Work Text:
“You’re certain it’s him?” Blackbeard tries to sound disaffected, twirling a dagger between his fingers, booted feet propped up on the antique table in his quarters.
Jim leans against the wall across the room, hips out in their favorite slouch, while Izzy shadows the doorway. He’s always watching, these days. Always listening. Blackbeard pretends not to understand what he’s waiting for, and Izzy pretends not to be waiting for anything, arms folded across his chest.
“Can you think of anyone else it might be?” Jim scoffs. “Six unarmed men aboard a dingy taking control of a Dutch sloop in Curacao by convincing the crew the ship is haunted? The merchant said half the crew threw themselves overboard.”
“And the other half?”
“The ones that survived signed articles.”
That’s what does it for Blackbeard. It’s not the taking of the ship or the distinctive fuckery alone. It’s the fact that, in the end, the enemy willingly joined the man’s crew. He can’t think of many pirates who could inspire that response in strangers.
His lip twitches, remembering how quickly the English soldiers had stepped in to defend Stede from Badminton. Across the room, Izzy coughs.
Blackbeard’s smile dies in infancy. “Mister Hands,” he barks, “a change of course!”
“We’re less than a day outside Guadeloupe,” Izzy growls. “It will be over a week, if not more, to reach Curacao.”
“Good thing, then, that we’re not heading for Curacao.” Blackbeard punctuates the declaration, slamming his dagger down, embedding it in the table. “We’ll move northwest, toward San Juan.”
Izzy doesn’t move, and Blackbeard glances up at him, raises his eyebrows. “Something to say, mate?”
“No,” Izzy answers, rolling the words around in his mouth. “I’ll pass along word.”
“See that you do. And get moving, before we lose a good North wind.”
He watches as Izzy goes, feeling the pleasure rolling off the other man’s back in waves. It hits the middle of the room, clashes with the disdain flooding from Jim, and mixes into a typhoon of contrasting emotions. At the center of the storm, Blackbeard leans back in his chair, folding his hands on his stomach, and tilts his head toward the ceiling. When the door clicks quietly shut in Jim’s wake, he smiles.
-
Ivan overhears the next one while slumped a tavern in Santo Domingo the following week. He’s not meant to be at a tavern at all — Izzy had ordered him out for fresh water and flour only, the Revenge running low on basics despite a stockroom still well-supplied with luxury goods. Telling the captain what he heard, he risks losing rations if not limbs, but he ends up bending Blackbeard’s ear next time he passes by the helm alone anyway.
“French soldiers wouldn’t shut up about it,” Ivan grouses, voice barely audible over the crash of waves against the stern. He grips the railing tight with one hand, holding steady on a choppy sea. Blackbeard keeps his arms folded, stance wide at he listens, blank-faced.
“Nothing odd about a French merchant gettin’ captured by pirates,” Blackbeard says. “Happens all the time.”
“Right, but the cargo.” Ivan darts a glance across the quarterdeck, on the lookout for the first mate. “There was nothing worth looting — seeds and fruit and some fabric for a dressmaker. The merchant was just skipping through the shallows from Montserrat to Petite Goave on a quick restock. Then this sloop comes out of nowhere, and—” Ivan releases the rail long enough to bring his hands together, one aiming for the other like an arrow, straight into the side.
The ship lurches on a rough sea, and Ivan stumbles, ribs colliding with the rails. Blackbeard’s thighs strain, his bad knee twinging as he fights to keep himself upright despite the tumult.
Ivan says something else, but the words are lost to the lash of the waves and wind, and Blackbeard shouts back, “What?”
“I said, ‘They were laughing,’” Ivan yells, swaying, both hands tight on the rail. “The Frenchmen, I mean — laughing about what kind of fucking stupid pirate would pick off a ship full of gowns and plants!”
He grins, raising his eyebrows at Blackbeard, who looks away. His beard has grown in considerably, but it’s not yet full enough to hide his expressions. Ivan knows as well as he does exactly what fucking stupid pirate would go for that ship.
Blackbeard does not stumble as he leaves Ivan and approaches Fang at the helm. Fang is sturdy enough to hold himself upright and two more men besides, and Ed resists the sudden urge to lean on him for support.
He does, however, clap a hand on the man’s shoulder. “The storm may lighten if we turn,” Blackbeard shouts. “West, I think.”
Fang raises his eyebrows, cocks his head at Blackbeard. “West, Cap’n?”
“I hear La Habana is in for a shipment of spices.” The winds hit again, harder, the flag above their heads cracking as if the storm is trying to rip it at the seam. “We can catch up with the merchant on the way, take them while they’ve slowed.”
His grip on Fang’s shoulder tightens, a reminder as well as a support, but the man only nods and checks his bearing.
The storm will worsen before it gets better. Clouds to the West of them hang heavy, deep grey, and Blackbeard can hear the rumble of something stronger than a wind on the horizon. As the crew shouts and runs to furl the sails, Blackbeard himself remains on the quarterdeck, riding out the lash of the route he chose.
-
Between tearful pleas that Blackbeard spare his life, the second Spanish merchant they raid is all too willing to give up every piece of information in his brain, from his desperate crush on his brother in law to the location of a secret entrance to his father's house.
Blackbeard barely even had to tickle his throat with a knife to turn the topic to news of the Spanish navy, and that's when news of the captured treasure ship spills out.
"A flag," Blackbeard repeats, slow and careful, "with a cat on it?"
The Spaniard nods, face red and streaked with tears. The movement is jerky, arrested by the knife tip pressed beneath his chin.
"A real treasure ship," Izzy repeats, disbelieving, "with an escort?"
"Si," the Spaniard whispers, then spills out a rattle of words slurred by a thick and desperate tongue. Blackbeard's Spanish isn't half bad, but it's beyond him to make sense of that. He cuts his eyes to Jim, who is lounging near the mast, looking bored.
"He says they raided the ships outside Santiago, kept the loot and the warship that was guarding it, but sank the barque." Jim's eyebrows raise. "Santiago is far behind us."
It is, and a warship will be slower than a sloop. It could be weeks for the other crew to catch up.
Blackbeard removes his knife from the merchant's chin and watches the man slump in gasping relief.
"Swim," Blackbeard tells him. "Swim for your life."
They're at least a day from La Habana without a single ship in sight, but the Spaniard doesn't even hesitate.
"Beautiful swan dive," Blackbeard mutters as the man hits the water with nary a ripple. He tilts his head, pursing his lips. "Shame about the sharks."
"Maybe he can outswim them," Jim offers, leaning against the rail to watch the speck of yellow fabric cutting through the sea. "Oh. Nevermind."
“Change of course, then, Captain?” Izzy asks. He sounds resigned, which is the first step toward him getting tetchy again. He’s running out of toes.
Blackbeard glances over where his crew are still divvying up loot from the merchant vessel, Frenchie helping to count the new additions and stow supplies away. There are several barrels of rations — grain, fresh water, even oranges. Enough to last them quite a while without needing to find a friendly port.
“No,” Blackbeard says, rubbing his chin and feeling the bristles of fresh growth against the grain. “Weigh anchor.”
“Weigh—” He cuts Izzy’s question off with a dagger tickling the man’s ribs.
“Weigh anchor,” he growls, “or I’m working my way up to fingers. Got it?”
Izzy’s brow is dotted with sweat when he nods, flashing a grin despite the bob of his throat. “WEIGH ANCHOR!” he shouts at the crew, turning on heel to stride up toward the helm. “Captain says we’re having a breather.”
“That man needs help,” Jim mutters under their breath, a true master of understatement.
It’s hours later before Blackbeard finds himself on deck again. The sun has long vanished over the horizon, night closing in on what was once the Revenge. The crew are below decks, sleeping, save a few stuck with night duties, and the ship herself is almost still, anchored tight and sails drawn up, bobbing on a peaceful sea.
A quiet melody floats through the still night air, and Blackbeard’s eyes and ears trace the sound to the prow, where Frenchie is perched cross-legged on a barrel with his lute. Jim sits at his feet, back pressed to the barrel, sharpening their knives in the steady light of a single oil lamp.
Blackbeard snags a half-empty bottle of rum from the lax hands of a crewmate already asleep, curled up like a cat in a coil of line. Frenchie’s music only seems to get louder as Blackbeard climbs the mast, scaling it with ease despite being one-handed. His knees and thighs ache with the strain by the time he reaches the crow’s nest, reminding him of exactly how many years it’s been since he had to go into the rigging on the regular.
He stands straight, one hand gripping the mast and the other curled around the bottle’s neck, and looks to the horizon. The sky tonight is clear, aswirl with stars that reach as far as he can see, folding over to reflect a blurred mirror on the sea, as if the ocean itself were full of a vast spectrum of lights, rising to the surface to meet their twinned stars. On the deck below, Frenchie’s playing takes a turn from lilting to mournful, slow and winding as the notes soar up to gather in the sails.
Blackbeard pops the cork from the bottle with his thumb and takes a swig, letting the fire of the rum course through his chest, his veins, and keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon. The salt water breeze carries a hint of lavender.
C’mon, then, he thinks, smiling out at the sparkling sea. Chase me.
-
It’s size that makes the biggest difference between a warship and a sloop. Size and guns, and even with his crew bolstered by a few adopted Dutchmen, it would be a much greater effort for Stede to catch up with his new flagship than if he’d stuck with the first one. Of course, there’s advantages to having more guns, too, but this is a race, not a fight. The only bonus points Stede will get with a bigger ship and more canons will be for style.
If Stede’s goal is to catch Blackbeard, the warship is impractical. In other words, it fits him perfectly.
There’s no reason to worry they’ll be caught too easily. The Revenge is remarkably fast for something of her size, responsive and maneuverable even with a gentle touch like Fang at the helm. For all that Stede made a lot of ridiculous choices designing his ship — the secret passages, the lack of gunpowder storage, the book shelves — he ended up with a real beauty.
That fits, too.
And so, the Revenge remains in place, anchored somewhere in the no man’s land between La Habana and the Keys, the black and white and red of her flag like a lighthouse beacon warning away merchants and fishermen traveling between the ports.
Here there be monsters.
The days crawl by in sunlight and rest, the crew growing sleepy and well-fed on the extra rations despite Izzy’s occasional outbursts, trying to create work on board where there is none. Blackbeard himself stays off the deck, leaves his first mate to give the orders for a few days, so long as the ship doesn’t move. In his cabin, he waits in the window, spyglass always at hand, watching for the first sign of a ship on the horizon.
Sleep still being an occasional necessity, he’s woken on the seventh day by the crew shouting, announcing the sight of a sail. Ed takes a moment to rub his forehead, sore and flat-feeling from pressing to the cool window pane for a few hours, then grabs his dagger from the table on his way out the door.
The ship on the horizon is huge, a frigate, and it’s flying the Spanish flag.
He passes the spyglass back to Fang, who collapses it down and tucks it back into his vest. “What’ll we do now, Cap’n? Run? Or—” he breaks into a smile that hints at how he got his name “ — do we chase ‘em down?”
Blackbeard leans on the rail, hands stiff as they often are of a morning now, and curls and uncurls his fingers over the wood. He smiles, watching the white sails approach, still a shimmering speck like a mirage on the horizon. “Now, we wait.”
-
The warship catches up sooner than he’d expected. He’d hoped to make another run when the ship got close enough to taunt properly, but after a stiff and sleepless night pressed to the window, he’d fallen asleep again in the thick summer heat of the Caribbean. He wakes, hours later, prickly cheek scratching against the silk of one of Stede’s old robes, to canon fire.
“What the fuck was that?” Blackbeard bellows, going from dead sleep to running in an instant. There’s a limp to his gait as his knee locks, but he catches himself on the door, gives a kick to shake things out, and storms onto the deck in full fury. “Mr. Hands!”
“It’s the fucking Spanish,” Izzy spits back from the bow. “What’d you think it would be?”
The Spanish. Not Stede’s hastily-taken new prize bearing down on them, but the actual fucking Spanish navy, and his crew are only just heaving the dripping anchor back up over the side of the Revenge.
“Oh, we are fucked,” Blackbeard groans. “Fuck!”
Stupid. He’d been stupid to make assumptions, forgot there were other pieces on the game board that the universe might play. He can see it in his first mate’s eyes, the burning embers of spite heating to outright hatred. Izzy spins away, shouting at the crew to man the guns, but they’re late, running a page behind in the playbook, and it’s Ed’s fault.
The Spanish ship is bearing down fast despite her size, and the Revenge is barely catching a breeze. There’s no outmaneuvering now, no escape. Blackbeard wraps his hand in the rigging and stares down the oncoming frigate, knowing there’s no other choice. They’ll have to make a stand — maybe the last one they ever get — and hope the devil himself is on their side.
“FIRE!” Blackbeard shouts, and the deck vibrates beneath his feet as the canons roar out, every gun they can get going off in unison, hoping for a lucky shot.
They get it. A ball whips through the air and hits the frigate’s foremast with a crack that’s audible over the waves. Blackbeard watches through the rising smoke as the great beam tilts, slumps.
He crows, drops the rigging to go clap the nearest crewmates on their backs. “That’s it! That’s fuckin’ it! Who did that?”
But the men shake their heads. The few not busy reloading have a stunned look on their faces, a wide-eyed sort of creeping fear that Blackbeard doesn’t like the look of.
From near his elbow comes a soft voice. “There,” Jim says, finger raised, pointing toward the sea.
Southeast of the Spanish frigate is another vessel — smaller, lighter, coming in at a truly incredible speed from its own passing cloud of black smoke, and Blackbeard doesn’t need a spyglass to know what he’s seeing. It’s a sloop, Dutch-built, and while the flag is difficult to see from such a distance, whipping in the wind, Ed can see a curve of black at the center of the cloth, a shape not dissimilar to a cat.
-
Stede Bonnet boards the Revenge as the Spanish vessel is slipping into the sea, its bowsprint thrust into the sky like a blade to slice through the sun. The crew who didn’t make it onto boats are shouting, those few who can swim, but the sound may as well be a gull’s cry for all it matters to Blackbeard.
Izzy reaches Stede first, nose wrinkled and lips pursed as if he’s cleaning up sick instead of helping the man on board, hauling him up by his elbow. “I’d hoped you were dead,” he growls.
Stede, on his feet, brushes himself off and pauses, hands lingering on the lapels of his blue frock coat. “Well,” he huffs, “it’s rather good I’m not now, isn’t it?”
It’s unfair how much the same he looks — a bit more browned, his golden hair swept back from his face, dressed in simple breeches and boots rather than hose. The blue coat is open, no mass of buttons and delicate designs beneath it, but a loose white shirt which, untied, shows a flash of paler skin at the throat. Ed finds himself staring at that hollow. If he pressed his nose there, would the man smell the same, too?
He’s dimly aware that others are now boarding behind Stede, that Oluwande is embracing Jim against the ship’s rail, running frantic fingers through their short and sun-lightened hair. Blackbeard ought to notice everything that happens aboard his ship, but Ed is still caught, unable to rip focus on Stede’s slow, almost dainty steps, his wary approach.
Stede stops with a good foot of space between them — too much and not enough at once, and Ed is torn between pulling him closer and kicking out like a skittish horse, bolting back to his quarters. Stede’s hands flutter at his sides, and Blackbeard watches them settle on his waist, then reach, drop again. Tense, pulse hammering in his chest, he waits for the man to try and touch him.
He’s not sure what he’ll do if it happens. That idea, that uncertainty, makes his heart beat more loudly in his ears. It almost drowns out the sound of Stede’s soft sigh.
“Ed,” he says, hushed, the same reverent and rounded tone he’d used when it was just the two of them, the beach. It’s the first word of a broken prayer.
Blackbeard can’t bear to hear the rest. “I heard you’ve been up to some world class fuckery,” he grumbles, tearing his eyes away from Stede. The last of the marooned crew has crawled back on board, and Fang is in tears greeting them.
Still, Ed doesn’t miss the soft curve of Stede’s broad smile. “You’ve heard of me?”
“I’ve heard,” Blackbeard says slowly, deliberate, “that some absolutely mad pirate has been terrorizing the merchant class by raiding ships for silk and produce instead of dubloons.”
“Yes, well.” Flushed Stede looks even better than before with a bit more sun on his skin. His cheeks could inspire Ed to write songs — better ones. “I didn’t account for the fact that you’d made off with one of the better tailors I had on board.” He tugs at the lapels of his coat again, and now that he mentions it, even Ed can see the flaws and bumps in the seams, the uneven edges and drooping, misplaced buttons. His chest aches.
Stede looks around, craning his neck upward toward the mast. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” he says, jovial enough, and his eyes fixed to the flag means he doesn’t notice when Ed takes a quick step closer, then another.
When Ed runs his fingers along the rumpled lapel of Stede’s coat, the man startles as if struck. Ed can feel him staring, his light breaths barely stirring the air between them, and two pairs of eyes watch in silence as Ed’s touch smears black down the fine blue silk. He’d have felt guilty for that in another life, but this coat is already damaged — droplet stains of dark brown, dried blood from battles and black-rimmed holes where embers caught on the cloth as Stede forged his own path back to Ed’s side. There’s no damage Ed can do it that life hasn’t already done.
“Is this—” His voice comes out strangled. He stops, clears his throat, and tries again. “Is this silk?”
“Satin brocade, actually,” Stede says, sounding like he’s been breathing nothing but tar smoke for hours. What a mess. “It’s a bit sturdier. I thought it would hold up better to—”
The rest of the sentence is lost to Ed’s lips when he yanks Stede in by his stupid, uneven lapels and crushes them together. There’s no tenderness beneath the weight of desperation, only smooth satin crumpled between desperate, clutching fingers and Stede’s hands caught in his tangled, unbound hair.
A cheer goes up from the crew, followed swiftly by Izzy bellowing a threat to kick them all back into the dinghy they came from.
It’s an unmistakable reminder that the mess isn’t cleared up yet. They’ll have to do something about Izzy, and the state of the ship, and the weeks and unsaid words and wounds between them. None of that has vanished in the act of kissing, but Stede is here — alive, glowing, forehead pressed to Ed’s own, the fading screams of the Spaniards they sank together being drowned out by the sea lapping against the hull. Ed presses his hands to the other man’s cheeks, feels the smile curve beneath his palms as he buries his nose in that notch at the base of Stede’s throat, and breathes.