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After months of terrorizing the newest additions to the Queen Anne’s crew into submission, Izzy needs less than three minutes to shout the whole sorry lot of them below deck. Only a select few of their most trusted remain, and none of the rest are best pleased to be bullied below, but they don’t need to be happy—they only need to stay there until Izzy lets them out, and if tempers fray enough that there’s one or two less mouths to feed and greedy fingers to keep an eye on by the time he does, then good riddance.
He nods to Miguel as he goes past, then to Fang. There’s Ricky and Albert, too, and Lyam, that old coot, but they’re already scattered to their posts, hidden away. All of them will keep to the edges with their eyes on the horizon line, doing only what needs doing and never looking behind them—they know already after Frank that Izzy will keelhaul them if they try.
Izzy takes a deep breath in front of the Captain’s cabin. Rolls his shoulders, tidies his attire.
Heads on in.
Within Blackbeard’s den it’s smothering. Heavy air thick with smoke, sour with body sweat. It’s dark, none of the candles lit and the windows all covered. Tucked in a corner is a little fortress made out of a busted barrel, a repurposed cargo crate, two draperies, and all the cushions from all the mismatched chairs and stools and pilfered couches on the entire fucking ship.
Izzy shuts the door behind him quietly and clears his throat. “Boss, need you a minute.”
“He’s not here,” comes Ed’s voice, low and heavy, crowded and sour just like the air. He’s been like this for a week; it’s worse this time around than the last two, Izzy grimly thinks, eyeing the fortress he built himself under Blackbeard’s wrathful, desperate watch.
Happens that way sometimes, Izzy is learning in fits and starts, through miserable, first hand experience. He can never tell what might set Ed off—can never guess at how long he’s been faking it until he finally collapses. Never knows what to do to fix any of it, and isn’t at all sure there is any fixing to be done, worries that this is just…what Blackbeard is now, maybe what he’s always been beneath the desperate drive to survive, only now breaching the surface when there’s calm waters and time to breathe, safety to be found in the dreadful reputation they’ve built up, one broken body and at a time.
Not for the first time since shit started to go south, Izzy thinks about leaving. About slipping away at the next port, abandoning Blackbeard for mutiny. Fuck knows Izzy’s the only thing keeping this crew in line anymore. The legend of Blackbeard works better at a distance; without Izzy, there’d be nothing to protect Ed from reality.
And he could do it, Izzy thinks. He could turn his back and find his fortune, return to that old dream of his where he’s captain of his own fleet, a god above men and never wanting for nothing.
He could do it.
But he never does, is the thing; Izzy sighs, stomping over to the fortress. “Get up, Edward.”
“I am up, leave me alone.”
“Get out, then.”
“Don’t think I will, actually,” in a mumble, and Izzy grinds his teeth hard enough it hurts. He crouches down in front of the ridiculous construction that houses his captain and lifts up the ratty shirt that belonged to…someone, somewhere down the line, and is now a makeshift door for Ed’s miserable abode.
Izzy squints inside. “Fuckin- are you smoking in there?”
Ed releases a puff of smoke. “No,” he croaks, and his eyes are red-tinged and watery, but when Izzy sniffs it’s just tobacco and nothing more. He’s going to suffocate in there. Izzy glares at him.
“All right,” Izzy decides. “That’s enough. It’s coming down.”
“Izzy, Izzy, no no, wait-”
But Izzy doesn’t ever fucking leave even when he probably fucking should, so he isn’t going to wait, because otherwise what’s the point of even staying. To watch Blackbeard turn to ruin? To let Ed slide down into an abyss, alone?
Fuck that.
He stands and kicks at the ramshackle construction with a boot, vicious and nearly gleeful about it. Building these make his stomach twist, his heart turn leaden. He does it because Ed wants him to, maybe genuinely needs them for a time. But the relief of finally tearing one down is sweeter than that bottle of cherry fucking brandy Lyam got his hands on last raid. Izzy kicks the top clear off, then kicks at the sides, the tapestries and a few cushions all collapsing atop Ed’s head, who is silent and shaking and furious, probably, but down deep in the sucking pit of his own black headspace like this, he doesn’t lash out often. Izzy’s heart is in his throat though, as it always is at this juncture, waiting to be wrong, waiting for Ed to truly give in, give up, to hate him for trying and decide he’s finished with it, all of it—
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” muffled by the curtains, dreary and empty.
Izzy sighs out, explosive. Flexes a hand and then reaches into the pile and finds Ed’s limp, unresisting arm, grips it hard and heaves him out. “I haven’t even started, boss,” he rasps, steadying Ed onto his feet. It’s been a few days since he’s found them, after all.
Ed stares miserably at him, frowning, a tapestry sliding off his head and onto his shoulder. There’s a distance in those eyes, the same kind that Izzy found when he was a boy and praying on his knees because his father told him to, fingers cruel on his shoulder, gilt-edged bible clenched in his fist and ready to swing—like pouring love and trust into a communion cup and being told to drink it after, to be replenished, only to find that it’s rancid, a poisoned cup; it’s taken all there was to give and left nothing of you behind.
“Ed,” Izzy says, breathy and wounded, as he always is. Ed only blinks at him slowly; an uncomprehending god. A child on his knees, hopeless. Izzy’s hand tightens on Ed’s forearm, holding on. With his other he pushes the detritus away.
Reveals Edward teetering in his boots and leathers, still dressed as he was when he first crawled into darkness.
“Izzy,” Ed answers, several beats too late.
Izzy swallows hard, nods once, and sneers at his captain. “C’mon then, you useless twat. I need a sparring partner.”
“Izzy, no. My knee-”
“Put your fucking brace on then!”
Sullen silence. Izzy pushes and pulls, and Ed is a void that Izzy can shape, albeit with some resistance. He uses his own two hands, his steady breath, his broken heart. Down Ed goes onto a stool for Izzy to kneel before him, strapping on the brace. Up Ed goes, scowling, dragged across the cabin floor. Out, out, into the light, the fresh air.
“Izzy,” Ed grumbles, squinting hard, staggering a bit.
There may as well be no one left out here in the universe, Izzy thinks. Just him and Ed, Ed and him, out on a freshly swabbed deck and with the breeze brisk, in their favor. The snap of the sails and the creak of the ropes. The endless sky and the bottomless sea. Izzy pulls out his sword, steel ringing against the scabbard’s ornate mouth.
“En garde, Captain,” he says, grinning fiercely.
Ed turns in a tottering circle, still squinting, to say, “What- fucking, wait a minute, mate, I haven’t got-” but Izzy swings, wide and graceless, a blow meant to be avoided. And Ed does, thank fuck, all that hard work he’s put into surviving not yet snuffed out: he lurches to the side, gropes for his blade.
He hasn’t got one.
Izzy grins more fiercely. “What’re you gonna do now, Captain?”
A glower, still so much distance in those dead dark eyes. “Well now, s’pose I’m a goner, aren’t I, Izzy.”
Not yet, thinks Izzy, lunging fast.
Ed slips aside, dragging in a great big breath, irritated and still halfway dreaming, but moving now, reacting even if he’s not thinking clearly yet, refusing to just give up and die, even when he wants to, and fuckin—
Izzy fights, snarling and savage, to keep Ed here.
-
By the end of the bout, Izzy ends up ass over head, tripped up on a length of rope left out by someone. “Bad form,” Ed tells him, crouched over Izzy’s knees, stolen blade glimmering like a long tooth between them, point resting at the hollow of Izzy’s throat. “Shouldn’t the first mate make sure shit like that’s tucked into its proper place, hm?”
“I’ll get right on that,” Izzy rasps, chest heaving, “boss.”
A hum. Those dark and distant eyes, veiled by shadows, staring unblinkingly at Izzy. He casts down the blade. Gets up with a creak of his wrist brace. “Don’t follow me,” he mumbles, and then he turns and leaves and heads back into the putrid cave of his cabin, and Izzy stares up at the pitiless blue of the sky, hammered out harder than steel.
With a groan, he gets up. Collects his saber.
Limps over to let the rest of the crew back up, into the light.
-
When he goes in to take the captain his dinner, the fortress has been reconfigured. Not as well as Izzy can do it, but nonetheless it shields Ed from view. Izzy shuts the door, shoves a chair beneath the handle so no one can come in, and hunkers down onto his knees again with a platter of some of Ed’s favorites—grapes and sweet rolls that are still hot, herb stuffed fish covered in lard, a tomato halved and sprinkled with salt.
They’ll need to stop in a port soon, maybe Bath again if Ed’s still like this. Restock. Trade some of the furniture stacked below deck for fresh game, maybe. Give the crew a few nights to let loose in the colonies; beat it before any of them can get hanged.
Or maybe they’ll spend longer there. Months.
Maybe Izzy will stay with Ed through the winter months on shore, opening the windows now and again to clear out the bad air and splitting firewood out back to keep them warm, listening to the church bells being rung in the unknown distance.
“Hey,” Izzy says, tired. “Your dinner, sir.”
“Mm. Leave it.”
“No, you didn’t eat breakfast. Fuckin- Edward, open your eyes, or at least your fucking mouth.”
Ed rolls over, a lump in the dark.
Izzy thinks about force feeding him, but doesn’t have it in him. His ass still smarts from earlier. The room still stinks, almost as bad as Ed does. Izzy thinks again about leaving, but he only sets the platter down inside the little fortress, says gruffly, “Those sweet rolls won’t stay hot, boss. Eat up.”
“Hmm.”
Distance, distance—Izzy gives it to him, hoping to draw him out. Sits in the corner of the cabin and digs a dagger beneath his nails, cleaning them. Listening for any sounds of life.
Eventually, he has to go back out to shout at the crew some more. To check over their work, keep them in line. Dusk sets in. The stars come out. Izzy traces out mundane shapes from the lofty splendor of the heavens, tries to remember the constellations Ed taught him so as to never be lost at sea. Doesn’t matter if your hands are empty, if you’ve been spun around fifty times and tossed off deck in a barrel of rum, Iz. Just look up, up, all that glitters overhead can light your way, y’know. They’re always there. You can always trust the stars, Izzy.
You can always trust me, Izzy thinks, and in the morning when he brings Ed’s breakfast there’s one grape missing from the dinner platter, half of one of the rolls. It’s not much. It’s barely anything. It’s something though.
Izzy sighs, leaves him to it.
When morning slips toward afternoon, he yells the crew below deck again. “You know the drill,” he tells Ricky, Albert, Miguel. They make themselves scarce as Izzy wades into the dark again, and he holds within himself stars and constellations, the cold hard distant truth of the heavens, and Izzy never found god when he was a boy, not once in all those long years on his knees, taking a beating from his father, from the priest, from men who used him and then spit on him, called him sin.
But he’s learned to become a god, his own and Ed’s, too, maybe—to answer all those desperate, dirty prayers as best he can, to scrape together what salvation is to be had, to never, ever give up.
To never turn away.
“Boss,” he tries, even and bland. “Need you a minute.”
“Fuck off, Izzy.”
Izzy sighs, stomps forward, brings that fortress tumbling down.
-
It goes like that for three more days, and Izzy is weary and desperate and his chest is tight and his heart so heavy, and every night he looks up at those stars and counts the red ones, the yellow ones, the weird fucking twinkling green ones, and he tries and he tries and he fucking keeps trying, all right. And in the morning he goes in and gives Ed his meal, and on that fourth day he sees the dinner platter picked clean and feels so struck dumb with relief that he doesn’t notice Ed’s eyes glinting out at him from the torn open flap of his ramshackle hideaway.
“Izzy,” he murmurs.
“Fuck, yeah. Boss,” Izzy says back, platter trembling on his fingers. “Got you breakfast.”
“Hmm.”
Izzy sets it down, going to his knees gracefully; like a devout worshiper before the altar, a god ascending his throne. His head is bowed; his heart is lost in the stars. He waits a moment, staying still, hoping—
“Bring me a bucket, will you,” Ed mumbles, sulky and embarrassed. “Kinda ripe, y’know.”
“Little bit,” Izzy chokes out.
-
Ed’s still pretty ripe even after the grudging scrub down. Still distant, still pissed. He’s trying a little bit now himself, which is good, because no matter what Izzy tries, no matter how he pushes, pulls, tries to shape Ed with his own two hands into a creature of starlight and hope, of breath and longing and dreams he still wants to grasp, there’s no fixing him—there’s only being there, only staying, only pushing and pulling and praying until Ed becomes a little more himself again.
“Hey, boss,” Izzy says in the afternoon, the crew below deck. “Ready for our bout?”
“Bored of it already,” Ed tells him, sprawled in the wreckage of his fortress. He’s staring blind up at the ceiling; he’s eaten most of this breakfast. He’s breathing slow, shallow, a crease between his brows.
“You feel better for the exercise,” Izzy tells him, because he’s learned that it’s true.
Ed makes a face. “Doesn’t mean I want to, now does it, Izzy?”
“Do you think I care about that-”
Izzy doesn’t finish his rebuttal, because Ed reaches out and hooks Izzy around the back of his neck where he’s been kneeling. He topples him down against Ed, cramped into that leftover, miserable space. “Exercise me a different way,” Ed murmurs, but he still won’t look at Izzy, he’s still far away and dreaming.
“Fuck you, you impossible bastard,” Izzy grunts, leveraging up onto an elbow.
He glares down at Ed. A thin, ghost of a smile quirks Ed’s lips.
Izzy kisses him, because he has to. Sinks his fingers into Ed’s tangled hair and kisses the overgrown scruff on his jaw, the bristle of his cheek, that thin upper lip. “Edward,” he breathes out, kissing the corner of one eye, the furrow in that brow. “If you think I’m going to fuck you when you’re a passive sack of shit, you’re insane.”
Ed barks a laugh. His fingers tighten a little on Izzy’s nape. “Worth a shot,” he murmurs, shrugging awkwardly into the cushions, and when Izzy gets back up onto his knees and reaches out, it’s fucking worth everything that Ed finally reaches back.
-