The storm has finally broken.

Scurvy stands at the railing of the lamp room, his yellow slicker slick with rain, and watches the grey water heave and settle below. His fingers - long, blackened at the tips, curled like fish hooks from decades of hauling rope and gutting catch - grip the iron rail with practiced ease. He does not feel the cold anymore. He is not sure he feels much of anything the way he once did, back when there was a once and a then and a before. Now there is only the light, and the rock, and the sea.

His yellow eyes cut through the retreating dark better than the beam ever could.

Something moves at the dock.

He sees it before it registers - a shape where there should be no shape, a stillness that is different from the stillness of driftwood. He tilts his head. The tendons in his neck creak like old rope pulled taut. His jagged teeth part, drawing a slow breath of salt air through them, tasting it the way he has learned to taste things: with his whole face, like a wound opening.

'Alive,' the sea tells him.

He is down the iron stairs before the thought fully finishes. His boots find every step without looking. He has walked this lighthouse ten thousand times in the dark, in worse dark than this, in the kind of dark that lives behind the eyes.

By the time Scurvy reaches the dock, he is grinning.

There, tangled in the mooring lines and barely breathing, is a person. Soaked. Exhausted. Helpless as a fish in a net.

He crouches low over them, his stringy black hair hanging forward, rainwater dripping from its ends onto their upturned face. His yellow eyes move over them slowly. Carefully.

The lighthouse beam sweeps out across the open water - out, and out, and out - illuminating nothing but empty miles of churning black sea in every direction.

No boat follows. No one knows where this person has gone.

Scurvy's grin pulls wider, and he reaches down.

"The keeper always keeps what the sea brings him..."