Chapter Text
Jim’s on watch, and Frenchie doesn’t even know where Fang and Ivan are, somewhere on the other ship doing something. It’s windy as fuck tonight, and even if it wasn’t, there aren’t exactly spaces to sleep above deck – the ship is cramped and there’s too many men, too many men that Frenchie doesn’t know, all of them fucking hardened and cold and—
And the thing is, it’s not even them he’s scared of, not really. They’d been on the Revenge a few weeks before they’d managed to rendezvous with the Queen Anne, and now there’s so many more of Blackbeard’s crew around, and they’re fucking terrifying, a lot of them. He feels fucking small with most of them, feels like he doesn’t know anything, and they’re showing him how to do shit, yeah, but it always feels like he’s being fucking laughed at, like one of them will kill him just because it makes a funny joke – he’s seen them fighting together, seen two hulking great bears of men punch each other’s teeth out and fucking laugh over it.
None of them dare fucking touch Jim, but Frenchie’s not like Jim, Frenchie’s not strong in the way they are, can’t fight like they can, and the quartermaster’s been taking him through drills and shit but it’s fucking hard, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be good at it, not like Jim, not like the rest.
He sews, sews sails with the others, works on the flag, and he’s getting better at that too.
He hasn’t slept.
Since everyone was marooned, he hasn’t slept a proper night through – he’d worn his mask the first night on the Queen Anne and everyone had fucking laughed at him, and he’s been nervous to wear it since, but the candlelight gets at him, even the moonlight, and it’s not even just that. He keeps thinking Blackbeard’s gonna decide he’s tired of him and grab him and just…
What?
Kill him, like he did Lucius?
Maroon him, like everyone else?
He doesn’t even know, but it scares him fucking shitless. Now and then Blackbeard will go by and he just freezes, doesn’t say a thing, but Blackbeard doesn’t look at Frenchie for the most part, just gives Izzy orders and then goes back into his office, and Izzy—
He’s the same, but he’s not.
He calls out orders, and everyone just hops to, and Frenchie and Jim do as well, and the things get done, and by the time he looks up to see what Izzy’s doing, to see if Izzy’s laughing or gloating or yelling at them to go faster, go harder, Izzy’s already limped off to start doing something else.
Frenchie feels sick, his stomach a pit of snakes, but it’s been fucking weeks and he’s barely getting a few minutes a night, he’s so exhausted all the fucking time and he just wants to sleep and sleep without constant noise and light or, when he finally gets off to sleep, waking from a sudden, horrific nightmare about Blackbeard slitting his throat and playing his vocal cords like he’s a mandolin himself, or Blackbeard killing Jim in front of him, Blackbeard setting them all aflame.
Izzy’s door is closed, and Frenchie is terrified of even knocking too loudly as he puts his knuckles to the wood. There’s no answer, and he doesn’t want to risk knocking louder in case it wakes up everyone – it’s too close here to the captain’s cabin, and he doesn’t want to wake Blackbeard, if he’s even asleep, doesn’t want him to come out and see him and ask what he’s doing.
He inhales and then suddenly pushes open the door, looks inside. Izzy’s asleep, laid on his back with one of his arms over his head, his forearm rested over his eyes, and Frenchie shuts the door.
Izzy jolts up in the darkness, barely lit by a sliver of light that comes in from the porthole in the corner, and Frenchie sees the glint of his dagger and goes in a whisper, “No, no, Izzy, Izzy, please, Mr Hands, it’s just me— It’s just me.”
He can’t see Izzy’s expression, but he knows that the other man is frozen. “Frenchie?” he asks, voice hoarse with sleep, tense and sharp. “The fuck do you want?”
Frenchie opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He wants to explain. He wants to say that he’s not sleeping, that he’s not been able to sleep, that he keeps trying but there’s too many people and actually maybe that’s not true because he used to sleep pretty well on the Revenge with everyone and the thing is it’s not even that he likes to share a bed because he grew up having to share beds with a lot of different people and it’s been a relief since joining Bonnet’s crew to have his own hammock but it’s not about people touching him or touching people it’s about the noise, maybe, people breathing, but people he knows, and also does Izzy have nightmares because Frenchie is having nightmares and he’s been chewing herbs to make them stop but it hasn’t been helping and nor has rum and he’s terrified he’s gonna die in the next raid because he just can’t sleep and he’s so fucking tired and he’s always terrified he’ll die and anyway—
It all blurs into words and nonsense in his head, and he stumbles forward and doesn’t ask at all. He just shoves himself into bed beside Izzy, lies down beside him with his head on the pillow he brought and his hands clutching at his own blanket.
Izzy sits further upright – the bed is wider than he expected, but still narrow enough that they’re almost touching, and Frenchie looks up at Izzy’s face, aware that his eyes are almost watering, that Frenchie must look like he’s about to fucking cry, staring up at him.
Izzy’s face looks weird, lit from the scant moonlight just hitting his face the way it is, looks grey and white, like he’s been carved of stone, and Frenchie looks at the downturn of his mouth, the shine of his eyes.
“Please?” Frenchie asks in a whisper. “Just— Just for tonight? I keep, I keep thinking that Blackbeard is going to—”
“Shht,” Izzy says sharply, his hand over Frenchie’s mouth so fast that Frenchie can barely even grasp it, and he sees Izzy’s eyes flit toward the closed door, back to Frenchie. Frenchie swallows, and the sound of his gulp is audible in the silent room, but then Izzy draws back his hand.
He’s stripped down to his smallclothes, is wearing his shirt mostly open, the laces undone, and Frenchie can see the rise and fall of his chest, the shine of the sweat on his neck. He wonders if Izzy’s going to kill him, right now.
He doesn’t.
After a minute or so, probably less – it has to be less, right? – Izzy slowly lies down again and turns to face the other way, so that they’re back-to-back, and Frenchie is aware of how much warmer Izzy is than he would ever have thought, slowly kicks off his shoes and throws his blanket over himself, keeps most of it hugged up against his chest.
He sleeps, and he doesn’t know what it is, the relative darkness of the room, the presence of one body beside him instead of a dozen, maybe just the fact that he’s in a room instead of in one of the broader spaces below decks, he doesn’t know—
But he sleeps, and he sleeps solidly, and his dreams are a little scary but they don’t wake him up.
When he does wake, it’s to light coming in through the porthole and shining in, and he looks at Izzy’s naked arse, his back, as he pulls a shirt out of a trunk. There are scars and tattoos all over him – whip scars layered on his back and a few across his arse as well, a clipper ship tattooed on the back of one of his calves. His backpiece is a little awkward in size and shape, was obviously tattooed after the lashes he took, because it should be across the shoulders and instead takes up all of his lower back from the midsection of it – it’s a giant whale and a kraken, and the whale is biting through the kraken’s tentacles with millions of sharp teeth, and the kraken is ripping great pieces off the whale.
“Have you ever been whaling?” asks Frenchie, and Izzy turns to look at him, raising his eyebrows. Frenchie gets a glimpse of his cock – it looks strange, not quite right, compared to cocks he’s seen before, although he’s not sure what’s wrong with it – before Izzy’s shirt is over it, and Izzy pulls on breeches before grabbing for his leathers.
“Go back to sleep,” says Izzy briskly. “It’s not even five, you can take another two hours.”
“I haven’t,” says Frenchie. “I’ve heard people talk about it. Do you really get inside the whale’s head?”
“Ask Fang.”
“Fang was a whalerman?”
“Yeah.”
“What about you?”
“Go back to sleep,” says Izzy again, and Frenchie looks at him as he laces up his leathers, laces up his shirt, pulls on his vest. He ties a kerchief around his neck, then slides the ring off of his finger and puts it at his neck instead.
“Do you have a wife?” asks Frenchie.
Izzy ignores him, putting on his sword and his gun before he sits down. Frenchie doesn’t say anything as Izzy changes the bandage around his foot. The gap where he’s lost a toe is clean and burnt – cauterised – and it’s not bleeding or weeping or anything.
“Does it hurt?” he asks.
Izzy pulls on his socks, then his boots.
“Can I sleep here again tonight?” asks Frenchie, trying to swallow down the anxiety it makes him feel.
Izzy looks up from the floor and stares at him. His expression, Frenchie doesn’t know what to make of – it’s frozen, somehow, his eyes dark, and then he exhales, finishes lacing up his boots.
He doesn’t say anything as he goes, shutting the door behind him, and Frenchie turns over. He doesn’t mean to go back to sleep, but he does – for what must only be twenty or thirty minutes before he’s jolted awake at a swell that makes him feel for a second like he’s being tossed into the maw of a fucking whale, and then he’s awake and on his feet, a cold sweat lingering under his clothes.
* * *
Frenchie had grown up in service. He’d been born into it, and he remembers the specific way it was talked about, the way it was there and not there – because he was treated so well, growing up in Bristol, being allowed to live in the big house instead of the cottage further down the grounds where most of his family were, because he could look so nice and so neat when they wrapped his hair up, because he was light-skinned enough to be handsome decoration, and that was what he fucking was.
He keeps thinking of the navy on Bonnet’s ship, how it had felt to suddenly go back to that after thirty fucking years away from it, to just being silent decoration, to add “colour, and it makes his skin crawl even thinking about it now, even when for all the bad shit Blackbeard can do, he wouldn’t do something like that, not without thinking about it.
But then, Frenchie probably wouldn’t go along with it now – not with Blackbeard, but not with Stede, either. He’d argue, maybe, or point blank refuse, even if it could get him killed, even if he was scared to, because he knows he can’t do it again.
He knows he can’t.
Blackbeard’s ship doesn’t have any of the familiar-but-not-exactly notes that Stede’s sometimes did – nothing here is for decoration, nothing is so nice that it must be poison, except that you won’t know until after, because it’s not polite to call it what it is, because it’s politer just to choke on it.
Everything on Blackbeard’s ship is as horrible as it looks, is cold and nasty and brutal, and he doesn’t think he can take it, doesn’t think he can stand it.
“I’m not going to make it,” says Frenchie.
“Yeah, you fucking are, mano,” says Jim. “Pull.” Frenchie does, hauls on the rope until they have it taut, and Jim grips tightly at his shoulder, looks up into his face, their eyes dark. “I got you,” they say lowly, and Frenchie believes them.
Frenchie thinks of Jim’s knife whistling across the room, the way it had gone right through that fucking naval prick’s hand, and for what he’d said to Frenchie, the way that for Jim it hadn’t even been a thought, it had been just like fucking breathing.
He nods. Then, he asks, “You okay?”
Jim stares up at him, then walks away, and fuck, but why do Jim and Izzy have to be the same? Why do they both have to do this whole, this whole silent thing, and he’s just meant to, what, work it out from the looks on their faces, which are barely looks at all, by the way?
He sleeps in Izzy’s bed again that night, and then the night after.
On the fourth, he’s in bed before Izzy is, and Izzy just climbs over him so that he’s closest to the wall. Frenchie wonders if that means something, him sleeping close to the wall like that.
“Are you ever scared?” Frenchie asks in the darkness. “Like— Like, at night? Are you just… scared?”
Izzy turns over to face him, and Frenchie can see barely a sliver of his face, the arch of one eyebrow, before Izzy takes hold of Frenchie’s facemask with surprisingly gentle fingers and pulls it off his forehead, down over his eyes. Frenchie feels Izzy turn back over.
“You can’t just give me the silent treatment forever,” says Frenchie.
“I’m not giving you the fucking silent treatment,” says Izzy. “Or I’d not talk to you at all. Now, if you’re here to sleep, sleep.”
“I’m scared,” says Frenchie.
“We’re all scared of something,” mutters Izzy, and Frenchie means to keep asking, means to poke at him, but he’s so fucking tired, and it’s warm and it’s comfortable and it’s so dark that he just drifts.
Izzy gets closer to him, bit by bit. Their arms touch, their hands, their noses. Frenchie actually does it on purpose, one night, slides closer and puts his chest against Izzy’s back, just wants to feel him, just wants to feel his heartbeat, and Izzy lets him, lets Frenchie put his hand on Izzy’s hip.
Blackbeard’s ship is rough, hard work every day, surrounded by rough, hard men. Every time they go on a raid he thinks he’ll fucking die, and he doesn’t – he kills people, even, manages to do it, although most of the time the ships don’t even fight them, just surrender as soon as they know it’s Blackbeard, and then it’s just about moving the cargo, moving everything.
Izzy’s surprisingly soft, for all that. It’s comforting, feeling his heartbeat, feeling how fucking warm he is, and on the night that Izzy turns into him, his cheek resting against Frenchie’s shoulder, one of his arms slung around Frenchie’s waist, Frenchie can barely stand it.
“Are you married?” he asks that night.
“Not anymore,” says Izzy.
“She died?”
“That he did.”
“Sorry.”
“Go to fucking sleep, Frenchie.”
And they both do, except the thing is, the thing is—
It’s morning, and light is filtering in, and Frenchie feels hot and sweaty and Izzy’s breathing hard. Really hard. He’s fucking panting, and Frenchie’s eyes flutter open. They’re curled together the way they have been, recently, Frenchie’s leg between Izzy’s, and in his sleep Izzy’s lips are quivering, his eyelashes shifting, and his cock is hard and wet at the head as it grinds against Frenchie’s thigh. Frenchie moans without meaning to, his own cock suddenly giving a jerk of interest, and Izzy’s eyes fly open, his body jerking back.
“No, no,” says Frenchie. “No, it’s fine, it’s fine,” he whispers as Izzy leans back, and he hesitates a second, but then he reaches for him, touches Izzy’s wrist and feels how warm he is, and fuck, fuck, but he can’t even remember the last time he was with someone, with a guy or a girl – it was before joining Stede’s crew, maybe in a tavern or something with someone who just rolled into bed with him because they liked his music, it wasn’t like this. “Can I— We can. Please. If you want.”
He just wants to be fucking touched. He can’t believe it, can’t believe that on this fucking ship it’s all he wants when he never was that much with Stede’s – yes, him and John would play around and sit close together, but not do this, nothing like this, and yet right now, it’s all he craves, all he needs, just to tell him that he’s alive, that it’s fine, that he’s alright.
He tugs Izzy’s hand to rest on his hip.
Tugs the other up to the side of his neck, slides his hand down Izzy’s arm and feels him shudder, and then Izzy is kissing him and it’s incredible. Izzy’s got no right being as good a kisser as he is, being able to move his tongue like that as he straddles Frenchie’s thigh again, and they’re grinding together, and fuck, fuck—
“Do it,” says Izzy, pushing a bottle into Frenchie’s hand, and Frenchie feels bad, almost, because he doesn’t need asking twice, he just needs to feel it, needs everything else to go the fuck away, Blackbeard’s ship, Blackbeard’s crew, Blackbeard, he just needs this, wants the world to be narrowed down to this, and the fact that it’s Izzy—
Well, that’s unfortunate, but he’s what Frenchie has right now.
He slicks himself up and he tries to put his fingers to Izzy’s arse, but Izzy just slaps his hand away and goes, “It’s fine. Just— Go.”
He’s tight and slick and perfect, and Frenchie grits his teeth to keep from moaning too loudly as he sinks into him, feels Izzy sprawl on his back and his hands are all over Frenchie’s body, underneath his shirt to touch his chest, his sides, his back, and fuck, fuck, but Izzy’s face is incredible like this, slack-jawed and open, his eyes closed tight, muffling the barest noises.
Frenchie wishes he could hear them.
He wishes he could fuck Izzy hard enough to get every fucking sound out of him, to hear him, but he knows that’s probably not the best idea, advertising that he’s sleeping with the first mate, let alone fucking him.
“What’s wrong with your dick?” he asks as he wraps his hand around Izzy’s cock, and Izzy suddenly makes a sharp, scoffing noise that it takes Frenchie a second to realise is a laugh.
“I’m circumcised, you idiot.”
“What’s that?”
“No foreskin.”
“What? Why?”
“Shut up,” says Izzy, and kisses him again, crushes their mouths together. Everything else fades to darkness for a bit, and it’s just the two of them, just their fucking bodies, just Izzy’s arse and Izzy’s weird cock and Izzy’s clutching, roaming hands and the eked out sounds and the taste of Izzy’s sweat under Frenchie’s tongue, the flutter of his throat.
“Is it bad that I still kind of hate you?” asks Frenchie, and Izzy’s laugh makes his arse clench, and the kiss that comes after is weirdly tender, makes Frenchie’s heart jump and squeeze and then feel strangely light.
“No, that’s not bad,” whispers Izzy, sliding his hand over the back of Frenchie’s neck. “That’s good instinct, that is. Now, put your back into it.”
“My back is into it.”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
Frenchie fucks a noise out of Izzy that makes his head rush, and he immediately starts going harder, desperate to get that noise out of him again, even as Izzy leans up to kiss his chest, his throat, his cheeks, the side of his jaw.
It’s—
Good.
He’s surprised, afterwards, by just how good it is.