Chapter Text
Izzy doesn’t often bed someone on shore leave.
He’s…choosy, for the lack of a better way to describe it. If he were inclined to ask Lucius, the man might tell him that he has lofty standards, which sounds absolutely ludicrous so it’s just as well that he’s never asked. He has certain aspects he likes, features that he prefers, and he’s quite sure other people do as well. And it’s not like they’re unreasonable by any means. He’s heard the sort of talk sailors - pirates especially - get up to when they’re deep in their cups and get asked about the perfect woman.
If Anne Bonny ever heard any of them speak, she’d laugh uproariously at the way they worship her thighs and chest before gelding them and keeping them around as eunuchs to goad them with what they can never have.
Not that Izzy has any business throwing stones with his unattainable love; he hates that he can call it that at all. It’s a foolish soft hearted notion, one that he holds close, clutching it tight like a frightened child clinging to favorite stuffed toy during a storm. He keeps it secret and hidden and every once in a while, he’ll take it out and let himself mourn it.
But he’s ruthlessly practical. It’s a stupid love; one that will never, ever come true. So when the ache of it grows too heavy, he uses the next shore leave to find someone and has them fuck him until he can’t think anymore, until his mind is nothing more than a blissfully empty stretch of white.
They’ve put in at the Republic of Pirates again because Bonnet has a death wish and still wants to make amends with Jackie. It works in Izzy’s favor today because Bonnet is pleading pathetically outside the window of Spanish Jackie’s and is thusly occupied enough to not notice Izzy’s disappearance. By extension, Edward and most of the crew are also shouldering the task of keeping Jackie or one of her more enterprising husbands from simply skewering Bonnet.
It means Izzy can slink off uninterrupted and unnoticed and head deeper into the Republic, past the initial messy facade of it. There’s still drunkards aplenty but they grow sparser and sparser as he heads further into the island. By the time he makes the last convoluted turn towards the gilded building deep in the Republic’s core, the streets are completely clear of them. He’s an hour’s walk from the docks, another hour yet to the next town, and the establishment towers over him: three levels of fastidiously maintained brick and wood, with swooping arched doors and windows covered by gauzy curtains hinting at the shadows of people moving within.
He pushes through the doors of the building, which is somehow understated and ostentatious all at once, and the woman stationed at the reception desk flicks him a disinterested look. The towering mountain of a man next to her fixes him with a glower; plainly meant to be a deterrent should Izzy consider getting tetchy.
“If you’d let Madam Red know Izzy is here,” he says with a small nod, polite enough to make Bonnet have a stroke if he were present to witness the event. Just because Izzy doesn’t typically employ manners doesn’t mean he’s bereft of them, and it’s another point to Bonnet’s willful blindness that he thinks so. The woman’s mouth twitches, not quite a full blown sneer, but enough that it’s evident she doesn’t believe the proprietress of the establishment will bother meeting him.
But she goes and a moment later Madam Red enters the foyer, bringing a cloud of sweetly scented jasmine with her. She’s clad in a devastatingly scarlet robe, the silk of it so fine it feels like water on his skin when she surrounds him in a hug.
“Back so soon?” It’s meant in jest but Izzy hears the worry underlying it; there’s an unspoken ask for why he’s been coming so frequently. She leads him into her office and forces him into the squashy chair she keeps for people she actually likes and fusses over him, plying him with a cup of coffee and a lemon tart as she always does.
“Otilla,” Izzy says when she swings herself onto her desk, bare legs kicking carelessly in the air - the habit of it an echo of when they were children. She taps the heels of her feet against the wood of the desk, a whispering drum beat that soothes the itch in his mind.
“The usual?”
He nods and she stares at him a moment longer. Izzy lingers on her and wonders yet again why he couldn’t have loved her. She has everything a man could want: a full pouty mouth, painted as crimson as her robe; a voluptuous figure, generous in the bust and hip with a narrow waist; clever eyes, green as emeralds; a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, both of which she’s employed to raise this brothel up. It’s no small feat for her to run an establishment so reputable that it draws the wealthy from other islands, willing to weather pirates, to experience it for themselves.
They’d tried to want each other as lovers do once, long ago when they were both young and fresh off escaping from the workhouse. But Izzy couldn’t love her more than a sister and Otilla couldn’t love him more than a brother and they’d decided after a chaste kiss that had them both grimacing that they were better off otherwise.
“You’ll tell me why you’ve been coming in more often first,” she says, no more demanding than someone asking about the weather. He could say no. He could lie. He could do any number of things to turn her away from this conversation.
And yet he doesn’t want to. Izzy has grown tired of bearing it, that soft little love that he’s nurtured a garden of thorns around for protection. It hasn’t served him anything but heartache in the last thirty years and though she may not have a solution for him, Otilla has always been somewhere he can rest.
“You’ve heard that Blackbeard has taken up with a Thomas Edwards?” Izzy says and Otilla makes a noise of understanding. Relief washes through Izzy - that he won’t have to say more than that is a balm - followed by shame and chagrin. That he has become so obvious that Otilla knows what pains him with a single sentence makes him want to shrink away, never mind that he’s known her and she him since they were children.
She comes forward to hug him again and he lets himself melt into it this time, tucks his head against the crook of her neck and lets her pet his hair, the silk of her robe a quiet susurrus as it sweeps against his vest. It’s too long and too short all at once when she pulls away and she dots a kiss to his forehead before shooing him through the side door.
“Benny will get you a bath and a meal,” Otilla calls after him. “I’ll have someone by sunset.”
Benny greets him and shows him to his usual room, a piping hot bath already laid out and an assortment of tiny foods on a small table next to it. Izzy has a vague memory of Bonnet calling them canapés and Roach calling them a pain in the ass to make.
“Madam has been rather taken with the idea of eating in the bath recently,” Benny explains when Izzy makes an inquiring noise.
“Of course she has,” Izzy says. He shakes his head fondly and Benny shares a small smile with him before departing, leaving Izzy to disrobe and sink into the bath in peace. The window to this room opens out into the jungle; the rich clean scent of greenery wafting in and the hazy translucent layers of curtains fluttering gently in the wind.
Izzy lounges in the bath, snacking lazily on the offered food, until the water cools and his fingertips prune. He rises carefully, diligent in keeping too much water from sloshing over the edges of the tub. There’s a towel soft from age and use on the bed, his name embroidered into a corner in crooked stitches - a bygone of an era when Otilla thought she might make a rich man a pretty empty headed wife. He towels himself most of the way dry and then wraps it around his waist as he cleans his nails with the tools left to him on the small vanity. Once he’s satisfied with the state of his nails, he starts in on his calluses with a pumice stone, grinding down the worst ones until he can close his hands without the pinch of skin stinging.
An assortment of scented oils stand on the vanity next to an expertly sharp razor. Its strop sits in a neat bundle next to it and Izzy reaches for them when he’s finished with his hands. He runs the blade across the strop several times, more out of habit rather than need, and chooses an oil that smells faintly of olives. The routine of applying the oil to his face and shaving his goatee meticulously out of the last few days of growth settles him; another step along the road of clearing his mind and bringing himself back to an equilibrium.
He uses a small amount of the afforded pomade to comb his hair back into some semblance of its usual form but even then it looks soft, makes him look soft, something sweeter than the gnarled exhausted thing that he has become. There’s a robe tossed over the dressing screen in the corner, every bit as crimson as Otilla’s and the same expensive silk, too. She’d told him it didn’t fit her when she’d handed it over and when Izzy shook it out and pointed out that it would have never fit her - too broad in the shoulder, not enough in the chest or hip - she’d shrugged and bundled him into it anyway. It had been large across the shoulders even for him and she’d been pouty until he’d pointed out that it gave him that seducing air she always complained about him lacking.
It’s one of the last steps in this little routine he’s made for himself and he leaves it until someone comes for him. His weapons are all with him and he starts in on the quiet tedium of caring for them in the meantime, carefully taking his pistol apart and cleaning it until it gleams. The blades get taken over with a whetstone until he can run a sheet of paper - snagged off the vanity - over each one and cut it clean. He’s just finished with the dagger in his boot when Benny knocks and pokes his head in.
“She’s got a pair of them for you, if you’re ready,” he says.
Izzy nods.
After Benny leaves to tell Otilla, Izzy slides the robe on one arm at a time, belting it loosely and arranging himself onto the smooth sheets of the bed. There’s a black length of silk on the bedside table and as he fastens it over his eyes and mutes out the world, he can almost make himself believe that he’s a fine enough thing to be wanted.