( ooc: hope this is ok! I left the location pretty vague in terms of where exactly Flint is but please do let me know if you'd like me to change anything! also wrote it up in prose but if you prefer action tags I can match that :) )
The door John stands at can't just be a door. No, this door has to be the door, the journey to it both long and arduous. In some ways, perhaps he's distantly aware that his route to this particular door has been far longer than the physical journey itself. Years long, each passing week stretching away from Skeleton Island, from Savannah, and yet it's never far enough.
He isn't free. At least, not in a way that allows him to truly live. He'd unmade Flint and left what he'd hoped to be a different man, a man at peace, in Savannah. He'd killed Long John Silver in the hopes that the part of him that had become so soundly intertwined with Flint could be laid to rest alongside him. But that hadn't been enough.
Betrayal, he knows intimately, has never left such a gaping wound, has never affected his own sense of identity down to his very core. He used to know who he was, didn't he? His best kept secret, the kind of secret that had been the shield he'd crafted to protect himself from a world full of terror. Scant few had come close to seeing past it, had come close to truly knowing him.
He knows just as well that nothing will fill this empty void he's been carrying around with him, heavy in ways that are unbearable on his worst days. Death had suggested itself as a conclusion on more than one of those occasions. But, even then, he could feel that death wouldn't be enough, wouldn't be enough for him.
So, he had started in Savannah, asking the right questions, carefully collecting answers that had taken him on what still feels like the hunt for a ghost. Terrifying, and bordering all-consuming. Obsessive, much like the ghost he's searching for. All roads had led to here and so he stands, eyes affixed almost unseeingly to this door.
He doesn't know how long he stands there, mind drifting back at an alarming speed, replaying the last time he'd seen the man he's here for. In all likelihood, he has come here to die, to provide an opportunity for retribution, an opportunity for closure. To be put out of this unending misery. It's selfish, of course it is. But he stands here all the same, a hand slowly, shakily, reaching up to rap knuckles against the wooden grain of this door.
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The door John stands at can't just be a door. No, this door has to be the door, the journey to it both long and arduous. In some ways, perhaps he's distantly aware that his route to this particular door has been far longer than the physical journey itself. Years long, each passing week stretching away from Skeleton Island, from Savannah, and yet it's never far enough.
He isn't free. At least, not in a way that allows him to truly live. He'd unmade Flint and left what he'd hoped to be a different man, a man at peace, in Savannah. He'd killed Long John Silver in the hopes that the part of him that had become so soundly intertwined with Flint could be laid to rest alongside him. But that hadn't been enough.
Betrayal, he knows intimately, has never left such a gaping wound, has never affected his own sense of identity down to his very core. He used to know who he was, didn't he? His best kept secret, the kind of secret that had been the shield he'd crafted to protect himself from a world full of terror. Scant few had come close to seeing past it, had come close to truly knowing him.
He knows just as well that nothing will fill this empty void he's been carrying around with him, heavy in ways that are unbearable on his worst days. Death had suggested itself as a conclusion on more than one of those occasions. But, even then, he could feel that death wouldn't be enough, wouldn't be enough for him.
So, he had started in Savannah, asking the right questions, carefully collecting answers that had taken him on what still feels like the hunt for a ghost. Terrifying, and bordering all-consuming. Obsessive, much like the ghost he's searching for. All roads had led to here and so he stands, eyes affixed almost unseeingly to this door.
He doesn't know how long he stands there, mind drifting back at an alarming speed, replaying the last time he'd seen the man he's here for. In all likelihood, he has come here to die, to provide an opportunity for retribution, an opportunity for closure. To be put out of this unending misery. It's selfish, of course it is. But he stands here all the same, a hand slowly, shakily, reaching up to rap knuckles against the wooden grain of this door.