Chapter Text
The first time Izzy reappears, it’s in the kitchen of the inn. Stede has wandered down bleary-eyed after a very late night indeed, intending to rummage for breakfast in bed. He’s lit the fire, boiled the kettle, poured the water over a pot of tea leaves, and he’s digging through the pantry for marmalade—in the jar this time, with an appropriate spoon—when there’s a thunk from behind him that has him standing, spinning, and—
The whole world shrinks quite immediately down to the kitchen, and his breath stutters to a halt in his throat at the sight of the man. “Izzy?” he says, in utter disbelief.
“Who else, you twat?” He’s sitting on the kitchen counter, dressed in his usual black, swinging his legs and bumping the carved unicorn hoof into the cupboard. He’s got the same smug grin as ever, though it still holds the affection that grew in those last few days instead of the disdain it always held before.
Stede stares, and stares, mouth hanging open, until his brain catches up and asks what feels like the most pertinent question. “Tell me we didn’t bury you alive.”
Only two weeks ago, out there beside the road, where the cravat is still blowing in the breeze over the makeshift cross made from that very unicorn leg, which Izzy quite inexplicably still has. “Wouldn’t put it past you.” Izzy gives him a toothy grin, but then his expression goes wistful again. “No, I’m… I’m gone, but I’m here.”
“A ghost.”
Izzy holds up a very corporeal hand, turns it in the light. It’s entirely opaque, and it calls to mind a Badminton on the beach, shouting incoherent threats. “Of a sort.”
“You’ve come to haunt us,” Stede says. “Lovely.”
“Might’ve thought about burying me somewhere other than your front fucking garden.”
Well, that’s enough of that. He tugs his robe more tightly closed and nudges past Izzy, not daring to touch him, digging into the bread box for yesterday’s loaf. “Edward wanted to keep you close.” It sounds odd to say it like that, but it’s true. He turns back and meets Izzy’s eye, feeling that same shiver of surprise run through him at how very real he seems. “So did I. Every co-captain—“
“Needs a mate, yeah.” Izzy scoffs. “Always been a sentimental bastard.”
Stede tilts his head. “I have been so accused once or twice.”
“I was talking about Edward.” Izzy hops down off the bench and takes one clomping step after another to peer out the window, toward the beach where the waves roll hard and fast against the shore. “Nice spot you found yourselves.”
“It is, now that the roof is fixed and we’ve sorted the… somewhat extensive dead rat situation in the ceiling.” The smell had lingered quite a bit, even after they’d traded off Ed stoically ditching mummified rats while Stede dry-heaved, and Stede carefully extracting a dozen or so spiders every time Ed screamed about it. “Very quiet. Haven’t had any guests at the inn yet—“
“Which is just as well, the racket you two make.”
Izzy’s grinning, and Stede finds his own lips twitching. “Had you turning over in your grave, did we?”
“Few times,” Izzy says. “Sure you had half the nearest cemetery up last night.”
Stede laughs. Can’t help it. He’s probably not wrong, because last night Ed had—at last—agreed to his begging and given him a turn at being taken apart and fucked to within an inch of his life, and Ed was, as Stede always knew he would be, utterly incredible at it. It was a transformative moment, and he’s a new man.
A few months ago, talking so easily to Izzy about such a personal topic would have felt as unlikely as standing here in the kitchen of their own personal inn, with Izzy dead.
The thought sobers him, and he gestures up and down Izzy’s still leather-clad torso. “Where’s all the blood, then?”
It had been soaking through his clothes on that last day at a rate Stede had never seen before, an inevitable outcome from the moment the bullet caught him in the gut. Soaking warm, pulsing, dark against dark, glistening wet on the deck of the ship, all over Ed’s hand, where he’d made a futile last effort to stem it as he sobbed out his pleas and apologies.
“Magically gone,” Izzy says. “I don’t make the rules, which is nice, for a change.”
“And yet you’ve still got a hoof.” Stede lets his brow rise bitchily, because he thinks, with a startling bit of clarity, that Izzy quite likes it when he does that. “Didn’t want the leg back on the other side of the veil?”
Izzy clomps closer, looks up into his eyes. This close, there’s a subtle sort of shine, a glow to his irises. “Liked this one better.”
He shuffles past, and Stede feels the old pang of grief strike him again. It’s been lingering, growing rather than diminishing, actually, since that somewhat subdued funeral. Because the leg was part of the ship, the Revenge still out there on the high seas without a literal figurehead. Because it was an act of kindness from the crew, a moment that brought them all back together after they’d been so thoroughly broken apart by their co-captains. Because it defined Izzy’s final days, being part of something when he’d always held himself apart, being loved, in whatever capacity was available.
Love does change things, as Stede knows all too well, but it’s not enough to stand in the way of fate. “Why are you here, Izzy? Just to eavesdrop on our lovemaking?”
Izzy drops into a chair at the dining table, and once again lifts that hoof and thunks it onto the wood, that little affectation that had become so common. “That’s just a bonus, Bonnet.” He shrugs. “I don’t know why I’m here. Some kind of unfinished business? Maybe the universe knows you still need me.”
He makes a passing attempt not to scoff at that. “You’re very welcome here, of course. But—"
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve got it all sorted now, I know.” His smile’s faint. “Suppose it’s more of an as needs must basis, and I don’t know what the need is any more than you do.”
“Huh.” He frowns, because nothing feels especially unresolved here. That day on the beach, he and Ed had quite literally fought their way back together with guns and swords, before they’d flung themselves into one another’s arms and kissed. Ed had told Stede he loved him, of course, and Stede had said he knew, because he had, even when they were apart, even when Ed had still been too bruised to hear it, let alone say it back. They’re intertwined, destined to be together.
Ed had read one of the letters, one of the most intensely romantic ones Stede had poured himself into, and thank god for that. We wrote our names on each other in permanent ink, god, when he’d felt that all was lost he’d truly let his pen run as if he had nothing more to regret, but last night Ed had murmured it against his skin, marked those words into his throat with a bruising kiss that is no doubt still starkly visible, and he’d said, gonna to ink you for real one day, babe, let the whole world know you’re mine—
“It’s still out there,” Izzy says softly. “Piracy, the Crown. Just because you left it behind doesn’t mean it’ll leave you.”
Stede snatches up the nearest knife—there are always several around—and takes to slicing the loaf of bread with a touch more urgency, carving off a pair of rough slices that he drops onto the pewter tray—one of many newly acquired things they’ve looted from all the abandoned buildings around the Republic this past week—and whacking the marmalade jar beside it. The tea he’d been making before his pantry expedition has fully steeped, and so he pours that into a pair of mismatched china cups on saucers, the collection of those gradually growing, and places each of them carefully on the tray, too, along with a dish overflowing with sugar cubes for Ed.
At last he looks up at Izzy again. “If the Crown seeks us out, we’ll knock it back. But until then, we’re retired. We’re going to live.” He goes to stalk haughtily out the door, but at the last moment Izzy’s hoof slings across and blocks his path. “Do you mind—“
He’s interrupted by an enormous crash as a section of lath and plaster ceiling falls in just on the other side of that door, right where he would have been standing, and he staggers back a step, miraculously managing not to spill the tea.
Ed’s voice floats down from the stairway, distant. “What the fuck was that?”
“Nothing, my sweetness! Just a little mess.” His heart’s still hammering, because one more step and all that would have landed directly on his head. He cuts a look to Izzy, who slowly lowers the hoof. “Did you make that happen?”
Izzy shakes his head, gives a wry laugh. “I wouldn’t have missed.”
“Izzy!”
“I’m joking. No, I didn’t—I didn’t know that was going to happen until the moment before you stepped there, and then I was compelled to block you, and—“
“You saved my life.”
He gives a shrug. “I’d say just returning the favour, but—"
“But we didn’t manage. Yes. I’m well aware, I dug part of that hole myself, before Jim took pity and finished it for you.”
“A real hero.” Death has reduced Izzy’s sarcasm not one bit. “Go on, then. Show Edward what else you can do with that mouth, when you’re not running it constantly.”
“Christ.” Stede rearranges his grip on the tray, straightens himself up. “I just might.”
He steps over the wreckage on the floor—another job for the list that only ever gets longer, not shorter—and makes his way upstairs to take all the time they've been gifted.
And then, perhaps, later, they can help Izzy figure out what's left to do with the time that ran out.