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house-afire · 1 month

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you can have a little revenge, as a treat (Izzy/Lucius)

(tw: references to noncon)

Izzy knew Lucius was tailing him back to his cabin. He didn’t stay so close it was stupid—more like a nervy cat’s way of following than a puppy’s—but he was still as subtle as a cannonball. He wasn’t surprised when there was a knock half-a-minute after he got inside.

“I’d say ‘fuck off,’ but you don’t like listening, do you?”

The door creaked open. “Did you know it was me, or is that just, like, how you greet people?”

“It can be both.”

“Fair.” Lucius slipped in and sat down, like he’d had a real invitation. He gave Izzy a fierce, almost angry look. “I asked Pete to be my matelot.”

He didn’t know what he’d expected this to be about, but it sure as fuck wasn’t this. “And you came to me for congratulations?”

“Uh, no. I can see why that would be weird, if I’d done that. No, I want to—” He pressed his lips together. Turned out that was one last bolstering-up of the dam before he kicked it to pieces. “Stede doesn’t want to listen to what happened to me after Blackbeard pushed me overboard, and he said I shouldn’t tell Pete every dark little detail, either. And he was right. It’s a lot, and I shouldn’t … track filth around. But if I don’t tell someone about it, I’m going to lose my fucking mind. You’re not squeamish, and you won’t cry over me.”

That glare of his, Izzy saw now, had just a hint of desperation to it.

He’d never talked about anything more than he’d had to—swallowed it all down like his fucking toes—but he had, as the whole cursed lot of them knew by now, sicked up enough before to know that it could help. And if you were going to spew, better to do it in private.

“Fine,” Izzy said.

Lucius boggled at him for a moment, like a fish pulled out of the water, and then said, “Right, I expected that to be a lot harder.”

He sat down on the other end of the bed, as far from Izzy as he could get. Crossed his legs and uncrossed them, scowling at his knees like they’d betrayed him. He fixed his gaze somewhere over Izzy’s shoulder.

“I went between a lot of ships, after I got picked up. Wasn’t really by choice, not after the first … first bad one. A good ship—a good ship will let you leave, and you don’t know until it’s too late that if they’ll let you go, you might be … might be better off staying. I should never have left the first berth I got. They only wanted me as a whore, but that’s not so bad, is it? I mean, you’d probably say that’s most of what I did around here anyway.”

His gaze flickered over to Izzy like he expected him to laugh or nod. Izzy didn’t do either: you didn’t fuck about when you could see there was a storm on the horizon.

“Okay. Fine. Be understanding, like that’s not creepy.” He shifted around again, fidgeting like his own skin wasn’t enough to keep together, like he had to hold on to himself. “The other ships were all worse. I thought most pirates were—”

“Like Bonnet?” Izzy said incredulously.

“Like you,” Lucius said. “I thought the worst I’d have to contend with would be a whole ship of Izzy Hands, and I’d just be annoyed and stressed or, fine, dead, but in a—normal way. But you never—you wouldn’t—”

He dug his fingers into his arms. He’d wind up with bruises from it.

“The worst ship was called Dead Man’s Folly. And they had a little dog named Pepper, and they liked having puppet shows in the evenings, and I just fucking need—somebody—to fucking listen.”

Izzy didn’t know the details yet, but the puppet shows were a cursed enough notion for him to tell the outline of it already. Nothing curdled like whimsy; nothing was worse when it turned dark.

He listened. And as Lucius told him all of it, he stowed away a few things in particular.

Dead Man’s Folly. Captain Graves.

***

It took another fortnight—and a through-gritted-teeth request about it to Bonnet, who was so shocked Izzy would ask him for a favor that he gave in at once—but Izzy saw to it that they made one of the Dead Man’s Folly’s regular ports of call.

“I never had the impression you were all that enamored of shore leave,” Bonnet said, watching as Izzy scanned the ships crowded into the bay. “Care to share your holiday plans?”

Izzy’s lips flexed, hard, as he found the flag he was looking for. “Not responsible for what you don’t know about,” he said. “Better to leave it.”

“If you’re looking for trouble, you ought to have company!”

“Not for this,” Izzy said. “You’d approve, at least in theory, but you won’t want to see it. It won’t be very … gentlemanly.”

Bonnet looked crestfallen, but he said, “Well, if that’s what you think, I suppose I agree. I—trust you, Izzy. God, never thought I’d be saying that.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Izzy said.

“It is a bit weird, yeah. Nice, though.”

Almost against his will, Izzy said, “Yeah, it’s nice.” He cleared his throat. “Keep Lucius and Black Pete on the ship, even if everyone else goes to shore for the night. I don’t know, throw them a fucking engagement party.”

Bonnet brightened. “I have been meaning to do that, you know. Of course, you can’t plan a proper celebration in one night, but—”

“Whatever,” Izzy said, putting his foot into the rigging and starting down. It took more presence of mind to do this these days, but it wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. “Just no cake.”

“Yes, I think we all learned our lessons on the cake front. Have no fear! Roach is a pastry virtuoso. There doesn’t exist a confection that he can’t master.”

Perfect. A night of sugar and blood. Captured their lives here pretty well, really.

***

It wasn’t hard to find the Dead Man’s Folly. Ships captained by assholes always made themselves known sooner or later.

Some of Bonnet’s luck must have rubbed off on him, because he got the sweetest of chances: all hands in port for the night, and just Graves and his first mate aboard.

Easiest thing in the world for Izzy to hail them, plain and simple, and get welcomed on. The first mate didn’t even ask him his business, though he found it out in a hurry. Izzy didn’t make a meal out of that one: it was Graves he’d come here for, Graves who had been the rotten core of Lucius’s story.

Graves, who was drinking the night away in his cabin.

He wasn’t completely soused yet, which was good. Izzy wasn’t going to give him a chance to retrieve his sword or pistol—he was here to murder, not raiding or dueling; the usual rules of the profession didn’t apply—but he wanted him sober. He wanted Graves to know what he was paying for.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Curious passerby,” Izzy said. “My ship dropped anchor here, same as yours, and I’d heard so many rumors about the fearsome Captain Graves that I had to come myself to see what was what.”

The fact that Graves didn’t immediately blink at him and ask if he was taking the piss was a marvel and a half. As far as Izzy was concerned, the only pirate worth that kind of slobbery adulation was Edward himself—and Edward had tired of it a long time ago.

“What rumors would those be?” Graves said, hungry for any morsel of a reputation.

“I heard,” Izzy said, “that you picked up a pretty little piece of one-time jetsam a while back.”

Graves earned himself an even slower death by not even being able to fucking remember at first, like he fished bitchy scribes out of the sea every week at least.

“Oh,” Graves said, comprehension finally dawning on him. “Rat Boy. I wouldn’t go as far as pretty.”

Fucking hell, at this rate, Izzy was going to have to spend most of the fucking year killing this prick.

“Rat Boy. That’s the one.” He gave Graves a smile that would’ve sent a smarter man running. “Heard something about a bit of puppetry too, I think. Sounded … inventive.”

Graves, not content with all previous acts of wanton fucking stupidity, took this compliment at face value too. “Keeps the crew entertained on the slow nights. Everybody loves a good show.”

“Yeah? You come up with that yourself, then?”

Graves spread out his hands. “I’m a great innovator, unrecognized in my time.”

“Oh, I bet recognition’s right on its way,” Izzy said. “Nipping at your heels. You really got your whole hand up his arsehole, then.”

“He squirmed, but in it went,” Graves said, wiggling his fingers.

“You like that, watching him squirm? Wouldn’t go so far as to call him pretty, no, but you liked how he looked with you wrist-deep in his arse and making a show of him? Liked having him catch rats with his teeth? You must have. Liked it so well you didn’t even call him by his right name. Do you know it?”

It was, to Izzy’s great pleasure, finally starting to dawn on Graves that Izzy hadn’t really come here to have a wank to his great ingenuity. He stared at Izzy, the damp whites of his eyes looking like Roach’s poached eggs.

“My first mate is right up on deck—”

“He is. All over the deck, you might say.” Izzy leaned back in his chair. “Now, him I didn’t have much of a conversation with, so he didn’t have a chance to make things worse for himself. Just as dead as you’re going to be, though. Had it coming too, because a first mate’s responsible for everything that happens on his ship.”

Graves stared up at the ceiling, like blood was going to start dripping down right on cue. Izzy hoped he had a vivid picture of what all over the deck could mean. He gave Graves time to think about it. Then some more time to think about how much worse Izzy might do to the man who’d just been running his mouth about being the brains behind the human fucking puppet.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Izzy said, drawing his sword and laying it across his knees. “If you can come up with his name, I won’t cram a fat bilge rat down your sorry throat until you choke on it. I don’t really want to go looking for one anyway. This is going to take enough time as it is.”

Graves was sputtering now, like he was trying to save Izzy the rat-finding trouble by choking on his own spit first. “But he—he—”

“Made it back to his own ship.”

“He couldn’t have,” Graves insisted. “He—he said his captain there threw him overboard!”

“I’m not his fucking captain,” Izzy said. “Come up with that name yet?”

Graves’s pulse was fluttering in his throat, rapid as a lady’s fan. Thinking so hard beads of sweat were popping out on his brow: the great innovator at work.

“J—John.”

“Reasonable gamble,” Izzy allowed. “Thing is—it’s not right by even a letter.”

He ran Graves through, pinning him to his fancy chair; rapped the hilt with two fingers and set it to quivering in Graves’s belly. The screams were easy enough to ignore. Just part of the mess, like the blood.

He’d intended to make Lucius Spriggs the last thing Graves ever heard, but it seemed like Lucius’s name deserved better than being dragged back into this room with all its filth. Stupid thought, but there it was.

Instead, he said, “S’pose it doesn’t matter. Saw a dead rat right outside—seems a shame to waste it.” He hadn’t, but he figured Graves deserved to die with that thought in his head. And one more for good measure: “I’m not much for imagination; save that for the captains of the world. But I do work out how to make the fucking plans happen, even yours. The way I see it, all I have to do is cut your hand off—” He tapped a dagger blade against each of Graves’s wrists. “And then I can shove it up your arse. Put on a puppet show just the way you like.”

“You can’t do this,” Graves said. Blood was already hitting his lips as he whined, which meant he was dying faster than Izzy would like, and the bastard was too fucking dimwitted to know it.

Aided in the fuckery, at least.

“Oh, you’ll squirm, but in it’ll go,” Izzy told him. “You said as much yourself. It’ll be slick enough with your own blood, that ought to make it easier.”

He let Graves wriggle and bleed for another few minutes, but there wasn’t any satisfaction to it once the man was well and truly out of his head. Nothing to be gained by hurting a dumb animal. Izzy cut his throat to finish him off.

He stood there a while, breathing in the scent of blood. (And shit. He bet Bonnet’s tales of piracy never talked about how often dying men shit themselves.) He hadn’t paid Graves back for even what the fucker had done to Lucius, but there was revenge and then there was fucking monstrosity. He’d had enough of the latter to last him a lifetime.

Mutilating a corpse, though—that was run-of-the-mill pirate shit, honestly.

“Not saying he’ll make you the centerpiece of the fucking wedding,” he said to Graves’s body, “because he’s still a bit too soft for it, even after what your lot did to him. Which is almost fucking impressive. But he is, God help me, enough of a pirate to appreciate a token.”

Not the head. You walked through port swinging a man’s severed head like a sack of fucking apples, you wound up having to talk about it. Hand wouldn’t attract nearly as much attention—stray hands were as common around here as the pox—but Lucius wouldn’t want one. Not with where Graves’s had been. Fucking reminder, not a proper keepsake. Foot? He glanced down at his hoof—smiled a bit—and then scoffed. Jesus Christ, if he took Graves’s foot, Twatty would never fucking shut up about how interesting it must be inside Izzy’s head. He’d grow old and die before he heard the end of it.

Ear, he decided. Graves had been thoughtful enough to wear some gaudy emeralds there, might as well make use of it.

He sawed off the left one; it had a bit missing off the top, tapering to a lump of scar tissue, so between that and the fucking jewels, it’d be plain enough who it belonged to.

He spat on Graves’s body, before he went.

***

Frenchie was playing his lute when Izzy got back, and he shot Izzy a shy smile and plucked the first few notes of the tune he’d somehow gotten in his head was Izzy’s favorite. He raised his eyebrows.

Izzy waved him off—don’t change it on my account—and Frenchie drifted back to the other song.

Unbefuckinglievable that he’d somehow wound up with a life where people cared what fucking music he wanted. Fucking smiles and moonlight.

And a man’s ear in his pocket. Couldn’t say he’d ever had that before either, strictly speaking. Not as such.

Sugar and blood, he thought.

He found Lucius tucked up in Black Pete’s arms, listening to the music. Little fucker had always been bold as brass when it came to lazing about, never one to spring into action, but this was a new development, this melting back into his boyfriend’s chest and fucking relaxing more as Izzy came close.

Lucius looked up at him through his eyelashes. “Joining us?”

“Oh, get up,” Izzy said, nudging at him with the toe of his boot. “I’ve got a … matelotage gift for you. Just you, not him.”

“Well, color me intrigued,” Lucius said. He twisted around enough to press a kiss to Black Pete’s lips. “Save my seat.”

“Of course! And if he’s giving you what I think he’s giving you, babe, you’re gonna have to let me know if he put a bow on it first.”

They made it around to a quiet side of the deck—as private as anything ever got, with a ship this unwholesomely chummy—and Lucius flicked his gaze downwards and says, “Does it have a bow on it? I’ve always liked unwrapping presents.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Izzy reached into his pocket and pulled out the handkerchief-swaddled ear. It still felt warm. “Here.”

“I swear,” Lucius murmured, “the number of otherwise lovely gifts I get with blood all over them ….” He unfolded the handkerchief and his breath caught in his throat. He stared down at it. “This is—his.”

Izzy nodded.

“That’s what you did tonight. You went out and cut a man’s ear off for me.”

“Killed him too,” Izzy said. “And the first mate.”

“Killed. You walked onto another pirate ship, killed its officers, and brought me back an ear.” Lucius tugged roughly at the earring, like he was half-tempted to tear through the earlobe and yank it free. “How did you even get away with that alive?”

Izzy shrugged. “They’d given the crew shore leave. Otherwise I would’ve had to settle for just the captain, and it would’ve been trickier. Easy enough as it was.”

Lucius wrapped the handkerchief up again. His fingers were shaking. “And here I had this whole vastly symbolic shark telling me I had to move on.”

“You are moving on,” Izzy said. “Or did you miss where it was a fucking wedding present? You’ve got Pete. You’re not sulking about the ship anymore, letting your whole life fester. You fucking talked it out, like you’re Bonnet Jr. You’ve just got some bastard’s ear now too, little piece for the mantel.”

Lucius took a deep breath and then said, “Don’t stab me, because it will so ruin the moment,” and leaned in fast and pressed his lips to Izzy’s cheek. The touch was light and warm. “This is honestly one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me.”

“Fuck off,” Izzy said, even if it took a moment or two too long. His face felt hot. “It’s a severed ear, not a bunch of flowers.”

“I love it.”

“Yeah.” There was more open appreciation in his voice than he’d meant to put there. “Figured you were enough of a bloodthirsty little shit for it.”

“Speaking of which—you’re not … expecting me to cut off Blackbeard’s ear for you, are you?”

“You couldn’t give him so much as a fucking haircut,” Izzy said.

“I know that, but I figured I should, you know, offer.”

“Mm. You didn’t quite, though.”

“I said that I knew I should,” Lucius said. “That’s almost the same thing. I’m self-aware.”

Izzy snorted, and Lucius smiled—victorious and alive and prettier than fucking Graves could have ever fucking hoped to be.

“Don’t tell me you commit glorious, bloody acts of heroism for all the boys,” he said, slipping the bundled-up handkerchief into his pocket. “I don’t need to be a one-and-only, but I still like to feel special.”

He wasn’t quite a one-and-only, Izzy thought, looking over towards the stern, where the ship’s captains and her company was lounging about listening to their moonlit music and probably fiddling with their own beloved severed ears. But he was one of just a few. And special wasn’t the worst word for it, if Izzy were going to talk about it, which he absolutely fucking wasn’t.

“Oh,” Lucius said quietly, following his gaze. “I can certainly work with that.” He kissed Izzy again, on the mouth this time, even more softly than before. It hit Izzy like a kind of slow lightning strike and left him tingling. “Come and sit with us? God, that would be something. One valiant defender of my honor on either side. And Frenchie will play that song he’s absolutely convinced you like.”

“Don’t know why he thinks that,” Izzy said, following Lucius, “but I might be coming around on it.”

#izzy hands #lucius spriggs #izzy/lucius #hints of izzy/crew #tw: noncon references

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