Chapter Text
It is a theory universally speculated that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. A rather ambitious undertaking that He ultimately, by fair means or foul, deemed as good. Or at least good enough to continue, that is. Thus beginning the primordial checklist. The first great audit of thingness. A cosmic rhythm. He went on to set the sun and moon on their appointed courses, stirred the oceans into existence, lifted the sky like a great span, and scattered the earth with every creature that crawled, and soared, and swam, and… slithered.
And it was good.
All of it.
Well, almost all of it. The heavens had already endured their first glorious act of rebellion against their Creator, and by the time the world was finished, the fallen angels had been cast down to forever wander until the day of judgment. A warning to stop, perhaps, but not enough to halt Him. For as they say, Better to follow through than leave it undone. Never mind the interlude, of course. On the final day of His making, He bent low over the dust and breathed His own breath into the clay, and He shaped a man in His likeness.
When He beheld this man, this hairless ape of a creature, He nodded; for this, too, was good. Perfect, even. But man, as the story goes, grew depressed in paradise, and his soul lonely for companionship. The birds had their mates. As did the mammals and the reptiles and the insects and the amphibious beings… Creation came in twos. Pairs. One male, one female. When God, with all His omniscience, saw this sorrow settling upon His creation, He must have felt it then - the subtle wrongness. The imbalance. He resolved to give man a companion; a woman, fashioned from his very rib. When she breathed her first breath, God declared that she too was good. She too was perfect.
Though perfection, unfortunately, is a dangerous gambit. Especially when that perfection is generously given a free will.
From that moment, that specific point in time, a structure was laid. A divine understanding that man and woman together would form a single whole. Man to take woman as wife; woman to bear his children; and that the pair were to harmoniously walk the earth not as separates, but as one. And for a time, this order held. Man tilled the earth, woman gathered its fruit; they built homes from the clay and filled them with children. Generation after generation man and woman danced through history according to that first pattern, believing it to be fixed, unchanging, and divine.
Yet, as the world grew, so too did the complexity of the hearts within it. Kingdoms rose and fell and rose again, languages split and morphed and divided, cultures tangled; but among all this abundance, humanity discovered that the heart was not, and is still not a simple creature. It strayed. It wrestled. It reached. It demanded and lusted and envied and begged - it learned that desire did not always follow the “perfect” lines drawn in Eden. For there eventually came a question. A simple one, but a hard one to answer, What becomes of the design when man looks upon woman and feels no biological pull? When woman gazes upon man and finds no attraction? What then? When man would rather turn toward man, and woman toward woman - not out of any particular type of rebellion, but out of what could only be deemed as cognizance? Is the bond less sacred for being incompatible? Is the love less real? Is it unholy? Or is it merely and simply another form shaped from the same breath that once animated dust?
By the eighteenth century, the question had decomposed into a type of defiance; a swelling corpse that could no longer be ignored by polite society. A stench so rancid, it caused legislators to feel the need to write laws against such questions, burying the problem rather than confronting it. But the odor persisted. In France, where these laws against “unnatural vice” held weight, there lived a man ripe out of boyhood. He was the son of a minor noble family, raised on catechisms and expectations, and burdened with tastes that refused to align with either.
He prayed. He fasted. He confessed with a fervor that outpaced the sins he could conceivably commit, but it was never enough - and miracles seemed to run short when it came to conversion. Still, when he knelt in the chapel’s reflective stained-glass glow, he found himself pleading the same plea night after night.
Our Father, please…
Make me what they say I must be.
Make me what I am not.
Make me yearn for what is normal.
But as it had been discovered, the heart does not easily yield to threats of damnation. Once the pot of desire is stirred, the concoction could not be un-stirred. It seeks to its likeness as the tide seeks the moon. Like a moth to an open flame. Like a worm gnawing at the core of an apple…
Like anything that cannot help but return to the thing that first awakened it. A beast even Saint Michael could not slay.
His longings lingered. His father died. His family, burdened by debts, fell from grace. His mother grew sick with a bloodied cough. His sister unwillingly married off. Then, in the midst of that ruin, he did possibly the most inconvenient thing a man could do in France: he fell in love with another man. The nephew of a wealthy merchant, and a man already promised to a bride.
What followed was a year of peculiar seasons…
A spring of flirting…
A summer of passion…
An autumn of betrayal…
A winter of fear.
When he watched the man he loved be dragged before tribunals for the simple crime of loving him in return, a conviction formed hard within him. If love is a gift given from the divine, what mere mortal is to say which flame is permitted to burn? So the man fled France, and he sought a life where he and his lover could eventually be free.
That was when he acquired a ship. Its former captain had called it La Fantaisie.
The Fancy.
A floating rebellion, the Fancy was no ordinary vessel. It became a sanctuary of sorts; and word of her eventually spread in taverns and cathedrals and hidden brothels within the shady corners of Paris. They spoke of a man who welcomed those cast out by either the church and Crown. Young men accused of sodomy. Women punished for loving women. Sailors and merchants and soldiers who had been stripped of their dignity and whipped bloody for their affections. Runaways who wanted not just freedom, but a place where their existence was not a sin. A place where they could be, at the very least, understood by their fellow man. Empathy.
They came in ones, then twos, then threes… desperate, yet hopeful for a chance away from societal structure and the oppression of which they were bound. And the man who stood before them - Capitaine now - a fugitive twice over for irritating both the East India Company and the Compagnie des Indes, offered them a choice: “Join my crew, and the world may hunt you. They may brand you. They may even hang you until your neck snaps. But here aboard my ship, your damned life will be entirely your own.”
Without hesitation, and much to his surprise, his crew grew. The decision to die as a pirate was better than whatever it was life was currently offering them, and freedom, even lawless freedom, was the kinder of the executioners.
Under his command, the Fancy became a pirate ship crewed entirely by the condemned and unrepentant, and before long, its Jolly Roger carried a reputation as being one of the most feared pirate ships within the Mediterranean. While the Capitaine, once a noble, once a Catholic, once a proud man of societal structure and expectations, rose to become one of the nine pirate lords.
His story written in the bones of a ship…
His sanctuary.
For if love is divine, who are you, king or priest, to deny it?