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The home of Stede Bonnet is quiet, save for the sound of running water filling porcelain and muted splashes each time he checks its temperature. He dips his hand, uncaring of how the old ring he adorns may tarnish.
“Is it that you haven’t ever had a bath, then?” asks Stede, in his distinctly posh voice that Izzy, standing mulishly in the lavatory doorway, scoffs at. “That’s quite sad, if not.”
“I’ve had a fucking bath, Stede,” Izzy mutters, thumbing over the cravat at his neck, remembering the solemn silence within which Edward softly cleaned filth from his skin, turning the water a stomach-turning muddy red. Dead skin and dried blood from his injuries fell free into the water. Ed watched intensely, squinted at each pained breath. “Just not in a long time.”
Izzy found, later, that Ed was acting all fucking weird halfway through because he got his goddamn rocks off to the sound and look of Izzy in pain. That became a key element in any sex they’d have, utilized over and over. Izzy found that surrendering control could concomitantly be reclaiming it under Ed’s scratching fingernails, his bruising knuckles, his slicing blades.
“Well, I’ll make sure that you’re tended to nicely, yes?” Stede says sweetly, tipping some purple oil right under the faucet. Bubbles spread languidly in ripples.
“I think you just want me to wear your clothes,” Izzy dismisses even as he steps toward the clawfoot tub. “Fuckin– goddamn emerald, thought you only imagined that. ‘Course you fucking own it.”
“This?” Stede looks down at the shimmering silk garment folded neatly on a plush black bath towel, both atop the closed lid of the toilet. “I found it quite suited you, but that might’ve been the influence of your ring, there.”
Izzy didn’t notice he’s still been touching it until now, but he smiles to himself while Stede isn’t looking, letting it fall once he is. Stede’s eyes lower and his face crinkles in mirth. Fucking tail.
“What do you mean, you thought that I only imagined that?” Stede’s face scrunches up the same way the rag in his hand does. Rag’s a good bit wetter, though. Izzy’s sure he could change that.
“When you first came all over yourself,” Izzy says low, “you were thinking about yourself, Edward, and I, were you not? All dressed in your- your silk gowns.”
“Guilty.” Stede’s squinched expression mutates from confusion to embarrassment, then falls into nothing as he swirls a hand around in those circles in the soapy water. “Why don’t you undress?”
Izzy’s not done that in front of Stede yet. Even when he’s done it countless times, it’s different when it’s his body, not some caricature of ideal features glued onto one vessel.
He curls his wings away, grinding his teeth as they lodge themselves into his skin, as do his horns and tail. He starts to unbutton his vest, emboldened as his ears catch Stede’s heartbeat, harelike to match his wide eyes.
“You’re quite something,” he says. It might’ve been a compliment if it didn’t sound as though he had to beat it out of his throat. Izzy chuckles sardonically, laying down his vest. Stede huffs a breath before Izzy can speak. “I mean to say, um– that you’re quite–”
Izzy pulls the shirt over his head, broadening his shoulders once it’s placed securely. All of his clothes are clothes of Edward’s, but even on him, they always ran a little big. Izzy theorizes that, just like all of Ed’s shit, before they were Ed’s, they were Hornigold’s.
These things he never thought to ask, until Ed was gone and all Izzy thought about, and even now, it doesn’t seem right to acknowledge how Izzy still wears everything Ed gave him, brandishing his devotion even as a defector.
“Cat got your tongue, Bonnet?” Izzy jokes as Stede gawks at him, brazenly following every movement as Izzy strips down to shirtless.
It’s strange to be nude, when he’s only lately been naked in the ill-fitting body of whomever a nameless, faceless bedmate desires him to be, and here’s Stede fucking Bonnet, wanting him like a lunatic. His wings flutter of their own accord as though they’re grateful to finally be freed without the qualm of catching his clothes with spiked ends.
Not that it ever stopped him from keeping them out, though, because Stede’s favorite fucking thing lately is touching them, and Izzy, though he’ll only ever grouse about it, really fucking likes them touched.
“You’re a vision, Israel,” is what Stede comes up with, sounding reverent with it. To his credit, it makes Izzy fucking shiver. A vision. He peeks in the mirror and supposes that if it’s the truth for Stede, he could probably get around to believing it. “Truly God’s most wondrous creation.”
“Fuck, Stede,” Izzy says, breathless with exasperation. “No one says shit like that.”
“Well,” Stede gets that tone in his voice, “I say shit like that, so it would benefit us both for you to get used to it, would it not? You seem to do quite poorly with that. With change. Is that so?”
“What the fuck would you know?” Izzy grumbles, shielding himself with a wing as he settles his clothes on the long, marbled counter. His emotions aren’t on his sleeve for his disposal, but he always wears them right on his fucking face, he’s been told, and so Stede might just know with a look at him that his analysis is entirely correct. “I’m in your head, not the other way around, far as I remember. Don’t try to change that.”
“And if I want to?” Stede challenges. The slide of his stockinged feet against the tile alerts Izzy. He peers over his wings to find Stede off-kilter, his eyes unfocused until he adjusts to standing.
“Then you’re more of an idiot than I thought,” Izzy responds, with little hope that Stede would ever leave him alone. His face in the mirror matches the sunken defeat and reluctant acceptance in his tone. The disinclination only exists to veil his desire to have Stede in his head for a change. He turns only after he’s pushed his hair back out of his face, smoothed by his palm where the removal of his clothes tousled it. “There even fucking room in there for me?”
“On what earth would anyone own a washtub the width of your wingspan, Israel?” Stede snipes, placing a hand on a cocked hip, but all Izzy can focus on suddenly is the softness of his body under his robe until he speaks again. “I hadn’t exactly intended to be hosting your kind, offering- offering baths, of all things. Perhaps with holy water. Would you boil?”
“Why the fuck should I tell you?” Izzy asks, finally finding the nerve to peel off the glove from his burn-scarred hand. Some days, he still feels the angel’s touch, the drag of rusty bars into sweat-sticky skin as he thrashed, shackle digging into his ankle where a permanent ring remains. “You gonna fucking baptize me, Bonnet? Maybe an exorcism? Send me back to Hell?”
“Of course not,” Stede mutters. He sounds annoyed with the truth in his statement. Izzy only finds his face betraying his intentions for perpetual impassivity by contorting itself in an affectionate smile that makes his stomach turn when he catches it in the mirror. He also spots the one Stede wears, equally a mirror of the amorousness that makes every cell in Izzy drink wine, eat wafers, sing hymns; praise be to Father Stede Bonnet.
“It should be an ideal temperature,” Stede invites as Izzy stares into the soapy water, tinted the lilac color of Stede’s Porsche. “And I’m not sure how it might work for you, ideally with no adverse effects, but lavender is often a very soothing smell to humans.”
“I find it soothing,” Izzy agrees, though he’s sure it’s not an attachment born of some natural herbal remedy. He existed even before the lavender producing the redolence that now clogs his head. He thinks it must be Stede, how he always carries this smell, how it laces his lust and shame, his mirth and contentment, thick in the air. He speaks before he even thinks: “The springs of the deep burst. The floodgates of the heavens were opened.”
“That’s Genesis 7:11-12,” Stede chimes immediately, always an encyclopedia of Bible verses if nothing else. Izzy has to believe him. He doesn’t even remember where the fuck it came from, just that he read it in sifting through Stede’s Bible, a book that once held truth, from which man built fairy tales of a God who gave a damn, fortified hate with mistranslations. “Not quite right. It’s ‘on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened’. But, ah, what’s that matter, anyhow? Nothing to prove now, have I?”
“Definitely fucking not,” Izzy laughs. He sways his tail in indication. “Just thought I’d talk the way you do for a change.”
“I usually have meaning in my proverbs,” Stede says prissily. If not for his dexterous hands working his laces as a sailor ties his rigging, Izzy might punch him. “That is not to say that you don’t, of course– I simply, uh. I don’t think that I understand.”
“Everything outside of Noah’s Ark was gone,” Izzy explains, but it’s all he can dredge up from the depths of feelings without descriptors. He sits, mouth still hanging as he grasps at straws for its antecedent statement. He closes it defeatedly, only to look up to find Stede’s expression, intense as it is loving. His gut constricts with the threat of another date with Stede’s black-spattered toilet bowl even as he smiles.
“It was its own world,” Stede whispers, soft in comprehension.
“Wondered if you had a deficit in picking up implications,” Izzy jokes, an attempt at levity as his hair raises, his stomach settles, and his lungs filled with air laced in Stede, Stede, fucking Stede. “That’s– yeah. Don’t think I could’ve found the words for it like that, but that’s– what it’s like.”
Which is barely a sentence, yet Stede pets Izzy’s back and assures, “I understand, Israel.”
With his touch, everything fades out. Izzy slips his leathers down to free his tail. He slithers it over the rim of the tub. He dips its pointed end into the shimmery water. Sure enough, it’s pleasantly heated, cooling into tepidity the longer he waits. He’s not as elegant about stripping the cotton briefs, kicking them off of his scarred ankle.
He doesn’t realize it’s gone quiet until he sees Stede shift.
His eyes are sealed on Izzy’s cock, rocking oceans of lust, enough to flood the Earth for one hundred and fifty days. His fingers furl around his sleeve.
“Want something?” Izzy asks, giving his cock a perfunctory tug and somehow waking it from the dead. Stede swallows and shakes his head, the wide eyes of a liar. Izzy laughs at him because it’s a pathetic display, seeing him stiffen with need under his loosely tied dressing gown, yet cowering from it. “Thou shalt not deceive.”
Wavelets form all around Izzy as he finally dips into the water, wings folded at his back until he manages to sit up enough to spread them out a bit. Water drips onto the floor.
“Ah.” Stede’s hands flap uselessly. “Izzy, there’s water. Izzy- you’re getting-”
“Get a bigger tub, then, Bonnet,” Izzy sighs, muscles relaxing with the hot water.
“You really are rotten,” Stede says under his breath. He leans into Izzy’s tilted his head back onto the rim of the tub. He squints his flighty, clouded eyes. The corner of his mouth twitches.
Foolishly, Izzy thinks Stede might kiss him for a second, but his lips move away within the same second they begun to hover. His tongue darts out to wet them, then he’s mouthing swears until he finds the soapy rag he’d been fiddling with when Izzy first entered. The expectation must be a derivative of delusion alone, the pinnacle of wishful thinking.
“That more of your lavender soap?” Izzy asks.
“That would be it, yes,” Stede says softly. All that bother about the floor getting wet seems to have reduced to nothing. He dabs at Izzy’s neck with the warm cloth. It’s the same set he’d used to clean them up of spunk just a couple of nights before, soft and gold.
They lapse into quiet, save for Stede humming a song, one distinctly not anything Izzy remembers from Edward’s diverse music taste. He can admit that it’s pretty fucking nice, relaxing like this, and his eyes even shut at a point in time he can’t place. He only notices when the humming stops that he’s shut his eyes and he cracks one open to find that the relaxing circles Stede’s been scrubbing into him have reached his abdomen, just hovering there, as Stede stares.
“I already asked, but I’ll ask again,” Izzy says. “Do you fuckin’ want something, Bonnet?”
“Your leg,” Stede breathes. It’s only partially a lie. Izzy lifts it. He remembers the procedure of being washed well. Stede’s hold on him is firm. Edward’s was too gentle. He grasped Izzy like he feared he’d break him with too harsh of a touch, but Izzy feared he’d break if Edward didn’t keep a solid grip of him.
Edward couldn’t uphold it anyhow and ended up sobbing into Izzy again about ten minutes after he’d been cleaned and wrapped in his clothes, so it hadn’t become much of an issue.
“You’ve got quite a bit of hair,” Stede observes with a worshipful note in his voice, soft-spoken like a compliment to Izzy’s masculinity. Izzy thinks about how his arm is in biting range. He could also just snap the bone with sheer will, but it wouldn’t have the same effect. “I wouldn’t have even known it!”
“Yeah, you’re the only one parading around like a harlot in your robe and nothing else.” Izzy gestures to Stede with a dripping, soapy hand, who happens to be in that exact scantily clad get-up. “And yet I tempted you.”
“You- you touched me, Izzy! And you licked my ear! Constantly!” Stede accuses shrilly. “Those are sensitive!”
“I noticed,” Izzy replies evenly, but he can hear the grin in his voice just as he can feel it, melting the ice that’s formed in the cold cavernous chasm within him.
“Go- go-” Stede stutters, eyes noticeably fixed on Izzy’s chest, “go suck eggs in Hell!”
“That’s what you’ve got?” Izzy raises a brow. “Suck eggs in Hell.”
“That’s on the itinerary somewhere, I imagine,” Stede says solemnly, dragging his soapy towel up Izzy’s leg and back up to his chest. He makes pointless circles with his wash towel, soaping up Izzy’s tits. “Your piercings here are extraordinary. Ed has those, too. You’re beautiful. A work of art.”
“Christ,” Izzy groans, switching his legs and relishing in the brush of his thighs against his thickening cock. “Just fucking finish your job here, Stede.”
“Oh, dear,” Stede murmurs when the movement tears his eyes from the titanium barbells pierced through his nipples. “What happened there?”
Izzy follows his eyes to the branded ring around his ankle.
“Aforementioned cage,” Izzy says.
Stede’s face creases with a frown, but he doesn’t reply. The warm, damp rag presses gingerly against scar tissue. His hair raises at the rough texture against sensitive skin. He grinds his teeth, his wings shaking out with it and spattering everything within a six-foot radius with water.
“Oh, Izzy.” Stede’s disappointment is akin to that of a dog owner who found shit on their favorite rug, but love the dog too much to discipline it properly. He adds more soap, rubbing it until suds start to drip in bubbly globs into the lilac water. “You’ve just got water everywhere again.”
“Fuck, Stede, then stop–” Izzy’s breath catches as Stede’s bare fingertips trail over the scar. “You- Stede, it’s sensitive, for fuck sake.”
“Is it?” Stede raises his eyebrows, licks his lips, then carries on to clean the top of Izzy’s foot. He starts up a song again, different this time, one to which Izzy can hear the steady drumbeat without any need for more than the melody in Stede’s breathless, somewhat shit humming.
“Never break the chain,” Izzy murmurs as Stede hums. Stede beams at him.
“What?” Stede’s face lights up with exuberant delight. “How do you– do you listen to music, Israel?”
“I’ve known people who do,” Izzy says.
Edward likes that song, Izzy wants to say instead, but then Stede would question him like he always does, and there’s no fucking way that I’ve been in his head will be an ample excuse every time. He’s made a whole fucking mess by trying to keep himself guarded, boxes upon bags of shit he’ll need to unpack eventually.
“That’s lovely. I love that song. That band."
Stede shuffles around the tub until he’s behind Izzy, rubbing more circles in his back over welt marks that match the old, faded ones Izzy’s spotted on Stede’s back when he showers.
Then he brushes the end of it to the membrane of Izzy’s wing. They shudder again, flinging more droplets onto the tile. Stede makes a soft, awed sound. “Oh. Bit sensitive here, too, are we?”
Izzy’s heart pounds. He feels every fiber of the cloth. White-hot sparks shoot from the point of contact and sizzle through Izzy’s body, his cock fattening with a rush of blood that follows the fire licking through him. “Yeah, Bonnet. There too.”
“You’re a wonder.”
Izzy swallows down his instinct to bare his teeth to the ugly face of affection. He unfurls his wings as much as possible. The left cramps uncomfortably with the wall in his way. He doesn’t focus on that. Stede’s got this sensual, gentle pressure rubbing down the arm of his right wing. His breath comes in heavier as Stede treats him like something that could break. He can’t break, yet he shakes like a leaf for it.
The humming gets broken, crackly, when he moves onto Izzy’s other wing. Somehow, Izzy listens to it with no animosity for its unpleasant tone; somehow, Stede’s poor attempts at maintaining his composure drive him wilder. The poor guy’s nearly panting when he next speaks. “And your… intimate extremities, I imagine you don’t wish for me to–”
Izzy rises out of the water, slowly enough that only some water splashes onto the shag bathroom rug outside of the tub. It puts Stede perfectly at eye-level with his cock. The fussy bitch of a man doesn’t even seem to notice the water displacement. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. There exists a new language between them, a link that leaves little need for words.
Stede traces the soapy towel over blood-swelling flesh, following the curve of Izzy’s cock, rubbing circles over his balls, a new reverence in his touch that Izzy thought he was only capable of dedicating to the Lord God, our Heavenly Father, Izzy reads from the canvas knocked askew on the wall.
“You’re so perfect here,” Stede rasps as he holds up Izzy’s cock with his hand wrapped in the wash towel, as though it’ll protect him from the inherent depravity hanging in the air, tainting their breath, soiling their blood. “God, just look at you, Israel.”
“What the fuck,” Izzy says, cock throbbing in Stede’s hold even as his hand remains suspended in inertia. Stede regards him hungrily, like he’s one of his fucking sweet baked goods, a delicacy to devour. Its intensity is tenfold as he brushes it over Izzy’s hole. Izzy’s tail twitches wildly, wings still trembling with nothing more than the ghost of Stede’s attention on them. “Stede. You want to fuck me?”
“Oh.” Stede is so affected that his hands twitch and he drops the towel into the bath. Izzy fights a laugh, even as he feels fresh droplets spray, then drip down his legs from the splash. “Um. Is that… that’s allowed?”
“What the– allowed by– yes, Stede, it’s fucking allowed,” Izzy gripes. Only Stede would ask some shit like that. Izzy loses his patience and steps out of the bath
“Ah.” Stede ushers away to get a towel.
It’s a damn good thing he does, too, because Izzy shakes off the water and sprays just about everything but startled Stede Bonnet, who shields himself with his towel and makes feebly affronted noises from behind its protection. He keeps going until he finds he’s amply dried, even if the rest of the bathroom remarkably is not.
“Now my stockings are going to get soaked, Izzy,” Stede laments, staring at the white tiles covered in water, ranging from droplets to puddles. “And you’re still wet!”
“I’m not–” Izzy looks down at himself. He is still wet.
He doesn’t bother to warn Stede for his second series of side-to-side twists, wings flapping obnoxiously until he rights them and stands up straight. He’s only got a few droplets clinging to his skin now.
Stede is hiding behind his towel again. “Are you done?”
“Yeah,” Izzy says, plucking the robe from under Stede’s arm. Stede only then lifts his head to watch as Izzy pulls a magic trick, making his most obnoxious demonic traits disappear. He slips on the robe and feels it whisper at his ankles. It’s extraordinary, but Stede’s just staring, parted lips and needy eyes. Izzy just goes for it.
Stede is surprisingly easy to pick up, save for the way he jerks and thrashes and screams. “Put me down! Unhand me, now! Israel!”
Izzy smiles fondly throughout. “I thought you didn’t want your stockings wet, Stede. Could put you down in the bath.”
“No!” Stede shrieks, squirming even more, a direct contradiction.
“Keep fucking moving and I just might!” Izzy snaps. He lifts Stede higher in the air just for show as he takes him to the bedroom.
“I didn’t even get to drain the bath!” Stede whines.
Izzy slams the door open with a lift of his finger. “I’m sure it’ll be taken care of.”
He narrowly dodges Stede’s shoes. He swishes the curtains back with the same twitch of his finger. He unfurls he loose tie of Stede’s robe with another half-hearted flick. He drops him onto the bed.
Rather than shouting, he only gasps as his back hits the mattress. Everything moves with it, cock slapping his belly, freckled thighs and light-haired tits jiggling the bit of softness they’ve got.
He’s fucking royalty, shrouded in gold, something only of dreams.
“Can’t imagine you’ve got any lube,” Izzy mutters. He dives between Stede’s legs without a moment’s hesitation. He takes as much as he can down his throat. Stede shouts and jerks, but Izzy anticipates it. He moves back the moment he hears the whine begin in Stede’s throat, scarcely avoiding another gag reflex incident.
(Has Izzy yet mentioned he fucking hates Jack Rackham?)
If he closes his eyes, doesn’t breathe, he can try to pretend that it’s Ed whose legs he lays between as Ed patiently trains him to take and hold his dick on his tongue, to make a good hole for skullfucking, to be a good dog, Iz.
He can try, but Stede’s presence is indelible. It’s heavy in the air, his scent hanging heavy as Izzy buries his face in blonde pubes and drools over his cock, only a slight musk to him where Ed would have a mind-numbing amount, where Jack would have a nauseating amount. Stede’s breathing is labored, his whiny voice letting out a stream of prayer that Izzy can’t even discern as English.
Because it’s not, he realizes a minute later. It’s fucking Latin. He’s repeating the same thing.
“Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison,” gasps Stede, fingers clutching the rosary at his throat, somehow finding a final prayer within its blessed beads, whispering it like its conduit. Izzy growls and pops off. An excessive amount of drool spills from his mouth. It slowly drips down the fully stiff length of Stede’s prick.
“You trying to fucking exorcise me, Stede?”
“No,” Stede gasps. His eyes lie not on Izzy, but on the drop of spit that's slid down the base of him. “No, I'm- oh, God, Izzy, your mouth- I'm trying to pray.”
“Fuck did I tell you, Stede?” Izzy warns in a reedy drag, lifting his head away from between pasty thighs. “I’m your fucking God now.”
He draws his hand back like he’ll hit Stede where it’ll hurt, right in his big, stupid dick.
Stede flinches. He lets out a hoarse, afraid sound, his hands covering his eyes. Izzy drops the threat immediately, an onslaught of memories not his own reaching his head. He remembers soft, faded scars at Stede’s back, harrowing memories he catches hints of like a scent carried downstream.
However hot it might’ve been is forgotten. “Stede. Open your eyes.”
Stede’s lip quivers and one squints open, then his whole body relaxes, tension only noticeable as it fades out. His eyes are vulnerable, widening as Izzy shifts their positioning. He gasps as Izzy puts his knees next to his hips. Izzy reaches his hands back, spreading himself open and using his tail to align Stede’s blunt cockhead to his hole. Stede’s breaths come in heavier at once. He’s leaking pre-ejaculate without Izzy even needing to put in any work. “Doesn’t that need– preparation?”
“Don’t know,” Izzy says, feigning thoughtfulness with a furrow of his brow and an aversion of his eyes, a distinctly human gesture as he roves over the floor like it’ll blare his answer. He plummets, then, and listens blissfully to the sharp sound of all the air leaving Stede’s body as Izzy houses his cock in too-tight warmth. He filters out as much of the pain as he’s able whilst honing in on the pleasure of being full. “Been wanting this ridiculous thing in me for fucking ages.”
“Why do you sound so cross about it then?” Stede asks, words well strung despite the quaver in his tone. He starts to thrust like an instinct, the same way he’s fucked his fist. Izzy feels stomach twisting pride at that, like all of his hard work has made the wooden puppet become a real boy, from that story he’s read to the children. “Are you so rotten you can’t enjoy it?”
Before, he’d stunk with shame. Now Izzy only breathes in lustful delight from Stede. Now, Izzy’s riding Father Stede Bonnet’s prick in his bed like he’s got a fucking gun to his head, shimmying free of silk fabric to display himself for the unruly, wretched thing he is.
“No one fuckin’ said I wasn’t enjoying it,” Izzy hisses, almost as breathless as Stede. He takes him apart with precision, as if he last rode a dick yesterday and not over a month ago. Like riding a bicycle, Ed said the first time they fucked after Izzy was freed from Hell. “Clearly you are. Look at you.”
Stede’s face contorts, a mix of poorly faked disdain and adoration so fervent it bleeds from his eyes and his lips in crow’s feet and flashes of teeth. “I absolutely am not.”
“Right, ‘cause that’s the face of someone who h– ho- fuck–”
He shouldn’t have run his fucking mouth. Stede’s sitting up with core strength that Izzy wouldn’t expect from a gut as soft as his. He’s right in Izzy’s space. He’s holding his fingers just barely to Izzy’s wings. With each drop of his hips, Stede’s cock splitting him open, those fingers trace over him, featherlight.
Izzy could play it like it’s Edward below him, all the rubbing on his wings and toying with his nipples, but it’s undeniably Stede. It’s careful, testing the waters, flicking at the barbell piercings in his nipples because they’re novel. Izzy’s cock sways into nothing under all the attention in what, so he braces his weight on Stede’s shoulder and wraps his prick snug in his shaking hand. “Fuck you, Bonnet.”
“I believe I’m fucking you, actuall-”
“I’m going to kill you if you don’t– hnng-h- shut up,” Izzy strains, claw-jagged nails digging into the skin of Stede’s neck. He grabs a fistful of golden fabric and tries his damndest not to tear the shit to shreds. He knows it’s Stede’s favorite. His battle jacket. “Stupid fucking Stede Bonnet.”
“Yours truly,” Stede replies, cheery even through his huffed breaths. His cock throbs and pulses with the threat of dumping its load in Izzy. He’s holding back, Izzy faintly realizes as he, too, holds the floodgates of his orgasm with a force that’d burst the blood vessels of the average human. Izzy squeezes the base to stave it off further, even as his wings tremble under Stede’s caresses, every firm brush making Izzy’s plummy head drip slick over his fingers.
“You are mine, aren’t you?” Izzy starts talking, mindless on the pain-pleasure as he loses his focus on the plethora of tasks in favor of one objective: taking Stede apart. “You were mine since I looked at you. Since I fucking smelled your shame, you were mine, Bonnet. You’re my bitch, aren’t you?”
He thinks of Edward, then. He carries on with a wild pace, his demonic instinct to conquer and take from man overtaking him. Stede’s eyes are blown huge, his hands grasping at Izzy, one at his tit, one at his wing with enough pressure to make a lump form in Izzy’s throat at the overwhelming rush of stimulus.
“That’s right,” Izzy growls, heart pounding in his throat, dick pulsing in his hand as he keeps a blanched-knuckle grip on himself. “Father Bonnet, all wrapped around the finger of a demon.”
“Israel,” Stede wails, despondent.
Izzy’s lived long enough to learn quick; Stede just needs that one extra push, and so Izzy leans forward and laps at the lobe of his ear once, then whispers, “Show me you’re my bitch, Stede.”
Stede slams into him, repeated, grinding thrusts that resonate in Izzy’s entire body. He cries out loud enough to wake the other side of the planet, to disturb Heaven and Hell, and cums with tears streaming down his face, hot pulses shot into Izzy like geysers.
It’s as though Stede shot the force of his orgasm right through Izzy, too, because Izzy’s whole body locks and tightens around Stede’s cock, jolting him into a mind-wiping rupture of his own that leaves him clutching at Stede, breath coming heavy. He feels, vaguely, as his cock empties in his hand, on Stede’s chest, but the scratch of Stede’s hair against his face is most of what he focuses on.
“Creature of sin,” Stede’s saying as he locks one last time, then tightens enough for Stede’s cock to slide out. The vulgar noise of his body still grasping for nothing as it slaps Stede’s thigh wetly brings Izzy back to the present. He manages to open his eyes.
Stede is watching him, the whole fucking cosmos in his eyes, like Izzy’s really a wonder.
Then he takes Izzy’s hand, but it’s the wrong one, the one ugly and brutalized from the scorching touch of the angel who set him free, and he presses his lips to it softly, kissing raised scar tissue.
“Who are you,” Stede murmurs sweetly into his skin, “Israel?”
Adoration rings beneath his words. It sounds like he really wants to know.
An outburst of dry sobs startles Izzy just as much as it does Stede, who fumbles and panics, taking him in his arms stiffly. No tears fall, no words form. There’s only constricting weight in his throat, heavy and sinking him into Stede gradually, accepting the soothing rubs on the small of his back. Stede eventually does relax, too.
“Oh, Izzy,” Stede says softly. Izzy’s body wracks as he sucks in rattled breaths. “It’s okay, Izzy, you’re alright. Was it too much?”
“No,” Izzy says hoarsely, his focus solely on lavender-scented love. “Just a fucking lot.”
“You’ve seldom experienced affection,” Stede observes. He doesn’t even let Izzy keep a bit of his dignity by phrasing it like a question. It leaves no room for rebuttal, but at least it means Izzy doesn’t have to confirm it to be true. He can at least shrug it off, even as he lets Stede’s arms guide him down onto the bed, more of an answer than any spoken word. “I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. I’m not sure what happened. With your hand, I mean.”
“Set free,” Izzy tells him, hoping the words will be lost as he shifts their position to spoon Stede. Easier that way, with the appendages always getting in the way when Stede tries to hold him. He doesn’t want the sharp points of his wings to cut the bastard.
“What?” Stede’s confusion is so palpable Izzy feels as though he’s looking at his puzzled expression, even as he keeps his eyes buried within the satin quilt. “Set- I’m sorry, free from what, exactly.”
Izzy sees it before he answers. “Cage.”
“Oh,” Stede says quietly. “You’ve said a bit about cages. Were you– kept as a prisoner, or something?”
“Not now,” Izzy mumbles, trying to cling onto the firm press of Stede’s body, rather than any sense memories overtaking him.
“If not now, then when, dearest?”
Izzy chooses not to answer, but he does take Stede’s limp hand and place it over his burnt one. He conjures up the willpower to at least throw him a bone. “Angel did that.”
“Angel– who’s– an angel, or someone who is called Angel, or- or do you have someone–”
“An actual angel, fuck sake,” Izzy sighs. “Can’t remember his name. I knew it when he touched me, fucking– felt like it exploded in my mind for a second, then it was gone, and I was just left with a burnt hand and- broken shackle.”
“How peculiar,” Stede mumbles, but he squeezes the back of Izzy’s hand appreciatively, gratitude that Izzy’s telling him anything at all. “Why would an angel seek to free you?”
“I have no fucking idea. Something about purpose.” Izzy flexes his fingers in Stede’s soft grip.
“Purpose?” Stede echoes, rubbing his thumb in circles.
“And it burnt your hand?” Stede presses on. His voice is soft, wary, like pressing Izzy at all is sailing treacherous waters.
“Not on purpose,” Izzy specifies. “Just a thing that happens, with angels and demons and that.”
“I’m… not sure I understand,” Stede confesses, his voice apologetic enough that Izzy chooses not to meet it with derision. “An angel pulled you out of Hell to– to carry out your purpose?”
“Seems that way.” Izzy’s exasperation starts to bleed into his voice until floral redolence drives it off. He realizes, then, how little he wants to think about all this, how shit a time it is to start unpacking his baggage, when Stede’s got work in the morning. “Go to sleep, Stede.”
Stede stiffens. “Alrighty.”
“I’ll tell you all of it, one day. Just not when you have work in the morning.”
“Okay,” Stede whispers. “Do you promise?”
Izzy rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Go to sleep.”
“Okay.”
Stede kisses the hand again, and then the home of Stede Bonnet lapses into silence, save for sound of his voice, whispering sleep talk like secrets, and the sound of Izzy’s in turn, replying maudlin shit to Stede’s nonsense, cradling his body like an emerald fragment.