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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...” he frowns, reaches down, dips a finger in and brings it to his nose, murmuring, “Oil?”
“Oh, shit!” Pete ducks under John’s arm and crouches down, too. “Ed’s leaking.”
“Ed’s... what?”
#
Look. Archie’s only been on this airship for a couple weeks, and it’s been... weird. It’s a weird fucking ship! The crew’s weird—hot, queer, up for anything, but weird. The captains? Even fucking weirder, and that one she means in a kind of insulting way, actually, even if she’s grown kind of fond of them lately? But she still remembers the way Blackbeard—Ed, fine, even though it’s still weird to call him that—tried to get her and Jim to kill each other, tried to kill them all, and yeah, that’s pirating, but then he’d worn the bell and the sack and now he’s all soft at Stede, who.
Stede was not what she was expecting, that’s for fucking sure. She’d assumed, based on the way they weren’t allowed to talk about him—and the way that when they did, it was in hushed tones that rode the line between fond and almost reverent—that he’d be like. Nine feet tall, with an eight pack, not a sort of cute forty something fancy guy with bouncy blond curls?
But whatever! People’s taste in romance is baffling! She’s happy to roll with it! Ed’s been cool ever since they picked them back up from what was apparently a disaster of a new start but a pretty nice not-honeymoon, so. She’d been sort of thinking things were getting back to normal, for whatever normal meant on the Revenge.
And now Blackbeard is leaking. Something that’s not blood!
“What the hell is he leaking?” she bursts out, cutting through the chatter.
#
Roach stands, stretching out his back, and looks around the cabin. “If Stede’s trying to fix him again, I’m going to have to clean up his mess,” he says with a mental wave goodbye to a nice evening of exchanged massages and maybe a soak in the hot water tub that Frenchie and Fang had installed just above the engine (the one that Pete won’t get in on account of it being heated by engine water and some kind of concern for his balls and the energy of the crystals, which, as the closest thing to a doctor the ship has, Roach thinks is ridiculous, he’s spent years sleeping near the engine and his balls are fine, thank you very much).
“There’s a trail,” says Auntie, sniffing the air. “Two men went through this wall—” she points at a solid bulkhead— “one mecha, one meat.”
“Wait.” Archie raises a hand. “Excuse me. Okay. Blackbeard’s a clockie?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Roach sees Olu wince. “Archie, we don’t usually use that word—”
“Yeah babe,” says Frenchie. “Kind of rude. But yeah, he’s a mecha. Self-maintaining, obviously.”
“Obviously!” says Archie. “And he’s leaking?”
Pete’s running careful fingers over the edges of the panel, frowning. “How did they go through the wall?”
“Oh my god.” Zheng steps forward, narrowing her eyes at the shelves, and— “aha!” She puts a hand on the little clockwork man dressed in a tiny version of Stede’s teal coat, and tugs it forward.
Pete yelps as the door swings forward, stumbling into the space beyond, until Auntie catches his shoulder and yanks him back. “You’ll mess with the evidence!” she hisses, and he gets his footing, frowning sulkily as he rubs his shoulder.
Roach leans forward, staring into the darkness of the tunnel. It’s narrow, and the walls are smooth wood, nowhere to hide. It turns a dozen feet down, dipping to a staircase. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m not going in there.”
“What if they’re fucking,” Lucius says, and he shudders dramatically. “I’m not seeing that again. I’m still recovering from the first time. And the second. And the third, actually, that one was the worst.”
#
“Dios mío.” Jim knew, somehow, that they were going to have to deal with this. “Frenchie, you’re the other mecha here. Pete, you’re the mechanic. The rest of you—fuck. I dunno. Isn’t there work to do or something?”
“Taking charge, babe?” Archie raises her eyebrows, folding her arms over her chest, and fuck, it makes both her boobs and her biceps look amazing, but Jim has to find these fucking captains or Swede will cry about the little wooden boy all night again, and his sobs are operatic. None of them will get a minute’s sleep if he’s wailing all night, and it’s a long fucking night tonight.
So instead they just wink at Archie, and Archie winks back, and they curse the fucking captains again for making it so they have to go and find out what’s happening instead of going back to the cabin and fucking Archie and maybe Olu, too, and Zheng if Zheng’s feeling it—
Enfoque, they think to themself, and banish the image of Archie and Zheng’s perfect boobs—and Olu’s perfect, boobless chest—from their mind as they step through the opening.
#
Frenchie’s made his peace with Ed, since it all went down. Smashing his gears to shit helped, back in the lightning storm that had nearly thrown them all the mile to the ground, and so had the countless careful hours he’d spent with Pete and Stede, bending over Ed’s machinery, urging the bent metal to straighten, the teeth to link, the gentle wisps of his soul twining through rods and gears. He feels like he knows the guy now, inside and out—not like that, Frenchie’s never been one for mech-on-mech action, loves John’s soft, meaty body too much—and he gets him now, the whole mess of him, the old seams of repair and damage on his innards, the way his hard shell is filled with gears and rods thin as butterfly wings.
Still, he’s glad Jim asks him to come along when they start after Ed and Stede, because Pete’s great and all, but he doesn’t get it the way Frenchie does.
The tunnel gets darker the further down they go, spiraling into the bowels of the airship, and Frenchie’s trying to keep a picture in his head of where they’re going, but can’t quite manage it. Jim has their little mechanary on their shoulder and they’re whispering instructions to it in Spanish, its light bright and focused on the trail of oil on the floor—tiny droplets, not worrying each in themselves, but concerning given the sheer quantity. The little bird beeps, a sweet bell-like ting, every few steps, and Frenchie can hear the satisfaction in its sounds, the simple joy of a job well-done. He knows that feeling well, remembers it from the days before he went rogue and gained control over his own mech—knows Jim’s offered the mechanary its own soul back, and that it hasn’t wanted it yet.
Anyway.
He doesn’t need the light the way the meat people do, but still, he hangs back, lets Jim and Pete take the lead, and in the distance, he hears a slight clank, and a gasp, and—hmm.
Frenchie dilates his earholes, pulls extra power from his springs—he’ll get John to wind him later, make it all sexy-like—and yeah, that’s definitely the sound of a spring hitting the floor.
“Babes,” he murmurs. “Something fucky ahead.”
“Shit.” Jim stops, tips their head, whispers to the birdie on their shoulder, and it peeps rustily and lowers its light.
There’s another sound, a slap against flesh, and Frenchie’s mind starts spinning through scenarios: stowaways or Ed’s compressor gone rogue or Bonnet finally cracking, that nice exterior falling away in a villain reveal, and he speeds up a bit to match Jim’s near-silent footfalls (they’re nearly as good as a mecha, and Frenchie had been kind of convinced they’d been one when they first came aboard, still wouldn’t be surprised), Pete’s slightly-less silent meat feet hitting a beat behind. The mechanary peeps again, a subsonic noise that Frenchie knows only he should be able to hear, and he replies in the same tone, with a series of tones that convey something like it’s all right, the big folks will handle it and keep you safe, and when it beeps back its absolute confidence, his heart-gears warm to nearly melting.
They pause at a closed door, and his eyes meet Jim’s, wide and bright in the darkness, and a beam of understanding passes between them—and when Jim pushes open the door, they’re ready for anything, except—
#
“I’ll plunder your flesh!” Captain Bonnet says, raising his sword, and Captain Blackbeard arches under him, body nearly naked and starkly lit by the sunset through the glass window underneath them that must be part of the hull, then whimpers in obviously fake distress—god, Pete would have thought that the famous pirate of air and sea Blackbeard would have a better fake hostage voice, although maybe he’s just never been defeated and so he’s never needed it—and says,
“Oh, I’m just an innocent meat-human who’s been spelled to need your pendulum!”
“Well, we’ll have to take care of that—” Captain Bonnet starts, voice weirdly deep, and—
“Oh, christ, really?” Jim steps back, covering their eyes, and Pete has to agree because yeah, he’s daydreamed about fucking Blackbeard—or being fucked by Blackbeard, or maybe wearing the leather while... anyway—but seeing him spread out, nude, dick all shiny copper against Captain Bonnet’s silks while Captain Bonnet hovers above him in a shirt covered in fake machinery? Yeah. Turns out there are some kinks he is not into.
Jim’s little clockwork bird tweets in distress, and Pete makes eye-to-lamp contact with it, for once feeling entirely on the same page, and Frenchie’s frozen in place, mouth open, gears maybe fried, and Pete grabs him by the shoulder, yanks him back with them, and slams the door behind them all.
“Oh shit!” he hears Captain Bonnet say from behind the door, and in the darkness, all Pete can picture is the enormous swell of his huge dick, and, shit, is he maybe into that?
And then there’s a ping of something hitting the ground—probably a gear from Captain Bonnet’s mecha costume, and nope, he is absolutely not, thank fuck.
“Do you think they saw?” Captain Bonnet continues, muffled through the wood, and Captain Blackbeard responds with a wheezing giggle of “yeah, Stede, I reckon they did,” and Pete lets Frenchie drag him by the hand back down the corridor to the cabin and then up onto the deck to breathe in the clear, cold night air and maybe shake the image of the Captains’ dicks from his mind.
#
“Baby?” Jackie’s voice is low and intimate, and makes Lars shiver all the way down. “You hear that?”
Lars keeps rubbing at her shoulders, knowing better than to stop. “Sounds like the Captains are explaining something? What, I can’t tell?”
“Those two weird-ass dudes wear Jackie out,” she says, and puts her beautiful head back down. “Lower.”
#
Stede’s dressed, and he’s done his best to soothe the crew—though really, what did they expect, exploring his private cabin!—and he smiles at Ed as he sits beside him for storytime.
“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.