Work Text:
The love of a pet is a foreign concept to Israel Hands. His father always had a dog or two–big, half-starved, savage-looking fuckers. It never occurred to him to love them; they had jobs to do, like all his father’s creatures. And if they didn’t do those jobs, they weren’t worth keeping around.
And so he doesn’t understand the monkeys and the parrots, doesn’t like or trust them. He’ll tolerate a ship’s cat: they keep millers out of the ropes and the rations. But tolerance is not affection.
His father used the dogs to scare men, sometimes to hurt them. He used them to fight other dogs. He used them the way Blackbeard uses Izzy.
His father used to strike the dogs, when they misbehaved, or when he was angry, or sometimes out of thin air, “just to keep ‘em mean.” Edward has struck Izzy the same ways. The cut of a lash when the rum ration went up in flames, the quartermaster with it. The furious blow of a fist or the hard edges of a backhand, knuckles heavy with plundered rings: rage over plans gone wrong, or increasingly, Izzy’s refusal to enact plans that surely would. Maybe he’s refusing more because Edward’s getting crazier. Maybe he’s refusing more because he likes to taste the back of Edwards’s hand. Maybe a little bit of both.
The third kind of blow never has a point or purpose, but Izzy has begun to be able to predict it. There is a moment just before that reminds him of storm weather: when the wind drops, when the sails go slack, when the sun hangs wan and still, unmoving in the cottony sky. The kind of weather that is holding its breath.
It’s the same kind of feeling he gets when the candles in Edwards’s cabin have burned down to wicks in liquid wax, when the bottle is nearly empty and the rest of the crew is asleep.
The ship’s cat, who always hisses and hides before a storm, does not notice this particular kind of pressure change. But Izzy’s internal barometer is attuned differently. He never flinches, even when he knows the blow is coming. Maybe he leans into it a little. Maybe he savors the sting.
He watches the weather and waits, because doesn’t know how to ask for it. And if he did, he wouldn’t dare.
The dogs used to whine and cringe and grovel for his father, and he always thought it was out of fear, or respect, which to Izzy is the same thing or near enough. It never occurred to him that, hungry and afraid and starved of a gentle touch, they desperately craved the love Izzy’s father had cautioned him never to give. That unlike Izzy, the dogs had never unlearned the art of asking for affection.
And if his father’s hand sometimes fell to their boxy heads when they lounged by his chair, if he sometimes absently tugged their tattered ears, if he sometimes told them “Good boy,” that was simply a just reward for their service.
Love ruined a good dog, his father always said. And for Edward, Izzy wants to be the best dog there fucking was.