Chapter Text
I.
James is half drunk already, just like he very well meant to be.
It's the middle of a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Just outside of the brothel, merchants shout to each other and share belly-deep laughs. Someone nearby plucks at the strings of a lyre, forming the notes into a jaunty tune. Overhead, gulls soar and sing against the cloudless blue sky, as they circle in hopes of a spare bit of fish or bread.
And James slumps, half propped up in a rickety chair near a window with his brows furrowed against the headache of it all. Methodically, he picks bits off of the hardening end of a quarter loaf of bread that had long since cooled from the oven. His dirty fingers leave black smudges against its soft whiteness. He doesn’t eat.
It's that goddamned John Silver. James sees his smug, striking face against the redness behind his eyelids every time he lets them close for longer than a split second.
Earlier that morning, Silver had made one comment or another. Flashed one too many crooked smiles, and cocked one too many a brow. And now Flint, frustrated as he was with the whole fucking thing, was talking to a pint about it in a bar in the middle of the damn day, in the middle of the week.
Silver’s a liar. A thief. A storyteller that could maybe outspin James’ own intricate tales one day, with practice. Less practice than James was comfortable with admitting, but practice just the same.
Plus, he’s got those fucking eyes. Sapphire, crystal, Caribbean blue, whip-smart eyes that shine like the sun glinting off the waves in a port. Like the hopefulness of trading a good few weeks worth of plunder for proper coin in an unexplored port. Like the promise of going home.
He’s still so young. Fresh. Green. His face still burns from being out in the sun too long before settling into a godforsaken dappled glow. His forehead unlined. His face clean-shaven and still sanguine enough to lift into a genuine, excited smile as he looks over the bow of the ship to the endless blue of the horizon.
James glowers, and upends the contents of his tankard into his mouth before slamming it back on the tabletop with more force than he meant.
A barmaid quickly bustles across the room and tops him off with something that smells like it’ll sting a little more than what he’d just finished. Before she can back away, James snaps his fingers and nods to the tabletop. She leaves the bottle.
He takes a swig with a wince that twitches one eye closed. The liquor stings like it smells, sandpaper on the back of his throat.
And then there was Miranda.
Miranda, who flaunted the wedding portrait that she’d forced him to carry with them, wrapped up tight in pristine white linens, all the way across the Atlantic. Even brushed into the softness of cracked oil paint and half-hidden between the now yellowed cloth, Thomas’s small smile puts a stitch in James' chest and a falter in his breath.
Miranda, who’d fucked him only thoroughly enough for herself and then cried rolling, fat tears about old lives and old cities and old friends, like James wasn’t cracked open and spilling underneath her with how much he missed it too.
Miranda, who he’d end the world for. Who he was trying to end the fucking world for. Miranda, who didn’t want the world to end so much as she wanted the world they knew before. In another life. On another island. In a world that stood just out of James’ reach no matter how much he strained and stretched and wanted.
So he sits and he drinks. And the more he sits and the more he drinks, the more his fingers start to twitch. He'd mutilated the loaf of bread to crumbs and drained this new bottle down to a sedimented swill and now his hands ached to be wrapped around something. Anything. Pulling, twisting, shoving, tugging, killing, anything.
Suddenly, sitting here is taking more effort than he would like. He shoots to his feet. His head takes a moment to catch up with the rest of him like an anchor being pulled up from the ocean floor. Not optimal. He’s now quite a bit drunker than he’d intended to be. Great. Nothing he hasn’t dealt with before.
He takes a step in what he hopes is the direction of the privy, suddenly very aware of how much he’d been drinking bythe urgency to get to there. He inhales through his nose against the nausea roiling in his empty stomach and takes another almost wobbly step.
His shoulder checks into a man walking past his table, hard enough to make him stumble.
James doesn’t think, his body moving on its own accord as he fists his hands into the front of the man’s vest (who wears a leather vest in the fucking Carribean?) and slams him with a grunt into a pillar nearby. The whole brothel shakes around them, and James shakes his hair out of his face, his veins singing with the adrenaline he needed to expel.
The man is short. Shorter than James by at least a few inches, made clear only by the fact that he is perched on the balls of his feet as he scrambles for purchase against the pillar. He has a neat, gray-streaked beard and easily slicked back hair, and a tiny black cross tattooed under his left eye, like he’d marked the perfect spot to land a good blow. His chin is cocked high, and he’s looking down his hooked nose at James. Like he’s not the one being pinned. Like he’s nothing but muck on the bottom of his boots. Like he’s in the middle of accepting a boring dare.
Now, this could be something.
“Gonna say excuse me?” Flint slurs. He wants to fight, he truly does. But the part of him that isn’t drowning in shitty liquor unfists his hands, and lets the man drop to his feet.
“Fuck off,” the man scowls, and tugs at the bottom of his vest to straighten it back out. He drops his chin, rakes a hand through his hair and turns on his heel to make his way to the bar.
The other patrons gently fall back into their own conversations, breaking the silence that had fallen amongst them the second the man’s back hit the wood.
Dismissed, James huffs past the smirk tugging at his lips, just like that.
For some unknown fucking reason, James adjusts his own coat with a few tight yanks and follows him, carefully weaving through the scattered tables.
James doesn’t make it all the way to the bar, but stands back and watches. He almost laughs as the man does a very dignified little hop onto one of the tall barstools and orders a drink with a rap of his knuckles on the bartop. He drains it, amber liquid running over the sides of the tankard and his beard as he gulps it down. He orders another, placing silver pieces on the bartop in a neat pile. Only one of his hands is gloved, and he wraps it around his full tankard, taking his time to sip at its contents this time.
Interesting.
James pulls the stool next to the man out, with a scrape against the cobbled floor. All he has to do is look for a moment too long at the barkeep before a new tankard is placed in front of him. He takes a loud slurp and the man tenses, his shoulders around his ears.
“‘S your name, then?” James catches the question just as it tumbles out of his loosened lips, and tenses, squinting sideways at the man who is very pointedly not looking his way.
“Izzy Hands.”
James is fully ready to accept that as his answer, but the man continues to speak.
“First Mate Hands, or God, as far as you’re concerned.”
James snorts into his drink.
“Practice that, did you?” His laugh sends a visible ripple up First Mate Hands’ spine, which only deepens James’ smirk.
The man looks at James with the single most loathsome look he’s ever seen on another person, which is something, because he’s seen his own face in a mirror before. There's something in that look - so bone-deep exasperated, so irritatingly familiar and blood-thirsty pissed, that something curled up resting next to his spine stirs to life and sleepily reaches out its talons.
James looks back, easy, drink-loosened smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “What the fuck are you even First Mate of?”
“A fucking ship,” he says, irritation ripping into his raspy voice. He takes a slug of his drink and scowls at the shelves of bottles lining the back of the bar. “Are you dense or something? Should someone be watching after you?”
Izzy peers around the bar, turning finally in his stool to face James head on, like James is a boarding school bully and this man’s father told him that was the way to get them to leave him alone.
“What kind of fucking ship?” James presses, leaning into Izzy’s space.
“A big one.”
James widens his eyes with a roll and laughs again.
“With sails and cannons and a captain and an anchor and what the fuck does it even fucking matter to you anyway?” Izzy hisses, talking with his hands now, his cup sloshing it’s contents onto the floor.
James finishes the rest of his drink with a few quick swallows and places the empty tankard upside down on the bartop.
“Alright, alright, First Mate Hands,” James makes sure to move his mouth just right around every syllable of the title. “Buy me a drink?”
He nods his head at the pile of coins on the bartop and then cocks an eyebrow across the narrowing space between them.
Flirting isn’t something James ever did. And yet, here he found himself - annoyingly drunk and asking the embodiment of a pissed off Pekinese to buy him a drink. It was new. Thrilling, in a way that was rolling over his skin like a sunrise.
Izzy eyes him over. He lets his hazel eyes trace slowly from the flush contained behind James freckled cheeks, to the tips of his plain boots, and then back up again before shrugging, and waving a hand at the barkeep to refill his cup.
Izzy is dressed all in black. Leather pants stretch tight across his thighs as they spread over the stool. Tattoos. Thin blade of a rapier strung through a loop on his belt.
It's ridiculous. Lavish. Showy. Eye-catching.
James isn’t thinking about Silver’s crooked smile or Miranda’s tear-filled gaze as he stares back.
Under his scrutiny, the fingers of Izzy’s ungloved hand start to fidget with the ring fastening a black cravat around James’ neck.
On its own, James’ hand reaches across the distance. Izzy flinches, just barely, as James’ fingers knock away his own, to close around the warmth of the small silver band. James turns the embedded stone into the light filtering in from the front of the bar sending glimmers of emerald green glittering against the bartop.
A wedding band. But not on his finger. Worn around his neck like a collar.
James’ hands start to itch again, skin sizzling with the urge to wrap his fist tighter into the strip of fabric around this man’s neck and shove him onto his knees or drag him up the stairs to somewhere more private.
“‘S Nice.” James settles on saying. Izzy exhales and they’re close enough for James to smell the liquor on his breath. He lets his fingers stay on the ring, brushing his first knuckles against the skin at the hollow of his throat as his thumb traces the band.
Izzy is handsome. This close up, James can see the flecks of green and brown in his tired eyes. He can see where maybe Izzy had shaved his beard too narrow, exposing skin that hadn’t seen the sun in decades. He can see the way his tattoo is slightly raised into a scar against his cheek. If he ran his thumb over it, he could read it like braille. James wants to do just that. He wants to touch him and keep touching him until they’re both hot and panting and-
A large man with a pointed, all-silver beard, and a studded belt wrapped a few times around his head, appears behind Izzy’s shoulder.
James lets his hand drop.
“Boss is looking for you,” the man says half into Izzy’s ear, leaning down.
Flint watches as his eyes fall closed. Izzy takes a breath through his mouth, holds it for a count, and lets it out through his nose before he shoots the remainder of the contents of his drink to the back of his throat. He wipes the wrist of his glove across his mouth and gets up to leave without so much as looking back at James, leaving the silver pieces on the bartop.
He’s short, he’s mean and he comes when he’s called, Flint notes, taking a sip from his freshly filled tankard as the smile drops from his mouth.
He still really needs to piss.