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The first time Roach asks Izzy about the glove is when he’s sliding his hands under the cook’s shirt, blunt nails dragging over sensitive skin on one side of his chest, supple leather caressing the other.
“During sex too?” Roach murmurs, half joking.
Izzy’s hands still on his ribcage, only moving with the in and out of his breaths.
“Is that going to be a problem?” says Izzy.
His voice is clipped. Irritated. Roach doesn’t know Izzy all that well, but he knows enough by now to have figured out this means he’s afraid. After all, neither of them would have made it this far if they’d continued to take each other at face value.
“Not for me if it is not for you,” says Roach quietly.
Izzy searches his expression, then seems satisfied with what he finds there.
“Good,” he says, squeezing firmly at the flesh at his sides, “because yeah. It’s staying on.”
*
The second time, they’re in the galley together. Izzy’s been helping out from time to time, peeling potatoes, slicing carrots, chopping onions. It turns out that swordfighting is nothing like using a knife in a kitchen, but Izzy’s a quick study, and Roach doesn’t really care if he doesn’t get all of the pieces even. It all looks the same once it’s in your stomach, he says. He knows, because he once disembowelled a man shortly after he’d had dinner, and had been fascinated by the contents.
Today though, they’re making bread. Izzy stares at the dough that Roach turns it out onto his countertop.
“You will need to take that off,” says Roach, nodding at the glove.
Izzy doesn’t hesitate.
“I’ll have to find something else to do then,” he says tersely.
Roach knows better than to press the matter.
*
The third time, Izzy knows it’s coming. They’ve agreed on a sort of exchange, sitting together on their shared watch under the stars. Neither of them are much for gifts - they each have jewellery that is more like a talisman, and they both have scraps of clothing that they hold dear, but ships are small and space is precious, and the practicalities of ship life win out over any thoughts they might harbour about the buying of trinkets and tokens.
So their deal is this: A question for a question, a secret for a secret. They do the exchanges only when they’re absolutely sure they are alone.
The night is suffocatingly warm, heat and moisture in the air drenching them both in sweat even though all they’re doing is sitting. There’s no relief on a night like this, and all they can hope for is that the time passes quickly, and that the sea favours them with a breeze soon so that they can breathe again.
It’s on nights like these that Roach wishes that he was able to switch off his brain. The constant barrage of information his mind takes in and sorts through leaves him so tired that sometimes it hurts, forcing him to take in every sight, every sound and smell, every possible piece of information that the world throws at him so that he knows what’s coming, where he stands, how he will react when a threat inevitably comes his way. His skin tickles from where beats of sweat roll down him, like the sheer effort of thinking so hard is running him ragged.
“Was your name always Roach?” says Izzy.
His head lolls to the side. His eyes are half lidded, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths that don’t quite seem to satisfy his need for air. Roach huffs out a laugh, but even that feels like too much effort to exert in the face of the oppressive heat.
“No,” he says, “it was not.”
“What did you used to be called?”
Roach tuts at him.
“One question, little man.”
Izzy groans. He looks exhausted.
“My turn,” says Roach, and he is better at asking questions than Izzy is. He’s thought about this one.
“Why does the glove stay on?”
Izzy glares at him. There’s betrayal in those eyes, because they both know that Izzy is incapable of playing outside of the rules. He must answer, whether he likes it or not.
“Fuck you,” he breathes.
“I promise, whatever reason you give me, I will not-”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” hisses Izzy.
Roach doesn’t respond. Instead, he waits. Izzy makes him work for it, taking his time to put the words in order inside his mind before he opens his mouth to speak. Roach’s mind turns over all the possibilities that could come out. Burns, perhaps? A tattoo he’s ashamed of? Is it a fencing glove? Something that hides an old injury? A birthmark? Does Izzy have a wooden hand?
“I’m cursed.”
Roach bites his tongue, forcing back his initial reaction to laugh at the admission. There’s no laughter in Izzy’s voice, no indication that he’s being teased. Izzy is, at the very least, telling the truth of what he believes.
“I can sense peoples’ emotions through the skin of my right hand.”
“That sounds useful.”
Izzy’s stare is full of reproach. You’d better not be making fun of me , his eyes say.
“It goes both ways,” says Izzy, and - ah.
No wonder the taciturn man doesn’t like the idea of using that particular ability.
Roach simply nods that he understands. That he accepts this, whatever kind of truth may be there in the admission. Still though, he cannot quite satisfy his curiosity now that Izzy has told him what might well be the strangest fact about him yet.
“Can we try it? One day?”
Izzy is silent, unwilling to deny him, but terrified of what might happen if he doesn’t.
“Not right now,” he says eventually.
There’s a promise in there. It’s enough for Roach.
*
In the end, it’s only a matter of weeks before Roach gets his wish.
It happens when he’s standing at the taffrail and smoking, watching the way the tremor in his hand makes the trail of smoke from his cigarillo wiggle and curl around itself.
He hasn’t slept in two days. There’s blood under his fingernails. His back and shoulders ache from sitting hunched over wounded crewmembers (friends, they’re friends now, which is why this is so much harder all of a sudden) and though he’s standing still, his mind is racing, playing him back memories so shredded by exhaustion he’s not sure how many of the screams and tears and blood splatters are from reality.
When Izzy appears at his elbow, he looks as ragged as Roach feels, and when he takes the glove off to reveal a pale but unmarred right hand, Roach knows that Izzy must need the reminder as much as he does.
They’re alive.
Izzy extends his hand, palm upwards.
“It feels a bit weird at first,” he says, not meeting Roach’s eyes, “and I don’t - I don’t know if it’ll make things any better, but-”
Roach doesn’t think, he just takes his hand, and then-
And then he’s falling.
The endless litany of information goes quiet, snuffed out like a candle, and his ears ring with the strange, eerie deafness like the kind that comes from being underwater.
Everything sounds slower. Muffled. Muted.
Roach floats in the gaping abyss, and he realises that this is Izzy, numb to the horrific defeat they’ve just experienced, closed off to the pain of it all.
It’s not perfect, though. There are keen edges of something in here that tease at his skin, scraping the tip of a knife against his nerves. Somebody is screaming in the distance, and the echoes reverberate through his bones.
There’s grief here, heavy and overwhelming, and it oozes through the walls.
He feels Izzy squeeze his hand and he squeezes back, caught between the physical sensation and the strange, endless nothing that’s touching his mind.
“Roach,” whispers Izzy, his voice trembling, “ oh-”
Roach has an idea of what Izzy has been greeted with, the wild thoughts that have been uncorralled by his fatigue, an endless stream of information that he cannot hope to sort through while he so badly needs to sleep. Frayed threads of analysis that barely finish before the next one starts up - relentless, unending, debilitating.
He knows, and he takes a deep breath as he forces himself to think of something else.
Another hand covers his.
“Breathe,” says Izzy.
Roach gasps for air, forcing his lungs to inhale, then exhale.
“Easy,” says Izzy, “I’ve got you.”
Roach has always forgotten that it takes time to adjust to the darkness. They’ve all done it, stumbling around when they go below decks on a sunny day, their eyes filled with dark-bright spots from the suddenly absent sun. It always lasts just long enough to wonder if he’s going to adjust at all.
But from somewhere in the deathly silence of Izzy’s mind, Roach senses a hum. A glow. A gentle breeze - movement and life of some kind amongst the nothingness.
It’s warm, much like the hands that currently hold his own between them. The warmth of skin on skin, of life.
This, at least, feels familiar. It feels like a full belly. It feels like lips against a pulse.
“I’ve got you,” says Izzy again, more fiercely this time, and heat flares at the point where their minds are joined.
We’re alive, Roach thinks, and from the barest hint of a whimper that escapes Izzy, he knows the thought has wormed its way through.
The heat pulses again, the thought bouncing back to him.
We’re alive.
We’re alive.