Chapter Text
The sea be no place for a lass, many a sailor would say.
Be it due to the bleeds a woman gets, the penchant towards creating more itty humans, or the simple danger of high water and storm, many a sailor would agree: the sea be no place for a lady.
The superstitious sailor spreads tales of ships being doomed to the locker for having the bad luck of a lass aboard. Women be accursed, he'd say, be bad luck, he'd say.
The well-traveled sailor would scoff, after all, Mistress Ching has sailed her sea fer decades yet, and she sure will be sailing for years more. He'd point to she, and the many more pirate women who sail the seas. If women be cursed, he'd argue, how do they be pirate lords?
The brutal sailor would scoff at the prior two, and speak his simple truth: a lass has no place on aboard a vessel, navy, merchant, pirate, or otherwise fer far simpler reasons: the brutal bastards who sign themselves to sea shouldn't be trusted with a lady aboard, for they'd take her in ways be unfitting for the lass herself.
Captain Edward Teague is plenty superstitious himself, as well-traveled as any pirate lord, and many would call him brutal in his own right. But pressingly, he also be a fourth option, one many a sailor dreads, runs from, or pretends he is not. Edward Teague is a father, and of course, has the wee problem that comes with that title:
His lass.
Jackie Teague, born in the eye of a typhoon she was, and the anger of that storm shines through her dark eyes. Angry and loud, she be, snappish with the temper of a raging gale.
Teague loathes to admit it, but he'd been a rather meek boy himself when young. There's an argument to be had, he'd say, that the lass couldn't be his by her temper alone. But that be beside the point, as the lass has curly black locks of hair, and nose that Teague recalls his younger sister Hazel having at that age. The lass is his. There be no denying facts when they be right before yer eyes.
Or in his case, often clinging to his pants leg with little devilish claws and screaming like a parrot who hasn't been fed.
His lass be a problem of a child. Yet one here nonetheless.
Here, nonetheless. Aboard the Misty Lady, his ship.
Teague had not expected to leave Shipwreck Cove with her, but fickle lady fate had different plans.
For not a moment did he intend to have her on deck than however long it took to make port. He needed to drop off this quarter of the years tidings and gifts for the lasses poor starving ma.
It be his fault he sired a babe in the belly of a whore, and it be his duty to leave her with the coin to keep the lass fed and clothed while he be away sailing.
He'd be damned if he didn't at least pitch in a piece of eight or two towards the lass' life. He may be a pirate lord, but Teague has always tried to be a good man, or at least, a man who could live with what he'd done.
Leaving a lass he (if inadvertently) sired to starve was not something he could live with, she be his flesh and blood - and by that alone, deserving a bit of his coinage.
It had been a muggy day. Hot and humid, air thick. The sun beat down against Teague's neck, the air sat humid and muggy against his shoulders. He'd visited the brothel he'd known the wench to stay near, but the fine lady who directed the madness there, usually with an iron fist (and a pistol, if the gentlemen got to rowdy) pointed him towards the church down the way, said if his lass would be anywhere, she'd be there.
The lasses ma had fallen deathly ill, it seemed, and sge left his lass in the care of the local parish. Teague would've been sad, if you'd have told this to him a few years prior, but the woman hated him, and he disliked her in turn.
So hearing of her untimely demise, Teague went to collect his lass…
…And learned while talking to the parishioners and the nuns who's been keeping the lass fed, that she'd made herself a right terror in their little congregation.
They'd handed her to him with the finality of a ship sinking, they would turn her to the street, their duty in keeping her till he sailed by fulfilled, if he did not take her. She be hardly 6 years of age and already a theif like her old man. And Teague had not the heart to turn her to the streets to beg.
(Nor, at this moment, the coin to pay for her board elsewhere)
So onto the ship with the crew she went. Plucked from the bowels of shipwreck cove and deposited directly into the (much better kempt) bowels of his own ship.
The lass is a spitfire for certain. Standoffish, cutting mad, and as his crewmen whisper, fabled bearer of bad luck.
…at least he had no need to sail to back and forth shipwreck, aye? More time spend in Madagascar, patrolling his own waters, making more gold.
Jackie Teague was a strange girl, that was a truth Teague learned quick. She took to him like a maggot to rotting meat, that is to say, burrowed her way into his heart and began eating away at anything she could.
She clung, dug her devil-sharp nails into his breeches, walked at his side, and insisted she sleep beside him in the night. She'd tuck herself between his arms and his chest, and sleep right there, leaving him to worry about crushing her in the night. Teague reasons watching her mother die put the fear of losing him too in her heart, and he feels for her, he does. But he has never had a more troublesome crew member. Always in the rigging, or underfoot, always making a mess of the cabin, or picking fights with cabin boys thrice her size.
The lass be a terror.
But she be Teague's terror.
And after a few years sailing with her at his side, Teague would not have had it another way.