house-afire

[house-afire]

WIP word game

Tagged by @firstaudrina. Thank you! <3 This gave me an excuse to dig up some dusty WIPs.

Rules: you will be given a word. share one sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that start with each letter of that word. my word was HAUNT.

H -- He hadn’t stabbed anyone yet. All his kills were rats, done with his teeth and sometimes a shake of his head, thrashing them from side to side until their backs broke. Maybe it would be nice, in a fucked-up sort of way, to take a life he actually wanted gone. To kill a person like a person, not an animal like an animal.

A -- All those years tacking down every loose end of himself, and he was still a fucking disaster when you came right down to it.

U -- Ullman would throw a fit if a chambermaid’s snot-nosed seven-year-old in a holey flannel jacket wandered through the lobby and into the kitchen.

N -- No matter where she went, she always had to pass it; she would intend to walk to the garden shed and find her hand stretched out for that preternaturally warm doorknob, hear the voices behind it rising into chattering ecstasies.

T -- There were ivory inlays all along their frame, polished to a shine and covered in minute and dark-red etchings, and it made Ellen feel she was walking into some enormous mouth.

Up for anyone who wants it! I'll throw in the word LOST.

[house-afire]

Queen's Consort (Jim/Jackie)

Prompt: 100 words of tied up and used

“This is not what Jackie agreed to,” Jackie says through gritted teeth.

Jim trails their fingers up the inside of one of Jackie’s thighs, the gentle scrape of their calluses the only kind of tenderness Jackie’s liable to get tonight, and fuck if she doesn’t love it. She’s put in a fuck-ton of time and effort making the men in her life, even her husbands, snap to on her damn say-so, but Jim? Jim ain’t a man or a husband. And if a woman can’t get bent over her own desk by her one-and-only fucking consort, shit, life’s not even worth living.

Doesn’t mean she’s not gonna bitch about getting tied up with plain cord instead of Bonnet’s silk handkerchiefs, though.

“Yeah,” Jim says, “Stede started locking those up after last time. Ropes are easier anyway.” They crouch down, swift as a pit viper, and so close in their breath’s cool against Jackie’s flushed-hot pussy. “You just don’t like it because you think you don’t look like a queen. But you do, cariña.” They thrust two of their fingers into Jackie without any goddamn warning at all. “Just one who’s been conquered.”

A queen who’s had her city sacked by some noseless, dickless wonder—but she doesn’t want to think about that, doesn’t want to think about anything but how she’ll get back at Jim for making these knots so tight she can’t thrust back on their fingers. She has to just stay put while Jim finger-fucks her cunt like they’ve got all day to do it.

Jim knows exactly what they’re doing. Jackie’s soaked—she usually is, as soon as Jim draws the lot that says it’s their night for domestic responsibilities—and when confronted with a sopping wet pussy, somebody as good as Jim has to fucking try to not make her come. Jackie’s good at getting off on almost nothing. The number of husbands she’s taken over the years, well, they can’t all be winners, and while the lazy motherfuckers go out the door right away, she gives the skittish ones time to learn, and she makes the best of it.

She’s down to just Jim and the Swede now, though—though she’s thinking on Roach—and they’ve gotten her spoiled.

Except now, with this bullshit.

Her cunt tightens around Jim’s fingers like she wants to keep them inside her, and she knows Jim feels it, because they just laugh and pull out anyway, leaving her aching.

“You call this keeping our marriage bed warm?” Jackie says. “Maybe your boyfriend or your girlfriend like all this pussyfooting around, but your wife wants to be fucked right.”

Jim runs the hard edge of their thumbnail over Jackie’s clit, and for a second, all Jackie can see are black stars—the cusp of an oncoming orgasm mixed with some sweet, rough pain.

“I could do it wrong,” Jim says. “I’m thinking I can do it however I want, since I’m the one in charge.” They press forward, the damp curls of their own cunt flush with Jackie’s ass. They’ve done this before, on the nights it goes this way—rubbed themselves off against the curve of her ass—sometimes after they’ve smacked it hot and sore first—and then acted like they were going to leave Jackie hanging. They never do, not in the end. That’s a fucking dealbreaker and they know it. But this—this is a good night, and Jackie thinks she sees how it’s gonna go.

But she’s wrong this time. Jim goes around in front of her and kneels up on the desk instead, parts their own cunt-lips with two fingers so Jackie can see she’s not the only one who needs it. Jackie can smell them—the sea-air scent of their consort’s cunt that’s like nothing else in the world. And the angle is shit—Jackie will have to strain forward and bend her neck in a way that’ll leave it stiff for days—but she doesn’t even care. She wants Jim to ride her face this way, use her, ignore her displayed cunt and ass to take this passing fucking fancy instead, just because they can.

She gives Jim a half-nod, and Jim spreads their knees out wider and presses their cunt to Jackie’s mouth.

And it’s so good Jackie comes from it, her cunt clenching down on nothing at all. It’s a shitty little stutter of a climax, but she can live with that for now. Jim’s always good for another round.

[house-afire]

Testament (Izzy/Lucius)

Prompt: 100 words of inheritance

Izzy dreamt of an enormous moth lighting on his face, beating its wings furiously. It was a strange fancy for a man who’d spent most of his life at sea, away from almost every creeping, crawling thing, but it made more sense once he struggled back awake and felt a sheet of parchment slide off his face.

“What the fuck is this?” Lucius demanded, his voice off-pitch with some emotion Izzy was too inexperienced or hungover (or both) to identify.

He turned over enough to blearily take in whatever Lucius was talking about before Lucius shoved it in his face again. The paper was stamped with Wee John’s powder and paints now—Izzy hadn’t washed his prettiness off before he’d collapsed in bed. But that wasn’t what Lucius meant, of course. He was—God only knew why—all stirred up about what was written on the paper.

“What the fuck does it look like?”

“What does it—it looks like a fucking will, Izzy!”

“Good,” Izzy said. “I did it right, then.”

“What are you doing writing your will?”

It was far too early for this shit. “Pirates die, Twatty. One-legged pirates die even faster. I might’ve lived through last night, might’ve made it out of the Pirate Queen’s brig, just because Bonnet’s got a soft heart and the devil’s own luck, but I can’t ride his fucking coattails forever.”

Lucius didn’t look like someone who’d heard a reasonable explanation and was ready to let a painted-up cripple with a pounding headache and a shit taste in his mouth go the fuck back to sleep. He was still tense and white-faced, his lips pressed into a thin line.

“Fine. You want to be all morbidly defeatist, then fine. Mood, honestly. But what I want to know is why you think you’re going to die before my fucking wedding.”

Lucius stabbed his finger down at the damning line: my ring to Lucius Spriggs for his wedding. The last few words were in a wobbly, heavy hand.

Izzy silently cursed himself for having written that little proviso in before his head had hit the pillow. He’d just been falling-down drunk and too fucking sentimental, that was all. He’d have left the ring to Lucius is any case; he fucking had left it to him, no strings attached, before Calypso’s birthday had done his head in. What Lucius would do with it—and especially what day he would put it on, if he even kept it at all and didn’t just sell it off at their next port—didn’t need to get solemnized in Izzy’s piss-poor will and testament.

Of course the boy would want some explanation for it. He’d done this to himself, hadn’t he?

Izzy sighed. “Look at what my life’s been, lately. One near-miss after the next. I want my shit in order, that’s all.”

Lucius sat down on the edge of Izzy’s narrow bed. “I get that. But that means planning for your life too, okay? Not just the end of it. And I’ve marked you down as a yes on the RSVPs, all right? I’ll be very disappointed if you no-show, no matter how good an excuse you have. Like being dead.”

“I changed my mind. I’m not leaving my ring to some twat who wakes me up after a Calypso party.”

Lucius probably knew that for the dodge it was, but he let Izzy have it. He must’ve known too much earnestness was bad for a man’s blood.

“Excuse me, don’t you fucking dare. It’s wildly romantic to have your death ring. If you even try leaving it to someone else, I’ll tell everyone you bequeathed your sword to Stede.”

Izzy had known that was a mistake. He’d never fucking hear the end of it if the rest of them found out about that while he was still alive.

“He’s a fucking captain. He needs a better one than what he’s got. It was a practical choice—”

“Mm, very practical. Now he’ll have something even sharper to cut himself with.”

“He’s getting better.”

“Aren’t we all,” Lucius said, with a fleeting smile that had a wistful edge to it. “Look at me, up at the crack of dawn, well before our usually diligent first mate—”

Izzy groaned and covered his eyes. “Fuck off, you’re only up because you never went to fucking sleep.”

“That’s neither here nor there. Anyway, I have the updated duty roster. That’s what I came to drop off before I started, you know, going through your things. Look, you really shouldn’t leave papers out like that if you don’t want people to read them.”

Of course Spriggs was contrary enough that the only time he’d break a sweat on this ship was right after the fucking revelry when all decent people were still hungover.

“Working on Calypso’s birthday,” Izzy muttered. “Fucking disrespectful. See if I don’t have her put some hex on you.”

Lucius brightened. “Ooh, speaking of our goddess—you two did look good last night. Was our Dizzy Izzy a virgin sacrifice?”

“Fuck off, Spriggs.”

“Do you only like bears? Is that why you don’t want me sketching you? Because I’ve got the beard now, so that’s something.”

I left you the ring, Twatty, Izzy almost said. I’m already giving you the only pretty thing I have.

But everything he’d doled out on that silly slip of paper had meant something—his knife and sword-hand glove to Jim, his trunk to Fang, his share of current plunder to Frenchie, all of it—and Lucius, he knew, would understand that and not quarrel over it. It would take a lot of fucking talking, though, and he was bone-tired still.

Instead of any of that, he rubbed his hand over Lucius’s cheek, feeling the bristles beneath his palm. Lucius’s breath caught sharply before he leaned into Izzy’s touch.

“Suits you,” Izzy said.

“Being caressed by a silver fox always suits me.”

He kept his face tilted against Izzy’s hand as he carefully folded the will back up and stretched his arm out to put it back where he’d found it. Out of sight, out of mind—at least with Lucius now lying down next to him, curling up to fit around him. His breath, warm on Izzy’s cheek, smelt of Fang and Roach’s fruity drinks. It was nice. Like the last of Bonnet’s marmalade, scraped out to the edge of the bread. Sooner or later he’d have nothing but dry crust again—or he’d starve altogether—but not now. Not yet.

[house-afire]

What to Expect When You're Not Expecting (Fang/Izzy, pregnancy fantasy)

Prompt: 100 words of getting him pregnant

“I wish you could knock me up,” Fang said.

This was what Izzy got for lounging about after a fuck like he hadn’t a care in the fucking world. It was too easy to wind up like this, loose-limbed and cock-drunk, his sweat-soaked hair rubbing against Fang’s belly. Izzy had to use him as a pillow—or so he told himself—’cos the bed was narrow as a virgin’s arsehole. No room for two unless you piled atop each other like this. God only knew how some aboard managed their little fuck-arounds.

He couldn’t run away from whatever the hell fancy Fang was spinning for himself. His leg was halfway across the room, swaddled up cozy in a blanket.

Bit like it was the babe Fang was apparently after. Izzy gave it a look like it had betrayed him, playing along with all this.

He didn’t know why his hand found its way to Fang’s belly too, resting there in front of his eyes.

“Well, I can’t,” Izzy said. It came out blustery somehow, indignant and spitty and riled-up, like he was months back, talking to a peacocking Spriggs. “Have Roach explain it to you, if you’ve gone this long without—”

“I know how it works, boss.” Fang patted his stomach. His hand fell to the side of Izzy’s at first and then, almost shyly, straight on it. “Got nowhere to put it. But if you could.”

If he could. If he could, he’d still be a one-legged pirate past his prime, sailing on a ship where the crew was already vulnerable and downy enough without adding an infant in the mix. He had enough to take care of already. He had a child, he’d wind up throwing himself in the fucking sea.

But he remembered Calypso’s Birthday—the sweep of gold glitter above his eyes, the cloud-pale shimmer, his painted lips against a goddess’s hand. No one had come right out and said he wasn’t pretty, that it was all just paint and pretend. Fang had draped a chain of flowers around his neck. There were times and places when the world this lot believed in wouldn’t die straight-out like a hothouse bloom in the cold.

Nothing cold and brisk about the times he shared his bed with Fang.

They weren’t talking about a real child that would bawl its fucking head off and shit its drawers and deserve more than Izzy could give it. They weren’t, he realized with a hot wash of something, even talking about it getting born at all. Fang would be good at it, having a little one, but that wasn’t what this was bout. Just Fang carrying it. Just Izzy putting it in him.

“You’d swell up,” Izzy said. “Have to loosen your leathers.”

“Ooh,” Fang said happily. “You’re right, Izzy. And they say your feet swell up too. Would you rub them for me? My little tootsies?”

“Christ. I’d have to, or I’d never hear the end of it. Bonnet would probably hold a fucking intervention. Because they’d know—” What he was trying to get out was too big and jagged, like he couldn’t force the words from his throat. But he did anyway—for his own sake, this time. “Because they’d all know it was mine. Ours. Wouldn’t they?”

“Of course they would.” Fang sounded almost scandalized by any threat to his imaginary fucking child’s legitimacy. “We’d tell them. ‘Izzy and I are having a baby.’ Bet there’d be cake. And Pete could make a crib for it—”

“It’s my fucking firstborn, I’ll make it a crib.”

“—and Wee John could knit it little booties—”

“I can feel it,” Izzy said, spreading his fingers out on Fang’s belly, a starfish on the shore he could really call home. “Kicking. Can’t you?”

Fang wriggled under his touch, pink-cheeked and pleased as anything. “They say that’s a good sign,” he said, and he took his hand off Izzy’s and put it on Izzy’s cheek instead, turning Izzy’s head up to look at him. “When you can feel it like this. Means, you know, that it’s healthy.”

First healthy fucking thing he ever had a part of, then.

“Good,” Izzy said. He swallowed. “I suppose I’ll do my best to take care of you both, then, so it stays that way.”

He kept his hand where it was. It rose and fell with Fang’s belly as he breathed. A sign of life against his palm. A sheltered little hothouse bloom that could thrive so long as he stayed cupped over it.

[house-afire]

worth looking (Frenchie & Jim, Kraken era)

“How long have we been—” Jim makes a harsh, frustrated sound in the back of their throat and waves their hand around.

“Dunno,” Frenchie says. “Days have been bleeding into each other.”

Jim makes that sound again. It’s like somebody breaking a broomstick over their knee. Everything else it might remind Frenchie of is all locked up tight in the box, but he’d still say it’s a sound that can only come out of a person so many times before they’re used up.

“‘Bleeding’ is the word for it, yeah,” Jim says.

Red dawns, dark stains of night. Frenchie’s good at all the laundry that comes with it. What you do is you fix your eyes on whatever passes for a clean spot. You don’t focus on anything else. And then you scrub all the blurry bits hard as you can. It’s easy once you get used to it.

“It’s just,” Jim says, and stop again. They tug at a piece of their hair. “It’s getting long. Olu cut it, the night we made the fake nose, and it’s—it’s getting too long.”

So that’s how long it’s been, then: long enough that what they had with the others isn’t enough anymore.

“I should just do it,” Jim says, but they don’t move.

Frenchie still looks at Jim, these days, even though he knows it would be smarter not to. Fang and Ivan, too. He just never quite stopped. He was doing all right for a while with Izzy, but he’s slipped up a bit there too.

The trouble is there’s no clean spot on any of them, so he just has to see, and the seeing keeps him up at night. But they raid all hours now, so—bright side, maybe? No one ever has to wake him up.

“I could give you a trim?” Frenchie offers. “Just to keep it out of your eyes.”

He knows there are shears aboard because, well, Iz, but biting through bone’s probably left them too dull for a good haircut. He does what he can with Jim’s knife, instead. Before all the bloody days, Jim would never have let him do this—probably wouldn’t have let anyone, except maybe Olu, handle their gear at all. But now that everything’s red and black and sticky—now that they’ll die sooner rather than later, if he’s being honest—Jim sags back on the barrel, their spine curving against Frenchie’s front. The loose hairs on their collar mat onto his shirt.

“Change it up,” they say. Their voice shakes for a second, like a plucked string. “I want it to look different.”

Because then it’s not Olu’s cut, Frenchie reckons. They’re out of leftovers. They need something new. A token of what few of them are still around. It won’t hurt so much to remember this—Jim tilting their head back so their eyes meet his. Not, at any rate, until Frenchie’s gone too.

[house-afire]

drop of blood (Ed-centric, Ed/Stede, post-canon, horror)

Prompt: 100 words of becoming an eldritch horror

Fucking deck’s covered in blood! You do leave them dripping, don’t you, Eddie? Nothing quick and clean for you, eh? Good lad. But make sure to throw in a drop of your own for the kraken.

Ed’s marooned a fuck-ton of his memories on sandbars in his head. They’re supposed to starve there, wither away when he’s not looking. But they hang on like Hornigold—or Hornigold’s ghost, anyway. Braid their sandals, stir their soup. He sails by—or washes up on their shores, in worse times—and they’re all as round-cheeked and hale as he left them. They’re doing what they do.

He’s still killing his dad, on one of them. He always will be.

Most of his time with old Horny is stranded like this, and his mental map’s got a warning scrawled on it: Visit only with Jack, and only when you’re fucking hammered.

Jack’s dead, so Ed shouldn’t be thinking about Hornigold at all, really. Dangerous waters.

But he is thinking about him, sort of. About the old pirate legend Hornigold taught him, about how after you indulged in some splashy bit of bloodshed, you were supposed to prick your finger, too. Shake the red off your hand and onto the waves: a drop to feed the kraken.

He’d done it a few times back then. Trying out superstitions like he’d tried out kohl on his eyes (fucking love it) and letting Jack suck on his toes (eh, but he’d let Stede have a go if he wanted).

But when he’d really done it—when he’d bled on the water enough to get swoony from it, swoony when he’d had nobody’s arms to fall into (which Izzy, pasty from his own blood dripping into the deck, hobbling around trying to knot his cravat around a still-moving Ed’s hand, hadn’t thought was funny)—was when, well. During all that. When they were on a break. Plenty of islands for all that, too. He’s got nothing but forbidden isles and a dark sea, and he and Stede are in a rickety dinghy, but they’ll keep afloat. Ed knows boats, and Stede knows him. And they love each other. That’s all that matters: that’s the one fine thing you can’t buy or steal or be born into, and they wear it well.

And he ought to just think about that, on these clear, hot nights when he can’t sleep. He shouldn’t go sailing alone, even if it’s only in his own head.

It’s just that he fed the kraken a lot, during those months that are far away but not so long ago. And lately he’s been having these dreams. Like, what if all the blood he dripped on the waves knew it was his? What if it stayed together somehow? Kraken feeding the kraken. A drop of blood for himself. He sees it in his dreams—this black-red clot down below the surf, this new beast he’s made, its tentacles all whipping hair and severed limbs.

He dreamed about it during their break, too. Had dreams where he saw through its gore-glazed eyes, because it was him. It’d always been him. And it was comforting, cuddly and cozy as the knife and the storm and the gun: the sweet solution to every fucking problem he’d ever had, to every Stede-shaped wound gored into him. The monster was just blood and water, just salt and iron, and that meant it was everywhere. Its tendrils snaked through everything. If he could just be that, then he’d be in Stede like a vein, have Stede in him. And nothing would hurt.

You have weird fucking dreams when you’re on rhino horn.

But all that—he doesn’t have to think about all that anymore. He’s just Ed now, or so Izzy told him, and Ed wants to believe him. They never said too many nice things to each other, him and Iz, so it only seems fair to have one of them be true.

He doesn’t want to look at the white-tipped waves and think about what’s stirring beneath them, what patiently dragged itself to their island.

Doesn’t want to think about what might be everywhere he is. What might just be everywhere, since when Ed made a monster, made himself a monster, he didn’t fuck around.

Nah. It’s just his imagination. Never met an idea he couldn’t run away with, has he?

He’s fine. He’s good. He’s happy.

And if, this morning, he looked across the rim of his killer fucking mimosa and saw a broken blood vessel in Stede’s left eye, a cloudy, branching splatter of red—if he saw it move—then he can put that memory on its own separate shore too. Strand it too. There’s no shortage of islands.

Or so he hopes, on nights like this.

[house-afire]

Storied Life (AU, outsider POV)

Prompt: 100 words of valets

Dennis had been excited to land a plum position like being Stede Bonnet’s valet. “Dire fucking turnover with that one,” a friend of his had said, but Dennis had gone straight ahead and applied anyway. He didn’t have any regrets. The work itself was shit—wasn’t it always?—but Mr. Bonnet could be staggeringly generous with those haphazard tips of his, and the wages were decent (when Mr. Bonnet remembered to pay them).

Mostly, though, Dennis had wanted the job because he’d figured it’d be nice to serve under a man like himself, for a change. Mr. Bonnet wasn’t exactly standard-issue aristocracy—wasn’t in lots of ways, really, but particularly the way you could tell just by looking at him, if you had any sense. Of course, Dennis soon found out that a boss was a boss no matter what you had in common—but all the same, he could have done worse.

At least Mr. Bonnet was interesting in his own sad, daft way, so that sometimes just going into the drawing room would feel like grabbing some serial fresh from the printer.

And when he was in his cups—which was often enough—he didn’t mind Dennis asking him questions.

“I heard a rumor,” Dennis said, “that you once took to sea to become a pirate.”

Left, mucked about a bit, and came back to his old life with his tail between his legs: Dennis had heard the tale often enough that he was starting to find it plausible. And Mr. Bonnet did have his whims.

“I did,” Mr. Bonnet said. “I did do that, Dennis. The Gentleman Pirate, they called me.” He looked down into the dark depths of his wine glass. “Do you know, I even met Blackbeard? Ed. I called him Ed. One of the only people in the world to ever do that.”

Dennis didn’t believe that Ed part any more than he’d believe that Mr. Bonnet had once stuck his head in a lion’s mouth, but he supposed that man could have met Blackbeard.

“I left everything behind when I came to the sea,” Mr. Bonnet said. “Everything except myself.”

(Everything, Dennis knew, included his wife and kids.

“Gone,” was what Mr. Bonnet had dramatically said of them, whenever someone asked—as if he’d shipped them off to England, they’d all fallen to consumption, or both. So far as Dennis could tell, they were still in Barbados, but Mr. Bonnet moved house like mad so his wife couldn’t find him even if she wanted to.)

“That’s one of the things Ed found so appealing about me,” Mr. Bonnet said. “I was so much myself. You’ve got to be bold, to be yourself.”

You’ve got to be rich, Dennis thought.

“What was he like, sir? Blackbeard?”

“Nice guy, really,” Mr. Bonnet said. He sloshed his wine around. “Or no, actually, probably not. He wasn’t always—wasn’t always the man I knew. He had a darkness in him, eating away with sharp teeth. But do you know what? The time I spent with him was the happiest of my life, and it was the happiest of his, too. That’s got to count for something.” He drained the last of his glass. “But everything ends. Everything dies. So, you know, why should he be an exception?”

Dennis wasn’t sure he understood all that, but he could see he’d be fetching bottles from the wine cellar all day, so he might as well resign himself to it and get a few more stories out of it.

“How did he die?” he said, reaching for Mr. Bonnet’s empty glass.

“It was brutal,” Mr. Bonnet said, looking somewhere past Dennis. “He never saw it coming. Skewered by—by some fucking traitor.” His lips curved in an expression that was nothing like a smile, and for the first time, Dennis could see why Mr. Bonnet had had such trouble keeping his servants. You wouldn’t want to stay too long around a smile like that. It was like Mr. Bonnet had sawed open a gash in his face, and it was bleeding white and red. “By the time they found him, the fire had ruined him. His first mate only knew him by his leathers. Whole face burnt right off.”

He touched his own lips, very lightly, not cutting himself on the edges of that smile. His eyes were wet.

“And that,” Mr. Bonnet said, “was the end of my career as a pirate. That was the end of him.”

[house-afire]

Do Yourself Proud (Jim/Izzy, knifeplay)

“One of the good things about Bonnet,” Izzy said, passing the brandy bottle to Jim. “Better class of spirits on board.”

They tilted their whole head back when they drank, even though, life they’d led, they must have known baring their throat like that left them vulnerable. It was a choice. Jim used to be a crab, like him, but they’d made themselves into a knight from one of Bonnet’s bedtime stories: their armor something they could take on or off, not a shell they had to live in.

“I could tell Stede you just said he’s got more than one good point,” Jim said.

“And I could push you overboard and leave you to drown in our fucking wake.”

“Eh, pretty sure I could knock you over the railing first.” They passed the bottle back to him, and this time their fingers brushed his: as slow and deliberate as the line of their throat in the moonlight. “I’d rather knock something else.”

Izzy wanted them—he thought anybody with eyes in their fucking head would want Jim—but wanting had never gotten him anywhere before.

“Christ, Jimenez.” He took a long drink and let the sweet burn of it spread through his chest. “You’ve got Archie and Boodhari already. You’re turning into Spriggs.”

They shrugged. “And I’ve seen how you look at him, so—not like that’s going to hurt any. Look, I won’t get in your face about it all night. If it’s no, then it’s no. I just figured I’d ask.”

Izzy thought about Jim on Calypso’s birthday, all dressed-up with that penciled-on mustache, handsome as anything; swaggering around the deck like sparks should’ve been shooting from their heels, brighter than Roach’s fireworks. Jim soaked in his blood because they were the only person aboard back then tough enough to saw through a screaming man’s bone to save his fucking life.

“Take me to bed, then,” Izzy said.

Jim’s smile was enough to cut his own good leg out from under him. Seemed to be a fucking pattern there.

***

Izzy kissed Jim more that night than he had anybody in the last twenty years put together. He knew that made him fucking pathetic.

Jim tasted like Bonnet’s brandy, and they kissed like they were trying to devour him whole. Izzy had only ever tumbled with other pirates, and he’d still never been plundered like this. Like the brandy, it was a fine burn.

They used his bunk, since Jim’s was crowded enough already. Izzy unbuckled the straps on his leg and eased himself onto the bed; he let Jim stow the hoof away as he lost the rest of his clothes.

“You like it?” Jim said quietly, handling it—to Izzy’s inexplicable relief—like it was as delicate as china.

Izzy told himself he’d had more to drink than he knew, and that was why his voice sounded so fucking rough when he said, “Nicest thing in here.” Jim was a smart one. They didn’t need his help working out that it was also the nicest thing he’d ever had, the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. If the ship caught fire in the night, he’d save that leg before he’d save his mother’s ring, and not just so he could hobble out on it.

He lay back on the narrow bed, and Jim came to him.

There was a glow of possessive pride on their face, and it undid him, even though he had a grimly amused hunch he knew where Jim’s head was right now. The way they were skimming their fingers over what’s left of his thigh gave the game away.

“Jimenez, stop admiring your fucking work and fuck me already.”

“I just think I did a good job for someone who’s never done an amputation before.”

“You made a clean cut, and you kept me from dying,” Izzy said. “I’m all a-twitter about it.”

They danced their touch up, ignoring his cock to play along his hipbone instead.

“I could make some other clean cuts,” they said offhandedly. “You know. If you’re into that.”

Izzy had never minded a bit of rough sport, but he’d only ever held still and waited for the cut of one man’s knife, and that was Ed’s. Wasn’t like it had gone well for either of them. But whatever they’d had had been poisoned long before the knife ever came out, dying of Izzy’s jealousy and frustration and Edward’s boredom and fury.

It was easier with Jim. He knew they wouldn’t kill him, and he knew he wouldn’t want them to, wouldn’t ache for them to cut his heart out so long as that meant they were touching it.

And he knew one more thing: how fucking good Jim looks with a blade in their hand.

Jim said, “If it’s a bad idea—”

Izzy met their eyes. Let a challenge creep into his gaze. “You have one of your daggers on you?”

Jim grinned. “Wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.” They slid it out of its sheath and showed it to him. Their voice went soft as they said, “Family heirloom.”

“Can use another if you’d like.”

“No,” they said, giving him a brief glare. “Idiot. I don’t want to cut you with just anything.”

The words buzzed in Izzy’s blood, and they made it easy for him to stay relaxed as Jim lightly ran the point of their dagger over his skin.

It did something for him, lying there as Jim studied him and decided where to put the first cut. They settled on a spot up by his collarbone, slicing a thin, straight, sure line that was just barely deep enough to bleed.

Jim dabbed one fingertip in the blood, and Izzy couldn’t help thrusting his hips up at the sight of it, pumping his aching cock against nothing at all.

“Oh, you like that,” Jim said, almost in a purr. “Fucking great, isn’t it?” Two more swift cuts, with hardly a pause between them, and Izzy panted as Jim wrote their name on him in his own blood. He was so turned on his ears were ringing from it.

It wasn’t entirely about the pain, though God knew he’d always liked that well enough. It was about how Jim looked at him, all satisfied and thoughtful, like Izzy was a canvas they couldn’t wait to paint all in red. It was about Jim taking over him, touching his blood like they had a right to it—and they did, they’d brought it to the surface, it was their possession now that it was spilled.

It was Jim thinking he deserved the best dagger they had.

The pain was pretty damn good, though, especially when Jim put in a few more shallow notches on his side. It felt like Izzy was being whittled down into something better.

Above him, Jim’s eyes sparkled with more pride than ever. A question crept in, though, when they ran their hand down his thigh, and they stopped short of the scars they’d already given him.

“Want me to leave it alone?” they said.

“Would’ve thought you’d have polished that part of me off already,” Izzy said. “Can’t leave your mark there more than you already have. But yeah, sure, touch away.”

He didn’t think he could have told anyone else to do the same, but no one else would have wanted it as much, would have looked at him with this tender reverence as they stroked the most damaged part of him. No one else had ever looked at him that way at all, in bed or out of it.

“I don’t have to make a cut.”

Izzy swallowed. “I want you to. Let’s have one there I asked you for, then.”

Jim leaned in and kissed him, their touch chaste but burning all the same.

They scratched a delicate J into the lightest part of the scarring. Izzy held his breath for it at first, waiting for the pain to ramp up, to sour, but it was no worse there than anywhere else. Jim was taking it easy on him, of course. They must have barely broken his skin. He didn’t think he had it in him to urge them to do more. Not tonight, anyway. They looked almost shaken by this last bit of bloodletting, even though their eyes were dark, pupils wide from how much they liked it.

Worried they’d done too much, Izzy realized. Worried that they’d crossed a line.

He reached down and covered their hand with his.

“You do good work, Jim.”

They sounded hoarse as they said, “I like doing it right.”

“You do. Killing or saving or teasing me until I’m about to come untouched like a fucking boy.”

Jim lit up, and the tense, shaky look went away. “Let me do something about that too, then.”

Izzy let his head fall back against the pillow. “Fucking finally. However you like it,” he added, because if they were here with him, they must have wanted something besides what they were getting with Archie and Boodhari, and he had no fucking objections to ticking whatever boxes they had left.

It must have just been the knife-play they’d been after, though, because when they stripped down and joined him, he had trouble imagining that anyone in their right mind would object to this. They straddled his face, climbing on so they looked down the length of his body, and then they bent down and took his prick into their mouth.

Izzy had to bite down on his wrist to stifle a shout, but Jim heard it anyway.

They straightened up a little. “All right?”

“Of course it’s fucking all right,” Izzy said fervently. It had just been a while since anyone had sucked him off, and no one had ever done it in a way that gave him this kind of view and the promise of this kind of taste. “You’re fucking brilliant.” And he wasn’t going to waste any more time talking about it. He took hold of their thighs and licked up into them.

Jim said several things in Spanish that Izzy couldn’t really follow with their thighs up against his ears, but the tone was promising.

They put their mouth back on him, and he did his best not to fucking explode before they could even properly get started. He concentrated on his own business: licking them open until he could slide his tongue over their cock.

Fuck, he loved the scent and taste of them, being face-first in their cunt like this, buried in their body. He closed his lips around their cock, testing it out, and Jim bucked into his mouth at the first suck. A clear instruction—do more of that—so he did.

He matched Jim’s own rhythm at first but soon slid into complementing it, instead—like they were sparring, their retreats and advances and strikes and parries all falling just where they needed to, more like a fucking dance than a duel. He’d noticed Jim from the start, and after they’d tried each other—their knives against his sword—he’d been fucking gone on them. And for good reason.

Jim was dripping wet, and Izzy felt an almost gut-level satisfaction at the idea of his beard being soaked from them, of having them mark him this way too.

His balls drew tight just thinking about it, and he pulled away from Jim to mumble a warning—his lips slick and swollen, his pulse pounding—but Jim just hummed around his cock, finishing him off. He wasn’t going to be outdone on that front—well, not by much, anyway—so he plunged his face back between Jim’s legs.

Jim spread themselves out even wider, moving their legs from Izzy’s ears so he could hear them.

“Suck me until I scream, all right?” they said.

Izzy had always been good at following orders.

***

Afterwards—after he’d licked Jim clean and Jim had, despite him snarling at them, doused his shallow cuts with what was left of the brandy—Izzy lay there, dissolved and undone, watching Jim get dressed again. He felt a little low somehow, but he usually did after the best and roughest fucks; he was used to it by now. He looked at Jim, golden in the candlelight, getting covered up piece by piece.

He cleared his throat. “I take it your little harem doesn’t like knives in bed. You get that itch again and want to scratch it, you know where to find me."

Jim stilled, their trousers only half-buttoned. “What do you mean?”

Jesus, kids these days. Was scratching an itch that foreign a concept? Outdated lingo? What the fuck did they say instead?

“You wanted to play around with your daggers, so you found someone who’d be into it.” Roach would have been enthusiastic too, but Izzy wasn’t a saint, wasn’t going to toss around suggestions for how Jim could replace him in this little niche of theirs. Roach was getting laid enough on his own anyhow.

“Olu’s not wild about them, but Archie’s good with the daggers,” Jim said, still looking at him like he was babbling nonsense. “Why’d you think she wouldn’t be?”

Because why else would they have asked him for a tumble? Izzy kept that answer to himself, but Jim seemed to read it off his face anyway. They got back on the bed and straddled his hips, the rough cloth of their trousers threatening to rub his overused cock raw.

“Fuck,” Izzy said.

Jim started grinding on him, slow and sure. “You think I’m only here because I can’t get what I want somewhere else? I’m here for you, pendejo.” They dragged their thumb along one of the marks on his chest, the sweat on their skin a bright spark of pain in the cut. The friction started the bleeding up again, and Jim leaned down and kissed it away. Izzy’s blood shone on their lips until they licked it off.

“Everybody on this ship’s always ready to turn cannibal at the drop of a fucking hat,” Izzy said, because nothing else he was feeling has any words that could go with it.

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone how good you taste.” They put their mouth to his ear, and the next words came out in a whisper: “Unless you want me to.”

Izzy was spent, but his cock still gave a desperate twitch at that idea, and perched on him as Jim was, they couldn’t help but notice it. He felt their lips curve: hard and victorious as any pirate gloating over their plunder. It was about time, that unseen smile said, that Izzy remembered that the crew painted his hoof with gold.

“You up for another round?” Jim breathed.

“I’m too fucking old to be up again tonight at all,” Izzy said, but he reached down between Jim’s spread legs so they could rut against his hand, too. “But don’t suffer on my account.”

They pushed his wrist away and slid their hips along his instead. “Want to feel you soft, feel how I’ve got you all used up. You good with that?”

Izzy hitched his chin up. He was, yeah. Or good wasn’t even the word.

Jim ought to be done with him, by anyone’s standards. They’d exhausted him, finished off what he was good for, and they had other people they could go to—softer, kinder, better, more beloved—but they were still here. They still wanted him. Still enjoyed being with him.

They could look at what the two of them had done together and feel good about it, want more of it, even now. Izzy needed that, just like Ed needed Bonnet. He’d needed it for a long time.

“Shit. Hang on a second—let me get naked again.” Jim wriggled off of him and shed their clothes quickly. Even when they were in a hurry, they were neat, which Izzy liked. Jim did things right.

They came back to him bare, and this time, without as much lust fogging up his brain, Izzy could appreciate what a bizarre fucking sight it made when Jim straddled him, their strong young body—as well-balanced as one of their daggers—against his old, scarred, sinewy one. If Jim minded the fuzz of graying hair on his chest or the weathered coarseness of his skin, though, it sure as hell didn’t show. They touched him everywhere, not just on the marks they’d given him.

They seemed set on the notion of rubbing themselves off on his softened cock, however long it took, so Izzy didn’t offer his hand again. He put his fingers to use elsewhere, stroking along Jim’s thighs again.

Jim usually kept their chest bound flat, but they’d stripped off that bit of cloth along with everything else. Izzy ghosted his hand up Jim’s sweat-slick belly and stopped just short, waiting to see if this was safe ground or not, the way they’d waited for his signal about his leg.

Jim nodded. “Yeah. Go for it. Feels good.” They made a small noise in the back of their throat, and the lazy ride they were on sped up a little. “Just—easy. I get sore.”

Izzy had built his reputation on years of shouting and scowling and slashing about, but that was just what caught the eye: he’d done plenty of work that required a light touch. He showed that off to Jim now, pressing soft kisses to their chest before licking one nipple with the flat of his tongue.

Jim rewarded him for his consideration with a very pleased gasp.

“Just—just like that—fuck, Izzy—” They pressed down even more firmly against him, wild and desperate now, and made a frustrated noise in the back of their throat when they couldn’t find the pressure they needed for this last bit. “Put your hand back?”

Izzy did. The angle was too fucked for him to crook his fingers and stroke Jim’s stiff, slippery cock the way he’d have liked to, but that was fine—didn’t seem to be what Jim was after anyhow. They just wanted to rock against him, use him like a dog would use the leg of a chair, and God help him, it was fucking hot. He was breathless from it.

Not so breathless, though, that he couldn’t try to give Jim what else they wanted. They couldn’t feel his soft, chafed-red cock anymore, not now that they had his hand, but Izzy could give them the next best thing.

“Fucking used me up, Jim,” he rasped. “Sucked me fucking silly. I won’t be good for a fucking thing, not for hours—all soft and worn out and sticky with you, you fucking menace.”

A sound tore its way out of Jim’s throat—half-laugh and half-moan. Encouraging, Izzy decided.

“Need to use my hand because you’ve finished off my prick. You gonna finish off the rest of me too? Until I can’t even move?”

Jim’s hips snapped forward, and they dug their fingers into Izzy’s sides as they finally tumbled over the edge a second time.

They folded down onto him, muttering curses against his neck. Izzy turned his head just enough to brush a kiss against the short, damp spikes of their hair—fucking embarrassingly tender, but it was … fine. Fuck it. He was on Bonnet’s floating paradise of tarted-up lovingkindness, and he was past caring anyway.

“Thought you were going back to yours,” he said, when Jim showed every sign of falling asleep on top of him.

They yawned. “Yeah, I was, but then you were all hot and … emotionally needy. And now I’m exhausted and you make a nice bed, so deal with it or kick me out.”

“Fuck off,” Izzy said, but he didn’t mean leave, and they both knew it. “I’m not ‘emotionally needy.’”

Jim hooked their ankle around the crumpled-up blanket and kicked it up high enough for them to grab it and pull it over where they lay tangled up with Izzy. “Take it from somebody else who figured it out kinda late: it’s fine to let people give you what you need sometimes.”

This was what he’d needed tonight, he knew. He let Jim tuck their head into the hollow of his shoulder, and he breathed in the scent of them. He could, Izzy let himself realize, need this again, and he just might get it. It was almost painful to think about—because how many years had he wasted, not even trying, not even asking—but sweet, too. Gentle and warm and steady, like Jim’s hand on their knife.

[house-afire]

Old Chums (Stede/Nigel)

Prompt: 100 words of "we're not gay, we're sailors"

Nigel had seldom been so pleased to see someone. The long journey to the Caribbean had looked to be intolerably boring—this downright crawl across the ocean was not how he’d hoped to celebrate leaving school. But Father had insisted on seeing what England had made of him before he wrapped himself in its colors for good, so here he was, in the middle of blasted nowhere. Milling about at sea in his private life before he’d be strongarmed into doing it all his life. And there was very little chance of fun on this stodgy ship—

Or so he’d thought, until he’d seen Stede.

“Little Baby Bonnet, all grown up!” Nigel said, clasping him by the shoulders. “I honestly never thought about you existing outside of our dear old school.”

“Was it dear?” Stede said, squirming under his hands, soft and shaky as a pudding, bless him. “Can’t say I’ve given it any thought either, since I left. I finished up—”

“Oh, were you in England too? I’m surprised we didn’t run into each other before now.” Nigel patted himself on the chest. “I was at Eton.”

“Harrow,” Stede said, with another of those appealing wriggles. This time it slipped him out from under Nigel’s hand—clever little fish.

Nigel decided to be magnanimous. “Well, that’s nearly as good. You’re headed home, then?”

Stede nodded. He looked a bit miserable about it, poor fellow. But then Stede just tended to look like that, didn’t he? Like a little stomped-on rose, all crumpled and red-faced and dew-damped, their dear Baby Bonnet. Nigel had decided early on that he couldn’t possibly be as unhappy as he looked, because only an absolute spoilsport would properly sulk through all their romps and fun.

Actually, aside from the rather pathetic cast of his features, Stede looked … good. He had quite unexpectedly acquired some definition about his jaw and shoulders, and his mouth had shed some of its poutiness. The wind ruffled that Goldilocks hair of his.

Nigel was vaguely aware that one didn’t technically consider such things, not when it came to a friendly handy—it was obviously very far afield from, say, choosing a wife. You just wanted a chum. Had nothing to do with proper intercourse. More like how you couldn’t tickle yourself. It was just useful to have somebody else involved.

He was probably only thinking of Stede that way because Baby Bonnet had always been a bit of a girl. They’d forced him into one of the matron’s dresses once and told him he looked almost pretty. So there you were, Nigel thought, relieved. They had all said that much.

“Let’s go see the stores,” Nigel said, putting an arm around Stede’s shoulders and steering him belowdecks.

Stede stumbled as he followed along. “And, ah, why should we want to do that?”

“Like the games shed, you know. Lots of clutter to duck behind.”

“Duck behind for what?”

Oh, playing hard to get, was he? If he thought Nigel was going to turn foolish over him, like one of those soppy, soft-handed boys who used to turn half their tuck over to the cricket captain and moon all about him, he would be sorely disappointed.

Then again, it was a long voyage. If he absolutely had to give Stede a fruit tart and a silly compliment about his lovely hair to make him behave like a proper pal, he could probably be talked into it. It would be entirely understandable if Nigel chose to indulge him like that, just to make it all go over without any fuss.

Only a real problem if you did it on land, when there were plenty of women to be had. Then you were just a deviant. At sea, one simply made compromises because one was healthy and red-blooded.

“Ah, here we are,” Nigel announced. He swung the door open and had a look around for any sailors already making use of the place. None at all. What a lucky day it was turning out to be.

Stede let Nigel drag him in and close the door behind them, but he still had an endearingly baffled look on his face. Maybe he truly didn’t know. God, he really was a babe in the woods, wasn’t he? Nigel decided to clarify things by pushing Stede back against the door and doing his best to get Stede’s breeches off him.

“Mmf!” Stede protested against Nigel’s mouth, which had wound up overlapping a bit with his.

“Oh, come on, Stede,” Nigel said, pulling back because one didn’t kiss during this sort of thing. They were both gentlemen. “There’s nothing else to do on this unbelievably dull boat. And anything goes when one’s at sea, you know that.”

“I do?” Stede’s voice trembled like a maiden’s, but—in a move that made something inside Nigel flash bright, like the sun had hit upon it—he tugged his own breeches and drawers down and thrust forward into Nigel’s hand.

His cock was rosy and far more sizable than Nigel would ever have guessed. He wondered what it would be like—

No, he didn’t. He put that aside firmly. He was going to be an officer in His Majesty’s Navy, yes, but he was not going to be a sailor in that sense. He would get accustomed to whatever was convenient, but he was still going to have some decorum.

“Obviously,” Nigel said, stroking Stede’s prick and feeling it twitch in his hand. “We wouldn’t be doing this on land. Not unless you wanted to dress up like a girl again and pass yourself off as my wife.” He mashed their bodies close together, his burning cheek against Stede’s temple.

“I didn’t even—” Stede’s breath hitched. “I didn’t even want to dress up as a girl the first time!”

“Oh, it was all good fun. I did it for that panto, remember?”

It was foolish of Stede to pretend that the stage, or lack thereof, made that much of a difference. So what if he’d been shoved into that frock in the dark, by more than one set of hands? They’d all been high-spirited, and Stede had squeaked so marvelously back then that he’d made for wonderful entertainment. And Nigel remembered perfectly how Stede had blushed when they’d all told him he was pretty, and how well he’d curtseyed when they’d finally talked him into it.

He had thought of it a lot over the last few years, really.

“Be a good chap,” Nigel said into Stede’s ear, “and shoot off in a hurry. I’m more than ready for my turn.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t surprise people if you want them to be ready,” Stede said, with a very Stede-ish blend of querulousness and heat, as if Nigel could possibly be cowed by him. He honestly was very fond of Stede. Always had been. He suspected Stede was fond of him as well—Stede had always watched him, back at school, as if Nigel’s every move had needed to be charted.

Then again, he had watched all their circle of school chums that way. Little harlot.

But all those fellows were far away, and even if they’d been aboard, Nigel wouldn’t have minded sharing Stede with them. An Eton man was generous. Anyway, he was sure they’d understand that Stede would always prefer him.

“I think this trip is going to turn out to be quite bearable in the end,” Nigel said, pleased.

Stede threw his head back until his skull cracked against the door, sinking his teeth into his lower lip as his hips juddered in helpless little spasms.

Not on land, Nigel reminded himself, even as he further reminded himself that obviously he needed no reminding. Pretty as Baby Bonnet is, there will be prettier women, of course.

But would any of them be wrung out like this, shaking, their spend slicking Nigel’s hand? Would any of them ever be so gloriously flushed, so sweet and so petulant? Would they tug at his cock with this look of utmost concentration, like they were trying to understand some sophisticated machinery? Yes, of course they would. Of course they would have to be all those things and better, and whatever they were not, he wouldn’t want. This was a matter of opportunity. He was clear on that.

And if he closed his eyes and imagined Stede in a turquoise silk gown, approved as Mrs. Badminton by popular delusion, well—it was only because he had no proper girl in mind. And might not for some time.

Very abruptly, he felt a sudden, awful gratitude at being pushed into the Navy. What a lot of long voyages there would be, so unavoidably.

“It’s so good,” Nigel said afterwards, panting into Stede’s almond-scented hair, “to have friends. Old friends. Isn’t it?”

“I suppose it must be,” Stede said.

[house-afire]

Scientific Reasoning (Frenchie/Izzy, post-S2)

Prompt: 100 words of unusual logic

No matter how often Izzy insisted his gut-wound had healed up soundly, Frenchie—irritating twat—only had to see him wince once, and he’d order Izzy off-duty.

The fucking crew didn’t even have the decency to object to this.

“You are looking kind of tired, Izzy,” Fang said.

“Plus you’re even more of a dick when you’re hurting,” Lucius added. “And you just threatened to drown me in a water barrel, so ….”

Everyone nodded at that.

“We’ll know you’re back to normal when you just stick to yelling about maiming,” Jim said.

Izzy glared at them all and stomped off.

“Feel better!” Oluwande called after him.

He was tempted to go back to his old room, but turning himself out of Frenchie’s bed felt too much like a childish sulk even to him. He wouldn’t seem beleaguered; he’d just look like a cunt. He headed to the captain’s quarters instead.

He hadn’t realized Frenchie was already there. Two months of this—whatever it was—and he still felt a catch in his chest when Frenchie gave him that easy smile.

Felt more than that when Frenchie kissed the scowl off him and untied his cravat, his fingers a hot brush against Izzy’s throat.

Izzy wanted to just sway into his hands—maybe get down on his knees and do the kind of job he would fucking hope Frenchie would still let him handle on his own—but he couldn’t keep on being coddled like this. He had to say so, so he did. So he said it against Frenchie’s neck and had his teeth scraping Frenchie’s jawline for half of it, fine, that didn’t mean it hadn’t been fucking said.

Besides, Frenchie understood him anyway. “If it makes you feel better,” he said, letting Izzy steer him over to the bed, “I thought about it, and this—” He grazed his hand over Izzy’s latest scar, like it wasn’t an ugly red mess, like it was a gorgeous knee-knocker of a thing just for being there, when it could have just been an open wound in a cold corpse. “This is the last serious hit you’re ever going to take. So once you’re all healed up—”

“I fucking am!”

“Once Roach says you’re all healed up,” Frenchie said, being too clearheaded for a man getting his trousers undone, “then the way I see it is, you’ll be more or less bulletproof, won’t you?”

Izzy boggled at him. “How the fuck do you figure that?”

“Glad you asked,” Frenchie said, lying back and putting his hands behind his head. “Since we met, you’ve been shot twice, yeah?”

“Nice of you to keep track.”

“Well, the first time, Ed made me the new first mate. And the second time, one thing leads to another, power vacuum, B&B openings, all that—I get elected captain. So I feel bad about it, but I think you only get shot so I can get promoted. And I’m at the top of the career ladder now, so you’re—”

“Bulletproof,” Izzy said.

“Just logic, really,” Frenchie said. “Scientific reasoning.”

It was fucking nonsense. And Frenchie looked so satisfied with it that there was no way he didn’t know it: Izzy knew the way he looked when he’d come up with a line of pure bullshit that’d outfoxed some deserving asshole of a mark, and it was this exact pose: all cheerful accomplishment and like butter wouldn’t melt in that pretty mouth of his. Only this time, Izzy supposed it was fate Frenchie was looking to outfox.

He was too old to believe that sort of thing was possible. But he was also old enough that his edges had started to fucking crumble, and he wasn’t hard and sharp enough anymore to see the worth in putting out the light in someone’s eyes. In making them admit that the world was harsh and unkind.

He wasn’t even that interested in making himself admit it, these days. When he was with Frenchie and the rest of them, he wasn’t even all that sure it was true.

Izzy couldn’t say any of that, though. It’d be a snake eating its own tail, and its tail would taste like fucking treacle besides.

Instead, he said, “I’ll be shit-out-of-luck if we ever get a fleet, then. Best keep a pistol loaded if you want to make admiral.”

Frenchie curled one hand over the back of Izzy’s neck and pulled him down.

“I’m good without it,” he said. “Who needs a fleet, when you come down to it? I don’t want a number two ship. Just a number one Iz.”

Izzy closed his eyes, something inside him stuttering and stilling.

“Then we’ll both do fine,” he said. “‘Captain’ sounds better than ‘Admiral’ anyway.”

“It’s just got more verve to it,” Frenchie agreed. He traced Izzy’s scar again, that same achingly stunned look on his face. “Don’t think I could ever go for anything else.”

[house-afire]

Only One Ending (Ed/Stede, canon-divergence AU)

Prompt: 100 words of role reversal

“I thought about putting an end to you,” Badminton said.

Ed didn’t like having his hands empty. He tried to make up for it with some glitz: unsheathed his smile a fraction of an inch at a time, like he was taking out a blade. He did his best not to watch the dark bore of Badminton’s pistol, but it was tricky. It was a gun with a lot of fucking ideas about itself.

Ed said, “Oh, killing Blackbeard. That’s a completely new one. Honestly, no one’s ever come up with that idea before.”

“You think you’re funny.”

“No, I mean it. Well, pirates—not creative thinkers, are we? Not like the British Admiralty.” He let the smile droop into a frown. “Actually, now that I think about it, there may have been a couple dozen guys before you. Fuck, if I could only remember what happened to them. No one’s seen them since.”

Playing both sides of good pirate/bad pirate had worked for him before. Jovial to dead-flat, back-slapping to back-stabbing—it all had a whiff of madness to it that most people backed down from and Ed didn’t like to think about. It slipped away from him sometimes and twisted him up, like a snail fork under his skin. But hey, price of doing business.

It wasn’t working on Badminton, though. He looked like he was hungover at a turtle-crab fight, a foul taste in his mouth and the sun shrinking up his skull around his brain while he watched impatiently as something capered around. He wasn’t scared or spitting mad. He wasn’t even there, except as a finger on a trigger. Ed didn’t mean anything to him.

He would, though. He’d leave the bastard pinned to a tree, palm sap stickying up his wounds.

And there Badminton went, carrying on like Ed hadn’t even said anything: “I thought about putting an end to you,” he repeated, “because Stede Bonnet deserves to lose someone he cares for. Someone who must, for some godforsaken reason, care about him. But now I find I’m having second thoughts.”

Badminton’s eyes met his for the first time.

“You’re going to get him killed, you know,” he said, his voice lower than ever, like it was going down and down to dig into the sand under Ed’s feet. “As long as I let you live, I have the satisfaction of knowing that Bonnet will die bloody.”

This time Ed didn’t bare his teeth deliberately. It just happened, his lips pulling back all stiff and rigid like he was long dead and shriveled up. And wasn’t he? Hadn’t he been, before Stede?

“The last time I saw you,” Ed said, “I saved his life. Don’t know what you’re drawing your conclusions from, mate.”

“You saved his life from the fallout of a squabble with one of your own men. Whatever uniform they try to shove you in, you are Blackbeard, and violence and jealousies and darkness eddy around you, and they will suck him down, and he will drown in your wake. You said it yourself. How many dozens of men have drawn on you? How long will it take one of those bullets to go astray?”

His mouth was dry. He wouldn’t let that happen to Stede. He wouldn’t, until he did, because the bullshit never stopped coming. Even if Blackbeard died, men would hunt down his ghost.

Badminton, stepping closer to him, said, “I know what happens with pirates. Bonnet isn’t a real one, and he never will be, but you—you’re as real as they come. So I wish you joy of him. Keep him close, and one day his blood will paint—”

Tripped over a root, Ed noted distantly, wiping the spray of blood off his face. Fucking gun really had had opinions. One problem solved, anyway.

*

Taking the chance was intimidating, but invigorating too, wasn't it? Like sea air, it had the tang of adventure to it.

The Revenge had been just her toy-sized model once, a fantasy and a plaything, but Stede had seen her grow into a life. He had walked out on the deck of a dream and steered it into the sunset.

(Well, he had told Buttons to steer it into the sunset, but it was almost the same thing.)

So things that were too good to be true did happen. The world wasn’t as narrow as he’d always been told. There were escape hatches into dizzying freedom, into lives worth living, even for people like him, who had always been so unsuitable for everything else. It wasn’t always disappointment. Sometimes, every so often, fate was kind.

Stede sat on the beach and told himself that, over and over. All around him, the sands steadily changed from silver to gold as the sun began to come up.

[house-afire]

Name of the Play (Stede/Izzy breakup, endgame Ed/Stede, angst)

Prompt: 100 words of losing

Stede had read Romeo and Juliet as a boy. He’d always felt a certain pang in his heart for the ever off-stage Rosaline, the girl Romeo had once pined for so fiercely. She didn’t know the play wasn’t named after her. She was, presumably, doing her best, even throwing up the requisite dramatic obstacles: Capulet lineage, vow of celibacy. And Romeo ached for her. He said such pretty things about it!

Until he met Juliet, of course. Then Rosaline was yesterday’s news.

Because, well, it was Romeo and Juliet, wasn’t it? You couldn’t argue with fate, with what God or Shakespeare had set out for you, with the headiness of destined love. Romeo had poured his heart and soul into his poems for Rosaline—or so Stede had always believed—he really had done his best for her. It was just that Juliet made his heart and soul so much more, made him more profound and passionate and true. So when you looked back at his one-time best efforts, they suddenly seemed stilted and shabby.

You had to wonder what Rosaline thought when she heard of Romeo dying for love—and then realized that it wasn’t for love of her. That it probably never would have been for love of her.

A young Stede, full of fervent and unreciprocated passions, had always imagined that to be Rosaline was the best he could reasonably hope for. Someday, he might find someone who could truly, if mistakenly, believe they loved him as best they could.

He’d remembered Rosaline when he had come home to find that “Stede and Mary” had only ever been the awkward first act of “Mary and Doug.” And yes, fine, his marriage had never been grand and thwarted, just thwarted and thwarted, but still. Alas, poor Rosaline.

But then Mary had made him see that he was, quite wonderfully, in his own play after all. Ed and Stede!

Everyone neglected to mention that, partway through this lovely drama, Stede’s Juliet would fuck off to become a fisherman.

But Stede had—or so he’d believed, these last few months—done quite well in Ed’s absence. Crew morale was high. The coffers were full. And he had Izzy in his bed, more nights than not, and Izzy was beautiful in the early morning light: the scars on his back a mellow gold, his face soft and relaxed. Izzy cuddled, and it seemed so sweet and precious to know that, to be the man who felt Izzy’s breath stir against his neck.

And now Ed had come back. And Stede’s heart, like an arrow, had gone straight back to its truest target.

“You don’t understand,” he said helplessly, watching Izzy gather up the few belongings he had, gradually, been persuaded to leave in Stede’s cabin. “It’s just … it’s Ed.”

Ed, hair and beard more brightly silver than before, smile gentle and teasing and electric at the same time. Ed, quietly saying, “I understand if I can’t come back—” His lips parting beneath Stede’s as Stede had breathlessly told him to stay, of course stay, stay forever.

Izzy looked up at him slantwise. His eyes were damp in a way Stede knew better than to acknowledge. “What part of my whole fucking life makes you think I wouldn’t understand? Edward is Edward. Most of the world stands in his shadow. I’ve never been so fucking naïve to not think I was part of that.”

“And of course it’s the same for you.” Stede clung to the faint feeling of relief there. “I’m not what you really wanted. I know we were just each other’s consolation prizes, in the end. Very nice consolation prizes! The kind of prizes you’d ordinarily be very happy to win and treasure forever! I’ve really enjoyed our time together. I don’t want you to ever think I didn’t.”

Izzy made a noise of indeterminate meaning.

“It was only a couple of months,” Izzy said finally, once he’d found his last identical black cravat between the cushions of Stede’s sofa. They had undressed each other there, two days ago, comfortable and affectionate and easy. “Don’t tie yourself in knots about it.”

“Yes, but all together, we’ve been with each other a good bit longer than I was ever with Ed.”

“And I was with him twenty years, before you came along,” Izzy said. “Thought he was happy, for most of it, but he wasn’t. Not like he is with you. Not like you are with him.” His mouth twisted. “Someone’s got to be your Rosa Linda, or whatever the fuck her name was.”

“Rosaline,” Stede said automatically. He’d forgotten he’d told Izzy about that. He wondered when he would start to forget that there had even been a time when he could have talked Shakespeare and hopeless childhood crushes with Izzy Hands.

“Rosaline,” Izzy echoed. He tucked his cravat in his pocket. “Yeah. Anyway. I’m taking a bottle of your brandy. As a consolation prize.”

“Of course. Whatever you want, Izzy.”

Tell me you’d give me up too, if it was you he wanted, Stede wanted to plead. Tell me it’s fine. But Izzy had told him it was fine, of course. And that meant it was, surely, because Izzy had certainly put up a fuss about losing Ed. So he couldn’t care as much this time. He couldn’t. It wasn’t like you could just get used to having your heart broken.

Izzy picked up the brandy. “What I want is to get fucking shitfaced. Easy enough to achieve.”

“I did love you,” Stede said, when Izzy was in the doorway. He could hear the desperation in his voice: he’d never liked leaving things broken. “I said I did, and I meant it. I was happy.”

Izzy didn’t say anything to that, because, Stede realized, he’d already given Stede the only answer he could: yes, they’d been happy, but not as happy as Stede would be with Ed. Not at the highest of the highs, anyway.

Rosa Linda, Stede thought.

He didn’t know when Izzy had been most happy.

Later, he hoped. Someone had to come along, surely, and write a poem for Rosaline, the best they would ever be capable of writing. Someone Rosaline would give speeches to in return.

“Bye, Bonnet,” Izzy said, without looking behind him. He sucked in a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and walked away.

[house-afire]

Knives in His Feet (Ed/Frenchie)

Prompt: 100 words of cats

“You’re the one who made the cat flag, aren’t you?”

Frenchie did his best not to jump out of his skin. It was sort of Blackbeard’s deal, especially these days, to suddenly be right behind you, so the startle reaction was just something you had to train out of yourself, wasn’t it, like needing sleep or flinching at the sight of blood. He always had blood on him now, drying around his fingernails and in the weave of his clothes.

“Thought it’d be fierce,” Frenchie said. He hastily added, “Skeleton with the heart, though, that’s better. Some of my best work, really.”

Blackbeard leaned close to him, his voice a hot whisper in Frenchie’s ear. “Want to see something weird?”

No, he actually didn’t. A guy asked you that kind of question, it wasn’t ever the good kind of weird, like a funny-colored parrot or a biscuit that sort of looked like you.

But he liked all his fingers and toes right where they were, thanks, so he wasn’t going to make trouble.

“’Course,” he said, following Blackbeard to the captain’s cabin.

It’d been a pretty place, in Stede’s day. Bit of a pit now, if Frenchie were honest. Very obviously the home of a man going through a real shitstorm of a break-up: damp hankies everywhere, slashed-up paintings, ashes from the ritual burning of the ex’s possessions, all that jazz. Sort of smelled funny.

“You hate cats,” Blackbeard told him.

“Hate’s a bit strong. Healthy terror of them, I’d say.”

Blackbeard’s kohl was streaked with tear-tracks, but picking up on that didn’t really make his bared-teeth smile any better. “Would you kill one?”

Frenchie had heard about Fang’s dog by now. Did Blackbeard have a cat in here, waiting for an appointment with Frenchie-the-executioner?

“D’you want me to get Iz?” Frenchie offered. “Think the whole, ah, death thing is more his speed.” Not that Izzy didn’t look as ashen and out-to-lunch as the rest of them, lately.

“Oh, Izzy won’t kill this kitty,” Blackbeard said, with something dark curling in his voice: satisfaction and anguish and bitterness all mixed together. “One of the few things he won’t do, even when he’s ordered, the little fucker.”

“Guess we all draw the line somewhere,” Frenchie said.

“But you’re smarter. You wouldn’t stick your head in the lion’s mouth, would you? Fucking terrible idea, right? Something shows you it’s a monster, and you know it’s a monster, you’ve got to put it down, not trust it, not let it go on gnawing at you.”

Did lions gnaw? He’d have thought they could just bite straight through. But then, he’d lost the plot here, he was pretty sure.

“Yeah,” Blackbeard breathed. “Yeah, you’re a smart man. ‘Healthy terror,’ love that. Gotta be healthy.”

He started peeling off his leathers.

So they were doing that, then? Frenchie could work with that. He couldn’t say he was much in the mood, what with the exhaustion and the mind-numbing fear and all, but he also couldn’t say he hadn’t thought about it. Never imagined there’d be this much preamble about cats, though. Well, nobody could accuse Blackbeard of being predictable.

“Right,” Frenchie said, undoing the clasps on his jacket. “Bit of fun’s healthy too, yeah? Good thinking.”

He was a touch behind on the undressing, so he hadn’t gotten more than his jacket off before Blackbeard went and turned into a cat.

Frenchie decided to fit in that jumping-out-of-the-skin bit after all, and he recoiled to the point where he banged his back against the door. It wasn’t every day that you saw a man you were ready to bed turn into a … small-ish panther? Crazily enormous house cat? There were silver strands of fur mixed in with all the black.

Blackwhiskers, Frenchie decided, and then he had to bite down on his lip until it bled, because there were certain laughs that could come out of you that you could never get back in. He didn’t want to find out how far gone he was just from that.

Blackwhiskers was even more terrifying than most cats. Wicked sharp claws, and a hiss that made every hair on Frenchie’s body stand on end. But, well—its tail wasn’t all bushy, was it? And cats did that, when they were pissed off at you: made themselves into bottle-brushes to scrub the soul clean out of your body. It wasn’t slinking into a hunting pose either.

Frenchie wanted to jump ship to get away from it, but that wasn’t the same as wanting it dead, least of all dead by his own hand. He was more of a lover than a fighter, really.

And Blackbeard had it all wrong if he’d thought Frenchie would kill him while he was like this. Cats were a holy terror, but Frenchie had never gone around picking them off one by one. He’d armored himself in them, flown them on his flag, tucked their claws between his fingers. There was no point in wasting what scared you. Blackbeard was fucking terrifying, too, but sometimes that had kept them safe.

Mostly kept them safe from dangers Blackbeard himself had led them to, true, but safe all the same.

He knew his fear wasn’t all Blackbeard had counted on for this, though. He never looked at a thing from just one angle: it was like he had eyes like a fly’s, everything broken up into all these shards of possibilities. He’d known that Frenchie would have to think about the others, too.

It was hard to imagine any of them would ever get close enough to Blackbeard to do a proper mutiny, with a quick in-and-out, sorry-about-that knife plunge or a proper heave-ho with an anchor. Blackbeard had them all outclassed, even Jim. Izzy … there was a chance Izzy could do it, skills-wise, but he was three toes down and still loyal, so there wasn’t much hope there.

Cat was … manageable, maybe. And Wee John and Roach and Olu and the rest had all died parched and starved somewhere, and the rest of the crew was coming apart at the seams, and the box in Frenchie’s head was beginning to look a bit battered. And if Blackbeard died, they could all breathe for a change. Sail to Nassau, maybe. Regroup.

And if Blackbeard died, Blackbeard would be dead. And he hadn’t always been … this. It wasn’t so long ago that he would’ve been the cat on the flag, not the cat on your chest in the middle of the night.

And it was awful, wasn’t it, that Blackbeard had called him in here for this? It was so sad it made something twist around inside Frenchie’s chest.

“Can you still understand me?” Frenchie said softly.

Blackwhiskers gave him another hiss. Bit hard to translate.

“I know it might backfire on me and all,” Frenchie said, sliding down the door to sit on the floor, “or on the rest of us, but I don’t particularly want to kill you, if that’s all right.”

The cat’s ears flattened against its head. Very cursed skull shape, that. He ought to keep it in mind for their next flag, if he lived long enough to stitch one.

“But,” Frenchie continued, “I’m still not clear on whether you’ve got, like, a human brain in there or not. Far as I know, you’re just working with cat instincts. So if you wanted petting, or anything like that … I mean, I’d think it was just the cat asking for it.”

The cat’s eyes were luminous, like those eerie bits of the sea. It stalked towards him, and Frenchie held his breath, waiting to see if it would claw his face off or sink its teeth into his throat and toss him side-to-side.

It dug its claws deep into Frenchie’s legs, instead. It felt like being sliced open by a bunch of white-hot razors. Having his clothes bloodied from the inside-out made for a bit of a change, at least. If he didn't die in here, he'd need to dump some rum over the scratches so they wouldn’t infect. (To be fair, if he did die here, infection would be the least of his worries, wouldn’t it?)

Blackwhiskers settled down on Frenchie’s lap, its claws still rhythmically flexing in and out of his thighs. It glared up at him.

“On it,” Frenchie said. He stroked a hand down the cat’s back: once, twice, three times.

Blackwhiskers didn’t purr for it, but it put its knives away, and Frenchie was of a mind to count that as a win. He might have to grab that bottle of surgical spirits after all.

The cat’s fur was soft and fine as silk, the way he used to imagine Edward Teach’s hair would be. He had always marked those fantasies down as pleasant but unlikely, since Ed had only had eyes for Stede, but here he was, living proof that dreams did come true, in a fashion. Granted, he wasn’t having a nice nooner with his boss’s boyfriend so much as he was petting a suicidal cat-man who’d ordered most of his friends marooned, but if you looked at it a certain way, those were just details. Life never worked out how you thought it would.

“I’d like to hold on to what I’ve still got, you know?” Frenchie said, tentatively scratching the cat’s ears. “You included, I think? So, just one man’s recommendation and all, but you could stop trying to get people to kill you.”

Blackwhiskers let out a noise that was like a strangled creak, still less like a purr than the opening a door maybe better left closed. Kindness was always chancy that way.

Frenchie decided to be hopeful about it. It was nice, being hopeful. Nice and dangerous, like an enormous warm cat napping on some of your blood, but still the best he’d felt in weeks. No sense in ignoring a silver lining.

[house-afire]

But Not Too Bold (AU Ed/Stede, dark)

Prompt: 100 words of a different color

No one on the Queen Anne talks to Stede. He doesn’t understand why Ed wanted to come back here when they could have just stayed on the Revenge, which—he’s proud to say—has much better vibes.

It was his ship. He didn’t mean to give it up so easily, chasing after a feeling—but what does that matter? He’s owned things his whole life, even if it never felt like they truly belonged to him, even if he was only given the most begrudging custody of them while the whole of his ancestry panted for him to die and leave their wealth in better hands. Technically, his name was on the deeds, so. His. But no one ever felt much for him before, not until Ed, and he’s never felt so much in his life. Isn’t that worth chasing, worth having?

It is. It must be. And they won’t stay here forever, will they? Ed likes the Revenge.

“I thought you wanted a vacation,” Stede says. He can feel his voice trying to turn petulant on him, and he fights against it valiantly. “Something different.”

Ed kisses him and smiles against his mouth. He’s like honey and lightning. “You’re my vacation, mate.” Stede can feel the sweep of his eyelashes as Ed looks down, thinking, like the answer to all the world’s riddles are written on the bow of Stede’s upper lip.

His reply has Stede floating around all day, not caring two straws for the sullen, close-mouthed men around him.

“Look at you,” an all-too-familiar voice drawls. “Never seen anything so useless be so fucking happy.”

Of course Izzy—the one person Stede would actually welcome some peace and quiet from—will talk to him.

“I’m surprised you can recognize happiness when you see it,” Stede retorts. “It must be something of a foreign concept to you. You’ve never made anyone happy, after all.”

He expected that to be a devastating blow, but Izzy just twitches his shoulders in a shrug.

“I make Ed happy too, you know,” Stede says.

Izzy’s smile is nothing like Ed’s. It’s a broken thing, like his lips curve only because something deep inside him has snapped in two. “He’s been happy before.”

Of course he has. Ed teems with life, and Stede never expected them to match each other first for first. It’s enough, he thinks, that they meet love for love.

But it’s true that their lopsided natures were easier to ignore back on the Revenge, when Stede felt more grounded. Here, Ed’s life has swallowed him up, and Stede just moves around inside it, like Jonah batting helplessly about the whale’s belly. It would be better if they still slept together—he’s had Ed, and been had by him, on every corner of the ship but the captain’s quarters.

“The captain’s bed is for the captain, I’m afraid,” Ed said, when Stede asked about it. “I don’t make the rules.”

“Right. You literally do, though.”

“For fuck’s sake,” he heard Izzy say under his breath.

Ed shot him a look—flat and gleaming, like gunmetal—and Izzy broke away to shout at someone about the rigging.

“I’ll give you everything else,” Ed promised. “Whatever you ask for. Just name it. Impossible feats in the name of the Gentleman Pirate. A tattoo of you as a mermaid.”

And there have been things. Bolts of velvet. Ed’s careful hand painting him with kohl. A pearl ring, a diamond stud for his cravat. Impossible feats.

But they’re still here, weeks after he first asked if they couldn’t go back to the Revenge sometime soon. He can live with that, but he just wants—it would be better if he could rest his head on Ed’s shoulder, if he could sleep while he breathed in the strange, sweet scent of him, like leather and dust, like rum and old blood and lavender. He is Ed’s vacation, isn’t he? Breaking Ed’s routine is what he’s here for. It will be different, truly different, because no one will have ever dared to presume this much before. No one will have trusted Ed so much.

Izzy hasn’t, he knows. They must have been together at some point—Izzy looks at Ed like a compass needle looks north—but Izzy never ventures into his quarters even for the morning report. He knocks, that’s all, and Ed finds him later.

Stede can offer more intimacy than that. It will be good; he knows it will be.

Ed’s door isn’t locked—the only bolt on it is everyone else’s fear. Don’t they know it’s all a fuckery? Ed is more bark than bite, really. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

The room is hot and still, stained indigo by what little light seeps through the curtains. In the center of the white bed, Ed is surrounded by shadows like twisted tree branches. He’s Sleeping Beauty, Stede thinks fondly, asleep amid the thorns. But he takes another step, and another, and sees the gleaming white bones on the floor. The air smells of carrion. The branches on the bed are arms and legs, desiccated by time. How stiff they must be. They must break—like a smile—whenever Ed needs to move them to crawl into the tangle of their limbs.

So this is history. This is happiness.

Now he knows why this crew never meets his eyes.

The night has painted Ed, too, and his beard is as blue as they say. Stede never understood the name until just now. He’s seen Ed in moonlight, but never in this kind of darkness. It makes all the difference.

Stede takes one step back, then another. He can slip out. No one will ever know he was here. Even he won’t know. He’s amazing at not knowing things—his whole life has been one long exercise in not being in on the joke. He hasn’t understood himself, or Ed, or piracy, or love.

But a board creaks beneath his heel.

Ed’s eyes fly open.

“Oh, Stede,” Bluebeard says—disappointed, resigned. It sounds like something he’s said before, though of course the name is different this time. Perhaps that matters.

It matters to Stede. When Ed stretches out his arm, he goes forward again, numb and dry-mouthed, his heart pounding, and lies in the half-circle of Ed’s embrace, on his bed of bones. Maybe he’s been the first to ever do that, to ever love Ed so much that even this doesn’t matter. But no, he realizes, as Ed kisses his temple and something silver flashes in the corner of his eye, as a hot emptiness opens up at his throat—probably not.

[house-afire]

at least until morning (Jim & Izzy, Kraken era)

That last raid—

Merchant ship. The captain tried to surrender as soon as they got on board. Jim heard him then, and they can still hear him now: high, desperate, panicky.

“Sorry,” Blackbeard said brightly. “Don’t speak Dutch.”

Jim doesn’t either. But terror is a goddamn international language, and so is throwing your sword on the fucking deck and falling to your knees.

“So slippery here,” Blackbeard said, putting his foot on the captain’s chest and bending him backwards. “Everyone be careful where you step, unless you want to end up like him.”

They all knew what that meant, same as they knew they were looking at someone begging for his life.

Blood froths, when there’s enough of it. It looks like the surf on the beach then, just crimson instead of blue, and you can wade through it. And they all have; they’ve tracked so much blood on the Revenge by now that even Izzy’s given up on keeping it clean.

Jim needs to sleep. It feels like there’s never any chance for rest anymore, and here they are, lying awake in the precious little time they do have. They’re shaking in trembly little jerks like a sick dog. The cabin isn’t cold, but they are.

They were raised to kill other killers, not men shitting themselves with fear. To kill seven men, period, not seven a day.

They’re up on their feet before they let themselves think about it, moving swiftly through the ship’s passageways until they wind up at Izzy’s door. This doesn’t make sense, but what does, these days? They rap their knuckles lightly against the wood.

Izzy—not sounding muzzy with sleep at all—answers at once: “Come.”

He has to know Jim’s not Blackbeard, at least. There’s no way Blackbeard knocks.

Jim comes in and closes the door behind them. It’s not safe on the ship these days, and Jim’s no fool: you don’t leave your back to an open door.

Izzy is in bed—propped up on his elbows now—and by the look on his face, he has no fucking idea why Jim is here.

Neither does Jim, until they hear themselves say, “Can I sleep here?” in a low voice.

Surprise flickers over Izzy’s face for a second, like the wobbly light of a candle flame, and for a second, Jim thinks he’s about to say yes.

“No,” Izzy says.

Yeah. Jim’s been wrong about stuff before.

They hitch their chin up in a half-nod and turn to go, because what else is there? They’re not going to beg a man they would have been fine with killing just a few weeks ago. Coming here was a mistake.

But Izzy, for the first time in Jim’s short and fucked-up acquaintance with him, actually says more than he needs to without shouting orders or calling someone a twat.

“If Blackbeard gets—an idea,” Izzy says, and Jim doesn’t think they’re imagining that little hesitation, “in the middle of the night, he’ll come here first. I’m the one he’ll want to find. Don’t get involved.”

Jim turns back around. In the dark of the little room, the shadows under Izzy’s cheekbones turn his face into a skull. The whole crew—what’s left of them—is scraped raw, but Izzy looks gaunt, too, like something eating him alive from the inside. It tells Jim all they need to know about Blackbeard’s late-night brainstorms; maybe only one of them’s left Izzy’s blood on the floor so far, but that’ll change sooner or later. Blackbeard’s spinning, a blade tossed up high and turning end over end through the air, and not even Jim can do that trick for long without getting cut.

Izzy doesn’t want them to even try for a safe catch, apparently. He’s just got his own hand stuck out, night after night, waiting to see if he’ll be lucky enough and good enough to get the thud of the hilt against his palm���or if the knife will run him straight through instead.

“You really like the chain of command, huh,” Jim says, leaning up against the door.

“Well, it does let me tell you to fuck off out of my room.”

“It puts you in between Blackbeard and us.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Izzy says, his voice rougher than ever, “I marooned your precious boyfriend. I arm you lot up for raids that’ll get you killed. I carry out Blackbeard’s orders—don’t ever think I’ll do anything else. Telling you to stay out of his way isn’t a favor, it’s just keeping the ship in order.”

The idea that this ship is anything close to being in order almost makes Jim howl with—laughter, sure, they’ll go with that. They could laugh so hard it would sound like a sob or a scream.

“See you later, then,” they say, when they know they won’t make the kind of sound you should only hear in a nightmare. “Unless he kills you before breakfast.”

“Go on the deck with the crew,” Izzy says to Jim’s back. “Frenchie or Fang—they’ll give you a cuddle.”

Jim knows they would, but it’s too close to having Olu in their bed: lifelong pirate or not, Fang is sweet, and so’s Frenchie. Putting their heart to close someone delicate, someone good, has already ended horribly twice—once with their family and once with Oluwande. They’re so fucking tired of losing their people.

They need to trust, just for a night, that someone like them—someone hard and sharp and too shitty to die young—has a better chance of making it through.

“Yeah,” they say hoarsely. “Probably would.”

They don’t know what’s in their voice that Izzy sighs behind them and says, “For fuck’s sake. Fine. Stay, if you’re so broken up about it.”

“You’re a dick,” Jim tells him, but the feeling like they’re about to shake themselves to pieces ebbs out like the tide; they’re not freezing anymore.

They lift the covers on Izzy’s narrow bunk but pause before they slip beneath them.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” they say. “You put your hands anywhere I don’t like—”

“Do I strike you,” Izzy says, sounding exhausted all of a sudden, “as someone anxious to part with even more of bits and pieces of himself?”

You still love him, Jim thinks, so yeah, kinda, but they don’t want to get kicked out of bed before they’d even gotten into it. They keep their mouth shut and get settled in.

Izzy turns on his side, facing the wall, giving Jim nothing but his hunched-up shoulders and the knobs of his spine.

Jim turns too.

“Tell me if this sucks,” they say, and they lie against him, curled up just enough that their knees fit into the hollows of his. Izzy exhales, long and soft, and doesn’t tell Jim to fuck off. Jim rests their forehead against his shoulder, where a scar meets it like a kiss.

Sooner or later, sleep comes.

[house-afire]

heads or tails (Fang/Izzy, puppyplay)

Prompt: 100 words of puppies

Izzy had whittled the plug, but he hadn’t expected the strip of fur Fang had tied to it.

The last time Izzy had seen that, it’d still been the trim on some toff’s coat. Fang had claimed it in his share of the plunder, even though it was cut for some spindly squirt who’d never done a day’s work in his life. Izzy had wondered why he’d wanted it, but he hadn’t had the chance to ask—Jim had pulled their dagger out of someone’s head and accidentally brought the man’s eyeball along with it, and Roach had cooed, and Lucius had yelped, and Oluwande had puked over the side, and while Izzy was tending to all of that, the coat had slipped his mind.

Fang had cut the fur off—or maybe had Wee John or Frenchie do it, which made a furious heat rise up in Izzy’s face—and brushed it out nice and smooth.

It was sleek and dark, almost the color of Izzy’s hair before all the fucking gray had come in.

“It’s a tail,” Fang said.

“I can fucking see that,” Izzy snapped.

“Puppy,” Fang said, with the don’t-snap tone in his voice, warm and scolding at the same time, that always turned Izzy’s muscles to jelly. “Will you be a good boy and wear it for me? I’d like to see you with such a pretty tail.”

It was pretty. Too pretty for an old dog like him. Too silly for a man to bother with. He didn’t deserve it, and he couldn’t say he wanted it, and for some bewildering fucking reason, Fang wanted him to have it anyway. He hitched up his chin and turned around slowly.

It was an awkward balancing act, being down on his hands and his one good knee, staying canted to one side so his weight didn’t come down too hard on his stump. But he needed to do it. This was where he felt best, down at Fang’s feet. He’d take any amount of pain for that.

But Fang, being Fang, had insisted on him having a pillow for it. So it didn’t hurt. He just felt old and clumsy, but—but maybe their young and most graceful days were behind them both.

Wasn’t like Bonnet wouldn’t let Fang have another dog, a real one, if Fang asked him for it. He didn’t have to make do with Izzy if he didn’t want to.

Izzy shuffled his knees apart and raised his hips. One of Fang’s broad, callused fingers, slick with oil, stroked against his hole. A needy little whimper escaped Izzy before he could bite it back.

“Shh, shh,” Fang said, stroking along Izzy’s ribs with his free hand. Nice, steady pets that made Izzy breathe easier. “What a good puppy. ”

He slid the plug in slowly, and fuck, it felt good, just enough stretch—and then Izzy felt the fur tickle at the backs of his thighs.

The whimper turned into a whine. Tail. He had a tail in. He looked like the fucking dog he was.

But—like a good dog, maybe. Like Fang’s dog, who made Fang happy. And Fang wasn’t taking the piss. He wanted Izzy to have a tail like a good dog, and Izzy could want that too. He wasn’t being too fucking needy or slobbering all over someone who didn’t want him or biting people who didn’t deserve it. He could lick Fang’s hands and sleep at Fang’s feet and sigh happily as Fang scratched at his ears.

“Do you want it out?” Fang said softly. “We can play without it. You can be my good puppy no matter what, or you can just be my Izzy.”

Izzy leaned heavily against Fang’s hand and felt Fang’s warm fingers curl around his side. He shook his head a little.

No, he didn’t want it out. It wasn’t the tail he should have had—it was too handsome for him, and if Izzy had been a real dog, he would’ve had his proper tail docked back when he was still a pup. Guard dogs didn’t have long, soft tails. They were a fucking liability.

But a lot of the good in his life had turned up late, so—he’d allow it.

Fang said hopefully, “Want to give me a nice little wag? Can you do that for me?”

Izzy twitched his hips a bit, but he barely felt the tail stir. That wasn’t a wag; he was just making the fucking thing tick back and forth like a pendulum. He put more effort into it until it swung properly. Between the plug shifting inside him and the fur brushing his legs and the knowledge of what he was doing, his face was burning more than ever, his cock hard and leaking.

Fang’s delighted little squeal made all of it—the humiliation, the turn-on, the need—come together into something hot and delicious that made his chest ache.

“Oh, what a good boy! What a—”

He didn’t get the chance to say anything more before Izzy whirled around, pillow be damned, and head-butted into him, nuzzling impatiently at Fang’s cock and trying to lick him through his leathers.

It wasn’t the best-behaved he’d ever been, but Fang didn’t seem to mind.

[house-afire]

own true love (Izzy/Crew, past unrequired Ed/Izzy, mild D/s)

Prompt: 100 words of custom-made collars

Izzy had always made do with a black cravat. Edward’s men all dressed in black—“Nothing more fearsome than mass color-coordination,” Edward said once, a half-joke he delivered with a man’s blood on his teeth—so the color was a foregone conclusion. I belong here, it said. I belong to him—but only in the way everything on the ship did. Edward wouldn’t notice or care if Izzy tore this pathetic, grasping, makeshift claim from his neck.

At least it was Edward who had chosen the color. Who had said, “Above all else is loyalty to your captain.”

But it was Izzy who tied the knot every morning, who drew it up close where he could feel it all day long. It was Izzy who held it in place with his mother’s ring.

“One day,” she had said, folding his hand around it, “you’ll give it to the girl you want to marry.”

It was a long time before anyone else figured out what Izzy wanted the cravat to mean.

Maybe years of only ever having what he wanted on starvation rations had made the need start to show. Or maybe this crew just had more time to sit around and dissect his tender feelings—wriggling, bloody things that they were—because they were never doing any fucking work.

Either way, they noticed things. How pliant he went when one of them fitted a hand around his throat and held him like that when they dipped down for a kiss. How much his face burned when they called him theirs: our Izzy, our Iz, our first mate, our unicorn.

(How he’d spent days having a fucking idiotic personal crisis about whether to keep on wearing the cravat, how he’d loosen it, tighten it, take it off, put it back on.

Took it off again and felt bare without it, but more honest than he’d been in years.)

And because they were all the touchy-feely kind, when they saw he’d put the cravat in a drawer for good, they had to do something about it:

“We thought you might like it,” Frenchie said. “Bit of each of us.”

“We know it’s super-weird,” Lucius put in, “obviously, but it’s not like any of us are normal, so—”

“If it’s the bad kind of weird, just say so,” Jim finished.

It was a collar. A real one, like they’d just decided he could want what he wanted and they would give it to him, as easy as that.

Like maybe they wanted it too: that stamp of ownership, a claim on him that would rest flush against his pulse.

Black Pete cleared his throat. “Elephant in the room here, but—sorry it kind of looks like ass.”

“That’s some of my best leatherwork,” Fang said, as affronted as he ever got. “The leather part’s okay.”

Izzy ran one finger along the patchwork outside of it. They had all added something, stitching together bits and pieces and snips from Fang’s leathers, Jim’s old duster, Wee John’s knitting, Lucius’s scarf, Frenchie’s coat, Archie’s snakeskin, Roach’s apron, Oluwande’s hat. Pete had carved the wooden buckle.

“We did pad the inside,” Wee John said. “Figured it’d be more comfortable that way, if you did want to wear it.”

“Which you don’t have to,” Oluwande said. “I mean, like Jim said. It’s up to you.”

“It’d be really hot, though,” Archie said. “Kinda hope you go for it.”

“He will,” Roach said with perfect confidence, before Lucius hissed at him and Olu elbowed him.

Izzy had to clear his throat, and even then, his voice came out strained. Anyone but this lot wouldn’t have known the difference between that and how he sounded any other time, but now he had to put up with Roach’s smugness spreading to the rest of him.

Put up with. Fine. He loved it.

“He’s right,” he said. “I’ll wear it. You sentimental twats. I—” He wheeled around and dug through his desk until he came up with his mother’s ring.

He hadn’t known what to do with it after he’d finally let go of Edward, but he knew now. He held it out to them.

“If you want it,” Izzy said roughly. “String it on a cord or something. Pass it around amongst you.”

He had to put up with Fang’s tearful hug and Lucius’s delighted, “Oh my God, that’s so romantic,” and Archie wolf-whistling him, but eventually, thank God—sometime after Pete asked if they were supposed to come up with the cord themselves: “I’m just saying, there’s a disproportionate amount of labor here”—Frenchie took it and slipped it onto his little finger for temporary safekeeping.

“I can’t believe that fits you,” John said.

“It’s because I’ve got a musician’s slender fingers, babe.”

Izzy couldn’t bring himself to pick the collar up off the table. It was like it was too heavy for him to lift on his own. He swallowed and said, “Suits you. Now is someone going to put this on me or not?”

It took them a fucking endless number of games of rock, paper, scissors—during which Izzy threatened to leave them all at the next port—to determine who would have the honor, and Roach and Frenchie started side-bets that would probably keep the lot of them in hock to each other for years. But by the time they pressed him down to the bed, the collar was around his neck.

In the end, he gave up a lace from his leathers to hold their ring.