Work Text:
Life is an unwinnable war you fight alone, knowing it will destroy you. There’s no surrender possible, no white flag to wave for a ceasefire. And someday, some beautiful fucking day, you lose the war and then you can finally stop fighting.
Fuck the philosophers in their ivory towers, far above the waste and agony and terror and yearning of the human lot—Izzy knows life is war.
Poets be damned, too, while you’re at it, for their flowery descriptions of love like it’s some soft, tender, delicate thing. Izzy knows better.
Love—real love—is having someone to fight with, back-to-back against the rest of the world. All its wreckage, its ruination, its pain, its glory. Love is someone holding your spilling entrails inside you as you bleed out and telling you, “The war’s over and you lost, mate, but that’s okay: you can finally stop fighting.”
On the hard nights, years upon years of the hard nights, Izzy would imagine death to fall asleep. He’d close his eyes in his bunk and remember his ugliest injuries, the closest calls he ever had. You never forget how cold you get when you’ve lost that much blood. Your heart races, your pulse pounds in your ears like war drums, and it’s a battle in and of itself, the body dying, cold around you, and all the impulses for survival burning through your core. Izzy would lie on the verge of sleep and imagine what it would feel like to stop fighting, to let go—the cold and the shakes and the final agony giving way to the mercy of the endless quiet dark.
On his very worst nights, Izzy would permit himself to imagine being held as he died.
It was only to be an imagining. His deepest secret weakness, his most damning failure. The only shadow of justification is that in the privacy of their bunks in the moments before sleep, men have certainly taken relief from uglier imaginings than his own. There are lower deeps to sink to, probably.
Like imagining being held while he lives. Now that would be unjustifiable.
On the worst nights, when Izzy closed his eyes and ached for sleep and pictured death, it was only ever Edward holding him. (In Izzy’s entire life, it was only ever Edward. ) On his worst nights, Izzy would let himself imagine Edward’s hands curled into the deepest parts of him and holding him together, Edward’s voice pitched low and unbearably gentle, saying, “It’s okay, Iz. It’s all over. You don’t have to fight anymore.”
Eventually, the beautiful day comes, after decades more war than Izzy ever thought he’d have in him, after life upon life of bad nights and worse nights and decent nights and nights that were just nights, really, at the end of it all.
But when it finally does happen, when death comes for Izzy at last, Edward tells him the fight doesn’t have to be over. Edward stays with him because Izzy asks him to stay. Izzy didn’t ask to be held, but when the moment comes, Edward is holding him—crying for him, even, the fearsome legend Blackbeard, and that would’ve been leagues beyond anything Izzy could’ve imagined.
And under the legend, underneath this story they told, the culmination of a lifetime of stories they lived together—Izzy understands now—he is just a man. Under all the stories there was a life. Somewhere in all stories, in the breathing room between punctuation and paragraph and page, there is room for life. And how many stories were told about the fearsome Israel Hands, how many more stories about the dreaded legend of Blackbeard? How much life did Izzy manage in between the stories that will be told when he’s gone?
It was so much more life than he could have imagined.
Eddie begs Izzy not to go, and in their lifetime together, what has Izzy ever refused him? What order has his captain given him that Izzy hasn’t obeyed?
But he wants to go. This is his time, he feels it deeper than his bones. He survived long enough to learn to live for himself, and he takes pride in knowing that he can die for himself.
So he does.
And a life fighting back-to-back against the whole damned world and its seas of troubles, that’s just what life is. When life is fighting an unwinnable war alone until it kills you, but instead you get to die being held and told that it isn’t over yet, you don’t have to stop fighting, you won’t have to soldier on alone…
… well, YOU WON the fucking war.
The philosophers wouldn’t call it victory, but what have they ever gotten right, in all the long ages of the world? It is a fucking victory.
And the poets would never call it love.
But it is.
It fucking is.