Imagine yourself adrift in the open ocean. You're sturdy at the moment, clinging to salvage from the wreck you've endured and surviving. It feels like years you've been alone out there in the darkness. Every now and then things float by to reassure you that you can survive. This may not be the end for you after all.
After a lifetime of isolation, trusting only in yourself to stay alive, you find something with you in the water. It feels like you've been searching your whole life but now in your hands you see a flare. Something to bring attention to you, to you alone, to let everyone know you are alive and you're fighting.
The water is cold though, so very cold. Each move you make feels as if it could be life or death purely by making the choice. You look down in your hand and consider what you are holding. This flare, this LIFE saver clutched in your freezing mitts is your fate. No matter what happens from here on out, it will all stem from this moment forwards. This one ray of hope.
When this ship sank, you knew everyone you loved was onboard. In the lifetimes since that horrible moment when the hull breached and things begain to sink into the bottomless depths never to be found again, you've had to know that it was all you fault. And not only is the blame solely upon yourself, but throughout all this time cinging to dear life upon your door or upon your floating ring, your driftwood you're broken raft, what have you... All this time you've been alone in the cold darkness of nowhere the only thought in your mind has been how you should have stopped it... But you didn't.
Perhaps this was fate, to live long enough to realise the full consequences of what you've done before you disappear forever. To come to an uinderstanding that you're promises and commitments to keeping everyone on board safe and happy have been completely destroyed in their eyes and that no one will ever believe you again.
This must be why the captain goes down with the ship. When his promise is broken, everything that he is, A CAPTAIN, goes down with him. What life pervays for those who abandon their station? What possible future awaits a captain that begs to be rescued from the people whose lives he has ruined? The men and women he was meant to keep safe, but didn't? There will never be faith in such a man again I would assume.
The best life he could hope for after is for everyone he encounters here-to-in forward to have never have heard of 'Captain Such and such, who abandoned his post and lived a long long life after abandoning those in his care into the black depth of the ocean. If no one ever knew of his past, then mayhaps another life will await him. A life wherein nobody ever had reason to look into his past or ask him how he could go on after doing something so heinous to those that trusted him.
Imagine yourself in that captains shoes. Alone, adrift, cold and numb, debating amongst yourself whether to let go and let it end or keep fighting to no damn reason at all. Imagaine hearing, far far away in the distance, the all too familiar voices of your crew. Of your passengers and friends. Your family, as far as you;re concerned. Imagine holding that flare, knowing that this will be the end of this story, one way or another. Imgaine yourself shooting that flare and getting their attention, only for them to come all that way and see how far you've already sunk. They all know you're a lost cause. Hell, half of them even spit at you as a final unforgiving goodbye. Or perhaps it may go a different way. Perhaps they would make room for you upon their lifeboat. They would ensure your survival all the way to shore, and then some. Make sure you're getting the help you need to become firm and fit and healthy. And then one day, far away, you thank them for everything they've done for you in spite of it all. But they don't answer. They don't aknowledge what you say.
Its then that you realise that you've had it wrong this whole time. It wasn't their love for you that let you not die out there, it was the fact that they couldn't allow that on their concience, unlike you who believed that a fulfilling life lay in the wair just beyond the surface. You caused all this pain, all this hurt and chaos and trauma, you would realise as they lefr you to live a long life alone thereafter.
And so you sit out there, dying in the freezing cold darkness, hearing the voices of the people that mean everything to you, with a flare in your hand. To die with an understanding, or live with shame.
Therein is the captains dilemma. Go down with the ship and preserve that image, or live on a ghost, unable to live a good life, and unable to die the good death, The flare is in your hands.
