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Chapter Text

He quickly learns that it’s not what he’s saying that causes people to doubt him, but how he’s saying it; and he’s nothing if not adaptable.

He notices at the docks where he first tries to find passage to get as far from his old life as he can, that the naval officers with their commissions and decorations hold the attention of their men in a very specific way. Their cadence carries an authority that Jack has seldom if ever heard. At least, certainly not in Yorkshire.

Their clipped vowels at first force his ears to focus on the unfamiliar speech. The leisurely pace with which they pronounce their commands – unlike any of the orders his father used to give at the shop – seem to elevate the importance of their instructions, orders like:

“The main mast must be repaired swiftly.”

Jack notices the elongated “mast” and it’s stuck in his head like a song that won’t stop repeating.

Of course, other people in London speak in similar ways, but this is coupled with patterns absent from among the officers, and only shows Jack how similar their stations are to his own, if of a slightly different style.

No, there is a way with words that these men in command seem to share; Jack is too ambitious to ignore it. So, he practices. Day after day, forcing his mouth to form unfamiliar sounds, sounds he didn’t hear until he left Leeds. Sometimes he slips up, reverting back to the same voice he grew up with, and the other men aboard look at him like he’s a new – and Jack’s paranoia tells him – lesser person.

When he grows in confidence, he jumps ship; a trends he continues, reinventing himself to match the person speaking, whose voice is a perfect mask of sophistication.

By the time the Georgiana reaches the West Indies, and Charles Vane boards his ship, he’s already taken what he wanted from those commanders from London; any trace of the tailor’s son from Leeds is buried so deep it would be harder to bring him back.

Charles offers him a choice. He shed his voice the way he shed his father’s debts, and tells the world he will owe no one again.

Chapter Text

He’s not sure when exactly he stopped speaking, but he notices, after floating in an endless sea of rope and sails and salt and flogging, that he’s forgotten how his voice used to sound.

He rarely interacts with anyone anymore. In what he later registers was three years of impressment, he has learned how to do his job and do it well, so no one deems him worth shouting at, and he makes no effort to speak to them, either.

It’s only after his ears are ringing with cannon fire, and his hands are covered with the blood of the man who stole his life from him, that he notices someone apparently speaking to him.

“This ship’ll be sinking fast, lad. Best be on our way.”

A hand squeezes his shoulder, and it’s enough to shock William – or is it just Billy, now? The new crew seems to think so – back to the present moment. He knows the voice sounds nothing like his father, with the flat “fast” and a “lad” that just sounds odd, but in that moment he decides it’ll do. He’ll let himself follow this stout man with a tattoo on the back of his head and hope it’ll see him to safety. Or at least, somewhere else.

Some of the crew say he must’ve been beaten one too many times in the head; he hasn’t yet spoken again, in the numbness of it all. But when he does finally find his voice – a voice his parents wouldn’t recognize – it’s a voice he carries happily.

It’s a voice that sounds like the first person to offer him guidance, who even through the kind gesture, never patronizes him. It’s a voice that joins him to the crew.