There were moments when Vera walked the ship that she forgot herself.

When each corridor had looked and felt like the inside of another ship. When corridors, lined with metal and not wood, had been her constant comfort. And it was the rooms, like the ones on the bridge, that blurred the lines the best. The hallway didn't exactly fit into the pieces in her memory but even twisted up, glimpsed of the past didn't look or behave they way they should sometimes on the Etruria.

Not when the metal railings felt the same under her hands or the voices, overlapping one another, said similar things to a bridge on a different ship. Orders to steady and check watch, keep sharp eyes even in the dark.

However clear her head had been before, it was full now.

She could hear the tick of it through the walls, echo'd back to her from the aft staircase, in the spaces between the throb of her pulse in her head.  It didn't matter how far into the ship Vera went or how many doors she closed between her and them, she could still hear it.

It pressed in around her. A gentle touch to the space between her eyebrows, a finger resting lightly against her skin. And just underneath it, the longing to give up. There was too much ground to cover. The ship was too large and this was only a small part of –

No. No, she couldn't believe that, not here, not now.

She'd chosen the bridge over the crew cabins, seven decks below her feet, because the odds had been better. The choice had been easy. An officer for an officer. She'd picked.

And there had been a wrong answer.

She didn't know yet if she'd chosen the wrong one.

The noise of the navigation bridge drew out her thoughts, amplified her panicked, too fast, breathing. The first half of the officers deck had been empty. Not of passengers but of him. There had been no sign of anyone that didn't belong, but Vera didn't leave marks either. Nothing that couldn't be explained away by anyone looking for her.

It was that thought that had Vera leaving bread crumbs behind.

A glass in the middle of the hallway. A flotation device on an arm chair. She'd thought about opening doors but the officers were constant streams of in and out, and she didn't think an open door would tell her anything, if he had been leaving her breadcrumbs.

She'd thought about leaving her socks on the steps down here to B Deck. The pink set would certainly not belong to the Etruria but Vera had taken a single step away on bare feet when she changed her mind.

It was a small, insignificant line of defence for the water she knew was coming. The thin material would offer no protection and yet, the thought of being bare foot in water so cold it burned, made her chest tighten.

Vera focused her gaze back into the room. Inside the bridge, wide windows look out into where the ocean would be if there had been light left. The Boat Deck is illuminated, the passengers under a blanket of it, but beyond that, there's nothing. The room inside is small and practical. Darkened banks of control equipment, line the wall of windows. The entire room is made of wood and behind it, the wheelhouse where two officers are at their stations.

Neither look up as Vera stepped through them. There and then gone. She was left with empty and with the ache in her body that tingled and spread where the rest of the arm passed through her. She grit her teeth against the sting and stepped into the second half of the officer's quarters.

The bridge, the the officers's cabins that lined it, was one long hallway made up of two squared off hallways. One that branched to the left, the other two the right. Vera had cleared exactly half. Again and again, she'd come up empty. Cabin after cabin, and all the other rooms connected to them.

Vera pushed her fingers into her eyes and set her shoulders against one of the nearest cabin doors. It was closed and from this side of the door, Vera could hear the heavy thread of footsteps over carpet, the hushed whispers of those trying too hard to be quiet and the voices of some who didn't bother. 

With her eyes still closed, Vera shouted down into the hallway. "Hello?"

Her words didn't so much as echo. There was no one there to hear her. She was alone and she wanted to desperately not be alone. Despite her need, Vera drifted deeper along the bright hallway, knocking her knuckles against each cabin door as she did. Counting them the way she counted the bones in her palms to steady herself. Three, four. 

The hallway didn't have any windows – the cabin doors, when opened and left unattended would have let some light in, but the lights above, each spaced evenly apart, were bright enough that she wouldn't have been able to tell it was even dark. That she was surrounded by an endless sheet of nothing but steel and iron and wood and steam.

The hiss of it drowned out the tick of the clock, but both were a constant, dull ache and Vera was unable to ignore them both. And when she tried, they got louder.

Vera's socks sank into the carpet as she stepped into and through another room. Her fingers trialing beside her to ghost along the railing, secured and bolted to the wall.

There were still rooms she hadn't checked.

Places a person could go that weren't connected, directly, to the bridge, but still a part of navigation, but if he hadn't heard her by now, would he? Doubt creeped into her gut. If he had ever really been there, wouldn't he have heard her by now? There wasn't a lot of noise on the bridge. Even under the tick of the clock and the hiss of steam running under and through the walls, she could still hear the officers on the bridge. If she'd been shouting, someone would have heard her.

Vera reached out a hand and braced herself on the wall. An hour, and all she'd done was clear the bridge – maybe. There were still those few rooms, she could still go through the crew cabins well below her feet. Did she go back? Try again down there? Or, should she keep going through the bridge?

The only thing she couldn't do was stop, and yet, she couldn't make her feet move.

An officer crossed in front of her, coming from the direction of the bridge at her back.

His steps were sure, easy, unhurried. The black buttons along his front caught each of the lights on the ceilings the further he walked ahead of her. His uniform was pressed and navy blue, a badge stitched into the side of an arm – identifying him as the first officer.

He was close enough that Vera could reach out and touch him if she wanted too. And there was that tugging again, a tread loose that need to be connected to something. If water breached this ship, right now, where she was standing wouldn't be effected for sometime. Depending on the breach, they may not even feel it. This high up above the water line.

Where would this officer go, up here, in that kind of emergency?

Vera watched him step down the hallway and before she moved to go after him, she saw her mistake laid bare before her. She had done the entire sweep of the bridge because the doors that connected it to the rest of the ship were looking back at her. Big, metal, doors that had a single round window in the top to see out of, and a crank at it's centre. Two water tight doors kept the bridge from the passengers.

Even if a ship was sinking, someone would have needed to stay behind to give everyone else time. Either to navigate away from whatever caused the breach or to send a message for help. These doors would close and there would nothing but the air in the room to keep that person alive until the water found it's way in.

If it found it's way in.

Or else they'd be left chocking on what little air there would be.

Vera turned slowly back towards the bridge, marking the doors that flanked either side of the entrance from this hallway. Water-tight doors. Impossible to open once closed off.

It didn't click at first, but then words that weren't hers bubbled forward and repeated over and over and over in her head like a mantra. On the expedition vessel, the doors could only be opened and closed with an officers key. Vera didn't get it wrong. It was the right choice to pick the bridge but not for the reason she'd thought.

"No. No, no." Not after all this. Not after she'd – the hope died in her chest.

Someone had sent the distress message from the bridge of the Etruria.

And if he was alive, if he was really there, why hadn't anyone found him too?

Vera knew the answer. She'd known it and ignored it. Twisted the possibility into something that served her better but that wasn't true anymore. She had simply wanted to keep them safe. Close to her, where she could see them again if she tried hard enough.

She knew that was why she stayed in Arthurs house. Why she never went into any of the rooms. Why she never touched anything she didn't have too.  She could pretend they were coming back.

She could pretend that there was a way to bring them back. Not alive, she knew. Just back home and placed somewhere she could see them again. Talk to them, outside the echo that lived and snapped and barked at her in her head.

That hope wasn't real and neither was the stranger that didn't belong.

That thought made the tears come harder and she did nothing to stop them. They tracked down her face and over her chin, onto her sweater. She'd been sliding down the wall and now she was tucked up with her knees at her chest. Alone.

Alone because he'd never been there. He wasn't real in the way she was.

The officer from the Etruria Expedition had drowned or suffocated. Probably on the bridge of the ship and she had made him up in her head. Like all the other voices. There but not.

A racking sob escaped her and she let it out.

It took a while before her tears subsided. When she was too tired do more than sit and wait for the timepiece to start chiming in increments. And then the water would come, and she'd have to do it all over again. Every time she closed her eyes.

Vera reached a hand up to wipe at her face, the tears swelling her eyes. The bruise on her knuckles had gone a shade darker than purples since she'd seen it last. Under the yellow light above, it looked sickly and wrong on her skin. She turned her head away from it and rested her cheek on her knee.

Something moved on her left.

Vera could feel it. A bone-deep dread, a wrongness in her stomach. She felt it like a tug under her skin. If she moved, she would see them: Sydney, Arthur, Jay or maybe it would be someone else – another member of the crew that her mind latched onto or who ever her brain conjured in it's place. Someone else that was waiting for her to remember them. It didn't matter, there was no where to hide in this part of the bridge and even then, she couldn't hide from her own hallucinations.

Vera raises her head and turned, slowly, to stare deeper into the ship. A brief, sharp whine snaked from her clogged throat when she saw him standing in his full dress blues and looking like the crew officer in the picture she'd seen of him. Young, hopeful, alive. Except his smile, turned down, and the bruised skin under his eyes, blood vessels popped and pooled in his eyes from coughing. 

But it was his lips, tinged blue and moving that broke what little hold Vera had left over herself. Stay with me. I will. Your fault. Your fault. All the voices compounding into one. Sydney, Jay, Arthur, him. Over and over.

A low moan built in the back of her throat as she looked up at him. She could see it now. He wasn't whole, wasn't breathing, wasn't alive. She could see the finger marks at his throat, deep and swollen against his ashen skin, and, there, against his temple a smudge of red. A sharp indent on the left side of his face. Triangular and deep. The end of a table, maybe, where he'd fallen, not yet dead but dying. 

No. No, no, no. Panic rose, pooling beneath her sternum. Vera tried to control her breathing. It's not real.

He's not real. Vera couldn't move her gaze locked on the officer. He looked back at her for a long moment, then took his first full step towards her.

A whine pulled it's way from Vera's throat. He was dead, he had to be dead, the proof of it was more violent then she'd first imagined. She could feel the panic, imagine the pain and terror. Unable to escape, barley being able to breath, to feel the dry pull of what little air there must have been. The burn in his chest as his lungs screamed and depleted.

The pain and the cold, the numbness that wasn't a mercy. The awareness that air wasn't expanding her lungs. She couldn't breath. This had been her, in another part of the ship, just as alone and hopeless. Buckling and thrashing as water rushed into her nose, her ears. Trying desperately just to keep moving forward while her limbs slowed and stopped responding.

She was running out of breathable air, coughing out what little she could hold onto. But she had to see for herself, she had to see if they were still there. She could save them. If she could just –

Not real, Sydney barked at her.

"Where are you?" Vera voice came out as a whisper, high and thin. He was only a few steps away from her.

The officers mouth moved again, slow and deliberate, but nothing was coming out. The red, swollen lines along his neck churned and convulsed. The whites of his eyes swimming in red. The broken capillaries so stark against his expression. But his lips keep moving, slower now then before and he's closer.

He mouthes something, articulating the words, looking right at her. And then he turns his face to the left, hiding the horrible impression of the dent at his skull.

For a single moment, all of this seems so real. As if they're both standing on a brigade of a ship, having a conversation. Reliving those few minutes before the world snapped in two. And when the officer turns back to look at Vera, his face is almost perfect again. The seconds stretch out between them, marked only by Sydneys incessant screaming over the hiss of stream running through the walls around them, before he staggers to the side and coughs up water.