before entering. She thought that Alex would likely be asleep. Well, she would find out soon.

Alex was dimly aware of a dull throbbing in the back of his consciousness, but his body refused to let him awaken to tend to it. His mind began to cycle through old memories, almost forgotten, and began replaying certain scenes from his past. It started harmlessly enough. A kindly smile from his mother here, a proud nod and grin from his father there, but it soon began to phase into the memories he had repressed in his surprisingly long 27 years of life.

The initial one was a haunting crime scene. The first he had worked on as a London detective's aid, and the one where he made his name in the Yard. It was a grizzly, cold-blooded massacre. A fairly wealthy couple had decided to host a party on the eve of Christmas and invited several of their well-to-do friends. The first thing his eyes had been drawn to upon entering the main hall of the house had been the jagged rip in the party goer's throat from across the room. It was only a few inches long, but it was at such an angle that the perpetrator had to have been holding the victim's head back. Most likely he had held his hand over the poor woman's throat.

The woman's body laid slightly apart from the rest of the party, and only two other guests had had their throats slit, the rest had been shot multiple times, some in the back, some in the chest, and how the bodies lay told Alex the whole story.

A man, no doubt, due to the strength required to hold a clearly struggling male victim while cutting their throat, had slipped into the reception hall by an open window on the west side of the room. The first victim seemed to have been surprised as the object used to open her carotid artery bit into her neck. The wineglass tipped by her hand on the floor suggested she thought the man a bit suggestive, but she seemed receptive to his advances. The second woman seemed a bit more put off at the man's advances, as suggested from the slight scuffing on the newly waxed floors. The male victim plainly struggled against the drunkard grappling him from behind, and managed to let out a small cry as the weapon slid through his throat.

After that, all hell broke loose. The other guests began to turn to the sound of alarm and the shell casings on the floor near the window suggested some sort of rapid firing gun had been used to riddle the remains of the party with deadly projectiles. Alex began to pale and his hands started to shake. He hadn't seen anything like it before in his life, and by the looks on the other officers' faces, neither had they. The police were concentrating on the victims who were shot, not giving much consideration to the victims near the window. Alex turned to the detective he was working under to propose his theory when he heard the striking of boots on wood that signified the commanding officer's approach.

Wait, wood? Alex looks back to the floor, and notes that, just as he remembered, it was marble. The hard striking of boots softened to the dull rap of knuckles, and the scene began to fade. He opened his eyes slowly, the dim light coming through the cabin's windows stinging his eyes. Light? That means the storm must have let up. Wait, why am I just lying here? In the Captain's quarters? Pushing himself up with his right arm, Alex cries out shortly in pain as the sharp stab of his injury shoots through his side and he falls back to the deck with a dull thud. Oh, yeah... He begins panting as the pain recedes.

"C...come in..."

A tremor of concern shook Delia's body, radiating from the pit of her stomach upon hearing Alex's sudden pained cry. Her hand was already firm upon the doorknob by the time he called out - weakly - opening the door rather quickly.

Approaching Alex's bedside, Delia suppressed her clear concern with a look that summed up her typical bedside manner - soft, and comforting. She eyed his arm, which did not seem to have been bleeding while she had been gone. That was a relief, she supposed, releasing a long breath.

"Hello again," she said, her voice almost a whisper. For some reason, she felt as though talking loudly was not necessary. "Are you alright? I heard your shout outside..."

Glancing to her equipment, she decided that she would definitely begin work on the man's arm as soon as she could. First she would need to clean the wound, however, but that would not take long. If she worked hard, she would be able to get his arm all fixed up within the next few hours - perhaps even before they reached London.

"Now, are you feeling up to having your arm reattached now?" she asked softly, not pressing him in either direction. After all, it was up to him, not her. "Please tell me if you'd rather continue to rest for a while - either is fine with me."

She went into her quarters, face paled and cold from the weather. She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Honestly doctor, I know you are only trying to be kind, but you are sick and injured, sir. If it helps, think of sleeping in my bed as a sort of favor to me. You are the key to this investigation and thus you need to be in tip top shape." She called two of her crew members and told them to put Alex into her bed. "Now not another word of protest. I've a cot belowdecks for this very purpose. I expect you to return to your duties the minute the nurse gives the okay." Like her father, she had a hard time taking no for an answer and sometimes found declines to her hospitality a sort of insult. However, she knew this was just how the detective was so she wasn't hurt.

She went to check her map wishing things weren't so foggy. She got on the radio "Whoever is concious in there, we are about to get a little lower and see if we can ge out of this fog." She went back out to give the orders to her crew. Sure enough, after a couple hundred meters, London glittered in the distance.


"Prepare to land, everyone!" she called, jogging to the wheel. A crew member turned on the small, gass lantern they used to signal The Friday that they were about to land. She fought a little to keep her vessel steady as the Thames got closer and closer. They landed in the water, not too far from the docks with hardly a bump. She sighed with relief a small, hardly audible giggle of delight coming from her. With the pull of a lever the paddles were out and rotating and she cooly steered the ship. A roar of applause erupted from the crew and they cheered her name. She smiled and shook her head. "I'm only the designer, fellas. Let's get the genius up here."

She got onto her speaker "Ignautius! Get your sooty rump up here on the double!"

In Ezra's cabin, the radio crackled into life and the deckhand jumped up, and stumbled over to it, panicking over the controls. Before he had a chance to do anything, Captain DePaul's voice died away and it clicked off. From the bed in the corner, Ezra muttered something that sounded like a curse into the pillow and awkwardly propped himself up.

"Hmm- Jim? What are you doing here?" he said, gingerly examining the splint on his arm. His head was still full of something that had the same consistancy as cotton wool.

"Er- Sorry sir, Captain DePaul said that I should stay here to watch you, Captain Blake, sir," he said hurriedly, staring at his feet. "She just called you on the radio, sir, said we should be nearing London when we get through the fog-"

Sure enough, a bell began to ring above deck, closely followed by a shout of 'Land, 'ho! London straight ahead!'.

"Well, I can take care of myself now, go and help First Mate Czeslaw take her into land," said Ezra, as moved to sit on the side of the bed, opening the drawer latched shut underneath with his good hand and taking out a clean shirt. He paused for a moment as his vision swam.

"But- Yes, sir..." said Jim, reluctantly disappearing up the stairs, hoping one of the other deckhands would be on deck to listen to his recounting of events.

It took Ezra some minutes to manuver the sleeve of his shirt over the splint on his broken arm but, once he had managed it, he dug back into the drawer and pulled out a green scarf. He'd bought it from a market in Cairo, not because he was in the habit of buying souvineers but because he needed something to protect his face from the stinging sand that was whipped up as the air racers skimmed the desert on the track on the outskirts of Giza. Well, it would come in useful once again.

A moment later, Ezra emerged on deck, the scarf knotted into a loop to act as a make-shift sling, his broken arm clamped to his chest underneath the unbuttoned front of his greatcoat. London, the city where he'd probably been born and had certainly grown up in, stretched before him as they drew ever closer to the grey ribbon of the Thames.

The Friday made contact with the water and, unlike The Scalawag, lurched with a jolt to port, sending up a great curtain of water that drenched the deck of the other ship. Ezra, reflexes still dulled by the morphine, only avoiding falling flat onto his face by grabbing hold of the stairway railing with his good arm and holding on for dear life.

"Czes!"

"Capt'n! How are- I mean, sorry Capt'n. Bit of a rough landin' there..."