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Jim presses an ear against the door of their cell, intensely listening to the person breathing on the other side. Deep, steady. Okay. Go.
They slip free, stepping over the dozing guard. They pause mid-step, eyes snagging on the sight of a weapon’s handle from the guard’s pocket. Jim considers. Hesitates. Fuck it.
They slink from shadow to shadow, in rhythm with the rock of the boat. Jim picks a lock and then spends what turns out to be an embarrassingly long time hyping themselves up to burst into the captain’s quarters. Embarrassing because they burst into an empty room. Completely empty. Gutted out and stripped bare. It is deeply uncomfortable to look at, so Jim quietly shuts the door and searches elsewhere.
Up on deck, the psyching up process begins again. It’s easier this time. From where they lurk, Jim sees him leaning over the wheel. He is alone, or so he thinks, and the sight of him pops a white hot aneurysm of fury in Jim’s brain.
The barrel of a gun presses into the side of Blackbeard’s temple. He does not move.
“Three seconds to tell me where my crew is, or I blow your face off.”
The captain’s lopsided smile does not reach his raccoon eyes. “Nah.”
“Huh?”
His lack of fear makes Jim feel a twinge of smallness, of insubstantiality. This dissipates in a curl of smoke when Jim thinks, that’s what he wants.
“Bet it’s not even loaded.”
“Oh, it is.” Jim’s hands stay steady.
“Pull it then.”
Jim hesitates.
Blackbeard counts, “Three. Two—”
Fuck it, double down. They lunge for the knife strapped to his leg.
Rather than sidestep or block the attempt, Blackbeard watches with interest.
A split second later, he has a gun to his head and a knife at his neck. “What if I slit your throat instead?“
“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
Glaring into his murky eyes, Jim knows this fight is lost. They want to kill him. They really really really really want to kill this guy and shove the corpse overboard.
Instead, they pocket the knife. The gun falls to their side. They don’t have the will to decipher what the fuck kind of freak emotion Blackbeard’s showing on his face. Jim flips him off, backing away.
Calmly, Blackbeard reaches into a jacket pocket. He whistles for Jim’s attention and tosses something across the deck. Jim catches.
It’s a cartridge.
Disconcerted, Jim sneaks back into their own cell to stare at the wall for a while. They were out of their element back there. All they had was a gun. Not ideal. Not their comfort zone. Jim twirls Blackbeard’s knife in one hand. The weight isn’t what they’re used to, but it’s an upgrade from the gun. This, they can properly work with.
They sleep with one eye open.
The following day passes uneventfully. The guards on the other side of the door rotate with no concern. Their captain doesn’t seem to have alerted anyone that a captive slipped loose in the night.
When night falls again, Jim has a plan. A solid plan. The plan is: Stab the hell out of Blackbeard, get your answers before he bleeds out.
He’s clearly unconcerned with avoiding death, but everyone avoids pain after a certain threshold. It’s a caveman instinct. Right?
Besides, Jim’s pretty sure Frenchie is still around somewhere to stitch him up after.
They sneak out of their cell again and this time, they wait. They wait for Blackbeard to retire to his quarters for the night. Then, they wait a while more before following, hoping to catch him in his sleep.
Jim draws the knife taken from Blackbeard the night prior, ready to throw it the moment they slip inside. Their chest tightens at the damp creaks of the ship’s bolts beneath their feet and the handle as it turns beneath their hand. They take a deep breath and plunge into the room, blade poised.
The captain's quarters are empty.
Jim blinks in the moonlight, frozen still with their knife still raised. How is it empty? They watched him go in. There isn’t even a single piece of furniture left in the gutted out room for Blackbeard to be lurking behind. He simply vanished.
Already on the verge of reconsidering the legitimacy of ghost stories about Blackbeard, Jim hears a disembodied wail behind them. Heart pounding in their throat, they whirl around to find nothing but darkness and a bookshelf stripped bare.
Wait…
Jim stands still, quiet, for as long as it takes. Eventually, they hear it again. A sob from behind the wall. They tiptoe to the wall, slowly feeling along the edges of its panels. When that yields nothing, Jim turns to the shelf. They feel around until their elbow jostles some trinket left there and, without understanding how or why, a panel in the wall swings open.
In the room beyond, Blackbeard crumples in a pile of frilly shirts. His watery eyes meet Jim’s. They stare at each other for a horrifically awkward moment. Jim tugs the trinket-lever on the shelf again to end it. Blackbeard jumps to his feet, which snag on the pile of fancy clothes, and the door closes on him before he can get out.
“What are you doing here?” he hisses, one arm clawing at Jim while the other fights against the mechanical door.
Jim steps out of reach from his black glove’s aggressive swipes. “Just trying to stab you in your sleep, man.”
“You—” With a grunt, Blackbeard squeezes free and the door clicks shut behind him, blending seamlessly with the wall once again. “You were? Oh man. You can go out and come back in and try it again. I’ll just lay down over there—”
“What? No.”
“Why not? C’mon. I’ll act surprised.” Blackbeard fakes a surprised gasp to prove it.
“Pretty sure I just saw real pain and shock on your face, and that wasn’t it.”
“You didn’t see anything,” Blackbeard growls so ominously that Jim instinctively raises the knife between them in response, “And if you did, it was one—manly—tear.”
“Sure, whatever. Your tear had biceps.”
“I never skip tear duct day.”
For the second night in a row, Jim backs off despite badly wanting to maim this walking disaster bastard of a man.
The next time they clash, it is Blackbeard who comes for Jim. Not with a knife or a gun, but armed with Jim’s diary. They recognize the journal in his black gloved hands the moment he enters the guarded room.
“Why do you have that?”
“Oh, we went through all your stuff,” he answers distractedly, leaning against a wall and flipping through the pages.
If he’s planning to threaten the journal, joke’s on him. Jim’s not sentimental about it. They only kept it out of frustration during their vow of silence and have barely used it since they stopped being mute. It’s written in Spanish anyway, so Jim’s not concerned about anyone reading its secrets.
“Estoy atrapado en este disfraz,” Blackbeard reads out loud with alarming fluency, “En una prisión de mi propia creación. El precio de la venganz—”
“Te voy a arrastrar por el pelo,” Jim snarls.
They swing at him, not with a knife, but with an open hand. Blackbeard recoils, face twisted more in shock than offense as the slap rings in the air. Jim doesn’t know what possessed them to do that. The only person they’ve ever slapped in their life was their brother. Jim takes advantage of this stunned beat to wrest their diary out of Blackbeard’s hands. Something activates between them—A flurry of slaps and shoves and hair-pulling in close quarters. It throws them against the wall, until Jim trips Blackbeard’s leg out from under him and sends them wrestling across the floor.
The fight is short and the violence mild, but the fury is potent. When Jim breaks off with the diary triumphantly pressed to their chest, Blackbeard is repelled to the opposite corner by some twin magnet.
“Why are you still Jim, if you hate the costume so much?” He asks, utterly casual, as if he isn’t still out of breath from their little smackdown.
“Jim isn’t the costume, comemierda.” They set the diary aside, uninterested in what happens to it now that the principle of the thing has been taken care of. “It was the stupid black beard.”
“It’s not stupid,” Blackbeard snaps, and then—maybe—sniffles?
“Are you—Are you crying over my diary?”
“What? No. What is it with you and thinking everyone’s crying all the time?”
“It’s only you that I find crying all the time.”
“It was one time.”
Blackbeard slams the door on his way out.
Jim takes a moment to clench their fists and growl at the wall before storming after him.
“Ey?” The guard at the door shouts behind them.
“What do you even want from me? Why did you keep me here?” Jim demands, struggling against Ivan attempting to tug them back to their cell.
Blackbeard slams another door, the one to his quarters, without looking back.
That’s it. Jim has to kill him. They feel themselves sliding backwards into the way they were trying not to be. If hatred doesn’t fill them any longer, then what will? In the absence of love, what else can keep the emptiness out?
The next time Jim tries to stab Blackbeard in his sleep, it almost goes off without a hitch. He does not stir when Jim picks the lock and slips in, nor as Jim creeps to his bedside. Jim does everything right. The problem is, they can tell Blackbeard is not really asleep. The breathing, the movements beneath his eyelids, it’s all not right.
Why does it matter? Since when do they care about being an honorable killer?
They poise Blackbeard’s knife right over the stupid apple of his throat. It stays poised. In that moment of hesitation, Blackbeard’s eyebrows twitch—expectantly? hopefully?—in fake sleep and Jim loses it. They plunge the knife into the pillow by his face.
“I give up, I can’t—I hate you—”
His mouth scrunches to the side of his face. “Thought you’d be better at this.”
“Don’t even talk to me—”
Blackbeard’s dark eyes open placidly and he stays reclined on the skewered pillow, arms folded calmly over his stomach. “How many people have you killed? Be honest.”
“What do you care?”
“I mean, you asked why I did something terrible to you on purpose and then kept you around on purpose.”
Jim’s face flinches in disgust. “You kept me around hoping I would assassinate you?”
“You keep getting so close. What do you want from me? Reading your diary’s not personal enough?”
“You think I’ll kill someone for reading my diary?”
“I mean, yeah, you have the vibe. I also left your friends to die, so—ow—”
Jim punches his arm. “You’re gonna turn this ship around.”
Blackbeard half-heartedly attempts to punch back, but doesn’t commit enough for it to escalate to anything more than another slapfight between them. How the hell did Bonnet get through to this guy?
Over the mess of elbows and open hands between them, Jim reluctantly adds, “They’re your friends too.”
He abruptly clamps both of Jim’s forearms in a death grip and pulls himself up to sit straight, glaring into Jim’s face. “They don’t even know me. I don’t even know you. You won’t even tell me your bodycount.”
“One,” Jim grunts, extricating their arms from his grip via a complicated twist that leaves Blackbeard puzzled. “Just one.”
Jim backs off, takes a seat on the edge of the bed near Blackbeard’s knees.
“One? Huh.” To their mild surprise, he shifts one leg beneath the other to make room. “Kind of expected you to be more prolific, or at least serial—”
“Well, I’m not. I was groomed to be a perfect killing machine and it turns out I don’t have the—guts—or whatever—for serial assassination. ”
He’s weirdly staring at Jim with some kind of knowingness, lit in gloomy shades of moonlight.
Jim averts their gaze to the window, where black waves glitter bright beneath the moon’s glow. “If Spanish Jackie can have a drink with me after I got two of her husbands killed, I don’t see why I have to kill you for—whatever all this is. It’s reversible.”
“Thought you only killed one guy.”
“Yeah, well. She beat me to it on my second try. I didn’t wanna follow through. Much as I flaunt it, I don’t like what I’m good at.”
“That’s rough. I mean, huge disappointment.”
Jim nods bitterly. “I am, actually. Thanks for noticing.”
Blackbeard’s head slowly tilts toward the window, leaning his forehead on the glass. “You probably feel so humiliated and miserable and alone and you don’t want to be here, you really don’t.”
“Me? I feel that?”
“Hm?” He snaps out of his thoughts, then adds with studied casualness, “Yeah, I’m talking about you. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Jim does not like where this is going. They’re not a feelings person. When Olu tried to talk about feelings in the past, Jim’s automatic reflex was to knock something over and slip away while he cleaned it up. That’s not what Bonnet would do, is it?
Lord. Alright. Time to talk it out. For your crew.
“La vida es dolor,” Jim sighs.
Blackbeard responds with a deep hum of instant agreement.
Jim talks about pain and expectations and anger and daddy issues. How the desire to lash out and hurt those who hurt them is a wound that won’t close for as long as they breathe, that will need to be painfully cleansed and maintained for the rest of their life. At the very best, at their most self-realized, it will still feel like hunger without appetite. How even the good feelings are a wound, the way your skin rejects an earring you desperately wanted to keep. It all hurts, all the time, forever.
How they speak is somehow pathetically vulnerable and guarded at once. Two wild animals uncomfortably circling the other as they share shelter for one night. Jim tracks the length of their conversation by the light slowly changing from grey to orange on Blackbeard’s face. It circles around to their unwilling loyalty to violence. Learn to fight back, learn to defend yourself. Life is a fight. Inflict pain and fear to establish your place. How we are conditioned to be to survive is dehumanizing. La vida es dolor.
A firm knock at the door comes as a harsh reminder that there is a reality outside of this nook in the window. Their mutual shelter is compromised.
Blackbeard knees Jim in the back to push them out of bed. “Hide.”
“Where?” Jim hisses, gesturing at the absence of Stede’s furniture in the wide empty room.
He pushes them toward the bookshelf with no explanation. As Jim reaches around where they accidentally opened it from before, the door to the captain’s quarters creaks open and Blackbeard nearly trips over himself in a rush to block the frame with as much of himself as possible.
“Your door was unlocked.” Izzy’s voice.
Silently cursing, Jim slides through the hidden passage and tries to close it without a sound. The last thing they see before it closes is Izzy attempting to peer inside. They press their ear to the wood, praying to Mary that the movement or soft click shut did not draw his eye.
“I heard you talking.”
“I talk in my sleep.”
“No, you don’t. There’s a knife in your pillow.”
“Wasn’t a good conversation partner.”
“One of the captives is missing.”
“Nah, I let ‘em out.”
“Where are they?” A pause. “You let the deadly knife-thrower out and you don’t know where they are.”
“Yeah, it’ll be fun. Most dangerous game. Keep you all on your toes. The ones you have left.” Another pause. A long one. “And Izzy? I want the ship turned around. Back to the maroons.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
The door to the captain’s quarter closes. Jim listens to two sets of footsteps fade away, indicating that Blackbeard took Izzy with him and left them locked in Stede’s closet. Stede’s other closet. It’s ridiculous. It is in disarray, with most of the shirts tugged off their hangers to a pile on the floor, but strangely comforting to sit in. Jim curls themselves into a corner and gets some sleep.
They are days away from where the crew was deserted. In those days, Jim witnesses first hand how Blackbeard comes into the secret closet and just sort of lies on the floor for a while after a long day.
“Know what’s funny?” Jim doesn’t wait for an answer. “Oluwande moved all my stuff out of our room when I left, too.”
Blackbeard stares at the ceiling for so long that they assume he has nothing to say. So long that it startles Jim when he asks, “What made you come back?”
“Nothing.” Normally, Jim would stop right there. Something about being among Stede’s things possesses them to be slightly less freakishly secretive. “I just wanted an excuse to run away when things got too real with Olu.”
“Sucks for him.”
“Yeah, I know. At the time, I could choose between returning to my abandoned duty that I’m totally apathetic about or some unknown future with another person that I care way too much about. When you realize your choice sucked, you just… gotta go back.”
Blackbeard says nothing, but the way he stares at the ceiling seems to become somewhat hopeful.
“What are you gonna do with my crew?”
He does not answer.
The air is clammy and salty on the morning that the ship has finished retracing its wake. With Blackbeard’s oversight, Jim frees Frenchie and the pair get a dinghy ready. They overhear Fang trying to make a bet with Izzy on which of the Bonnet crew got eaten first. Izzy’s calm makes Jim wonder what Blackbeard told him the plan was.
“Jim, what is going on? What is happening?” Frenchie frantically whispers as they climb down a ladder over the ship’s side.
“Iunno. We’re getting our guys and then—I dunno.”
“He’s gonna maroon us, isn’t he?”
The thought had not occurred to Jim, and it terrifies them, but is proven wrong by Blackbeard climbing down after them and dropping into the dinghy behind Jim. He points them to a small land mass, barely visible through the mist. As they row closer, moving shapes become clearer and voices carry across the water.
Jim can’t help shouting, “Olu! Olu, I’m almost there!”
An entire chorus cries back, “Jim?”
Frenchie’s rowing turns frenetic. Jim struggles to keep up—because it’s hard to look away from Blackbeard. His expression is tired, but the emotion is inscrutable. Jim doesn’t know why he came alone with them. Maybe for the same reason he kept Jim around, hoping someone will be crazed enough for a crime of passion.
His face twists as it stares at the land, and he asks, “Jim, is this real?”
Jim’s head turns in the direction of his gaze. They are relieved to see their entire crew dashing into the water to meet them. Oluwande, Roach, Black Pete—Stede? Jesus Christ, Stede Bonnet is there. He’s waving.
Jim hears a click from Blackbeard’s belt and in a heartbeat they are yelling and pulling at his arm as the pistol comes up. It fires into the water.
“Ed, let go,” Jim growls into his ear as he struggles, “He left you. You left his friends for dead. That’s it. You’re even.”
If Jackie could use this line on them, it should work for him.
He takes a sharp inhale and the gun clatters to the floor of the boat. Jim sighs heavily and releases his arm, then pats it in half-consolation and half-relief. Frenchie’s already grabbed the gun and tosses it into the water with a splash. Nice.
“Don’t fuck this up for me, Ed,” Jim mutters in his ear. “I opened up to you.”
He swallows, then nods.
“Good. Gimme your knife.”
“What?”
“You lost your weapon privilege.” Jim holds out their palm and demands, “Give it to me.”
Rolling his eyes and cursing beneath his breath, Blackbeard’s hand goes to the sheath at his leg. It grabs at empty air.
He glances down to find his knife missing. “You fuckin’ took it already.”
“Yeah.” The knife twirls in their other hand. “Just wanted to know you would if I asked. Alright. Stay here.”
Jim and Frenchie dive over the dinghy’s side, abandoning it to splash toward their family. They both blissfully crash into Oluwande’s arms at the same time and it’s like coming home. As they squeeze Olu tight, Jim opens their eyes and catches sight of Stede slowly doggy-paddling out to meet Ed.