Chapter Text
How am I still alive?
He thought it every morning when we woke up, curled into a ball in whatever fetid corner offered comfort, on whatever ship he happened to be on. Which ship didn’t matter. They were all the same after a while. The only changes were the faces and the manner of cruelty. None were home, none were safe.
Yet he woke up every day, still alive. Even when we very much wished he wasn’t.
That first time had been the real surprise. When he was wrenched from the freezing cold sea, half-drowned and almost unconscious, thrown down on the deck like a gasping fish. That was the miracle. The moment he felt death slip past him like a shark, a blur of teeth and blood-soaked breath and then he was safe again.
Only he wasn’t.
He wasn’t safe then and he wasn’t safe for the days, nights, weeks, months, that followed.
But he was stubbornly alive.
Lucius wasn’t sure what drove him during that time. He’d found himself traded off, foisted on one ship after another. Some he begged passage on when he was left stranded in small ports, some he was handed over to like a sack of flour – or to buy one.
But eventually they hit a port – sizeable enough that he could get lost amongst the crowds. Insalubrious enough that there was pirate news and gossip in the taverns and he wouldn’t immediately be arrested as a known pirate or vagrant. He only had a moment of opportunity but it was all he needed. A flicker of rebellion flared inside him and he felt like his head was finally, briefly, above water. With nothing but the clothes on his back he sidestepped into the bustle of port and when his latest…owner, captor, jailer?...looked back, they found only empty air.
He didn’t breathe until he was in an alleyway, heart pounding and eyes blurring with panicked tears. But free. Finally free.
Once he stopped shaking, he stole. Only enough to keep himself fed but not so much that he drew attention to himself. So he was still in his stinking ragged clothing and lurking in an alleyway with the other rats when he heard the news that made his heart lurch.
The Revenge had been wrecked and its soul survivor had washed ashore a day ago.
“Keeping ‘im down at the fishing shacks, ‘til the navy send men out to collect ‘im and pay the bounty,” one of the fishwives told another. “Blackbeard’s crew’ve been tearing their way through so many ships I’m not surprised their luck ran out. Suppose even the devil has his favourites, and he’s lost his taste for mad pirates.”
Lucius spent his last few coins on hiring a mule cart to get him across the island to where the fishermen worked. He knew it was unlikely, stupid. But he couldn’t help but see Pete in his mind’s eye, lying in a dark shed surrounded by old nets. Waiting to be taken away to hang.
He’d lost all hope of ever seeing him again. Of laying eyes on a familiar, kind face at all. He had no idea how to reach the Republic from where he was, had never been a navigator despite being able to read a map in theory. But he was due a miracle and if the sea had killed Blackbeard and spared Pete, he would never ask for anything again.
Or if it was Frenchie or, Wee John or anyone. Anyone he could rely on because…he couldn’t do this forever. After only a few days on his own in this place he knew that. He was a good thief but a terrible pirate, and on his own he’d be right back to where he’d been only days ago – the lowest of the low, prey for everyone and anyone.
He’d rather die.
Before Stede things had been different, he’d been in a small town, polite society which he’d frankly longed to escape from. But it had been some protection. Now he had nothing. No one.
Lucius reached the shed shortly after dark. The fishermen weren’t hard to spot from the road – sitting around a blazing fire, cooking their catch and talking loudly and in rum-fuelled voices of the money they were about to have when the navy paid them for their captive. He picked his way closer, listened and worked out which shed they were talking about. Then he crept over in the shadows and eased the door open, letting himself inside.
It wasn’t locked, which was a surprise. He’d expected them to have at least bolted the door to keep whoever it was inside. But once he was in there, choking on the reek of seaweed, spoiled fish and something else more…human, he understood why that was unnecessary.
The man sprawled unceremoniously on the sandy ground looked close to death, unmoving in the faint light creeping in from the nearby fire. Completely still, so much so that Lucius thought at first that he wasn’t even breathing. He certainly smelled awful – like blood and sickness.
“….Pete?” he made himself whisper, hating the pained need in his voice.
The figure didn’t move and as Lucius shuffled closer, he saw that he was missing most of one leg.
And his face was horribly familiar.
Only screwing his eyes and mouth shut, clenching his hands into fists, kept him from crying out, from cursing every hope and every wish he’d had since he was hauled out of the sea. Lucius clapped his hands over his mouth and half-crouched as if absorbing a blow from the universe.
What the fuck was this?
A joke? A cruel, final, insult spat into his face?
Breathing hard, he straightened and looked down at Izzy’s prone form. There was movement outside, raised voices. He didn’t have much time to make a decision. But just as he’d broken out of the fog of misery long enough to escape in port, he made his choice in a fraction of a second.
He hefted the unconscious body up over his shoulder, and, with difficulty, vanished along the dark shoreline.
It was only when he was sitting in the cart again, the stinking bundle of humanity huddled behind him, that he asked himself – what now?
*
Why the fuck am I still alive?
The thought rushed in like surf as he opened his eyes a crack, peeling them apart under a crust of salt. His mouth tasted like bilge and he felt as if he’d been given the lash and thrown down some stairs into the bargain.
Flicking his eyes first left, then right, he saw only wooden planks, light creeping in around some of them. But the floor under him wasn’t moving and though he heard gulls and the sea, it was distant.
He tried swallowing and regretted it, his craw felt stuffed with sand. A croaking sound slipped out of him and he struggled to get his breath.
Still alive.
It was like a curse.
Being shot and losing only his leg (only that, Christ) that could be chalked up to the kind of dumb luck that that followed Bonnet and his crew of fuckwits around. But the gun he’d placed against his own temple misfiring, only to send a perfect shot into Edward? The storm, the wreck…and he was still here.
Why the fuck couldn’t he just die?
Why was he still here when Edward…
Eddie…
It took a while for him to manage to get over onto his side. A great effort to try and claw his way to a wall a few inches away and haul himself upright. By that time he could taste blood in his throat and knew he was nearly out of strength. He’d shut his eyes again, mostly out of pain, but also because there was nothing to see except gloom.
By touch he checked his chest and belt. All his clothes were saturated with cold seawater, the outside dry and crusted with salt and sand. His pistol was gone, knocked out of his hand and he hadn’t been wearing his sword. That was likely at the bottom of the sea now. With the Revenge, the crew, and his captain.
His fingers found the handle of his knife, the leather sheath still attached to his belt by some miracle. It was difficult to get it loose, the leather shrunken and wet, but he got it out eventually, held it in one exhausted hand.
Not even a cursed man could survive a knife through the neck. He’d stake his life on it.
He’d almost gathered the nerve necessary to swing it up into his jugular when a larger hand closed around his and unceremoniously took the knife away from him. He heard it skitter over the stone floor, hit the wall.
Then, silence.
He prised his eyes open again, the darkness swirling as unconsciousness tried to get its fingers into his brain again. A face swam in front of him.
“…you…” he managed, wrestling those features into something familiar. “Give it.”
The scribe didn’t reply, just wiped his hand off on his filthy clothes and went to the other side of the tiny shack they were apparently in. He watched as Spriggs slid down the opposite wall, picked up the knife and held it idly in his hands, eyes closed against him and the world.
There was no point in demanding it back again. He knew that. Wasted effort on words that were costing him dearly. So he leant against the wall and waited, knowing that eventually he’d marshal enough strength to go and take it. Another or hour wasn’t going to change all that much. By the end of the day he fully intended to be lying in a pool of his own cooling blood, no longer able to think or feel much of anything. As close to heaven as he could hope to land.
As soon as that blade was in his hand, he wouldn’t hesitate again.