Chapter Text
You love Edward Teach like God, and you don’t think you have to explain that one.
–
You love Edward Teach like the angel Jacob fought.
You’ve heard the Bible, front to back to front again, even read it a few times. You retain little and care less, but some pieces of it stick, bubble up in your head every now and then the way only things that are beaten into you as a child do. You catch yourself muttering old verses, lines that could be appropriate to the times or could just have a pleasing sort of rhythm to keep you moving. You know the genealogies the way you know the names of the men on each of your ships, generations upon generations lost to time but building history into what you are today.
You know, by virtue of your baptism, the story of Jacob. That one, you paid attention to, if only because they kept saying your name. You had little interest in the family politics of Isaac’s sons, or the twelve tribes that came after. But you remembered what you considered the turning point, when a man who was not a man approached Jacob on a riverbank and fought him all night. When the morning came, the man who was not a man was divinity instead, and bestowed upon Jacob the name Israel, for he had contended with a divine angel, and your mother glanced down at you in the pew, as if to remind you that your very name came with struggles attached, as if she wasn’t the one who had given it to you.
You read that part of Genesis, a few times, brushing your finger over your name, teaching yourself how to spell it. The text was short, just a few dozen lines, so you imagined: the face of the man who was not a man, and the grip of his hand on Jacob’s wrist, the dig of his fingertips in the hollow of his thigh. You imagined: two men who were more, clawing at each other on a lonely riverbank, and what they must have thought of each other as they matched each other blow for blow. You imagined: the sun rising on an angel who was bested by a mortal, who could be bested by a mortal, how that could possibly be and yet it was.
You wondered: what Jacob would have been called if he lost that fight.
You’ve made it over half a year, so far, aboard the ship of the legendary pirate Blackbeard. You keep your head down, your eyes up, your blades sharp. The men you sail with are often better pirates than you, so you shadow them and better your knots and your stars. You’re not humble, but you’re not arrogant either; both will get you killed out here. What you are is watchful, and careful, and dedicated to staying alive, no matter the cost, just like you’ve always been.
During the day, you work. During the night, you pace the deck, lit only by a lamp you bought yourself, fueled by oil you swapped for your share of loot in Jamaica, your own private reserve for your own private lessons. Your sword, ever faithful, twists at your leisure. An extension of you, as it always has been, more natural than breathing. Your nighttime practice is the only time you really feel at ease, when you’re alone with the very best parts of yourself, to rule them as you want in a flash of well-worn silver.
In the dim light, in the middle of a series of well-practiced maneuvers, you see a shadow approach you. You play for now that you haven’t noticed, though your shoulders tighten up a bit, likely giving you away. As natural as you are, a performance is still a performance, and no one moves as quietly as he does, no one waits for as long to step out into the light.
“Late,” is his greeting to you, and you finally turn your head and give him a nod.
“Yes, sir,” you agree. “Hope I didn’t cause a disturbance downstairs.”
“No more’n the waves do.” Edward rests his hand along his hip, the way he usually does, but instead of the hilt of a knife and the butt of a gun, his palm curls around the hilt of a sword.
You clock that, and your movements slow, and then stop, and you straighten your back as you sheathe your sword and come to rest on the balls of your feet, at attention.
“Aw, knock it off, Hands. Relax,” Edward says, waving you off. You do not.
“D’you need something, sir?” you ask.
“Need’s a funny word,” Edward says instead of answering. He runs his free hand along a rope wrapped around the mast, examining it intently, stroking his thumb over each twist and bump of the twine, and then he turns his head and directs all of that straight at you. You almost step back with the force of it; you lock your joints, your hands behind your back. He stares at you until you raise your eyes to meet his, and then he holds onto that gaze like a tangible thing clenched in his fist, squeezing, as he steps toward you.
You’ve fought him before, during the day, or when the sun is winding down, when the crew circles up and everyone fights everyone to stay sharp. Most of your men have taken a few runs at Blackbeard, and you’re no exception. You’ve fought him and lost, and you’ve fought him and won. His edge lies in his creativity; yours lies in carefully honed skill and bone-deep instinct. Your losses earn you jeers and sympathetic pats on the shoulder and bandages and salves. Your victories earn you applause, and respect, and that grin that Edward gets when something interesting is happening. You’ve fought him before, in the warm light of the sun when everyone else gets him too, illuminated like an idol on a dais, lined with obsidian and fine gold.
You have never fought him at night, though. You have never fought him alone.
In the dark, Edward looks like a man, the sort that might approach you on the riverbank. In the dark, you look like a man too, the sort that might be passing by Canaan on the way home.
“Captain,” you say, more breathless than you’d like, when he comes to a stop in front of you. Like this, you understand the legend, the scripture of the ocean. You can feel even more than you can see how much taller he is than you, how much the specter of him looms over you, how he truly is larger than life. He looks down at you with a hungry sort of spark in his dark eyes, and your lips part slightly, and you have absolutely no idea what you mean to say.
“Israel,” he replies, which always makes something inside you clench and twist. No one calls you that, not for ages now, not since you left home. You’re Hands, or worse, and you prefer it that way. You ascribe no holiness to it; you barely recognize it as a part of you. But the way the syllables roll off his tongue make it feel like it means something, and that something has nothing to do with Jacob grandson of Abraham, and everything to do with you. “Draw.”
Slowly, like it’s something to savor, you reach up and grip the hilt of your sword and withdraw it again. It hangs heavy at your side, laden with the tension in the air like irons clapped around the guard. He pulls out his as well, with a little flourish at the tip because he just can’t help himself, and gently taps at your blade with his, almost playful. You lock your arm to keep from striking back harder, which is all your body wants to do, but you’ll wait, wait until he makes the first move, before you unlock yourself and set yourself free.
The two of you linger like that, in each other’s space, for one long, long moment, and when he steps back again, you almost sway with him, like he’s got strings around his fingers, a leash around your neck, pulling you with him. Your weight shifts into your toes, then back in your heels, and he looks at you again in the way he looks at merchant vessels and foreign admirals, with intent to destroy, and you fall into your own skin between one blink and the next and you can breathe again.
Before, you’ve tested the waters, trading test blows to feel the other out. But at some point, you realize, between then and now, he saw you, and there is no easing into things. His first strike is straight for your gut, and it gets closer than it ought to. His second goes for your face, and his third as well, and his next for your throat, like he means it, just like you want him to. You parry, parry, parry, parry, and you strike, snapping the side of your blade against his bare elbow when he pushes you just off your target. He grits his teeth and grins into the pain, and he strikes at you and you parry, and you strike at him and he bashes you away like he wants it to hurt.
The thing about the way that Edward fights is that it’s unpredictable and wild and clever. The thing about the way that you fight is that it’s precise and brutal and unforgiving. You’ll follow the rules, if you can, but you can adapt. He pisses on the rules, keelhauls then and loses the rope, until there are no fucking rules anymore. He slashes at you and you push his blade away and, instead of regaining his balance, he falls into you and bashes his hilt hard into your temple, leaving you reeling for a moment. He takes the time to stab at you again, and you shove him hard in the chest before his blade can get around to your body.
So this is how it is, you think, torn halfway between panicked and pleased. You’re best in a duel, of course; you favor the clash of swords over anything. He’s already seen you like that. He’s seen you with the rapier, and the cutlass, and the dagger, when you’re allowed to show off your finesse. But you also know how to brawl. You’ve done it your whole life. You’ve bruised your knuckles on other men’s jaws and licked the blood from your own split lips. And you don’t think Edward really wanted a duel tonight. You think he wanted a fight, to see what you’re really fucking made of.
You circle each other, the two of you, as if you were on even ground. He’s a good swordsman, but you’re better. He’s a fucking filthy cheater too, but you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty. You strike and he parries and he fucking slaps you, backhanded, hard enough to throw you off balance and make your ear ring, so when it’s your turn, you kick him hard in the knee and prove that you’ll get down on his level. You circle closer; you strike harder; you hit him on the thigh with your blade like it’s a fucking whip and he punches you in the stomach for your troubles. He gets you cornered against the mast, far too close to even try to touch you with his sword, so instead he gets an arm across your throat and digs in. You choke on the satisfaction in his face, the strange furious glee. Your head starts to pound as you scrabble your fingers against his arm, but you’re not stronger than him and you probably won’t ever be. He leans in closer, his nose almost to yours, as your vision throbs with your heartbeat, which gives him just enough of a blind spot for you to swipe your sword up and cut deep along his forearm.
He yelps and jerks a little, letting you get in a deep gasping breath, and you manage to drag his arm off you with your free hand and knee him awkwardly in the balls as you shove him away. He grimaces and coughs and he has to stumble back and catch himself, cursing. The wind twists as he rights himself and stands again, whipping at the folded sails, pulling their corners wide. In the flickering light of your lamp, the shadows you cast make them look like wings looming over the two of you, rendering him as holy as you knew him to be, and you think, oh. That’s what it must have been like.
He lunges for you, really lunges, like he wants to fucking kill you. You’re not fast enough to get your sword around, but your free hand is there, and you catch his forearm with yours and push. The tip of the blade drags a gash into your belly, along your side, but it’s just enough, enough to avoid certain slow death, and then you grab his wrist and twist as hard as you can. His arm bends badly and he makes a noise and you keep twisting, back and back and back, bending him around you. You sidestep as he shoves forward and you jerk his arm hard, twisting it all the way up behind his back as his sword hits the ground between you. You push him hard against the railing of the deck and pin him there. Your stomach presses into his hips to shove him up onto his toes and your grip on his arm pulls ever higher as you bleed on him. The noise he’s making gets louder and it takes a moment between your own heavy panting but you realize that he’s laughing. He’s laughing hard, open, pure fucking delight, as you threaten to dislocate his shoulder. He struggles because he can’t not, which you’re more than familiar with, but you won’t let him see you back down until he tilts his head back and looks at you out of the corner of his eye. “Alright. Alright.”
“Captain,” you reply.
He laughs again. “Are we goin’ overboard tonight or what?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“Gonna let me up, then?”
“That depends, sir. Do you concede?”
“Never.” But he does, he relaxes in your grip and he lets you kick his sword down the deck before you release him. He rolls his shoulder, groaning at the way it pops. “Fuck, man. Some fucking nerve you’ve got.”
You preen a bit at the praise as you tuck your sword back into its sheath and press a hand to your bleeding side. He leans back against the railing, facing you this time with his arms draped over the edges, as you retrieve his sword for him. You hold it out to him and he takes it, holding it up to the light of your dim little lamp and twisting it from side to side to see the way your blood splatters against it. “You’re a hell of a swordsman, Izzy.”
It rolls off his tongue so easily that you don’t even register for a moment, and then you say, “What?” without even thinking. You’ve never been called Izzy, not by anyone – it’s too soft, or too sacrilegious, or simply too unthought of, to tie fondness around your name like a ribbon. And surely he means nothing by it, of course he doesn’t, but it throws you anyway, just a little off center, to be named like that, to be given that–
“And fucking mean, too,” Edward is saying. “Like you didn’t already know that, mate.”
“Yeah, I– yeah. Thank you. Sir.”
Edward raises his eyebrows at you, a bit quizzically. “Yeah, you’re welcome. Fair and square and all that.”
“You play dirty,” you say.
“Well, obviously.” He gives you a bit of that electric grin as he slips his own sword back into his belt with your blood still on it. “So do you.”
“Obviously.”
“Good man.” He looks down at his arm, as if he’s just noticed the gash in it. “Brutal. Better go take care of this. God knows how many men that sword’s been inside.”
You grimace. It’s a lot of men.
Edward groans through his teeth as he drags himself back up. He’s limping a bit, but he claps his hand on your shoulder as he passes. “Well done, Izzy.”
Izzy, you mouth to yourself, and out loud, trying hard not to stammer, “Thank you, sir.”
He heads down the stairs to the cabin and through the door, scrubbing blood from his skin as he goes. You watch him, feeling strangely too big for your skin, too light. You feel like he saw it too, like he knew something you didn’t yet. You feel like– more, somehow. More than you were before.
Jacob was not nothing before he wrestled with an angel, but afterwards, he was more. He was Israel. You were not nothing either, before you wrestled with Blackbeard, but afterwards, you were more too. You were Izzy.
–
You love Edward Teach like a death sentence. Despite all odds, this comforts you.
The day you became a pirate, the day you gave up all other hopes and prospects and chances of a sterile civilian life, you knew that was how you would die. The lifespan of a pirate is not long, especially not a good one. You’ll die in battle, or you’ll die of dehydration or starvation, or you’ll die by the King’s hand, or you’ll die of infection, or disease, or insanity, or any other malady that plagues a ship. Either way, you will die, and you will die a pirate.
Officially, you swore your life to Edward in his cabin, just the two of you alone, when you agreed to be his first mate. But really, he knew as well as you did that you had signed yourself over long before that. He dug his signature into your skin, marking you as his, and it was beautiful, but it was unnecessary. Everyone who looks at you knows who you belong to, and if they don’t, then you’ll be quick to let them know.
You find clarity in your own death the way you find clarity in everything Edward does. You suppose, sometimes, that that ought to bother you, but you’ve long since stopped caring about the ways you’re fucked and broken inside. It no longer scares you the way it once did, the way it does for most men in the world. You’ve seen enough bloodshed to know that the end is inevitable, but you’re sure like you’re sure of the sun and the stars that it won’t come for you until Edward Teach is ready for it.
One time, before you were ever made first mate, you were on shore leave with your crew, and you were drunk enough to make it tolerable, drunk enough to go along where they dragged you without complaint. One of the men heard rumor of a soothsayer in the marketplace, and in retrospect, you’re pretty sure she worked exclusively for people like you and not for any true divining force. Either way, your crew piled around her tent and presented their palms and pulled cards from her deck and rolled her bones with deep brown runes etched on them. They plied her with questions – about the weather, about their families back home, about incoming fortunes. They dropped coins into her bowl and clamored for her vague platitudes, which were tempered only by shreds of common sense truth. Families were fine; riches were forthcoming; not a single man there had a long life line.
They jostled you, c’mon, Hands, see what you get, mate, see what you get, and you were stupid on rum and secretly kind of enjoying yourself, so you sat down and you passed over your coin and she spread her deck of cards out in front of you. You leaned your chin on your hands as you surveyed them, and then reached out and pushed one forward with your finger. She flipped it over to reveal a skeletal figure on a horse, with bodies surrounding it.
“Death,” the soothsayer said. Your crew ooooohed behind you.
“What‘s that mean,” you asked lazily, tongue loose from the agricole. “Am I gonna die?”
“Everyone dies,” she told you. “Do you want me to tell you how it’ll happen?”
Your crew tittered and nudged at your shoulders and clapped at your back, but you shook your head. You didn’t have to pay a coin to hear how you were going to die. Even then, you already knew. Even then, you were sure.
You still are.
You know for a fact, one of many things you know, one of a series of tenets that all end the same that you have built your life around for years: you will die for Edward.
It’s the truth. A basic one. And now that you know, you never have to wonder, or be afraid. You never have to dread the mystery of what’s coming for you or look around the corner. You don’t have to make the choice of whether you live or die, because that choice is no longer yours. It will come when it comes, at the right time, and not a single second before. And really, you couldn’t ask for much more than that.
(“Would it change anything?” one of your crew asked, as you all trooped back to the ship, poorer and drunker than when you left. “If she had told you? Would you do it different?”
You shook your head. You didn’t even have to think. “It wouldn’t change anything at all.”)
Your life has not been all that long, all things considered, but in the short span of it, you’ve taken far more bullets and knives and swords than any person should. Each one has the possibility to end you, and yet somehow, you are never afraid of them.
On a raid, you get stabbed in the forearm. This is so commonplace as to be nearly boring, except it’s not a well-honed sword that cut you. It’s a dirty, rusted deck tool, and one that hasn’t been cared for in quite some time. It burns in a way that getting stabbed doesn’t usually burn. The entry isn’t clean, and the exit isn’t either. Grime and oxide flake off on your sleeve. You grimace, shrug it off, carry on. You’ve had worse. You clean it at night, get stitched up, and get on with your duties.
Except the wound doesn’t heal right away. The pain gets unpleasant and tight instead, and your skin gets hot all around it. That’s fine, you think, it hurts and you’ll keep an eye on it, you’re not worried, until one morning you wake up hot all over and there are red streaks running up your arm from wrist to elbow, and you say, “Fuck,” and fall out of bed and onto your face.
You drag yourself to the surgeon at some point, and come in and out of a fevered delirium in his quarters. Sometimes you wake up to him bleeding you; sometimes you wake up to sharp, hot prodding at your arm, rushes of disgusting relief; sometimes you wake up to a cool damp cloth wiping at your forehead and a wet rag being pushed into your mouth to help you drink. You feel so fucking hot. You see things that you’re sure aren’t real. You see spiders the size of your hands crawling on the ceiling. You see shaky alternate worlds in the mirror hanging on the wall. You see Edward’s face, stony and dark, swimming above you. You reach up with a trembling hand to touch it.
No. Wait. Hang on. That one’s real.
“Ed?” you slur out. His skin is even hotter than yours. It burns your fingertips. You keep touching anyway, until he takes your wrist and folds it down to rest on your bare heaving chest instead.
“Really got yourself into some shit this time, didn’t you,” he says.
“M’fine.”
“Like fuck.” He looks away from you for a moment, over to your arm, and grimaces before he looks back at you.
“Bad?”
“Not good,” he confirms.
You sigh. It comes out as a shiver. You’re so warm, and you’re so tired. You’re maybe more tired than you’ve ever been in your life. Your eyelids flutter as you look up at Edward, and then somewhere between blinks, you get too tired to open them again.
“Hey.” You hear it like you’re underwater, far away, but then a hand presses down directly on the wound and it hurts more than anything you’ve ever felt. You arch up and gasp, trying to squirm away. The hand holds you, and it fucking burns, it makes you whimper in your feverish haze, but eventually Edward’s face comes back into focus.
“Don’t you dare, Izzy,” he growls. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“‘m not,” you mumble. You’re not sure what you’re fucking daring. You really just want to lie here and go to sleep, and if you wake up, you’ll feel better in the morning.
“Hey!” The press comes again, and then a slap against your cheek. You grunt and jerk and blink your eyes open, as annoyed as you can be. You’re not sure when they closed. Edward’s face is twisted oddly above you. Maybe it isn’t real at all. You don’t think you’ve ever seen him look like that.
“Stop it,” you say, or try to.
“You listen to me, Israel Hands,” he says. His voice is quiet, and as fevered as you are, you still can’t help but strain for it. “You are not going to fucking die here, alright? Only I get to decide when you fucking die, and it’s not fucking today. Okay?”
Your head lolls a bit. You try to reach up again, but your limbs aren’t cooperating.
“Izzy,” he says, more urgently. He sounds frantic. “Okay?”
“Okay,” you agree.
“Swear?”
“Swear.”
You slip off to sleep after that, without remembering what you just swore to.
You wake up, eventually. You feel like absolute dogshit, drenched in sweat both fresh and dried and smelling like something dead. You lift your right arm to hand your face, then freeze. You slowly, slowly lift your left arm and take a deep breath before you glance at it.
Still there.
You breathe out a sigh of relief and slump back on the surgeon’s cot, boneless. You feel absolutely vile, and parched, and starving, and in need of a real fucking bath. You’ll get up in a minute, find the surgeon and ask for help.
“About fuckin’ time.”
You stiffen, and then through some herculean effort manage to lift your head and look down. Edward’s sitting against the wall, pipe in hand, a little hazy behind the smoke. He sets the pipe aside when he sees you move and leans forward, elbows resting on his knees.
“How long?” you rasp. Fuck, you want some water.
“‘bout four days,” he says. “You’re looking better. The fever broke yesterday and the infection’s easing. Weren’t sure, for a minute there, but…” He shrugs and looks away from you, down at the floor. You note the tired lines around his eyes and the heavy slump of his shoulders. It makes you– it makes you think– no, you’re too tired for that. You’re much too tired for that.
“S’okay,” you tell him instead.
“Dickhead,” he mutters. “Gonna get yourself fuckin’ killed.”
“Nah. Won’t. Only you get to decide that, r’member?”
He looks back up at that. His eyes are wide. “You remember that?”
“Yeah. Swore, didn’t I?”
His face does that twisting thing again. Maybe you hadn’t imagined it last time. He stares hard at you for a long, silent moment while his throat works around something, but in the end, he just says, “Well, fuckin’ act like it then, yeah?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” you mutter. “Get me some water, then, or ‘m gonna fuckin’ dry out.”
“I miss when you were unconscious,” Edward says as he gets up to find the surgeon. You manage a dry, wheezy laugh, and he pauses to squeeze your leg before he goes.
Your surgeon comes with grog and rations and slings. You get cleaned up and fed, and after a couple days, you feel functional again. You do half chores until the infection goes away, leaving an ugly scar behind, and then you feel normal again.
You see Edward watching you sometimes, like he thinks you’re going to collapse on the spot. He only does it when he thinks you’re not looking, which you’re more than familiar with, so you let him think he’s getting away with it and you don’t tell him to relax. You don’t remind him of your promise. You don’t reassure him that, even if the rapture came and ripped away every body on the ship except the two of you, you still wouldn’t go, because he hadn’t released you yet.
You don’t need to, anyway. He already knows.
–
You love Edward Teach like your own blood and bones, and you see him about as often.
You are intimately familiar with the inside of your own body. You’ve seen your tendons, your flesh, the pallid sacks of tissue that make up a man. You’ve seen yourself carved apart and stitched back together more than any human should, short of a cadaver. You’ve seen bright red flow from your skin, from your nose, from your teeth. You spit it out onto the ground, or in the faces of the men before you. They opened your veins; you will open their graves.
Science tells you (or so Edward tells you) that you need blood to live. “Science tells us,” he says, holding a book he stole as if it’s a medical text, as if he can read it, “that you need blood to live.”
You know that this is a novel, German in language and likely containing no gore at all. You nod anyway, because you’ve seen dozens of men bleed out before, and you had been pretty sure about the thing about blood already. “Well, if science says so,” you say.
“It does, just here, look.” He opens to a random page and points to a paragraph. You do not read German and only recognize most of the letters, but you nod, looking pensive for him.
“It does say that, just there,” you agree.
“Exactly,” Edward says, pleased.
He scolds you like a child the next time you get hurt. Your surgeon stitches up your belly as Edward hovers over you, and he says, “Now, Iz, we talked about this. The blood’s gotta stay on the inside.”
“Ah, fuck, guess I forgot that part when I got stabbed,” you grit out.
“Well, we can’t bloody well put it back in, now can we?” Edward says, as if you’ve broken a vase or a hair pin instead of a rib. “Can we?”
“Never tried.”
“Do you think that would work?”
“It wouldn't,” says the surgeon.
“Shit,” says Edward.
“It’s all in the ocean, anyway,” you point out.
“We’ll have to bleed someone to get more for you,” Edward says.
You picture yourself opening your mouth, letting him slash someone’s veins to drip down into your waiting throat and fill your heart up to bursting again, and you ignore the surgeon informing Edward that that’s not how that works and you nod dumbly, hungry for your communion.
History tells you (or so your heart tells you) that you need Edward to live.
You think you probably knew this already, and on the same fundamental level. You missed when it happened, exactly, but one day you walked into the captain’s quarters and you knew that your heart wasn’t your own anymore, and it would stop on command. You felt strange about that, and regretful, but only sort of, because the realization came with the sort of acceptance that you had about every other fact of the world. It is, therefore it is. Anything else is unimaginable.
And truly, you might not mind so much, if not for Edward’s stalwart dedication to nearly getting himself fucking killed.
Sure, he’s always been reckless, it’s why he’s the best that’s ever been or ever will be. You can’t be a pirate and not be a little reckless, it’s in the nature of the beast. But the twists and turns and maneuvers he goes through to ensure that utter annihilation is always a hair’s breadth away would be impressive, if it wasn’t giving you a heart attack every other week.
He gets wounded; you hover as he gets patched up, making sure the best possible job is done. He gets overwhelmed in battle; you dispatch every assailant with a sharp snap of your wrist and a slash of your blade, ignoring his protest of, “I fuckin’ had it, man!” He sticks lit matches in his beard, a demon on the water, the stuff of nightmares; you helped him practice in the hazy reek of burnt hair, so you keep a bucket on standby.
(“Sure you fuckin’ had it,” you said, holding a newly-empty tankard of grog in the cabin the night before. He glared up at you like a wet dog, sodden strands of hair in his eyes soaked through by your water ration, and threw the book of matches at you for safekeeping.)
It isn’t frequent, but it does still happen, when the ships you set your sights on set their sights on you fight back. Blackbeard’s reputation precedes him, especially by those who own the backs he stepped on to get there. Revenge in the pirating business is usually taken out on naval ships, or merchant vessels who serve predatory businessmen, but friendly fire happens, and is anything but friendly.
This isn’t a raid that you’re on right now; it’s a fucking battle, because Blackbeard screwed over some sailor years ago and some people know how to hold a grudge. There’s pride in it, and glory, that keeps their white flags down when you board them. Nothing you can’t handle, of course. Your numbers are bigger, your guns are better. They may have things worth taking, but even if they don’t, it’ll be a good lesson to the community at large: do not try to take revenge on Blackbeard. You’ll never win.
Or so you thought.
You’re in the middle of a fight with a couple other men, who thought you’d be easy pickings because you’re small, and somehow, through the clink and clank of blades, you hear a growl. “Leave him,” a voice snarls. “He belongs to me.”
You turn immediately, your sword still in the air in a blocking position. You see Edward, splayed on the ground, paused partway through getting up. You see the enemy ship’s captain, bedecked in rings and jewels and a billowing coat and a savaged tricorn hat, a dirty sneer across his pale face. You see a gun in his hand, with his finger on the trigger and the muzzle pointed directly between Edward’s eyes.
You feel what should be the once in a lifetime experience of your heart stopping in your chest.
Several things happen all at one.
One: the captain’s thumb cocks back the hammer of his pistol.
Two: you drop your sword and you turn your back on the two men trying to kill you, something you have never done in your entire life.
Three: you don’t have a pistol, so you pull out your knife from the sheath on your hip and you throw it as hard as you can.
Four: your dagger pierces the captain’s arm and sinks in and sticks, just as a burning hot blade pierces your back.
You gasp against your gritted teeth, your hands curling into fists. You jerk yourself forward to the sickening tune of the blade sliding back out of you. You stumble a few feet, but you look up and your assailants at your back are not the ones you search out. You see Edward, kicking hard at every part of the captain he can reach with his teeth bared, and he glances up at you as he scrambles to his feet. Your eyes meet, just for a moment; his dart to the dagger in the captain’s bicep, and then back to you. Then he points at you and shouts, and pure instinct makes you duck, just in time to avoid a sword through the side of your throat.
You grab the sword’s guard when it hits your shoulder and you jerk it from your man’s hand. He seems surprised by that, and moreso when it’s suddenly in his chest. The other man cuts you again, a slash to your leg that makes you stagger, but you manage a series of quick punches to the gut to get him down, and a quick death when you open his throat.
You turn and rush, as much as you can with your blood starting to run free, toward Edward, who’s still struggling with the captain. Your knife is in his hand and there are gashes on the captain’s face, one cheek open and one eye bloody. The gun is still in the captain’s hand, and he’s trying desperately to bring it down to Edward’s temple, so focused that he doesn’t even notice you’re coming until you’re there. He blinks at you and you snarl and grab the gun from him, turn it on him and put the barrel to his cheek and fire. The body lets go of Edward immediately, and Edward stumbles and falls to one knee among the viscera. You toss the empty gun to him and you take back your dagger, wiping it on your shirt. He says, “Iz.”
“Do not,” you pant, “say you fucking had it.”
He gives you a somewhat penitent look and you feel yourself begin to relax, the panic draining from you.
“I did have it, though,” Edward says after a moment.
It’s only the bang of cannon fire, dooming the ship you’re on to a watery grave and you with it if you don’t get off now, that keeps you from throwing him fucking overboard.
Edward tells you (or so Edward tells you) that he needs you to live.
This one, you doubt. This one reads like a piece of scripture you can’t quite wrap your head around, a historical inaccuracy that doesn’t make sense. You draw lines in the sand between the three ideas, Edward and need and you, and they never quite seem to match up, except, for some reason, they do, because he told you they do.
You suppose that Blackbeard might need you, the way a deity needs a follower, the way an artist needs a medium, the way a gun needs a bullet, the way a story needs someone to tell it. He might need you for the dirty work because someone’s gotta do it; he might need you for the logs because he refuses to be ashamed that he can’t read them but they do need to be read. He might need you to be the enforcer who keeps the crew in line, and the prophet who spreads gospel on shore, and the blade he wields with a mind of its own that absolves him somehow, somewhere in his head that you don’t understand, of blame.
And you do delight in being needed by Blackbeard. You revel, sometimes, in being First Mate Hands, the clawed right hand of a deep sea monster who sends the whole ocean fleeing. There’s a certain amount of power and respect that comes with it that you were starved of as a child. You didn’t get enough of it then, so you’re hungry for it now, and you keep your own leash tight on that particular vice. You take it in small pieces instead, meted out over the long weeks at sea, lest you forget what you are and indulge yourself to death.
But more than that, you like that there’s a place for you in this world. There’s a niche in the universe that’s yours, that guides you and presents its own decisions. His gift to you, when you boarded his ship all those years ago, was a single unyielding truth, and you have built yourself around it ever since. You are blessed with something that few men ever see in their whole lives: certainty. That’s what being needed by Blackbeard gets you – the best thing in the entire world.
So you can take being needed by Blackbeard. You will happily be needed by Blackbeard, up to and until the point that you have outstayed either your usefulness or your lifespan on this earth. What really throws you is being needed by Edward.
You think he’s joking, most of the time, when he needs you, and that does you just fine. He got along alright before you, and you would think that he’ll get along alright after you, except brushing against that thought sends your mind rebounding in the opposite direction, tearing away from the idea of a you without Edward. But you keep doing things for him, mundane things that anyone could do, and he thanks you for them like they’re anything.
When you bring him tea and rum instead of blood and death, he claps you on the shoulder and says, “You’re a fuckin’ lifesaver, mate,” and you think, no. I was a lifesaver when I saved your fucking life. This is a cup of coffee, and yet he acts grateful and you don't get it. He’ll prowl around on deck at night and say, “Hands. I need you,” and you’re by his side in a minute, and he’ll look at you with the gravest fucking face and you take a quick tally in your head of who’s fucking died recently– and then he’ll say something like, “Don’t you think being a fish would be nice?” and you have to work so hard to not walk straight into the mast.
“Don’t I what?”
“It just seems nice,” Edward says. “All floating along in the water. Nice’n cool. Don’t have to worry about becalmings or anything.”
Maybe you should have been a fish; you’re fucking gaping like one right now. “I don’t– what the fuck did you need me for?”
“Second opinion,” Edward says. “Do you think a turtle would be better?”
“No, I don’t think a turtle would be better,” you snap, and he gives you one of his sad looks that you’re pathetic for, like you’ve pissed on his dog or whatever the fuck sort of thing he would say, so you sigh your most put-upon sigh and say, “Actually, yeah. Turtle’s less likely to get caught and eaten.”
He snaps his fingers and points at you, pleased again. “You’re so right, Iz. Knew I could count on you. Always can.”
And that, you could tolerate, if that’s all it was. You could take those things and keep them for yourself, locked in the little keepsake box of your heart, and take them out to look at them when you're alone, play pretend with them like toys. You could permit yourself that, because it’s fucking childish and you know it, overly indulgent and foolish and personal. It’s like drinking too much, or getting into the opium, or fucking your way through a ship. A vice, once that you should kick but not one that anyone here would judge you for, because everyone’s allowed a vice or two at sea. It’s the only way to survive.
Except sometimes Edward does know how to be serious, when it’s just the two of you, and even you can’t pretend he's kidding, or that it’s late night camaraderie with the only soul around for miles. The shit he says to you– you’re deep in your cups, both of you, late at night in the captain’s quarters drinking fucking brandy like lords, but you’re not that deep. Not deep enough to wave away the secrets he tells you. Not deep enough to ignore the way he stares at you when he waits for you to reply, like your answer matters to him or something. And definitely, definitely not deep enough for when he sits back in his chair, legs sprawled and hair falling around his shoulders like rain, and mumbles, “Iz.”
“Yeah, boss.”
“Israel.”
Your throat sticks. He never calls you that, hasn’t for years now, except like this. He’s sober enough to remember your name, which means he’s sober enough to mean it.
“Edward,” you force yourself to reply.
He levels his gaze at you. He pins you like a rapier just over your left hip bone. You feel like you would be hyperventilating, if you could breathe at all. As it stands, his heart inside your chest is working double time as he says the worst fucking things you’ve ever heard in your life, things that scare you to fucking death, things that make you want to throw yourself on your own sword so you can die knowing they were the last things you ever witnessed.
He takes your wrist in his hand and squeezes. It hurts, and he means it to, because it directs every shred of your focus back onto him. His nails dig into the thin skin next to your veins and his thumb strokes over your pulse, where he can certainly feel your shameful, racing heartbeat. He doesn’t comment on it, but he does look at where you’re joined together, as if he can see the blood under your skin, as if it’s not his to spill as he pleases. “I don’t...” The words are soft, and scratchy with the scabs of peeled-off bravado. He never sounds like that, ever, not in front of anyone, except in front of you. “You’re the best first mate I’ve ever had, you know?”
“Edward,” you say again, more desperately this time. Your mind starts on a dozen trajectories, labeling your tasks as first mate and how adequately you perform them, reviewing the last few weeks and all the successful raids and repairs–
“Hey.” The hand around your wrist tightens. The nails dig in harder. The pain jerks you out of it with a barely-there gasp from you, and your eyes are locked on him again. He leans in closer; you fight the urge to lean away, and the smaller, hotter urge to lean forward. Your whole body is betraying you right now. Maybe you will fucking die like this. “I mean it. I don’t even know what I’d do without you.”
You feel like you’ve been punched in the face. You can’t hear this. You shouldn’t be hearing this. You shouldn’t be privy to the absolute desperation mounting inside of you. You shouldn’t be subjected to this kind of agony. It’s inhumane. Oh, God. Your hands are shaking now, and there’s no way he doesn’t know. It’s fucking humiliating, and you’d slit your own throat before you pulled away. Tell me again. Tell me again. Kill me kill me kill me take me take me.
“You’d be alright,” you manage. A genuine fucking God-given miracle that you’re able to say anything. “Lot of good sailors on the crew.”
He shakes his head hard, wild. He pushes into your space. He’s got one hand on your wrist and the other on your chin now. He grips your jaw and forces you to look at him. You glance away instinctively, like you would from the sun, but you always come back to him. He’s practically out of his seat now, and his knees knock against your thighs from how close you are together. He’s going to climb into your body and make a home in your ribs and you’re going to break the bones open yourself to let him in.
He twists the knife that lives in your chest and he says, horribly, “No. Half the time, I think you’re the only person I can trust on this ship.”
Your breath catches, unbearably loud. Your body twitches and arches and you feel insane, some dark black shade of religious ecstasy. He’s breathing hard too, you can taste it in the air between you. The two of you are drunk together on frenetic desperation and poisonous hunger. You could reach out and touch him if you wanted to, if you dared. You want to, so fucking bad.
“And the rest of the time?” you whisper. It’s all you can do. It’s all you have left, your last shred of defense.
It will not be enough to save you.
He touches your cheek. He holds your face in his hand, and with it, your heart. He unravels you, releases you, held in his grip, gasping and shaking under him, all at once, and he says, “The rest of the time, I know it.”
–
You love Edward Teach like pain, in a thousand different ways.
You’ve always had an affinity for it, one way or another. Your mother said you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough. You don’t remember a day of your life when it wasn’t inflicted on you, so it burrows in and it gets in your bones and you make a skeleton of agony and you learn to enjoy it.
You like pain because it keeps you alert. On night watch you dig your nails into your palms to keep yourself awake. You thumb the hammer of your pistol to feel the way it kicks back. You pass your fingertips through candle flame, ever slower, looking for the sear and the ache. Your palms sting with rope burn and your legs ache with shin splints, and you revel in them – a sure sign of safety, as much as you can have, because the work is getting done.
You like pain because it reminds you that you’re alive. It sets your blood on fire, the nicks and slices of a sword against your arms while you land blow after deadly blow. As long as you hurt, you’re alive to be hurt. As long as there’s pain, you can push through it. As long as the world is trying to destroy you, you are still in it.
You like pain – and you will not tell this to anyone, you will never fucking speak of it – but you like pain when the man you’re fucking reaches up and gets a handful of your hair and yanks, when teeth dig into the soft parts of your throat, when you’re bent to breaking and shown no mercy. It doesn’t make you go hazy and soft like some you’ve heard; it puts you so firmly in your body, so deeply present in the moment, that you could be nothing and nowhere else. Your nerves must be broken, because when you are hurt, intimately and intentionally, your body fucking sings and you settle into yourself like you had been somewhere else and you are coming home.
Edward knows this. Edward knows all of this, so he gives it to you, frenetic and clumsy and precise in turns.
You need a firm hand sometimes, you can’t deny that. You have a place, and you know it, but when your heart gets lost in the gaping caverns of your chest, you want a reminder. You push (and you’re not proud of this, you know it’s beneath you, but really, you’re just an animal, hungry and wanting, at heart, like any other man, and so you’ll give into your hunger when it’s too much to bear). You push and you push to gauge where the line is, which is never in the same place twice, so the surprise is always sweet when one second you’re spouting off shit and the next, there’s a hand in your hair slamming your body against the wall and a snarl in your ear that reverberates all the way down your spine. He reminds you exactly who you are, and who he is, and you come back into yourself, gasping and shaking and sinking and fucking grateful.
Sometimes you respond in kind. You push more, when you’re really fucking lost. He pulls your hair or chokes you out, and you warm the skin of your palm against his cheek, cut your knuckles open on his teeth. You bruise your own knees on the ground no matter which of you puts you there. You wipe your face with the back of your hand and smear the blood from your nose; you pierce your tongue on your left canine and you swallow down the metal of your body, remaking yourself again and again and again under his watchful gaze, until you’re just right.
Afterwards, you stroke your scars with your fingertips, with your lips, like they’re precious. And they are. They’re reminders, that only you can get away with what you’ve done, and that you’re understood, and that broken as you are, you still belong.
On one of the rare and special occasions that a raided ship puts up an actual effort, you get into a duel with a deckhand, the real type of fight that fills your lungs with adrenaline and threatens a watery grave. He’s taller than you, and nearly as skilled, and you see in his eyes that the two of you possess the same cockroach-like need to survive. You are two sweating, bleeding magnets being pushed together, repelled by each other and the unmoving ability to stay alive.
You both stab each other in the end. It’s honorable in that way, equal. You stab him in the heart, a token of your respect that he will die quickly and not of sepsis. In the same instance, you see his blade going for your own chest, so he can do you the same favor, and you can’t dodge so you reach for it instead. You spread your hand and let the blade pierce your palm, shredding agonizingly against your muscles and tendons. You aren’t embarrassed by the way that you howl or the way your vision goes gray around the edges, because it gives you just enough of a push to take the sword under your rib cage instead, pinning your hand to your own body. You twist your sword sharply and the deckhand falls back against the railings with a sickening crack inside him, taking your blade with him, his frantic breathing fading out quickly under the sound of your own. You pant and whimper against the backs of your teeth and you reach for the end of his sword but there’s already a hand on it.
“Holy shit, Iz,” says Edward.
“Help,” you hiss, and he braces his hand against your chest and yanks. The blade comes free twice, and you grunt and butt your head against his shoulder as he presses his palm against the tide of blood that spills from you.
“He almost got you there,” Edward mutters against your temple. “Good luck it wasn’t your dueling hand.” You just nod, swallowing hard, drinking the pain down like hot tea. It floods through your system, replacing the blood you lost, keeping you swaying on your feet as you straighten up and pull your sword out of the deckhand’s ribs.
There’s no time to go back for bandages, so Edward helps you wrap your sword strap around your palm and you fight like that, one hand literally behind your back. You clench your fist into the leather and blood drips from its seams like bolts of lightning to your nerves. You are as much of yourself as it’s possible to be, which is a force of fucking nature. You tighten your grip on your sword as you walk out onto the deck and let the tempest roll in.
After the smoke clears, your surgeon fixes you up. You sit quietly as he puts his fingers inside your skin and prods your flesh back together, your bones back into place. You bite down on the sticky, crimson-laced leather of your sword strap and feel yourself become whole again. You tune out everything that’s not forceps and bandages and splints, the soft tap tap tap of a bloody sewing needle piercing you over and over, the slick slide of rough thread as each fiber drags against your insides. The stitches align with your pulse, or your pulse aligns with your stitches, if there ever was a difference. Your heartbeat hammers in time, making your fingertips throb. You are alive. You are alive. You are alive. You are broken down and remade again in a crucible of agony with a needle and a pair of steady hands, and better for it, as always.
“You’ll be fine,” your surgeon says, which is true. You’re always fine. Your scars are proof of that. The neat rows of thread in your hand are just more evidence.
You sit in Edward’s cabin, weeks later, when the scabs have healed into three shiny pink knots of tissue. He has your hand in his, examining the entry wound through your palm, the exit wound by your thumb, the way your fingers curl slightly slower for now. He pokes at it and you don’t even hiss as pain flickers up your wrist like a candle flame. Instead, you just bite back a smile at the attention.
“Fucking lucky,” Edward says, and you nod, even though it wasn’t luck at all. It was a calculated decision, a sacrifice you were more than willing to make. A blade through your hand was nothing. But Edward presses down on the knot of scar tissue, which burns up all your nerve endings and makes you want to pant like a dog, and says, “Fucking lucky, Izzy.”
“Ugly, though,” you say, as if it matters. It is ugly, an unromantic wound for an unromantic profession. It doesn’t bother you.
Edward laughs. “Sure. Getting run through never leaves pretty things behind.” He rubs his thumb over the scar again. “Here, I’ll cover it up for you.”
You sit in your seat, head tilted back and eyes half-lidded, as ink begins to burrow its way into your body. Edward keeps your hand pressed down with his own as he works the needle into your skin, over and over. Your fingertips twitch when he hits nerves, but the rest of you relaxes and leans into the feeling. The edges of your vision go sharp instead of gray as the edges of your scar go black. You hold the tip of your tongue between your teeth and so does he, focusing more intently on you than he ever does on anything else. He keeps a real rhythm for this, dipping the needle into the ink and pushing it into you like a rabbiting heartbeat. You let yourself become the process, the soft tap tap tap of candle-singed metal digging into you. You can’t get lost in it; you have to be present, and you prefer it that way. You feel every single dig of the tip, and the tiny splits of your skin when it gives up trying to protect you, and the tug when the needle pulls back out and your body tries to cling to it, hoping against all hope that it will stay inside you this time.
Edward takes pass after pass over your twisted skin, and the pain keeps ramping up. The prickle becomes a sting, and the sting becomes a wound, and the wound becomes a fire as the ink relentlessly abuses your skin. Your chest feels tight; your mouth feels dry. You feel like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. You feel like it’s just the two of you in this whole aching universe. You don’t want him to stop. You want him to color your whole body in, just to keep feeling like this, and to know that he was the one who made you.
It’s far too soon when he wipes the extra ink off of your skin with his forearm and lets you go. You hold up your hand to the candlelight to admire his handiwork. He’s branded you with an ace of spades, nestled comfortably between your thumb and forefinger. A symbol of good fortune.
“Perfect,” you pronounce it, and he beams at you like you hoped he would. You let your hands fall into your lap and you press your fingers against it. It seizes in your throat like a hand around your neck.
You keep it clean, washing it daily until it heals, but you don’t cover it. You don’t protect it. You brush against it, in your day to day, by accident, or at night, alone in bed, on purpose. It itches and it aches, and you let it, so it can remind you how fucking lucky you really are.
–
You love Edward Teach like air – a fact, one that you don’t even need to think about, until you do.
People give too little thought to air. Even you, sometimes. You use it all the time, even when you’re asleep, or unconscious, defenseless. Sucking it down and burning it up and blowing it away, only for it to come right back. It’s everywhere, all the time, one of the only things every person in the world has in common. You don’t have to barter for it, trade up your gold, steal behind a merchant’s back. It’s just there.
This is, of course, a wild oversimplification.
No one ever thinks about air, until the miasma hits and disease sweeps the rations closet. The slow, creeping reek of night air starts to threaten the ship, making everyone uneasy. Illness lurks around every corner, and men get skittish. You’re far from port, even if you divert right now, which you should, and you will. Your surgeon keeps your infections at bay, but there’s not much he can do about the elements. It follows you around every time you go below deck: a warning, and a threat. You tie a bandana around your face and hope it’s enough.
No one ever thinks about air, until it gets heavy, weighs men down. Pressure descends on the ship like the hand of God and shoves. You smell a storm. You taste it on the air like licking metal. You can’t see it coming in yet, but you all know. When the whole world gets heavy like this, you know you can’t win. All you can do is take down the sails, batten down the hatches, and hope.
No one ever thinks about air, until they’re dying from the lack of it.
The weather today is heavy and humid today, a warning from the sky if you’ve ever seen one. There’s certainly a storm on the way, which Edward very well knows because of the way it makes him ache, but you’ve been chasing a ship for days now and you’re just about to converge, and there’s no way he’s about to give it up, so you all commit yourself to wanton violence and a speedy getaway after.
The ship you attack seems to have similar ideas, because her crew is blunt at your throat instantly. They try to buck you off more than anything, and you can see them tugging at the sail ropes. You see Edward ducking and bobbing through the crowd, looking for the captain, hoping for once to get a quick surrender. He’ll be pissed off about that, but not more pissed off than he would be if you capsized in the middle of the ocean. You track him through the fight as the two crews try to beat each other back, shoving and shoving like a battering ram, trying to get you back into the Queen Anne’s Revenge as fast as possible.
He dodges a blow, dodges a sword, shoots a rope connecting a sail. He takes the steps two at a time up to where the captain is calling orders and pulls a knife. He runs, and the captain sees him, and instead of pulling a gun or a sword or simply getting run through, he grabs Edward by the collar with a steely kind of resignation and uses every inch of his momentum to drag them both over the edge of the ship.
You turn your head as that dark shape you orbit around slips, falls. Your eyes move, even as the rest of your body does not, and you track the arc of Edward’s body as he drops past the railing, past the deck, out of sight, into the ocean between these two warring ships.
Then you’re running before you can even register what you’re doing, and if you had any control at all, you would stop doing it. Going in the water between two ships in battle is a death sentence; doing it on purpose is suicidal. This might kill you, really and truly and once and for all, and as you throw your sword down on the deck and dive off the side of the ship and plunge into the ocean below, you don’t fucking care.
When you surface, you look around for Edward, or the other captain, and it takes a long moment of scrambling before you realize you– don’t. Your body rejects that in a strange spasm, like you’re jerking away from the idea, and you start swimming as hard as you can toward the place you’d guess he went. The waves between the two ships kick up sea foam and you shove it aside as much as you can, until below you, you see a dark shape, moving strangely as it sinks, drifting down and down and down and down and down and down–
You take two breaths, then one more big one, and you dive again, squinting as the salt water batters your eyes. You kick hard, you reach out, you’re so fucking far– how did he sink that far, when you’ve just gotten here? The shape’s strange movements take on a new pattern, moving up, moving toward you– toward you, he’s still there, your body is fucking freezing but the relief keeps your joints moving. Your chest is starting to burn, slowly but surely and getting more all the time. There’s a heaviness there that wants to convince you that maybe sinking isn’t the worst idea, and maybe it’s inevitable. Your lungs will only listen to you for so long. You swallow, with your tongue thick in your mouth, trying to block up your airways from the inside in a desperate fucking hope that you can dominate yourself for long enough to see the sky again.
You finally get close enough to see the waving tendrils of his hair, tossed around by his sluggishly flailing arms. You can’t see his face through the salt, and you don’t need to; as long as there’s movement, you have something to work with. Your fingers brush his wrist, and then catch on the second go, and you grip him as tight as you can and start kicking up immediately. He weighs you down, absolutely no help at all, and you feel, to your absolute horror, a couple of air bubbles brush against your wrist from below. Fuck, no, fuck, you keep at it, you’re going to make it, the sky’s getting closer every second, you’re going to fucking make it up and so is he. Every single one of your muscles is burning now, screaming for you to stop. Your chest feels like you’ve been beaten; you can feel it everywhere, in your jaw the way it’s clenched, in your face the way it’s heating up. No more bubbles, your brain supplies, which wracks through all your limbs like a seizure. Dead fucking weight.
The sky seems awfully far away.
You breach it anyway, after an eternity and then suddenly and all at once, to the boom of cannon fire. Your greedy, useless body gasps for air, prizing you above all else, wasting precious seconds. You allow yourself three hungry gulps before you get Edward up above the water too. His head lolls back against your shoulder and some water slips from his mouth, and you snarl, a wordless fucking sound because you’ve forgotten fucking words and there’s nothing to fucking say.
You get your arms around his middle and squeeze as hard as you can. His neck knocks forward and you hear more water coming out. You pound on his back, turn him around, block up his nose and force your air into his lungs. He spasms and shakes under you, so you do it again, and then his whole body stiffens and he rips away from you, coughing violently and retching. You catch his arm and drag him back as everything inside of him comes back out, and you keep him afloat as best you can so that it doesn’t all get sucked back in. He yells between coughs, some violent panicked thing, a deep and animal reaction that you understand all too well, because you would have made that sound too if you hadn’t given all your breath to him, if it hadn’t worked.
“Fuck!” Edward bellows, still flailing around uncoordinated, which is the best thing you’ve ever heard in your entire life.
“Stop yelling,” you say shakily. “They’re going to fucking notice us.”
“Christ,” Edward chokes out.
“Come on, come on, let’s– can you–” You drag his arm around your shoulder and he clings on immediately and you start to swim again. His panting is sharp and wet and uneven in your ear, which terrifies you, in a muted sort of way. You know that’s not good. You think that’s actually pretty fucking bad, from what you’ve seen before. You also know there’s not a damn thing you can do about it right now. On the ship, you can string him up by his ankles from the mast until everything drains out. All you have to do is get there.
It’s a long fucking swim back to the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Not that it’s far, just a few hundred feet, but any swim is a long swim when there’s more cannon fire above your head and sticky red rain from the sky. A cannonball blasts a hole in the side of a boat, you have no idea whose, but you see a spray of ragged wooden splinters coming at you. You catch Edward around the back of the neck and order, “Breath,” and he takes one and you drag the two of you down below the surface, which is currently the last place you want to be for the rest of your fucking life. You hear, muffled, the impact above you, two dozen angry splashes, and then resurface barely a beat after. Edward gasps like he’d hit the bottom again, coughs some more, pink on his lips. You look away and you hope the ocean cleans him up before you have to look back.
There are rope ladders waiting for you when you finally drag the two of you up to the hull of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. You wrap Edward’s limbs around one and the crew starts dragging him up; you climb the other yourself, without waiting. By the time his sodden body hits the deck, you’ve already screamed at half a dozen people, and there’s crew ready and waiting, getting him onto his side and propping him up. You kneel down in front of him, but you hesitate; your brain’s not sure where to go. You know the raid’s still ongoing, that the men need a command and it won’t fucking be Edward today, but you’re worried that if you look away, he’ll slip back down into that terrible, sluggish quiet, drifting in the underwater current.
He blinks up at you, like he can hear what you’re thinking, and rasps, “Go.”
“Captain.”
“Go, Iz.”
“Ed–”
He cuts you off with another hacking fit, spraying more blood and seawater onto your boots, but the gaze he fixes you with after is clear. “That’s an order, Izzy.”
You suck in a breath through your nose, quiet but sharp. Rather than soothe, it burns your abused chest. You can’t quite get ahold of yourself; everything is spinning, like you’ve been choked out. You wipe at your wet face with your equally wet sleeve. You let the breath go, whipped away by the wind, and you say, “Yes, sir,” and you go.
–
You love Edward Teach like God, and actually, you will explain that one.
When you were young, before you learned the way the world worked, that it was a hand-cranked machine full of broken gears with men’s bones stuck between them, you, like every other child, asked your mother why bad things happened.
“Because the world is a hard place,” she told you, with dull eyes that punctuated her statement.
“But what about God?” you asked.
“What about Him?”
“Why does God let bad things happen?”
She considered you, as if you were one of the bad things that He let happen, and brushed your hair off of your forehead. She considered you for a long time, sorting answers in her head, what was appropriate to say to a six-year-old and what would get her damned.
“Because men can be cruel,” she settled on eventually, which did not answer your question.
“Why doesn’t He stop them?” you pushed.
“Because God can be cruel too,” your mother said, so immediately and so tiredly that you lost your faith then and there, because you could see how true it was and how heavily it weighed.
You did not dislike God solely because He was cruel. You did not dislike God for the flood in Mesopotamia or the near-sacrifice of your namesake’s father in Moriah or the conquest of the Canaanites. These were things that kings did, and emperors, and governors, and lords. They were nothing new, even to you, a child who only heard about them.
No, you disliked God because He was not those things, pretended not to be, pretended to be good and merciful and righteous, and brought them down anyway.
God loves you, said every priest you’ve ever listened to. God loves you, except. Except if you fall to temptation. Except if you sin. Except if you stray. Except. Except. Except.
God does not love you, no matter what your priest says. God does not care about you at all. God will raze the ground you stand on without a word because He thinks you deserve it, and the masses will fall to their knees, mumbling thanks into their prayer beads for the violent, blood-soaked miracles. God is good, they whisper, God is good, and so you take your holy name and you leave the rest behind, because that lie is one you just cannot abide by.
When you found Edward Teach, years and years later, you found a new object of worship, an honest one. For all that Edward was full of shit and hot air and insane ideas, he was honest about the things that mattered: piracy, and violence, and attention, and discipline. He was honest about hard, painful work, and the rewards at the end of it. He was honest about your share of loot, your back-breaking chores, your ship’s reputation. He never lied about who he was – he was Blackbeard, and the proof was plain before your eyes.
So you got on your knees and laced your fingers together and you built yourself a new god. One whose blood you would gladly swallow, one whose existence you would define yourself with. One that you would follow into the hell he made you, and you’d make your home there and you’d be grateful, even, to be allowed to live inside of his creation, because you knew it was real.
You are not his first follower, but you are his most ardent, and his most long-serving. You are the one who stands at his right hand as you bear witness to the method to the madness. You bear witness to miracles born out of his frantic mind, and feats of fuckery you would never have thought possible, and holy violence razing everything in your path. And you think about the people whose lives dictated the Testaments, who lived among the blessed and the saints and the holy son, and you think you get it now, because this feels just like God, just like the church you grew up in, except–
After, when you kneel before your god and say your prayers, sometimes he fucking kneels back.
And when you don’t understand – because there is an explanation, there always is, even if you don’t get it – you ask, and he answers you, instead of leaving you alone at the foot of your bed in the dark, wondering and wondering alone.
And when you feel lost, in moments of bitter weakness, when you feel like somewhere along the line you’ve broken irreparably and you’re coming apart at the seams, you go to him in the sanctuary of his cabin and you shatter in front of him, the only place in the world where it’s safe to do so, and he fixes you. You break and he puts you back together and you break and he puts you back together and you break and he puts you back together, making you more and more yourself each time, and more and more his, until you can lift your head again, until you can breathe.
And when you wonder to yourself, in the blackest, drunkest dead of night when even you can’t hear you, why bad fucking things fucking happen, why you’re exhausted and in pain and fucking lonely at sea– well. You wake up to the honor of once again laying eyes upon the reason.
And then, over time, behind your back, behind your closed eyelids because you couldn’t witness it, you couldn’t even conceive of it– you lose him. He pulls further and further into the stuff of legend, into things that the two of you know aren’t even real. He slips into the distance and you’re still on the ground, preaching the gospel, writing his texts in blood. You look to the sky for messages, but they’re few and far between these days, and confusing besides. When you ask, what should we do and what do you want, he snaps at you, can’t you fucking figure it out on your own for once? So you retreat like you’ve been lashed, cut adrift and absolutely terrified of it.
You wonder, on your knees, in your room, alone, who said the first prayer that God didn’t answer. You wonder what it felt like when the source of all reason fell silent without warning. You wonder what they did, if they cried or begged or ran to their temples in a panic, or if they just knelt there, waiting, until they discovered the truth of the matter. And before, you might have wondered why they stayed, why they bothered to ask again, when there was clearly nothing there.
But now you know.
Now you know.
And now you know, too, that all the worship in the fucking world isn’t enough to keep a god satisfied for long. And now you know the price of the belief that you’ve held onto for so, so long, and it’s everything. And now you know why everyone before you has stayed, because if you stop believing now, after everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve done, then there would be absolutely nothing left of either of you.
You live your three days of him being dead and gone, ruined by some kind of satiny rich black magic that you will never understand, and then he rises to save you one last time, except he comes back all wrong. He comes back soft and open like a gut wound, and then he comes back hard, walled into his own tomb. You can’t reach him there. You can’t see him. You can’t ask questions, or receive benedictions. In the end, your own flesh was his last gift to you, and after that, you could never reach him again. And you suppose, this time, that you deserve it.
Because you loved Edward Teach like God, and now he loves you like God does.