Even with the bullet in him, it takes four men to bind and drag Flint from the wood. Once on the beach, he goes heavy like a stone down into the loamy sand - an animal whose last option is to simply refuse. So Israel Hands strikes him hard enough on the head that, for a time, Captain Flint is dead to the world.
Presumably he's then put into the bottom of the longboat and it's rowed back to where the Lion lies in wait. What does Jack Rackham say when what comes off Skeleton Island isn't a chest of pearls and gems but a man who must be swayed up over the side like a sack of flour? Likely nothing at all. Rackham is a man with ambition these days; if he didn't agree with what had been done, would he be so eager to set the sail and be away?
Because they are gone. Flint knows it in the moment before he's even fully conscious as the ship skims along its course, the motion of the water against the keel so fundamentally different at pace than at anchor. Even so, when he comes to in the cabin's stern window, he finds himself sluggishly searching the horizon line for any trace of that place. Any smudge between water and air to indicate how far he's been removed. But it's just grey sky, a wine dark sea, the heavy chains at his hands and feet, and the bolt fixed to the bulkhead to keep him exactly where he is for as long as is required.
The bullet hole in his side has been cleaned and stitched. Dried blood has been washed from his face and neck. The light through the window is warm. The cabin is quiet and comfortable - as if he belongs here instead of below. As if a kindness has been done. He sits quietly for some time with his head against the painted window frame, watching how the sea churns beneath her. It is rhythmic and nauseating and he doesn't know how long he looks before the sound of three bells melts into a tell tale thump on the quarterdeck.
Flint doesn't raise his head when the door to the cabin opens and closes, but after a time he does ask, "Where are we?" as if it matters at all.
Pulling the trigger puts to rest any assertion Flint had made of reparations between the two of them. John knew that. John was always aware of consequences. They loomed large in his mind, insistent on being considered. John knew the consequence of pulling the trigger: Flint would never forgive him. But he also knew the consequence of allowing Flint of proceed unimpeded. John had pulled the trigger, and watched the pretense of reconciliation shatter. All that was left was to hope that he could render a reunion worthy of ending Captain Flint.
Rackham is not quite sulking. He and John had spoken of options in low, furious undertones as the shackles clacked closed around Flint's hands. The chest is lost to them. John stands by Jack as the watch the island recede, before he maneuvers down to watch as the bullet is dug out of Flint. It's John's soft heart that has Flint placed in the cabin rather than the hold. Flint had done as much for John once. John had woken missing a leg and in a great deal of pain, and Flint had been there. John intends to do the same, though he is slow to compose himself, slow to gather his strength to enter the cabin and confront whatever he finds.
By the time Flint speaks, John had made his way to the chair aside the window. It's been placed carefully out of reach. John doen't move it any closer.
"Right now? Nowhere," John answers, voice contained as he sets his crutch down beside the chair. "But we have a destination in mind."
John's held the idea of it in his head since Max had spoken of a place where men disappear. Even with confirmation, the plantation seems more convenient dream than a viable reality to reroute Flint. But still, John finds it preferable to martyring Flint and burying him in the lush, menacing foliage of Skeleton Island. Either way, Flint will be lost to him. But secured on a plantation, with the man he loved, seems a better fate. And selfishly, it will afford John some small peace of mind.
They return to the Station literally garlanded in brassy flowers and the rising, animal pleasure of winning something. But in the evening - or what passes for it -, that pan flash of elation has passes so fully that he wonders if it was ever his to begin with. Or if it was something he absorbed like heat from the air, like sun into skin, words in a language he shouldn't know in a book he shouldn't be able to read but does and can.
There are other things to feel that should have taken precedence, he thinks after. There is a blunt numb nerve ending of something distant gone missing in the place where a stranger once was - some young silly boy he'd hardly known at all and had no connection to except by way of a half dozen others, there and gone as an image on the horizon - and in the quiet of the Station after it feels like that should have mattered more no matter what was in the air. Or that it should have mattered less. The boy wasn't in his brood. It shouldn't matter at all.
Only later, it does. In the low light of whast passes for night, he wakes up with a weight on his chest in the shape of him and for a long minute James doesn't know why it's there.
Then that too crawls out of the darkness - the lip of some wave slithering up glass smooth sand. He throws back the blanket, sets his book on the table beside the bed, and takes a walk. Eventually the Station bends to accommodate him, spitting him up wherever John has set himself. Flint has two cups and a bottle under his arm by then. He says, "You're keeping me awake," before he sets them down.
John Silver isn't in his brood either, they tell him. But the bleed of him tastes like copper in his mouth, like an ache in his hip.
They achieve a victory that only barely feels like a victory. The satisfaction of it pales when set against what it cost them to achieve it. John was never intending to lose another limb, but he feels as if the youth's death was both his own and a replication of having his ruined leg sawed from his body. The sensation lasts even when the flowers are laid aside, and the group of them disperses through the ship.
John had known the boy too well and not at all. When he sits awake, it's in consideration of the pain left in his wake rather than because John was particularly attached to his presence. He had grown accustomed to the ache of his leg. Would he be obliged to resign himself to this same pain on top of the intrusion of other minds pressing in against his own? He sees no way of escape, apart from winning a seemingly impossible war.
In all honesty, John isn't sure how the rest of his brood isn't sitting up mulling over this predicament with him. But as that thought comes and goes, the ship deliver Flint to him. John eyes the cups, settling into the electric buzz of Flint's presence.
"Well, my apologies," John answers, voice flat as he uncrosses his arms and shifts to better face Flint. "My head is too crowded to sleep, at the moment."
But it isn't truly his brood's fault to blame. John's stewing in his own thoughts without any help from borrowed nightmares.
The black sea rises and its horizon line devours the matchstick skeleton of Charles Town and all the smoke which hangs over it. It takes Peter Ashe and the threadbare dream of what people in an empire can be; it buries Miranda. It swallows the L'Urca gold in the fort on Nassau. Flung far enough in the days that follow, one might be forgiven for fantasizing about the possibility of the water climbing high enough to swallow every piece of land on the globe leaving only doomed ships floating on the surface.
The Walrus wallows down into the trough of the shifting sea; in the great cabin, fresh water in a pan sloshes far enough to splash over the side to soak into the dry cloth beside it on the table. Flint hisses - a sound that might be Shit if it were more enunciated - and hooks the razor on the edge of the pan, trading it for the cloth. Folds it over twice and then presses it to the sting he can feel there at the crown of his skull. A minor nick from the lurch of his hand at the wrong moment, he thinks, then he draws back the cloth and swears over the dark spot there. Takes a moment to examine the cut in the small hand mirror laid a moment ago beside small scissors, a comb-- "For fuck's sake." He soaks the cloth's edge more completely, pressing it back in place with one hand and cleaning the goddamned razor in the shallow water with the other.
It's such a minor form of idiocy that he doesn't bother disguising it when there's a knock at the door, when it opens.
Reality feels as if it were coming apart. Waking to a raw stump may someday be easy, but John hasn't managed to acclimate to it. Every morning brings him swiftly back to the new and painful realization of his circumstance. He's trapped. His body is a betrayal. And worse, his priorities have expanded beyond the simplicity of his own advancement. He cares for the crew, and recognizes their care in return while being aware it won't save him.
Something must be done. John can't think of exactly what, but the urge to be proactive propels him to Flint's cabin. Just inside the door, John's eyes flick quickly over knife, bowl and blood before he closes the door behind him with a click.
"Can I offer you a hand? Luckily I still have two in my possession."
The offer comes out carelessly. John hardly expects it to be accepted. Surely Flint isn't a man who would trust someone like John so close to him with a sharp knife in hand.
Most pirates, Kaz Brekker knows, have no particular aspiration for their coin beyond a day or a week of pleasure. To be drunk and well-sated by women, to experience the risk and reward of cards and dice, to be, for a night, generous enough to be well-liked by all — and then back out the door without a penny to their name for more long hard weeks at sea.
When he first arrived in one of these seaside towns of ill-repute alongside his brother, Jordie, he had been young and wide-eyed, a child of a different name and a different world, believing in a better life. Now he's alone and all he believes in is living long enough to seek his revenge. In the time between his natural sense for numbers and planning has helped him find his way through this rough new world, though he still has no idea how to sail a ship. He's been from Tortuga all the way up to Barataria Bay, where he had truly started to see how, as each man pursued his individual freedom, how wasteful the spending was without the vision of a greater good.
The man he works for is just as short-sighted as his clients; he wants to run his bars and brothels and gambling dens, take men's money, and spend it on his own liquor and girls and ridiculous clothes. Kaz thinks bigger. Kaz thinks of how much money it would take to buy trade goods, to buy local businesses, to buy power. To rise high enough to buy everything owned by the man who killed his brother.
Most pirates, Kaz Brekker knows, have no particular aspiration for their coin. But then he sails to the Bahamas. To New Providence. To Nassau.
-
Probably Flint isn't expecting the person Eleanor wants him to meet to be no older than a teenager, even if his three-piece suit and polished shoe buckles are the clothes of an older man. Kaz stands by the window, gloved hands clasped at the head of his cane, but when he hears Flint enter the parlor he turns with a slight smile. "Captain?"
There's a lot about him Kaz didn't expect either. The trimmed beard, the neat lines of his clothes in juxtaposition with his sea weathered skin and the hints of old injuries. Kaz isn't sure he can guess his age at a glance. More unnerving, usually Kaz prefers to be the most dangerous person in any given room, even if he also prefers to be the only one aware of it. But something about Flint makes him feel like right now, that's no longer true. He keeps his expression carefully neutral.
((Real talk I'm going through and tagging things I flaked out on like a real champ - would you want to circle back to this and Do The Thing or is that completely laughable?))
[It is said that if you want to transport a queen, you get a navy, and a king, you get a pirate.
Well, at least, that is what Edmund says. However, needs must. The war has pushed the royal family to bundle up the youngest queen and set her with Edmund's less than above board contacts, and insist that if the entire kingdom should fall in this, she will be safe. Edmund, particularly, insists that whatever may happen, this ship will fare her well to warmer waters.
So there she is.
Seventeen, and young, and fearless, or so it seems. Perhaps someone was worried she would cry, or be afraid, or skirt around in fear. If they did, they were proven wrong; she sits atop bow of the ship and refuses to do nothing, so she sews sails or ruins her fine hands doing whatever chore someone puts in her hands.
But the sun and the salt and the terror catches up with her, even then, and so she can be found, half asleep against a barrel and inside a twine of coiled rope, shocked awake with a heavy boot.]
Every action has its equal in opposition. This is the law by which the wind drives ships before it, which grows Nassau and Port Royal and places like it from parliamentary and mercantile houses managing rich trade on the backs of subjugated men, which rattles the bones in a hand as the bullet is forced from the pistol, which funds a war of freedom with goods and men and land and breath stolen from so many empires. It is also true for magick.
On the island of New Providence, there is a farm. On that farm is a garden and under it is buried a small mahogany box. In that box three promises are placed from the year he and Miranda first arrived. They are a stone from the island's center wrapped in locks of dark and auburn and yellow hair to swear them to the place and it to their purpose; a piece of one of Thomas's shirts soaked in sea water and carried stitched inside his coat lapel from England to the Bahamas so that he might somehow come to them from across that same ocean; and blood - his and hers - to bind them to each other.
'It's a funny thing isn't it,' Miranda had said. That first year on the island had been colored with such determination. He sees it now even in memory: the ferocity of her spirit in that wild place, underwritten by the the fervent tenderness of dressing mutual wounds - her wrapping the cut made high on the inside of his arm, he tending to the one there on the inside of her thigh. 'That letting blood should be as useful as it is dangerous. A little given here and there can heal all kinds of things.'
A cut from a knife for cooking bleeds. A cut from a sword's edge bleeds. A cut from a handaxe hacking over and over into a limb bleeds and it all runs down into the earth and the sea where Nature remembers and pays it in kind. That's how the world works. The sea gets the key to the cache; the ground gets the box.
Here, now - on an island not so far from New Providence, the final preparations are at last being made to deliver on so many promises. Can't you see it?, he'd said to Silver on that hill overlooking the sea between the maroon island and Nassau. What he'd meant was Can't you feel it? - the sensation of the world poised. It's important that he does. Let the man have his story; it can be enough to share the rest. And so in the evening before the ships must sail, after the coalition has discussed the last fine details of the plan to take Nassau and most of its figureheads have retreated to their separate camps, he says to Silver, "Stay a moment," and takes from a packet of oilcloth a short knife and a small bowl.
In this dream, the sea runs backwards from the maroon island. The tide pulls forever low, the surf coursing outward, and the beaches white all lay half stripped: tide flats worn flat and smooth, flecked by broken shells and sea glass and small dead things. It isn't so unnatural, yet in his dream he is certain there is something wrong with it. The sea is too dark, the sand too still, the no matter how quickly he walks, there is a figure standing ahead of him on the beachhead who is always too distant to make out. He stretches toward it, his boots leaving heavy creases in the wet sand, and gets no closer.
The squall beating on the roof of the hut wakes Flint from it. He stiffens where he's sitting in some low slung chair, as abruptly cognizant of the coarse blanket draped across him as the wind and rain sheeting down between the structures of the settlement. He can tell by some quality of the light that it's just evening, the storm casting everything in false midnight shadow despite the persistence of a precious candle burning here in this single room.
By that small light, he can clearly see John Silver sitting on the edge of the low bed. The same place, Flint thinks, he'd been what had seemed like a moment ago as they'd been discussing how best not to resort to strangling Teach by the thick neck in order to agree on some relentless detail in the planning of their impending assault. He's watching the weather - John is - and the small light gutters gently about him, a strange half lit figure who should by all accounts seem irregular waiting quietly there and doesn't.
For sluggish seconds, he watches him through the tilting dark without much thought or precision. At last, Flint shifts the sprawl of his legs and draws the blanket down from his shoulder. The woven seat of the chair creaks under his changing weight.
"You didn't need to stay." Once he'd fallen asleep in the middle of what was meant to be a conversation. How long's it been? Five minutes? Fifteen? The turn in the weather makes it impossible to know.
The sound of Flint waking comes before the sleep-rough rasp of his voice. John has as little sense of the passage of time as Flint does, takes a moment to try and consider it before he turns to look at Flint fully.
"I know," John answers, though the expression on his face likely communicates that simple thought and more. John does not have to stay. He has not had to stay since Charlestown. But he choose to stay then, and even with the promise of warmth in Madi's bed, he chooses to stay now. There had been very little consideration of it beyond the pleasure of privacy and the sound of Flint's steady breathing. He's achieved a balance that seems to hold so long as John does not look at any aspect of it too directly.
"Feeling better?"
By which John means: less prone towards murder as our first option. Returning to the conversation isn't really John's intention; the initial glancing nudge of the inquiry is more to gauge Flint's temperament, to assess if he's likely to slide back into sleep. The heel of one hand scrapes absently down his thigh, metal leg discarded.
Even by the half-light, he holds Flint's gaze, takes in his the familiar landscape of his face. Thinks about what's coming, what he is accompanying Flint into, about the way the space between them changes into something else entirely in the dark and quiet of this room. It's a trick of the weather, perhaps, but John has the sense of being outside of things, as if this moment existed separately from the argument they'd been having before Flint had slouched back in his chair with a sigh.
Late in the spring, he brings seeds. They are for beans and tomatoes and cabbage and carrots and other vegetables meant for summer planting. They come in crisp, tightly wound packets of waxed paper to keep from sprouting where they have lived for months, first in some barely cool cellar and then in the wetter and darker hold of a boat passing from Jamaica to Saint Kitts. They're not precious like books or pattern cotton, and what they will grow bears no resemblance whatsoever to the shrubs and flowering plants of a Lady's garden. But, he thinks, there can be such a thing as sweetness in the necessary and so is pleased with himself anyway.
(The house isn't new, but it is new to them. The garden isn't undug, but it is grown over and filled with weeds in need of uprooting. They have been on Nassau for two years and soon there will be a letter from someone Miranda once knew in England which comes by way of Port Royal and begins with, Dear Lady Hamilton, First allow me to express my regret that I have not written prior. News of your husband's regrettable passing has at last inspired me to--', but today he's come from Nassau Town where a girl of barely fourteen named Guthrie has beaten a man twice her size with the unpleasant side of a broom in full view of the street, God, and everyone, and he can't help but be amused enough by it, and satisfied with the money earned from the latest prize in addition to the seeds, and so affords the island's interior with is unfolding whispering grasses and low scrub and the life slowly taking place at the middle of it some version of charity.)
"I've a brick of tea as well," he says in the thinly furnished front room of the house, producing the thick packet of waved paper from inside his coat. The floor is faintly uneven here, but the foundation of the house has yet to shift far enough to crack any plaster. "Though I can't imagine you've made your way through the last one yet."
Miranda's acquaintance with this life has happened in the same span as James', and yet she feels as though change has come over her more slowly than he. Every time he strides through her front door (their door, but she finds she cannot help but think of the house with a sense of possession), the man he's made himself into sloughs away a little more slowly. The transformation is, perhaps, more dramatic when one encounters more of the world--or she simply spends too much time with herself to see more alteration than the calluses her palms have developed.
"I have not," she agrees, letting the words sit lightly between them as she sets the kettle on the pothook. The last brick of tea is not more than half gone, each little crumble of leaves having been steeped and resteeped more than once; the price is too dear, and James' comings and goings too unpredictable, to risk using it up quickly. She learned that lesson in the first year.
Leaving the water to heat, she comes back to the table, and to the gift he's brought. The pointed envelopes bear the names of plants, written in a careful hand; she lifts and looks at each packet in turn before setting it back on the tabletop. When she is finished, she looks up at Flint, one hand smoothing over his coat, and the familiar chest beneath it. "Thank you. I trust it was a good voyage?"
The man on the deck actually reeks of money. It's the cologne on him, attar of roses and sandalwood and myrrh, the smell almost nauseating the way it lays atop the normal smells of the ship. He is clad in a silk coat, tailored to his trim form; his cufflinks are of gold; his shoes are of fine leather. He looks like he's ready for a night at the opera. It borders on the absurd.
"You shall be well pleased by the ransom that shall be offered for my safe return," the lordling is saying to his captors. For all the direness of his situation - being, as he is, a former passenger of a vessel that has been captured by a pirate crew - he seems calm. Nearly imperious. "This day is a happy one for you indeed."
"Was there a change to trade routes that I'm not presently aware of? Some shift in scheduling perhaps? Or are the ships now sailing light on load these days?" Eleanore scanned over the list of goods from the last prize and found it sadly lacking anything of true value. She gestured with the pages in her hand. "Anything that might explain why Captain Flint, the man I've decided to stake my reputation and backing on is now bringing me less than a quarter of what he used to?"
She dropped the list to the crate beside her and folded her arms. She'd requested this meeting with Flint in the warehouse where she could speak to him without the worry of his reputation being at risk. But she needed to know, she had to know what was going on, stories would need to be clear and maintained or the very backbone of the power structure of trade in Nassau could be at risk.
She'd put her trust in Flint, and perhaps at one time that was out of spite for another captain, but he'd proven himself time and again. The man could be ruthless but he was always efficient. He knew how the navy and free traders operated as well as anyone. Only that knowledge was no longer serving either of their interests and she needed to know why.
If Flint had lost his steel or could no longer be the man she needed to bring in goods she'd need to find someone else. She wanted him to give her a reason to keep her faith in him, she was offering him this chance to do just that.
[ It is an odd thing, to see the entirety of one’s life in stark relief. It’s an odd thing to see the shit fall away, the unimportant crap that fills a life sink to the bottom of the sea like a dead body. Rather: at first, the notion that anyone else might kill Flint was offensive simply out of pure competitive jealousy. No one else merited killing Flint, especially not some puffed up governor who got the opportunity out of luck and not skill.
But then all that emotion calcified and burned away into something more true.
It’s dark and late and the ship is moving at a clip, with the kind of wind that keeps the crew busy and the captains without much to do.
Charles sees Flint on the deck, a place he has not been in the past few days, maybe because of the shame, or the guilt, or perhaps the grief. It doesn’t matter. Charles doesn’t care.
He steps up.]
And now?
[It seems like an important thing to discuss: what happens when they arrive in Nassau.]
[The moon is heavy in the sky, and the night air moving under it tugs steadily at the edges of his clothes. It nips at him with the same animal curiosity as it does the warship's canvas. Presently, the wind is an ally. But it's possible that it will recall it's bite as they descend below the edges of Spanish Florida. It's possible the wind is not the only thing that will recall there are other directions to set its teeth in once they pass into those more southerly latitudes.
The stern deck is crisscrossed with the shadows from a dozen rigging lines, a blue black spider's web draped shroud-like across the ship's hip and heels. Flint, inside its net at the taffrail, bears remarkably little resemblance to a ghost as he turns his face toward the sound of Charles Vane's approach, his address. If there is something dark and calculating in the pit of his eye—
Well. When is there not?]
It seems that is likely to depend on your former shipmates.
[He's heard a rumor. Something about a great deal of Spanish gold stolen off a beach.]
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Presumably he's then put into the bottom of the longboat and it's rowed back to where the Lion lies in wait. What does Jack Rackham say when what comes off Skeleton Island isn't a chest of pearls and gems but a man who must be swayed up over the side like a sack of flour? Likely nothing at all. Rackham is a man with ambition these days; if he didn't agree with what had been done, would he be so eager to set the sail and be away?
Because they are gone. Flint knows it in the moment before he's even fully conscious as the ship skims along its course, the motion of the water against the keel so fundamentally different at pace than at anchor. Even so, when he comes to in the cabin's stern window, he finds himself sluggishly searching the horizon line for any trace of that place. Any smudge between water and air to indicate how far he's been removed. But it's just grey sky, a wine dark sea, the heavy chains at his hands and feet, and the bolt fixed to the bulkhead to keep him exactly where he is for as long as is required.
The bullet hole in his side has been cleaned and stitched. Dried blood has been washed from his face and neck. The light through the window is warm. The cabin is quiet and comfortable - as if he belongs here instead of below. As if a kindness has been done. He sits quietly for some time with his head against the painted window frame, watching how the sea churns beneath her. It is rhythmic and nauseating and he doesn't know how long he looks before the sound of three bells melts into a tell tale thump on the quarterdeck.
Flint doesn't raise his head when the door to the cabin opens and closes, but after a time he does ask, "Where are we?" as if it matters at all.
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Rackham is not quite sulking. He and John had spoken of options in low, furious undertones as the shackles clacked closed around Flint's hands. The chest is lost to them. John stands by Jack as the watch the island recede, before he maneuvers down to watch as the bullet is dug out of Flint. It's John's soft heart that has Flint placed in the cabin rather than the hold. Flint had done as much for John once. John had woken missing a leg and in a great deal of pain, and Flint had been there. John intends to do the same, though he is slow to compose himself, slow to gather his strength to enter the cabin and confront whatever he finds.
By the time Flint speaks, John had made his way to the chair aside the window. It's been placed carefully out of reach. John doen't move it any closer.
"Right now? Nowhere," John answers, voice contained as he sets his crutch down beside the chair. "But we have a destination in mind."
John's held the idea of it in his head since Max had spoken of a place where men disappear. Even with confirmation, the plantation seems more convenient dream than a viable reality to reroute Flint. But still, John finds it preferable to martyring Flint and burying him in the lush, menacing foliage of Skeleton Island. Either way, Flint will be lost to him. But secured on a plantation, with the man he loved, seems a better fate. And selfishly, it will afford John some small peace of mind.
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demands a s72 au.
looks you dead in the eye
There are other things to feel that should have taken precedence, he thinks after. There is a blunt numb nerve ending of something distant gone missing in the place where a stranger once was - some young silly boy he'd hardly known at all and had no connection to except by way of a half dozen others, there and gone as an image on the horizon - and in the quiet of the Station after it feels like that should have mattered more no matter what was in the air. Or that it should have mattered less. The boy wasn't in his brood. It shouldn't matter at all.
Only later, it does. In the low light of whast passes for night, he wakes up with a weight on his chest in the shape of him and for a long minute James doesn't know why it's there.
Then that too crawls out of the darkness - the lip of some wave slithering up glass smooth sand. He throws back the blanket, sets his book on the table beside the bed, and takes a walk. Eventually the Station bends to accommodate him, spitting him up wherever John has set himself. Flint has two cups and a bottle under his arm by then. He says, "You're keeping me awake," before he sets them down.
John Silver isn't in his brood either, they tell him. But the bleed of him tastes like copper in his mouth, like an ache in his hip.
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John had known the boy too well and not at all. When he sits awake, it's in consideration of the pain left in his wake rather than because John was particularly attached to his presence. He had grown accustomed to the ache of his leg. Would he be obliged to resign himself to this same pain on top of the intrusion of other minds pressing in against his own? He sees no way of escape, apart from winning a seemingly impossible war.
In all honesty, John isn't sure how the rest of his brood isn't sitting up mulling over this predicament with him. But as that thought comes and goes, the ship deliver Flint to him. John eyes the cups, settling into the electric buzz of Flint's presence.
"Well, my apologies," John answers, voice flat as he uncrosses his arms and shifts to better face Flint. "My head is too crowded to sleep, at the moment."
But it isn't truly his brood's fault to blame. John's stewing in his own thoughts without any help from borrowed nightmares.
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Something must be done. John can't think of exactly what, but the urge to be proactive propels him to Flint's cabin. Just inside the door, John's eyes flick quickly over knife, bowl and blood before he closes the door behind him with a click.
"Can I offer you a hand? Luckily I still have two in my possession."
The offer comes out carelessly. John hardly expects it to be accepted. Surely Flint isn't a man who would trust someone like John so close to him with a sharp knife in hand.
i 100% don't know what i'm doing.
Most pirates, Kaz Brekker knows, have no particular aspiration for their coin beyond a day or a week of pleasure. To be drunk and well-sated by women, to experience the risk and reward of cards and dice, to be, for a night, generous enough to be well-liked by all — and then back out the door without a penny to their name for more long hard weeks at sea.
When he first arrived in one of these seaside towns of ill-repute alongside his brother, Jordie, he had been young and wide-eyed, a child of a different name and a different world, believing in a better life. Now he's alone and all he believes in is living long enough to seek his revenge. In the time between his natural sense for numbers and planning has helped him find his way through this rough new world, though he still has no idea how to sail a ship. He's been from Tortuga all the way up to Barataria Bay, where he had truly started to see how, as each man pursued his individual freedom, how wasteful the spending was without the vision of a greater good.
The man he works for is just as short-sighted as his clients; he wants to run his bars and brothels and gambling dens, take men's money, and spend it on his own liquor and girls and ridiculous clothes. Kaz thinks bigger. Kaz thinks of how much money it would take to buy trade goods, to buy local businesses, to buy power. To rise high enough to buy everything owned by the man who killed his brother.
Most pirates, Kaz Brekker knows, have no particular aspiration for their coin. But then he sails to the Bahamas. To New Providence. To Nassau.
-
Probably Flint isn't expecting the person Eleanor wants him to meet to be no older than a teenager, even if his three-piece suit and polished shoe buckles are the clothes of an older man. Kaz stands by the window, gloved hands clasped at the head of his cane, but when he hears Flint enter the parlor he turns with a slight smile. "Captain?"
There's a lot about him Kaz didn't expect either. The trimmed beard, the neat lines of his clothes in juxtaposition with his sea weathered skin and the hints of old injuries. Kaz isn't sure he can guess his age at a glance. More unnerving, usually Kaz prefers to be the most dangerous person in any given room, even if he also prefers to be the only one aware of it. But something about Flint makes him feel like right now, that's no longer true. He keeps his expression carefully neutral.
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i still don't know what i'm doing
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I do whatever the fuck I want
Well, at least, that is what Edmund says. However, needs must. The war has pushed the royal family to bundle up the youngest queen and set her with Edmund's less than above board contacts, and insist that if the entire kingdom should fall in this, she will be safe. Edmund, particularly, insists that whatever may happen, this ship will fare her well to warmer waters.
So there she is.
Seventeen, and young, and fearless, or so it seems. Perhaps someone was worried she would cry, or be afraid, or skirt around in fear. If they did, they were proven wrong; she sits atop bow of the ship and refuses to do nothing, so she sews sails or ruins her fine hands doing whatever chore someone puts in her hands.
But the sun and the salt and the terror catches up with her, even then, and so she can be found, half asleep against a barrel and inside a twine of coiled rope, shocked awake with a heavy boot.]
I'm not sleeping!
[The insistence suggests that yes.
Yes that's what she was doing.]
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everything's the same but with gritty nasty magic.
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On the island of New Providence, there is a farm. On that farm is a garden and under it is buried a small mahogany box. In that box three promises are placed from the year he and Miranda first arrived. They are a stone from the island's center wrapped in locks of dark and auburn and yellow hair to swear them to the place and it to their purpose; a piece of one of Thomas's shirts soaked in sea water and carried stitched inside his coat lapel from England to the Bahamas so that he might somehow come to them from across that same ocean; and blood - his and hers - to bind them to each other.
'It's a funny thing isn't it,' Miranda had said. That first year on the island had been colored with such determination. He sees it now even in memory: the ferocity of her spirit in that wild place, underwritten by the the fervent tenderness of dressing mutual wounds - her wrapping the cut made high on the inside of his arm, he tending to the one there on the inside of her thigh. 'That letting blood should be as useful as it is dangerous. A little given here and there can heal all kinds of things.'
A cut from a knife for cooking bleeds. A cut from a sword's edge bleeds. A cut from a handaxe hacking over and over into a limb bleeds and it all runs down into the earth and the sea where Nature remembers and pays it in kind. That's how the world works. The sea gets the key to the cache; the ground gets the box.
Here, now - on an island not so far from New Providence, the final preparations are at last being made to deliver on so many promises. Can't you see it?, he'd said to Silver on that hill overlooking the sea between the maroon island and Nassau. What he'd meant was Can't you feel it? - the sensation of the world poised. It's important that he does. Let the man have his story; it can be enough to share the rest. And so in the evening before the ships must sail, after the coalition has discussed the last fine details of the plan to take Nassau and most of its figureheads have retreated to their separate camps, he says to Silver, "Stay a moment," and takes from a packet of oilcloth a short knife and a small bowl.
He lays both on the circular table between them.
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is this a fuckin wedding
I mean
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The squall beating on the roof of the hut wakes Flint from it. He stiffens where he's sitting in some low slung chair, as abruptly cognizant of the coarse blanket draped across him as the wind and rain sheeting down between the structures of the settlement. He can tell by some quality of the light that it's just evening, the storm casting everything in false midnight shadow despite the persistence of a precious candle burning here in this single room.
By that small light, he can clearly see John Silver sitting on the edge of the low bed. The same place, Flint thinks, he'd been what had seemed like a moment ago as they'd been discussing how best not to resort to strangling Teach by the thick neck in order to agree on some relentless detail in the planning of their impending assault. He's watching the weather - John is - and the small light gutters gently about him, a strange half lit figure who should by all accounts seem irregular waiting quietly there and doesn't.
For sluggish seconds, he watches him through the tilting dark without much thought or precision. At last, Flint shifts the sprawl of his legs and draws the blanket down from his shoulder. The woven seat of the chair creaks under his changing weight.
"You didn't need to stay." Once he'd fallen asleep in the middle of what was meant to be a conversation. How long's it been? Five minutes? Fifteen? The turn in the weather makes it impossible to know.
thanks satan.
"I know," John answers, though the expression on his face likely communicates that simple thought and more. John does not have to stay. He has not had to stay since Charlestown. But he choose to stay then, and even with the promise of warmth in Madi's bed, he chooses to stay now. There had been very little consideration of it beyond the pleasure of privacy and the sound of Flint's steady breathing. He's achieved a balance that seems to hold so long as John does not look at any aspect of it too directly.
"Feeling better?"
By which John means: less prone towards murder as our first option. Returning to the conversation isn't really John's intention; the initial glancing nudge of the inquiry is more to gauge Flint's temperament, to assess if he's likely to slide back into sleep. The heel of one hand scrapes absently down his thigh, metal leg discarded.
Even by the half-light, he holds Flint's gaze, takes in his the familiar landscape of his face. Thinks about what's coming, what he is accompanying Flint into, about the way the space between them changes into something else entirely in the dark and quiet of this room. It's a trick of the weather, perhaps, but John has the sense of being outside of things, as if this moment existed separately from the argument they'd been having before Flint had slouched back in his chair with a sigh.
np
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you're a criminal
im rubber and youre glue
i'm an innocent
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(The house isn't new, but it is new to them. The garden isn't undug, but it is grown over and filled with weeds in need of uprooting. They have been on Nassau for two years and soon there will be a letter from someone Miranda once knew in England which comes by way of Port Royal and begins with, Dear Lady Hamilton, First allow me to express my regret that I have not written prior. News of your husband's regrettable passing has at last inspired me to--', but today he's come from Nassau Town where a girl of barely fourteen named Guthrie has beaten a man twice her size with the unpleasant side of a broom in full view of the street, God, and everyone, and he can't help but be amused enough by it, and satisfied with the money earned from the latest prize in addition to the seeds, and so affords the island's interior with is unfolding whispering grasses and low scrub and the life slowly taking place at the middle of it some version of charity.)
"I've a brick of tea as well," he says in the thinly furnished front room of the house, producing the thick packet of waved paper from inside his coat. The floor is faintly uneven here, but the foundation of the house has yet to shift far enough to crack any plaster. "Though I can't imagine you've made your way through the last one yet."
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"I have not," she agrees, letting the words sit lightly between them as she sets the kettle on the pothook. The last brick of tea is not more than half gone, each little crumble of leaves having been steeped and resteeped more than once; the price is too dear, and James' comings and goings too unpredictable, to risk using it up quickly. She learned that lesson in the first year.
Leaving the water to heat, she comes back to the table, and to the gift he's brought. The pointed envelopes bear the names of plants, written in a careful hand; she lifts and looks at each packet in turn before setting it back on the tabletop. When she is finished, she looks up at Flint, one hand smoothing over his coat, and the familiar chest beneath it. "Thank you. I trust it was a good voyage?"
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why not
"You shall be well pleased by the ransom that shall be offered for my safe return," the lordling is saying to his captors. For all the direness of his situation - being, as he is, a former passenger of a vessel that has been captured by a pirate crew - he seems calm. Nearly imperious. "This day is a happy one for you indeed."
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She dropped the list to the crate beside her and folded her arms. She'd requested this meeting with Flint in the warehouse where she could speak to him without the worry of his reputation being at risk. But she needed to know, she had to know what was going on, stories would need to be clear and maintained or the very backbone of the power structure of trade in Nassau could be at risk.
She'd put her trust in Flint, and perhaps at one time that was out of spite for another captain, but he'd proven himself time and again. The man could be ruthless but he was always efficient. He knew how the navy and free traders operated as well as anyone. Only that knowledge was no longer serving either of their interests and she needed to know why.
If Flint had lost his steel or could no longer be the man she needed to bring in goods she'd need to find someone else. She wanted him to give her a reason to keep her faith in him, she was offering him this chance to do just that.
you owe me internet money
But then all that emotion calcified and burned away into something more true.
It’s dark and late and the ship is moving at a clip, with the kind of wind that keeps the crew busy and the captains without much to do.
Charles sees Flint on the deck, a place he has not been in the past few days, maybe because of the shame, or the guilt, or perhaps the grief. It doesn’t matter. Charles doesn’t care.
He steps up.]
And now?
[It seems like an important thing to discuss: what happens when they arrive in Nassau.]
$$$
The stern deck is crisscrossed with the shadows from a dozen rigging lines, a blue black spider's web draped shroud-like across the ship's hip and heels. Flint, inside its net at the taffrail, bears remarkably little resemblance to a ghost as he turns his face toward the sound of Charles Vane's approach, his address. If there is something dark and calculating in the pit of his eye—
Well. When is there not?]
It seems that is likely to depend on your former shipmates.
[He's heard a rumor. Something about a great deal of Spanish gold stolen off a beach.]
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