Chapter Text
The seeds are sown far too early.
But what is the matter of a few centuries to a creature as old as the Earth itself?
*
The Kraken’s story will be told.
The night Edward Teach kills his father, he leaves his house with a rope in his hands, full of vengeance and anger. For the few paces it takes him to catch up, he believes that this will be enough.
The man is drunk, but he’s twice Edward’s size, and Edward himself is skinny and hungry and still so young, like his mother says, still just a boy. Drawing closer, he remembers the stinging slap he’d heard, remembers the strength and the force behind it, and he falters.
But it’s too late.
He’s made his decision, and he will go through with it or his father will turn and see him, and that will be the end. A storm rages, churning the sea into foam and spray and, frightened out of his mind, Edward Teach’s soul cries for help.
Young Edward Teach prays.
The god of this place, the god of his father, whose name is only ever spit out in anger - he does not answer. But something below the depths smells his anguish and rises to the surface.
It answers his call.
Edward welcomes the sudden power under his skin, and it is enough to let him surge forward and do the deed. Something dark and immense and eternal has made its home under his skin now, too much to be contained within the body of a boy so small, and yet when he catches his reflection in a window, he sees it - a shadow at the edge of his vision.
I am here.
The words are a promise. An agreement. A threat .
He reaches for it, whoever it is, whenever he needs it, and it always comes when he calls.
He dreams of the deep, of thick coils of rubbery flesh, immense and eternal and desperate to be remembered.
The details of that night fade, but he carries the dregs of them in the stories he tells around firelight. The Kraken’s story.
It gathers keepers young and old.
Izzy Hands lives half a lifetime of devotion to Edward Teach. To Blackbeard. To the Kraken.
He places his heart in the palms of those he is loyal to, and trusts that whatever happens from there is what is good and right. As if that kind of power, that kind of responsibility can be handled by a mere man. As if that kind of power is not tasted most keenly in the abuse of it.
Izzy Hands gives his heart to a boy who has made a pact with the sea, a boy who already carries his fill of burdens, who has no hope of making sense of this raw, bleeding gift.
He might have lived out his entire life waiting for Edward to understand.
But then he meets Roach.
Izzy has never fit anywhere except for in someone else’s shadow, and Roach has found the shadows to be a wonderful place to hide. They meet there and realise that perhaps they are not so different after all.
From sandy shore to raging sea
Roach and Izzy chase each other around the galley, brandishing knives and scaring the shit out of everyone until they realise the two of them have somehow found a common language.
It is in the meaning of a blade that caresses the flesh but does not break through, in the way Roach threads his fingers through Izzy’s hair and pulls, his breaths hot and urgent against his skin, in the promise that lingers there against the shell of his ear, against his throat, against his mouth.
He knows Izzy would carve his own heart out and place it in his hands because he too knows devotion only in the terms written out by the blade of a knife. He realises, therefore, that above all else Izzy must know that he will never, ever require it of him.
And Izzy - sometimes Izzy can barely believe his good fortune, when his hands, his life, his very soul is stained beyond repair with the blood he’s spilled. But Roach sings to the ship’s goats while he milks them, and Izzy cannot help but stare in a kind of wonder he’d thought had been long since beaten out of him.
Roach hands him a cup, then laughs at the white smear it leaves on his moustache. He feels so light he doesn’t know what to do with the feeling, like his feet might lift right off the deck while he floats away. He’s giddy with it, but some nights he still weeps for fear of losing what he’s found.
The Kraken rules eternally
Far too late into his life, Edward Teach discovers what it is to truly rest. He’s been running ever since he left the corpse of his father behind on that pier, and exhaustion has embedded itself into his bones like a fine grit. Stede makes everything skid to a halt, and it is the tragic truth that his world must shatter before they can hope to rebuild something new.
But rebuild it they do.
Journeys end in lovers meeting.
At night the sea still calls to him, fills his mind with smoke and tethers him to a promise he never remembers making. But now when he wakes, it’s to a man with golden hair and eyes that crinkle at the corners, and he lets the images slip through his fingers as easily as breathing.
They stop. They rest. They heal.
But beneath his skin, Edward Teach feels the dormant power still, there to rise up should he ever need it. He finds it a triumph, that he does not reach for it again.
At least, not in this lifetime.
When sailors come to beg for grace
If the murder of his father was the tipping point for Edward Teach’s prayer, the day a stray bullet rips through Roach’s chest is the day Izzy Hands falls to his knees.
The bullet takes what little life Izzy has managed to scrape together and sinks it to the bottom of the ocean. It is waiting for him to join it.
Roach is buried at sea, and while the crew screams as Izzy dives into the deep, Edward simply watches, knowing. He knows this, the sound of someone begging for mercy, from whoever will listen. Though he cannot articulate the details, he knows that there is but one who will answer.
The water freezes Izzy’s blood to ice as he swims down into the depths of the water. He swims for a long time, not realising that he has long since passed the point where a man would run out of breath. He has ceased to breathe, his body growing cold and blue, the light receding behind him until he faces the sky below - the depth of the ocean that glitter with a starlight all of their own.
He sits on the bottom of the ocean and he waits. Before too long, a voice, low and rumbling, reverberates through the water.
“Is it I whom you seek?”
“Yes.”
“State your request, man of the sea.”
“There was a life, taken too soon-”
“Speak the whole truth, man of the sea.”
Izzy closes his eyes. He goes to breathe out a sigh, and realises there has been no air left in his lungs for a long time. A small flame of panic flickers to life inside his chest.
“The life of my love. Taken too soon.”
“And who are you to decide this?”
“Nobody. I’m nobody.”
“So you offer your life in return?”
“What? Fuck off, I sure as fuck do not. What’s the fucking point of that?”
“A life for a life. The exchange must be equal.”
“Shit.”
Silence while Izzy mulls this over.
“A future life, perhaps? You will give me your next life.”
“My next… you know what? Sure. Whatever. Just… just give him back to me. Please.”
“Take a deep breath, little one. Birth is always painful.”
It gathers them in cold embrace
The sun is shining when Izzy’s head breaks through the surface of the water, and he takes his first breath of air in a full day. Beside him, Roach claws his way up as well, splashing and gasping in panic. Their bodies ache, their limbs are leaden with fatigue, and their throats are raw as though they’ve been screaming. They barely manage to paddle their way to the ship, and it’s only because Izzy knows somewhere deep down that he’s bartered too much for this to let it go now, that he manages to summon the strength to call for help.
Roach is speechless with terror, and Izzy barely registers how frightened he’s been too until they’re back on the deck, the sun in their eyes, surrounded by a mixture of confusion and delight that they are both somehow alive, that he allows himself to hold Roach to him and wail, clinging to sodden, dripping clothing as he presses their bodies together, desperate to feel Roach’s heartbeat against his own.
“Don’t you dare fuckin’ leave me again,” he whispers, “don’t you fucking dare .”
That night, under the cover of night, they make another promise in silence. Izzy slips the ring from his cravat and slides it onto Roach’s pinky finger. Roach unfastens his amulet and ties it around Izzy's neck.
The two of them never take them off again.
Their souls for mercy will be sold
The Kraken’s story will be told
*
Blackbeard and The Gentleman Pirate leave their names behind for history to remember.
Their love, they take with them.
The Kraken's price is steep, but there are some things even it cannot touch.
*
“The closest a person can get to understanding eternity is to go out to sea and wonder where the horizon might end. Surrounded by the endless ocean, the dome of sky stretching overhead, all of it indifferent in its enormity to the blips of humanity that brave the waters, one might receive a glimpse of what it means to be truly without beginning or end.
In the heart of those depths, where time is meaningless, the Kraken waits. It watches the passage of its souls through the nothingness, until they are ready to be reborn and pay their debts.
The Kraken’s story will be told.”
“Wait. Hit pause. I need to fuckin’... I need to process this.”
Roach stretched his leg out from where it was tucked under him, and pressed the spacebar on his laptop with the heel of his foot. A bowl of chips teetered dangerously on his knee as he did so, and Frenchie shot his hand out to rescue it before it spilled all over the couch.
“Okay,” said Frenchie, shoving a handful of salt and vinegar chips in his mouth and crunching while he tried to get his thoughts in order.
“Okay,” agreed Roach, exhaling a cloud of musky smoke into the air. Frenchie snagged the joint from his fingers, took a moment to brush the salt and crumbs from his moustache, and then held it to his lips. Roach watched him hold the smoke in his lungs for far longer than was necessary.
“Hhhhhhokay,” said Frenchie, releasing a haze of smoke into Roach’s face, “I’ve done some thinking about this, and I think the Kraken’s full of shit.”
“Oh? Tell me more about this Kraken theory, do you know him personally?”
“No, because I don’t think he’s real .”
Frenchie sat up straighter. He meant business.
“Listen, everybody knows that the biggest source of oceanic pollution out there is fishing nets, right? And the Kraken’s meant to be this gigantic, like, big tentacle monster thing. Right?”
“Right,” nodded Roach.
“So why haven’t they caught the Kraken in one of those fishing nets yet? They’re all over the ocean! Statistically speaking, if the Kraken really is eternal, that’s a lot of time for fishing.”
“I think you have a point here,” said Roach, scratching thoughtfully at his beard, “but I think also we should let the man finish. Perhaps he has some insights we have missed.”
He stretched out his leg again and mashed some of his laptop keys, finally managing to land on the spacebar.
“That was from the diary of an old seafaring gentleman back in, oh, the early seventeen-hundreds? As far as I can tell so far, there’s a lot here about guiding souls, enslaving souls, bringing souls back from the dead. I suppose you’ve got to keep busy when you’re hanging out down at the bottom of the ocean. Anyway, that’s just a taste of next month’s episode of Cryptids On Call. I’m very excited about putting this one together - I’ll be visiting the seaside town of Geelong in a few days to look at some local Kraken lore… and of course have a look at the work of their famous street artist, Blackbeard!”
Roach and Frenchie stared at each other, their eyes widening in delight.
“Holy shit-”
“He’s coming here?”
“Oh my god-”
“Oh my god-”
“I’m Stede Bonnet, and I’m absolutely delighted to have had your company. I’ll be on my way to bring you more Kraken content in the next month, and until I see you again, there’ll be no rest for the cryptid. Toodle-oo!”
*
On the other side of town, in an old warehouse that had been gradually converted into a studio, Edward Teach scribbled designs onto butcher’s paper with a feverish urgency.
They needed to clean. The sharp tang of acetone burned his nostrils and something, somewhere was filling the air with the damp stench of dishes that were starting to go mouldy. He needed a new workbench too - this one was notched and pockmarked from craft knives and blowtorches and carving tools, and with every new splinter that pricked him he swore he’d get a new one. Once this project was finished.
He just had to-
His mind was pulled back to the task at hand, and any meandering thoughts evaporated into the air.
The urge had come upon him that morning, had wrenched him from sleep and sent him to his workroom, calling for Izzy to wake the fuck up already. Izzy, as always, had trailed wearily behind him.
He wasn’t sure what it was that guided his hand in the dark, manic swirls of graphite. Only that it would not let him be until he was finished, or until he crumpled under the sheer weight of exhaustion.
“Izzy,” he said, snapping his fingers, “paper.”
He heard the answering grumble but did not acknowledge it, knowing that within a few moments new paper would be placed at his elbow. No matter how pissed off the two of them were at each other, Izzy always did as he asked.
Shapes began to take proper form. The creature that had become his signature emerged from beneath his hands - a creature that struck fear and wonder alike into those who saw his work. A reminder of the depths of eternity.
The Kraken.
Art critics marvelled at his work and wondered if he’d been touched by the gods. A true artistic mind, motivated by nothing but the desire to simply create.
Privately, Edward felt like he’d been cursed.