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Izzy Hands stands in the snow. It’s dark, and it’s cold. It’s been fucking dark and cold for weeks now, but tonight it’s really fucking dark and really fucking cold. He refuses to shiver out of principle, so he clenches his jaw, instead. He has a tooth going bad in the back on the right. Add that to the fucking list.
He knows, logically, that he doesn’t have to be like this. He’s got the good leg on. It’s about fifty metres to the door. It’ll be warm inside. He can see the fucking lights through the fucking windows. It’ll be warm and light and – fuck. They’re singing. Too late now.
He fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette. Different kind of sacrament. Works better than any of that shit ever did. Feels like a lifetime ago, his mum in the third row beaming up at him, his shirt collar buttoned too tight round his neck as he’d lifted the candle lighter high to get the ones farther back on the altar. Mum’s been gone longer now than she’d been there, at least with him, and that’s a hell of a thought. That’d been the last time he’d taken Communion. This is my body. Fuck all of that.
“Evening, Izzy,” a voice says from behind him, and Izzy closes his eyes, lets the smoke out in a thin, controlled stream through his nostrils.
“Evening, Bonnet.”
Stede Bonnet looks like an off-duty Father Christmas all year round, all rosy-cheeked and twinkly-eyed and inadvisable suits. Izzy’s used to other men being taller than him, but he resents it from Bonnet. Though maybe it’s not the height so much as the breadth. Or maybe not the breadth so much as the absolutely relentless fucking optimism he radiates in an inescapable miasma along with the posh cologne he favors. What even is vetiver?
(Izzy’d looked it up. It’s just a grass. Should be forgettable. Isn’t.)
Izzy spares him another glance, because the miasma’s absent tonight, or at least reduced. Yeah, Bonnet’s cheeks are flushed and his eyes are bright, but the twinkle is gone. He’s missing some of the usual pep, is the point, and he’s just standing there watching Izzy smoke like he’s never seen a cigarette before.
“Want one?” Izzy asks, because he’d just been thinking of Mum and she, at least, had raised him properly.
“Oh, I –” Bonnet says, and Izzy’s digging in his pocket to pull one out because the avarice in Bonnet’s eyes is unmistakable when he adds, “Maybe just a sip?”
He steps closer, and Izzy takes the cigarette from between his own lips and hands it over. The filter is damp. Stede Bonnet takes a long, deep drag that if you’d asked him twenty seconds ago, Izzy would have sworn down he didn’t have in him, and the sound Bonnet makes when he exhales is probably illegal on consecrated ground. Izzy takes the cigarette back from him, puts it back between his own lips. The filter is damp.
“Thank you.”
Izzy nods, looks up at the church. The stained glass window is aglow, though not enough to cast colors over the snow, and inside they’ve stopped singing, at least for now.
“Are you going in?”
Izzy looks up at the church, looks up at the sky, looks up at Bonnet.
“No. Are you?”
Bonnet blinks at him. “I thought I might, but…” He shakes his head. “I don’t think I can. Not this year.”
“Yeah,” Izzy says. “Yeah.”
He pinches off the end of his cigarette and puts the butt in his other pocket, digs out a second. Lights it. Hands it over. Stede accepts it and they pass it back and forth. The choir stops and starts. It starts to snow again, just enough to sting. Izzy tucks his scarf more tightly into his coat front. The stained glass isn’t casting colors over the snow, but the cherry of the cigarette illuminates the lines on Stede’s face whenever he inhales. Inside, the organ starts to wheeze out Silent Night.
Mum had made him learn the alto line when he was a boy, and they’d practice it together when they walked to town in the mornings, him to school and her to work. It’s that line he takes now. He doesn’t look at Stede, just looks up into the snow, and when Stede takes the melody, it feels easy like it had when he was just a lad. Their breath is visible on the air, and Izzy watches the twin clouds meet just before they disappear, thinks again about the damp filter. It’s still in his pocket, and he turns it over and over in between thumb and forefinger.
The song ends, and Izzy knows, because he’d been a fucking acolyte once upon a time, what comes next. He holds out his hand. Bonnet takes it with a questioning look.
“Peace,” Izzy mutters, the “be with you” out of reach of his voice and his nerves. Stede’s palm is shockingly hot.
“Peace,” Stede agrees, and doesn’t let go until it gets fucking weird and he seems to realize it and drops Izzy’s hand like a bucket into a well and goes enragingly pinker.
“Right,” Izzy says, and shifts his weight onto his good leg in preparation to turn back down the lane. He actually makes the turn, but immediately turns back and clenches his jaw again. He refuses to feel embarrassed about this.
“Right. Do you want a drink?”
Stede just cocks his head, and Izzy sighs because nothing is ever fucking easy.
“Do you want to come to mine for a whisky?”
“Now?”
“No, tomorrow morning – fuck, Bonnet. Yes, now. Do you want to come to mine and have a Sad Cold Twat Alone on Christmas Eve whisky or not?”
“Is that the brand, or –?” but he’s smiling, and the Father Christmas twinkle is finally back from wherever it’d fucked off to. Izzy tells himself he’s not glad to see it back.
“That would be lovely,” Stede adds. “Shall we?”
He goes so far as to offer his arm, which Izzy ignores. There’s a patch of ice he’ll give a wide berth just before the turn off onto the road, but he doesn’t need the pity.
They’re silent as they go, save for the crunch of their boots. Their breath mingles again, and Izzy watches it. His flat will be warm. He’d left the tree on before he left, and the heating pad on for Horace, and Stede Bonnet will take up too much room on his sofa and too much oxygen in the room, and maybe –
Well. Maybe.