Chapter Text
The tides of fate, like most things worth a damn in this wretched life, couldn’t be charted, predicted, or bargained with.
If John Silver were given the obscene luxury of turning back time – one year, five, ten – and asking his younger self a single question about the road ahead, he suspected the answers would be pure fiction. A younger Silver would have spun some gilded tale, all charm and improbable fortune, never once picturing himself a half-ruined quartermaster limping about the deck of the most feared pirate ship afloat, a leg hacked off and consigned to the deep.
Back then, the thought of living without a limb would have seemed a grotesque impossibility. He’d been a man of absolutes: either you lived whole, or you didn’t live at all. But time and pain had taught him there’s a bleak and sprawling territory between life and death, and you could make a long, miserable home in it if you were stubborn enough.
It didn’t make him any less of a man – or so Flint had claimed, with the kind of drunken conviction that vanished by morning. On those rare nights, Flint’s smile softened into something almost human, and his hands wandered, slow and searching, charting the ridges of what muscle remained above the peg, fingertips pressing like a man mapping the edge of a known world. Silver had wanted to believe it. Hell, he’d have kept Flint in rum until the casks ran dry if it meant the lie would hold.
But the truth was cruel, and the truth didn’t give a shit about keeping a man’s dignity intact. It didn’t care to flatter him or ease his misery. The truth had a way of grinding down hope until it was nothing but grit between his teeth.
And some days, long after the wound had sealed into its ugly knot of scar, it turned traitor, revealing one more cruelty – pain without reason. A phantom agony that curled its fingers into the ghost of his calf, his ankle, his toes, crushing down until he swore he could feel bones grinding in a limb that no longer existed. It twisted and tore as if some alive parasite with teeth had taken up residence in the absence.
When it came on, it was merciless. The breath would seize in his lungs, and he’d double over like a man gut-stabbed, nails digging into the wood beneath him. Curses spilled between clenched teeth, spat into the dark or the wind, though neither gave a fuck. He could press the stump into the deck until the wood bit back, slap it with his palm until the skin burned, but nothing could silence it.
On the worst nights, it kept him from his bed entirely, had him crawling instead to whatever hard surface was closest – galley table, bulkhead, bare planks – just to brace himself, forehead pressed to the cold timber as the fire ran its course. There was no pattern to its cruelty, no rhythm to track or outwit. It might grant him three days’ reprieve, let him stride the deck with something almost resembling grace, only to return without warning and pin him for hours, shirt plastered to his back with sweat, fingers twitching as though they still belonged to the foot he’d lost.
It hadn’t always been so vicious.
In the early weeks of recovery, back when the crew, drunk on their own good humor, had crowned him quartermaster, Silver had been given a cabin of his own. A cramped, splinter-riddled little kingdom, but his all the same. Privacy was a rare prize aboard a pirate ship, and for a time he guarded it like treasure.
That ended the first time the phantom pain came for him in earnest. A flare-up so severe it made standing a joke, let alone the duties of quartermaster. He lay marooned in his bunk, jaw locked, half-mad with agony, when Flint arrived – broad-shouldered, reeking faintly of powder and ink, steady as a rock and absolutely furious. No knocking, no questions, nothing more than a grip under the arm and an unceremonious haul back to the captain’s quarters, Silver’s protests met with the kind of look that promised worse if he dared persist. Independence, it turned out, was a privilege Flint had no patience for when it kept his quartermaster from the deck.
That arrangement – two men, one cabin – held until the day it didn’t.
Storms were the sea’s common coin; sailors took them as they came. But this one… extraordinary was too mild a word. It was a wall of weather rolling toward them with the malice of a fleet, black clouds bruising the horizon, lightning splitting the belly of the sky. The wind caught them early, driving salt into their eyes, filling every sail until the Walrus groaned like a wounded beast.
Even Flint, who never looked away from a fight, spared the approaching squall a long, measuring glance, weighing whether the ship would survive the meeting. Silver knew the truth of it – you could plot all the clever courses you liked, but when the wind meant to throw you into the teeth of a storm, strategy was nothing but a polite word for wishful thinking.
Still, men with too much brain and not enough sense will always find room for a scheme. Between Flint, De Groot, Billy, and himself, plans bloomed like weeds – options weighed, risks counted, strategies proposed.
Even from a distance, it was obvious enough that it was no common squall. A ship-killer. Sensible thought said steer wide, lose time but live. Flint, of course, had no interest in sensible thought. He was unwilling to bend – there would be no sidestepping it. If the sea meant to throw the Walrus into the heart of it, better to go in braced and snarling than caught with their trousers down.
Preparation, however, has limits.
When the storm came, it didn’t so much arrive as detonate – a concussive crack that reverberated through mast and marrow alike, followed by the ocean’s full, murderous weight hurled upon them. Rain attacked – hard, endless, and biting, each drop a sting, a thousand stings, drowning the deck. The sea howled, waves battering the hull until the timbers shuddered. Men scrambled for the hatchways, lungs heaving for the luxury of air not thick with water, vanishing below like rats fleeing a lantern.
Flint and Silver had no such escape.
And of course, of course, it came down to that damned leg again.
The wind or the water had torn something loose – a crate that should’ve been stowed below, a snarl of rope left where it had no right to be. Whatever the culprit, it stood squarely between Silver and the hatch. The peg was never cooperative to begin with, today it was mutiny outright. The deep, twisting ache had been eating at him since dawn, muscle memory sending sharp shocks through what muscle no longer existed. Walking was punishment, every step leaving him wetter than the rain alone could account for. Sweat and seawater both ran into his eyes, stinging and blinding.
But storms don’t pause to pity a man already in pain. They grind him further into the deck until he’s near part of it.
God, he tried to be quick. He really did. But speed on one leg is a cruel sort of joke, and the deck was a treacherous son of a bitch at the best of times. The storm turned it into a trap – planks warped slick, every familiar gap disguised by rushing water. His peg caught on something – a bastard board, a knot of rope, he couldn’t tell – and his weight pitched forward. He flailed, hand scrabbling for a line, but instead stepped clean into a heap of wreckage. The metal-shod end snagged deep in a coil, and the moment he tried to wrench forward, the rope bit back.
Momentum did the rest.
He went down hard – face-first into the cold, wet deck. The shock of it stole what little breath he had left. Salt water filled his mouth, and the storm’s bellow was loud enough to make him wonder if the world had narrowed to nothing but that sound, that taste, and the ache in his missing leg.
Then the Walrus heaved hard to port.
Everything not nailed down or lashed tight slid with her, and Silver went with it.
He caught the rail with his hand, the jolt sending his back into the wood. Pain flared, sharp and hot, stealing his attention from the constant ache in his leg. He grunted, tasting copper, just as a wall of seawater reared up and crashed over him. It slapped the deck, the rail, his face, cold and stinging, leaving him sputtering, essentially blind, and deafened by the sea’s rage.
As if that weren’t misery enough, the broken crate – unsecured, jagged, and twice his weight – came careening across the deck.
Silver saw it coming. Saw the inevitability in its path. And he knew, knew deep down and without doubt, there was no chance of getting clear in time. The peg was a useless anchor in weather like this, and crawling away would be about as effective as wishing the damn thing elsewhere.
So he did the only thing left – wrenched one hand free of the rail and crossed both arms in front of his chest, bracing for the blow that would crush ribs and leave him spitting blood.
But the blow never came.
Instead, there was sudden heat, solid and strong, seizing him under the arms. An arm hooked hard around his chest, another at his shoulder, hauling him sideways. The crate smashed into the rail where he’d been, splintering.
“Silver!” Flint’s voice, deep, cutting, and impossible to ignore, hit his ear even through the storm’s roar. “Quit lying about!”
Silver spat water, blinked salt from his eyes, and shouted back, “Why the fuck are you still here?” His hand tightened on the rail, desperate for something fixed and immediate, until the tilt of the deck stopped shifting beneath him.
“You were unaccounted for,” Flint said as if it were the most obvious, immutable truth in the world.
And that tone – calm, unshaken, as though he hadn’t just pulled a half-drowned cripple out from under a deathtrap – was so very Flint it made Silver want to throttle him.
He’d long since worked out that Flint liked him best when he was miserable. Misery, after all, made him compliant. Dependent. When they were in step, when necessity kept Silver at his side with no other port to run to, Flint thrived. And now here he was again, the stubborn bastard, risking his own neck in a storm that could tear the Walrus in two, all to drag his useless quartermaster out of harm’s way. Not for the first time, Silver wondered if Flint saved him out of necessity… or because the man simply couldn’t resist proving to the world, and to him, that he could.
But against a storm like this, even defiance had no room to breathe. Hope, rebellion, anything that reeked of choice was snuffed out quicker than a candle wick drowned in its own wax.
Flint had both arms locked on Silver, braced like he could hold the sea back by sheer force of will. But the Walrus pitched again, this time hard to starboard, and there was no time for him to reach for a cleat or line. The deck shifted under them, treacherous and slick, and his boots went skidding.
Silver clung to the rail, the wet wood biting into his palm. He felt the sudden wrench as Flint’s weight yanked against him – felt the captain’s grip cinch tighter, almost crushing, as gravity decided it wanted both of them. The pull was brutal, dragging at his arm, threatening to rip his shoulder clean from its socket.
“Hold on!” Silver shouted, the words whipped away by wind before they could fully leave his mouth. His fingers locked like a vice, but he could feel Flint sliding, could feel the gradual drag.
It was one thing to fear for himself. It was another entirely to feel Flint’s life hanging from his grip, the bastard’s heat, his weight, his sheer bloody-minded will to live, all bound to him by a single, tenuous hold, both of them swinging in the hands of a ship fighting not to roll belly-up.
Silver had never confessed it, but the first day he took those clumsy, humiliating steps on the peg – Flint’s shoulder under his arm, the captain’s coat bunched in his sweaty fist – something in him shifted. Every plan he’d nursed for Flint’s ruin, every private thought of betrayal, scattered like ash in a gale. There was a particular breed of desperation in that moment, a shared bleakness that tied them fast.
And God help him, he didn’t hate it.
He didn’t hate the nights drawn out till dawn, when the pain was sharp enough to make him sweat through the sheets, and Flint would sit beside him with a book, voice steady, reading each page aloud from cover to stubborn cover. He didn’t hate the nights when Flint stumbled in drunk, eyes glassy, smelling of sweat and rum, crawling into the narrow bed built into the windowsill and pressing his solid weight against him until Silver was shoved up against the planking, protest ignored entirely. He didn’t even hate the mornings after – Flint bloodshot, hollow-eyed, muttering curses as he fled the cabin – trying, with all the conviction of a man selling rotten fish, to insist that it was just strong drink, that he didn’t need another body beside him to sleep soundly.
By choosing the Walrus crew over the gold, Silver had chosen Flint – whether he admitted it or not. And God damn him, he didn’t think it was a price to pay. It was a windfall.
Now, all of it hung in the balance.
Water sluiced across the deck in torrents. Flint, again and again, fought to regain his footing, but each lurch of the Walrus threatened to wrench him free entirely. Silver clung to the rail, arm screaming under the weight of holding them both, the muscles in his shoulder and back stretched to the point of tearing. His peg scraped and slipped uselessly on the slick planks, offering no leverage at all.
The sea yawned below, an open, black maw, frothing white, waiting for one slip, one loosened grip to swallow them whole.
“Goddamn it – hold!” Silver shouted, though whether it was at Flint or himself, he couldn’t say. His chest burned, rain and seawater on his lips, every breath a gasp. The storm wanted them, wanted to pry them apart, and it was doing a fucking good job of it.
Somewhere in him, deep beneath the pain and panic, there was a single, stubborn resolve – he would not let Flint go. Not to the sea, not like this. He didn’t care if it tore his arm from the socket or dragged him over with the captain – better to drown together than live knowing he’d let go.
Then the wind howled different and something in it made his head snap up. Too late. A length of board, torn free from somewhere above, came spinning out of the darkness, carried by the gale with all the speed and force of a broadside shot.
It caught him just above the temple.
The world went white for an instant, the impact ringing through his skull like a struck bell, and then – nothing. The roar of the sea faded, the panic retreated, the pain in his arm and leg vanished, and he was falling into a deep, unlit place where even the storm could not reach him.