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Silver trespasses personal boundaries with galling ease: the book lays in front of Flint and then it doesn’t.
It’s like Silver doesn't really care that Flint could snap his neck in the blink of an eye. No, worse: it’s like he doesn’t really think that Flint would. Flint absolutely would.
“The Odyssey,” Silver reads. The column of his neck still nice and straight, kept that way just by the provisional grace of Flint’s exhaustion. Flint lacks the energy for murder.
To compensate, he tries to glare but finds his gaze trapped beneath the tip of Silver’s index. He blinks, uselessly. The finger licks along the letters of the title, line by line. A job both mindless and meticulous. Most of all infuriating. Flint’s whole body crawls. There’s something venomous about Silver’s touch. It lingers. Flint will have to burn the fucking book now. “What do you want?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Silver runs his tongue over his chapped lips, making sure to lap dry any truth attempting to seep through their cracks. “Billy has been… restless. I wanted to,” he cuts himself off, swallows. Gives a shrug, then a smile--tentative, not sly. He must be plotting something. “I’m just bored, I think. I thought you might be as well.”
A moment ago Flint had been trying to doze off the coils of nausea, which had been summoned by a witless attempt to read off the ones of tedium. He can still see the ink rioting on the page, the letters bleeding into each other then swirling wildly apart. His stomach had swirled with them--swirls still. How ironic. The ocean has never been meeker and yet, for the first time in decades, he feels seasick.
Silver’s presence comes as somewhat of a relief, a much needed distraction. The fact makes Flint livid with the man and with himself. It makes his rotting brain reel in search of a way to keep Silver exactly where he is whilst ensuring him aware of just how much of a nuisance, of how thoroughly unwelcome he really is.
Flint clenches his jaw. “I am perfectly content.”
“You’re not,” Miranda says, lips quirked up in amusement, hair ruffled by the breeze. Maybe not happy, but breathtakingly close. A memory, not a ghost. “You’re burning too.”
Flint blinks.
Sailing toward Charlestown. Miranda leaves lady Ashe to her diary and wanders at Flint’s side. They look down at the main deck. They see: a throng of bewitched pirates and at its heart, kissed golden by the dimming sunlight: John Silver, sculpting the world as Flint needs it to be with the magic from his siren tongue.
“He’s being very useful,” Miranda says.
Flint gives a non-committal grunt.
“Zeus himself would be jealous of you, for securing the services of such a skilled herald. One so lovely to look at.”
“Miranda,” Flint warns, eyes snapping up and away from the expanse of glistening skin that the vertiginous v neck of Silver’s shirt offers to public display.
Miranda laughs. She doesn’t understand. Silver may be useful, but before that, he’s a liar and a thief. Treachery radiates from him like a magnetic field. It’s only prudent to keep a close watch. Nothing more to that.
“If you’re not careful Zeus might try to steal him away. I bet he’s burning to put that clever mouth to the test. Eloquence must hardly be its only talent, don’t you think?”
“Miranda!”
“Don’t tell me you’re not at least a little curious about it yourself,” she teases. “I know I am.”
Flint clenches his jaw. “I am perfectly content.”
“Ah,” Silver nods.
Flint blinks, Miranda’s answering laugh still trilling in his ears.
“You already found company," with one broad palm, Silver taps the book.
His hands are outrageously sized, Flint notices not for the first time--this one, though, the thought grows teeth. It bites Flint’s ears red. Silver’s thick fingers would feel so sweet spreading him open, filling him up. So perfect wrapped around his cock, working in concert with Silver’s clever mouth, his silver tongue--
“Is it good?” Silver asks. He must know.
Embarrassment adds to Flint’s color. Then anger, a world tilting rush. He grips the edge of the desk until his knuckles are white. Silver is always watching, eyes more poisonous than a Gorgon’s, lashes snapping like fangs, shredding off the veil of Flint’s secrets, feasting on the unspoken.
“I actually know the story, a little bit,” Silver adds, maybe prompted by the silence. Then, trying to weave a sense of camaraderie from the thread of their shared misfortune, “A man cursed by the sea, is it? Quite fitting to our current predicament, I’d say.”
The affected friendliness stings like an insult. Does he really believe that Flint is desperate enough to fall for it? Does he really believe Flint doesn’t know better than to trust a trickster?
The thought of the Urca gold flits through Flint’s mind, it stirs something vicious low in his stomach. His teeth bare in a cacophonous approximation of cordiality--honeysweet, sharp-edged. “Have you done anything to elicit the wrath of Poseidon, Mr. Silver?”
Silver turns to stone. So does the air in the room, in Flint’s lungs. In the bone-crushing stillness that follows, the ship clacks her wooden tongue disapprovingly.
A few moments go by or a couple of years, Flint couldn’t tell. Seconds throb meaningless at his temples.
“I have stolen enough of your time,” Silver says finally, as he scrambles to hurl himself to his feet, ready to make his flee just as non-negotiated as his irruption.
Flint won’t have that. Before the man can stand, he reaches across the desk and grabs his wrist. “You never had any qualms about stealing things from me.”
Silver tries to tug himself free. “Let me go.”
Gold, quiet, sanity, the goddamn right to disrupt the conversation at his own leisure.
Flint obeys, fingertips burning, but Silver doesn’t move.
“Anyone else in your place would be dead,” Flint says. “I would have made sure of that. Yet you still breathe.” He means for the words to sound threatening, but the incredulous edge in his tone prevents it. Speaking aloud the anomaly they convey makes it seem even more mind-boggling. He looks at Silver with a blur of marvel and contempt. “You must be Hermes’ favorite child. Are you familiar with him?”
Silver glares.
“In the days of Odysseus, he was the patron of thieves and liars. A shepherd for Death himself, herding souls to the underworld at his whim,” Flint murmurs. And after a pause, “You led us here.”
Silver gives a short, humorless laugh. “Your folly led us here.”
“No,” Flint starts, shakes his head, but Silver storms to his feet, snarling louder:
“You thought your grief could rage mightier than a tempest and chained our fate to your hubris.”
Flint throws the blame at the slamming door, “You chose to follow me.”
“I want to stay back,” Silver says days later, weeks at most. Long enough, however, for an eternity to pool between then and now.
“Back?” Flint asks. Seafarers are a superstitious kind. It’s hard to have the ocean lick at your boots and spittle at your face from dusk till dawn and back without ending up with your brain a little watered down. And Flint is a man of reason but—well, he’s been at sea for many years. Suddenly, the prospect to sail without Silver terrifies him.
“Here at the camp. This alliance,” Silver says. “I fear it’s too fragile to hold the brunt of distance. They are wary of us. If I stay, my presence will be assurance of our goodwill. It will help cement our bond, breed trust between us,” the slight quiver in his voice muffled by the soundness of his argument.
Flint has good ears and recognizes the excuse for what it is. He looks away from Silver’s tired profile, from the sheen of sweat glistening across his forehead, from his trembling hands, balled tightly into fists. “Yes,” he agrees. “You should stay. It’s the wisest choice.”
It’s the wisest choice--Flint knows. Still, it knots tightly around his stomach, haunts the nights leading to their departure.
“This alliance,” he pleads. “I fear it’s too fragile to hold the brunt of distance.”
“You trust it enough for this,” Silver taunts softly against his mouth, words turning into a kiss, into tongue moans hands cupping Flint’s cheeks, into Silver’s body pressing him onto the bed, into Silver’s hard cock, into Silver wanting him back, making him beg, desperate wild bare with need, into please please oh god—
Guilt startles him awake.
Punishes him with this:
he arrives back at the camp with Vane and an army of ships. He looks around searching for Him and waits and waits and finally asks, “Where is he?”
They say, “The fever claimed him.”
For a moment, after he flounders back to consciousness, Flint considers looking for the Queen, informing her that the Walrus crew cannot sail without its quartermaster. The revolution will need to be postponed. You see, he’d tell her, seafarers are a superstitious kind.
Silver, of course, would be furious. So instead, the night before leaving, Flint drains a bottle of sweet wine and lets it tell him:
“They called him the luck-bringer.”
Silver’s gaze slides away from where it lingered on the maroon princess and climbs up to frown at Flint’s twitching face. “What?”
“Hermes,” Flint says as he sits down next to Silver on the wooden porch of his hut. Too close, he thinks, when his whole body starts to itch. He fidgets with his rings and stares forward, at the celebration taking place all around them: pirates and maroons trying to charm the fate, to propitiate the success of their upcoming, conjoined labor. “He protects travelers. Before embarking on a journey, they used to honor him with sacrificial offerings. Animal tongues mostly, because he was also the god of eloquence.”
“Really?” Silver’s voice bubbles with some mix of confusion and amusement.
Flint rummages inside his coat, looking for his oblation, closes his fingers around it. It’s not a cow tongue but, he thinks, it will do—it holds many more words.
“I thought he was a liar and a thief,” Silver larks.
“He is many things. A very mercurial character.” Flint places the book on his own lap, unsure on how to proceed. The weight of Silver’s attention feels suddenly so crushing, Flint is unable to stir a single limb. He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t breathe until Silver cocks an eyebrow and reads,
“The Odyssey.” This time he doesn’t snatch it from under Flint’s nose which is—frustrating. Of course Silver always has to make things difficult. “Do you think it’s an appropriate time to have a read?”
“I— I don’t—“ Flint says, “I’m—“ The words are all sharp corners as they stick in a jumble inside his throat.
His inarticulacy tickles a laugh out of Silver, the soft wind of it wafts across Flint’s cheek, then shivers down his spine. “I think you’re a little drunk, Captain.”
Flint dares a glance at him. Silver never looked worse, not even when Howell delivered him in the captain cabin freshly off of the slab, a leg slimmer than the last time Flint saw him. There’s not much of divine in his gaunt, pallid face. Still, all it would take are just a few words from him and Flint would be happy to fall to his knees.
“They’re going to start to worship you,” Silver muses. It’s a few hours earlier, and he is bending over Flint’s shoulder to better examine the ocean unrolled on his desk and the route Flint traced over it. “When they see you alive and well.”
Flint lets out a startled huff. Me? he thinks. “As what, the god of shipwrecks?”
“A sea god, of course,” Silver schools him, straightening up. In the withdraw he holds all the heat, leaving behind a ghost carved from thin air, a bone freezing body of absence that cloaks itself across Flint’s back, hugs him tightly enough to bruise. “Or perhaps a god of war.”
“Ares, he,” Flint says now, shivering in the night breeze. He clears his throat before continuing, “Once he was kidnapped by two giants. They managed to chain him up and imprison him inside a magical jar. At first he tried to escape, raged and thrashed against his bonds, but all his efforts proved to be vain. With each moment he passed inside the jar he became weaker and weaker, and he passed in there so many that they would have been his end, if Hermes, having heard of his misfortune, hadn’t decided to come to his rescue. It was easy for him. He distracted the giants with his silver tongue, stole the jar away with his thief fingers and just like that, he toppled Ares back into existence.”
Flint stares at the book in his lap as he waits for Silver to do anything. “That was very considerate of him,” Silver says at length. Then, teasingly, “And how did Ares repay such kindness?”
“Here,” Flint offers him the Odyssey and Silver’s dazzling eyes blink down at it, then up at Flint as though he doesn’t trust either enough to reach out. “I just thought you might get bored, without the crew’s needs to tend to, so I thought…” he explains, feeling suddenly quite foolish when Silver just keeps staring. “You don’t have to take it.”
“No, I,” Silver says. His hand surges forward and wraps itself around Flint’s wrist to stop him from taking the book back. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to take it.”
“No,” Silver says. He caresses his way from Flint’s wrist to the back of his hand to the entire length of his fingers before finally closing his own around the book. “I want it.”
“Good,” Flint breathes. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
Flint laughs, soft and disbelieving. “When Odysseus was at his most hopeless, trapped on Calypso’s island,” he says, just to make sure that Silver understands. “It was Hermes who pushed him back at sea. He convinced Calypso to let him go seek his home.”
“Just promise,” Silver says the next morning. A launch waits to take Flint on board of the Walrus. “That it won’t take you twenty years to come back.”
Flint’s face cracks on a smile. “I’m sure it won’t,” he says. “I have Hermes’ favor protecting me.”