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Howell is accustomed to men howling and lashing out during the procedure; he is accustomed to their bodies racked with shock-shivers dragging them up again and again from the black unconsciousness they chase; has seen them bite and kick and scratch and beg until the last peaceable sigh of either sleep or death washes over them.
He has never seen what he sees in Silver: a feverish desperation to keep hold of consciousness even as the scrape of the bonesaw overtakes the crash of cannonballs against the Carolina shore.
Muldoon kneels at Silver’s head, his fingers pressing the sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes, whispering to him -- it’s alright, Mister Silver, we’ll care for you, it’s alright, you can sleep -- but he shakes his head and sobs, wordless moaning that falters only when the pain must hammer so sharply through him that he cannot even draw breath. Howell grits his teeth and keeps working, his fingers dug into the unmarred flesh of Silver’s thigh. Below the knee, he reassures himself -- below the knee is always a better sign. He can refit Randall’s wooden boot without trouble, he can have Silver walking again in weeks. He can. He must.
“I’m sorry,” he hears Silver say distantly, so quiet and slurred he wonders if he imagined it until it comes again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” someone in the audience says through gritted teeth, and Silver lets out another helpless keening whimper before, for the first time, stilling.
Howell lifts his head to look towards the men at the head of the table. “Is he out?”
One lifts his eyelid; he looks gravely at Howell and nods.
Now it is a flurry. Now Howell can work in earnest, without fear of causing the man to go into such fits that he seizes. He pulls tighter still the tourniquet and peels and carves with all the grace of a butcher, sawing away the ruined meat and digging out enough to leave skin to pull over the remaining stump. He saves as much as he can -- he always tries to save as much as he can -- but is still sickened when the leg comes away and he sees how very much of Silver he is leaving behind.
Silver wakes again only once -- when they cauterize the stump, his eyes fly open and he screams, enough to give his voice out, not a true wakefulness but a man’s desperation to remain alive. The men grimace when they hold him down, but hold him down they do. One tries even to joke with him -- you’ll be a properly frightening quartermaster like this, eh? -- and the word quartermaster fizzles through the room like gunpowder lit.
Howell seals the wound shut best he can, and it holds -- it holds and does not bleed, only the sluggish leaking of pus that follows any amputation. He feels for the first time since he cut off Silver’s boot that he can breathe in full.
The cannon-fire from above has subsided, as well. Either Carolina has burnt down, or Flint has; it does not matter. They are moving into open ocean once again.
“Undress him,” he commands, rubbing some of the blood and viscera off his hands onto a rag. “Get him into clean clothes before he catches ill as well as loses a leg.”
Three of the men set to it, one cutting away his blood-soaked trousers as the other two manouver his torso like undressing an infant. Howell is busy clearing the viscera from the table; he dimly recognizes the mood of the room slowly shifting into something unnameable as Silver’s clothes are stripped away, but he assigns it to the drain of adrenaline that always follows an amputation.
He is already considering which of the men to send to Silver’s bunk for his clothing change when he hears, in a shaken tone, “Doctor.”
Howell turns around, fearing the re-opening of the wound, and sees instead --
He is not sure at first what he sees. It is so incongruous with what he expects that his mind for a moment rejects it, informs him he must be mistaken until he blinks again and sees it still.
Silver’s figure is muscled and lean and unremarkable but for two glaring features. Around his chest is wrapped a thick and sweat-damp cloth, which in the process of undressing has exposed two small, rounded breasts. And between his legs is not the figure of a man’s cock, but a smooth, rounded mound.
The men are quiet, all waiting for another to be the first to speak.
Howell swallows thickly.
“Find me some new bolts of cloth as well as his clothes, then,” he says.
He looks towards the men, who all seem frozen in the same confusion that plagues him.
“Must I assign one of you men to it like a child?” he snaps, and the room breaks again, swarmed in activity as Howell places a hand on John’s shoulder and sighs.
---
Bones informs Flint the next day about what the men in the sickbay told him.
Flint, his shirt still stained with flecks of the Barlow woman’s blood, gives him a verbal lashing for wasting his time, and threatens a physical one if he comes to him with such inane news again.
---
On the second day, while Silver still sleeps, the mess hall goes quiet as some man named Rodgers murmurs, “I’m just saying, if he’s keeping that, who’s t’say what else he might be hiding from us.”
Muldoon feels something in his stomach he cannot identify. Halfway between rage and nausea; a trembling in his hands that sets his fork clattering back down to his plate.
“I dunno if that’s fair,” murmurs the man seated next to Rodgers. “Don’t seem like the same thing.”
“I’m not saying it’s the same thing,” Rodgers shrugs. “Just saying dunno how much I really trust ‘im, now, is all, y’know?”
Muldoon stands, his chair skidding across the deck. At the same moment, he hears a thudding of flesh, a sickening crack.
Rodgers falls on his ass, holding his jaw with one hand, blood filling his palm. Billy Bones stands before him, massaging out his fingers.
“Right,” Bones says. “Anyone else got an opinion on that subject?”
If anyone does, they do not offer it.
---
Somewhere below decks, John Silver sleeps fitfully, watched on rotation by his men and by his Captain.
Somewhere above decks, the quartermaster vote is no contest at all.