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Izzy Hands is having a shit night.
That on its own isn't particularly special; he’s had shit nights before — in fact, sometimes, he wonders if his entire life is an escalating joke of shit nights, each one ratcheting up the gag until the punchline inevitably lands and leaving him bleeding out in some ditch, too beat to shit by fate and God knows what else to even laugh at his own sad fucking end.
Be that as it may, tonight has been uniquely, well—
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Edward’s tone lands like a slap. But that’s what Izzy’s been looking for isn’t it? If he slaps him he touches him, if he touches him he’s close to him, if he’s close to him, well, Izzy hasn’t lost him yet.
Izzy stays where he is, knelt at his Captain’s feet. He lets the back of his knuckles move, barely, tracing the edge of a leather-clad thigh, light enough to be reverent but present enough to be undeniable. His knuckles reach the solid outline of a blade on Edward's leg and Izzy swallows, his throat already bone-dry.
He can feel Edward’s eyes on him where he’s leaned back in his chair. The attention's heavy: pressing and constant. It would be so easy, so perfect, to be smothered by that weight. Swallowed whole and lost in the dark. Izzy drags his gaze up. He lets himself look at his Captain.
The beard’s started to fill in properly again; it accentuates the downward turn of Edward's mouth that’s also back with a vengeance. Edward’s buried in the darkness of the beard and the makeup and the weight of his mood, but something still glints out, something sharp and hard, unyielding and furious, and Izzy’s sick with how badly he wants to pry it free and sink it into his skin.
He should say something, something confident and clear and even tantalizing, but his knees ache on the boards underneath them and there’s a feeling so tight in his throat he thinks he might actually choke on it.
“Let me.”
The words stumble out: broken and raw and infinitely more pathetic than he’s ready for. A squirming, lost thing.
“ Just— if you’d... Christ, Edward—” Izzy’s fingers suddenly feel stupidly childish where they’ve curled, timid and shaking, around the weight of the knife on Edward’s thigh. “Just... God, please. Please just let me.”
Dark eyes look down at him. They don’t move at all. The glinting thing within them just stares back.
Under Izzy’s hand, Edward's thigh shifts to rest slightly wider.
Relief bubbles up in Izzy’s chest is so suddenly it catches on a laugh.
He looks up at his Captain, a burning sensation suddenly alive in the corners of his eyes. “Really?” Izzy asks. There's a hope clutching to the question that makes his voice alien in his ears.
The dark eyes don’t shift. “ No.”
Edward's booted foot hits his chest.
Izzy's kicked back, slamming to the floor in front him.
Air leaves Izzy's lungs with a painful gasp; he blinks at the ceiling in a daze. There's blood on his tongue. Familiar and sharp.
A sound creaks through the room: someone standing from a wooden chair. Steps. Two of them. Then a boot pushes firm and fast to Izzy’s throat.
Izzy can’t stop the smothered groan that scrambles out of him. The boot only presses harder, hard enough that the sound is choked into something weird and wet.
Izzy’s body tries to save itself without his permission: hands scratching uselessly at the leather and metal looming over him, boots kicking against the boards underfoot. Izzy stares up at the shadow above him. He’s still hard, tight behind his trousers, the need of it aching in his gut like a weeks old wound that won’t heal over right.
His vision starts to go dark at the edges. His fingers scramble at the boot on his neck, then slow, then stop all together.
One of Izzy's hands falls to his side. His legs go loose and still. He can’t see the ceiling anymore. He can’t see Edward anymore. All that’s left is the dark. An infinite dark that’s swallowing him. Finally. Finally—
The boot leaves his throat.
Izzy’s lungs suck in a desperate breath. Coughing seizes him as he rolls to one side, catching himself on his elbows, hacking through the pain in his throat, the ache in his chest. The breath flooding him makes him dizzy, giddy. He tries to focus on the worn boards of the floor between his hands. The shadow above is moving away, turning his back on him, running a hand through long hair. Edward swears under his breath.
Despite the burn in his throat, Izzy manages to sneer. “Coward.”
The boot hits him between the ribs before he’s ready for it. Izzy gasps, fresh pain blooming as air is forced from his lungs in a bright new way. He swears, maybe laughs, it’s difficult to say exactly. Everything’s gone a bit tilted.
“— the fuck out.”
Izzy barely catches the edge of the words, rolling onto his back with a groan. He stares at the ceiling, curling a hand over the bruised line of his ribs, shivering as pain skates and dances with the touch.
“Make me,” Izzy breathes.
His body feels loose and easy, tense and wound somehow all at once. There’s a raw anticipation between his teeth that tastes familiar as the blood on his tongue.
Across the room, Edward sighs. It’s a soft sound. Too soft.
It sinks through Izzy, pinning him to the ground like a rock on his stomach.
“Just...”
The voice is wrong. A voice he despises. A voice he never, ever used hear and now... now he can’t seem to escape it.
The voice sighs, lost and sad and wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Just go... Just fucking go, Izzy.”
Izzy shuts his eyes.
He swallows once.
Slowly, aching — in all the wrong ways — he lifts himself back to his feet.
He lets himself glance across the room. Edward is stood by the window: his hands resting on the lip of the sill as he stares out into the heavy blue of night, at glittering lights of Nassau in the distance punching through that gloom. His shoulders sag, head hung low. Everything about him utterly, entirely worn though.
Izzy swears into his chest. He shoves his way out of the room.
— So now here he is.
In a bar he doesn’t know, in a shit town, with shit rum, and shit-all he can do about it.
Maybe he should go find that ditch. The inevitable one. Hurl himself into it before the universe can land that punchline and take the air right out that cosmic fucking joke. Could just cut right to the chase. A nice wet hole in the nice cold dirt where he can just lie down, push his face into the mud, and wait to drown in shi—
A shoulder knocks into his. Izzy's drink spills across his shirt.
Izzy stares down at his chest.
He blinks.
“Hey,” he says.
Steps come to a stop behind him. As if the guilty party has realized he’s talking to him, but isn't sure why.
“Yes?” the voice asks.
Izzy stares at the rum shining wet on his hands. “You spilled my fucking drink.”
There's a beat. The voice comes back. “... And?”
Izzy spins faster than the other man is ready for - faster honestly than he’s ready, and ah — interesting — he has been drinking. The room swims but it doesn’t matter, doesn’t stop him from snatching the stranger's ginger head, twisting his arm behind his back, and slamming him into the nearest table with a bared snarl.
Izzy reaches for his sword and pain suddenly bursts across his face. He stumbles back, clutching his nose where the other man's head has slammed into it. Izzy blinks, refocuses, looks back up just in time to see the fist before it cracks across his jaw.
It hurts. Which is funny. Izzy doesn’t stagger. He laughs, leans into it rather than falling back, and roars as he catches the man round the waist and slams him into the nearest wall.
Izzy pulls back, flicking his hair out of his face. He spits a mouthful of blood, reaches for his sword and—
Stops.
There’s a knife at his throat.
It's not a particularly insistent knife, but it is steadily, confidently, very much There.
Izzy looks at the man who could cut his throat. Green eyes look back.
The first thing Izzy realizes is he looks absolutely fucking furious — which yeah, alright, fair enough. He’s got shorter ginger hair. A beard like Izzy’s but kept neater. Earrings like Izzy’s but worn simpler. Bleeding like Izzy but, well, maybe a bit less.
And he’s handsome.
Izzy realizes it suddenly and slowly somehow all at once. Bit like a bloody painting even. The kind you saw up on walls in rich folk's houses. Only, well, no painting had eyes like that, did it? You’d have to be mad to keep a painting with eyes like that in your home. They were bright and clear and looked — honest-to-fucking-Christ — ready to set the whole damned world on fire.
Izzy's fingers loosen on the hilt of his sword.
The knife at his throat doesn’t so much as twitch.
It’s gone quiet around them. Izzy can’t tell if the bar has emptied out to escape the violence or if he’s just drunk enough he can't notice anything else. Those green eyes keep glaring back at him and Izzy thinks — almost comically — that they haven't so much as fucking blinked. Which might be strange. Might be. If in this dizzy, oddly stuck sort of moment he didn’t find that —
“Spilled my drink,” Izzy hears himself say.
The man says nothing.
Izzy's lip feels split. He cheats his tongue over it.
The man’s attention darts to the movement. Thank fucking God.
His gaze shifts, moving to scan the lines of Izzy’s face with sharp economical movements. There’s a furrow between his brows that seems as though it might never go away. He smells of rum and gunpowder and something else, something more... real somehow. Something grounding. Something Izzy doesn’t want to put a name to.
It’s funny. Looking at him. Being looked at by him. Izzy feels it in the balls of his feet, almost like peering over the edge of a cliff, the knife under his neck sure as gravity.
Izzy takes his hand off his sword.
His ears are ringing. Just like they always do when he’s about to make a massive bloody mistake. But he’s drunk, and he’s had a shit night, and the man in front of him has very green eyes.
"You spilled my drink," Izzy says again. He feels a nasty smile start before he can stop it. “Buy me another one?”
Izzy slams face first into the wall of the alley.
He doesn’t have time to catch his breath before there’s hands on his hips, breath hot in his ear—
“Could tell me your name first.” Izzy glances over his shoulder, tone goading, heart thudding in his chest like a frantic bird.
He gets exactly what he’s aiming for. A wide, rough hand shoves his face back against the wall, smart boots kicking his stance wider, messier. “You don’t want me to tell you my fucking name.”
There’s a strange educated sort of edge to his voice that has Izzy baffled. Come to think of it, a lot about this night has him baffled. But hips urge against his, bucking Izzy into the shoddy brickwork, and his brain shorts out with a low groan. Izzy pushes back and the other man checks him soundly, getting one hand firmly on his hip, holding him still and tight to the wall. Izzy shivers, the pressure of the bricks relieving a sliver of the aching need where his prick is pressed hard against the stone.
“Ought’ta call you something,” Izzy muses, dazzled by how steady his voice sounds; it gives him the gall to push his luck. “Sir?” he suggests with as much dripping sarcasm as he can muster, even as the word settles heavy and warm in his chest.
There’s a grunt behind him. The hands on his hips shift, spinning him, shoving his back against the wall instead. One wide hand lands on his chest, keeping him pinned.
It’s dark in the alley, but there’s light enough from the lantern by the inn and the windows from busier alleys that Izzy can see him well enough. Those eyes meets his and there’s something there, something that Izzy suddenly realizes is so tired, bone-deep fucking exhausted. It’s so familiar Izzy feels his own chest surge, grasping out for it in some intangible way.
The other man takes Izzy in, for one stark moment. Evaluating, unraveling, and — insanely — Izzy just lets him. Nailed to the wall of an alley behind a bar, pinned there more by the raw clarity in that gaze than the hand on his chest.
Honest, Izzy realizes. There’s something in his expression that’s so damned honest it hits like a swinging boom.
“It’s Captain," the other man says. A dare catches across the other mans' face, subtle and quick. His mouth twitches into a just there smirk. “Captain’ll do fine.”
Izzy’s brain releases out a low, long sound.
He tries to smother it quiet, begging his his face to do anything other than appear as utterly fucking desperate as he suddenly feels. He doesn’t think it works.
The man considers Izzy like he’s reading the wind. “Put your hands behind your back,” he says quietly.
Izzy lets out half a laugh. The man simply stares back at him. Izzy swallows.
“Fine,” he spits.
He tries to keep his posture loose despite feeling like every muscle in his body is a rope pulled tight enough to snap. He loops his hands arrogantly behind him as he takes in the man in front of him: pretty bone structure, tidy ginger beard, those eyes that scream bloody fucking murder.
"Whatever you say," and with a well practiced sneer, Izzy pronounces: “Captain.”
The man stares back at him for half a beat. Izzy feels tension prickle in the air between them: sparking and dangerous along every inch of his skin.
The man smirks. “Huh.”
He slaps Izzy clean across the face.
Izzy gasps.
It’s a perfect slap - full across his cheek and jaw and just hard enough to flip from a sharp sting to a heavy burn. When it lands, it’s as though something deep and heavy inside of him, something he’s never been able to move on his own has suddenly, easily, shuddered, slid, locked, firmly into place.
Izzy’s eyes go heavy. His heartbeat slows in his chest, clicking to a heavy pleasant thump instead of the panicked shiver. A gorgeous thrill bleeds through him: clean and clear, like wind pushing a fog out to sea.
Rope-rough fingers lock around his jaw, turning him back. Izzy gazes where he’s directed. He thinks his split lip’s opened up again. He runs his tongue over it, metal tang lighting up his mouth in a lovely way.
The man holds him in place, that educated edge to his voice confident and low: “Say it properly.”
Izzy feels his eyelids flutter. He swallows and, this time, he fits his mouth around the word like it was made to be there: “Captain.”
A thumb catches on his split lip. “Good.”
And then he’s dragging Izzy onto his mouth, kissing him hard enough to hurt.
Izzy moans into it without thinking. It’s nothing but heat and force. His lip stings — sings — as he opens his jaw to let the other man in just as deep as he bloody wants. The hands locked behind his back twitch, shoulders jerking slightly with the impulse to reach out, to hold on, but the other man’s hand tightens in Izzy’s shirt and Izzy stays put, like he’s been told even if he hasn't, the shivering peace of that implicit instruction settling over him, grounding him in the delight of the challenge.
The Captain lets him go, pulling back just enough that Izzy can feel his breath on his mouth.
He takes his hand away from Izzy’s chest, keeping those well-made boots of his positioned just right, just so they're not touching Izzy at all, which seems impossible for how close they are but he manages it easily all the same. The only part of him that actually touches is where one of his hands — deftly, grazingly — begins to tug the ties of Izzy’s trousers loose.
A soft, needy sound finds its way out of the back of Izzy’s throat. He can’t help it. He’s so hard and those knuckles are so close yet not close enough. He kicks his hips forward, nudging up to bite at the Captain’s mouth.
The man catches him by the throat, pining him back against the wall. “Don’t be a brat.”
Izzy’s cock jumps so hard in his trousers he's sure, for a moment, that he'll completely ruin this by coming right then and there.
“Okay,” Izzy manages. "Alright—"
That gaze lands on him again, eyebrow quirking with calm expectation.
Izzy's throat goes dry.
“Captain,” Izzy finishes, leveling his voice as well as he can: “Yes, Captain.”
The man gives an approving grunt. Then he’s tugging Izzy's prick out of his pants.
He wraps his palm around him, working a confident hand tight down Izzy's length.
“Jesus Christ—” Izzy moans.
A mild, approving smile catches the other man's lips as he works him. “Not actually my name.”
Izzy can’t help laughing. It's quick and genuine and lost to a low whine as man’s other hand — suddenly, firmly — presses over Izzy’s throat.
The Captain twists his wrist on a downstroke, eyes locked on Izzy’s face with heated fascination. Izzy digs his nails into the arms locked behind his back, blinks up at dark of the sky, gasps—
The man takes his hand off his dick, and if Izzy Hands — feared mate of the most infamous pirate crew on these seas — lets out an honest to Christ sob, well, there’s absolutely no one here to fucking know about it, is there?
The captain’s hand remains on Izzy’s neck; not firm enough to constrict or even to hurt, but just enough for Izzy to know it’s undeniably, firmly there.
He gazes down at Izzy — low, curious burn flickering behind his eyes. He’s taller. Just. If Izzy’s boots gave him an extra inch or two they’d be exactly the same height.
Something to consider.
“Tell me what you want,” the man says, voice clear and rough. “Now.”
Izzy swallows. He knows the other man must feel every bit of it.
“I—” he tries and God he’s hard but it’s good, so bloody good, obscenely good, a shivering wild sort of good: like leaning over a ledge further than he ought to, like feeling gravity bite at all of his edges — “I don’t know, I—”
“Yes.” The other man's voice is quiet, shockingly gentle even as he tightens his grip on Izzy’s throat. “You do.”
Izzy can taste blood and rum waltzing dreamily around his mouth, his tongue, the edges of his teeth. His arms are starting to shake where they’re knitted behind his back. His knees feel like fucking pudding.
That’s about when he realizes this man’s grip on his throat is, quite possibly, the only thing keeping him upright at all.
“Hit me again,” Izzy says.
The man considers him. He gazes at Izzy, like he’s unwinding a mildly annoying knot and Izzy can’t do anything but simply look back. Every pretension he’s ever had has scattered to the wind, every the wretched, glinting part of his soul spilled out between them, a cut purse of ill-gotten trinkets.
“Just like that?” the man asks. "Again?"
He has a way of holding questions like they’re statements. As though he doesn’t really need to hear your answers to know them.
It makes Izzy feel so delightfully off-balance.
“Yeah,” Izzy manages. He licks his teeth. “Like that. Exactly like fucking th—”
The sound of the slap echoes through the abandoned alley, up to the crisp stars overhead.
Izzy’s breath falls out of him like something golden. Pain sings through his bones, hums like a rung bell, echoes though the very core of him–
The captain is standing very still. “What else?” he asks.
Izzy can’t seem to make his mouth work. Everything’s gone hazy and clear at once. He can’t even think, not exactly. It's like his mind’s been swept clean into one divine, simple Nothing.
He can only imagine what he looks like: Izzy-fucking-Hands, pinned to a wall with his dick leaking over his pants, slapped about and bleeding, staring at some stranger like the man could wring his neck, like Izzy would bloody beg him for it—
“Hey.” The man’s hand tightens, voice soft.
Izzy blinks, trying to find his way back.
“What else?” the man repeats.
“Fuck me.”
It’s out before Izzy even hears it. But as soon as it is, it Fits.
It ought to be strange, or hard, or — God — just anything: to look back at a stranger who decked him in a bar and ask him to fuck him in an alley but it’s just... not.
In fact, it might just be the easiest thing he’s ever done.
“Please,” Izzy says. His voice is soft, broken open into something new and shivering.
Izzy unloops one hand from behind his back. He move slowly, catching his fingers around the wrist of the hand that’s holding his neck. Izzy gazes back at the Captain from under the mess he's made of his hair, a sting creeping into the corners of his eyes.
The green gaze doesn’t yield an inch, doesn't give away a single damned thing.
Izzy runs his thumb over the heat of the man’s wrist. His pulse is hot and fast.
“Please.” Izzy feels himself smile and that’s easy too. “Fucking please —”
“Fuck,” falls out of the other man's mouth and then his hands are everywhere.
He’s pushing Izzy, pulling Izzy, twisting him until he’s gotten his chest back into the wall. Izzy’s hands land against the bricks with a gasp as the captain shoves his pants down his ass, spits, and—
Izzy moans low and deep, shoving back despite himself, urging into the feeling his fingers, thick and confident and wet and just absolutely bloody perfect—
“Quiet,” the man mutters into the back of his neck. But his voice is frayed and he doesn’t seem wholly committed to the idea. His boots nudge Izzy’s feet wider, back pressing against him as he urges deeper, curling his fingers exactly right and —
“Fuck—!” Izzy fairly sure he fucking shouts at the bricks in the wall.
The man behind him huffs a curse into Izzy’s hair, then he’s moving, shifting and Izzy’s body sings as he hits that spot deep inside him.
He's floating. Lost, on the deliciously flayed feeling of being taken apart. The feeling that quiets every other damn mess crowding his mind. Lost on it. In the buzz still lighting up his cheek, on the sting as he bites into his own split lip. He shoves his weight back just to feel the way the other man's strength answers him, checks him, grounds him against the wall again sure as anything.
“Open your mouth.”
The captain’s voice cuts clear through the noise in Izzy’s head.
Two fingers slip over Izzy’s jaw and he opens, readily, groaning as they slide over his split lip, sound muffled around the weight of them. The taste of the other man's skin is raw on his tongue.
And then they’re gone. The weight of the other man vanishes: his warmth, his breath, the fingers that had urged so deep inside of him and Izzy almost falls off the damn wall at the loss of it.
A hand lands firm in the middle of his back, shoving him into the wall, forcing him to stay upright just in time.
There’s a series of movements behind him that Izzy’s far too gone to take in. The only thing he’s dully aware of is the empty feeling where thick fingers used to be, the taste of copper on his tongue, the aching of his cock as it drools pre-come against the brickwork of the wall—
A hand finds its way into Izzy’s hair, tightening, pulling his head back. Something soft edges against his jaw and Izzy opens without even fucking thinking twice. The captain presses a handkerchief into his mouth.
The voice behind him mutters, “Alright, alright—” and then there’s a hand on the wall by his head and another on his hip and the world whites out as he presses into him.
Izzy makes a sound. It's a sound that pulls out of his chest like a hull cracking in a storm. It's a sound that deepens as his head lands firm and damp on the bricks of the wall. It's a sound that catches on the fabric in his mouth, the fabric that's gone wet and warm, the fabric that tastes of gunpowder and rum and salt.
Izzy’s hands shift against the wall, staggering between balled fists and clenched claws as the man behind him pushes in as deep as he can, grounding himself fully against the weight of Izzy’s body. Izzy can feel his breath quicken on the back of his neck, the hand on his hip not digging in, just grounding, solid and sure.
The captain pulls out and — steadily, easily — shoves right back in.
The radiant stretch of it courses through Izzy. For one thrust. For two. For three.
His eyes flicker open, gazing into the grime of the brick wall. Izzy grounds his boots as well and kicks his hips back: sharp and greedy.
A grunt startles out of the man behind him: quick, surprised, and then, then Izzy hears him chuckle.
He locks his hands on Izzy’s hips and drives into him.
Izzy barks out a shout, the sound of it smothered instantly into the handkerchief heavy on his tongue. It’s a blessing really, if he could talk he’d probably be babbling, nothing but: “God”, or “yes”, or “please”, or — worse of all — “thank you, thank you, Christ, fucking thank you—”
Izzy meets the thrusts. Well as he can. What with every bone in his body feeling like they're melting deliciously into nothing.
Behind him, the Captain’s breath catches. A hand lands on the wall by Izzy’s head, the other tilting the cant of Izzy’s hips just so before he snaps into him even harder and— oh sweet fucking CHRIST—
The utterly raw noise that punches out of Izzy’s guts seems to set something off in him: he huffs out a satisfied sound and does it again, and again — setting a pace that doesn’t seem like it will let up for bloody anything, hitting that spot inside that makes Izzy see fucking rainbows, every, single, goddamn, time—
Izzy’s lost on it, cut adrift by it, fucking drowning in it. He wants to swallow this feeling whole. He wants to feel the sting of it flood his throat, blur his vision, wrap around him heavy and sure and pull him down into oblivion.
The man’s pace behind him staggers into something truly frantic. He reaches around him, scrambling with a shocking lack of composure but when he gets a grip on Izzy’s cock it's firm and sure and Izzy is coming so fast it knocks his breath out.
A shocked sound leaps out of Izzy’s throat, the hand around him still working fast and slick and the hips against Izzy’s twitch, snap, and the captain's digging his teeth hard into the meat of Izzy’s shoulder as he comes.
Izzy groans, low and loud. He shivers as the other man empties inside him, another jerk of come spilling over the fingers still clutched around his prick.
The hand on his hip loosens after a moment. A head falls against his back. And in the dull light of the alley, the world falls still.
Izzy's hand adjusts on the wall. The grit of the brickwork catches under his fingers.
He can hear the captain's breath behind him, slowly falling back into something steady.
Izzy lets himself — for now — feel as though it's the only thing in the whole bloody world.
Slowly, the warmth of the other man's body pulls away. Izzy’s slips down the wall. A strong hand catches him, holding him up and gently turning him round.
Izzy sighs as he leans back, his head thunking against the bricks. The captain eases the handkerchief out of his mouth. Izzy flexes his jaw as the other man wipes off his own hand, then passes the spit-damp cloth over Izzy's prick in a perfunctory effort to tidy him up before easing him back into his trousers.
Izzy gazes back at him. He’s too stunned to do much else. Every single thing in his brain has gone insanely fucking placid.
“Thanks,” Izzy says.
The other man gives him a wave of his hand and a flicker of a smile as glances down to tuck himself back into his pants.
The quiet settles in around them. A few streets over it sounds like a party is kicking up, and — further than that — Izzy can hear the steady roll of the sea.
It should be horrible. Leaning here, against a wall, in front of stranger he’s practically begged to fuck him stupid.
It isn’t.
In fact — the realization starts to settle around him — in this moment, there’s not much of anything he finds horrible.
Every mundane, consuming vexation that’s plagued him for days, weeks, months, all of it seems to have simply fluttered apart, lifting up and away into the quiet of the stars. Like ashes on the breeze.
Hell, the way he feels, Stede-bloody-Bonnet could prance around that corner and Izzy would probably just give him a half-hearted wave.
Overhead, the stars blink down at him, clear and cold and pretty.
And yhey are pretty, aren’t they? Very pretty…
“I think,” he says after a moment, eyes still caught on the sky, “that I might have seriously fucking needed that.”
The man in front of him releases a low chuckle, adjusting his belt. “Yeah. Think you may have.”
Izzy smiles at him like an idiot and doesn’t remotely care.
The man straightens up, gesturing at Izzy’s general, well — everything. “Your, uh, face alright?”
“Bloody fantastic,” Izzy grins.
The other man does seem different now. Somehow. Satisfied, clearly - if the way his weight sits loose and easy on him is any indication. But he’s a bit… nervous, uncertain? Almost like he’s been pushed out of exactly where he expected to find himself, which that makes two of them then fucking doesn't it?
“Good.” The other man clears his throat. “That’s good.”
Izzy looks back at him. “You come here often, then?”
Green eyes land on Izzy sharply, and they're still so honest the rest of the world falls away beyond them.
“Sometimes,” the man answers, eventually. “But not, I don’t actually do—” His attention shifts vaguely around the alley, “Well... this. Often.” His eyes flick back to Izzy’s before moving away again, hands finding their way to his belt. “Or ever. Really. Actually.”
“Oh.” Izzy stares into nothing much at all. “Huh.”
The breeze picks up, pushing through the alley low and warm. It really is a very nice night.
“It’s Flint, by the way.”
Izzy blinks, pulling his attention back to see that absurdly, hilariously, the man who just fucked him stupid is offering a handshake.
“James. I suppose—” he says, expression still uneasy on the edges. But there’s a flicker of a smile hidden there as well; something sharp, and bright, and almost hopeful. “James Flint.”
“Well,” Izzy lets himself smile back, easy and open. He takes his hand. “Nice to meet you then, Captain James Flint.”