Singing the Body Electric

Fandom 50 #39

Title: Signs of Life
Series: La Vie en Orange #1
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Archie/Fang/Frenchie/Izzy/Jim (principally Fang/Frenchie/Izzy, Izzy/Jim, and Archie/Jim)
Rating: Mature
Word Count: ~5900
Content Info: Contains canon-typical 2x02-2x03 content (trauma, grief, suicidal ideation and aftermath of a suicide attempt, and descriptions of eating raw meat in a survival situation) as well as canon-typical loosey-goosiness with how sailing works.
Summary: Warmth, food, and intercourse—and maybe something more. Izzy and his fellow survivors of the Revenge take a few crucial steps back into the land of the living and toward a more hopeful future.
Notes: This AU diverges from canon in between episodes 2x02 and 2x03. It imagines that Ed’s "corpse" was swept overboard during the mutiny, and that the five survivors of the storm were left alone on the Revenge for a longer period of time instead of quickly being found by Stede and the rest of the crew. While it doesn’t come up in this story, Ed is just fine. He's currently off having mermaid hallucinations and getting reunited with Stede after the Red Flag discovers him drifting unconscious on some flotsam.

A heartfelt thank-you to kingneilz1 for beta-reading. Any remaining errors or quirks are entirely my own doing. This fic is also available on AO3.

I also want to thank kingstoken for this wonderful cover art for the series, which I received as a donation gift through fandomtrumpshate.




There’s a hole in his head. It’s his own fault, his own doing. He must have put it there when he pulled the trigger, and now all his thoughts are falling out.

The storm’s the last thing he can remember. The world tearing in two. Flashes where the darkness ripped open at the seams: lightning, a gunshot, a guttering torch.

Edward...

Edward reeling toward him, wild-eyed and howling. Fang. The sound of him, more than any clear picture in the blur of rain and blood loss. A roar that rivalled the thunder. Darkness. A flash. Edward sprawled on the hatch grate like a puppet with its strings cut. Edward smiling up at him, fever-eyed, delirious.

“Finally.”

The cannonball slamming down.

Edward, Eddie, bloodied and still.

Then the last sickening snap as something came apart. A dizzying plunge as the ship suddenly dropped out from under them. The oncoming wave, tall as a cathedral tower and broad as a garrison wall, the biggest thing Izzy had ever seen in all his days. The great grasping hand of the sea herself crashing aboard with a deafening boom and clawing Edward to her bosom along with half the fucking railing.

Taking him away from all this. Away from the madness of mutiny and any misery left to him in this life. Washing away the stain on Blackbeard’s legacy and leaving only petty wreckage in her wake.

After that, there’s nothing.

Pain tries to fill in the blanks for him. His head is throbbing, and so is his leg. (Oh bloody fucking Christ, his leg.) The palms of his hands are on fire, and his throat feels like he washed down a razor with rotgut. He must have been shouting, screaming. Trying to be heard over the wind? They should have launched a drogue to slow the ship and keep her straight if they wanted any chance of making it out of the storm. Did he give the order? God, let him have given the order. Please. Let his hands hurt so badly from holding tight to a tripping line, from splintering something heavy free from the deck to use as a weight.

Let him have gone out doing his duty.

Because he knows that’s how things must have ended for him, crippled and concussed, a sea’s worth of water around him and barely a half-ration of blood inside him. He can’t open his eyes, can’t move or make a sound. He died. He’s dead. Which means this must be Hell, for all that it’s colder and quieter than he expected.

It makes sense, he supposes.

Everyone always talked about Hell as if it were a grand and terrible kingdom. Lakes of fire and dungeons deep. Flesh burning down in the pits, and bones crunching over breaking-wheels and other cunning devices. He once drank with a Portuguese crew who claimed to have sailed there and survived a shipwreck on its scorched shores, down near the Horn of Africa. But if the next life was anything like the one he’d just left, it seemed more trouble than anyone would really go to, setting aside a piece of the hereafter and staffing it full time just to torment some sinners.

In his experience, the people in charge might make places that claimed to improve sinners that did the job of tormenting them all the same, but at the end of the day, leaving the wretched to suffer was as easy as keeping them wherever they were and putting a lock on the door that led to anywhere better.

“They shall be punished with everlasting perdition, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” That’s what he learned as a boy, standing hip-high in the press of fidgeting bodies and damp wool in the back of church. Thessalonians. He’d known the chapter and verse once, but now it’s gone, slid out of the hole in his head along with the rest of it.

Why waste the wood keeping hellfire burning? Just bury the dead and let the damned lie there alone in the cold clay for eternity, tortured by whatever wounds they’d died from and whatever guilt they’d lived with.

If he’s six feet under, the crew must have made land. Someone must have survived the storm with enough money or strength to waste on seeing him interred. There’s comfort in that at least. He wonders where he’s been laid to rest. Is he home somehow, mouldering in England’s green fields? Not that it would be a green field for the likes of him. Mud and stone, more likely. A pit crammed close with a week’s worth of the city’s paupers, like the hole they put his mother in.

He can hear voices above ground, half-familiar and far away.

“He’s still cold.”

“That’s better than hot, isn’t it?”

“I mean...up until the point you’re dead.”

“We could put him in the captain’s cabin. Get a fire going.”

“And burn what? Everything’s soaked.”

“Hang on. I found this in that little room that shouldn’t be there. Let me get under it with him.”

The gravedigger’s just finishing up the job. He can feel the weight of the dirt settling on top of him, shovelful by shovelful. It must be sand. You wouldn’t get that sort of even weight with Lancashire peat or the brittle stone of Bristol, nor the sunshine to warm it all the way through. It’s only when his tremors start to ease that he realises he had been shaking.

Maybe he’s buried in the Bahamas. It feels like the Bahamas. That was the first place he ever set foot in the Caribbean after the long crossing. Other islands and other shore leaves would blur together in his memory, but that first time off the ship on this side of the Atlantic is lodged in his head like a bullet.

He’d been seventeen or thereabouts, sunburned and seasick. Uncomfortably drunk after switching to straight rum after a month of grog. But he wandered off on his own, away from the din of the port, to a deserted stretch of beach with nothing but the sound of lazy waves breaking on the shore. There, he took off his shoes and stockings and sank his bare feet into the softest sand he’d ever felt. It burned a little, but in a way that convinced him that the impossibly blue sea and mild, sweet air weren’t a dream.

His foot is burning now. It’s been burning for months, ever since he lost the first toe. Cutting off the whole leg didn’t stop it. Only made it worse. Maybe he can convince himself that he’s ankle-deep in the hot, fine sands of the Abaco Islands. That his head only hurts from too much rum, that his tender hands are still getting used to sun, saltwater, and the trials of long sailings. That he hasn’t fucked up everything yet, that he didn’t—

“Shh, it’s all right, Izzy. Am I hurting your leg?”

His resting place closes around him.

“Let’s get you warm.”

It will be some time before Izzy’s gunshot-addled brain can understand that sand should neither be breathing nor sniffling into his hair. Longer still for the ringing in his ears to fade enough to admit the rush of wind over water and the creaking of the ship’s timbers. Ages before he can accept that he might still be alive.

For now, all he can do is lie in the firm embrace of his grave and wonder at the revelation that there’s more mercy in Hell than he ever found on Earth.

---

“Hunger is the best seasoning."

Some toffee-nosed twat who had likely never missed a meal in his life once said that within Izzy’s hearing, and it's lived in his ear like a pest ever since.

It's bollocks. You don't taste anything when you're starving. Flesh or fowl or fucking shoe leather, the measure of it is all that matters when your jaw is trying to remember how to chew and your guts are unsticking themselves from your ribs. How much there is. How close it is. How long you might make it last, and who’s going to try to take it from you.

Shipworm and seagull will turn out to be what gets them through the first week. Not the worst he’s ever eaten, but not by much and not for a very long time. The hunger won’t make it taste any better.

“Shouldn’t have thrown the leg away,” he says when a full search of the Revenge turns up only spirits, a few sodden confections, and half a sack of sweet potatoes that might as well be stones without the ways and means to start a fire and cook the poison out of them.

No one else seems to find the comment as funny as he does. Fang sucks his teeth, and Jim rolls their eyes. Frenchie doesn’t glance up from diligently patching the torn headsail. Archie tilts her head in consideration and looks Izzy over like she’s weighing his chops. That’s encouraging, at least. Someone’s going to need to take the initiative when the time comes.

Before the storm, they’d been scavenging in an attempt to run light. No rations, no cook, just letting the crew fill their bellies and pockets with whatever they could grab while raiding. That was fine when you were taking a prize every day or two. Not so much when you’re limping in the water, no land in sight, and you haven’t got any salt meat or ship’s biscuit to keep body and soul together.

No one’s been able to find a single tinderbox on board. Whatever wood isn’t waterlogged would barely make toothpicks once you scraped off all the paint and varnish. It’s impossible to tell what was swept overboard in the storm and what was jettisoned prior. He’s having trouble remembering his orders.

“Take your boot off.”

He shades his eyes against the sun as it rises over the deck, and he locks his throat against being sick again.

There’s rain-catchings and grog, at least. The barrels and bottles are stacked in a tally column in what’s left of his head. He’s running through the numbers. How much drink it takes to knock the pain down to a muffled wail. How long between doses to keep him conscious. How much fresh water is left to cut it with. How far that might stretch divided more neatly by four if he threw himself to the sharks while the others were sleeping.

Sums and figuring are all he’s good for now, sat on deck like a useless lump of spoiling meat until someone hauls him below. He counts the knots and tracks the sun. Calculates the odds that their jury rudder will hold as long as that easterly wind.

He’s never been more than an adequate navigator, and Fang’s about the same. Between the two of them, they’d be fine if the storm hadn’t blown them off course, or even if either of them could say for certain where they made their last raid. But it did, and they can’t, and they have no charts. Bonnet’s got tossed along with his books, and Edward had never really needed his own. The waters of the Caribbean were his kingdom, and he could calculate a dead reckoning three days out from the last landmark.

Maybe they can’t even trust the stars. Blackbeard is dead, murdered by his own crew. It feels like the sky should have gone dark. As if the constellations might be upside down or scrambled, drifting apart with nothing left to hold them together. Something should be different. The world should be fundamentally changed.

All Izzy can say for certain is that they’re a lot further north than they ought to be this time of year, far from the shipping lanes where the Queen Anne is likely laden with sugar. They’re bearing west if they’re not sailing in circles. They’re in no shape to outrun anything, and the only question is whether it’ll be the Spanish, the French, or the English who finish them off.

“Fuck it,” Jim announces, striding across the deck and grabbing a coil of rope and Frenchie’s experiment in netting from the salvage pile. “Plan B.”

They tie a sloppy bowline around their ankle, toss the other end to Archie, and pause only to seemingly assess whether it makes more sense to go over the remaining rail or through the jagged gap the storm tore out. Thin luck, dredging up any fish this close to the surface, this far out, in the wake of a moving ship. But it’s an idea, at least.

“Christ’s sake,” Izzy rasps before taking another swig of rum, “you’re going to break your face if you don’t break your back first.”

Jim glances over at him, eyes narrowing like it’s no one’s business but their own what they break. “You got a better idea?”

They’ve still got some fight in them. Good. Fucking irritating at the moment, but good.

“Come here.”

Half to his surprise, they do. From where he’s sitting, he’s already in position to untie the travesty of a knot from their ankle and wrap the rope around their upper thigh instead. Jim startles at his touch, rocking back on their heels, but doesn’t retreat.

“Steady,” he mutters uselessly, taking half a start at explaining that he’s not trying to play grab-ass here, even as he does in fact have to grab the general area to make sure the rope’s resting in the right place to form a seat. He loses both confidence and will to finish the sentence, however, having to focus to make a proper bowline around first one thigh and then the other with a loop between them. Up across the hips through the crosspiece next, around their back, then a trio of square knots up each side of the harness.

He tells the warmth in his fingertips to fuck off.

Jim’s thoughtful “huh” as they take in his work is enough gratitude for him. He sends them forth with a smack on the hip and gets flipped off in return. With Archie and Fang lowering them down on the rope harness, Jim goes over the side for Plan B with a cutlass in one hand and a laughably small net slung over their shoulder. Maybe they’ve got a shot at catching something if they open up their arm and get a little blood in the water. Or maybe they’re only going to drown. He hopes they won’t. They might be the least experienced sailor on the ship, but they’re the rest of the crew’s best chance at surviving.

If Ivan were here—

The thought falters, useless.

Frenchie watches Jim go over, his eyes glued to the taut line being tied off on the mainsail as he scoots over to sit at Izzy’s knee. Izzy bites his tongue, refraining from pointing out that Frenchie’s got two perfectly good legs and can bloody well walk instead of polishing the deck with his arse. He looks down at the bundle of sailcloth that Frenchie dragged with him instead. It’s good work, the stitches neat and strong. He sighs and gives the lad an approving nod. Scans the horizon. Closes his eyes for just a moment.

Jim’s back by the time he opens them, and the sun’s a few inches lower in the sky.

He has a feeling that the heap of shipworm Jim’s pried off the hull is Plan C, if not Plan D, E, or F, but there’ll be no complaining. Shipworm might be vermin, nearly as low as eating lice, but the ones that survived the storm are big bastards, and meat is meat. They divvy up the catch and eat their shares raw on the deck, no pride amongst them, hands shaking as they pry the things out of their shells and—if their thoughts are anything like Izzy’s—thinking longingly of the pickling barrels they jettisoned a fortnight back for being dead weight.

“It’s not bad,” Archie says, seeming to gulp one down whole.

Fang hums, and Frenchie nods in agreement, having shuffled over even further at some point, half-leaning against Izzy’s side. He’s a cat, that one.

Jim, for their part, carves a rubbery piece off their share while looking out at the horizon. There’s a determined glint in their eye. He knows that look, that little glimmer of light that says, ‘I see how it is, and I’ll be damned if I can’t do better.’

He swallows hard, having gnawed through a piece of worm and worried it with his molars to give his gullet warning that something with more heft than rum was on its way. That’s the sort of light you can steer a ship by, when it holds.

Sure enough, Jim brings down a bird two days later.

Izzy has a second leg under him by then, or at least something that does half the job of one, put to more earnest labour in holding him upright than when it was attached to one of Bonnet’s dainty little tables. A mop’s the best he could find for a crutch, and he’s in the process of hobbling over to Fang at the capstan when he hears a sudden hubbub behind him, followed by a more worrying “Shhh!” He pivots, his vision whiting out from the agonising jolt that the motion sends straight up his thigh to the back of his teeth.

It’s too late to stop them.

Every sailor knows it’s bad luck to kill a seabird. They’re good omens. They’re the souls of drowned sailors, freed from the cold black deep to ride the warm trade winds forever. Or they’re the ghosts of lonely sweethearts who died alone with a candle in their window, come to guide their lost jolly roving tars back to the shores of home. Either way, woe betide any ship that brings one down from its flight.

Would he have called out, if there had been time?

No. He wouldn’t have. It’s food, and they’re starving. He’s never had enough of the sea in his blood to put superstition ahead of practicality, and as the flash of steel goes arcing through the air, his first and only panicked thought is that they’re about to lose one of their few good blades. But Jim strikes true, and both bird and knife plummet to the deck with a dead thunk.

“Thank the Lord,” Fang breathes, and maybe that’s what sets off the bout of religious fervour that follows.

Jim cradles the gull like it’s a holy relic, an impression that’s only bolstered by Archie and Frenchie crowding around to touch it in awe. In the flurry of excited babble that follows, Izzy can scarcely make out which one of them insists they need to bring it below, and which one of them insists they need to lay the table, and which one of them insists there needs to be drinks—only that it’s Archie who crows that this is Sunday supper, for all that by Izzy’s count it’s Tuesday.

The relieving tackle’s left in charge against his better judgement. Frenchie has him by the sleeve, and then Fang is substituting in for his crutch as he helps him through the hatch. They’re too good for the galley, the lot of them invading the captain’s cabin and gathering around the table by mad entitled assent. Five chairs pulled up, a sixth lying on its side against the far wall.

“Be present at our table, Lord…” Izzy recites by rusty rote as Jim and Fang obediently bow their heads. If they’re doing this, then they’re doing this. Frenchie folds his hands only to sloppily rest his cheek upon them, and Archie looks around in bafflement as if trying to figure out who he’s talking to. “...be here and everywhere adored. These morsels bless, and grant that we may feast in paradise with thee.”

He takes a swig of rum from the bottle, and the rest of them tear into the bird, carving off whatever they can by knife or fingers.

Edward, he thinks dully as the carcass comes apart at its joints and the drink trickles into the hollow parts of him. He takes the wing that’s lobbed his way and plucks the feathers from the gash in what used to be its shoulder. His gaze flickers to Fang, who’s already tucking into his share with a hungry grunt. Fang knows about those drowned sailors, but thank fuck he’s keeping it to himself. They’re sensitive, the rest of them. Frenchie is, at least, and Jim in their own way. There’s no call to put those stories in their heads. No reason to get them thinking that Ed could have come back to them somehow, free and soaring, only for them to pull him out of the sky, his blood on their hands and between their teeth.

He pries loose a rubbery strip of meat and puts it in his mouth.

“Don’t forget to chew.”

His jaw snaps shut and a fine little bone splinters between his teeth, the sound of it reporting through his skull.

He flinches, then works it loose from anything edible and spits it onto the floor. There’s no talk around the table, no stories or songs, but there’s a funny sort of communion all the same in the gory mess and determined chewing. He wouldn’t be so sorry, he thinks, if this were his last meal. Not for the scraps of meat sliding away into the dark hole of his stomach, but for the momentary ease in his chest as he watches the rest of them eat.

It wouldn’t be so unbearable if the curse of the gull took hold. If the stories of ghost ships were true, and some who would never make it home just kept on sailing around in circles long after their bodies fell to pieces. Not if there were Sunday suppers like this.

There is no anticipating, not then, that there will be a minor miracle in three days’ time. No loaves, but fishes. That a fifth of a seagull will prove enough to shake off the doldrums, and that the folly of weighing down their progress with a tethered tender will see Fang back from his third impromptu fishing trip soaked and bloody-handed with a snapper the size of his arm.

It will take shuddering, hard-biting restraint to save the thing for the cookpot instead of falling upon it like a pack of dogs right there on the deck. But by then, some of the wood in the salvage pile will have dried out enough to sullenly smoulder, and Izzy will manage to grate out that this could be their first or last chance to boil the poison out of those sweet potatoes. They haven’t any oranges, lemons, or limes, but Frenchie swears up and down that anything the same colour is nearly as good in a pinch, and Izzy’s heard much the same over the years from other sailors with all their teeth in their heads.

Giddy with their blessings, they’ll take the risk of starting a fire. What might have been the work of one or two in better times will take all five of them: Izzy prying the eyepiece out of his spyglass, Jim holding it steady to catch the sun and light the tinder, Frenchie and Archie standing by with buckets of water should a spark spread to the deck or sails, and Fang the slow and steady bearer of it below deck to the galley stove.

Fish and sweet potato stew, with twice-rinsed sargassum. Nothing else but a goodly share of their drinking water, but it will be watched by an audience of five as raptly as a molly house panto until Izzy insists that one of them does have to steer the fucking ship and ensure they’re on course, whatever that is.

Jim goes above, seemingly without any doubt in their mind that no one will start eating without them.

They’ll sit around the table again, all five of them, and Izzy will say grace through the clawing demand of his reawakened hunger, his gut clenching impatiently and his mouth flooding at the smell of cooked food.

They have no cutlery save their knives and one water dipper that escaped the purging of the galley, and that might be all that saves them from choking to death in their eagerness. Hunger still won’t be any seasoning, not as they burn their tongues senseless just as surely as they burn their fingertips snatching chunks of firm fillet and crumbling sweet potato from the pale pot liquor, passing around the dipper and forcing down mossy clumps of sargassum with every greedy swallow.

But there’s a pleasure in the pain of it, in the blisters that will linger as proof of life. They’ll scrape the bottom of the cookpot bare, then wipe it clean with handkerchiefs or sleeves. Then they’ll sit there for some time, cloth in their mouths, suckling those precious last drops like orphan babes at their milk, eyes shut in bliss.

---

One, two, three, four. His ears track them when his eyes won't stay open any longer. One, two, three, four. Jim and Archie against the bulkhead, whispering to each other. Kissing. Halfway to fucking by the sounds of it. It takes some people like that—after storms, after tasting death, after killing—and with those two it just keeps taking.

Fang lies to his right, on his side, his hand resting heavily on Izzy’s chest. Frenchie is on his left, folded up like a hermit crab out of its shell and breathing damply on Izzy’s neck.

One, two, three, four. Izzy in the middle of it, lying in a nest made up of dead men’s hammocks. The smell of the four of them has muddled together into something that lingers on every soft surface, woven into the canvas of the bedding now. It’s something different than the sickening sweetness of fever and rum that clings to him. Something reassuring, made up of ordinary sweat and leather, thick and worn soft around the edges. The sort of scent you take for granted on a crowded ship and only notice in its eerie absence when some abandoned wreck has been reclaimed by salt water and wind.

He can feel them too, the living. Sometimes better than he can hear them over the sea-sounds and ship-sounds down here in the hold. They throw off heat, rare enough on this damp, desolate vessel that he can feel it the way buried seeds must feel the sun. He could reach up an arm, and he knows without sight which way and how far to stretch to graze the bottom of Jim’s boots.

Someone should be at the wheel. Someone should be keeping watch.

One, two—

The ship shivers, its constant low groan stuttering as the bow dips slightly.

—three, four.

Someone should be holding a vigil.

He can almost hear Edward’s footsteps if he listens hard enough.

“I had a dream about you last night.”

He hasn’t dreamed since the storm. Sometimes it seems like he hasn’t slept, even though he knows he closes his eyes and jerks awake hours later, disoriented by the change in the light and crying out as he moves too suddenly. There’s only blackness when he’s away. A relief from the nauseating throb in his head and his leg.

“I dreamt that you killed me.”

He thinks for the dozenth time, the hundredth, that he should have pulled the trigger when Ed asked him to. Made it painless for him. Then killed himself and done it right, with the steady hand of a man who’d followed his captain’s last orders.

That other Izzy, the better one, he would have died with an answer. He would have known for certain whether Edward had come to him with a second round of powder and lead waiting in his pouch. He would have known whether Ed ever really thought about him, ever cared, by whether it was the mercy of a gunshot at the end or having to crawl over to Ed’s body for his knife.

He’d have done it either way. Cut his throat if he had to. Cut his wrists. Just laid down with Ed on the floor and gone to sleep with him. Then they never would have sailed into the storm. The crew would be fine, all of them. Fang would be looking after them.

This is his fault. The truth of it lives in his bones. It should have been him and Ed at the end. He should have taken care of him.

He should get up. Take the wheel. Keep watch.

But he can’t move, not under the weight of Fang’s arm. He tries to get his leg under him to get up, but it isn’t—

“Shh.” Fang gathers him up closer, rolling him onto the hip that isn’t on fire. “There, now. It’s all right, Iz.”

The noises in the corner pause, or at least everything short of the heavy breathing. “Don’t fucking let me interrupt,” he says, but it’s a pulled punch.

Jim was working the rigging for twenty hours straight. The steering gear’s only up and running thanks to Archie serving as Carpenter’s Mate under Fang, putting all her fearlessness and muscle to clambering over the side and through the wrecked decks with the salvage they’ve used to refit at sea. Those two have earned their rest, and if they want to spend it jerking each other off instead of sleeping, that’s every working sailor’s right.

He could tell them to get a room. That’s the one thing they’re not short on. But he’ll only be kept up longer, ears straining fruitlessly, if they disappear into the emptiness of the ship. Let Fang or Frenchie boot them out if either of them are feeling precious.

Which they aren’t. They’re all past that now. Fang’s chest shakes like he’s suppressing a laugh, and the warmth in the room only seems to spread, especially when Archie makes one of those rough little sounds of hers. Frenchie wiggles closer to him, sneaking an arm across Izzy’s hip and pressing up against his back, already hard.

A moment passes. The darkness rocks slowly as the ship blindly sails. Izzy doesn’t throw an elbow to knock Frenchie off him. He doesn’t want to move. One, two, three, four. He knows right where they are.

Frenchie pulls a public house reach across him, his fingertips slowly strumming up and down Fang’s thigh. Shyly, as if he’s waiting for an engraved invitation to go any further. That’s the wrong move for a man who has Job’s own patience at the worst of times. Fang shifts forward in obvious interest, but only an inch. With a scoff, Izzy grabs Frenchie’s hand and relocates it to Fang’s cock.

There. Get on with it. His own parts feel as absent as his leg, but something tightens in his stomach as he shapes Frenchie’s hand with his own and demonstrates by muscle memory the firm, slow rub that Fang used to like five, ten years ago, whenever they last shared a room on shore leave.

Fang sighs happily. His knuckles brush over Izzy’s trouser-front, but Izzy shakes his head tersely. It won’t—he knows it’s not going to work. But the pressure against his chest and back feel good, momentarily taking his mind off the crackling burn where his foot should be and the bothersome patches of numbness where there’s still flesh and bone. Mercifully, Fang doesn’t prod, only kneads at his side instead, rubbing at the tight band of muscle over his hip that’s been pulling twice its weight.

A sound of anguished pleasure breaks loose in Izzy’s throat as the muscle eases, and he feels Frenchie shiver behind him. The brush of a beard and hot lips at the back of his neck. A hard-on rubbing stealthily against his arse, like there’s a chance he might miss it.

It takes a little fumbling for Frenchie to get his hand down Fang’s pants. Izzy lets his own drop, resting somewhere on the swell of Fang’s stomach. Just lies there, sinking deeper into the bedding, down into warm waters below. Feeling a heartbeat inside him for the first time in weeks. Not his own, but half of the one at his back and half the one at his breast, both of them strong enough to meet in the middle of his hollow chest.

His lungs are worked by proxy by the motions of breathing on either side of him. In and out. Out and in. It’s catching, like the grippe went and fathered itself a rosy, hale son. They move on either side of him, through him, slow at first and then quickening. Someone’s touching his hair. Jim. Hardly there at first and then unmistakably firm.

His face is wet. Blood–that’s his first thought. The wound on his brow must have split open again. But there isn’t any new pain, only the hard squeeze in his chest, and he soon realises that he’s weeping. Without force, without ceasing, hot tears are running down his cheeks, dripping damp into the makeshift pillow and into the corner of his mouth.

The last thing he’s aware of before the blackness comes again is Fang carefully brushing them away.

---

“Izzy. Iz.”

Frenchie’s peering around the edge of the hatch, a length of rope coiled over his shoulder and a backward lean to his posture that says he’s in the middle of trimming the mainsail and should not be faffing about talking to him.

“I know,” Izzy rasps, sitting up and reaching first for the bottle and then his crutch.

Up on the deck, Archie calls out: “Did you tell him?”

“I’m telling him. Hey, Iz!”

“I know.”

He’s known from the instant he woke from his nap that the wind has changed. Not that he’s ever been the kind of sailor who can feel it in his sleep, but with precious little else to hang a hope on, he’s been listening hard enough for weeks to hear the difference in the sound as it blows the stern to the mizzen.

Frenchie flashes a grin and disappears from sight.

The ship has taken on speed by the time Izzy hurriedly limps on deck. The sky above is a startlingly deep blue, strung with wispy white clouds under the afternoon sun. Fang is waiting near the hatch to lend an arm, and the rest of them are gathered at the bow. Frenchie’s a few feet up the rigging, arm looped in the shrouds and leaning forward like a second prow. Archie is stamping a beat on the boards, grinning ear to ear and looking fit to burst.

Izzy follows Jim’s narrowed eyes west as he joins them at the rail. There’s a blur on the horizon, like a stray smudge of paint. He wipes his eyes, squinting to be sure.

But he’s seeing it, same as them. God, he can almost smell it, the way you can smell the sea when you’re on land. Sun-baked earth. Fresh water. Greenery. Shade. And, from the dredges of his memory and some unknowable feeling in his gut, oranges. His mouth waters and his stomach clenches, fed recently enough to beg. His good knee nearly buckles, and he leans his weight against Fang’s warm chest to steady himself. Jim’s hand skirts over his lower back, sending an unexpected prickle up his spine.

“St. Augustine,” they say quietly.

He’s never heard their voice sound that small before. In the space it leaves, he draws a deep breath and forces his own to fill it.

“All right,” he calls out, clapping his hands to cover the creak in his throat. “Lollygagging time’s over. No shirking now. Step lively, you lot!”