Chapter Text
“Remind me again why this is necessary, Bonnet?”
Stede’s couch looked comfortable from an outside perspective, but Izzy found that almost immediately after sitting on it, it was the most uncomfortable piece of furniture known to man. It was almost too fluffy, the way the fabric bunched up around his body and tried to sink him in with it.
Ed seemed to have no problem with it, seeing as the man took a nap on it for an hour each day. And Stede himself didn’t seem to notice how scratchy and terrible the texture was, either. Everything in his room was like an assault to the eyes.
“It’s necessary for me to check in on how everyone is doing every once in a while. It gives you a chance to reflect on your time with me, and it gives me a chance to reflect on what I could be doing better as a captain.”
Stede was being surprisingly straightforward, his eyes calm and observant as he watched Izzy squirm under the harsh candlelight and explosive colours surrounding his room.
“When I have something to say, I say it to your fucking face,” Izzy reminded him, “I don’t see how scheduling time out of both of our days does anything but repeat things I’ve already said.”
Stede closed his book and took off his reading glasses. “I suppose that's fair. Let us talk, then.”
“About?”
“Anything. Just talk.”
Just talk? Izzy thought to himself. What was wrong with the people on this ship?
He opted to stay silent. He was never one for small talk in the first place, and the fact that Bonnet was sitting here, expecting him to say something purely just to fill up time was fucking absurd. He could think of about thirty things he could be doing instead of sitting here in silence with Edward’s joke of a boyfriend, but the man decided to punish him instead.
Whatever it was, he probably deserved it.
“Not in the talking mood I see,” the man finally said, and Izzy wanted to drag a hand across his face and rip out his own eyes. Stede offered him an invasive smile. “How’s your relationship with the crew going? Making any friends?”
His first thought was that Ed had to have put Stede up to this. Then again, Bonnet always seemed like the nosy type, so maybe not.
“They despise me, I despise them. Nothing new,” he crossed his arms and tried to make his body touch the least amount of couch possible.
“I wouldn’t say despise,” Stede continued, “I actually don’t think they hate you, at all. They all seem to be taking more of a liking to you.”
They have a pretty good reason to hate me, he thought with a laugh. It was like Stede was immune to believing people on this ship could do anything but love each other.
“Yeah?” Izzy couldn’t help but offer him a wry smile, “What makes you say otherwise?”
“No reason. No reason at all,” Stede averted his eyes and tried to hide the mischief in his voice. “I just have a feeling they have something in store for you very soon.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing. I just…think you’ll know it when you see it.”
Stede said nothing after that, and Izzy spent the next few days pondering what he told him, dreading the day that he realized the man wasn't lying.
That day came far too soon.
***
“What the fuck?”
Out of all the sentences in the world, what the fuck was probably the one Izzy said the most.
His use of the word increased exponentially when he set foot on this ship, almost always because someone on the Revenge was wasting his time. He wondered how half of them survived on their own before boarding the Revenge to work for Bonnet. He also wondered how they all managed to survive the trials, tribulations, and awful captaining skills shown by Bonnet before Edward came and took over the ship.
Since Stede and Ed reunited, however, things were looking reasonably up in the realm of good captains.
They’d just pushed through a terrible storm, and the moon was almost full as the clouds drifted away. The sea’s waters went from hellish to calm, and the ship and its people seemed to be recovering just fine.
Izzy was still wringing the water out of his glove when the crew sidled over to him, holding something indescribable.
“What the fuck is this?” he repeated. The team looked excited? Or maybe mischievous was a better word.
“It's exactly what you think it is,” Stede said with a smile too big for his stupid smug face. Izzy looked down at it again, a glare forming over his brow. This had to be a trick question.
“A handful of soggy rags,” he glared down at it. Stede looked mortified.
“No!”
“He’s got a point there,” Ed mentioned, and Izzy fucking jumped because he swore his captain wasn’t looming behind him just a second ago. “From this angle, he's pretty spot-on.”
“Maybe asking Izzy to guess what it is was a mistake on my part...”
“Do we all have to be here for this?” Pete raised an eyebrow, “I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Like hell you do,” Oluwande muttered.
“The disrespect you show your future first mate is baffling.”
“You know they all voted me in as their cap—”
“Alright, everyone! Why don’t we talk later?” Stede popped his head in the middle of their spat and silenced his crew, “Because we have something to give our friend Izzy over here. Don’t we, crew?”
In anticipation, the crew silenced themselves and stared at Stede’s pile of rags. Izzy decided the best course of action was to keep quiet, having barely enough energy today to so much as look at these people. He had no idea how the rest of them had this much energy after yet another near-death experience involving choppy waters.
“Now that I’m looking at it, Ed’s right. It does just look like a pile of scraps,” Stede said with a smile, “But its appearance deceives you! It's actually just old fabric used to wrap up your gift.”
Gift?
“And protect it from all the rain we just had,” Frenchie added quickly. The crew all nodded in agreement, and he thought he could see a hint of nervousness on all of their faces. He still didn’t know what to say, and Stede dropped the “gift” in front of him, making a thudding sound as it hit the ground. Whatever was beneath the damp layers had to be heavy.
He wanted to say it again, but he wouldn’t. So Izzy resigned to saying it in his head instead:
What the fuck?
“Don’t keep us all waiting,” Stede said, “Unwrap it.”
The crew crowded in closer.
Fang and Ivan had to step back to keep from smiling any harder, and Izzy stared up at Ed in desperation, begging the man to get him out of whatever this was. Edward only nodded, a knowing smirk on his face that Izzy attributed to Bonnet. He thought to just drop it and walk away, but underneath that smile, Ed had a look in his eyes that said, ‘If you don’t go along with this, I’ll fucking kill you.’
“Whatcha waiting for, Iz?” Blackbeard really knew how to push his fucking buttons. “Go on.”
So Izzy swallowed his horrible pride, ignored the seawater drying in his boots, and took off the fabric that clung to whatever this mystery present might be.
“Attaboy, Izzy.”
Oh, he was going to kill Edward for that one.
It seemed like everyone was holding their breaths in some kind of morbid anticipation, but Izzy felt nothing but unimpressed as the soggy, damp cloth was discarded on the deck and what lay in front of him did nothing to diminish his confusion.
“A box.”
“I think it's actually what's inside the box,” Lucius said carefully.
“Shut up,” he spat, and before Ed and Stede could rip into him for disrespecting another crewmate, he shoved his hand into the crat, and felt his hand grip something surprisingly soft.
As he pulled it out of its hiding place, the crew filled the strange silence with dramatic gasps, pointing, and smiling.
Sitting in Izzy’s hands was…a quilt?
Sitting was a bit of an understatement. The blanket felt heavy under his hands, and within seconds of holding it, he could feel it starting to slip out from under his grip. The consistency of it was strange. Hot yet cold. It looked like it should be light, but it felt like he was holding up a bulky sail instead of something he was supposed to throw on top of a couch.
“Well…?” Stede leaned in, giving him an obnoxiously happy stare. Izzy’s eyes fleeted over to Edward, whose arms were still crossed. Did that count as a threat?
“A blanket,” he said, not really sure what else to say. It wasn’t really in the merit of the crew to ever do something productive, so a gift that could actually be useful was a strange surprise.
“It's more than a blanket,” Stede beamed, “It's a quilt commissioned by me, sewn by our very own Frenchie, and each little square is stitched by one of your crewmates!”
Frenchie looked slightly uncomfortable as he was pushed under the limelight and shoved into view by Roach and Wee John. Izzy was still caught up in Bonnet’s words as they all pushed forward to attempt to show them their very own square.
“You should be proud, Frenchie!” Roach clapped. The rest of the crew followed suit.
“Nah, mates. It was nothin’. I love a good craft project.”
“Give yourself more credit. It turned out beautiful, man,” Ed said over them.
“Ed’s right,” Wee John nodded, “Fine craftsmanship makes all the difference.”
“This here is my square. Took me three days to think of a design, an’ another three days to create it,” Buttons pointed down at the blanket, but Izzy was thinking about other things. Specifically what Stede fucking Bonnet just hinted at a few seconds ago.
“My crewmates?” he echoed. Stede attempted to speak over the Swede trying to show his mermaid-themed square and Wee John showing the little ribbons hanging off of his square like tiny red flames.
“I contributed the materials, but the gift was the crew’s idea,” Stede revealed, “Think of it as an official initiation into our little family.”
The use of family made him want to keel over and die from disgust, but Edward was watching him carefully, and he was sure he’d be thrown off the ship if he did anything to offend Stede fucking Bonnet in his vicinity.
“We wanted to say thank you,” Oluwande stepped forward, and Izzy felt like he was walking right into a trap.
“...for what?”
“This here’s what Lucius calls your ‘NBAT for a week’ blanket,” Fang said. Ivan turned around and snickered. Izzy turned to Lucius, pissed off yet also incredibly curious.
“En Bat?”
“It's an ack-row-nym, or whatever you call it,” Frenchie said.
“What the hell does it stand for?”
“Not Being A Twat for a week,” Lucius stated smugly. Izzy wished he hadn’t even fucking asked, because the whole ship erupted into playful, annoying laughter. He should have taken the look on Edward’s face as a fucking warning. Or Stede’s mysteriousness a few days ago, while he was at it. He should have known it would be something like this.
“Seriously, though,” Oluwande nudged Jim, wiping a tear from his eyes once their bout of laughter was finally over, “The way you handled that storm just now was great. And the way you planned out that raid a few weeks before that was genius. And you’re being less of a dick. So we thought we’d give you a little token of our appreciation.”
“You’re still an asshole,” Jim stared them down, but it wasn’t exactly in a threatening sense, “Just the bearable kind now. Like Pete.”
“Hey!”
“I speak the truth and you know it, bald asshole.”
Izzy could not fucking believe Jim just compared him to Black Pete.
Izzy had also never been given a gift before—unless it was birthday booze from Edward over the years. He didn't exactly know how to react, so he held it up and said—
“Why does it weigh as much as a sandbag?”
The crew went silent, all of them turning to Frenchie who awkwardly shrugged.
“We didn’t really have anything to fill it with. No feathers or straw or anything like that. So the last time we hit land, we filled up buckets of sand on the beach and filled the blanket with that.”
Izzy retracted his earlier statement about this blanket being useful. This crew really was nothing more than a bunch of imbeciles.
“You didn’t think to just fill it with nothing?”
“We wanted it to be comfortable,” the Swede said unhelpfully.
“Well, it's fucking not! What kind of a blanket weighs this much? How are all of you this incompetent?”
“Don’t get all snappy with us, mister. You’ll break your one-week streak,” Roach teased.
“Well, now it's been more like three weeks. Since it took two weeks to make the quilt,” Oluwande commented. Jim snorted, and Izzy dropped the blanket, letting it hit the ground with a loud thud.
Blankets should not fucking thud.
“Now, wait a—” Stede’s protests went unheard as Izzy stormed off in the other direction, the crew laughing him offstage like he was in a living, breathing comedy. Then again, the world had yet to prove that he wasn’t.
“Aww, don’t be such a buzzkill!” one of them called out. Izzy responded with two middle fingers their way, making the whole crew go wild.
That Badminton bastard was right about living in backwards land. For Christ’s sake.
Izzy kept himself occupied for the remainder of the day, only sneaking off to his room at a time deemed socially acceptable and not considered sulking by the other twats that lived with him.
When he opened the door to his quarters, the blanket from earlier was folded up neatly on his bed, and Edward was sitting beside it, legs kicked back and arms crossed behind his neck. He looked dead serious as Izzy shut the door behind him and froze.
“Remember when I said I’d let you stay as long as you didn’t step out of line?”
He felt his blood run cold because as much as he hated Bonnet—with the passion of a thousand fucking suns—he thought all that shit about leaving people and staying in line was left behind the moment he came back and helped Edward shed his Blackbeard habits.
Ed must have noticed the look on Izzy’s face because he dropped the act and let out a little laugh.
“I’m just kidding,” he patted the spot beside him, “Sit.”
“Fuck off,” Izzy breathed out, but he couldn’t stop the amusement quickly growing on his face. He sat beside Ed, staring in distaste at the blanket folded so nicely next to them. Ed must have noticed that, too.
“You should give it a chance.”
Give what a chance? He wanted to ask. It was so idiotic, the way everyone was always so happy on this ship. They just wasted three weeks of precious time on a blanket—and not even a useful one. Edward must have read his mind because he continued onward with his persuasion.
“Being their friends. Accepting their gift. Giving in to the truce they laid out for you. I dunno,” Ed adjusted his position, leaning back to stare at the ceiling, “Sometimes, you gotta know when to pack it all in and raise the white flag.”
When Izzy spoke to Edward these days, he could barely even recognize him. He was still the same person he knew, but equally as different. He never quite knew what to make of it.
“What, and become all soft like you?” Izzy said dryly. He was happy Ed could see through his sarcasm, and he sat there rigidly as Ed’s fist came up to punch him softly in the shoulder. “All your old friends would maul you to death for suggesting a pirate ever raise the white flag.”
“Maybe there’s a reason they’re all my old friends, then,” Ed rolled over, his face pressed into the sheets, making his voice muffled as he spoke, “I bet they’re all dead, anyway. I fucking hope they are.”
“Even Jack?”
Ed lifted his head up and smiled.
“Especially Jack. The bastard can’t last a week without leeching off someone.”
Thinking about it now, it was a marvel he and Ed had gotten this far without one of them dying. Edward was always a bit of a chameleon, embracing new people and things and morphing into something different at the drop of a hat. That was how he survived. Izzy wasn’t sure how he managed to survive being so rigid in a world that quite literally went with the flow of the water.
“I don’t care what you do with this thing,” Ed sat up again, turning around to face his first mate, “Shove it under your bed or something. Or use it. But just know they actually worked pretty hard on it. Even if it’s stupid, you could just keep it to keep the peace, mate. Peace is nice.”
Izzy never really liked peace. Probably because he hadn’t really felt it before until now.
“If you decide to keep it, try and find my square,” Ed came up close, eyes holding the same glow they always had, and for a moment, he thought the man was going to offer him a hug.
He didn’t.
“Yes, Captain,” he uttered, breaking the silence. Ed flashed him a smile.
“Good talk,” he slapped Izzy on the back, trying to dissolve the sudden awkwardness, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out for a nice bedtime story.”
He didn’t invite him, because he knew Izzy would say no. So Edward left him in there, no sign of Blackbeard in sight, and Izzy found himself staring down at the blanket, that white fucking flag that he so desperately did not want. He’d survived in this business without all the softness that came with a crew like this one, and he hadn’t planned on changing anytime soon.
He liked when things stayed the same. Even so, he couldn’t help it when his eyes trailed along the messy stitches, and he wondered for a fleeting moment which square belonged to his captain.
***
Izzy didn’t end up getting rid of it.
But it took him another week to actually acknowledge it again.
The night was too cold to stay on deck, the sea too foggy to sit in his favourite night-watch spot above the sails. Everyone had gone to bed early, and Izzy, despite living through far worse than a little cold spell, could feel his body giving way to shivers as the night went down and the air grew colder by the minute.
He thought he had enough pride to ride it out. Losing sleep was the last thing he needed to worry about (or maybe it wasn’t now. He couldn’t tell, what with Edward’s talk about truces and peace and the white flag.) The blanket he normally used was scratchy and small tonight, something that could have easily been fixed with one word to Bonnet if he wasn’t so stubborn.
He thought to just tough it out and go a night without rest…but he had that meeting with the captains tomorrow about how to map out their next course. As much as he hated working with the crew, Oluwande really did know what he was doing. Perhaps he should at least try to get some sleep before he stumbled into the captain’s quarters tomorrow, sleep-deprived and scatterbrained.
His eyes drifted over to the patch of darkness where the blanket was sitting, neatly folded just how Edward left it.
No one would be watching.
The ship shook with the wind, sending a powerful gust his way. He shuddered again.
Oh, fuck it.
With a resigned, frustrated sigh, Izzy reached over to the end of his bed and grabbed the blanket, as heavy as it was, and pulled it over top of his body to try and get some relief from the cool air biting at his skin.
The moment the blanket fell over his shoulders, Izzy felt something press on his back, ribs, arms— everything —pinning him there and pushing all the air out of him in an instant. The immediate weight he felt on top of him was surprising.
And crushing.
He struggled at first, thinking to panic and rip it off, but the warm feeling encapsulating his body made him think otherwise.
He didn’t want to admit it.
He didn’t want to fucking admit it, but the crushing feeling covering him from his shoulders to his feet felt nice. Like a hug.
Yeah. That had to be it.
It was like a hug.
And he breathed in big, let the air fill his lungs, and for the first time in a very long time, felt his muscles relax and his body sink into the bed. His hand felt his way around the blanket, latching onto it like a lighthouse in a storm.
Fuck. Was this why the rest of the crew loved sleeping so much? Sure, he got his bare-minimum hours in like everyone else, but he had no idea he could relax so easily at night without the aid of alcohol. Or Edward. Or being so sick or injured that your body had no choice but to knock you out in an attempt to heal you quicker.
Thoughts were drifting from his head quickly, he realized. Izzy closed his eyes, let his body still, and was out like a light within minutes.
***
“You’re looking better.”
Bonnet was back with those weekly meetings, and Izzy was already floored with the things the man was saying to him.
"Better?”
“Yes. Better,” Stede repeated, crossing his legs and leaning in to get a good look at Edward’s first mate, “You even look a few years younger if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Is this your idea of a joke?” Izzy played it up like he was offended, but he was really just confused. Stede still had that awful couch and that tacky room, but it didn’t jump out to him as much as it had before.
“No jokes here! I was just wondering if something changed,” the man prompted, nosy and invading as ever, “Eating better? Sleeping more? Any life updates? It's been close to a year since I met you, but I feel like I don't know you at all, Izzy.”
“You’ve gone mad, Bonnet,” he scoffed and got up from his spot, leaving Stede to stare at his “notes” from their torturous conversation today. He pushed his way out the door and found his way back on deck.
“Talking with the captain again?” Wee John called out, “Exchangin' deep dark secrets and talking about all the boys you like?”
“Can we join?” the Swede asked, not-so-innocently.
“You fucking wish,” he sneered, though there was no malice in his voice when turned around to reply.
“Didn’t know you were the type to get all up close and personal,” Lucius was breathing down the back of his neck, “Why can’t you be that way with the rest of us, hmm?”
“You’ll be wishing I wasn’t when I have my foot up your ass for not doing your job,” he said simply, and the rest of the crew sent rowdy hollers their way. Izzy turned to face them, rope in hand. “Come and observe if you want to know how to actually hoist the sails properly. Mister Spriggs clearly has some fucking work to do.”
“You tell ‘em, Iz!” Fang cheered.
For once, despite the circumstances of today, he didn’t feel like throwing everyone overboard.
He had an idea as to why.
When he woke up the morning after that first night, he felt more rested than he’d ever felt in his life. All because of that fucking blanket filled with sand that weighed down on him. It perplexed him, but he couldn’t complain when he saw his reflection later that morning and noticed his eyebags had significantly lessened.
So naturally, when the night rolled around again, he pulled the blanket over his shoulders and let himself drift off, as effortless and easy-going as the last night.
And when morning came, he felt just a little bit better.
He wasn’t used to it—feeling like someone was wrapping themselves around him at night and waking up so refreshed in the day. It made him hate things just a little bit less, he realized. The sun beat down a little less intensely, and the wind blew around him instead of right through him. He hadn’t realized just how fragile he must have been before, how rejuvenating a full night of sleep could be.
He hadn’t called anyone a fucking twat in what felt like days. He hadn’t heckled Lucius for skipping out on chores or ridiculed the crew for being so sappy and stupid all the time.
The rest of them had to have noticed the change, though none of them said anything about it. Even Izzy began to catch himself talking to them like they were normal people that weren’t the bane of his existence. Even if the things they did still infuriated him, he had to admit that it infuriated him a little bit less with each passing day.
No one on the crew told him he was being “nicer,” but he could see it in their eyes each time he gave a command at a normal volume, helped them out on a fighting technique or taught them all how to re-tie their knots properly. Hell, he hadn’t even said a word of criticism to Stede since he started sleeping better. Or criticism that wasn't just half-hearted and meaningless, at least. He knew Bonnet could tell the difference.
He was really starting to wonder if Ed’s philosophy of going with the flow was starting to rub off on him.
If not Ed, it had to be that fucking blanket.
***
After the first night, and for the rest of the nights after that, he was too ashamed to even look at it.
When morning came, he would peel it off his body and discard it, hiding it among his shirts or shoving it under his sheets so if any other crew member—or Ed—had the audacity to come into his room uninvited, they wouldn’t see the fact that he was definitely using it.
After a few more days, he shrugged away the shame that came with loving that crushing, relaxing feeling, and finally decided to look at it in full. It was during a docked day when everyone was free to run their own errands or wind down the way they wanted to on land. Izzy chose to slip into his quarters and unleash the blanket from its hiding spot, spreading the quilted squares out on his bed to fully observe.
The base of it was made of silk. Or satin. Something soft and silky in texture, so finely stitched together that the sand packed into it wouldn’t escape and flood his bed with annoying little grains. To keep the filling in one place, the squares had been stitched on top of the silk in little sections.
He wasn’t sure if it was purposeful of Frenchie to do—he would ask him, but he wasn’t a fucking idiot. The moment something like that would get back to Lucius, or better yet Bonnet, he would be ruined.
Why would he be ruined, exactly? He couldn’t even tell you. He wasn’t too sure anymore. Perhaps it was just an act of self-preservation to be so secretive about it. It was hard to forget the days of old when they were so ingrained in everything he did. Maybe he would have seen a gruesome fate for being so pathetic years ago, but Edward sure didn’t care what he did now. He was the one who encouraged him to keep the damn thing.
So he kept using it, even if secrets were never his thing. As the night rolled around, he would pull it up over his shoulders until his body felt pinned to the surface like a treasure pushed beneath the waves and buried in the sand, toying with each of the squares until his eyes closed and a peaceful, dreamless sleep overtook him.
Every new night was like another jab to his pride.
It wasn’t even the sleeping part anymore. Or the feeling safe and secure part. Or the longing for the feeling of human embrace part of it, either.
It was the fact that he could now put every square to a name.
It felt so personal, it almost made him feel bad for trying to figure out why each square had a certain message or picture stitched onto it, and who it belonged to.
A lot of them were easy to figure out—Roach’s was obviously the stitchings portraying a ladle and a knife crossed over each other like the skull and crossbones on a sinister flag, Wee John’s was so clearly one depicting flames of leaping fire, and Jim’s was a dagger dripping with blood made of a soft, red material. Lucius had one that looked eerily like the quill he always had in his hand, and Swede’s looked to be a mermaid singing a song on the rocks.
Buttons’ square had to be the best one to toy with, a messily-stitched white lump that one could decipher as a seagull from the little yellow lines that resembled legs and a beak. In the centre of the bird-like design were two brown buttons. Bird eyes, he thought to himself when he first saw it. He liked the buttons best.
There were simpler designs, too. A little red heart, a golden star in a deep blue sky, a swallow, a rain cloud, a book. He would never admit it, but his favourite part of the sun going down now was running his hands over the different textures, imagining what it would feel like to envelope himself in their stitchwork, swimming through a land of fabric, subsequently drifting off into the unconscious plane before the blanket and its crushing weight was even fully over his shoulders.
Izzy knew half of them couldn’t sew for the life of them, and he wondered how many designs Frenchie ended up doing while the rest of the crew tried to tell him their creative visions.
Another thing he noticed quickly was that there were more squares than crew members.
He counted one night when the waters were too choppy for him to want to lay still. He knew there had to be doubles, that some of them could have done more than one design for the quilt to fill it up.
It angered him how he still couldn’t find Ed’s square.
Edward was never much of an embroiderer. He’d mended his and Izzy’s clothes in the short time when he was just Ed Teach, bottom-of-the-barrel ship worker and not the glorified captain he was now, but since that time, there was always someone to do that work for him. Part of him wanted to consider some of the grander designs, but unless Stede helped him out with his, Izzy knew Ed wasn’t capable of something so well-put-together.
After weeks of it, he still couldn’t figure it out and it irritated him that he couldn’t recognize his own captain’s needlework. Maybe Ed didn’t even have a design on here. Maybe he said that just to get Izzy to keep the gift.
Perhaps he would never find out. Because if he had half a brain to ask Edward about his square, Ed would know how much he looked at it and used it and thought about it, and the idea of Ed even thinking about Izzy being that… soft …it irked him.
The two arguments in his head, both yelling over the concept of soft clashed against each other each time he wasn’t acting fearsome and hard-shelled. He knew his brain wanted to protect him like it always had, but—
But he still wondered, in those bare moments before he pulled the weight over his shoulders and let himself rest, if a life full of truces and white flags was really all that bad.
***
“Is everyone here? Is anyone dead? Come on, people! We need answers! If you can’t speak, at least let out a little groan so we know not to dump you overboard!”
It was a fucking miracle no one was dead.
They’d been completely ambushed, deceived by the foggy weather and somehow pushed off-course, right into the hands of two rogue ships, ones that got close enough for the men to board and attempt to raid them for all they were worth.
Izzy had forgotten the harrowing feeling of being on the other end of a ship raid.
Bonnet was being surprisingly useful, flitting around and making sure everyone made it through alright. Fang and Ivan were already breaking out the bandages and dressing people’s wounds, and out of the corner of his eye, Izzy noticed Jim and Oluwande picking up discarded weapons and throwing them in a pile in the centre of the deck. Lucius was writing what looked to be a damage report. Roach pushed a few enemy carcasses over the side of the ship.
Ed had been stabbed. On the good side, thankfully, but it was never a pretty sight to watch someone stumble towards you with a sword sticking out of them. Izzy lost Ed in the heat of battle, focusing on making sure he didn’t get stabbed, as well, which didn’t seem to work in his favour considering he felt like absolute shit.
It was all a bit of a blur, but he remembered being knocked to the ground a few times, earning himself a couple of hearty bruises, maybe a broken rib or two. Nothing he couldn’t bounce back from, especially in a profession like this one.
“Look a’that. The Swede’s got a cool new scar,” Wee John elbowed his crewmate, who grinned and pointed to a slash-mark on his cheek. Fang went in with a rag doused in alcohol, wiping off the excess blood. The man hissed in pain, and Izzy rolled over from where he was slumped down, biting back nausea.
Stede came around to where they were all sprawled across the deck, Ed bandaged up and wrapped in the man’s arms. A morale booster was in order, and the man always knew how to make everyone feel better.
“The attackers were very aggressive. And very rude, if you ask me—it looks like they came with the intent to destroy, not just steal! Many of our items have been dumped overboard or taken onto their ship. They may have made a swift escape into the fog, but I still think we won! We definitely murdered more of their crew members than they did with us. That means no funerals for us and many funerals for them! We’ll bounce back from this mishap in no time at all!”
Ed said something that Izzy couldn’t hear, and his crewmates cheered. A ringing in his ears made him tune out everything else around him. Maybe if he just crawled back to his room and closed his eyes, he could…
“Hey,” a hand was snapping inches away from his face, and Izzy blinked his eyes back open. It was Jim, looking mildly concerned as their hat tipped back to reveal their face, worried expression and all. Black Pete had a jug of some kind of drink on him, and Fang was talking to Oluwande in the corner of his vision.
“…hurt?” someone asked out of frame. Izzy could only register the ending of the question—he couldn’t pinpoint their voice, so he kept silent. “Actually, don’t answer that. You’re probably just gonna lie to us.”
Pete’s bottle of booze was pressed to his lips, and he swallowed the foul-tasting liquid, already feeling his body numbing to the throbbing pain coming from the side of his head.
“Ivan, pass that bandage over. Make sure it's sterilized,” a voice that sounded like Oluwande rang out in his ears, and he scrambled to sit up as arms were pushing him down.
“I can fix myself up just fine, you—” he stopped himself as a pair of hands pressed into his shoulders, keeping him grounded in place. He fought the urge to flinch away and stab the person who so much as thought of laying their hands on him.
He felt flustered. The back of his neck felt warm. He didn’t dare move, and when he blinked again, Fang was trying a nice bandage around his forehead, and everyone was sitting in a circle beside him.
“We're not just gonna leave you on your own to fend for yourself. You can’t lick a wound you can’t reach. We’d be shit crewmates if we did that,” Lucius was talking to him, and Izzy blinked again, struggling to stay in focus.
“We know you care about us,” Roach formed a small space between his two pinched fingers, “just a little bit.”
“Bein’ a family is all about taking care of each other,” Frenchie said.
“And making sure none of us die of a bleeding head wound,” Pete added.
Izzy was too tired to protest, too tired to admit that he’d grown far too comfortable being around all of them ever since the ship reunited again, too tired to argue that he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t part of any family, much less the one they were all trying so hard to form.
He wasn’t sure when things changed. When he stopped thinking so obsessively about Edward or started trusting everyone around him more. He couldn't say he hated it.
Which was why he felt all the more guilty about walking back into his room at the end of the night and finding his room trashed, his things raided, and his patchwork quilt nowhere to be seen.
His first response was, fuck it. That’s life.
Because that was life. Nothing lasted forever. In the world of pirating, one had to accept the predisposed fate that anything you could keep strapped to your body would be taken from you in no time at all.
His second response was, but I liked it.
Because he did like it. As much as he didn't want to admit it, he grew to love it, grew to love the way it made him feel—and even if the raiders took it or destroyed it or sank it to the bottom of the sea, he still felt a bit sad that he would never find out which square was Ed’s.
It was just an item, he reminded himself. Materials possessions didn’t matter in the end, not when you could lose them so easily. Not when you could replace them.
Could he replace what he just lost?
Still feeling hazy from the day they all had, Izzy left his room without cleaning it up, leaving it to look like a tornado had run rampant through his quarters and destroyed almost everything in its path but his bed.
He left to go find Ed, whom he was sure was still awake. The man never slept after a raid. Whether it was adrenaline or pain from the injuries he sustained, he could always find Edward at the helm of the ship, staring off at the ocean after a big fight like the one they just had.
Tonight was no exception, and when Izzy got to him, he was already cracking open a bottle of something, flowery silk robe over his shoulders, open and displaying his bandaged wound in full glory. Ed smiled, and Izzy couldn’t tell if it reached his eyes.
“Tonight,” he said, “I wanna fuckin’ drink ‘til I’m not awake anymore."
There were a lot of things he couldn’t tell just by looking at Ed nowadays. But maybe things were healthier that way. When he wasn’t as close to him.
“Care to join me?”
And Izzy was never known for holding his liquor well, but alcohol was perfect for erasing any thoughts in your head and putting you to sleep quickly. Maybe he needed that.
So he sat down and joined him anyway because he knew what used to happen in the old days when they did this. And even if it wasn't fun when morning came after, it was still familiar.
And Izzy loved when things stayed the same.