titles

I’ve flown on ships where I haven’t known anyone’s names, real or otherwise. Especially after Michlun, and Rigon, when I was drifting, I’d take the look in the Captain’s eye as a promise that I’d get paid, that I wouldn’t be left to die. I was wrong enough times that I started demanding names, I started leaving folk as soon as I disliked one small detail of the job. It’s easy to get work if you don’t care what work you’re doing, and I didn’t. It was nice, sometimes, to be a hired hand, no name and no concern. I could have made a name for myself a long time past, if I’d cared. I like to know names now, like to have the insurance of information at my back when nothing else is.

That said, I wish someone could explain to me how it is I’ve been sailing with a man for weeks now and never even bothered to find out his name. I took him for what he is, a Doctor. Everyone called him Doc, that’s how he was introduced to me and he’s never given any sort of correction to it. So I’ve called him the Doctor all this time. But he must have a real name, a family perhaps, and most certainly a history. He’s never shared one way or another, and right there I should have been suspicious. Like Caban said, he’s the only one aboard who uses their real name anyway. Am I getting senile? Or is it this shaking trust that Caban has inspired in me? Ice would ask if it was truth or stupidity.

It took some searching, and I’ve got more codes than I’ll admit to.

Douglas Mezaro. Doctor, home practice on Paquin. Those words were all I could find, seven words to sum up a life we know nothing about. And it’s not just my curiosity that has led me to wonder. There is something I can’t understand about him, but the problem is that there is nothing of subterfuge behind his eyes, he is all innocent smiles in that sharp foxy face of his. Is his face foxy? My grandparents and my books would say so, but I’ve never seen a fox, so I don’t understand the reference.
Regardless, this Doctor is not who he seems. He is not…trustworthy. He is, despite his membership on the crew, despite his lodgings right across from mine, despite the time he’s spent treating me and Em, a stranger. Douglas Mezaro.