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Chapter Text

Lucius thought he might be the only person on the Revenge who knew about all of Stede’s secret passageways, hidden rooms, and concealed levers, and that was because Stede had shown him around on the first day, making him record all his favourite inane details in his ridiculous journal (“Look, Lucius—if you move this ceramic skull, this panel slides back to reveal the emergency hideaway!”).

He had sworn Lucius to secrecy, which would have been an enormous miscalculation under ordinary circumstances, guaranteed to make Lucius spill the beans to someone—except that, at the time, he hadn’t known or trusted anyone on the ship, and several of them had looked terrifyingly capable of murder. Jim and their knives that appeared out of nowhere and embedded themselves with unbelievable accuracy in unpredictable targets; Buttons with his undertones of cannibalism and apparently loose commitment to the rules of reality with which Lucius was familiar; Roach with his frankly unnecessarily extensive collection of cleavers… And, honestly, Lucius hadn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility that a soft, pampered aristocrat might snap at his first experience of real violence and go on some kind of bloody rampage. 

So Lucius had kept Stede’s secret as a backup plan, and by the time he’d gotten comfortable with the rest of the crew, he’d had more interesting things to gossip about than the captain’s stupid ship design.

Which probably accounted for the fact that, when Lucius finally woke up, still damp, from his nearly hypothermic doze in the crawlspaces, located Jim alone in the room, and slipped out—gracefully, he thought, given his state of near-drowning and the size of the trapdoor he’d dropped through—Jim leapt to their feet, caught Lucius by one aching arm, and slammed him to the floor with a knife at his throat.

“No, no, no.” 

“Where the fuck did you come from?” Their eyes flicked toward the still-locked door.

“Nowhere. It’s—” The knife pressed dangerously as Lucius swallowed. “Don’t kill me. Please. Don’t kill me. You would not believe the night I’ve had already.”

“Ugh.” Jim’s knife withdrew, and their knee lifted from Lucius’ diaphragm. “You’re wet.”

Lucius shoved himself up to lean against the wall. “Courtesy of everyone’s favourite unhinged pirate captain.” He infused his voice with as much sarcasm as he could to prevent it from shaking. It really had been like death, crashing into the cold waves, slamming against the sharp, barnacled hull of the ship, clinging for dear life to a rope that he could only assume someone had failed to stow properly, clawing his way up, hand over exhausted, bruised hand, praying to any and all gods that might be listening that the damn thing would prove to be secured at the other end, until he had collapsed in the darkness, expecting to freeze to death or something in his sleep.

Jim rubbed the back of their head. “Fucking insane motherfucker’s lost his fucking mind.” 

A dagger slammed into the panneling mere inches from Lucius’ left ear, and he drew a shaky breath. “Oooo-kay, so you’re, like, really upset about how he’s coping with his breakup, and I get that, I do, but would it really make you feel better to kill me?”

The measured calculation in Jim’s eyes made Lucius regret phrasing it that way.

“What I’m saying is, wouldn’t you rather save all the murder-y stuff for Blackbeard, hm?”

Jim’s lips compressed, and they slumped against the opposite wall. “He asked me to join his ‘new crew’”—they did air-quotes with their fingers as they said it—“and the next thing I know I wake up with a fuckin’ goose-egg on the back of my head, locked in this…chingado cuarto y—” 

Their frustration spilled over into a stream of what Lucius could only assume were increasingly creative expletives. He waited it out, thinking that maybe he should learn some of those, too. They sounded angrier and scarier than any swearing he had ever managed to do in English—although, to be fair, anything would sound scarier with Jim muttering it while flipping a knife like that.

“So…” he said after a while. “Now that we’ve agreed you aren’t going to kill me—I’m just assuming you agree, because you didn’t explicitly say otherwise, and you’ve always been more the tacit-agreement-not-to-murder-your-friends type, right?”

“I’m gonna kill that—”

Lucius cut off the fresh surge of Spanish. “Okay, okay, yes, yes, you can do that, and then, what, Izzy ‘Swab the Deck Four Times in a Row’ Hands takes over?”

“I’ll kill him, too.”

Lucius didn’t think he was going to get a useful plan out of Jim—not at the moment anyway—so he stood cautiously and said, “Yeah, you, ah…good luck with that? Tell me how it goes? I’ve been, like, attempted-murdered, and I’m starving, so I’m just gonna—yeah—”

He slipped back through the trapdoor just in time to hear Jim break off and mutter, “Where the hell did you go? Fuck.”

He found Frenchie in the galley, hunched over the table with a needle and thread, sewing something that Lucius thought looked like a flag. 

Lucius couldn’t see the whole room from his hiding spot, so he whispered, “Psst—Frenchie—is anyone—”

Frenchie let out a yelp and leapt to his feet, knocking the bench over and stabbing the needle into the pad of his thumb in the process. “Ghost! There’s a ghost! It’s—” He stuck his bleeding thumb in his mouth for a moment and turned in a circle, eyes darting about wildly. “Uh, greetings…Lucius’…spirit? Wherever you are? You know I had nothing to do with killing you, right?”

“Yeah, obviously I know that.” Lucius rolled his eyes even though there was nobody to see the expression. “I was looking right at Captain Edward Bastard Teach when he pushed me overboard.”

“Oh, shit, you drowned?”

“Of course I—” Lucius hesitated, suddenly struck with an idea. 

Killing Blackbeard was probably not a hyperbolic item on Jim’s list, but Lucius had never been all that keen on flat-out murder. For one thing, it really lacked the flair of a three-act structured vengeance plot. How long could you draw out the moment where your enemy looked you in the eye and realised that they were going to die, and why, and at whose hand? (Not that he had any particular experience in that area, of course, but he figured it was probably about ten seconds, at the outside.) But if he could convince Jim to hold off on the stabbing or slashing or whatever it was they were planning—not forever, but long enough for Lucius to build up a properly dramatic revenge… 

Ordinarily, he didn’t think he’d stand a chance in hell trying to put over a sophisticated fuckery on Blackbeard, but the circumstances had been nothing like ordinary since the moment Lucius had boarded the Revenge, and things had only gotten more bizarre since the return of a beardless, Stede-less, listless Edward Teach. The man had been drunk most of the time since he’d climbed over that rail, and pirates were all superstitious, right? If he could convince Frenchie he was a ghost—if he could startle Jim that badly—Lucius would be willing to bet his entire sketchbook that he could slowly drive Blackbeard insane.

He smiled diabolically in the darkness of the hidden passageway. “Frenchie, I need your help. To erm. Be at peace. Do you know where they’re keeping Jim?”

Frenchie turned in another circle, eyebrows crimped in a frown. “You’re really chatty for a ghost. Although you were really chatty when you were alive, too. Hey, how’s being dead?”

“It’s fucking miserable,” Lucius said, quite honestly. “I’m cold and I’m starving. Do you know where they keep Jim or what?”

“Yeah, locked in the room.” 

“Right, good. To, ah, release my spirit? I need you to bring me an offering of food in Jim’s room, really soon—and it had better not be anything gross, because I am already pissed off about the whole drowning thing.”

“Yeah, yeah, and I wouldn’t want to insult your ghost.”

“Exactly. So, erm, meet Jim in their room as soon as you can, with food—oh, and maybe a blanket? If you can find one?”

Frenchie sat back down with his needle and thread, and for a moment Lucius was sure he was going to wise up, but all he said was, “Whatever you want, I guess,” before resuming his sewing.

Lucius waited out of sight until Frenchie entered Jim’s room, and he had the sense to announce his presence before appearing this time. “Jim? Hey, could you, like, promise not to stab me if I come out again?”

They whirled to their feet, knife in hand. “Lucius? I swear to god, if you’re—”

“You’re hearing him, too, then?” Frenchie sounded relived. “I thought I might be, you know.” He whistled a little and twirled a hand near his head. “Hearing ghosts and all.”

“He’s not a ghost. He’s just really, really fucking annoying.”

Frenchie put up one hand. “Um, actually, he’s dead, though.”

Jim growled. “He will be if he doesn’t stop playing stupid games right now.”

Lucius stepped out of the panelling behind the pair of them, hands held up in simultaneously a gesture of surrender and a feeble attempt at maybe blocking his face if Jim attacked. 

“Alright, so, not killing me, just like we practised last time, and ah—perfect.” He snatched a hunk of bread from Frenchie’s hand and tore off too large a bite. “God,” he mumbled through the stale dryness of it. “‘m starving.”

Jim stalked across to the bed and slumped down on it. “You couldn’t have stolen some food in the galley? You’re getting crumbs all over.”

Lucius waved a dismissive hand, crammed another bite of bread into his mouth, and managed to say, “Got an idea,” around it.

“Excuse me?” Frenchie held up a candle. “I thought we were doing an exorcism? Or a seance?”

“No, sorry about that.” Lucius coughed on the last of the bread. “So listen, I know Jim is in a really stabby mood right now, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t kill Blackbeard—”

“They should definitely kill him,” Frenchie interrupted. “I think he let Izzy kill, like, everyone else.”

“What.” Before the word was fully out of their mouth, Jim had gone from slouched on the bed to standing in front of Frenchie, knife out and posture so deadly that Frenchie cringed away from them as though they weren’t a solid six inches shorter than him. 

“Yeah?” Frenchie took a few steps back from the knife. “Did you not know that? I guess you didn’t, because you’re locked in here, or whatever, but Izzy and Fang and Ivan, they took them all off in a dinghy, and they came back without them. So I figured, you know. They probably dumped them in the ocean or something. Like him.” He gestured with the candle at Lucius.

Dead. All of them? Maybe they’d swum, too, clung to a trailing rope like he had, or washed up on some nice beach? For a few heartbeats he felt saltwater running cold down into his lungs, closing over his head, bashing him back and forth.

No.

“You’re shaking.” Frenchie draped a blanket around Lucius’ shoulders.

Drowned. Not all of them, surely. They had thought he was drowned, and he wasn’t, so maybe the rest of the crew wasn’t, either. Didn’t Buttons have some kind of deal with the sea gods or something? Roach could swim like a fish, Lucius knew, and Pete was… 

Not dead. They’re not dead.

Not because he had any evidence to the contrary, but because if he believed it, he might crawl back into the dark spaces between the walls and never crawl back out. So, no. They weren’t dead. Pete wasn’t dead.

But, all the same, he was going to make Edward Teach remember the name of this goddamn ship.

He drew a deep breath and announced grimly: “I’m going to haunt the ever-loving fuck out of Blackbeard.”

Chapter Text

Voices outside his door distracted Blackbeard from the map he had rolled out across Stede’s—that is, his—desk. 

Izzy’s voice: angry, as usual. 

And Frenchie’s, which Blackbeard recognised not because he had developed any kind of amity for the crew of the Revenge, but because, obviously, identifying people by their voices was a kind of survival skill, and the best pirate in the world had every survival skill in his repertoire. He turned his attention back to the map. He needed to pillage something. 

Frenchie said something, and Izzy snarled back.

Blackbeard traced a route with one finger. He’d been submerged in the dream world of the Gentleman Pirate, where piracy consisted mostly of bedtime stories and chummy nightcaps, and he hadn’t burned a town down in months. 

He thought he heard Fang’s voice, too, before Izzy snapped some order.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d maimed someone properly, and that was definitely why he still had the sour remains of emotion lodged in his throat.

Frenchie again, sounding whiney, and Izzy again sounding murderous, and he must have drawn a weapon, because he bumped the door, and that was fucking it. Blackbeard strode to the door, knife in hand, and slammed it open so abruptly that Izzy had to take a quick half step to catch his balance.

“What the fuck is going on out here?” Blackbeard’s knife snapped to Izzy’s throat, because he was closest. “I’m strategising a goddamn raid, and if you fuckers make one more sound, I’m gonna put stabbing you right into the fucking plan, got it?”

Izzy, to his credit, managed to seem less frightened of or interested in the knife than usual. “It’s the flag,” he said. 

Frenchie held up a bundle of badly folded fabric to corroborate that statement.
“Yeah? And?”

“He says he wants to show it to you. Won’t leave it here and go.”

Blackbeard scowled at Frenchie, who nodded several times.

“It had better be a fuckin’ masterpiece.”

Frenchie kept nodding.

“Well? Get in here and show me, then.” He sheathed his knife and walked back into the cabin.

“It’s, uh.” Frenchie stopped just inside the door and unfolded the thing. “Just like you said, Captain Blackbeard, sir. I couldn’t find any—”

“Shut up.”

He shut up.

The flag was, in fact, exactly what Blackbeard had ordered: the usual spear-wielding skeleton on a black field, and now a red heart forming the target for the spear. In the dimness of the newly recently done-over (undone?) cabin, the black nearly disappeared, leaving the skeleton floating in midair. The red droplets Frenchie had sewn into the corner seemed to really be falling from a heart so bright it looked about to burst.

Badass. That’s what it was. A badass pirate flag signalling a badass pirate who didn’t fuck around and didn’t feel any of the emotions generally associated with the heart.

An eerie sound suddenly filled the cabin, emanating from the walls—a strangely human sound, almost like a sob. Blackbeard turned slowly, searching for the source of it, but there was nobody.

“It’s good enough,” he muttered grudgingly.

A look of stark relief crossed Frenchie’s face, which made sense; the lad had been informed in no uncertain terms that he was being kept alive entirely on a whim, and that if he didn’t produce a satisfactory addition to the flag, he would be disposed of.

The sound rose to a shaky wail. Blackbeard glanced around, but it was still just him, Frenchie, and the flag in this hollowed-out heart of Stede’s—his—ship.

“You hear that?”

Frenchie turned his head this way and that. “Hear what?”

“Laughing.” The moment he said it, he was sure that it was—the strangled sound of someone trying to smother uncontrollable laughter. “Who the fuck’s laughing on my ship?”

Looking a little as though he thought saying so might get him stabbed or shot, Frenchie said, “I don’t think anyone’s laughing. Sir. Captain.”

The laughter rolled on. It was coming from behind—no, to the left—no, from everywhere. Like the ship itself was mocking him.

Blackbeard grabbed the nearest object—his pistol, lying on the desk at hand—and flung it haphazardly in Frenchie’s general direction; Frenchie started, ducked, took two steps as if to run away, and then froze, trembling.

“Get out. Izzy!” He raised his voice to a shout.

Izzy stepped into the doorway, there exactly when and where he was needed, expression impassive.

“Get this idiot out of here. And hoist the colours.”

“We’re on the attack, Captain?”

“No, I just think they look pretty—of course we’re on the fucking attack, what do you think?”

Izzy jerked one thumb toward the deck, and Frenchie scurried out.

Before the door could close behind them, Blackbeard added, “And Izzy. That laughing? Get it stopped.”

“What laughing?”

“That…” There wasn’t a sound, though. The creaking of the ship, and the slap of waves against the hull, and the ongoing sounds of the crew were all he could hear now. He ground his teeth. “Any laughing. Laughter in general. This isn’t a fucking pleasure cruise, is it?”

He thought the heave of Izzy’s shoulders was a silent sigh, but all Izzy said was, “I’ll see to it.”

He retrieved the pistol from the floor near the cold fireplace and walked it over to the desk, then saw himself out, shutting the door behind him.

Blackbeard returned to the map.

On the attack. On the attack.

A burst of irrepressible giggling filled the room.

He buried his dagger in the eastern coast of Florida and roared, “What the fucking fuck do you want?”

The giggling trailed off, and then a voice behind him said, “That’s not important. Wait—no, yeah, it is, actually. I want to know what’s up with the flag. Is that a breakup flag? Did you seriously decide to signal to the entire world that you had a bad breakup? With a pirate flag?”

The voice dissolved into laughter again.

Ordinarily, Blackbeard invented creative and painful consequences for anyone who laughed at him. In this moment, though, he only stood stock still, one hand still clenching the handle of his dagger, heart pounding in his temples, because he knew that voice.

Almost involuntarily, he whispered, “Lucius?”

For answer, all he got was an even louder wave of that horrible laughter coming from everywhere and nowhere.

I’m losing my fucking mind.

Chapter Text

Lucius had meant to start small—eerie sounds in the walls that stopped the moment Blackbeard seemed to notice them, maybe some creepy humming, maybe some crying?—and build up. He reckoned that besides physically stepping into view, actually speaking would be the thing most likely to tip off Blackbeard that there was a real person somewhere, and he wanted to be sure the man was good and panicky before he introduced the harder-to-believe elements of the drama. The point of Frenchie in the room was to make sure someone was there to insist the sounds were all in Blackbeard’s head, and Lucius had argued a long time to convince him to risk it.

(“If I tell him he’s crazy, he’ll kill me on the spot,” Frenchie had insisted, until Jim had said,

“God, that’s so boring.”

“Killing is boring?”

“Killing like that is. Just wwwwhp”—Jim had made a slicing motion against their own throat—“just for kicks? He wouldn’t. He’s a drama queen.”

“Jim’s right, actually,” Lucius had said. “As the only person in the room who Blackbeard’s actually tried to kill, I want it on the record that he couldn’t even push me overboard without stopping to make a scary face.”

Frenchie had capitulated.)

After Lucius had gotten himself into the right spot in the passageway, where he could peer into the cabin through a knot in the wood, he’d had a brief shock at the sight of the room, formerly so extravagant and colourful, stripped nearly bare, curtains drawn so that he doubted Blackbeard could even properly see the routes he was tracing almost frantically on a map. This was going to be either harder or easier than he’d expected, and he wasn’t sure which—but as soon as Frenchie had unfurled that flag, he’d lost his shit.

It was sheer luck when Blackbeard actually addressed him, unhinged enough for Lucius not to immediately regret answering. He wondered how many sins he could coax the infamous pirate into confessing if he really got under his skin. How deep into a man’s head did you have to worm yourself before he fell apart?

He didn’t press his luck that day—less is more and all that—and instead sneaked back to Jim’s room to regale them and Frenchie with an account of the stark horror on Blackbeard’s face when he’d recognised the voice in the walls.

After dark, though, he made his way back to the crawlspaces around the cabin. Instead of Stede’s usual cheerful (if dangerous) array of lamps and candles and the merrily crackling fireplace, a single lantern lit the cabin, its glass smoke-darkened, its flame guttering. The place felt more like a tomb than a living space.

At first, Lucius couldn’t find Blackbeard. The sound of ragged breathing finally alerted him; if he angled himself just so, he could see the figure curled tight into the window, knees clutched to chest, face hidden in a tangle of hair. The lantern’s dim light glowed a dull red against the silk robe and glinted on an empty bottle near his feet, and Lucius realised the reason for the rough, shuddering breathing: Blackbeard was crying.

“Damn, bitch, you live like this?” Lucius said before he could stop himself.

Blackbeard stiffened and seemed to hold his breath—the shaky sobs cut to silence, and his head rose a fraction of an inch.

Lucius couldn’t help a giggle.

Blackbeard’s forehead dropped to his knees and his shoulders slumped. “Might as well lose my sanity. Lost fucking everything else, eh?”

The wall let out a hollow thump as Lucius’ head knocked back against it. He rolled his eyes and let out a dramatic groan. “Oh my god. I know. Right? Like, it’s just so hard to cope. Emotionally, I mean. Drowning your friends is literally just the hardest thing. You must be, like, super cut up about it.”

“Fuck off.”

Lucius laughed again.

“You’re dead.” Blackbeard’s raspy voice suggested he’d been at the crying thing for a while already, which was a fact that Lucius planned to give some real consideration later. Bad breakup was one thing—this seemed more serious.

Was…could Stede be dead? Not that it would justify killing the entire crew, but it might explain a few things. He made a mental note to weasel some information about it out of Blackbeard later, once he was really sure the guy bought the whole being haunted thing.

“Yep,” he answered aloud. “Good job on that.”

“Fuck off,” Blackbeard said again.

“Oh, but didn’t you miss me?” He tried for a more ominous tone. “Nobody to write your little sad lyrics, nobody to help plan your little sad talent show…I bet you’ve been thinking about me a lot, haven’t you?”

“No.” It came out as a hollow protest that made Lucius think he actually had thought about him at least a few times.

Good.

“Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’ll be here for a good long while, so you’ll have plenty of time to apologise.”

“Blackbeard doesn’t apologise.”

“That’s, like, ninety per cent of your problem.”

Blackbeard sniffled and lifted the empty bottle to his mouth, appearing slightly confused when nothing came out of it.

Lucius had been hoping to scare the shit out of him, get him trembling so bad he couldn’t sleep without hearing that last cry before the splash of Lucius’s body hitting the waves. (He couldn’t remember events super clearly, since he’d been more occupied with not dying in the moment, but he was pretty sure he’d screamed some kind of protest or begged for help or something, and he hoped it had been the kind of horrible sound that lodged itself in a man’s brain and slowly drove him mad.) But this wasn’t scary. This was just sad. A sad, drunken conversation with a ghost was probably a good precursor to getting Blackbeard to believe he was haunted, but it wasn’t as fun as Lucius had hoped.

“I’ll be here when you’re ready to apologise,” he said as he crept away through the passages. “Waiting. Watching you.” He hoped his voice was trailing off eerily, growing quieter with distance. “Sweet dreams.”

Frenchie thought that a weepy-drunk Blackbeard sounded kind of pathetic and that maybe they should give him some space.

“Sounds kind of pathetic, actually," he said. "Maybe we should give him some space."

Jim said, “Or stab him now.” They gestured indicatively with the knife they were sharpening.

“Put him out of his misery,” Frenchie agreed.

Lucius reminded them that miserable Blackbeard was, if not exactly what they were going for, at least a step in the right general direction.

Jim shrugged. “I dunno, man. Seemed pretty fuckin’ miserable every minute since he got back. I dunno if you can really claim that you made him that much more miserable.” They turned the knife over to work on the other edge.

Frenchie nodded. “Yeah, like, he was already kind of crying and stuff? You could tell because that black shit on his face got all streaky.” He rubbed the fingers of one hand under his own eye to demonstrate.

In the end, they all agreed that if they were going to get him from pathetic to a terrified shell of a man, some theatrics were called for. Lucius refused to use the word “fuckery” about it, because that was a Blackbeard word, and he wouldn’t give him that much credit.

“It’s pageantry,” he said. “Smoke and mirrors.”

“Nobody on this ship has a mirror,” Frenchie pointed out. “And I guess we could make some smoke, but we’re, like, on a wooden ship in the middle of the ocean. So. Maybe not?”

“We don’t need literal smoke or mirrors.” Lucius rolled his eyes. “We need…We need seaweed. And water.”

“Ocean’s too deep for seaweed here,” Jim said.

“There’s seaweed in the kitchen,” Frenchie said at the same time.

“Perfect.” He sighed. “I suppose it would be too much to hope that anyone stole a little of Captain’s fancy makeup?”

“You want makeup?” Jim actually paused, knife in midair.

“I want to look dead.”

“Why the hell do you need to look dead? You’re in the fucking walls.” They knocked on the panel behind their head.

“You could make some more dead sounds,” Frenchie said.

“Dead people don’t make sounds.” Jim went back to sharpening the knife.

“I mean, like, ghost sounds. Woooooooo”—he cupped his hands around his mouth as he made the sound, and Lucius was surprised at just how inhuman he managed to make the little howl—“and all that.”

“Fine. I’ll make ‘dead sounds’”—with finger-quotes and another dramatic eye roll—“in the walls while we’re planning the pageantry. But after that, I need to look really, horribly dead.”

“You want some blood?” Jim asked.

“Um…no? I drowned? So that’s, like…the opposite of what I want?”

They shrugged.

Lucius practised making scary sounds in the walls for the next few days. He practised a lot in the crawlspaces around the captain’s cabin so that Blackbeard could get the full benefit of the experience, and it seemed to pay off. Blackbeard got jumpier. He looked over his shoulder sometimes even when Lucius wasn’t the one making noise, even if it was just the ship creaking. He developed a habit of turning wild, searching eyes around the space every time he entered it, and sometimes—especially at night, especially if he’d been drinking—he muttered, “Fuck off,” or, “You’re dead, dammit, can’t you shut the fuck up?”

Frenchie had a new suggestion for another kind of groan or moan or scream every time they met, and Jim contributed a brief tutorial in exactly what a man sounds like when trying to curse you out through the wet gurgle of his own blood if you stabbed him in the lungs.

“Again, I drowned,” Lucius reminded them.

“Blood in the lungs, water in the lungs, it’s all the same shit in the end, right?”

He shuddered, considered the matter, and shuddered again, but he had to concede.

Jim was predictably smug when Lucius came back to report that the gross hacking, gurgling sound had awakened Blackbeard out of a dead sleep. He’d started up from the messy blankets on the floor where he had been snoring a moment before, let out an involuntary cry, fumbled for his knife, and then sat frozen, trembling, staring around and muttering under his breath. Lucius hadn’t been able to make out all the words, but he was pretty sure he’d heard his own name in there.

“Told you,” Jim said.

“Okay, fine, I admit, you were right. And”—he waited for a significant beat, looking from Frenchie’s face to Jim’s and back again—“I like to think his egg is sufficiently cracked.”

“The pageantry?” The eagerness in Frenchie’s voice didn’t carry over to Jim, who said,

“You don’t have to be so fuckin’ dramatic about it.”

“It’s theatre,” Lucius said. “It’s supposed to be dramatic.”

Frenchie said, “I’ll get the seaweed."

Chapter Text

In the darkness of the cabin, Blackbeard sat bolt upright on the pile of blankets he’d been sleeping on, listening for the sound that had woken him and ignoring the pounding in his head.

He hadn’t been sleeping very well for weeks now—and it wasn’t because he was sleeping on the floor, because he’d slept on loads of floors in his lifetime, and they’d never caused a problem for him yet—and it wasn’t because Stede was gone, because he had made an executive decision to stop feeling pain over that. He figured it had to do with the whole “on the run from the British navy” thing, although he didn’t think they were trying that hard to find him. He’d figured the sleep thing would sort itself out, but then he’d started hearing things. Noises late at night. Voices that woke him from his nightmares and then drifted away.

Lucius.

He figured that wasn’t conducive to a healthy sleep routine—hearing the voice of a dead man. He’d been drinking himself to sleep more frequently. Too frequently. His aching head swam.

There it was again: a thumping, followed by a sound like fingernails scrabbling for purchase on wood.

Rats. Every ship had rats. That was all it was. Rats in the walls. Why the hell didn’t the Revenge have a cat? Get a fuckin’ grip, man.

Over the thumping, a sudden strangled yell that made the hair at the back of his neck prickle. It sounded like the word “help” lost in there somewhere, and for a moment he was back, standing at the rail, listening to screams fading into the noise of the waves as the Revenge sailed away from Lucius.

Footsteps sounded in the corner of the room, and his head whipped around toward the sound. Nothing. Nothing at all. The walls creaked.

You’re fucking Blackbeard for fuck’s sake. Blackbeard didn’t sit up shaking like a child and listening for ghosts. Blackbeard didn’t feel fear. He heaved a weary sigh and turned back to lie down again.

Lucius stood in the cabin doorway.

Without thinking, he lifted his pistol and fired at the apparition. The waves heaved—or was that his hungover head?—and when he blinked, the ghost was still there.

“Fuck,” he said eloquently.

Lucius didn’t answer.

“Fuck, mate. Shot went right through you.”

Lucius looked ghastly—cheeks white and lips blue, droplets rolling down his temples from wet hair as though he had stepped into the cabin directly from the sea. Strands of something dark and slick and smelling of rotting ocean caught in his hair, wound about his neck and trailed down his arms, and he almost glowed in the watered-down light of the moon trickling in the windows. His dark eyes fixed on Blackbeard with a near-palpable hatred.

Or was he imagining it?

“I’d hate me too if I were haunting me after I drowned me,” he mumbled.

Was he hallucinating the slight judgmental quirk of the young man’s eyebrows?

You’re hallucinating the whole fucking man for chrissakes.

“You gonna talk to me or what?” he dropped the pistol beside his hip. “You were running your mouth a lot for a dead guy last time I heard you.”

Lucius’ ghost opened its mouth, but instead of speaking, it let out such a godawful moaning, gurgling sound that Blackbeard threw the empty whisky bottle, which missed the phantom by several feet before shattering against one of Stede’s empty bookshelves.

“What the fuck do you want?” He was shouting now. “You think you’re the only one who’s got it rough? At least you’re fucking dead—I have to get up every goddamn morning and be fucking Blackbeard. You know what that’s like? You’re better off dead.”

No answer.

He had a hazy memory of the ghost saying something about an apology the last time it had properly talked. He waved one hand. “And I forgive you. And you’re welcome. And begone.”

Lucius laughed.

It was a wet, choking laugh, half cackle and half sob, and it made him shiver in a decidedly un-Blackbeard-like way.

“Get the fuck out of my cabin!” He looked down, searching for something else to throw. There was his pistol. Nothing else easily to hand except blankets. He picked up the gun.

“Want to see if a bullet passes right through a ghost every—”

There was nobody there. The cabin door was shut as it always had been, and the dark shadows were empty. The moonlight illuminated nothing but the empty shelves, the locked door, the bare floor. Not even a pair of wet footprints marked where he had stood.

Where Blackbeard had thought he stood.

His hand trembled, and he lowered the gun again. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”

Men had been known to hallucinate, hadn’t they, at sea, at night, after a few drinks and a life of sorrows? So if he wanted not to see Lucius, he had better quit drinking, get some sleep, and…

Fuck that.

Blackbeard didn’t feel fear, of course, but he was a vigilant sonofabitch, and it would be nothing short of careless to lie back down and close his eyes with dead people walking through locked doors. So he held his weary eyes wide open and kept watch.

He nearly shot Izzy around dawn. Izzy knocked on the door before swinging it open, and Blackbeard put a bullet into the doorframe.

Izzy leapt back six inches and snapped, “What—and I mean this with all due respect, Captain—the fuck?”

“Is there another shot in that door?” Blackbeard demanded, slowly rolling up from the floor to stand as menacingly as was possible with a bleary haze in his eyes and a pile of rumpled blankets at his feet.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“Do I look like I think it’s funny?”

With compressed lips and a dour glare, Izzy turned to examine the door. After a moment he said, “Yep,” and pointed to a splintered hole around shoulder height near the hinges.

About where Lucius had been standing. Or hadn’t been standing. He would decide his exact position on that question later.

“Captain?”

“Hm? Yeah. Good. Thought so. Very observant, Iz, you can keep all your…digits and limbs and whatnot. For today. As a reward.” Fuck his head hurt. Without much idea of where he was going or why, he stomped to the door and shoved past Izzy into a brisk, damp breeze.

No ghosts out here.

He made his way to the quarterdeck, told Fang to get lost, and took the helm. He tried to enjoy the feel of the wheel in his hands and the wind in his hair. Time was this had been as free as he could get. Now it felt like he was pushing the ship himself.

He wasn’t in a better mood by the time he stalked down to the galley to find Frenchie miserably peeling potatoes in the corner.

“Find me something to eat or I’ll have Ivan roast your left leg for dinner,” Blackbeard growled.

Frenchie stared, knife in one hand, half-peeled potato in the other.

“Well?”

The knife clattered against the floor and the potato went rolling. “Right, yes, of course, Mr—Captain—Blackbeard, sir.”

As Frenchie disappeared around the corner, Lucius voice drifted from somewhere behind Blackbeard: “Not being very polite today, are we? Someone’s grouchy? Did someone not get enough sleep last night, maybe?”

“Fuck off.” He was too tired to argue with ghosts.

“That doesn’t work, and you know it by now.” Lucius sounded smug. Or more smug than usual. “You should be nice to Frenchie—he did that bloody embarrassing flag for you without even complaining, didn’t he?”

“Hmm you’re right. I could toss him overboard, too, now that’s done.”

“And have two ghosts haunting you? Has anyone told you that you’ve got a masochistic streak?”

Frenchie returned with a bowl and a steaming cup.

Still the stupid delicate dishes that Stede had stocked the ship with, because they didn’t have anything else to eat off if they threw them overboard, although he’d really given some thought to whether they could manage without any dishes at all just for the satisfaction of smashing the glistening porcelain to bits.

“Anyway, did you really keep him alive purely to sew that thing?”

Blackbeard snatched the dishes out of Frenchie’s hands and thunked them down on the table.

“Because as stupid as the flag is, I think what’s really pathetic is that you already knew, before you even killed everyone else, you knew you wanted that ‘oh no I’m alone and sad now’ symbolism flying over your ship—pirate ship, by the way, did you remember that? What kind of fucking pirate has a heart on his flag?”

“It’s a skeleton,” he mumbled. “It’s stabbing a heart.”

“Oh, pardon, yeah, because that’s less cringe.”

Frenchie was staring.

“What, you think I have your fucking potato?” Blackbeard snapped. “Get back to work.”

A ghostly groan pressed through the walls. “Ughhh. What did I just say about being nicer to him?”

“I don’t take advice from dead guys.” He glanced over to see if Frenchie was hearing both halves of the conversation, but he was crouching, knife in one hand, apparently looking for the potato as ordered.

“Do you take threats? How long d’you think you can go without sleep? I’d wager you last…five days? A week? Before you go stark, raving mad and throw yourself off the yardarm?”

A series of dull bumps followed the potato’s roll across the floor as the ship pitched, and then Frenchie caught it and returned to his task. Blackbeard stared at him. He really didn’t hear the voice, did he? His eyes were fixed resolutely on the potato emerging from its dusty jacket.

Five days without sleep.

Blackbeard didn’t need sleep. He ran on spite and rage and…

Fuck. “Fine. I won’t kill off Frenchie.” He sipped his coffee. It tasted terrible. He missed tea with seven sugars. No, no, I do not. Blackbeard doesn’t need sugar. “As long as you don’t do fucking that thing again, like last night, yeah? I mean, that was creepy as hell, mate, what the fuck was that?”

Ghost-laughter echoed through the walls and faded away. 

Chapter Text

It was a week before Lucius slipped up enough for Izzy to see him. Nothing dramatic about it, even; he simply forgot to check the corridor before stepping out through the false panel, and before the trapdoor finished had even finished swinging back into place, Izzy appeared round the corner.

It had been a good week, too, Lucius considered regretfully as he stood, frozen in place. He hadn’t quite finished decimating Edward Teach, so it was really a shame that the game was about to be up, but there had been some real high points.

“Thought you weren’t going to do this anymore.”

From where Lucius stood in the corner, Blackbeard didn’t look very Blackbeard-y. The rough stubble on his jaw hadn’t grown in nearly enough to make out in the dark, and the moonlight spilling halfheartedly through gaps in the curtains softened the edges of his silhouette.

Lucius broke off his horrible dying-man-choking-on-his-own-blood sound and said, “I’m going to do whatever the hell I want.”

Frenchie was right—there was something kind of pathetic about the guy sitting there with his knees drawn to his chest. But there was also that pistol in his hand, and Lucius hadn’t forgotten that first close call. If Blackbeard had been in even slightly better possession of his faculties, the bullet would have hit its mark squarely, ending both the revenge charade and Lucius.

“Haunt me during the day,” Blackbeard grumbled. “I’m fucking exhausted.”

Lucius tugged a strand of seaweed out of his hair and twirled the wet end of it around one finger. “Uh, sorry, but if I check my notes here I can see that…ah, yep, it says right here: you lost your right to make demands when you literally threw me into the ocean.”

“Fuck off.”

“No, I don’t think so. Have you ever drowned?”

“Not dead, am I?”

“Let me tell you about it. I think you’d be interested. See, it’s not just about not breathing. I mean, there’s that, of course, but before that, there’s a whole different kind of cold, rough hell…” Jim and Frenchie had contributed a not insignificant amount of advice for this bit—actually, Jim had contributed information with a genuinely concerning level of detail, which Lucius had decided not to ask about—and Lucius liked to think he had a bit of a gift for playacting—an assessment confirmed by the shaking of Blackbeard’s shoulders and the trembling of his fingers as Lucius spun the little horror story for him.

Still, when Lucius finished, Blackbeard, though with a perceptible tremor in his voice, only said, “That’s it, then? Educational. Now you got that out of your system, can I go back to sleep?”

In the corridor, Izzy stopped short. His eyes widened. One hand hovered near his sword, but he didn’t touch it.

Yet, Lucius thought.

He was definitely going to die for real this time. He hadn’t done nearly everything he wanted to—but at least, after that encounter in the auxiliary wardrobe, he could die knowing the world’s greatest pirate was probably near enough the dry bottom of despair to follow him soon.

Lucius ended up in the wardrobe because he was looking for a more comfortable place to sleep. He couldn’t sleep in Jim’s room for fear someone would come bursting in and catch him napping. Napping was a decidedly un-ghostly thing to be caught doing, and he didn’t think he could convince anyone he was properly a ghost if they happened to see him sprawled out, obviously taking sleep-deep breaths, or, worse, snoring. But the passageways through the Revenge had been constructed to satisfy Stede Bonnet’s whims, and a grown man living out a childhood pirate fantasy didn’t care about the crawlspaces being comfortable, as long as they led through hidden doors.

Lucius had avoided the wardrobe until now because, as far as he could tell, the only door to it was the one Stede had shown him on that first day: the door built directly into the cabin. The cabin where, at most hours of the day, a dangerously moody Blackbeard prowled about.

At last, however, Lucius decided the wardrobe was his best bet. With any luck, Stede had left an embarrassingly plentiful supply of impractical garments in it, which could be piled up into something softer than the floor of a hidden passageway. Maybe, if he got really lucky, he’d find some spare bedding. Anything would be better than the cramped crawlspaces he inhabited at the moment. He could scare Blackbeard from within the wardrobe if need be, and he could sneak out whenever the coast was clear.

The miniature mannequin that concealed the door’s lever had been snapped off—presumably at the same time as all the books and knickknacks had been disposed of—but there was enough left to engage the door’s mechanism, and Lucius relaxed a little as the bookcase swung on its hinges, only to immediately tense again.

The wardrobe was a mess.

A fair number of shining satin coats still hung in rows, but even more lay on the floor in crumpled piles, mingled with expensive shirts, velvet breeches, brocade waistcoats, silk stockings, ruffles of extravagant lace… The fainting couch that had been in the cabin now stood against the far wall, and if Lucius didn’t know better he would think Blackbeard did know about this room.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself out loud. It was reassuring to hear his own voice. “If he knew about this place, he wouldn’t believe the ghost pageantry.”

Having convinced himself, he shut the door and flopped on the couch with a long, happy sigh. The velvet was soft against his cheek, and the decadent plush of the seat was more comfortable than anything he’d been near in ages.
It might have been minutes or hours later that Lucius woke to the sound of boots on the floor and a voice swearing. His eyelids felt sluggish as he blinked them open to see, blurry between his lashes, the figure of Blackbeard himself standing in what was definitely the open doorway.

Fuck. So he does know. Fuckety fucking bloody hell. Think fast.

His mind stalled.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” Blackbeard demanded.

“Being dead, same as usual.” Lucius, deciding at once that his phantom alter ego necessarily held Blackbeard in fearless condescension, stretched languidly and stayed where he was. “I’m haunting. Restless spirit-ing. It’s basically the same here as anywhere else.”

“Not here.” Blackbeard took two more steps into the wardrobe. His hands rested ominously on his weapons.

“Anywhere I damn well please,” Lucius corrected. “What are you going to do about it—kill me again?” And then, because for a moment it looked like Blackbeard might try it, he sat up and added firmly, “You can’t.”

“Bullets go through you.”

“But they piss me off. And you don’t like me when I’m doing the vengeful ghost thing.

“I don’t like you in general.” It didn’t look like the captain had been drinking as much as usual. His eyes were disconcertingly clear, and now they narrowed suspiciously. “Why don’t you look dead?”

“Because.” Lucius yawned to buy himself a moment. “It takes some effort to generate the whole vibe. The water and seaweed and stuff. It’s not like the seaweed died with me, right? I bring that up specially for you.” He winked.

It was a gratifying reflection on the job he’d done thus far that Blackbeard swallowed that half-arsed lie.

Lucius still didn’t like the way he was approaching, though—another step, and then another. He didn’t think he could explain away a corporeal body if Blackbeard actually touched him.

“I’ll haunt you to the brink of insanity if you don’t leave me alone. I’m having some ghost-me time.”

Blackbeard paused. “What’s it like? Being dead?”

“Right now? Very annoying. I’ve got this great mopey pirate irritating me.”

The hand on the pistol flexed.

“You want to find out? Really?” Lucius pushed. He went so far as to extend one hand.

Blackbeard let go the gun and reached out as though he might actually take him up on it. “You’re gonna show me?

Lucius rolled his eyes and dropped his hand to his knee. “I’m gonna kill you, you dense bastard. You’re still alive, aren’t you? And I’m dead? What do you think happens if you touch a ghost?”

Blackbeard shrugged. “Something cool, I guess?”

“No, you die. You—” Lucius cut off as Blackbeard took another quick step forward, hand outstretched. “Did you not hear me? You die. Your soul rips out of the living world and I drag it screaming and crying into this in-between place, which is pretty hellish, actually. It's all very undignified.”

The fingers curled back into a fist, but Blackbeard didn’t drop his arm. “That sounds interesting.”

“It’s not.” Lucius glared. “Do you want to die?”

Blackbeard shrugged.

Lucius sat stock-still, totally at a loss. His entire spur-of-the-moment plan for keeping Blackbeard from touching him was to threaten instant death in the case of any physical contact. He hadn’t counted on the possibility that the guy might be something like suicidal.

Which was a stupid mistake on his part, he realised, because now that he thought about it, he remembered Ed lying in that pathetic blanket fort, talking about letting go and dying. Obviously he hadn’t gotten past that. Not entirely.

He groaned dramatically. “Oh, god. I cannot believe I’m about to give life advice to the guy that killed me, but…look, being dead isn’t, like, peaceful or anything. It’s not a break.”

“Tell me.”

So Lucius did. He did the most stressful improv he’d ever had to manage, doing his utmost to make death sound simultaneously horrifyingly painful and soul-numbingly dull.

He stood as he spoke, and felt a minuscule amount of relief as Blackbeard backed away a little.

He elaborated on how depressing it was not to be able to eat anymore. On how he missed doing things. He wove a sob story all about how he wasn’t even reunited with his dead mother, so melodramatic he thought for a moment Blackbeard would call him on his bullshit—but he didn’t.

Lucius gestured and paced as he talked, until he stood with his back to the door, and Blackbeard was the one trapped at the dead end of the wardrobe.

“Honestly,” he wrapped up, “the only reason I’m not killing you on the spot is I think it might be more satisfying to watch Jim do it.”

“Jim,” Blackbeard repeated blankly.

“Yeah, Jim. You remember Jim. Short? Scary? You knocked them unconscious and locked them in the room?”

“I know who Jim is.”

Lucius shrugged. “Okay, well, I mean, that was a monumentally stupid thing to do, killing Oluwande but keeping Jim within reach. Were you hoping to have your throat slit at the first chance?”

Blackbeard hesitated just long enough for Lucius to get another glimpse of that emptiness in his eyes before he muttered, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh my god. That really is pathetic. This is too sad. You, Edward Teach, are a disaster. I might as well not even be here; you’re practically haunting yourself.” And with that, he dared to turn his back and saunter out the door, engaging an impressive force of will not to look back over his shoulder to be sure there wasn’t a pistol aimed at his head.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think? I’m going to haunt someone less depressing.”

After that event, assured that he could walk around in broad daylight without arousing Blackbeard’s suspicions, Lucius had taken to catching cat naps on the fainting couch whenever the cabin was empty long enough to get to the wardrobe door unseen. Which meant that he was pretty well rested right now—enough to notice the slight tremble of

Izzy’s fingers as they dropped to grip his sword.

Enough to be sure he wasn’t imagining the horror in that rasping voice when Izzy whispered, “Oh fuck me.”

Lucius reckoned he had rather go out with a swagger than a scream this time, so he cocked his weight onto one hip, tipped this head a little to the side, and said, “Only if you ask nicely.”

And that was definitely going to get him killed. Which was too bad, because he’d kind of wanted to live long enough to find out what had really happened to Stede, and he wasn’t going to learn that if he didn’t make it off the ship alive.

Blackbeard was pacing, which was beginning to annoy Lucius, watching from where he sprawled on the unmade bed. He had swept the curtain aside and claimed the bed as his perch in part to see exactly how much impudence he could get away with now that he had firmly established himself as a phantom that could not be touched, killed, or dismissed.

The answer was “a lot of impudence,” as it turned out. All he’d gotten as he shoved the curtains back and made himself comfortable on the rumpled duvet was a dark glower and a growled, “Don’t you fucking—”

And then Blackbeard had cut off. His eyes had closed wearily and his shoulders had slumped. Without another word he had gone back to the map.

He’d been studying his maps almost constantly, and Lucius hadn’t figured out whether he was obsessively working some geographical problem or whether he simply couldn’t be arsed to find something else to do with his time. Contrary to what he’d promised Izzy, the Revenge had been flying the (depressing, embarrassing) pirate flag for days, and there was no sign of their quarry.

Lucius didn’t think there was or ever had been any quarry, and he wondered how long it would be before Izzy lost his patience and brought it up with the captain. There was no way he still thought Blackbeard had a plan.

He’d shifted onto his side and punched up the pillow to get a little more comfortable.

“Can you fucking not…” Blackbeard had begun.

“I fucking cannot,” Lucius had agreed cheerfully.

That was when Blackbeard had started pacing. Lucius had thought he was looking for something at first, but after a couple of turns it had become obvious that he was simply prowling like a caged animal. 

Lucius had watched, following the futile motion with lazy turns of his head until that got tiring, and then with just his eyes, and now, a little nauseous from the endless turns, he said, “You might as well talk it out.”

Blackbeard snapped, “What?”

“Whatever you’re so upset about. Before you wear a hole in the floor and fall through into…” Lucius couldn’t remember exactly what room was below them. He took a guess.

“The jam room.”

“It’s not the jam room anymore.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I’m not missing anything.” But he did stop pacing.

Lucius watched the way he tried to glower but couldn’t, because his eyes kept skipping away, as if they couldn’t quite get a fix on him. No sunlight in the window, so it couldn’t be too bright, and Lucius wasn’t under any illusions that he looked properly ghostlike at the moment. Which meant it had to be something else. He kicked at where the duvet was bunched up, and Blackbeard—flinched? Was he flinching?

“It’s the bed? Is that what you’re all worked up about?”

“I’m not worked up.”

“You don’t like that I’m on it?” Lucius gave the pillow another little pat and watched Blackbeard’s eyes turn murderous. “God that’s lame. Is that why you’re still sleeping on the floor?”

“The floor’s comfortable.”

“That’s a lie, and not even a good one. This is comfortable.” He yawned and stretched, pleased to see that every move seemed to irritate Blackbeard further. “And there’s, like, a dozen unused hammocks shoved in some corner somewhere. So you’re sleeping on the floor out of…pettiness? Sadness? Spite?”

“You’re pretty fucking disrespectful for a ghost, mate.”

“I was pretty fucking disrespectful when I was alive, too, and this isn’t about me. It’s about you being too…what,  lonely? Too lonely to sleep alone in Stede’s bed?” He rolled over to prop his chin on one hand. “Or too pissed at him to touch it?”

“You might be dead, but I bet I can still make a ghost feel some kind of pain.” Despite the threat in his voice and the hand on his knife, there was something pitiful in the words.

Something that recalled the absolute despondency of his first few days back on the ship, and his late-night weeping, and his tone of voice when he’d asked about dying as though he were jealous of the experience.

Lucius aimed for nonchalant but thought he landed somewhere in the territory of grudgingly sympathetic when he said, “And as long as we’re chatting about it, how did Captain Bonnet die?”

Blackbeard’s head snapped up. “Stede died?” There was a spark of something wild in his eyes as they finally met Lucius’—something that was disconcertingly difficult to label, in part because the manic burning in that gaze seemed improbably adjacent to hope.

“Didn’t he?” Lucius sat up. “I mean, when he didn’t come back with you, and you were…making up sad songs and stuff. We sort of assumed…?”

“That he died?” Blackbeard dug his fingers into his hair and whispered, “Maybe he’s dead.”

Yeah, that was definitely hope in his voice. For a guy who’d been obviously in love, he seemed worryingly excited about the idea of Stede’s death.

Lucius said, “Is that not…”

“Fuck it, I thought he just… left me.”

“Um. And why would he do that?”

“I dunno, mate, chose safe fancy rich people over a dirty dangerous pirate…would’ve made sense. He had a wife in Barbados, yeah?”

“Ohhhh. Right.” Lucius flopped back onto the pillow. “No, yeah, that definitely makes way more sense.”

For a heartbeat, the look of desperate hope tore away from Blackbeard’s face, baring a raw pain that made Lucius almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

He made himself think about Pete, just for a moment. About what if he wasn’t alive. About what if there really was never going to be a day where Lucius saw that smile again, or heard those atrocious tall tales, or…

“Yeah, he probably dumped you.”

Whatever agony Ed Teach felt about losing Stede, he deserved all of it and more.

Izzy drew his sword.

Lucius stared at its keen edge wavering between them and wondered whether being run through was better or worse than drowning, on average. He wished he weren’t going to find out.

Light caught on the honed blade.

He hoped whatever came next was at least better than the depressing afterlife mythology he’d been spinning for Blackbeard. He stood his ground.

And then, instead of stabbing him, Izzy took two steps backward.

“Oh, come on.” Lucius smirked. “Haven’t you been thinking about me for months now?”

As he backed away, Izzy was muttering under his breath something that sounded improbably like some kind of prayer—the kind of prayer a man suddenly remembered to believe in when he had a noose around his neck.

You have got to be joking. There was no way this should work, and yet…

“You keep the fuck away from me.” Another step backward.

Lucius took a few steps forward to feel like he was winning. “Or what?”

“I don’t get paid enough to deal with the dead.” And with that, Izzy fled.

Well, he didn’t quite run, but he did move quicker than usual, and he didn’t turn his back or sheathe his sword before he was out of sight.

Adrenaline and relief crashing together left Lucius lightheaded. He collapsed against the wall, laughing until his eyes watered.

And then from directly behind him: “Lucius?”

He turned to meet Fang’s wide eyes.

Chapter Text

“Hell—oh shit—hell—” Between uncontrollable bursts of hysterical laughter, Lucius finally managed: “Hello.”

“Captain said he killed you.” Fang prodded him experimentally with the tip of his dagger, which started Lucius out of his laughing fit.

“Ow—ow—stop that!” He jerked away, rubbing his side. “You don’t have to double-check. He did a good enough job killing me on his own.”

“You’re not dead, though.” Fang squinted. “Are you?”

While Lucius was trying to calculate whether he still had any hope of pulling off the I’m-actually-a-ghost routine in spite of Fang’s dagger having more or less proven that he was corporeal, footsteps sounded behind him, and he turned to see Frenchie rounding the corner.

Lucius groaned. “Oh god, is it going to be a whole meet-and-greet in the corridor, then?”

Frenchie stopped dead in his tracks, staring from Lucius to Fang and then back. “So, ah, are we not doing the ghost thing with Fang?”

Lucius rolled his eyes. “Well now we’re not, obviously.”

“Does this mean we’re telling Captain, now, too?” Frenchie approached warily.

“Telling Captain what?” Fang said.

“Nothing, unless you want him to actually finish killing me.” Lucius glanced both ways, suddenly afraid Blackbeard might actually appear. “Can we talk about this somewhere that isn’t the middle of the corridor?”

“Jim’s room,” Frenchie agreed immediately.

“Why does everything you idiots do have to happen in my room?” Jim demanded as they piled in and shut the door. “And what the hell are you bringing him in here for?” They glared at Fang.

“I think we’re bringing Fang in on the pageantry.” Frenchie raised an eyebrow at Lucius, who nodded.

Jim rattled off something venomous in Spanish, which Lucius took for swearing, which he figured was a good sign, since probably if Jim meant to do any actual stabbing about the situation, someone would already be bleeding.

“Right, so Fang—hi, Fang, by the way, been a while, how’ve you been?—Fang caught me in the corridor, so we have to get him on our side or we’re buggered. Also, and this is probably not an emergency: Izzy saw me.”

“Oh, shit, mate, that’s the game up then,” Frenchie said

“Izzy fucking saw you?” Jim spiralled into another round of Spanish, this time while giving Lucius a dark look that suggested the deprecatory-sounding phrases were probably direct insults rather than general invectives.

“No, no, no, it’s fine. He thought I was a ghost, too.”

“That’s way too lucky.” Frenchie made a complex gesture—or maybe swatted at an insect, Lucius wasn’t sure. “You got to do a ritual offering.”

“I’ve got to do bloody what now?”

“An offering. Or something. There’s a goddess of fortune, actually, and whatever you did to get on her good side, you better do more of it.”

“Absolutely not.” Lucius doubted the existence of a fortune deity in general—a scepticism that paired nicely with his total ignorance of what one might do to secure the ongoing favour of such a being and his disinclination to educate himself on the topic. He was already devoting an unwonted amount of effort to managing the fickle whims of an emotionally shattered pirate; he wasn’t about to lengthen his to-do list by adding, Placate an invisible (nonexistent?) goddess.

Jim, to Lucius’ secret relief, agreed immediately agreed. “If there were gods, I wouldn’t be on this fucking ship in the first place.”

Frenchie squinted suspiciously. “Isn’t your nan a nun, though?”

“Callate.” Jim produced a knife from seemingly nowhere. “You don’t talk about my family. Now. What about him?” They jerked their head in Fang’s direction.

“No, but think about it.” Frenchie counted off on his fingers. “Lucius didn’t drown. He got back on board, just happens to know all the hiding places on the ship, convinced Blackbeard he’s a ghost without even trying.

“I resent that. I worked really hard on learning that drowning-person-choking sound from Jim.”

“Yeah, you didn’t do too bad.” Based on the grudging approval in Jim’s voice, Lucius took that as an actual compliment.

“And,” Frenchie went on, “the first time you run into Izzy, he actually thinks you’re a ghost? All on his own? That’s a blessing from the goddess of luck.”

“Or it’s entirely a coincidence. I think I make Izzy nervous in general.” Lucius figured whatever conflicted mess of jealousy, resentment, and disgust Izzy felt about him probably helped predispose the man to some level of unbalance when faced unexpectedly with a guy he’d thought was dead

“He’s nervous in general,” Fang agreed. “Worse since Captain went funny in the head again.

“See?

“But, yeah, you gotta do an offering,” Fang added immediately.

Lucius groaned. “Not you too.

Frenchie crossed his arms. “Look, if you want your luck to turn bad, that’s your business, but I’m keeping clear of you if you start attracting bad luck.”

“Look, you have your superstitions, and I respect that, but, honestly, what are you even suggesting I offer? I live in Stede Bonnet’s absolutely mental crawlspaces, and I haven’t got so much as a change of clothes.

“You can still burn something,” Frenchie said stubbornly. “How about that?” He pointed to Lucius’ neckerchief. “Not like you need it.”

“And where am I supposed to burn a necktie, Frenchie? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of the ocean on a wooden boat.

“There’s the oven in the galley,” Fang said.

Jim groaned. “God, just agree to burn the fucking tie so they’ll shut up about it.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll”—Lucius cut off with a grunt of irritation as his fingers fought the salt-stiffened knot—“I’ll burn it, even though it’s basically ten per cent of my entire wardrobe at this point. Everyone happy now?” He succeeded in tearing the knot loose and balled up the scrap of fabric, which was honestly a bit gross by now anyway.

Frenchie and Fang looked at each other. Frenchie shrugged.

Fang said, “Yeah, that’s fine now.”

Jim muttered, “Madre de dios, estos idiotas supersticiosos.”

“Okay, with that out of the way.” Lucius shoved the tie in his pocket. “Good to see you again, by the way, Fang—how’ve you been?”

“Eh, not too bad, considering. And you’re not dead.”

“Nah.” Lucius flopped onto Jim’s bed. “Can’t get rid of me that easily. But, look, we’ve got Blackbeard convinced I am.”

“And Izzy, apparently,” Frenchie added.

“And Izzy. And frankly, I think one or the other of them would happily murder me properly if they figured out their mistake. So you can’t tell them you’ve seen me.”

“You’re just walking around out there, then?”

“Well, I am usually a bit more subtle than that.”

“Yeah, he’s just walking around,” Jim said at the same time. “Honestly. The only luck worth mentioning is that nobody saw you before now.”

“Shut up, Jim.” Lucius turned back to Fang, all but batting his eyelashes. “Fang, be a darling and don’t give me up?”

“It’ll piss off Izzy.” Fang grinned. “I’m in.” 

Lucius took more care about where he appeared for the next few days. With Fang in on the secret, he felt a little more secure, but he backed down for a while to follow Izzy about, making ghost sounds and keeping an eye out to be sure the first mate really bought the restless spirit act.

And he stopped by the galley to shove the neckerchief into the oven. He even took care to do it while Frenchie was around to nod approvingly at the “offering.” Lucius was just glad he didn’t make him do any kind of embarrassing chanting or gesturing about it. If it had been Buttons, he reckoned there would have been an entire ceremony. Lucky him Buttons was…

Not dead, Lucius snapped at his wayward thoughts. Gone, not dead. Gone as in somewhere else. Physically. Alive somewhere that simply didn’t happen to be this particular ship…

Lucius went off to play the part of a particularly harsh ghost in the walls behind Izzy. It didn’t fix anything, but seeing the man off balance and wide-eyed with fear he was obviously trying and failing to hide made Lucius feel some sense of vindication, no matter how slight.

Fang took to the innocent bystander roll with a wicked delight, occasionally pointing out Lucius’ presence himself if Izzy didn’t seem to be noticing. He quickly perfected the art of a well-placed, “Did you hear…? Nah, never mind, thought I heard something, probably just the ship. You know how it is…”

The real test of luck came when both Blackbeard and Izzy saw Lucius at the same time, without anyone else to mitigate the experience. Until then, he had been careful not to show up when they were in the same place. Keeping them off-balance required keeping them outnumbered, in his estimation. But he didn’t figure for Izzy slamming open the door while he was sitting on Blackbeard’s desk, trying to get the man to explain why he’d tried to murder him in the first place.

“I just think I deserve an explanation,” he said for the third time. “I mean, one minute you’re writing truly depressing songs and crying in a blanket fort, and you want everyone to call you Ed, and you’re planning a talent show—and then for no reason you push me overboard?”

“Your fault for trusting a pirate.” Blackbeard scowled.

“Don’t think for one second the jaded outlaw swagger is going to fool me. What the hell did I ever do to you?”

“Wasn’t about you.”

“Mhmm, what was it, some kind of post-breakup revenge? Because I would think you’d hang onto us and kill us where Stede could see it, if that was the point.”

“Can you not fucking shut up?”

Lucius was getting used to having a pistol aimed at him by this point, but his heart still stuttered as the barrel whipped out of its holster.

The door slammed open.

“I heard voices—” Izzy cut off as Blackbeard’s gun swung toward him. His eyes widened at the sight of Lucius.

Blackbeard snapped, “You don’t knock anymore?”

“Pardon me, Captain, but I ah.” He looked resolutely away from Lucius.

“You what?”

Lucius waited for one of them to acknowledge the obvious.

After a deep breath, Izzy said, “I must have been mistaken.”

“Must have.”

Lucius almost believed there might be something to Frenchie’s fortune goddess theory.

Izzy swallowed. “Anyway, what I came to say is, there’s sails on the horizon.”

“Fucking finally.” Blackbeard holstered his pistol and strode toward the doorway without sparing a glance for Lucius. “Come on, Iz. Been itching for a little good old-fashioned fight, haven’t you?”

“I don’t really want to fight,” Frenchie said when Lucius slipped away to warn him of an impending skirmish of some kind.

“Well I’m unarmed and I’ve never been in a fight, actually, so don’t look at me for help.”

“I can’t even see you,” Frenchie pointed out.

“And you’re not going to. I’m staying put in here where it’s safe until whatever happens is over.”

“Wait, you’ve never been in a fight?”

“No, of course not.”

“But you’re on a pirate ship?”

“On Stede Hello-I’ll-Be-Your-Robber-Today Bonnet’s pirate ship! As a secretary! He hired me to write his journal and sketch plants for godssake, not to get killed—again—by pirates because Ed can’t deal with a breakup by eating sweets and burning his love letters like a normal person.”

“Okay, fine, but Jim’s probably going to kill Captain in the melee. Then what?”

Fang appeared in the doorway, armed to the teeth. “You heard we’re gonna get a real fight?”

“I heard,” Frenchie said. “I don’t think this ship is really built for a proper battle, though, if I’m being honest. Lucius says he’s hiding until it’s over.” He jerked his head toward approximately where Lucius was standing behind the panelling.

“It’s not like I would be any use anyway,” Lucius pointed out. “I told Blackbeard ghosts can’t touch people, remember?”

Fang frowned. “You what?”

“Technically I told him people die if they touch a ghost.” At Fang’s unaltered frown, he added defensively, “He was right there! It was the first lie I could think of to make him back off.”

“So you got him afraid to touch you,” Fang said.

“Yeah, basically, yes.”

Fang grinned suddenly. “You wanna really convince him? And Izzy?”

Something about the glint in his eyes worried Lucius. “Am I going to regret it if I say yes?”

“I got an idea. But you gotta let me tell Ivan about you.”

“What? No! There are too many people on this ship who know about me already.”

“Aw, but Ivan won’t give you up.”

“No.”

“Come on. Don’t you want to scare the shit out of Izzy?” Fang wheedled. “Kill a man dead in front of him? Just one touch?”

“Actually, I would like to see that,” Frenchie said.

“Whose side are you on?” Lucius snapped.

“Well, ours. It’s…all the same side, yeah? Because we’re all in on the pageantry?”

Lucius sighed. “Fine. As long as you don’t expect me to actually fight someone. Because, like I just told Frenchie, I do not know how to use any proper weapons.”

Fang raised his eyebrows. “Not any?”

“Not any.”

“But you’re—”

“On a pirate ship, yes, yes, I know, I remember, I’ve been acutely aware of that fact for some time now. Can we get back to the topic at hand?”

“That’s the point: your hand. You can knock a guy dead easy, but we need Ivan’s help.”

Lucius groaned and hit his forehead against the inside of the wall twice. “Fine. I am the most well-known secret on this entire ship by now. But if I die—or, worse, if Izzy or Blackbeard figures out I’m not dead—I’m going to kill you with one touch.”

“Eh, don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Fang beamed in the general direction of the wall. “This is gonna be fun.”

“At some point, we’re going to have a serious talk about your definition of fun,” Lucius grumbled.

Chapter Text

The hot odours of gunpowder, sulphur, sweat, and steel hovered in a smoky haze above the decks of the Spanish ship. Blackbeard was in his element. The Revenge didn’t have the Queen Anne’s reputation, and she certainly hadn’t cut an imposing figure as she chased the other ship across the waves, with the satisfying result that his quarry hadn’t surrendered on sight, and he’d had the chance to carry out a proper fuckery—nothing special, nothing elaborate, but after weeks in that empty cabin, with only his nightmares and his hauntings, he had slipped into the familiar role like an old glove. 

The rush of action had overwhelmed any recognition that the familiarity came with a certain discomfort, and he had gone to work, losing himself in the adrenaline, the rage, the endless burn of the sun on his head and the weight of the knife in his hand. This was where he belonged. This was his world: the screamed curses floating on the humid breeze, the blood soaking the deck, the possibility, always, that his next step might be his last. If he wasn’t quick enough. If Izzy wasn’t near enough when he inevitably slipped up. If he just stopped fighting…

Through the smoke, he caught glimpses of his ghost: Lucius appeared to be following Frenchie through the melee. He looked very fucking dead today, with wet hair and pallid skin and dark hollows under his eyes. Blackbeard wondered whether he was acting as some kind of guardian phantasm, prepared to protect or avenge Frenchie should one of the Spanish sailors get a lucky shot. Not that Frenchie needed it—he seemed, unexpectedly, to be holding his own in the chaos.

And there’s no reason I care if he lives or dies. Pirates always died in these circumstances.

He turned a vicious blade on the nearest Spaniard and put both Frenchie and Lucius of his head.

He’d once told Stede that he hadn’t killed again—but you didn’t have to kill if you knew your way around a little. Cut a man’s leg just right, and he would die on his own. Knock him Izzy’s way, and Izzy would dispatch him. Catch him off balance, and he toppled into the waves.

For a split second, the shouts on the air sounded like Lucius’ last cry, and Blackbeard missed a step.

The Spaniard closed in. His pistol rose, and for the first time in a long time, Edward Teach looked down the barrel of another pirate’s gun.

And then the finger froze on the trigger. Eyes widened, the mouth opened in a breathless gasp, and sun-golden skin went ashy. In the moment it took Blackbeard to duck away from the pistol, the man had crumpled to the deck.

Behind him, Lucius stood, weight shifted onto one hip, dark eyes wide and dead face drawn. There wasn’t a single weapon on his person, but one hand still hovered in the air above the dead sailor.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

Something behind him: Blackbeard spun to meet another blade with his own before he had consciously identified the sound of the approaching footsteps. His attacker had obviously trained well, but he hadn’t been drilled by ruthless pirates. There was a refined skill in the polite angle of his arm, which did nothing to help against the dirty tricks any self-respecting pirate knew, but it did pose something like a challenge.

By the time Blackbeard looked back toward where Lucius had stood, there was no sign of the phantom. The dead sailor lay where he had fallen. 

With a frustrated growl, Blackbeard abandoned any semblance of proper form. He broke the man’s nose with a swift blow, kicked one knee with a sickening crack into a horrible angle that his own trick knee ached in sympathy for, and then left the unfortunate stranger for Izzy’s hungry blade.

The next time he saw Lucius, the ghost was on the quarterdeck, rushing through the chaos toward where Frenchie parried quick strikes from two attackers at once. Lucius reached out one hand and touched the back of one man’s neck. The man whirled, charged.

Not dead. He wasn’t dead. And if he wasn’t dead, then—

That thought cut away. Blackbeard watched, dry-mouthed, as for the second time a sailor froze on the spot, went pale, and collapsed.

While he was trying to reconcile the evidence of his own two eyes with the lingering scepticism he’d nurtured since that day in the auxiliary wardrobe—though he hadn’t been willing to test it, exactly—the handle of a knife sprouted between the remaining Spaniard’s shoulder blades, and Jim followed it at a run. They needn’t have bothered; Frenchie slammed the hilt of his cutlass against his opponent’s temple. The sailor staggered two steps, and Jim retrieved their knife just before he toppled over the rail.

It wasn’t a particularly long battle. The Spanish ship was running with a light crew, and they clearly hadn’t anticipated much of a fight. At some point, Lucius dissolved back into whatever aether he appeared from. There was one moment, when he paused for breath, that Blackbeard thought he saw Lucius overboard, his head bobbing against the waves and then disappearing beneath them, like a new kind of horrible reminder…

But it was difficult to be scared or regretful or whatever it was the ghost wanted of him when he was in the middle of letting out some guy’s guts all over the deck, so he mentally docked Lucius a point for bad timing and went back to work.

And not long after that, Blackbeard strode across the deck toward Izzy and said, “Enough. Blow this pathetic fucking ship to hell.”

The sour note in his voice was only because the excitement had wound to a close, and not because he felt hollow and weary and hungry for something he’d thought he might find in these men’s blood, and hadn’t, and couldn’t name.

Lucius’ ghost was waiting on the Revenge, damp now instead of sopping wet, leaning on one elbow against the far rail and looking peacefully out to sea as if he hadn’t just sent several people to their unnatural deaths. Blackbeard, gaining the deck and stomping immediately toward his cabin, ignored the dead man.

But halfway there, glancing past Lucius toward the horizon, he saw it: a longboat, slicing through the waves toward the Revenge. He had to squint to make out the silhouettes outlined in the fiery blaze of the setting sun, but what he saw in the blinding glare made him pause midstep while the deck heaved beneath his feet.

People.

Dead people.

People he knew for certain could not be living, because Izzy had—

He sauntered over to get a closer look, one carefully casual step at a time.  Definitely a longboat rowing toward the ship. Definitely a handful of familiar figures.

Fuck.

He turned to slouch against the rail and watch the crew boarding one by one, although putting his back to the approaching boat felt irrationally dangerous.

“Hey, Iz,” he said when that man swung onto the deck. “Remind me what you did with Bonnet’s pets?”

“That pack of idiots he called a crew?”

“That’s the ones.”

“Marooned ’em.”

“Where?”

“On a rock. In the middle of the fuckin’ ocean. You were there to see it.” Izzy looked at him like he’d lost his mind, which, honestly, he thought he might’ve.

Fang and Ivan nodded, and Jim started to say something vitriolic-sounding in Spanish, which cut off mid-sentence when Izzy spun on one heel to slam the pommel of his sword into their head. They crumpled to the deck, the knife they hadn’t thrown yet clattering from their hand.

“Lock them up,” Izzy said.

Ivan tossed them over his shoulder like a sack and disappeared belowdecks, and Fang picked up the knife. He tested the edge with his thumb, then tossed and caught it. Tossed it and caught it. Over and over, the muted thump of the handle hitting his palm setting into a rhythm like a slow heartbeat.

“Then what the hell are they doing rowing toward the Revenge?” Lucius said.

Blackbeard stiffened but he didn’t turn his head toward the spectre.

“That’s the question we’re all just dying to ask, isn’t it?” Lucius slid a little nearer, almost within arm’s reach.

After what Blackbeard had witnessed on the decks of the ship they’d just left behind, that distance felt hazardous. His lungs tightened as the restless dead approached inexorably from two sides.

“That was funny,” Lucius added. “‘Dying to ask’—it’s funny. Because I’m already dead?”

With Izzy there, Blackbeard couldn’t indulge the desire to say that jokes about Lucius’ current state of being hadn’t been funny the first time around and were, by this point, entirely boring.

Frenchie was shifting uncomfortably, inching away one step at a time, as though he wanted to go somewhere but thought Izzy might knock him out, too, if he drew attention to himself.  Blackbeard scowled at him, but Frenchie’s attention seemed to be fixed on Izzy, and the fierce expression was wasted.

The back of his neck prickled. He could almost feel that longboat drawing nearer and nearer.

On the eastern horizon, behind Izzy and Fang, the fire they’d lit in the belly of the Spanish ship finally caught up with the gunpowder, and a blast of flame and smoke and planking blew into the hot air.

Fang froze in momentary surprise, and the knife clattered against the deck; then his eyes crinkled into a laugh, which cut off abruptly as Izzy snapped,

“No laughing abroad the ship.”

Which momentarily distracted Blackbeard from the nearing longboat. He’d forgotten that half-mad order he’d given; but Izzy, with the rigid loyalty of a dog, had apparently been enforcing it.

Of course.

The Revenge rocked hard as the sea carried the memory of the explosion away from the burning ship in a seemingly endless series of waves.

“This boat is going to be just full of murdered spirits, isn’t it?” Lucius said. “You’ve got me, all of them…” He jerked his head indicatively toward the boatful of phantoms drawing nearer. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those Spanish sailors showed up soon. You’d better hope they were all dead before you set fire to their ship, because I bet charred ghosts are worse than drowned ones.”

Izzy was watching Frenchie’s ongoing slow-motion escape as though that were the only thing happening on deck. Which it was, if you weren't being slowly driven mad by the restless dead.

Fang picked up the knife and resumed throwing and catching.

Thump. Thump.

Blackbeard shifted against the rail so he could take another look casual at the sea, half hoping to find that the longboat and its occupants had been a momentary mirage, nothing but the sunset sparking visions across the water, but the boat bobbed and pitched against the waves, closer now—much closer. From this distance, he could make out Wee John, Roach, Oluwande, and the Swede at the four oars. 

Better sailors dead than they ever were alive.

“Personally, I think it’ll be nice not to be the only dead person around,” Lucius was saying.

Buttons stood in the stern, and the burning of the sun on the horizon glowed like a halo behind the seagull perched on his head.

I’m hallucinating the ghost of a fucking bird.

Black Pete sat near someone he couldn’t recognise from the back, and he tried to remember how many people he’d sent off to their miserable deaths.

Thump. Thump.

The rhythm of Jim’s knife in Fang’s hand distracted him again before he could match a name to the fair-haired man, and he turned back to snap, “Don’t you have work to do?”

Fang shoved the knife into his belt. “Eh…I don’t think so.”

“Fucking find something to do,” Izzy ordered. “Or I’ll find it for you.”

“I’ll, er, find something, too.” Frenchie made his escape ahead of Fang, who slouched off muttering under his breath.

Izzy took a couple of steps forward, looking more cautious than usual. “Is this what we can expect now all the time, or was there some good reason for that?” He jerked a thumb toward the blazing wreckage. “That was a perfectly good ship.”

Blackbeard shrugged. “We don’t need another ship.”

The corner of Izzy’s lip twitched into something that might have become a sneer if he hadn’t gotten immediate control of it. “Edward.” At a deadly glare, he corrected himself. “Captain. We’re going to—”

Whatever he thought they were going to do, Blackbeard didn’t hear it. All he could hear above the blood suddenly throbbing in his temples was a familiar voice calling cheerfully from below:

“Good evening—I mean, ahoy there! Would you mind awfully letting us aboard? There’s still a ladder somewhere on my ship, I presume?”

Stede.

His grip on the rail was the only thing keeping him upright.

Fuck.

Beside him, Lucius was laughing again—that horrible, hysterical, manic laughter that made the blood run cold.

He’s dead. He’s back, and he’s fucking dead.

“Hello? Ed?”

Fuck.

He released the rail with a rough shove and, aware of Izzy like a lingering bruise on the deck waiting for an answer to whatever the hell he’d said, he strode toward his cabin at a pace that was not a run. He didn’t know if he could get drunk enough to bear the torture of Stede’s restess spirit within reach, but he could bloody well try.

Chapter Text

“See?” Stede dropped one hand to Black Pete’s shoulder to keep his somewhat precarious balance in the prow of the longboat and beamed at his sceptical crew. “I told you we’d find her."

From above, he heard what sounded like Izzy Hands letting out a string of expletives—or, rather, repeating variations on the word ‘fuck’ in an impressive show of syntactical flexibility.

“Better hope there’s someone else up there,” Wee John grumbled. “That fecker sure as hell won’t be inviting us onboard.”

“He knows I’ll gut ’im the minute I get up there.” Black Pete pantomimed the endeavour with both arms so that Stede sat down with a thump to avoid pitching over.

“Now, now, what did we say about revenge?”

The Swede raised one hand. “She’s your real home, and you had to leave to learn that, and you know it now thanks to—”

Roach slugged his shoulder before he could recite the entirety of the talking it through as a crew that Stede had done during the long stretches of rowing.

(“Captain, is it as a crew, or at the crew?” Wee John had asked once, at which Stede had invited their input, which had been predictably limited in scope, given the none of them had left a wife and children, been sent to pirate reform school by the British navy, come back from the dead, faked death again, and then rowed across the Caribbean in a dinghy.)

“He doesn’t mean the Revenge,” Roach said. “Right, Captain?”

“Right, Roach, I was speaking of revenge as a concept. Or as an action. Either. What did we agree?”

A rope ladder dropped over the side of the ship before he could determine for certain whether his crew had internalised—or at even really heard—his injunctions to practice the virtue of forgiveness rather than going straight for maiming Ed.

As he set foot on the bottom rung, an unexpected face appeared over the rail.

“Lucius!” Stede started up the ladder. “What a lovely surprise. We’ve been wondering about you for ages.” He twisted his head to look back down and say, “See, Pete? I told you he would be here.”

Below him, Black Pete seemed to have lost his usual loquacity; he was staring upward repeating, “Oh my God. Oh my God,” with a soft look in his eyes that Stede would have sworn involved tears. Well, after all, the man had been separated from someone he loved with no certainty of ever meeting again. Stede could relate; he felt a certain stinging behind his own eyes.

“Shhhh!” Lucius shushed them, wide-eyed, pausing to glance about warily as though someone might be creeping up from behind. “Shut up! Get up here fast and for godssakes be quiet!”

Stede thought that his voice sounded a little tight, too, and his eyes were fixed on Black Pete in a way that made Wee John put one hand on his chest and let out a wistful sigh.

Buttons said, “Lucius! Are ye living, or are ye a wretched spirit?”

Lucius wrinkled his nose. “Bit of both. Now shut up and get on board before someone comes on deck.”

There would be plenty of time to ascertain what, exactly, the situation on board might be; Stede swallowed his questions and twisted to look down at the crew. “Right. Lucius has asked us to keep quiet, and we’ll respect that request—right, men?”

He was met with a pleasing set of nods and mumbled, “Aye, Captain”s as he swung a little trying to get his bearings again on the ladder. Within a few more steps, he felt the ropes stretch taut behind him as someone else started up. A few more rungs, and Lucius was hauling him over the rail onto the deck of the Revenge.

Lucius preemptively shushed him again, so instead of greeting him aloud, Stede put out one hand for a handshake, and then, surprisingly emotional at seeing the boy again, went for a warm hug. But at the last moment, Lucius stiffened and drew back, eyes widening. 

“Don’t—” He held his left hand away and shot his wooden finger a quick look before letting out what sounded like a relieved sigh.

“Lucius?”

“The finger’s poisoned.”

Stede stared.

Lucius stared back

“Lucius, that’s… what?”

“Later. Hush.”

Stede wanted to say, Why do we have to be quiet, and what comes later, and why the devil is your finger poisoned? How on earth does one even go about poisoning a wooden finger?

But he didn’t.

He wanted to say, You know, Lucius, it’s incredible how the deck of one ship feels totally different to another, isn’t it? I mean, they’re all pretty similar—wood and canvas and all that—but the ship I left moored in the inlet just around the coast of that little island there felt like an expediency, and this feels like home.

But he didn’t.

Instead Stede stood still, taking in the familiar motions of the deck beneath his feet, drinking in the familiar lines and curves of his ship, listening to the crew board behind him, and avoiding saying anything about the unusual design of the flag flying at the top of the mast.

He had wondered whether they would reach the Revenge only to find that Izzy had mutinied against Ed; that would explain the crew marooned on that horrible little island, although it did open up an entirely different line of worry for Stede—where on earth was he going to begin looking for Ed if he wasn’t on board the Revenge?—but he couldn’t imagine any world in which Izzy was confident enough in his feelings to fly a flag that included that rich red heart in the corner. That implied Ed must be on board still, which meant Ed must have known what Izzy had done to the crew, and—

Whatever Ed had known or done, Ed could tell him about.

“So. Lucius. Now that we’re aboard, could you—ah.”

The poisoned finger—whatever that meant—wasn’t stopping Lucius from greeting Black Pete effusively; he extended his left arm to hold the finger up safely above them, and with his right arm he clung to Pete like a drowning man.

“The lad’s mouth is otherwise engaged, Cap’n,” Buttons reported.

“Yes, thank you, Mr Buttons, I can see that.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and waited politely for Lucius and Black Pete to wrap up.

And waited.

The last burst of the sunset lit the sails like a flame, and then a rapid lavender twilight settled over the sea.

Stede cleared his throat. “Ahem. Lucius? As touching as this is, could you, perhaps, tell us how long we need to remain quiet?”

“Psst! Lucius!” Fang’s stage-whisper was what broke the two up a moment later. “Get them belowdecks before Izzy comes back.”

“Right. Um.” Lucius licked his lips, looking from Black Pete to Fang to Stede and then back. “Quietly, please?”

“I hope you’re going to explain why we’re sneaking about on my own ship,” Stede muttered, but at a look from Lucius, he shut his mouth and followed Fang with the rest.

At the door of Jim’s room, he balked. “Why can’t we talk somewhere else? There’s no way we’ll all fit in that tiny room. Lucius, what’s happening on my ship?”

“You’ll just have to squeeze in. Fang?” Lucius hung back outside the door as they all crowded into the room. “How long is this a deadly weapon?”

He waggled his fingers.

“Here, give me that.”

Stede watched in perplexed fascination as Fang whipped out a kerchief, folded it into a few thick layers, and took the finger delicately as a bomb from Lucius’ hand. “Ivan’ll fix it for you.”

“Tell him the crew’s dead, too.”

“Already did.” Fang swayed off holding the bundled up finger as though it might poison him even through the kerchief, and Lucius shoved Stede through the door before he could demand an explanation for that ominous exchange.

The room was, in fact, horribly tight, even with Lucius perching immediately on Black Pete’s knee and Oluwande doing his best to occupy the exact same physical space as—

“Jim!” Stede put out a hand to greet them. “They were all taking bets on whether you’d be dead or not. I’m very pleased to see that the optimists have won the day.”

Jim didn’t take the offered hand, and whatever they snapped at him in Spanish sounded like an indictment—a guess borne out by Oluwande’s soft, “You can’t blame him for all of it.”

“La mayor parte,” Jim growled.

“Yeah, most of it,” Oluwande agreed. He glanced apologetically at Stede. “I mean, it is mostly your fault.”

“It is all my fault,” Stede agreed promptly, feeling that familiar clutching of shame in his gut. “I kept running away from my problems instead of facing them. Even when I went back—”

“No offence, Captain,” another familiar voice interrupted, “but we don’t really have time for you to recite your whole emotional journey for us.”

“Frenchie!”

“Yeah, he kept me to make that flag.” Frenchie said it like he was irritated about it, but something in the way he looked up and added, “You saw?” suggested that he was proud of the work.

“Very…expressive,” Stede said, and several of the crew nodded along.

“I like the little drops of blood,” the Swede said.

Frenchie shoved his hands in his pockets. “Thanks, I did a kind of fancy stich around those. Although you can’t see it from, y’know, the distance. Because it’s so high up?”

“It’s still artistry,” Wee John said. “When my mother—”

“Can you all shut up for two seconds?” Lucius snapped.

Roach put a hand up. “I thought you said we could talk in the room.”

“First you have to listen. There have obviously been some changes to the way the Revenge is run—” his glare stopped Stede from saying that it would have to go back to normal now that he was here again— “and you’ll have to play by the rules. For starters, you’re all dead.”

Wee John crossed himself.

Buttons said, “Aye, I suspected as much.”

Stede frowned. “I think we would know if we were dead.”

“Would we?” Black Pete tipped his head to one side as though genuinely considering the philosophical question.

“It’s a pageantry,” Frenchie said.

Black Pete said, “You mean a fuckery?”

“Nah. Lucius said we can’t call it that, on account of that’s what Blackbeard calls it, and he refuses to be even synthetically aligned with the bastard.”

Stede levelled a look at Lucius, who rolled his eyes. “Don’t give me that look, Captain. I said no such thing; I’m not an idiot. I said I refuse to be syntactically aligned with that bastard.”

“Well, that’s more intelligible, but hardly better. Ed’s—”

“Ed,” Lucius interrupted sharply, “pushed me overboard and left this lot to die. So whatever you’re about to say about him, you might reconsider.”

Stede, who had spent quite some uncomfortable time listening to his crew talking out their feelings about the situation, and who had still been rather hoping to learn that somehow Izzy had taken over in spite of Ed’s presence, clenched his jaw to hold back an ill-advised attempt at defending the man.

“Explain the fucking plan before they all start talking again,” Jim said.

“Alright, alright. Basically, we’ve got Blackbeard and Izzy convinced I’m dead, and I saw you coming long enough before they did to convince them you’re dead, too.”

The Swede nodded like that made sense.

Wee John said, “Sorry, but why, exactly?”

“Torture,” Frenchie answered cheerfully. “You should see it. Lucius hides in the walls, right, and talks to them? They think they’re losing their minds. He’s made Blackbeard cry.”

Roach shrugged. “So has Captain.”

Stede’s breath caught. Ed had cried? The crew hadn’t told him that. They’d been too caught up detailing exactly how they’d been abandoned and what their plans were for cannibalising each other to bother describing Ed’s emotional state.

“Yeah, well, Lucius made them afraid to close their eyes at night.” Jim sounded grudgingly proud. “Now shut up and listen.”

They all looked expectantly toward Lucius, who briefly described a series of events that made Stede’s skin crawl.

“And you’ve been doing this for fun?” he broke in when he couldn’t listen in silence any longer.

“Actually I’ve been doing it to literally continue to survive while stuck in the middle of the ocean on a ship captained by a man who tried to murder me.”

That underlying steel hadn’t been in Lucius’ voice before, Stede was fairly certain. Was that his fault, too?

“But yeah, it’s also been fun.”

“He’s trapped in the walls, so he doesn’t really get a wide variety of entertainment options,” Frenchie added.

“I don’t think it’ll work,” Wee John said. “Now there’s too many of us.”

There was a murmur of agreement and disagreement that threatened to break out into another loud argument before Lucius shushed them again.

“It’ll work. We’ve got them half mad already. All you have to do is make sure they never touch you. And, thanks to Ivan’s incredibly scary poison, I don’t think they’re likely to try that any time soon.”

“I like the scary poison,” Roach said. “You said it goes on one finger and kills just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “Can I do that?”

Lucius said, “Do you have a wooden finger?”

“No, obviously not.”

“Then no, you cannot do that.”

“Oh, come on, please?”

“What part of ‘incredibly scary poison that kills you if it touches your skin’ did you not hear?”

Roach shrugged. “I was just asking.”

Lucius let out a long-suffering sigh. “Look, with any luck, the killing I did today is enough to make the point, and nobody needs to ever touch that stuff again.”

Stede knew he was staring in horror but he couldn’t school his expression. “You killed someone.”

“Actually, it was…” Frenchie did quick numbers on one hand. “Four or five, I think. One of them fell right on top of Izzy.”

“Lucius, you murdered someone!”

“Proud of you, babe,” Pete said into Lucius’ neck.

“This is awful. You’re just a lad! And I know how killing a man can weigh on the spirits. When I killed—”

“God, shut up,” Jim interrupted. “They were practically mercy killings. At least he killed them fast. Your ex-boyfriend was hacking arms off and blowing out kneecaps left and right.”

Stede, blushing at the “ex-boyfriend” thing, blustered, “But Ed wouldn’t…”

Nine pairs of accusing eyes met his, and he sighed, deflated. He would’ve also said Ed would never maroon the crew or try to drown Lucius.

His shoulders slumped. “I suppose I’d better go talk to him.”

As he turned, however, a dagger embedded itself in the wall behind him, pinning his sleeve. He stared aghast at Jim.

“You’re not going anywhere yet,” they said.

“Jim! You nearly skewered me!”

“I never nearly anything. You stay here until we know you aren’t about to go ruin the—” they closed their eyes as if enduring pain—“fucking pageantry.”

“Well I’m not going to tell Ed I’m dead. It would be cruel!”

Roach said hopefully, “We can torture him instead.”

Stede sputtered. “This is torture! Psychological torture!”

Lucius smiled in a way that Stede was sure he had never done before all of this. “Exactly.”

“Or just kill him outright,” Oluwande added.

Stede stared at him. “Even you? I’m disappointed in you.”

“You didn’t get marooned.” Oluwande looked unbothered. “Put it to a vote, then. All in favour of psychologically torturing Blackbeard and Izzy by pretending to be ghosts?”

Lucius and Frenchie raised their hands immediately.

“Actually, it’s been very entertaining,” Frenchie put in.

Oluwande lifted his own hand briefly. “That’s my vote. And who wants to kill them?”

Most of the remaining hands shot into the air. Then Black Pete lowered his hand and leaned over to whisper something to Roach, who immediately dropped his hand as well.

“Well.” Stede tried to look dignified while pinned to the wall by a dagger that restricted his options for posturing. “I’m glad to see a few of you have some conscience.”

“No,” Black Pete said casually, “we want to torture him first—physically—and then kill him.”

Oluwande did a quick count around the room and then raised his eyebrows at Buttons. “Are you abstaining?”

“Ye forgot ‘hex them,’” Buttons said accusingly. “That’s our vote, me and Livy.”

The seagull fluffed her feathers in agreement.

“Sorry, Buttons. Hexing must have slipped my mind.” Oluwande shook his head slightly.

“That’s three for kill, three for the pageantry, two for torture, and one for hexing,” Frenchie said helpfully.

“Two for hexing,” Buttons corrected.

“Two for hexing. Captain?” Oluwande looked at him. “You’re the deciding vote.”

Stede looked around the room, but not a single face showed sympathy or remorse. He sighed. “Oh, fine. Fine. Pretend to be dead. But I will not be participating in this particular fuckery.”

“Pageantry,” several voices corrected at once.

“That’s rather petty, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” Lucius preened. “I do petty incredibly well.”

“Alright, then, have your petty revenge. Play your childish games, but leave me out of it.”

Lucius stood. “You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t give us up. And if you do try to convince him you’re alive? Maybe have someone on hand.”

“Why would I want someone else around when I’m navigating a nuanced and emotionally charged moment like that?”

“To save your life when he tries to murder you on the spot.”

"And, if you don't mind my asking, do you even have a long-term plan?” Stede demanded. “Or are you all going to play dead forever?”

“Of course not. We’ll mutiny when this gets old.” He turned to the rest of the room, arms raised as though about to deliver a speech, but all he said was, “Alright, now who wants a tour of the secret passageways?”

“Lucius!” Stede ripped his shirt jerking away from the wall in horror. “Those passageways were meant to stay secret!”

“They still are. Blackbeard and Izzy don’t know.”

Stede gave up.

Chapter Text

Edward Teach, in tight leather trousers and a flowered silk dressing gown, sprawled across the one chair left in the cabin and refused to indulge that itching in his bones that wanted him to pace. He’d made it halfway to the bottom of a bottle, and with every swig, that sense of cold dread in the pit of his stomach grew. It was like waiting for another ship’s guns, as it sailed steadily into range—like waiting for a cannonball to blast through his hull. 

What kind of a ghost would Stede Bonnet make? Dramatic, obviously. But vengeful? Angry? Cruel? He tortured himself by trying to remember what the man had been like in a fit of anger. He hadn’t shouted, had he? He’d done that thing with his voice, a thing that was somehow more intimidating than raising it. He’d stood his ground or he’d walked away, but he hadn’t shouted. He’d been…

“Passive aggressive,” he muttered aloud. Memories flooded through him like a hurricane:

A ship on fire.

That wicked little grin curving Stede’s lips.

A full moon illuminating the mere inches between them.

The sensation of gentle fingers tucking a folded scrap of silk into his breast pocket.

A silent, infinite almost.

He took another drink, trying to douse the searing pain of the open wound he couldn’t resist prodding, and he imagined what hadn’t happened in that promising moonlight:

A kiss.

The impossibly soft sweetness of Stede’s lips.

Nothing but a few layers of silk and linen between them.

Those manicured fingers sliding into his hair.

A moan—did men like Stede moan? What kind of sounds did that sort make? Was it possible to groan politely and gasp in refined pleasure, or did they—

Knocking interrupted that line of thinking.

“Ed?”

He would rip that gentle voice out of Stede’s throat with his bare hands to stop the shock of hopeful agony it sent through him.

“Bugger off.”

“Ed, may I come in?”

“Can’t fuckin’ stop you, can I?”

Silence.

Was that it, then? The kind of ghost Stede made was the courteous kind that went away when you told it to?

Come back. He clamped his teeth on the bottle and washed down the words before they could leave his mouth, closing his eyes hard until the burning behind them subsided.

And opened them to see the ghost of Stede Bonnet standing in the cabin.

“Fuck me.”

“Erm.” The phantom blushed.

Blackbeard looked him over, searching for any indication of what had killed him. He was still wearing the drab knee-breeches and plain shirt they’d been issued in Barbados. Had he died that night? No blood. No bruises. None of that awful drowned gurgling that Lucius did. If anything, Stede looked better dead than he had alive.

He asked him: “How’d you die?”

“I didn’t.” The phantom was staring back at him, making one of those extreme expressions again. This one read as horror, surprise, and probably some of that never-ending guilt Stede had carried around in life. “Ed, I—”

Blackbeard cut him off by raising his pistol. “You what?”

“I don’t want to be shot, for one thing.” Stede put up his hands.

“Yeah, well, I want to shoot you.” He drew back the hammer. “Indulge me.”

“Ah…I’d really rather not.”

“Bullet’ll go right through.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of. Ed—please—”

“Passes right through. Tried it on Lucius. First night he showed up.”

Stede’s eyes widened and his voice shot up a register. “You shot Lucius?”

“No, I fucking drowned him. Keep up.”

“Oh.” Stede’s lips pressed tight together, and he managed to look incredibly pained for a dead man. “Oh, Ed.”

He nearly pulled the trigger at the sound of his name in that mournful tone.

“And I was so hoping they were exaggerating about that.” Stede dropped his arms and started toward him. “Ed, what happened to you?”

“You happened.” He tossed the pistol aside and took another drink.

“Ed—”

“For fuck’s sake would you stop saying that?”

“Saying what, your name?” The apparition continued toward him. “I’m only—”

“Don’t touch me!” The bottle spilled across the floor as Blackbeard sprang out of the chair, dodging Stede’s outstretched hand, stumbling a little, the room pitching drunkenly about him  as he put the chair between them.

The ghost stopped, expression crestfallen. “Of course. If you don’t want me to, of course I won’t touch you. But, Ed, I’ve…” His voice even trembled. “I’ve missed you.”

So that was what kind of ghost Stede Bonnet made: sorrowful and gentle and insidious. He’d gotten within arm’s reach before Blackbeard had even noticed—within mere inches of taking his hand, dragging him into that horrible limbo death Lucius had described so colourfully.

Blackbeard almost wished he’d done it.

Which was something this phantom absolutely could not know, so he snapped: “So fucking what?”

“So I’m…happy to see you. Even under the circumstances. I’m just happy to see you again.”

“Sod off.”

Stede heaved a sigh. “Incidentally, what happened to all of—” He waved an arm.

“Your fancy shit?”

“My….well, yes.”

“Bottom of the ocean.” He’d really thought it would be satisfying to say that, to see Stede take in the enormity of his loss, as though losing a pile of useless, expensive, extravagant things could in any way compare to the devastating wreckage Blackbeard lived with now.

But it wasn’t.

A deep frown carved lines between Stede’s eyebrows. “But why?”

“Why not?”

“Because they were mine, and throwing that quantity and quality of literature and textiles and art and…” Stede turned away and walked slowly around the room, trailing one dead hand along the empty shelves, the scarred walls, the draped windows. “I suppose that’s why you did it.”

The precise truth of that slashed through Blackbeard. Of course, even dead, Stede would start saying the kinds of things nobody else dared to.

“I see you exercised a modicum of restraint, at least.” Stede’s eyes traced the line of the dressing gown, and Blackbeard fought conflicting urges both to step fully behind the chair to avoid his gaze and to step out from behind the chair to give him a better look. “The contrast in texture and style is a bold choice, with the leather, but I think it suits you.”
Blackbeard clung to the chair until his fingers ached.

“You can keep it, of course, if you promise not to toss it overboard, too.”

If he closed his eyes against the rising ache in his head, would the ghost take the opportunity to leap forward and kill him? He risked it.  “Why are you here? I didn’t kill you.”

“Do you really want me to go?”

Yes hovered on his rum-thick tongue, but he couldn’t say it. He felt flayed and raw, and all he wanted was to escape, but he couldn’t resist the exquisite agony of standing within reach of Stede Bonnet’s spirit. Like the urge to press a bruise or worry away a newly formed scab, he wanted to hear that voice again.

Lucius was right: he was pathetic.

Even knowing it, he couldn’t get the word out of his mouth, and at last he said wearily: “I don’t fucking care.”

As he staggered toward the blankets on the floor, he heard Stede say, “I think you do.”

He woke to moonlight. Every curtain had been drawn back, and bright moonlight sliced through the windows, eerily illuminating the bare shelves and the scarred floor and the pale outline of a ghost: Stede, sitting on the bed, knees to his chest, eyes fixed on Blackbeard, so that with the first flutter of his eyelashes, he was caught in that quietly piercing gaze.

“Get the fuck down from there.” His tongue was thick and his throat sour, and he didn’t know whether the relentless pain in his gut was a reaction to the rum he’d drowned himself in or the presence of that particular phantom so near.

“Do you always sleep on the floor?”

“I don’t answer to you. Get out of that berth.”

“Why? Technically speaking, I believe it’s still legally mine—this is, after all, my ship—”

“Not when you’re dead, it’s not. It’s mine now, which makes that my berth.”

“You’re not using it.”

Blackbeard rubbed a hand over his face. “You were a lot more polite when you were alive.”

Silence.

He dropped his hand to his chest to look back up at Stede, whose face had scrunched into that adorable frown that meant he was thinking something through and probably about to say the least piratey thing anyone had ever heard.

But after a moment, he scrambled off the bed and said, “Alright, I suppose you’ve got a point there. I flatter myself I’ve grown more resolute since we parted, but I would like to think I’ve not lost my manners entirely.”

“Nobody needs bloody manners at sea, mate.” He rolled up off the floor and staggered past Stede to collapse on the mattress. “Get your own fucking bed.”

He closed his eyes to avoid seeing whether that kicked-dog look came back into the ghost’s face and determined to go back to sleep—how much haunting could the increasing number of dead spirits on this ship do if he refused to acknowledge them?

There was something to be said for a comfortable bed after so long on the floor. He’d forgotten the way the feather tick cradled his stiff joints, or the way the pillows eased the ache in his head, or the way the sheets smelled perpetually of flowery soaps and expensive oils. He was relieved to find that Lucius’ brief intrusion hadn’t diluted the scent. A few nights, though, and he expected the whole kit and caboodle would stink of leather and rum and unwashed pirate. Which made this the precious beginning of another loss.

Unless…

“Hey. You. Ghost.”

“Me?”

He rolled over to see Stede lying stiffly on the blankets he’d vacated. “Yeah. You. See any other ghosts?

Stede’s lips pressed tightly together and held back whatever answer he might have had.

“Do ghosts smell?”

“Excuse me?”

“Smell. Do you still smell like something?” He tried and failed to remember whether he’d noticed any particular odour around Lucius’ apparition.

“I don’t know about ghosts, but I still have a scent. Although…” His nose wrinkled and he turned his face to give his shirt an experimental sniff. “As I feared, I don’t smell particularly pleasant.”

Before he could stop himself, Blackbeard sat up and said, “C’mere. Lemme see.”

Stede blinked up at him, wide-eyed, long enough for him to feel that curl of embarrassment.

“I mean,” he qualified quickly, “as an experiment. If this many fucking phantoms are gonna be running amok on my ship—” he glared—“I want to know what to expect.”

With a sigh and then a little grunt of effort, as though he really did have corporeal muscles, Stede got to his feet and approached.

“Don’t touch,” Blackbeard warned sharply as he came within reach.

Another sigh. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t.” To avoid having to see how accurately the spirit replicated that look of unsurprised pain in Stede’s eyes, he closed his own and leaned forward a little, sniffing.

Salt. Sweat. The kinds of smells with which Blackbeard had already filled most of the spaces in this cabin.

But also, faintly, phantasmal as Stede himself, there it was—lavender.

For the first time in months, he thought he felt something that wasn’t rage and pain. Something like hope, rising almost imperceptibly from the achingly familiar smell of Stede’s soap.

With his eyes closed, if he sat very still, he could almost imagine it was Stede, back from the dead, or from wherever he’d disappeared to. Back to apologise, or to explain, or to give him some unassailable reason for his long absence—and one that wasn’t death.

That burning behind his eyes again warned him that he had entered dangerous territory.He jerked back as though from a flame, rolling over to avoid seeing Stede’s ghost as he opened his eyes.

“Yeah, you’re right, you smell like shit.”

“Well, perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to bathe—you didn’t dump my entire tub over the side of the ship with all the books, did you?”

He said, “Might have.” He hadn’t.

“Do you mind if I stay? Since you aren’t using these blankets anymore.”

“Can’t fucking stop you.” But he listened to the rustle of the blankets as though Stede were a living body settling on the uncomfortable floorboards, and he had to hold his breath for a long handful of heartbeats when the ghost said softly,

“Good night, Ed.”

Chapter Text

In the morning, since Ed still refused to listen to his protests that he was alive, Stede gave up on that and settled for simply keeping him company—from a distance of at least an arm’s length, because any time he got nearer, Ed physically recoiled.

Stede tried to remind himself of Lucius’ dreadful account, to convince himself that of course if Ed really did believe him to be a restless spirit, the mere touch of which could send him to some horrific afterlife, then it was self-preservation. Nothing personal. Still, every time Ed drew back, it felt like a rejection, and a confirmation that, even now, he couldn’t manage to do a thing right.

He hadn’t managed to make it to the beach—a miscalculation the magnitude of which he was increasingly aware—and now his return, which could hardly be called successful, was systematically destroying his visions either of sailing back in to sweep Ed off his feet or of sailing back in to make a moving apology and beg forgiveness, which, in his imagination, Ed had always been quick to give. But his father and tutors had been right, it seemed: Stede always had been possessed of too wild an imagination.

The bathroom, predictably, housed a bone-dry pitcher and basin, and the cupboards had been emptied of all his soaps and powders. The heavy tub still sat in its place, though, and Stede couldn’t help smiling a little at the sight. Obviously Ed had made little if any use of it, but he had kept it.

“I’m going to fetch some water to clean up with,” he said cheerfully, reentering the cabin with the pitcher in hand. “I hope you didn’t toss all the dishes overboard with the books, because I also want breakfast.

“The fuck does a ghost want with baths and breakfast?” Ed grumbled from the bed.

“I can’t imagine what a ghost wants, but I want to eat with a clean face. And I expect you could use something. How’s the head? I couldn’t help noticing you seemed pretty deep in the drink last night.”

He got a groan in response. Poor Ed.

The crew, he discovered, had committed to their roles with the unique enthusiasm that he loved, and, unlike the last time they’d performed on this ship, their incongruous clash of styles proved disconcertingly effective. He made his way to the galley to the intermittent cries, howls, and groans, of (entirely invented, he had to remind himself) physical agony. In the galley, he greeted Ivan, who walked past him with eyes resolutely forward, giving no sign of having seen or heard him. Roach, flatly refused to make breakfast for Ed, so Stede rolled up his sleeves and set to it himself, discovering along the way that what he had always assumed was an easy job that mostly involved the placing on and removing of pots over fires and the arranging of things nicely on platters was actually a great deal more involved and hazardous than he had known. He managed to create an unappetising-looking sludge instead of porridge, scalded his fingers on the kettle, and discovered that while Ed had, in fact, not pitched all the kitchen utensils overboard, he had allowed them to run entirely out of cake, butter, and any fruit that wasn’t citrus—and even the oranges looked bruised and withered.

On the way back to the cabin, full pitcher of water in one hand and a tray of rather pathetic toast and tea balanced precariously on the other, he caught Izzy by surprise with a cheerful, “Good morning.”

Izzy’s eyes widened. His cheeks whitened; his nostrils flared; his jaw worked as though he were fighting to swallow, and his hand dropped to his sword hilt. And then, without a word, he hurried on, giving Stede as wide a margin as he could in the narrow space.

Ed was dressed in intimidating black leather when Stede reentered the cabin, and he was squinting at a map on the desk while rhythmically stabbing the corner of the varnished mahogany with a knife.

“That’s actually a rather expensive piece of furniture, you know, crafted of the finest…ah…” Stede trailed off at the venomous look Ed turned on him. “I expect you know all that and you’re pretending not to care.” He set the tray on the desk beside the map. “The kitchen is in abysmal state. I think Roach is taking it in hand, but we really ought to make a stop somewhere for supplies. Did you know, there’s not a drop of marmalade to be had?”

“This is a fucking pirate ship. Of course there’s no marmalade.” Ed didn’t even look at the tray.

“Piracy and deprivation needn’t go had in hand. Anyway, this is an acceptable quality of tea, and the sugar, at least, hasn’t run out, so—”

He waited for Ed to take a cup

Ed did not take a cup.

“You’re very intent on that map, aren’t you?” Stede forgot himself for a moment and leaned closer, and then inadvertently flinched when Ed drew away sharply. He pressed his lips together, pulled away to give Ed his space, and then managed to keep some of that forced cheerfulness in his voice. “Are you charting a course? Planning your next adventure?”

“Sod off.”

Stede did not sod off. “Have some breakfast, Ed.”

“I’m not eating ghost food.”

After waiting a moment to see if Ed would relent, Stede gave up and went to wash his face. He felt as though the grime of the past few weeks were still accumulating on his skin, though he had continued to wash as frequently as was possible, given the situation. Sailing off into his own future had felt like a beginning. There had been, he’d felt, a sense of poetic metaphor to launching out alone, rowing himself, bringing along nothing unnecessary: no absurd indulgences, no extravagant pieces of his past life, and none of that weighty entanglement of shame he had carried for so long. It had felt like a clean start, heading back out to sea because he was running toward something instead of away from it. But since the moment he had found the crew, unexpected layers had begun building up again, until he felt as though he were exactly as overworked as before.

When he reentered the cabin, Ed jumped, and there was a soft clatter of porcelain.

Ed’s glower dared him to comment on the little puddle of tea in the saucer.

“I’m sorry,” Stede said.

“Too fucking late, mate.”

“Better late than never, as they say.” He picked up the other cup and took a sip. Certainly not the best tea he’d ever had, but not the worst, either. He thought the could drink merely acceptable tea for the rest of his life if he could do so at the same table as Ed.

“They say wrong.”

Stede shrugged.

By noon, he gave up trying to make apologies to Ed. Apologies, it seemed, turned Ed more sullen than before. Stede, trying to angle toward one by way of explanation, started off with an observation about their brief time in Barbados, and within a few words, Ed’s pistol entered the conversation.

“You start talking about that place, and I see if I can lodge a bullet in a ghost,” Ed warned.

“I did grow up there,” Stede tried. “Not talking about it does restrict my conversation topics to rather a narrow set of subjects.”

“Bullshit. You can talk for an hour at a time about fucking soup spoons. I should know.”

Stede smiled at that.

Ed didn’t smile back.

“Are you asking me to teach you more aristocratic habits?” He glanced about. “Because it seems like you’ve given up those aspirations, and a lot of what might be considered lesson material is gone, but we could probably make do with—”

The hammer cocked.

Stede considered whether it might be worth it to let Ed shoot him, both as proof that he was a living man, not a phantom, and as some kind of peace offering. Perhaps that would be what Ed needed to begin listening. Would he feel guilty, perhaps, if he saw Stede bleeding, possibly quite badly, from a shot he had taken? The anticipation of the quality of pain a lead ball tearing through his flesh could inflict put something of a damper on that as a course of action, as did the thought that Ed might not miss the vital points of his body—might not, in fact, even try to miss them.

“Romantic as it would be to die in your arms,” he said, “I’d rather not. What can I talk about?”

“Nothing.”

Stede tried that. He sat in the window seat and studied Ed, watching him pace, watching him disfigure the desktop, watching him obsessively trace the map—with, as far as Stede could tell, absolutely no goal in mind.

He tried to think about the experience Ed must have had, waiting for him for hours, probably—Ed wouldn’t have given up on him at once, would he?—before rowing off alone into the unyielding waves. Had he reached the Revenge and at once taken back all the weight of Blackbeard? Or had it grown on him, a little at a time, as he captained the ship without Stede, and with Izzy once more at his side? What sort off grieving did a man like Ed do, after all?

Stede tried to imagine it. He couldn’t imagine Ed grieving properly under any circumstances. The Ed he had seen tear-streaked in the bathtub was the nearest Stede could imagine to a grieving Ed, and that had been a momentary flash of something dark and raw waiting decades under the surface. Perhaps Ed had grieved his mother—though Stede couldn’t remember him ever actually talking about her, he couldn’t imagine that Ed ever saw her, if she still lived.

And where would she be, in that case? An island somewhere, or a town on the mainland? All the way back in England? Where had Edward Teach come from?

His memory stirred, and he said without thinking, “You weren’t really, were you? Born on a beach?”

Ed, still bent over the map, said absently, “I dunno, mate, I don’t fuckin’ remember the event.”

Stede laughed before he could catch himself. And Ed laughed with him—just a chuckle, but an unguarded one. It lasted only a moment before he cut off with a sharp breath and an unintelligible mutter, but for that moment, Stede felt something like hope.

That night Stede asked again if he might sleep in the cabin, and again Ed responded with what was neither a welcome nor an explicit rejection: “Can’t fucking stop you, can I?”

Stede lay on the blankets that smelled strongly of sour rum, leather, sweat, and Ed. From there he could just make out Ed’s profile in the moonlight. Ed lay stiffly, Stede thought, in the bed. Compared to his habitual loose body language, his swagger and sprawl that tacitly claimed ownership of any space he entered, his tense stillness on the mattress told a story Stede could only guess part of.

In the morning, Ed announced his intention of ignoring the ghosts on the ship entirely—a resolution that lasted several hours before a voice in the walls—Lucius, Stede was fairly certain—got under his skin enough to prompt an outburst of, “Can you not shut the fuck up? You’re supposed to be resting in fucking peace.

“If I don’t get peace, you don’t get peace,” Lucius shot back.

The laughter that followed convinced Stede that several of the crew had crammed themselves into the crawlspace.

By evening he had slipped twice into casual conversation with Stede—only for the space of a few sentences, and each times followed immediately by an outburst so harsh that Stede had said, the second time, “I know you’re trying to avoid being vulnerable by lashing out, but it does still hurt, so if it isn’t actually making you feel any better, might you consider trying a different tactic?”

To which Ed had said, “Bugger off."

But later, after the extravagant rose gold of sunset faded into night, and after Ed had drunk half a bottle of something and then, to Stede’s utter surprise, had set the rest aside at Stede’s soft request; after he had lain down stiffly in the berth that Stede had designed, with his shipwright’s input, for maximum comfort, and after Stede had lain down gingerly on the blankets that Ed had piled with apparently no concern for comfort; after Stede had shifted into several different positions in an unsuccessful attempt to discover the secret to sleeping well on the floor …after a while, Ed sat up abruptly and got down from the bed. He swayed more than the pitch and roll of the waves demanded until he reached the sadly empty bookcase and threw out a hand to catch the broken remnants of what had been the level for the auxiliary wardrobe.

Stede closed his eyes in a moment of painful remembrance of the many finely embroidered waistcoats that must now rest at the bottom of the sea. They were, after all, nothing more than objects—even if some of those objects were particularly fine linens and imported silks.

At a sharp scraping sound, he opened his eyes, and a moment later he saw what looked like—

“My fainting couch!” Stede leapt to his feet too quickly, and the immediate complaints of his back and hips reminded him that he’d slept badly for a long time now.

Ed grunted from somewhere beyond the doorway, and the couch slid the rest of the way out. As Stede stared, disbelieving, Ed shoved it a few more feet and then closed the auxiliary wardrobe.

“Ed, that’s…”

“Shut up.” With a few more painful screeches of wood feet against what had once been a polished wooden floor of which Stede had been proud, Ed situated the couch—haphazardly, but despite its careless angle, Stede noticed it faced the bed, and from a distance only somewhat longer than arm’s reach. Without another word, Ed collapsed back onto Stede’s mattress and closed his eyes

Stede stood, uncertain.

“At least pretend to sleep,” Ed mumbled without opening his eyes. “Fucking unnerving, you just standing there.”

“Ed, the couch, it’s…”

“Too heavy to throw overboard. Don’t get ideas.”

Stede was, in fact, getting several ideas, but he said politely, “No, of course not,” and did not point out that hiding the fainting couch in the auxiliary wardrobe was a only marginally less work than hauling it out to the deck and pitching it into the sea.

He fetched a blanket to the couch, which was every bit as comfortable as he remembered—and more so, after two nights on hard wood—and then lay in the darkness listening to Ed breathe and wondering how many other things might have been too heavy, in one way or another, to throw overboard. 

Chapter Text

They settled into an uneasy kind of lull, Blackbeard and Izzy and the ghosts. He couldn’t ignore Stede—no matter how he tried, there was too much inside him that reacted too strongly to the presence of that particular phantasm.

If he tried pretending it wasn’t there, the spirit chatted amiably and endlessly, too like the living man to bear, until Blackbeard snapped out something. Something that, as the days passed, grew less likely to contain a proper threat and more likely to betray the raw agony that was no longer inert beneath a flood of rum, because somehow, he’d let that ghost get under his skin enough to mind that it looked sorrowful and guilty and worried whenever he got properly numb in a bottle.

For a time, he tried venting all his rage and pain on the ghost, giving voice to all the most cutting accusations he’d prepared in the long nights, when he’d planned the kinds of awful things he would say before the awful things he would do that, always, culminated in Stede looking properly regretful before Blackbeard killed him. Numerous problems arose with that plan, though, because, for one thing, Stede was already dead, and for another, that fact left an incurable wound instead of satisfaction. Also, hurting Stede got old fast, because he didn’t sling any cruel jabs back, just apologised, again, quietly, and agreed, again, that he had been a selfish fool.

In the end, he settled for a cagey kind of camaraderie, wherein he let himself sometimes forget Stede was dead, and sometimes forget he hated him.

The other ghosts he could ignore more easily. For one thing, there was nothing complicated about the way he felt when it came to the rest of the crew. Guilty, though he didn’t admit that sober, and regretful, but he didn’t miss them. He didn’t lie in the darkness thinking what a monster he’d become without them. Thinking about how he could have been happy to be a monster until they came along. Until they abandoned him.

That was only Stede.

He had been ignoring the ghosts mostly successfully for several days before Frenchie came to his cabin, escorted by Fang.

“The fuck do you want?”

Frenchie didn’t open his mouth.

Blackbeard drove a knife into the now deeply scarred surface of the desk and ignored the way Stede’s ghost flinched at the motion. “Well?”

Fang elbowed Frenchie.

“Well,” said Frenchie, “see, I was thinking, Captain, sir, there’s some bad vibes on this ship?”

Stede sighed.

“Bad vibes,” Blackbeard repeated flatly.

“Yeah, like, energy? I’ve been feeling a lot of really negative spiritual energy on board lately.”

It’s all the negative spirits on board lately, he did not say. Instead he went back to focusing intently on cleaning his pistol and said, “That sounds like a you problem.”

Frenchie shifted his weight uncomfortably and did not appear to be leaving.

Blackbeard glared at him. “So?”

“So I was thinking maybe I could do a sort of cleansing ritual? To purify the ship.”

“The only cleansing this ship needs is the kind that Izzy makes you do.”

“Are you sure?” Frenchie peered around the cabin. “You are the captain, I guess, but I feel some really bad spiritual energy in here.

“Frenchie!” Stede’s ghost burst out at last. “Hasn’t this petty game gone long enough?”

Fang said, “Captain, can’t he try? The vibes are pretty bad.”

He was caught between the three of them like a ship in a storm. “How’s this fucking ritual go, then?” he demanded.

Frenchie shrugged. “There’s some burning and some chanting, and then if there’s bad spirits or negative energy or whatever, it clears them away.”

A while ago, Blackbeard would have dismissed the entire proposition, and maybe done something violent and unpleasant to Frenchie for even suggesting it. Now, however, he caught himself actually considering it. After all what harm could it do?

And if it did clear out Lucius and the other ghosts…

“You can do your weird magic,” he grumbled after a moment.

It was only after they left that Blackbeard remembered that if Frenchie’s ritual did manage to get rid of the phantoms, Stede would be gone, too.

Frenchie did his ritual on the deck, at midnight, under a moonless sky, surrounded by the curious and watchful eyes of the dead. It reminded Blackbeard painfully of those nights when Stede had read them stories, the crew piled together like puppies, happily captivated by their captain’s dramatic delivery.

He met the yearning gaze of Stede’s ghost across the deck and for a moment thought the phantom might be remembering those nights, too.

“Hurry the fuck up,” he snapped at Frenchie.

Frenchie, carefully lighting a fire in a large pot, started at the order and nearly set the deck ablaze.

The spirit of Wee John said, “Don’t be such an arsehole.”

The fire leapt up in its pot. The smoke was bitter. Frenchie started chanting in a language Blackbeard didn’t think he’d ever heard before, and which sounded like pure gibberish to him.

In the dancing firelight, the crew seemed to flicker in and out of view, now bathed in golden light and now barely silhouettes in the darkness. When Frenchie declared the end of the ritual and dramatically doused the fire, causing a brief but blinding burst of thick smoke to billow out of the pot, for just a moment, the deck might have been empty but for the living.

And then Black Pete’s ghost let out a bored yawn. “Done? That’s the whole exorcism?

“I don’t feel exorcised,” the Swede said. He poked experimentally at Roach, who slapped his hand away.

“Livy, are ye exorcised?” Buttons demanded of the phantom bird perched on his head. “Nay? ’Tweren’t real magic.”

Which seemed to be sadly true, because a quick look around the deck showed the whole crew still sitting there, as hauntingly discernible as ever.

“That’s it?” he growled at Frenchie.

“That’s it,” Frenchie confirmed. “I think it worked.”

“Yeah,” Fang agreed cheerfully. “Vibes are definitely better. Wholesome. You know."

Even Ivan nodded seriously.

And what could he say to that? Tell them it hadn’t worked at all? Admit he saw a half dozen ghosts sprawled across the deck?

So he stomped toward his cabin, snarling, “Clean up the fucking mess,” and resigned himself to this living hell.

Chapter Text

Stede didn’t know what the point of the exorcism drama had been, but the outcome he’d hoped for—that a failed spirit-banishing ritual might finally make Ed believe the ghosts were living people—didn’t appear likely. And he didn’t know whether to be hopeful or afraid after that, because what if the crew were tiring of their game? What would they do then?

He hadn’t made much progress in rehabilitating Ed into the kind of person they might be willing to forgo murdering, so if they were bored of the psychological torture, he couldn’t be certain physical revenge wouldn’t be next on their list.

On the other hand, they did seem much happier now that they were all back on the ship together, and frequently more interested in catching up with each other than discussing which of Ed’s limbs Roach meant to cut off first, so perhaps they would forget about the killing part of their plan regardless.

“Very theatrical,” he complimented Frenchie as he followed Blackbeard toward the cabin. Whether he approved of the whole charade or not, he was still their captain (wasn’t he?) and he felt it his responsibility to encourage their endeavours. “I especially liked the smoke at the end there.”

Frenchie, predictably, did not acknowledge him, but Stede thought he looked a little proud of himself.

“Worst ghost-removal services ever,” Ed was muttering as Stede slipped into the room.

Stede poured himself a drink—cheap rum from a half-empty bottle in one of the remaining cut-glass tumblers, which he’d appropriated from the galley. It wasn’t lavish, but it was the act of the little ritual that he found comforting, not the drink itself.

“You know,” he said, “I didn’t expect you to be this superstitious. Given the art of fuckery and all that. Once you’ve seen behind the smoke and mirrors, isn’t it a bit difficult to believe in ghosts and exorcisms and hauntings?”

Ed stretched out on the bed. “All sailors are superstitious, mate.”

“Are they? I’m not. I don’t think.”

“That some kind of bad joke about being dead? Because I’ve had it up to fucking here with those.”

“No, of course not.” Stede drained his glass. “I only meant…” He meant that the Ed he’d left would have taken the whole thing as a joke. Would have been derisive or in on it or exasperated or indulgent…would have been anything else except sitting on the deck with that look of wild desperation in his eyes—a look Stede couldn’t quite identify but wanted to soothe away, and couldn’t. He curled up on the fainting couch and tried to hope things might have changed by morning.

“I didn’t mean anything.”

Something woke him before dawn.

He sat up to listen more closely to the…voices? Was someone in pain? There was loud moaning in the walls, and a voice he recognised, and—

“Oh. Oh! God! Lucius!” If he buried his flaming face in the cushions could he escape it?

“Can it wait, Captain? I’m a bit busy at the moment. I’m—oh yes—”

“No, it cannot wait! I’m trying to sleep in here, and you’re—you’re—” He tried covering his ears.

“Mhmm.”

“You’re—”

“We absolutely are,” Lucius agreed.

“But where we can hear you? That’s—”

“Rude,” Ed’s sleepy voice supplied.

“I was going to say—”

“Kind of a turn-on?” Black Pete said.

“No! I was—” A thought struck him. “Lucius, is that sanitary?”

“They’re fucking dead,” Ed drawled. “Who cares?”

“Well, you’re half right.” Stede gave up trying to escape the sounds and attempted to look dignified instead. “But if they don’t find somewhere else to do the former, I’ll see to it that they become the latter.”

Ed shifted under the covers. “Prude.”

Stede could hear the smile in his voice as he said it. The fact that getting a smile out of Ed apparently required being subjected to the embarrassment of witnessing his crew’s—ahem—interpersonal negotiations, made him put his shoulders back and say stiffly, “I certainly am not prudish. I am simply trying to get some sleep here, and I should think they would like a little privacy.”

There was a muffled laugh from somewhere within the walls and then Pete’s voice called, “Nah, we’re fine with this.”

Ed said, “You’re pretty embarrassed for a dead guy.”

Torn between yet another iteration of “I’m not dead!” and a protest that he wasn’t embarrassed, per se, what came out of his mouth instead was, “Have you ever been in love before, Ed?”

“The fuck, mate?”

Too late to back down; Stede steeled himself and articulated as though he thought clearer enunciation would get him a clearer answer: “Have you ever been in love before?”

“I’m not in love now. Never mind before.”

The knocking in the walls matched the thumbing of Stede’s heart. “Right. Of course. Well. I haven’t. Been in love, I mean. Before.”

“Oh god,” Lucius groaned. “D’you have to have this conversation right now?”

“What’s wrong with right now?” Stede asked.

Stillness.

“It’s just that your personal life is kind of a mood killer, Captain,” Black Pete answered. “No offence.”

“Then go have your…mood…elsewhere!”

Unintelligible dialogue from within the walls followed, and then some creaking and shuffling.

Ed muttered, “Ghost buggery,” and shook his head.

In the eventual stillness, Stede picked up the conversation he’d had a thousand times in his mind: “I haven’t been in love before,” he repeated. “I had a miserable, lonely education, followed by a miserable, lonely marriage. Of course, I had no real idea of how a happy marriage might look, because my own parents never seemed to like each other overly much, and—”

“Fucking hell, do you not shut up, even dead?”

Waves slapped against the side of the ship, and last night’s bottle rolled across the floor.

“All I’m saying,” Stede said at last, “is that I had no idea.”

“Okay.”

“About how it might feel.”

“Got it.”

“To love you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Until Mary showed me—”

Ed threw the blanket off and surged from the bed, snatching up a knife. “If you think I’m gonna lie here and listen to you talk about your wife in my cabin on my ship after you fucking died and left me—”

The blade hovered a hair’s breadth from the heartbeat throbbing in Stede’s throat, and the implicit threat that should have terrified him only sent hope rushing through him, because certainly Ed would never have reacted so strongly, wouldn’t have thrown himself so recklessly within reach, if he didn’t still care.

Stede burned to touch him. To raise one hand from where it lay on his knee, lift it to the scarred brown skin stretching tantalisingly upward from the leather waistband. To tilt his head and press his lips to the fingers clutching so desperately the hilt of the knife. To slide his toes forward until one foot just touched Ed’s.

He sat like a statue.

Only his eyes moved, tracing the inked tentacles up Ed’s arm, following the line of his shoulder, his neck, his jaw, lingering only a moment at his mouth, measuring the growth of silver beard, and finally fixing on those wide, dark eyes, where Ed’s soul sat, fragile and shattered and so much more transparent than Ed could possibly know.

His heartbeat echoed silent in the space between his skin and the steel point of the knife.

“Are you going to cut my throat, Ed?” he asked when his neck began to stiffen from the posture.

“Nah.” The knife withdrew. “No use, is it?”

“Well, I don’t imagine it would make you feel better. It would certainly ruin this upholstery.”

Ed stalked out of the cabin without a backward glance.

“I’ll tell you about it later, then,” Stede whispered to the empty walls.

Chapter Text

“So,” the Swede said, “How long, exactly, are we doing this?”

“What, torture Blackbeard?” Roach twirled a cleaver.

Wee John, slumped at the table with a cup of tea, said, “It is getting a bit old. He’s mopey instead of jumpy.”

“We could torture him for real now,” Roach suggested. “If you’re getting bored.”

“I’m not bored, exactly,” Wee John said. “Just…yeah, actually, I’m bored. A bit. It’s just nothing’s changed? In about a week? He’s not even acknowledging us anymore.”

“Izzy’s still acting scared,” Oluwande pointed out.

“Wee John’s right,” Lucius said from the doorway. “I’m losing interest. And I’m incredibly tired of living in the walls.”

Black Pete, at his side, said, “Alright, babe, what next?”

Lucius shrugged. “I mean, I did tell Jim they could kill him. At the beginning, when this all started.”

“Cap’n won’t like it,” Buttons warned. Livy flapped in agreement.

“Another vote?” Oluwande suggested.

Which is how they wound up once more crammed, all of them, in Jim’s room, despite Jim’s protests.

This vote was a fair bit less organised than the previous one, if that was even possible, because they didn’t really know what the options were.

“Torture him,” Roach said, predictably. “I want to hit him with spiked clubs, maybe, for starters? Or cut some pieces off.”

“I did promise the murder to Jim,”  Lucius reminded him.

Jim, however, said that they were less set on murder now that everyone was back alive, and they would have to think about it. “Izzy, though. That pendejo I’ll fucking skewer.”

Nods all around the room at that.

“I just don’t think it’s as satisfying anymore,” Wee John said, sounding disappointed. “I mean, as revenge goes, the pageantry really did it. Now he’s sort of too pathetic to kill, if you know what I mean.”

Frenchie nodded along; Black Pete said, “Hmmmmm I still think it might be fun to kill him.”

“We don’t have to kill him,” Oluwande pointed out. “I mean, now we’re all back on board, the mutiny idea is really good.”

Frenchie raised a hand. “How much do we care about keeping Captain? Because I think if we toss Blackbeard off the ship, Captain’ll go with him.”

There was a dissonant rumble of opinions—

“Technically we already voted Oluwande the next captain,” from Black Pete, and,

“I like the captain,” from the Swede, followed by,

“Worst captain ever,” from Jim, countered by Oluwande’s moderate,

“He did rescue us, though.”

A sharp squawk interrupted.

Buttons said, “Aye, Livy,” and then sat silently, staring directly ahead, apparently uninterested in elaborating.

Roach elbowed him. “Translate for the people who don’t understand birds.”

“Livy says, Barbados.”

Silence. Scrunched eyebrows, tilted heads, a few confused hums, and then Lucius grinned. “Perfect. Very theatrical. Stede’s grave can do all the work for us, and we have the ship to ourselves while he’s off moping.”

The Swede said, “And then we come back to life?”

“Yeah. Then we come back to life.” Lucius shrugged. “And to hell with planning his death. Jim, the murder thing is all yours, if you decide you want to. I’m bored of thinking about Ed in literally any way.”

Black Pete said, “Just as long as something really unpleasant happens to Izzy.”

“Oh, it will.” Jim’s knife thwacked into a floorboard and stuck there, handle shivering, blade buried in the wood. 

Predictably, Stede hated the plan, but, also predictably, there was nothing he could do to stop them. Fang would steer the ship wherever Lucius suggested. Ivan acknowledged his presence for the first and only time in order to threaten to kill him for real if he got in Fang’s way. Nobody listened to him arguing that letting Ed visit that empty grave would be even more cruel than the ghost pageantry. Roach reminded him yet again that they could be removing his fingers one by one instead of this, and Stede had to admit yet again that if emotionally tortured couldn’t be removed from the equation, he did prefer that at least Ed wasn’t also physically tortured. He tried to scupper their scheme by telling Ed about it, but that only made things worse.

“Ghosts are charting me a course for your grave, eh?” Ed, at the edge of drunk, closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the arm of the fainting couch. “That’s fucking poetic.”

“Ed, we’re both wanted men in Barbados,” Stede reminded him.

“I like being wanted. And you’re dead.”

Since that was the state of things as far as the authorities were concerned, Stede wasn’t sure he could argue the point in this particular instance. Instead he asked, “Alright, then, what are you planning to do in Barbados?”

Ed blew a weary breath out and approximated a shrug with a swing of the bottle in his left hand. “Dunno. Whatever the ghosts want. I’m not the one planning this little jaunt anymore, am I? You want to show me where you died?”

Stede did want that, in fact—he had imagined it already, in detail: he and Ed in elaborate disguises, of course, to evade capture, sauntering down the street together, Ed laughing but looking flatteringly impressed as Stede pointed out the precise spot where the piano had fallen, and told him about Mary’s friend who had offered to kill him for her (“I think you’d like her, actually,” he had imagined himself saying).

“I absolutely do not want to do that,” he said firmly. “Under the circumstances, I think it’s a terrible idea.”

“Love terrible ideas,” Ed mumbled. “I’m fucking great at terrible ideas.”

Stede gave up.

He sat watching Ed until soft snores rose, and then, since Ed had apparently fallen asleep on the couch, he took the bed. He thought as he lay down that it would be lovely to sleep on the soft feather tick again, and to get the kind of sleep one simply couldn’t get on a couch. But after this long it smelled like Ed—the sheets, the pillow, all of it. Stede lay awake, curled into the bedding, pressing his face into the pillow to breathe in the scent, trying to imagine it was Ed there with him, warm and peaceful and no longer deathly afraid of Stede’s touch.

Stede almost changed his mind about going ashore by the time they reached Barbados, but he resolutely kept hold of his common sense—“Someone on this ship has to,” he reminded himself. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was an opportunity of some sort, one he could make the most of if only he could figure out what the opportunity was. He nearly missed it—it wasn’t until the longboat was being lowered that he had a minor epiphany and, for once making use of the secret passageways, snagged Frenchie by the arm and tugged him through a trapdoor.

“What the fuck?” Frenchie stared at him, appeared to process who had nabbed him, and added, “Sorry, I mean, what the fuck, Captain.”

“Never mind that. Frenchie, I want you to do something for me.”

“In here?”

“No, of course not in here. What would I possibly want you to do in here? No—you’re going ashore, aren’t you?”

Frenchie’s eyes met Stede’s, wary. “So?”

“So I want you to buy me something.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m dead! I can’t go myself.”

“You’re not really dead.” Frenchie turned toward the trap door. “You can buy your own souvenirs.”

Stede grabbed his shoulder before he could leave. “No, I can’t. There’s a grave with my name on it over there—if I turn up alive in Barbados, it’ll ruin everything.”

Frenchie turned a suspicious look over his shoulder.

“Please,” Stede said again. “It’s not a souvenir, it’s…important. Look, I’ll tell you the exact shop. And obviously give you the money. Just bring it all back before Ed returns to the ship.”

“Is this an order, Captain?”

“No, of course not. It’s a favour. As a friend, Frenchie.”

The ship creaked. From beyond the walls, Izzy snarled, “Fuck you,” and Wee John chuckled.

Frenchie let out a long-suffering sigh and said, “Fine. What the hell. You’re welcome. What is it I’m buying?”

Stede told him.

Izzy, predictably, tried to dissuade him from going ashore. “Captain, you’re not thinking straight. You’re a wanted man in Barbados.”

“Guess we’ll see how bad they want me,” he grunted, swinging over the rail into the longboat. “You coming or what?”

Izzy’s thin mouth twitched in that familiar way; the corner of his nose curled into the beginning of a sneer he couldn’t quite smooth away. “I’m coming.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

“To keep you from getting yourself hanged. Why the fuck did you chart a course for this, of all the miserable islands in the Caribbean?”

Blackbeard shrugged and didn’t say, Because the ghosts wanted it.

He ought to feel something, he thought, as the docks and the trees and the towns grew on the horizon, as the waves and oarstrokes carried him inexorably toward…something. He didn’t know what, but something. Instead of fear or excitement or hope or despair, all he felt as he disembarked was a twinge in his bad knee and a heaviness in his lungs.

“Supplies,” he told Fang and Ivan, as though they needed telling.

Fang said, “Right, Captain.”

“I have something to do.”

Ivan nodded.

As the pair of them strode off toward the shops, trailing Frenchie in their wake, the words burst out of him entirely unexpected: “And get some fucking marmalade.”

All three stopped midstep. Fang and Ivan exchanged a look, and then turned back to him, incredulous.

Rage rose, the very familiarity of it painfully comforting. “I’ll carve your eyes out for you if you can’t keep them in line,” he growled.

“Right, Captain.”

They disappeared into the crowd.

Izzy did not

“Sod off, Iz.”

“No.”

He glared.

Izzy held his ground. “If you’re going to get caught in something stupid, it’s my job to cut you out of it.”

He didn’t have the energy to fight. “Keep up, then.”

It wasn’t hard to find his way. The town might be bustling, but it wasn’t large, and the Bonnet family name seemed familiar to everyone. After a walk that was too long for his aching knee but too short for his aching heart, he found himself in a private churchyard on the family property, staring down at an expensively carved headstone for two.

Which made it all the more obscene. Because someday this stranger named Mary, a wife Stede didn’t love—couldn’t have loved—someday she would be buried beneath this stone, to rest and rot beside Stede’s bones. And Ed? Hell knew where he would be, but it wouldn’t be here. It would be alone somewhere, maybe hanging in the breeze or sinking to the depths of the sea, alone and cold and forgotten and far from this place where Stede lay under the implacable, unrelenting numbers carved into the stone.

Date of birth.

Date of death.

Date of death.

It was real. Stede was dead.

Ed fell to his knees without noticing the impact, heart cracking and mind breaking into a silent, inconsolable keening.

And then he read the date again, and he realised: Stede had died at home. Stede had died here, a week after the interminable night Ed had spent waiting with a stolen dinghy at a hidden dock. Stede had abandoned him first, and then had the nerve to die.

Fuck.

He leapt to his feet and strode away, and then, at the soft but unmistakeable sound of Izzy spitting on the grave, he spun on the ball of one foot and planted a fist in his first mate’s face.

“What the fuck?”

He couldn’t breathe. I fucking loved him, Iz, was the only answer he had, and he’d rather take a bullet to the gut than say anything that honest to Izzy

“Have some fucking decency,” was what he eventually managed to snarl, and then he strode away, barely feeling the grass beneath his boots, feeling only the growing pressure against his ribs: an icy explosion that burst and burst and burst again, relentless, driving his heart to beat like a funeral drum and his lungs to burn with every breath, until he found himself at the kind of front door he had never been allowed to approach.

He didn’t bother knocking before he slammed it open hard enough to rattle the obscenely beautiful glass of its windows.

“You let him die?” he roared into the hollow maw of the house

“Can I help you?” The question was pitched more as insult than invitation, but Ed didn’t care.

“You’re Mary?”

“Yes, and who the hell are you?” She stood with hands on her hips, eyes blazing, absolutely unintimidated. Of course that was the kind of wife Stede Bonnet had gone back to.

“I’m fucking Blackbeard, that’s who I am, and I should skewer you where you stand. You let him fucking die?”

“You mean Stede.”

“Of course I mean Stede.”

“I didn’t let him die. I—”

With the slam of a door and a clatter of shoes, a pair of children barrelled in from somewhere in the house, the little one in front sprinting for all he was worth, clutching something in his hand, and the larger one in the back brandishing a wooden sword that, stylistically speaking, looked stupid with her fancy dress.

“It’s my pirate treasure!” the one in front was hollering as he pelted through.

“It’s not part of the game!” The little girl had longer legs and caught him before he could slam into Ed. She snagged him by one little shoulder and whirled him against the wall with her wooden sword to his throat in a show of technique that, while absolutely dreadful objectively speaking, was more than Ed would ever have expected of a child raised in this kind of a house.

“Give it back or I’ll run you through,” she growled.

Mary rolled her eyes. “Kids, what have I told you about killing each other in front of company?”

The wooden sword didn’t waver; the little girl didn’t even look over her shoulder. “He stole my orange.”

The sheer unexpected absurdity of the situation had him so off kilter that he heard himself saying, “Oranges are pretty important for a pirate. Scurvy and all that.”

The little girl snatched the item out of her brother’s hand with one quick lunge, sheathed her sword through the sash of her dress, and turned to glare up at him. “This orange isn’t for scurvy. This one is petrified. And Father gave it to me not you.” That last was to the other child, to whom she delivered a sharp blow from a fist as she ran back out of the room—but not before Ed had noticed the glint of tears in her eyes and managed to catch a good enough look at the coveted orange to recognise it without a doubt.

Mary called, “Don’t hit your brother!” perfunctorily and turned back to him. “Sorry, did you need something?”

He stared down at her.

She couldn’t give him what he needed, and he found, now that he’d come down a little from the towering rage his grief had put him into, that he didn’t think killing her would make any kind of a consolation prize.

“That was the orange,” he said dumbly instead of drawing a weapon. “The fucking treasure hunt orange.”

“Yeah. It was.” There was something curiously like pity in her eyes, and it took the fight out of him. “And you’re—are you Ed?”

“Not to you.” He couldn’t end this kind of a conversation the Stede way, with some stinging remark, and he couldn’t end it the Blackbeard way, with gunpowder and bloodshed, so he ended it the way he found himself ending most things lately: “Fuck off.”

She raised a hand toward his arm, and he jerked away instinctively.

“Wait, Ed.”

He stomped back out through the expensive door. “Keep up, Iz.”

“Ed, wait. He told me about you. You’re—”

“Fuck off,” he said again, and walked faster.

“But he’s—”

“Fuck. Off.”

He waited for the blasted woman to try again, but instead there was silence, and then a footstep and the fading voice of a stranger: “Mary? Who’s that?”

“Oh, just one of Stede’s pirate friends,” she said.

As the door closed again behind him, Ed thought he heard the man say, “That’s nice,” which had to be another kind of goddamn hallucination, because that’s nice was absolutely not the kind of thing people like them said about people like him under any circumstances, but especially not these.

Chapter Text

Somehow the Revenge seemed more than usually steeped in the essence of Stede’s soul when Ed hauled himself over the rail and onto the deck. There was something he could almost feel, smothering his mind with memory. He looked over his shoulder twice before he reached the cabin door, irrationally certain he would see Stede there.

But of course he didn’t.

“So there’s this thing I’ve been meaning to tell you.” The ghost of Lucius appeared out of the dusk in front of him, and he stopped just short of running into it.

“Not a good time.”

The phantom didn’t budge. “Okay, right, except that it’s kind of a big deal. Pivotal. Essential. Vital.”

“Don’t care.

Lucius rolled his eyes. “You’re really ruining the moment.”

“You’re not real.”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I am.”

“Not real.”

“No, real.” The ghost huffed in irritation. “Wee John was right. This is pathetic. Look: I’m alive. We’re all alive. No ghosts. It was all a joke. Ta-da. That’s it.” He did a halfhearted stage bow. “God, you really do take the fun out of it.”

“So now you’re not just haunting me, you’re trying to make me lose my mind?” A bark of a mirthless laugh ripped from his throat. “Too fucking late.”

“No, that was before. Now we’re trying to tell you the truth so we can quit pretending to be dead and get on with our lives.”

“The fuck you are.”

“He is actually alive.” Frenchie was leaning over the railing of the quarterdeck. “I can see him. And the rest of the crew. Captain.”

A day ago that would have convinced him; but now, with the dates carved into Stede’s headstone appearing as though inscribed on the insides of his eyelids every time he so much as blinked, all he could think was that they were all in on it together—that maybe Frenchie had done this himself, summoning all these spirits here to torment him, and now for unfathomable reasons he was heaping insult on injury by making Ed doubt his own perceptions.

“You.” He pointed at Frenchie. “Talk to me again, I’ll cut out your fucking tongue and feed it to you. And you.” He pointed at Lucius. “Go back to haunting me the normal way. Not whatever the fuck kind of new trick you’re trying to pull.”

“It isn’t a trick.” Black Pete sauntered up and slung an arm around Lucius. “The ghost thing was the trick.”

“Because it was that or cut you up into little pieces,” Wee John said.

“Which is still an option,” Roach added.

“God you appear out of the fucking woodwork like rats.” Ed stared about wildly, pivoting on the ball of one foot in search of escape.

“Insulting, but true,” Lucius said.

“Stop turning this into a whole fucking drama,” Jim snapped. “You told him. Move on.”

He wished Jim had just stabbed him instead of joining in whatever new hell the ghosts were unleashing. He found himself staring at the spirits of Buttons and his goddamn seagull, both of whom stared back wide-eyed and unreadable, ironically the only reliable individuals left on deck with him.

“Are you okay?” the Swede asked.

Oluwande said, “Of course he’s not okay. We’ve been basically destroying his mental and emotional stability for ages now. He’s probably in shock.”

“Cap’n said we could do psychological torture,” Buttons spoke up. “As an alternative to breaking all your bones.”

“Captain said,” Ed repeated, feeling lost in the onslaught of voices. Was this how it felt to drown? Was that the point

Buttons said, “Aye. Cap’n didnae want to play dead.”

“But we took a vote,” said the Swede.

“It was all very democratic,” Frenchie assured him. “But yeah, Captain didn’t actually want to take part in the psychological torture pageantry.”

“He did try to tell you,” Lucius reminded him. “Like, a lot. I heard him say he wasn’t dead approximately every five minutes. You just didn’t listen.”

“Which is probably a life lesson to take away from the experience,” Oluwande offered helpfully. “To listen better. People don’t feel so inclined to trick you into doubting your own senses for revenge if they feel listened to.”

Black Pete turned to Oluwande to say, “And that kind of observation is why you make a good next captain.”

The wind shifted and that uncanny feeling of being subsumed by something indefinably but undeniably Stede-like muffled any conclusion his weary, overwrought mind was coming to. He swore at them again because he couldn’t dredge up a more articulate response, and he stomped across the deck to the relative escape of the big cabin

Stepping into the cabin had the eerie sensation of stepping into a dream, and he had taken three dragging steps beyond the slammed door before his mind caught up with his heart.

“Lavender soap,” he murmured, disbelieving and yearning and aching and more than half sure that he’d left what had remained of his sanity beside a grave in Barbados. But, hallucination or not, the scent was unmistakeable, thick and sweet in the muggy air.

The door to the bathroom creaked, and Ed whirled to see Stede’s lingering spirit in the doorway, curly hair glistening wet, silk robe open to the navel, where one hand clutched it together as though startled into reaching for propriety. A drip of water slid down that golden neck to pause in the hollow of the throat. Ed restrained himself from a nearly overpowering urge to close the few steps between them and lap up that single drop with his tongue.

“You’re dead.” He forced the words out aloud, like a penance, to keep himself from reaching toward the apparition.

Stede’s ghost sighed deeply, expression shifting immediately from surprise to weary sorrow. “I keep telling you, I’m not. Didn’t the others come clean? They were meant to.”

“Bugger the others. I saw your fucking grave, mate.” His voice grated out rough and raw, but he got the words out. He turned away when the look in those too-lifelike eyes cut deeper than he could bear, and he collapsed on the pillows and blankets that now smelled like Stede only faintly, in the farthest corners.

He’d been reckless. He had known sullying the bed with his own odours of rum and sweat, gunpowder and leather, would chase away the last traces of Stede, but he had been so intent on spiting the phantom that he hadn’t noticed the lingering smells slipping away. Perhaps this new infusion of aromatic soap would seep into the bedsheets.

It’s ghost soap, he reminded himself. It would fade away just like the ghost itself would, eventually. Here, so near where Stede was buried, perhaps the spirit grew stronger. That would explain the sudden presence of such an overwhelming smell.

“Ed.”

The ghost stood over him, still freshly scented and damp, robe now tied demurely closed, one hand extended hesitantly.

“Don’t touch me.” The warning was automatic, habitual by this point, but only halfhearted.

“Of course.” The hand dropped away. “I wish you would let me explain, though.”

The ship rocked beneath them.

“Fine. How’d you die, then?” 

“Oh, Ed.”

He could almost taste Stede’s presence. His eyes burned, his throat closed, and he rolled his face into the pillow because nobody, ghost or otherwise, saw Blackbeard cry. And he was still Blackbeard.

“Explain or go away,” he said into the pillow.

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Alright.” Weight settled on the mattress, gingerly, and Ed did not roll over into that gravity. “Alright, I died…well, I was crushed by a falling piano if you must know.”

“The hell you were.”

“After being trampled by a runway carriage.”

“Of course you were.”

“Which I didn’t see, because I’d just been mauled by a jaguar.”

“What the fuck, man?” Startled out of caution, Ed rolled over and sat up so carelessly that he nearly knocked heads with the ghost on the edge of the bed.

The ghost looked smug.

From this near, Ed would have sworn he felt breath against his own face. The dead man’s eyes twinkled with mischief and something painfully akin to hope. Its phantasmal hair dripped what looked impossibly like real water in dark speckles against the silk collar of the robe. Would it be so bad to go out like this, tumbling into death on the mouth of the man he loved?

He jerked back hard enough to knock his head against the window. “Bugger off.”

Stede’s ghost raised a hand again, reached toward him, and then withdrew. It sighed deeply, mournfully, resignedly. “I’ll get dressed, shall I?”

By the time the door of the auxiliary wardrobe closed behind the ghost, deep shudders wracked Ed’s whole body.

Chapter Text

“What did you say to him?” Stede stormed out onto the deck, voice uncharacteristically raised.

The crew were sprawled out under the stars, apparently enjoying the cool dusk and sharing around an evening snack—either stolen from the restocked galley stores or bought specially with whatever change Frenchie’d had left over from buying the lavish assortment of soaps, Stede couldn’t tell. Fang and Ivan were leaning against against the rail nearby; Ivan appeared to be in the middle of regaling them with some anecdote, to mixed reactions.

“Lucius!” Stede halted, hands on his hips.

“Mhmm,” Lucius mumbled around a bite of something. He was lying on the deck, head on Black Pete’s knee, and he tipped his head just far enough to see Stede.

“What in god’s name did you say?” Stede repeated. “To Ed? He’s—” Collapsed. Weeping. A wreck. In interest of protecting Ed’s dignity, he changed tack: “He doesn’t seem to have really processed an explanation. Which, I might remind you, you did promise to make.”

“Nothing! We just said we weren’t dead, and he freaked out!”

“I think he might have been kind of traumatised,” Frenchie offered. “On account of he went to see your grave.”

He had said that, hadn’t he?

“Was it a good final revenge?” Lucius asked, sounding rather as though he didn’t care much anymore.

Frenchie shrugged. “I didn’t go with him. You saw him when he got back.”

“Pathetic,” Jim put in mildly.

“Oi.” A metallic shhhng interrupted, along with a furious stomping of Izzy’s boots. He studiously avoided the rest of the crew, but his blade wavered between Frenchie and Jim. “That’s the last time I catch you badmouthing Captain Blackbeard instead of doing your jobs.”

“And what job’s that?” Oluwande asked. “You kept Jim around because they’re handy with a knife, didn’t you? It’s not like there’s any killing to do at the moment.”

Izzy’s eyes darted sideways before he got control of himself again.

“It’s fine,” Frenchie said. “You can acknowledge him. We got bored of the pageantry.”

Izzy must not have been present whenever they had told Ed the truth, Stede reasoned, because whatever that empty grave had done to Ed’s common sense, he suspected his rumoured death had no power over Izzy except perhaps the power to make him look smug.

“It was a joke, Izzy,” Fang said, sounding a little apologetic. “Because Captain tried to drown Lucius, there.”

If Izzy hadn’t been sure whether to believe Frenchie, he seemed fully prepared to believe Fang—and since Izzy had never shown an iota of a sense of humour, especially when it made him look bad, Stede shouldn’t have been surprised to see him leave off threatening Frenchie and Jim and, instead, surge toward Fang with all the fury of a cat that knows who splashed water on it.

Ivan’s sword met Izzy’s.

Izzy snarled, “Remember who’s in fucking charge.”

Ivan grinned. “Remember when we mutinied.”

And then Lucius, creeping up while Izzy was distracted, slung a familiar arm about his shoulders, appearing mischievously delighted by the violent shudder that ran through the first mate. “Come on, now, Izzy—you’re not really that upset about a little joke, are you? You didn’t really believe in ghosts, did you?”

Stede suspected that there was no way for a man like Izzy to admit that he had, in fact, been scared stiff of them all—a guess borne out by the way he furiously sheathed his sword, jerked out of Lucius’ reach, and stalked away. 

It became clear to Stede that his crew would be no help whatsoever in convincing Ed to give up mourning—which did seem to be in, its odd and awful way, what he was doing still—and his hopes that perhaps Izzy might help clear things up were quickly dashed. Though Izzy no longer went out of his way to pretend not to see the crew, he didn’t seem to have the courage to admit outright to his captain that he’d been fooled, too, by this whole charade. Fang and Ivan apparently had no interest in broaching the subject.

And Ed maintained his wary distance from the entire crew now, including Izzy, and he’d begun intentionally looking through everyone except Stede, as though the living, by acknowledging the presumed dead, had joined the ranks of ghosts on the Revenge. He ate the toast and marmalade they’d stocked up on in Barbados, but he made sure never to reach for the teapot at the moment Stede did. When Izzy snapped futile orders at the crew, he looked away as though something particularly fascinating were occurring off the starboard bow. At night he lay against the pillow watching Stede on the fainting couch until sleep claimed him.

Stede thought it wasn’t so much that he really believed in the ghosts as that if he stopped believing, he’d have to confront the reality of everything. But he didn’t say as much.

“Alright,” Ed said finally, around midnight, outlined in pearlescent moonlight that spilled through the window, voice rough with the sleep that wouldn’t seem to come. “You can apologise.

Stede half rose on his elbow, blinking. “I—what?”

“You keep trying. I’ll listen this time. Tell me how fucking sorry you are.”

Stede hesitated, trying to gauge the look in those dark eyes, trying to read the lines framing the mouth tucked into the growth of silver beard. “Well,” he said slowly, “I am sorry. And I’ve said it. And it doesn’t really matter how sorry I am, does it, if you don’t believe me?”

The room pitched a little on the waves.

Ed’s eyes closed.Stede thought he had fallen asleep at last before he opened them again and whispered, so that Stede could hardly make out the words: “Tell me why you didn’t meet me.”

Sour guilt curled again in Stede’s stomach. After explaining the situation several times over to his crew (maybe more than several, given the last time he had begun on it, Buttons had recited the whole story before he could properly get into it) he had thought he knew precisely how to tell Ed. Instead, he found himself stumbling over it.

“It was Badminton,” he started. “I mean, well, it wasn’t. I mean, I’m not trying to shift blame—it was me.” He bit his lip, trying to line up some words in coherent order.

“If you try to tell me you left me for that military bastard,” Ed began in a voice that was mostly pinched anxiety beneath a failed attempt at levity.

“No! Well, the thing is, he found me.” Stede shivered a little, and, with a deep breath, forced himself to recall the mad light in the man’s eye, and the smell of rum, and the gun waving in his face, and… “And he forced me out into the trees at gunpoint, and then he—I think he was trying to shoot me, in fact, but he was drunk, you see, and, well. He shot himself. Through the eye. Just like his brother.” He shuddered and then pulled himself together to add, failing at mirth as thoroughly as Ed had, “If I were superstitious, I’d say their family is cursed.”

“Shot himself through the eye with his own bloody gun?” Ed sounded sceptical.

Stede sighed. “I have particularly bad luck, I suppose.”

“Nobody just—fuck, mate.”

That wasn’t encouraging, and Stede wasn’t particularly looking forward to recounting the specific words that had stopped him, the feelings of shame coursing through him while he looked down at the dead body of the man who had tried to kill him.

“I said I’d listen,” Ed remembered at last. “Alright, so he shot himself. And that took until after dawn?”

“No, of course not. It…He said things. That made me think. About how I had responsibilities, and I ran away from them, and I hurt everyone around me because of it. That’s why I didn’t meet you.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not!” Stede sat up. “I had absolutely failed as a husband, and as a father—”

“They seemed alright to me,” Ed muttered.

Stede stopped short. “They what?”

“Seemed alright. A far as kids go.”

He couldn’t remember what he had been saying. “You…met my children?”

“Not formally.” Ed burrowed a little deeper into the blankets, sounding uncomfortable.

“You went to my—to Mary’s house,” Stede realised. That made sense; Ed had, after all, said he’d seen the grave. It wasn’t far from there to the house. If Ed had died, Stede thought he’d try to meet his family, too, or at least, if Ed in this hypothetical situation had family, which in real life the man seemed not to—but it was only right to offer his condolences. Although, Ed… “Not to offer your condolences,” he corrected himself aloud.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who offers condolences?”

“Not particularly,” Stede admitted.

“Not fucking particularly. Especially not to the wife of—”

Stede’s heart filled the abrupt silence with a frenetic pounding, but Ed didn’t finish the sentence. After a moment he started, cautiously: “I ah. I hope you didn’t…do anything rash? While you were there?”

“You mean did I skin her alive or roast your kids over a spit?” Ed asked roughly.

“Well that’s a very evocative and specific example of what I hope you didn’t do.”

“They’re fine.” Ed rolled over and put his back to Stede. “If anything I was the one in danger. I think that wife of yours would have shot me without a second thought.

Stede chuckled. “She does have nerves of steel, doesn’t she? Very nearly murdered me, actually—although, of course, she did apologise about it afterward.”

“She what?” Ed was sitting up in bed, facing him again, before the echo of his outraged voice faded.

“It was actually a very considerate type of murder, in its way, or it would have been, and if she had actually managed to put the skewer through my ear, I would never have—

“A fucking skewer?” Ed was out of bed now, pacing, swaying with the roll of the ship, eyes blazing

“A kebab skewer, yes, and I wish you’d stop interrupting and let me tell it properly,” Stede snapped, annoyed. “Now I’ve gotten all mixed up.”

“Fucking tell me then!”

“Where was I?”

That stopped Ed mid-stride, frowning. “You were saying some sentimental tripe about your performance as a father,” he remembered after a moment.

“Right. That’s…well that’s putting it starkly but not incorrectly, I suppose. And it wasn’t only that, it was…” You’re a monster. A plague. You defile beautiful things. The words were still seared into his memory like a brand. He forced himself to repeat them aloud, bitterly but accurately. “He pointed out that I, ah, ‘brought history’s greatest pirate to ruin,’ as he put it.”

“Bullshit,” Ed said again.

“He did, and he had a point,” Stede insisted.“He was just being an arsehole because he could. Trust me. I know that kind of person.”

Stede did not say, Yes, I’ve met Izzy, too, because he wanted to at least get through the full explanation now, so he wouldn’t have to bring it up yet again later, and he needed Ed to understand that he had left for him—or, at least, he had thought that was what he was doing, at the time.

“Well, I…I did sink you, didn’t I?” he insisted doggedly. “He was right about that—I dragged down the greatest pirate to ever live. Metaphorically speaking. The sinking bit, I mean, not that you aren’t the greatest—” He bit his lip hard, and his cheeks flushed a rough pink.

Ed dropped to the floor in front of the couch, just out of arm’s reach, and heaved a weary sigh. “Nobody drags down Blackbeard, mate. I fuckin’ dove.

Stede didn’t know quite where to go from there. His instincts suggested that the strategic response was to, perhaps, slip down from the couch to join Ed on the floor and kiss him until the fierce lines between his eyebrows eased and that bitter note faded out of his voice. Common sense suggested that he was lucky to have Ed listening to him for this long at all, and he’d better not push his luck by doing the precise thing he’d been asked not to do—touching him.

So he folded his hands in his lap to keep them restrained and said quietly, “Regardless, I did get you caught by the navy.”

“Izzy did that.”

“And I did do a pretty shabby thing to my family, disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving a note because I was too cowardly to have a grown-up conversation about the situation. And I did need to apologise and properly close off that part of my life. As long as I was still half cowardly-gentleman-Stede-Bonnet-who-scarpered-out-of-a-sad-marriage, I couldn’t be entirely yours.”

Ed’s breathing ceased.

Stede realised what he’d said and felt his cheeks flushing, but it wasn’t like that was a secret, it wasn’t like he was still a boy at school hiding a shameful tendresse for a classmate who would certainly pummel him for the merest hint of an expression of feelings. This was Ed, who had already looked him in the eye, said that Stede made him happy, kissed him gently and awkwardly and sincerely under the sunset. He already knew, didn’t he?

“Anyway,” he picked up bravely, “I thought you would go back to being a better pirate without me, and I needed to apologise to Mary and…well, I did think I should do my duty by my family and try to do better. So I went back.”

“To try to be a guy you hated being.”

“That’s not quite it.”

Ed’s eyebrows rose.

“I suppose that’s it. But I didn’t know it at the time. Anyway, if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t manage to do any better than before at being the head of my household. I bored an entire crowd in the pub by telling them you weren’t a bloodthirsty demon of a pirate, and I ruined a party by reacting with inappropriate levels of violence when startled. Mary was horrified to see me back, and I was miserable the entire time, so none of us had a particularly good few weeks of it, did we?”

That sent Ed surging back to his feet, glowering.

“Now what?” Stede asked.

“Weeks?” Ed grabbed a half empty bottle from the corner and stomped toward the door. “Weeks? It was fucking months, and you didn’t have the decency to even stop by the dock beforehand to say, ‘Hey, Ed, guess I don’t love you so much after all, I’m going back to my wife and kids, don’t bother waiting up all fucking night thinking something awful happened to me’? You didn’t think maybe I fucking cared?”

The words imparted an agony that made being gutted feel kind by comparison; Stede drew a sharp breath in.

“Did you?” Ed snarled

“When you put it like that…”

“I’m done.” The door slammed behind him

Stede sank back down against the velvet cushions and noticed after a few minutes that they were unaccountably wet, and his breathing was unaccountably shaky. 

Chapter Text

Ed didn’t sleep any better under the open sky, within earshot of Wee John’s gentle snoring and Buttons chanting ominously in his sleep—for ghosts, they certainly slept loudly. He caught a few hours of restless dreams before the sun set fire to the eastern horizon. He tried not to hear the phantoms with their cheerful morning chatter, or Fang trying once more to teach them something about being less useless sailors, or Izzy snapping orders that, he was sure, none of them were obeying, primarily because they all hated Izzy’s guts, with good reason, and secondarily but no less importantly because they weren’t fucking there.

Were they?

He was standing on the rail of the poop deck, hand on a rope for balance but holding it with far less commitment than usual, when he heard familiar footsteps behind him.

“Sod off,” he said without turning.

“No,” Stede said. “I don’t think I shall.” He sounded annoyed. “I’ve brought you breakfast, which I suspect you need, and which I certainly need. I didn’t sleep well.”

“It’s a pirate ship. You’re not supposed to sleep well.” And you’re dead. You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead. Maybe words were like swords: let them run through you enough times and you can pretend you don’t feel them anymore

Porcelain and cutlery rattled as Stede set down the tray. His footsteps neared, and Ed could almost feel the hand he saw in his peripheral, reaching up toward his arm. He tensed but, for once, didn’t draw away.

Maybe this was how he died.

The thought slithered in through a crack in is denial: Maybe it isn’t.

He took a deep breath.

When Stede’s fingers touched his, he would collapse. Crumple, disintegrate, disappear. All he had left were the heartbeats that drummed in his temples until he discovered what type of unbecoming awaited: his body, too, or only his heart?

He felt the faint warmth of Stede’s fingertips near his wrist—swallowed—and then Stede’s fingers closed in a fist and dropped. Stede Bonnett, always so goddamn courteous.

The sudden expulsion of the painful breath Ed had been holding was a whoosh of relief, Ed told himself as Stede’s footsteps backed away.

“You do as you like,” Stede said, “but I’m not handing tea up to you perched like that. You’ll just drop a perfectly good cup overboard.”

“Probably true.”

He listened to the sound of tea pouring out of the pot. One cup. Two cups. The sound of sugar cubes plopping, and then Ed hopped down from the railing. The unmistakeable softening of Stede’s eyes told him he didn’t miss the way he landed—weight on his good leg, but still wincing a little at the jarring impact up through his aching trick knee, stiffened from standing too long on the rail in the chill dawn. But he glowered, challenging the phantom to say a word about it, and Stede only pointed to the teacup and said, “I expect you’re still afraid to let me hand it to you?”

“I’m not afraid. Blackbeard’s never afraid.” He snatched up the cup, glared over its rim, and then slumped to the deck, leaning against the railing, eyeing Stede warily.

“I don’t think Blackbeard even exists.” Stede took a bite of toast.

“Of course he does.”

“I think he’s just a scary story you made up for yourself.”

The long sip of tea he took did nothing to ease the tightness in Ed’s throat, and his voice was rough when he waved a hand toward the quarterdeck, where Lucius and Oluwande sounded engaged in a serious debate over something that wasn’t quite intelligible from this distance. “Blackbeard did that.”

Stede raised an eyebrow. “You’ll have to be more specific.

“Than murder? Fucking…” His lungs weren’t working right. “That was Blackbeard, man.” He pointed again in the general direction of the rest of the ship. “That’s who he is. Murderous fucker who knocks nice guys overboard to drown and then I get—” he ground his teeth “—haunted to the edge of fucking insanity.”

Because that was really what it was, wasn’t it? Blackbeard did the crime, and in return, he got infamy and widespread fear at just the sound of his name, and Edward Teach got to lie awake at night smelling the last traces of lavender fading out of the pillow.

“I’d been hoping you would tell me.” Stede sipped at his tea. “About why you did it.”

“What’s there to tell? You…” He wasn’t good with words like Stede was. He didn’t know what it was you could say to explain the raw wrongness of it all. “You did something to me. Felt like my insides were outside my skin every minute. You didn’t come back.

“Yes, the crew did tell me you’d been rather despondent.”

“Despondent,” he repeated, trying the word out on his tongue. It sounded dramatic and beautiful and aristocratic. He was pretty sure he’d been something else.

“Right up until you tried to kill Lucius.” The censure in Stede’s voice was only a fraction of what it should have been, as though that hadn’t been the worst thing Ed had ever done. “There are a few theories about what made you change tactics so abruptly, but I’d been hoping you would tell me.”

“I’m good at being Blackbeard.” He drained his tea and set the teacup down with an intentional clatter. “Fuckin’ good at it. That’s all.”

There was a long pause, during which he heard the ghosts of the crew laughing; during which Fang shouted something that got an answer from Ivan; during which Stede stared at him, eyes wide and expressive and yet entirely devoid of the judgment they ought to have borne.

“I don’t think either you or I can go back to being what we were.” Stede’s voice was impossibly sad.

Shut up. His throat was too tight to voice the protest.

“It was all a farce, wasn’t it?” Stede said. “Trying to be the world’s fiercest pirate, or the best…well, at least, an acceptable…gentleman. It wasn’t ever us, just a role.”

Stop—fucking stop—

“One of your fuckeries. And we’ve outgrown the costumes, so to speak.”

From the helm came the sharp sound of Izzy swearing.

Ed clenched his fist and said fiercely, “I wish to god I’d cut off his head instead of his toe.”

Stede had been holding his toast up, prepared to take another bite; he lowered it unbitten. “Whose…head? Or toe, is it? Are we speaking of?”

Izzy shouted, “If you’re fucking alive, then you’re part of the fucking crew, and you will do as I fucking say.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? That was the reason. That was the thing that had pushed him back into the awful, stifling, familiar shroud of the bloody persona: Izzy. Israel fucking Hands and his slavering dog-loyal obsession with Blackbeard, and his unerring ability to find the precise spot from which Ed could be peeled out of his own self.

He heard the clatter of his teacup as he tossed it aside, followed by Stede’s horrified, “Ed, it’s fragile!”

But he was already stalking down to the quarterdeck, pulling his pistol from its holster as he went. He barely noticed Stede’s soft huff of indignation, his grunt of exertion, the clack of his footsteps on the polished wood as he followed.Izzy was standing on the quarterdeck, doing his best to intimidate a phantasmal Lucius, who stood perilously near to him, smirking, going so far as to lean toward Izzy in a way that would have had Ed scrambling backward to put space between himself and the ghost.

“I won’t, actually,” Lucius was saying. “And there’s really nothing you can do about it, is there?”

“Fucking watch me.” Izzy—good old predictable Izzy—whipped out his sword, and the ghost of Lucius leapt back a few steps as though it could be killed again.

Lucky for Lucius, he wouldn’t have to find out what happened to a ghost when you stabbed it, because Ed was going to finish this. Ghosts or no ghosts, the bad vibes on this ship were all coming from one person, and that person was Izzy.

No wonder Frenchie’s exorcism hadn’t worked.

He took aim at Izzy’s head.

“Ed! What are you doing?” Stede, clumsy for a ghost, jumped down the remaining steps and staggered off-balance toward him, arms outstretched. Before he reached him, he appeared to process the sword in Izzy’s hand, because he shouted, “Don’t you dare stab my crew, you…you humourless, fashionless…bully!”Ed could have given him a few more applicable terms but that would do, too, and Ed couldn’t manage to move, much less speak.

Time slowed as Stede drew a dagger and fairly leapt the last few steps toward them. “Lucius has been through enough already!” He knocked the sword away from Lucius with a bold swing of the dagger—a move only successful because he had caught Izzy so completely off guard.

“Alright.” Izzy shifted his feet in a practised stance. “I hear you’re not dead after all, but that can be rectified.”

It was like reliving a nightmare. Ed had seen this all before, but under moonlight instead of sunrise

“You’ve been a thorn in my fucking side since the day we met.”

Stede shifted his own feet to roughly match. “On that island? You tried to steal my ship! And threaten my crew!”

Izzy’s rejoinder was consistent if not creative: “Fuck you.” 

A rapid attack put Stede out of breath, but he still managed to puff out between desperate swings off his dagger: “I’m seeing—actually—a pattern here—”

Izzy’s sword danced and flashed in the golden morning light, and while it appeared death had made some improvement to Stede’s skill with a blade, the phantom still had the living man’s awkward footwork and untrained swings, and the dagger was half the length of Izzy’s sword.

“And I’ll take that.” Lucius snatched the pistol out of Ed’s motionless hand and held it distastefully between thumb and forefinger, leaving Ed staring in a still-paralysed bewilderment that rapidly congealed into stark horror at the sight before him.

He summoned a croak of a voice: “Iz, don’t—”

Ghosts can’t die again

Izzy swung a ringing blow against the dagger, jarring Stede’s grip, not quite knocking the weapon from his hand.

Can’t kill a ghost.

Stede returned the attack with a total lack of technique, made up for by an overabundance of stupid enthusiasm, but Izzy was going to have him in moments. Ed knew the motions, the course his body would take, the blade an extension of his lean arms. Stede was surviving on dumb luck, and this time, Izzy wouldn’t just pin him to the mast, missing all the important bits.

This time Stede was going to die.

He’s already done that. He’s a dead man. He’s a fucking ghost, he’s—

Ed’s knife cut into the deadly dance, sending Stede’s dagger clattering to the deck.

He let out his breath on an oath that felt like his lungs bursting, levelling the knife at Izzy as though it were a rapier. “Put it the fuck down, Iz.”

“Blackbeard—”

“Don’t.” He attacked. “Call me.” Izzy parried. “Blackbeard.”

Izzy’s sword swung and darted and Ed thought his first mate might actually be trying to draw blood.

“None of this would have happened,” Izzy snarled, “ if it weren’t for that ponce and his fucking crew of imbeciles.”

With an inarticulate cry of rage, Ed threw caution and form to the wind, reaching in past Izzy’s guard to seize the sword, ignoring the slice of sharp steel against his bare arm as he twisted the thing out of Izzy’s grasp and flung it overboard. He pulled Izzy’s arm up to a painful angle behind his back with one hand, and with the other he pressed the blade of his knife against Izzy’s throat. 

“None of this would have happened,” he echoed Izzy’s words back to him, “if you hand’t been so fucking infatuated with Blackbeard. You want Blackbeard? You got him, one last time. Because this is what Blackbeard does to a first mate that betrays him to the fucking English navy.”

Izzy rasped: “Captain—”

“I should have done this ages ago,” Ed whispered.

He felt Izzy’s convulsive swallow against the dagger. “Edward—”

The familiar sound of that name in Izzy’s voice, the call that had always stopped him going too far, reminded him he was some kind of living man in spite off everything—“Not to you, I’m not.” He steeled himself in anticipation of the hot blood pouring over his hand and the limp weight of Izzy’s body. “You never used my name if it didn’t get you something.”

“Ed!” Stede’s voice, however, had some kind of power over him no matter what name he called. “Ed, stop that this instant, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” He said it like a challenge, but he didn’t apply any more pressure to the knife. “You’ll stab me again? Leave me again?”

“I’ll…be very disappointed in you.” The defensive note stiffening Stede’s voice made it clear that he knew it was the weakest possible threat to make against a ruthless pirate.

Oh but you’re wrong about that. In the case of this pirate, anyway. Ed’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Yeah, well, you’re that already, so it’s not much of a fuckin’ threat, mate.”

“I’m not disappointed, precisely—”

“Not to interrupt,” Lucius interrupted.

Stede sighed. “Can it wait?”

“Not really. It’s just that you promised—we all promised—Jim that they could torture Izzy to death, or whatever it is they’re planning to do. And I know we all agreed that Ed’s gotten too mopey to be satisfying to kill—”

“You what?”

Lucius ignored Ed’s outrage. “So if whatever the hell you’re playing at here ends with Izzy dead, without Jim getting their say, I expect they would probably take slicing Ed into little bits as a second-best option to carving up Izzy.”

“Jim did seem keen on killing at least one of the two of him, didn’t they?” Stede’s lips compressed. “Lucius, you’ve made an astute estimation of the rather unfortunate circumstances.”

Ed didn’t bother picking his way through the big words. “Someone tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“If you kill Izzy,” Lucius said, enunciating every word as though to a small child, “Jim will kill you.”

“Fuck that.”

Lucius shrugged and, Ed’s pistol still in one hand, said, “I’ll go tell them you said so.

Stede said, “Good. Sent Jim up, actually,” and bent to pick up his dagger from the deck.

Ed waited, a hair’s breadth away from slicing through Izzy’s throat, watching as Stede turned, adjusted his grip, lifted the dagger toward Ed at an effectively threatening angle.

“Let him go, Ed.” There was an unaccustomed firm note in his voice.

Ed almost believed he’d do it. If a ghost stabbed you, was the blade still real enough to kill?

“Please,” Stede added

Did he still believe in ghosts?

“This is why, Stede.” He was breathing heavily, the motion of his chest slightly moving the knife against Izzy’s throat, drawing a hiss of pain from the man. “You wanted to know why I turned out like this? Because this bastard would rather see me cut into fucking pieces than happy.”

“That’s not—” Izzy cut off at increased pressure from the blade.

“Because he would rather burn me alive than let me have one goddamn moment of fucking peace.”

“Captain—”

The dagger touched Ed’s neck. “And he’d rather you kill him than learn to show a little mercy,” Stede said. “Isn’t that right, Izzy?”

It probably was, stubborn, uptight, masochistic prick that he was.

And fuck it, Ed was tired. Tired of remembering, tired of thinking, tired of trying to do the right thing by any metric, tired of fighting to survive so that he could wake up one more godawful morning and fight again to survive.

“Someone needed me?” Jim appeared at the stairs.

Ed blinked at them.

They stared back, unimpressed.

Exhausted. That was all he was anymore. Exhausted and—what was it Lucius had said, mopey?—of course, he should be insulted by that. Outraged. Blackbeard had never moped a day in his life.

His arm dropped under its own weight. He felt Izzy’s deep sigh against his own chest. “Take out the fucking rubbish for me, would you?” He gave Izzy a hard shove toward Jim and then, stepping back, felt Stede’s dagger still at his neck.

It was almost cathartic, making the quarter that put the dagger in line with his own throat while Stede was still frozen watching Jim—out of the corner of his eye, Ed could see Oluwande and Wee John climbing the stairs, whether because Jim needed help disposing of Izzy or because they wanted a little revenge themselves, he couldn’t guess and didn’t care. He was done.

He faced Stede, lifted his chin, let the dagger settle in the soft hollow of his throat, next to the dingy black necktie he had put on one impossible long-ago day and never taken off again.

“Oh!” The movement caught Stede’s attention. “I’m so sorry—”

Ed caught the blade of the dagger in one hand, sharp edges be damned, and held it in place.

Stede tried to lower the dagger, but he froze at Ed’s drawn breath as the movement of the blade drew blood.

“Ed. If I might ask.” Stede’s words were measured, his tone level, but Ed could hear the panic creeping in. “What the hell are you playing at?”

Ed raised his knife to Stede’s throat.

Stede let out a careful breath, and, phantasmal or not, Ed felt it stirring against his face. He clenched his jaw.

“If I mention Mary are you going to stab me? Because you’ve got that aimed at one of the more important bits at the moment, and to be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t much enjoy being stabbed through even the unimportant organs.”

“Tell me you’re not dead,” Ed breathed, “or promise me we go to the same in-between place before you kill me. Because if the last thing I hear you say is about your fucking wife—”

“Well for one thing, she’s not anymore. You saw the grave. She’s by law a widow now, and happily remarried to a man called Doug.”

“I’m going to kill us both all over again myself just to stop hearing you talk about her,” Ed warned, although he wasn’t.

“The point is, I don’t think there is an in-between place, and even if there is, I don’t particularly want to find out with you.” Something like a smile twitch at Stede’s mouth. “I mean, someday, perhaps, when we go, we might go together, and then I suppose we will find out after all. But at the moment, I’d say we have plenty of good years ahead of us, and we only have this one life.”

“A dozen ghosts on this ship tell me there’s more than one.”

“I’m not qualified to answer the metaphysical question, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s something Mary said, a long time ago.”

The irritated sound Ed made pressed his throat against the dagger.

Stede forged on ahead regardless: “It sounded like a prison sentence then, but now I think it’s more of a promise. We have one life. This one, now. A gift, if you want to consider it that way. Ours.”

“Fuck that. I don’t want it.”

“Don’t want…life?”

“What if I don’t?” He leaned a little harder against Stede’s dagger. “It’s a shit life.”

“Your life, in specific?”

Ed glared into the tiny frown in Stede’s eyes. The man looked, as usual, like he was trying to put together a puzzle in his head, and Ed couldn’t begin to guess what the pieces were, and no matter what he said, Stede was going to come out with something absolutely, beautifully mad.

Ed said, “Sure. Yeah. My fucking life in specific.”

“Well then…” Stede’s eyes cleared. “May I have it?”

“Have what?”

“Your life. If you don’t want it. Can I have it?”

Was that the kind of thing a living man said, or a dead one? Ed took a step closer, so that the dagger broke his skin. “You want it? It’s yours.”

There was a moment in which Ed thought he’d miscalculated—in which he did, truly, want to come out of this alive, and in which the too-pleased-for-words look on Stede’s face left him uncomprehending.

Stede whispered, “And, if you like, you may have mine in return, which makes it a fair deal.”

Ed sighed, feeling the whisper of Stede’s breath agains his mouth once more, letting Stede’s blade slip from his bleeding hand and lowering his own knife. “Fucking do it,” he said, leaning a fraction of an inch farther forward.

Stede jerked his dagger down with such haste that he left a rent then length of a hand down the front of Ed’s shirt. “I most certainly will not,” he snapped. “We’ve just agreed: your life is mine.”

He lifted one hand and pressed his thumb to the drop of blood welling at Ed’s throat. “And as it’s the most precious thing I own, I would request that you refrain from damaging it.”

Beneath his thumb, Ed’s pulse raced, while his entire body tensed. In spite of his certainty, he waited to die. How long did it take? He breathed, and the movement pressed his chest against Stede’s palm. Could you die without noticing the moment pass?

“I’m not dead, then?” he asked, to be sure.

“What? No! Of course not.” Stede sighed. He took Ed’s bleeding hand in his and looked down ruefully at it. “If you were, you wouldn’t still be bleeding. That was a stupid thing to do. We’ll have to bind this up, and you won’t be able to properly use it for—”

“You’re…not a ghost.” He knew it was inane as he said it, but he felt as though he were waking from a nightmare in an unfamiliar place.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks, you beautiful idiot. I’m—”

Ed’s mouth cut him off.

If he’d had any capacity to think, he might have thought, Ghosts don’t kiss like that, but his mind was wholly occupied with sensations decidedly within the domain of the living.

Somewhere off the main deck, he heard a familiar hoarse shout, interrupted nearly instantly by a wet splash.

Stede drew back to call, “Was that Izzy you tossed overboard?”

“Aye, Captain,” Buttons called back.

Though Ed appreciated Stede’s attention to detail, he wanted to be the detail in question. “Never mind Izzy.”

He got another breath’s worth of a kiss before Stede again turned away, frowning. “Did you leave him alive?”

“Not for long,” Wee John said cheerfully.

“Stede,” Ed said.

“Jim put some holes in him,” Roach added, helpful as always. “So with the bleeding, I give him five, maybe ten minutes, before the sharks come?”

Good. He traced Stede’s jaw with his lips, which had the desired effect of turning the man’s attention back to him.

“Actually, sharks don’t smell out blood,” Frenchie was saying in the background.

“Of course they do,” Black Pete countered.

Ed could just hear them over the steady double rhythm of his own heart pressed against Stede’s.

“It’s a well-known nautical truism,” Lucius said. “Sharks to blood and all that.”

“But actually,” Frenchie argued, “scientifically—”

There was another distinctively Izzy-sounding cry from the waves, and Stede pulled away again with an impatient huff to shout, “Give the poor man a…a rowboat. Or something.”

Ed groaned. “Will you forget about Izzy?”

“Not easily, not when I know he’s overboard, bleeding and…and drowning…or being eaten by sharks…” Stede shuddered. “Ick. He’s not a nice person but I’m not sure letting him die is—”

Ed gave up. Not that he cared what happened to Izzy, but if that was what it took to get Stede’s attention all to himself… He grabbed Stede by the hand and stomped down the steps. “Somebody put a fucking dinghy in the ocean right the fuck now so we can get on with this.”

The crew appeared to range from dubious to outright hostile, but he didn’t care. “Drop a boat on that man or I swear—”

“Please,” Stede put in, at another shout from overboard. “It’s very…distracting.”

That cracked Lucius, whose expression went from bored to positively smug in mere seconds. “Fine, but this time if he survives—”

“If he survives, I’ll kill him all the way next time,” Jim said grimly.

“It’s the fucking ocean,” Ed growled. “How far can he get in a dinghy?”

Stede said, “Well, actually, when I was trying to find you—”

Ed kissed away whatever his explanation was. “Fucking finally,” Oluwande muttered.

The boat hit the water.

“Happy now?” Ed pulled him toward the cabin blindly, unwilling to look away from him long enough to so much as see the door.

Stede’s eyes went soft. “Yes.” He kissed him again. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

“And not dead.” He believed it more every time he said it.

Stede reached past him to open then door.

“Very much not.”

From overboard came one more faint shout: “Where the fuck are the fucking oars?”

Stede tensed, but Ed propelled him unrelentingly into the cabin and slammed the door.

“Giving him oars was probably a bit much to expect from them,” Stede admitted.

“Shut up about Izzy and tell me again you’re alive.”

Stede’s fingers found the gap where Ed’s belt and his shirt didn't meet, just along the top of his hipbone, leaving delicious little shivers in their wake as they traced Ed’s skin. “I’m wholly alive.”

Ed breathed in the scent of him. “And here with me.”

That irresistible, mischievous twinkle was back in Stede’s eyes. “If you like, I’ll prove it to you.”

Fucking finally.