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Silver thinks about his missing leg. He stares out the cabin window at the sea, motionless in the port except for the few ripples against the sides of the ship. Somehow it looks blacker than the empty sky above it. His book lays abandoned in his lap, his only candle shrinking, and he thinks about his leg.
He’s thinking about the actual leg tonight. Normally his thoughts focus on what remains -- the cauterized stump, the twisted gnarl of skin and nerve, the stretching burn of his remaining bone pulling at his kneecap. But tonight he thinks about the other part. What did they do with it? They must have tossed it out in the harbor at Charles Town. It might have floated, like driftwood, before sinking deep into the Atlantic. Silver pictures it being swallowed like Jonah, lying in the belly of some great beast. He sees it gnawed on by sharks, picked at by bottom feeders until the muscle and flesh are all washed away, his bone sharpened by so many jaws clamping down on it. He hopes, somewhere out in the vastness of the ocean, some animal is choking on him.
Howell says it’s common for men to still feel missing limbs once they’re removed, and he does. Most mornings, he wakes, turns in his bed to stand, and still feels two feet planted on the dirty wooden floors. But he also feels the real thing sometimes, still connected to it somehow. He feels the pressure of the water pressing down on it. He feels it being eaten.
This is what Silver thinks about while Flint it out on another raid with most of the crew. They're pillaging some small town off the Georgian coast, guilty of nothing except following their laws to hang pirates. This is their second raid since Charles Town, since dealing with the Vasquez gold in Nassau, although “raid” might not be the best word. First, Flint said, they were taking lives. Anything of worth they might find afterwards was secondary.
Silver stays behind every time, while Flint is first over the rail every time. Not that Silver watches him go, but he knows. Silver’s men risk their lives every night while he stays below in the Captain’s quarters, learning to fucking walk again like an infant.
No one speaks to Silver anymore unless they absolutely have to. And when they do, Silver can’t help but bite and snarl at them, tense and bitter, hating the very sight of all of them. Especially how understanding they all are of Silver’s ire. He’s always been a snake, he knows this, but before he’d been mostly harmless, crawling on his belly through the weeds, looking for his own dark hole to be left alone in. Now he feels venomous, acid-tongued, spitting poison from his teeth as it corrodes him from inside out.
No one speaks to Flint, either, unless they absolutely had to. Since the loss at Charles Town, Flint has become skeletal, but not weakened by it. It’s as if all the vulnerable flesh and blood had been peeled away, leaving nothing but calcified bone. Silver knows a thing or two about that.
In fact, no one actually speaks to Flint at all, not really. He barks orders, and no one dares question it. Silver still holes up in his cabin, and when they are alone together, the silence is terrible, tangible, smothering. But to Silver it feels exactly like the kind of silence he feels when he’s alone, too. Occasionally, Silver, studying Flint’s nautical books, will be forced to ask him a question, which he mutters without looking at him directly, hands curled tightly into fists. Flint will simply point to the text Silver needs to find his own answer, or grunt one from his own corner of the room.
But Flint lets him stay there, to practice walking on the iron leg free from the concern of the rest of the crew, to learn how to be a proper Quartermaster, and a proper person again. And that’s about all the socializing either one of them can stand now. Silver has had enough of men, and he knows Flint feels the same. Men were responsible for lighting the fire beneath them, reducing Silver to ashes, Flint lingering in the air like smoke. Fuck the men who held all the matches.
Silver is thinking about his leg to avoid thinking about Flint. It’s not complete concern for his safety, although he is often consumed by the reality of Flint’s potential death. He can’t stop himself from thinking about Dufresne, Flint’s last Quartermaster who had to take over the role of Captain in Flint’s absence (one Dufresne orchestrated, but even so). If Flint died, would that become Silver’s responsibility? To step into such a role? It made him want to take the blunt end of an axe to his head next. He just keeps remembering the lives lost when the inexperienced Dufresne had attempted to hunt that merchant vessel. He remembers the way Dufresne had scrambled over the plank back to the warship, something Silver can’t even fucking do.
Once, it was such a pleasant memory for Silver. Watching Flint undermine that mutinous fuck, the way he’d seen every angle, every outcome, and manipulated them all with a few well-placed words and half-gestures. It had been beautiful to watch. At the time, Silver had only stayed close to Flint for the gold, but in that moment, he’d wanted nothing more than to learn from Flint. He’d wanted to delve deep into that mind, study all those tricks, be educated by Flint’s firm, intelligent hand. Christ, how he’d wanted to know all of Flint.
On some level, Silver still does, but he wants to learn from Flint, not be him, so Flint needs to survive. But Silver has no way to help him do that, so he sits by the window, facing away from the doomed town, and thinks only of his leg. He’d tried walking earlier, right when the raiders had left, and he’d managed twenty rotations around the cabin before needing to stop, which is a personal best.
He starts when he hears a shout overhead, the thud of longboats banging into the side of the ship, the heavy boots pounding on the deck, the cheers from the crew on a job well done. He doesn’t move. He figures someone will come get him if Flint has died. Until then, he’ll watch the turn of the ship the way the waves beat against the Walrus as they sail the fuck away.
Not long after, the cabin door opens, and a shadow stands there. It stalks into the room, slamming the door behind it, and makes its way to the center. It moves like the shadow of a bird flying over a deep blue sea. Silver isn’t the one in all black. He has a candle and is bathed in moonlight by the window, but he feels hidden anyway. The spectre in the room seems to see nothing with eyes so pale they look crystallized.
No, the eyes are seeing something inward, focused on the empty air and nothing else. Silver can see the way the scarf rises and falls with heavy panting from a muzzled mouth. He can see fingers curled tight over holstered weapons. But it takes a moment for his own eyes to adjust, to see the edges against the shadowed room, to find Flint in the dark.
Silver closes his book, sets his candle on the edge of the bench, and slowly stands. He’d left the boot on, needing to get use to the agonizing tightness even in repose. He’s never seen Flint like this before, not even after a raid or a hunt. He thinks if he doesn’t do anything, Flint might stand there the whole night.
Silver looks at Flint and thinks of the Bible. The words come to him from a place deep in the back of his mind. He thinks it’s from one of the gospels, but he can’t be sure. One of the men had left him a copy when he’d awoken, shortly after losing his leg, and he’d thrown it out the window without opening it. But he thinks of it now, thinks: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Silver doesn’t know if Flint is the voice, the wilderness, or the Lord. Perhaps to Silver, he is all of them. Silver wants to help Flint survive, so that he may survive himself. Perhaps this is how, then. He can make his paths straight.
So he stands in Flint’s eyeline so as not to startle him with his approach. It’s a slow approach, not just because of his leg, and Silver makes sure his hands are visible and open the whole time. Flint doesn’t react, not even when Silver is standing right in front of him. Up close, Silver can see his black clothes are wet with blood, but he sees no tears in the fabric, so he assumes it’s not Flint’s. The mask around his mouth looks wet, looks smothering, so Silver goes to remove it first, his hands moving slowly, so fucking slowly, they might not reach the knot at the back of Flint’s head until dawn.
Silver realizes he’s terrified. He hasn’t felt anything other than pain and anger for weeks. The change is altogether exhilarating.
Eventually, his hands are on Flint, gently loosening the scarf around his mouth. Flint’s eyes are still lost, his body rigid, like a knife stuck in something unmoving. But Silver is surprised by how warm Flint feels under his hands.
He works the knot loose and quietly says, “Flint. Are you alright?”
The mask falls from Flint’s face, and perhaps it had been silencing him, because as soon as it’s gone, Flint speaks. He says, “You’ve never called me that before.”
Silver frowns. Flint’s voice is as lost as his eyes, hushed and secretive. “Flint?”
Flint cups Silver’s face with both hands and pulls him closer. He looks faded and miserable, until he tilts Silver’s head so Silver can only see Flint’s stained tunic. Lips press softly into his forehead, and the words drift through his hair, “Don’t. Please don’t. Not you.”
Silver swallows hard. He feels like he’s eavesdropping on someone else's conversation, except they’re the only two people in the room. He says, slightly louder than before, “Captain,” and knows the exact moment Flint awakens from whatever daydream he’d been having.
Somehow, Flint’s body tenses even more. The fingers tighten on Silver’s face, thumbs dangerously close to the soft hollow beneath his eyes, and Silver holds his breath, unable to do anything but see what happens next.
But Flint just pulls away from him, taking a couple steps back. He doesn’t look angry, though. He looks horrified, and somehow even more ghostly than he did before.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, eyes wide. “I thought you were -- I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Silver says quickly. He doesn’t know what just happened, but figures it would be best for everyone to try and forget it as fast as possible. “I’m not. I mean, I was just trying to help you out of your -- clothes.”
Flint stops looking horrified, at any rate. “What?”
Silver wonders if it’s possible all his common sense had been stored in his left leg. He gestures to his face. “You were all -- and I needed to move around, so. You clothes are covered in blood, did you know?”
He looks down, blinking. “Oh.”
“Is any of it yours?”
He looks like he’s thinking about it. “I don’t believe so.”
But then he says, “Perhaps we should check, though.”
It’s the we that helps Silver grab Flint by the elbow, ushering him to the middle of the room. It’s a word they’d both protested in the past, but Silver couldn’t think of anything to negate about it. He could only think, make his paths straight.
He removes Flint’s turban, dropping it to the desk. The shaved head is still startling, especially this close. Especially when he can’t help but feel the soft hairs against his palm. Flint’s hair grows fast, and he has to shave it often, so his beard is often trimmed perfectly as well. Silver lets his own hair grow long in protest, letting it tangle and knot behind his ears, his own beard unkempt and wiry. Flint wants to look like a ghost, but Silver wants to look like a creature, both of them striving to be their own breed of monster.
Closer to the candle and without the covering, Silver can see the bruise starting to form on Flint’s jaw. “Someone hit you?” he asked, surprised. People cut Flint, people shot Flint. He can’t imagine anyone getting close enough to strike Flint with a fist.
Flint fingers his jaw idly. “Caught me by surprise.” With his hands up, Silver can see his knuckles are bloody and torn, streaked with blood that’s been wiped away. Apparently, Flint hit back. He winces, now touching his stomach. “Think they got me here, too.”
Silver clicks his tongue, both at the injury and the fact that Flint isn’t sure. He starts to unbuckle the straps across Flint’s chest without thinking, and Flint lets him. “Did you forget you were armed?”
Flint’s face twists a little, but his eyes stay present and on Silver. “Didn’t feel like using them,” is all he says.
Christ. He knows it’ll be hard keeping Flint alive, what with all the dangers they face, but it’s not much surprising the most dangerous risk is Flint himself. “It doesn’t look good for the dreaded, fearsome Captain Flint to be getting sucker punched. That’s more my area, remember.”
Silver starts pulling the shirt out of Flint’s trousers, and Flint says, “I’ve never hit you before.” He actually sounds confused about it.
“I’m sure I’ll give you an opportunity. Some day,” Silver says. “You have threatened to stab me, before, but I think it’s rarer to find someone on this ship you haven’t done likewise.”
“Joji,” says Flint.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever threatened to stab Joji before.”
Silver’s lips twitch. “Well, that just makes you an intelligent man.” He lifts Flint’s shirt and grimaces as the fabric pulls off his skin, tacked with blood, which now also coats his hand. Then he grimaces at the bruises already spreading along Flint’s pale skin.
“Take this off,” he says, dropping the shirt and wiping his hands on his trousers. He turns away from Flint, thinking, prepare ye the way of the Lord. “Howell gave me something that might help. It has mint in it, so it’s good for bruises. Less good for --” Shredded flesh, he doesn’t say. Exposed bone, burnt nerves, a raw, bleeding wound. He trusts Flint to know.
He grabs the unused jar of ointment from his corner of the cabin, and when he turns back around, Flint is shirtless. He’s leaning on the desk, absently trying to wipe off the blood that seeped through the shirt with a cleaner sleeve. His skin is purpling in two distinct places, from where only two fists landed, but they already looked livid and tender. One reaches below the high-waisted band of Flint’s trousers.
Silver swallows again. I am the voice of one crying --
Enough.
Silver could blaspheme along with the rest of the pirate nation, but some things are just asking for divine punishment.
Still, he approaches Flint, uncapping the jar and pocketing the lid. The smell tickles his nose instantly, strong and sharp and filling the room with an odd sense of freshness.
What Silver should do: hand the jar to Flint and continue their silent coexistence on opposite ends of the room.
What Silver does: dips two fingers into the jar, avoids Flint’s heavy stare, and applies some of the cream to Flint’s abdomen.
Flint jumps, and Silver freezes. But Flint says, somewhat hurried, “No, I -- wasn’t expecting it to be so cold.”
Silver sneaks a quick glance at him through his eyelashes before saying, “It’s the mint.” His hands start to rub the ointment in, his fingers tingling with the stuff. He tries hard to be gentle, something he didn’t know himself to be capable of anymore, sliding over hard muscle and the indentations of ribs and hip bone. He moves lower, over the trail of ginger hairs and freckles that disappear beneath the top of those tight trousers.
Looking down this way, he sees Flint’s hands gripping the edge of his desk so tightly the scabs on his knuckles have reopened. Silver coughs once, stepping back suddenly. He thrusts the jar towards Flint, who has no choice but to grab it before it falls. “Here. I’ll get you a rag for your hands.”
While he stumbles back to his corner, where he regularly keeps a bowl of clean water and rags for his leg, he takes the time to ask himself just what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. He and Flint haven’t had a conversation since he first awoke and he’d been told he’d been made Quartermaster. He often finds himself staring at Flint when Flint isn’t looking, but once the gaze is, however briefly, returned, Silver has to look away, suddenly filled with nausea and rage that sometimes takes hours to pass.
He wrings out the rag and faces Flint again. Flint isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at the jar of ointment, and Silver watches as he brings it up to sniff it deeply, watches his nose scrunch up and recoil slightly. Silver isn’t filled with nausea and rage tonight, that’s for sure.
Perhaps something had happened tonight that made Flint want to be tethered, present in this moment, instead of the assortment of moments in the past they both tend to get stuck in. For Silver, though, all he knows is, he hasn’t thought about his leg since Flint walked in the door.
He’s been moving and standing upright this whole time, and though the pain is still there, for the first time he feels like his life might be livable again.
Flint’s using one hand to rub the ointment into his stomach, so Silver takes the other in his hand. He runs the damp rag over the knuckles, delicately removing any dirt from the cuts. There’s also some bruising here as well, but the mint of the cream might sting the cuts. He didn’t think Flint would be too bothered by a little sting, though.
He works every finger individually, removing the layers of grime and soot from every line and nail. Silver’s hands aren’t even that clean, but soon Flint’s hand is spotless, apart from the cuts and freckles and fine hairs. Blood is caught in the cracks of Flint’s rings, in the intricate swirling of the steel and jewels, and Silver becomes so focused trying to clean them that he doesn’t notice right away that Flint has stopped spreading the ointment into his skin and is just letting Silver hold his hand.
Silver lifts his head to meet Flint’s gaze, and his eyes are pale again like when he’d first entered the cabin, but this time they are so sharp. Silver keeps rubbing at Flint’s fingers mindlessly, and Flint looks like he’s debating saying something -- or doing something -- when the wetness of the rag or the pressure from Silver’s hands, or maybe both, causes one of the rings to slip off Flint’s index finger and fall to the floor.
The soft clatter of it hitting the wood sounds like a thousand bells going off in Silver’s mind, and he steps back once more. Instinctively, he goes to pick it up before realizing he can’t exactly get down to the floor easily anymore and stops, half-stumbles with an aborted groan. He clenches the rag, jaw tightened, staring at the ring, which seems impossibly far away now. But it’s easier to look at the ring than look at Flint.
After a moment, Flint kneels down and picks it up. “Here,” he says, slipping it into Silver’s empty hand before standing. He scratches at his beard, a motion that usually looks contemplative but now just looks nervous, and brings attention to the fact that his face is slightly flushed. “You can have it, if it fits you. It’s gotten too small for me now, see?” He shows Silver the imprint of it on his now incredibly clean finger, starting to bruise from the metal making impact on the unlucky bastard who absolutely deserved it. He doesn’t let Silver look for long before walking away, getting a new shirt from his wardrobe.
There is still blood on Flint’s pants, and on his other hand, but Silver couldn’t figure out how to bring it up now.
“I’m going to speak to DeGroot about our next course,” Flint says, ignoring the fact that he never tells Silver where he’s going or what he’s doing, and apparently ignoring the fact that he doesn’t actually have the new shirt yet before leaving the cabin, the door shutting behind him less angrily that it might have done, before.
“Thank you,” Silver says to no one. He drops the rag on Flint’s bloody shirt and walks back to his usual spot by the window. He stares out at the sea again. When his heart has finally stopped racing, he opens his hand and looks down at the ring.
It’s simple, made of steel, lacking any color or jewel. The bottom edge flattened from wear that the hole one put one’s finger through is no longer exactly round. It has been molded from the years to fit Flint’s hand only. The top is thick and also flat, and in the center is etched a star, the jagged points curling out against the rough black indentation in the metal. Silver rubs his thumb over it, wondering at the kinds of things this ring has done in Flint’s company, how much blood and sweat has slipped into the minuscule cracks and crevices.
He looks out at the rolling sea and thinks of Flint’s hands. He slips the ring on.