Chapter Text
It’s the night after Charlestown. Flint’s drunk.
He’s so drunk he doesn’t even want to fight that thought when it comes. He’s drunk. His thoughts are little tinkling pieces of glass.
It’s not helping, though. He still sees it every time he closes his eyes. Every time he blinks.
Miranda, crumpling uselessly and terribly to the floor. Miranda, halfway through screaming the kind of curse that would have come straight out of his own mouth, with that suspended, slack look on her face. Miranda, with a hole in her brilliant head.
There’s a noise - door opening. The door’s not supposed to open. He’s the fucking captain.
Flint goes for his pistol. His hand, as always, is solid, steady as a rock. It’s just his brain that’s in flooded pieces.
He cocks the pistol. It makes that sound, that delicate little gear-shifting sound that Flint, despite all his best and worst efforts, can’t seem to stop loving.
It’s Vane, in the door. Shouldering through it like he owns the place, leaning up against the frame with no fear on his face at all. It’s a bit insulting.
“Making good time,” Vane says from the door in that voice that Flint has always thought affected. “Day early, looks like.”
“Fine,” Flint says, and turns back to his rum. It’s spilled on his desk, a bit.
“You are fucking drunk,” Vane observes from the doorway with something like amusement in his voice.
“Anything else?” Flint says, and he’s proud of himself, how steady it sounds. Like he’s - well, not sober. But like he’s not hanging on to the will to live by a single scrap of thread. Maybe.
“Yeah,” Vane says, and fuck him, he’s walking in. He’s closing the goddamn door. He’s pointing at the bottle of rum and his hands are still covered in the blood of Flint’s fucking captors. “Share that.”
Flint scoffs but Vane’s pulling up a chair, ignoring him and leaning forward and reaching for the bottle.
Flint remembers he’s got the gun in his hand and levels it at him.
Vane freezes, moves slow. He’s looking hard at Flint, probably harder than he ever has - though a gun in your face tends to do that, Flint thinks.
“Call it payment,” Vane says, and it’s almost like he’s grinning. Flint looks down at Vane’s big bloody hands again. Hard to say no after that.
“Then you leave,” Flint says, harshly. He hands the bottle to Vane, who nods. There’s a streak of dirt or gunpowder on the side of Vane’s temple. It makes his face, at the right angle in the low light, look hollow as a skull.
“Then I leave,” he says, taking a long drink out of the bottle and putting his feet up on Flint’s desk.
“Why did you come?” Flint asks, almost immediately. His words string together a little, but he figures it he slouches a little bit he can get away with that.
“Because I suspected you were drinking yourself to death in here,” Vane says, with a shrug and a tilt of his head, “And I was thirsty.”
“Why did you come,” Flint clarifies, “to Charlestown.”
Vane puts the bottle back on the desk. Flint has to lean past Vane’s legs to get it.
It’s much lighter now. Flint hesitates a fraction of a second - Vane’s mouth was just here, which he isn’t thinking about, except that it was, and the mouth of the bottle is probably still wet from it.
“I told you,” Vane says simply, with a shake of his head like that ought to be the end of it.
Flint puts his mouth on the bottle. It gives him an odd little - shiver, almost. To do it. Disgust, maybe.
Vane confounds him. He’s too straightforward, uncomplicated and alarmingly unsentimental, and yet Flint’s seen him with Eleanor Guthrie, with Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny.
“She was your wife, was she?” Vane asks simply, easily, and somehow Flint isn’t prepared for it.
For a moment - just one single moment, two heartbeats - he’d not been thinking of her. The abrupt ending of her last sentence. The empty staring eyes of her afterwards.
Guilt floods into his chest, sticky and cold. Familiar. He wants to apologize to her, suddenly. I forgot you. For one second just one I forgot you, and I felt relief, and I hate myself for it.
Vane looks at him, watches whatever must be showing on his face. Flint cannot stand to be looked at just now. He cannot control what happens to his expression and he feels exposed, vulnerable. Weak.
“Get out,” he spits at Vane, in the kind of voice that he’s seen men piss themselves over. “Leave.”
Vane looks entirely unimpressed. He says nothing in response, doesn’t even glance at the gun on the desk between them. He leans forward, grabs the bottle out of Flint’s hand.
Flint shocks himself by letting Vane take it.
He’s not sure he’d win, if he fought Vane just now. Bizarrely, the thought calms something in him.
This day - this monstrous, unending day - has reduced him to barely his component parts. There’s a good reason not to give up so quickly, but Flint is so tired and so drunk and he can’t quite remember what it is, so he answers the question.
“She was -“ my best friend, he wants to say. The last thread to the person I was. The only thing left of the love of my fucking life.
“My wife,” he finishes. “Yeah.”
Vane grunts, holds the bottle up as if in a toast and takes a long drink. Flint nods at him.
There’s a beat of silence, and the waves on the hull of the ship, and the men above deck, and Miranda’s ghost, trying to finish its sentence.
“Not quite wife, seems like,” Vane says, and Flint feels a sharp stab of fear at that and rage right on its heels, searches Vane’s face for something accusatory, looks for what he’s really saying. He finds nothing at all, just plain observation. He’s watching Flint. His eyes are much sharper than Flint had realized.
Flint says nothing.
“Did you fuck her?” Vane asks, and Flint is so caught off guard by it that he can’t even summon the proper anger at the sheer audacity of the question. He gives it a shot anyway.
“What the fuck-”
“Inland,” Vane clarifies. “Before. When you’d come home.”
Flint’s skin prickles. He looks briefly, heavily, at the gun on the desk. Vane doesn’t. His eyes stay on Flint, steady and unrepentant, like he hasn’t just asked how Flint fucked his dead wife hours after losing her.
There had been a few times - when she couldn’t stand it anymore, mostly. When she needed it, the closeness, the release of it. When he did. But that had often been more of a séance than sex. Summoning Thomas between them.
“Yes,” Flint says even though that’s not quite right, so drunk and so adrift and holding on to any chance to talk about her. Miranda. Miranda.
“Why is it you never say what you fucking mean?” Vane asks, and drains the bottle. Hands it back.
He hadn’t expected this: this perceptiveness from Vane. It makes his eyebrows draw together, makes him tilt his head. The whole ship tilts with it.
Flint wordlessly ducks into his desk drawer for the other bottle.
“Y’know sometimes,” Vane says as he takes the bottle, “Jack gets this look about him.”
“Rackham,” Flint says, and the room is spinning. His thoughts are getting harder and harder to keep together. It’s getting harder and harder not to treat Vane as a friend, simply because he’s here. Simply because he’d been there at Charlestown.
Vane nods.
“Too clever,” Vane says, smiling with just his eyes in a way Flint has never seen on his face before, “And not half as clever as he thinks. You’ve met him.”
Flint huffs. It could have been a laugh, yesterday.
“Man like Jack, his mind doesn’t stop,” Vane continues, and it’s probably the most Flint has heard him talk. “Gets loud, in there. All those thoughts. Crowded. I expect you know about it.”
It’s strange, how he says it. It almost sounds complimentary.
The rocking of the ship is softer, now. Moving how she moves when the wind’s with her and the sea is smooth. Flint relaxes with her, like he always does. It’s a reflex, almost.
“So he gets this look sometimes, Jack,” Vane says, and he settles a bit into his chair. Makes himself comfortable, spreads his legs a little where they’re still kicked up on Flint’s desk. “When it’s too…. Needs it fucked out of him.”
Flint blinks. Something rushes up in him: shock, mostly. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“I like doing it,” Vane says, and he holds his hand out over the lamp on Flint’s desk. Flint watches the flame lick over his fingers. “I like not doing it more, though.”
Flint chances a look at Vane’s face. He’s looking at the lamp, too. The bottle is between them.
“Y’know if you wait long enough,” Vane says, and his voice seems to have gotten lower, Flint can feel it in his chest, “It takes him over. Never seen anything like it, written all over his face in broad daylight.”
Another pause, and then, very low, “Hadn’t expected to see that look on you.”
For a second, Flint feels himself just staring. Stupidly. Shocked and nothing else.
Then he says, in a wooden sort of voice, “What the fuck did you just say?”
Vane’s mouth curves, and his head tilts, and for a moment the death-mask of his face looks … arresting. He’s still got blood all over him and Flint can’t stop thinking about how it got there.
“A captain’s got no equals, does he?” Vane asks, and he looks straight at Flint. Holds his gaze there for a long time.
“No,” Flint finally says, and then, with a tremble in his chest, “He doesn’t.”
“I’m not averse,” Vane says, and Flint marvels at it: his ability to be so entirely straightforward, his total lack of shame or subtext.
It’s … refreshing. Stabilizing, somehow. Sobering, too, a bit.
“I am,” Flint lies.
“Why?”
Just like that. No disappointment, no anger, no embarrassment. Vane simply wants to know.
Flint balls his hands up into fists. He feels like he’s going to spill over with feeling: grief, guilt, mind-erasing rage. Entertaining the idea of - of -
He looks over at Vane’s hands again. The bloody knuckles, the wide palms.
He shakes his head, keeps his lips pressed tight together. Every muscle in his body is screaming with tension.
He’s never had it, what Vane is offering. Thomas -
He swallows, reaches for the second bottle. Vane watches him in silence. He seems completely at ease. He even pushes the bottle into Flint’s hand.
Thomas was the closest. Touched him gently, fucked him, with care and certainty, gave him safety and a place to let go. Held him with those clean hands, kissed him with that kind mouth. God, Miranda, I miss him. I miss you.
But Vane is not Thomas. Vane’s hands are just as bloody as Flint’s are, and just as strong, too. Stronger, maybe.
“Huh,” Vane says, tilting his head, and Flint looks up at him with what he knows is a caught expression. “Hm.”
Flint says, bricking up his own face, “What.”
“‘S different, isn’t it,” Vane says, and he still hasn’t moved, still looks like he owns this ship, like this is his room. “Giving it up when you know you’re stronger.”
How the fuck did he -
“But here,” Vane says, and finally kicks his feet off the desk, sets them down on the floor with a thud of heavy boots, throws around his full weight like to call attention to it, “You don’t know.”
Flint grinds his teeth.
Vane adds, taunting, “You might not be. Hm?”
“I might be,” Flint finds himself saying, unable not to.
Vane shrugs one shoulder as if to say, Believe what you want . It makes something twitch in Flint’s chest.
It’s alarming, how very perceptive Vane seems to be about this one particular thing.
“I’m not averse,” Vane says again, and this time looks pointedly at Flint and waits.
Flint swallows, finds himself saying nothing. He feels - odd. Quieter than before, after considering this. Maybe it’ll help, to think about something else.
Vane’s mouth curves up. He gestures for the bottle, curls his fingers in this way that Flint can’t help watching.
“Gimme that,” he says, and his voice is completely different. It’s softer, infinitely more affectionate, intimate as if they’re close friends, or more. It astounds Flint entirely.
The thing about fucking at sea, Flint’s found, is that it isn’t like this. So often the men are so wrapped up in forgetting who they’re actually fucking that they barely even do it, and it seems deeply impersonal, perfunctory. It’s why he doesn’t do it. It’s one of the reasons.
But Vane’s tone of voice, the way he leans forward, the way he keeps his eyes on Flint as he lifts the bottle to his lips, it’s - blatantly seductive. Flint simply had not anticipated this from him at all.
“You’re too slow on your left side,” Vane says, still in that strange, soft voice. His eyes are dark.
“I fucking am not,” Flint says, because he isn’t - his left side is much stronger, he’d trained it that way-
“Not with your sword,” Vane says, “With your hands.”
“Oh.” Flint swallows. He’s suddenly very thirsty. He holds out his hand for the bottle and Vane passes it to him, more carefully this time. Slower.
“An injury, I’d guess,” Vane says, and it’s so quiet it’s almost hard to hear him without leaning forward. Flint refuses to do that. “Your shoulder?”
Flint does not trust Vane with this information, so he tries to steer him away from it. He puts the bottle within Vane’s reach - he isn’t willing to hand it directly to him.
“You should have kept your eyes on your own fucking fights,” he says.
Vane shrugs.
“Rare opportunity,” he says, utterly relaxed, “Worth seeing.”
Flint’s blood warms. It’s ridiculous that it does, but the way Vane is talking and the way he’s sitting and the weight of his expression, they’re all doing something to Flint.
“Distracting,” Vane continues, grinning. Still with that voice like he’s talking a fucking princess into bed. “You’ve got the best parry, you know. Doesn’t show your injury at all.”
Flint feels the corner of his mouth turn up a little.
Vane watches it, his mouth. With his eyes still on it he murmurs, “Does it still hurt?”
And the thing is, Flint’s starting to feel it. The tone of Vane’s voice. The softness of it. It’s wearing something away in him, and all his seams are so unsteady now to begin with, and -
Flint says nothing. For a long time.
They fall into a strange, precipitous silence, and for a long time, all Flint focuses on is the creak of the Walrus under him, and the push-drag of waves on the hull, and that godforsaken gunshot. Miranda. Miranda.
God, he’s tired.
“Everything hurts,” he finally admits, quietly, a traitor to himself.
Vane nods. Hands him the bottle back again. Barely moves his fingers out of the way when he does it, so the sides of them brush up against the sides of Flint’s. Just a reminder of the heat of him, the closeness of him.
It is bizarre and startling and more than a little terrifying to be so openly seduced like this. Here. By this man.
This is … not what Flint expected Vane to be. The novelty of it, in spite of everything, thrills him.
Vane takes up so much space in the chair, in the office. He looks too big for this ship.
Flint takes a drink of the bottle, feels Vane’s eyes on his throat as he swallows. His ears ring when he’s done.
“What are you doing?” Flint asks, in a voice that’s not what he’d intended it to be.
Vane shrugs one shoulder.
“I’ve never fought next to you before,” he says, like that’s an answer. It seems to be, to him. “I liked it.”
He smells like blood, overwhelmingly. In the low light, with the way he’s sitting and the blood on his neck, he looks like he could pin Flint to the floor of this cabin with one hand.
It’s terrifying, when the thought comes. Mortifying. And in front of someone, too. The fucking weakness of it -
But he’s so, so tired.
Vane watches this play out on his face. He tilts his head and makes a considering noise.
“Show me,” he says, and gets up, “Your shoulder.”
Flint shakes his head. “N- ”
“Show me.”
Vane is standing. He’s fucking huge. Some instinct in Flint is telling him to fight. Some other instinct is - being ignored with increasing difficulty.
“What are you doing,” Flint hisses, and he aims for angry but ends up sounding desperate, exhausted. Everything hurts.
Vane shrugs again. He’s standing, leaned toward one end of the desk like he’s going to come around the corner of it and get us closer.
“Tired of sitting around,” Vane says, with another shrug and a dismissive little wave of his hand at Flint. “Tired of seeing whatever this is.”
Flint flushes with anger: it prickles hotly across his forehead, down his neck. His lip curls.
“Just fucking show it to me,” Vane says impatiently, annoyed, and -
He’s around the desk, now. And he’s putting a big hand on Flint’s shoulder and squeezing until he winces, then until he curses, until he tries to shove Vane off, until he blushes all the way to his chest when he can’t, then finally until he says, “ Alright .”
Vane stops, hand fever-hot through Flint’s shirt.
Finally, with his face flushed hot and embarrassed, Flint mutters, “‘S a bit… left.”
Jesus. He’s disastrously drunk.
Then Vane’s hands are finding that bit of scar tissue - the first bullet Flint ever took - and pressing out the muscle around it, smoothing over it and it fucking hurts, it feels incredible. A noise escapes him: a hiss, maybe. Hopefully.
Vane says, even softer than before, “Here?”
Flint swallows. It feels like the back of his neck is red, too. Vane can likely fucking see it.
Vane prompts, “Hm?”
Flint answers without thinking, “Yeah,” and then grits his teeth at the way it makes him feel, to say that.
Vane presses harder, in precisely the right spot, and Flint hears himself groan just a little.
Agony. This whole thing is agony.
“‘S a bullet wound,” Vane remarks, unbearably close, and it raises the hairs on Flint’s arms, “Isn’t it?”
Flint hasn’t been touched like this in a very, very long time. The way Vane’s doing it, the sheer size and strength of him, it’s. Something’s shifting, in him. The truth comes easier.
“Yeah,” he says, in a voice that’s suddenly very hoarse.
“This happen at sea?” Vane asks, in a voice pitched so exactly like a lover that Flint feels a chill go down his spine.
“No,” he hears himself say.
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.” There’s a sharp stab of rage and embarrassment when he feels himself hesitate on the word, but it’s getting harder to hold onto it.
“You have others since, I expect,” Vane says, and his voice behind Flint like this, his big hot hands pressing agonizing and perfect against Flint’s sorest places, the sightless presence of him directly behind Flint like this. God.
“I do,” he says, soft in a way he doesn’t want to have to consider anymore. He’s tired. Vane’s hands feel so fucking good. That’s all. That’s all.
There’s a pause, and Vane digs his thumb in hard. Christ, it hurts.
But then he lets go, and the muscle in Flint’s shoulder relaxes for the first time in so long that Flint cannot even quantify it. He groans in abject relief.
“Better?” Vane asks, with a smile in his voice.
“Yeah ,” Flint says easily, and it’s like a sigh. He feels a strange distance between himself and the room, like he’s moving through warm seawater.
“If I’d known this was all it took to make you so fucking agreeable,” Vane says, and his hands curl around Flint’s shoulder to his bicep, his collarbone, his neck. “I’d have done it a dozen times by now.”
They’re so fucking hot, Vane’s hands. It’s been so long since a man has touched him like this. So long. Christ.
Vane presses hard at the side of Flint’s neck, right where it meets his shoulder, and Flint’s tongue is loosened by drink and touch and the colossal weight of Charlestown and he says, with far more feeling than he likes, “Fuck.”
Vane laughs behind him, soft and low and practically pressed up against his back. Flint’s heart is sprinting in his chest.
“What are you doing?” Flint asks again, forcing his eyes not to close. They want to. “Why’re you doing that.”
“Shut up and let me do it, Christ,” Vane huffs, and then digs his fingers in hard and adds, “You’d think I was fucking keelhauling you.”
Flint groans again when Vane’s fingers go over the bullet wound.
“Or,” Vane murmurs, and he sounds shockingly pleased, smug and proud and Flint feels himself get warm all over. He’s positive now that it’s not from embarrassment.
Vane smells like dirt. Blood. Sweat, opium, sword oil. It’s odd - he doesn’t seem suited to the sea. Something about him is too close to the earth, too rooted in the body. It’s strange, novel. Appealing, in a way.
Flint is tired. He doesn’t want to think anymore. He doesn’t want to do anything. He might as well do this. Vane is warm, and they fought today. Side by side.
Fuck this. Fuck it. Fine.
“I’m,” Flint says, finally, exhausted heart lurching, trying for the nonchalance that’s never been his strong suit and remembering what Vane had said, “Not. Averse.”
Well. No taking it back now.