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The long nights of winter are some of the crew’s favorites, actually, because there’s fuckall to do. There’s dinner, yeah: usually delicious, always slightly surprising, always served with Roach’s trademark mix of threatening and nonchalant (with a dash of sweetness, these days). There’s the final tasks of the night, making sure everything’s squared away, ship-shape and all that, but this time of the year there’s not as much trade, so they’re a little less likely to need to react on a moment’s notice, so.
It’s not that they let things slide (much): rather, it’s that things get a little looser, as the nights stretch towards the new year.
And then of course, there’s reading time, which. Well.
Sometimes it’s delayed a bit.
~
“Captains?” Frenchie knocks again at the door, three quick raps, and inside, there’s the scuffle of movement, and—is that a bell? Something jingling, anyway, and a giggle, and a thump, and Frenchie glances over his shoulder at Wee John, shrugs, and decides he’ll come back in a few, maybe. Or send Lucius? It’s his turn to want to gouge his eyes out, actually, he figures.
The thing is, though, they’re working their way through the one with the wooden boy, and this time, Stede’s promised they’re going to finish it before the new year, which is, by Frenchie’s calculations—and by the Gregorian calendar, that weasley, slippery thing, all its leap years and sneaky bits, and by the ship’s logbook, too—it’s tomorrow. So. They’ve got pages to go before they sleep, is all he’s saying. And they’ve got plans tonight, too. Plans that are non-negotiable.
He knocks again, and this time—silence.
Hm.
He swings his lute down from his shoulder and strums thoughtfully. He might need some reinforcements for this.
~
Fang’s on watch duty tonight—he likes the first watch of the night, actually, likes the quiet of it, likes the way things don’t tend to go wrong yet and likes the way that he can settle down afterwards and sleep through till the morning, if everything goes all right, curled up beside Roachie or Lucius or tucked tight between Frenchie’s elbows and Wee John’s warmth. It’s a good place, this ship, even if it’s not like any other ship he’s ever been on.
Maybe especially because of that.
So when he hears the crash from below, he has literally no idea what to expect when he rushes down.
He follows the sound of voices to the Captains’ cabin, finds most of the crew gathered around the door, which is not particularly odd—it’s a ship without a strict chain of command, usually, and so they’re always up in each other’s business. He still remembers fondly the way he’d stretched out on Stede’s soft silk sheets for Lucius to sketch him, that first week on the ship.
“I don’t know, babe!” Pete’s saying. “I wasn’t like, watching them!”
“But they were in there,” Lucius says. “I heard them in there!”
“We’re going to miss our reading time?” says Swede. “If we don’t find Captain soon, we’ll never know if the wooden boy gets flesh?”
“They probably fucked off into one of the stupid tunnels,” says Jim. “We can finish the fucking thing tomorrow, whatever!”
“Captain said by New Years?” Swede moans. “It is New Year’s Eve?”
“Guys!” Oluwande raises his voice over the chatter. “I’m sure they’re fine, I’m sure—”
“Is that blood?” Zheng says from inside the cabin, where she’s kneeling by a stain on the floor.
“Nah,” says Roach, pushing his way in beside her. “It’s ink.”
He touches it. His fingers drip with midnight purple.
“Oooh,” Fang finds himself crooning. “Ominous.” It’s not, really; but he likes the word. It came up in a ghost story recently. He’s been looking for every opportunity to use it since.
“Aren’t you meant to be on watch duty?” Jim asks, sweeping Fang with a scrutinising gaze.
“I am. I’m watching.”
“That’s…not really what you’re meant to–”
“There’s paper, too!” he trills, and there is, so it’s a good thing Fang is on watch duty, isn’t it? It’s balled up halfway under the bed, as though somebody was trying to make short work of discarding it. It gets smoothed flat; gets passed ring-around-the-rosie until it reaches someone capable of reading it.
“Dearest Ed,” Lucius recites, wrinkling his nose like he’s immediately regretting his entire education. “It’s been a week since I’ve reunited with the crew. I continue to think of you every waking minute, and dream of you for all the minutes leftover. If you were treasure, I’d spend my life searching every hidden cove just to find the X that marks your heart, which would sing, with every beat, the words: too contrived.”
“That’s…it’d sing what? ”
“That’s what it says,” Lucius insists, flipping the paper and jabbing at it. “And then it just stops there.”
The crew all gaze at the paper, mystified. The words too contrived are underlined aggressively, and a scribble of irritation mars the remaining blank page.
“It’s another of Bonnet’s letters,” Zheng scoffs. “We’ve been fishing them out of the sea for weeks. This one’s just a dud, that’s all. It didn’t make the cut.”
“Written months ago,” Frenchie points out.
“Yeah? So?”
“The ink’s still wet.”
It’s true. The text matches the amethyst stains on the floorboards, and it shines damply in a few spots. It’s printed over itself, smeared messily where the paper’s been scrunched.
“So what,” says Wee John slowly, “is Captain doing, writing a love letter and backdating it by close to half a year?”
Fang’s…admittedly more concerned about where their two captains have gone. The Swede, he’d wager, feels the same. He keeps peeking out the window at the moon like he’s trying to gauge the time. They’re wasting valuable wooden-boy hours.
“There’s something else under the bed!” Archie crows, planting her knee directly into the ink spill to get a better look.
Fang hopes it’s the captains. Being on watch duty is exhausting.
~
“Look at this one: ‘Dear Ed, I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I’m with you–”
“You have bewitched me, body and soul–”
“To me, you are perfect–”
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry– oop, nope, another dud, he’s scribbled that one out. Wise choice, honestly.”
“This one’s backdated all the way to last November.”
“Got one here from around a week ago.”
“What does this one say? Here, pass this to Lucius–”
“Hang on, lemme…oh christ, yeah, I’m not reading that out loud. I don’t even think that’s biologically possible. Unless Stede can somehow…fucking levitate while he’s also got his fingers–”
“Is there another pile under the bed? How many of these are there?”
The answer is twenty-six. Twenty-six so far , judging by the stack of blank paper and the mostly-full bottle of ink.
No, actually - the mostly empty bottle of ink.
It all happens very quickly.
They’re crowded around in a huddle, you see - because they’re all trying to see the letters. And there’s a stumble, a slip, a deluge of cursing, and it’s hard to say who’s to blame for it (they do all default to blaming The Swede).
The point is: the answer was twenty-six.
Now it’s zero.
Probably a good thing they all enjoy the long nights of winter, actually. Probably good that they enjoy the dark, the calm, the cold, the quiet.
They’ll all get plenty of that when Stede fucking kills them.
~
Archie’s not completely confident in her knowledge about what’s happening, but she does know that she’s not the one being blamed for The Disaster.
This is good.
This means that nobody noticed the way her ankle had knocked against the uncapped ink and sent the damn thing flying, so. Fuck yeah. Sorry, Swede - you’re gonna have to take one for the team, mate.
“Fuuuuuck,” Olu’s saying, staring down at the pool of ink soaking through the letters in dumbfounded horror.
“That’s… bad,” says Archie stupidly, in a way that she really hopes demonstrates she’s keeping up.
Thankfully, the only person keeping up less than Archie is The Swede. Fuck ‘keeping up’, The Swede isn’t even in the same race.
“Oh, Ed will be very upset,” he warbles. “He loves those letters from Stede.”
“Might be less upset, once he finds out Stede’s been faking it this entire time?” Olu peeps, voice flimsy and hopeful.
“I knew it,” Jim says. “There’s a new bottle washing up every other day , and we’re miles from The Republic at this point. I knew Stede had to have been–”
“Kinda sweet, you gotta admit. Faking the letters, just because Ed likes getting ‘em. S’cute.”
“Cute, yeah,” Pete interjects. “Question: where the hell is he getting all the bottles from?”
“Oh, they go through a hell of a lot of oil, babe. And we’re all far more aware of it than we wanna be.”
There is a ripple of grumbled agreement, and a nod that they pass to each other like nobody really wants it.
“Stede’s faking it?” The Swede says, breaking the lull. “But…that really looks like his handwriting?”
Archie’s all caught up now. She might go get a snack.
They’re gonna be here a while.
~
The solution to the dilemma goes like this.
Firstly, all of them who can write take turns in mimicking Stede’s penmanship. They use the leftover purple ink, and they practise on the back of ‘too contrived’ .
Lucius, much to his dismay, wins.
“You can’t make me do this,” he warns. “I’ll scream. ”
“All you’re doing is scribing. We can tell you what to write. I’m sure we’ve all heard enough of Stede to be able to get a pretty good approximation of his voice, right?”
“Why can’t Zheng do it?”
“Her handwriting looks nothing like Stede’s, is why! It’s gotta be authentic.”
Judging from Zheng’s expression, she’d been gunning for failure right from the get-go.
Next, they get out the blank paper. It works out to two each; just two feigned love-letters apiece to get them back to twenty-six. Lucius also has to do two, which he loudly voices is very unfair, because he’s already doing the scribing. This goes largely ignored by the crew.
The final step of Project Inkspill is supposed to be that they all parrot their love letters to Lucius, who dutifully writes them down. Boom, done. They’ll be listening to the wooden boy story in no time.
That bloody wooden boy is where it all starts going wrong, actually.
~
Dear Ed, if I had but one dying wish, it would be that the crew got to hear the end of the wooden boy story.
“Except, he’s not dying though, is he? That doesn’t make sense. It’s not even about Ed.”
Dear Ed, my love for you is sturdy and unyielding. Much like a wooden boy
“Reckon maybe we should just…leave the wooden boy out of it?
Dear Wooden Boy
“Shit, look what you made me write!”
Dear Ed. I like, love you and all that?
“Was I meant to write it like a question? Because you said it like a question. No, the question mark - the curly thing with the dot–yeah, okay, nah, I’m taking that out.”
Dear Ed–
“Look, personally, Jim, I don’t reckon Stede would see a knife fight as particularly romantic. No judgement, you do you, but– ”
Dear Ed, your smile is the sun that awakens my every morning, and your laugh the melody that cradles my every dream.
“Swede, okay, that’s…that’s proper gorgeous, actually. Maybe you should take Jim’s quota as well, you’ve got a knack for–”
It doesn’t last.
Fuck, they really need a lid for that ink, huh?
In defence of…well, all of them, the second spill is not their fault. They’re startled, that’s all.
“What on earth is going on here?”
~
Of course, the crew are quick to turn the whole thing around on Stede. That’s what they do.
“We were worried,” insists Olu. “We weren’t meaning to go snooping or anything. It’s just– we heard jingling, then this crash - what was that, by the way?”
It’s a poor attempt at distraction. Luckily, Ed is very easily distracted.
“We were in the wardrobe,” he mutters. “Wanted to put the latest letter on the shelf with all the others. Too much weight on it, I guess; whole bloody thing collapsed.”
“Too much–? Are you…keeping the bottles?”
“Yeah,” says Ed defensively, puffing out his chest. “That’s part of it.”
“So you heard a crash,” Stede says, before they’re able to get too derailed. “You came into our private quarters in search of us, and then, what? Just started defacing my personal property?”
“It was an accident–” says Olu.
“We were trying to fix –” says Archie.
“Your personal web-of-lies, you mean,” says Lucius.
Ed is, as expected, more than a little huffy about having the wool pulled over his eyes for months. He glowers at the Stede, arms folded churlishly across his chest, gaze thunderous. He glowers at the crew, who quickly pipe down and stop trying to explain themselves. He glowers at Stede some more. He is very good at glowering.
“I am sorry, darling,” gentles Stede, with true contrition. “I just…so loved seeing the look on your face each time a new one would wash up. I shouldn’t have lied to you. Though I will insist there’s not a word of a lie in any one of those letters. Surely you know that, don’t you?”
Ed’s glower tries to hang on.
“And we,” Olu leaps in, “just didn’t want either one of you to be disappointed that the ruse was up, y’know?”
Stede’s own pursed lips (at the crew, never at Ed), loosen a little.
“Which is a fair sign,” he murmurs to Ed, with some reluctance, “that we’re pretty bloody appreciated on this ship, hey? That the crew would go so far to try and amend a mistake? I don’t think they’d do that unless they really loved someone. Like family.”
Ed’s glower is dead in the water.
His lips twitch in a shy smile.
“Yeah,” says Archie. “That’s why we did it. It wasn’t even about the wooden boy.”
Stede shoots her a downright withering look.
“Won’t get my letters anymore,” Ed mumbles, dejected. “That part’s a bit shit.”
Stede pauses to think about this for a moment.
“Well…we could just pretend this whole… ruse thing never happened?”
“We could?”
“I mean…I could. If you could?”
~
There’s a story about lying and deception and the depths of the sea.
There’s a story about honesty and gratitude and looking after those you love.
There are so many stories they’ll get to experience together.
“All right, all right, settle down, crew,” Stede says, rearranging the blanket so it drapes over both of them. “We’re all anxious to see how it ends…”
An expectant calm spreads over the crew, eyes closed or on Stede, hands still or busy with repetitive tasks, bodies curled together or splayed out.
Stede takes a deep breath, settles his glasses on his nose, and begins.