Chapter Text
The downpour battering the enraged sea drowned out all sound but the occasional crash of thunder. With no means to protect himself, Billy was left to the mercy of the rain and the wind's chill as it whipped down the coastline. Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the world in sudden bursts before darkness just as swiftly fell again.
It was a credit, he thought, to the amount of storms he’d weathered at sea that he could tolerate this at all. But even enveloped by this chaos, he was all too aware of his more dire plight, next to which the storm seemed a mere inconvenience.
Although only a few days had passed since he’d been captured and laid out on this beach to die, he had already lost count. Three days? Four days? He couldn’t be sure. The passage of time was marked by only one metric now: the tightening of the leather against his chest.
His breathing had shallowed to meet his encasement as it constricted him further and further and he was acutely aware that there was only so much more pressure his ribcage could take. He squinted through the raindrops warily as though staring into the abyss above might give him some idea of how many hours remained until daylight. He did not want to think about what would happen if this didn’t stop soon and he was still soaked-through when the sun rose.
What was it that the captain, Hume, had said to him when he was first delivered to this godforsaken island? That he’d wanted his ‘help’ with something? Yes, that was it. At the time, Billy had told him to go fuck himself, but if he made the offer again, it seemed as though he’d have no choice but to accept it.
Not to follow through with it, of course. Those were two entirely different things. But he could be a convincing liar when the situation called for it. In fact, he’d had a lot of practice with that lately…
Billy sighed and shut his eyes, blinking the pooling rainwater out of them.
He’d run that night on the bow of the Walrus through his mind endlessly and, no matter how many times he replayed the feeling of Flint’s hand slipping away before he was claimed by the sea, he’d never truly know whether or not Flint had tried to kill him.
But what he did know was that it didn’t matter.
That didn’t matter and Singleton didn’t matter and incriminating letters penned by mysterious women didn’t matter.
Right now the navy was encamped here, forty miles from Nassau, with the ability to invade at a moment’s notice and, from the look of it, this was only the beginning. It was crucial that he return to warn his brothers of what was coming and, whatever the cost, Flint’s leadership was going to be necessary to resist it.
Gates had been right all along. That was the first thing Billy was going to tell him when he saw him again.
If he saw him again…
No. Hume was keeping him alive for a reason. If he only wanted him dead, there were quicker ways of accomplishing that. He would make his offer again, Billy was sure of it. And through it, Billy would find some way back to Nassau. Back home.
Twinges of sudden, sharp pain shot through his arms and hands and he winced, willing himself to maintain control of his breathing through the spell. Whenever the pain became unbearable, Billy put his mind elsewhere by thinking of his crew. He wondered where they were now, whether they’d yet made a move on the Urca. Not tonight, he hoped; this storm was a ship-killer, to be sure.
Abruptly, Billy thought of the funeral they must have held for him, commemorated amongst the other dead after Andromache.
There was something terrifying about being presumed dead. Even now, as he struggled through every breath in the hope of survival, he was reduced to a corpse in the minds of those who loved him, relegated to the past tense when they spoke of him. Did Gates blame himself for his death? Billy couldn’t stand to think about that. But worse still was the fear that everyone had already moved on. That, in these few short days, he had already become irrelevant to them. After all, there was no one looking for him, no one who would come to his rescue. His death was simply a fact of life.
Billy shook his head as if to banish the thought. If he let his mind go down those roads, he would become overwhelmed by despair when he needed to stay focused.
He was going back to Nassau. He was going to reunite with his brothers and renew his efforts to protect them. He was going to see Gates again. He was going to live.
As these resolutions passed through his mind, the steady beating of raindrops began to level off and, looking up at the sky properly, he saw that the clouds were clearing at last.
Billy did not ordinarily count himself among the superstitious but the timing of the storm’s retreat was nothing if not a good omen and, circumstances being what they were, he allowed himself faith in that small comfort.
He would be returning home. And soon.