Chapter Text
There was a cat by the fire.
John Silver’s eyes narrowed in slightly hung-over consideration.
***
“God damn the man!” Vane had snarled as Flint stalked off from one of their increasingly hostile pissing contests. His foot lashed out and kicked a nearby stool to the clear disapproval of the tavern’s proprietor.
John had buried his face in his tankard. No use wasting beer and he always preferred to deal with the Captain’s temper on the right side of a stiff drink.
Flint let the door slam loudly behind him and John dropped his empty mug on the bar with a sigh as Vane whirled back around.
“If he’s not going to get his dick wet like a normal man you need to at least get him a fucking cat,” he spat.
He’d been determined not to get involved tonight but –
“A cat?” he’d asked incredulously. “What the hell do you lot get up to on your ship, Vane? At least my men mostly go after the livestock.”
From the expression of slack-jawed shock on Vane’s face there’d been a different meaning to ‘fucking cat’ than the one John had taken.
“Not like-” he’d spluttered with a stunned laugh. Shaking his head, he’d tried again. “Your old bosun – the half-wit. He’d a cat, right? Men who ain’t right in the head sometimes take to animals. Keeps them calm.”
Vane’d gestured loosely towards the far corner of the tavern sending cheap gin slopping out of his cup. In the shadows, John could faintly make out the shape of a hat and more importantly, Rackham, in whose shadow Anne Bonny tended to lurk.
“Anne had two when we first got her,” Vane said casually. “Kept her from accidentally stabbing things so much. And if that bastard captain of yours gets himself wound up much tighter he’s going to need something similar.”
***
The cat was a scruffy looking thing with fur the same pale gold as the surrounding sand and ribs John could count from half-way across the camp. No wonder it was conked out somewhere warm, half-hidden among a pile of dirty cooking pots. It’d probably spent the night working on the leftovers and fallen asleep as soon as it had a full belly.
Hunger and exhaustion, in John’s experience, typically made for an easy mark - and the cat had been simple enough to corral. John’d simply swooped down and grabbed it by the scruff before it had time to wake up.
What he hadn’t reckoned on was getting the damn thing to Flint.
It started quiet, with inquisitive-sounding meowing and the odd disgruntled hiss. But that’d changed as soon as he stepped into the longboat.
Now it was clear John’d found not some whore’s abandoned pet but a back alley stray.
A damp sack hit him in the face before they’d got more than a few yards from shore.
“Keep it quiet or shove it in the sack,” Dobbs huffed between even strokes of his oars. “And if you can’t do that I’ll drown it myself.”
Well, John thought as he sucked at the long, bloody slice on his palm, the cat might be tricky to retrieve from under the bench but at least it was quiet.
***
Somewhere aboard the ship there was an unholy racket being raised and Flint would trade at least two fingers to make it stop.
He was halfway to the door of his cabin to announce as much (with a suitable number of curses for punctuation) when the door banged open to a chorus of inhuman screaming and a loud “-fucking shitbag of a pisswhore’s gutter-sucking flea-ridden daughter!” the latter of which came from a highly disheveled Mr. Silver.
“The fuck is your problem?” Flint growled. His hands were planted firmly on his hips so they didn’t go to his temples.
Silence fell with the same thundersome abruptness as the calm after a storm.
Then: a wary “hraow?” and a more urgent sounding yowl as the cat slipped from Silver’s heavily-padded grasp like coin through a drunkard’s grasp and landed neatly on all four paws. Its tail stood straight up and seemed to quiver and above its pale white muzzle were eyes the soft blue of well-water.
“Ah, yes,” Silver said, straightening. Any trace of abashment or apology already cleared from his features. “I guess that’s settled then, he certainly likes you far more than he likes any of us.”
This once, his missing leg didn’t slow him in the slightest, and before Flint had time to blink - let alone process the cat in his cabin - Silver was on the other side of his door once again.