![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
delphiTitle: Safe Harbour
Series: La Vie en Orange #2
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationships: Archie/Fang/Frenchie/Izzy Hands/Jim Jimenez, Izzy Hands & Jim's Nana
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~2700
Content Info: AU: Izzy Hands Lives. This is a canon divergence from 2x2 on, where Ed's "body" was swept overboard during the mutiny. He's off reuniting with Stede somewhere, but Izzy and the other mutineers continue to believe he's dead.
Summary: The crew of five has made it ashore to St. Augustine, but Izzy—confined to bed rest at Nana’s—is still searching for solid ground.
Notes: Sequel to Signs of Life My thanks tolookfar2 for kindly beta-reading. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. This story is also available on AO3.
Fucking laudanum.
Beneath the sweetness of the orange syrup lurks the poppy, a rank taste like someone pissed in the dregs of a pork barrel. It coats Izzy’s tongue right to the back of his throat. His eyes are full to soreness with its jelly. His brains get mired in its stickiness every time he turns his head on the pillow.
Beneath the pillow, a mattress. A bed. A cool stone floor in the windowless back room of a mission house.
Beneath sleep, the slow-moving waters of unconsciousness.
Izzy loses whole days, that first week in St. Augustine.
He drifts, an overladen ship. Now and then he runs aground on an island of wakefulness and peels his eyes open, dry-mouthed and sick to his stomach, always expecting to find himself alone and almost always wrong.
This time, someone has insinuated themselves directly under his right arm, wedged in between him and the wall. Frenchie, he decides, by the sound of the breathing. But he turns his head with some effort all the same, gorge rising and vision swimming at the movement, and peers down blearily to be certain. Yeah, it’s Frenchie—folded up tight, arms drawn to his chest and head bowed, his nose squished flat against Izzy’s ribs. Even with his knees bent, his unreasonably long shanks extend over the foot of the bed.
What time is it?
He ought to get up, but he hesitates. Everyone except him has been hard at work since they made land, and Frenchie can’t have been in here long for Izzy not to have woken up before now. A man’s due his hours off when he’s put in a proper watch.
He reaches over with a clumsily weighted hand and fixes Frenchie’s collar, laying it flat before that crease in it can set. Frenchie nuzzles closer, sighing in his sleep.
Just a few minutes, Izzy thinks. He’ll only rest his eyes for a few more minutes. Then the bed sinks slowly under him, and the faint noises of activity upstairs fade away behind the sound of even breathing, and all that remains is the sensation of someone warm beside him.
"Piss off," he groans as Fang carries in the makings of a bath, letting in too much light with him. "I'm getting up. I can wash myself."
"Come on, Izzy. You don’t have anything I haven't seen before." Fang inflicts a broad smile and a snicker on him while setting the basin down on the bedside table.
His jaw sets. He’s not actually certain if Fang has already gawked at the dog’s breakfast that remains of his left leg, and not being able to remember is worse than knowing he has.
"Leave it," he says sharply—or at least it would be sharply if his mouth weren't made of cotton.
"All right.” Fang ducks his head and looks at him sideways. "Maybe I could just...?"
"Just what?"
"Tidy up your beard a bit? I know you don’t like it scruffy.”
Like a conjuring, the words worsen the irritation of the bristle on his neck. His hand is stupid and slow as he raises it to scratch, but that gives him time to mull over the proposition. He does need it, and he can't trust himself to do it. It would be the way of things, to fuck up shooting himself through the head only to slit his throat shaving.
“Yeah,” he says eventually. “All right.”
Fang slides an arm under his back. “Upsy-daisy!”
Up Izzy goes with a wheeze, more 36-pounder than daisy, but he manages to stay sitting under his own power. A tin cup is filled with freshly boiled water and placed in his hands for safekeeping as Fang joins him on the bed, a warm and padded headboard to lean back against.
He lets his eyes close. Splish-splash and drip-drip-drip as the cloth is dipped into the basin and wrung out. It’s pressed to the lower half of his face, Fang’s big hands covering the entirety of his jaw and throat. The heat prickles on his cheeks, and the next breath he draws is thick with steam.
Fang's somehow managed to get a hold of the good soap. Izzy suspects Frenchie’s behind that, whether through light fingers or the stray-cat charm that's had the Sister continuously slipping him dinner scraps and telling him he’s too skinny. Unlike the ashy crumbles Izzy was previously rationed, this is the proper Spanish stuff, smelling of orange oil and lathering up like sea foam on his cheek as Fang lavishes it on.
He lays his head back, baring his throat. Once, words would have been loaded and primed, warning against accidental—or ‘accidental’—slips of the blade, but today the chambers are empty. The first short stroke of the knife’s edge over his stubble is just as light and smooth as the soap, and he breathes out in shaky relief.
Off comes the bristle strip by strip, the lather rinsed from the knife with a swirl in the tin cup after every pass. His newly bare skin tingles, then tightens with gooseflesh at the brush of Fang’s beard as a kiss is pressed to the top of his head.
He snaps his teeth at him, but Fang only laughs and squeezes him tight around the middle.
“I’m glad you’re doing better, Izzy. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t.”
“Shut it,” Izzy says, but quietly, laying his head back down on Fang's shoulder. No good ever comes of kicking up a fuss mid-shave.
"Open up for the clipper!"
Archie steers a spoonful of unidentifiable red stuff toward his mouth, and Izzy gropes under the pillow for his knife.
.
"Try it and I'll cut your fucking hand off."
"Suits me,” she says, licking some spilt sauce off her wrist. “Then I get to loaf around all day with dashing pirate wenches feeding me stew."
"Twat."
She holds up two fingers to her mouth, wagging her tongue lewdly in between. God help him, he snorts a laugh. It makes his head slosh and his chest ache.
He gives up on finding the knife and holds out his hand. “Give me the spoon.”
She does that, at least, and sets the bowl in his lap as he sits up woozily.
"What is this?" he asks, poking at the chopped bits of something in sauce.
Archie shrugs. "Chicken? Then again, the way that old lady's been giving me the evil eye, it could be the last person Jim brought home that she didn't approve of."
He tries a spoonful and nearly moans.
"Fuck me."
"Yeah?” Archie tilts her head and looks him over with a face-scrunch of middling interest. "'Cause Fang's been saying you're still resting up—"
"Shut it. Have you tried this?"
"It's good, eh?"
He closes his eyes, savouring the tenderness of fresh meat, the creaminess of beans, the tang of tomato, and pretends not to notice as Archie nicks a piece of chicken off his plate.
"Ship's drying out," Jim reports, standing at the foot of his bed with a hip cocked and their hat in their hand.
That right there is what he appreciates about Jim. If they’re going to look in on him like he's some sort of invalid, they at least come with business. Paying attention through the fog to what they’re saying takes more concentration on his end than it should, but he manages.
"What about the..." Even in here, you should assume the walls have ears. Best not mention the cargo.
The ship was left in a cave off that lagoon that split the barrier island. No share of the treasure on board could safely pay off a harbourmaster, not with the run the Revenge had been on before the storm. Even battered, she was recognizable, and any pirate hunter worth their salt would be keeping an eye out for her in every port. Still, leaving her unguarded was hardly any better. The first thing anyone with sense would do upon finding an apparently abandoned ship would be to find a cart and play Finders Keepers.
"We buried it."
"You what?"
His brains bash against the inside of his skull as he rolls over to reach for his crutch. Fucking hell, he would have thought Fang at least would have some sense. They might as well have thrown that treasure overboard, for all their chances of finding it before someone else does. They might as well have—
"Hey, calmate." The room lurches sideways and keeps on spinning as Jim pushes him back onto the bed, pinning him down with a hand square on his chest. “What else were we going to do, bring it here? Nana’s not a fence, and she’d know where it came from. Best case, it gets donated to the church. Worst case, she makes us get rid of it all for being filthy blood money.”
He grabs Jim's wrist, trying to wrench them off him and failing piss-miserably. Likely case, some local twat finds the big fucking hole that lot just dug in the woods, takes all of their loot, and brings the law down when someone notices said twat's sudden newfound wealth.
But the corners of Jim's mouth are quirking. It's an aggravating expression, but it gives him pause all the same. When that one has something to be smug about, there's a decent chance it's warranted.
"This had better be good," he growls.
"There's a place near here. It's...my land. No one else has moved in, at least. No one's been there for years. We put it there."
"Someone will have noticed you're back."
"We dug the holes long and narrow and stuck some wooden crosses on top. That was Frenchie's idea. If anyone comes by, which they won't, they'll figure we buried some of our crew there."
All right. It's not half bad, he has to admit. You can't rule out grave robbers, but this place knows sailors. Sailors will leave what they have to their people or their best mate, or they'll be picked clean before they’re cold if they're unpopular. No one would expect much but pox or plague from the resting place of unlucky sailors.
"Frenchie's got a devious mind," he says.
"Yeah. It's great."
"What about the ship?"
"Fang and I picked up some more work down at the docks. We'll see about buying more sailcloth and wood, but in the meantime I think just making sure everyone's recovered is step one."
"If I'm recovered, everyone's recovered."
The look they give him is sharp and succinct.
"Fuck off," he says.
They turn their hand and smack his chest with the back of it.
"Get some sleep, jefe. We've got this."
Izzy jolts awake, wrecking on the rocks.
For a moment, in the darkness, it's Ed at the door. The glint of something in his memory—shears, a pistol. The mercy of believing this might have all been a dream.
His heart is pounding. His tongue is stuck to the floor of his mouth.
Then the door opens. Candlelight spills in. The Sister follows it, with a sound of general disapproval at the state of him.
The taste of metal in his mouth recedes, if only slightly. He's more than a little afraid of her, but that's only the proper and respectful reaction to nuns, midwives, and every other woman who shepherds life into the world and lays out the dead.
She pulls the blanket down to his bandaged thigh and then ungently turns his head this way and that as she looks him over. Her cool palm briefly settles on the side of his brow that isn't split in two. The other side gets slathered once more with some sort of salve that smells like the time he sicked up after too much sack. He instinctively leans away from it, but she grips him tightly by the hair and holds him in place.
Even in the meagre glow of a single candle, he can see the resemblance between her and Jim. Not natural kin, maybe, but the cultivated kind at least. It’s in the way they carry themselves—how they move and how they hold themselves motionless. The way they find the shadows even when they’re holding a light. He briefly meets the Sister's eyes and thinks, not for the first time, that she's likely seen more blood of man than blood of Christ.
When she takes out the bottle of laudanum, his stomach recoils and his jaw clamps shut. He shakes his head. No more.
She narrows her eyes. "Do you want to die?"
For a moment, Izzy wonders what she can offer him in that department. He wonders if she knows about the bread and the beer. They're big on magic, papists. Big on bribery too.
Up until now, he's never really believed that paying some poor sod to eat and drink at a funeral really took the sin off a corpse. That was just the natural end of what those with money would try to get those without to do for them, and if taking that bread and beer and sixpence was a bloody stupid idea on the sin-eater’s part, it was only for the shame of letting the payer get away with it.
Does he have any shame left? He wonders what would it hurt to ask—if any of it's real, if she doesn’t need Ed’s body to make it work—if she knows the workings to give him Ed's sins to swallow. If she'll let him have them, make them his own to bear, and let him die here so Ed will be forgiven.
He wants...
Only it's not a matter of wanting, is it. It's never been a matter of what he wants.
He thinks instead about Fang and Jim, Frenchie and Archie. Out there working for their ship. Upstairs working for their keep. Burying fucking treasure like fairytale pirates.
He pries his tongue loose.
"There's things that still need doing," he says.
She nods gravely. Then she raps him on the chin with her little medicine-spoon.
He obligingly opens his mouth. The tincture is just sweet enough to almost fool his gorge, but then the rest of it hits and his whole body shudders.
"You'll live," the sister pronounces.
If it sounds more like a curse in her mouth than assurance, that only makes him more inclined to believe it.
Night has truly settled the next time Izzy stirs. Maybe it's the same night. Maybe it isn't.
There's no telling the hour by the light in this room, not really. But he can hear the lateness, the way you can always hear it on land: a sort of hollowness, a stillness when people are working by the whims of the sun instead of by the equal measures of a bell.
And, in here, the sounds of breathing.
One, two, three, four.
Frenchie is lying beside him on the bed again, curled in on himself, this time with a leg thrown over Izzy's. Fang is a dark mound against the far wall, half sitting up on the floor with his chin down against his chest as he snores. His back is to the door, blocking anyone from coming in unannounced. Jim and Archie have spooned up together on a pile of blankets and overclothes in the scant space between the Fang and the bed. If Izzy were to let his hand slip from the mattress, he might be able to feel the warmth coming off them.
He does. He can.
On the other side of him, Frenchie fidgets, snuffling against his shoulder. Slowly, carefully, Izzy eases his arm around him so that neither of them falls off the fucking bed.
The darkness pulses around him in time to the throbbing in his head and in his leg. The pain is dull and distant, something he's towing along behind him. His mouth tastes of laudanum, but the edge of it is softened by the smells of good soap, worn clothes, and sweat. He closes his eyes again, breathing deep, and lets himself be carried along to wherever sleep will take him.
Series: La Vie en Orange #2
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationships: Archie/Fang/Frenchie/Izzy Hands/Jim Jimenez, Izzy Hands & Jim's Nana
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~2700
Content Info: AU: Izzy Hands Lives. This is a canon divergence from 2x2 on, where Ed's "body" was swept overboard during the mutiny. He's off reuniting with Stede somewhere, but Izzy and the other mutineers continue to believe he's dead.
Summary: The crew of five has made it ashore to St. Augustine, but Izzy—confined to bed rest at Nana’s—is still searching for solid ground.
Notes: Sequel to Signs of Life My thanks to
lookfar2 for kindly beta-reading. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. This story is also available on AO3.Fucking laudanum.
Beneath the sweetness of the orange syrup lurks the poppy, a rank taste like someone pissed in the dregs of a pork barrel. It coats Izzy’s tongue right to the back of his throat. His eyes are full to soreness with its jelly. His brains get mired in its stickiness every time he turns his head on the pillow.
Beneath the pillow, a mattress. A bed. A cool stone floor in the windowless back room of a mission house.
Beneath sleep, the slow-moving waters of unconsciousness.
Izzy loses whole days, that first week in St. Augustine.
He drifts, an overladen ship. Now and then he runs aground on an island of wakefulness and peels his eyes open, dry-mouthed and sick to his stomach, always expecting to find himself alone and almost always wrong.
This time, someone has insinuated themselves directly under his right arm, wedged in between him and the wall. Frenchie, he decides, by the sound of the breathing. But he turns his head with some effort all the same, gorge rising and vision swimming at the movement, and peers down blearily to be certain. Yeah, it’s Frenchie—folded up tight, arms drawn to his chest and head bowed, his nose squished flat against Izzy’s ribs. Even with his knees bent, his unreasonably long shanks extend over the foot of the bed.
What time is it?
He ought to get up, but he hesitates. Everyone except him has been hard at work since they made land, and Frenchie can’t have been in here long for Izzy not to have woken up before now. A man’s due his hours off when he’s put in a proper watch.
He reaches over with a clumsily weighted hand and fixes Frenchie’s collar, laying it flat before that crease in it can set. Frenchie nuzzles closer, sighing in his sleep.
Just a few minutes, Izzy thinks. He’ll only rest his eyes for a few more minutes. Then the bed sinks slowly under him, and the faint noises of activity upstairs fade away behind the sound of even breathing, and all that remains is the sensation of someone warm beside him.
"Piss off," he groans as Fang carries in the makings of a bath, letting in too much light with him. "I'm getting up. I can wash myself."
"Come on, Izzy. You don’t have anything I haven't seen before." Fang inflicts a broad smile and a snicker on him while setting the basin down on the bedside table.
His jaw sets. He’s not actually certain if Fang has already gawked at the dog’s breakfast that remains of his left leg, and not being able to remember is worse than knowing he has.
"Leave it," he says sharply—or at least it would be sharply if his mouth weren't made of cotton.
"All right.” Fang ducks his head and looks at him sideways. "Maybe I could just...?"
"Just what?"
"Tidy up your beard a bit? I know you don’t like it scruffy.”
Like a conjuring, the words worsen the irritation of the bristle on his neck. His hand is stupid and slow as he raises it to scratch, but that gives him time to mull over the proposition. He does need it, and he can't trust himself to do it. It would be the way of things, to fuck up shooting himself through the head only to slit his throat shaving.
“Yeah,” he says eventually. “All right.”
Fang slides an arm under his back. “Upsy-daisy!”
Up Izzy goes with a wheeze, more 36-pounder than daisy, but he manages to stay sitting under his own power. A tin cup is filled with freshly boiled water and placed in his hands for safekeeping as Fang joins him on the bed, a warm and padded headboard to lean back against.
He lets his eyes close. Splish-splash and drip-drip-drip as the cloth is dipped into the basin and wrung out. It’s pressed to the lower half of his face, Fang’s big hands covering the entirety of his jaw and throat. The heat prickles on his cheeks, and the next breath he draws is thick with steam.
Fang's somehow managed to get a hold of the good soap. Izzy suspects Frenchie’s behind that, whether through light fingers or the stray-cat charm that's had the Sister continuously slipping him dinner scraps and telling him he’s too skinny. Unlike the ashy crumbles Izzy was previously rationed, this is the proper Spanish stuff, smelling of orange oil and lathering up like sea foam on his cheek as Fang lavishes it on.
He lays his head back, baring his throat. Once, words would have been loaded and primed, warning against accidental—or ‘accidental’—slips of the blade, but today the chambers are empty. The first short stroke of the knife’s edge over his stubble is just as light and smooth as the soap, and he breathes out in shaky relief.
Off comes the bristle strip by strip, the lather rinsed from the knife with a swirl in the tin cup after every pass. His newly bare skin tingles, then tightens with gooseflesh at the brush of Fang’s beard as a kiss is pressed to the top of his head.
He snaps his teeth at him, but Fang only laughs and squeezes him tight around the middle.
“I’m glad you’re doing better, Izzy. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t.”
“Shut it,” Izzy says, but quietly, laying his head back down on Fang's shoulder. No good ever comes of kicking up a fuss mid-shave.
"Open up for the clipper!"
Archie steers a spoonful of unidentifiable red stuff toward his mouth, and Izzy gropes under the pillow for his knife.
.
"Try it and I'll cut your fucking hand off."
"Suits me,” she says, licking some spilt sauce off her wrist. “Then I get to loaf around all day with dashing pirate wenches feeding me stew."
"Twat."
She holds up two fingers to her mouth, wagging her tongue lewdly in between. God help him, he snorts a laugh. It makes his head slosh and his chest ache.
He gives up on finding the knife and holds out his hand. “Give me the spoon.”
She does that, at least, and sets the bowl in his lap as he sits up woozily.
"What is this?" he asks, poking at the chopped bits of something in sauce.
Archie shrugs. "Chicken? Then again, the way that old lady's been giving me the evil eye, it could be the last person Jim brought home that she didn't approve of."
He tries a spoonful and nearly moans.
"Fuck me."
"Yeah?” Archie tilts her head and looks him over with a face-scrunch of middling interest. "'Cause Fang's been saying you're still resting up—"
"Shut it. Have you tried this?"
"It's good, eh?"
He closes his eyes, savouring the tenderness of fresh meat, the creaminess of beans, the tang of tomato, and pretends not to notice as Archie nicks a piece of chicken off his plate.
"Ship's drying out," Jim reports, standing at the foot of his bed with a hip cocked and their hat in their hand.
That right there is what he appreciates about Jim. If they’re going to look in on him like he's some sort of invalid, they at least come with business. Paying attention through the fog to what they’re saying takes more concentration on his end than it should, but he manages.
"What about the..." Even in here, you should assume the walls have ears. Best not mention the cargo.
The ship was left in a cave off that lagoon that split the barrier island. No share of the treasure on board could safely pay off a harbourmaster, not with the run the Revenge had been on before the storm. Even battered, she was recognizable, and any pirate hunter worth their salt would be keeping an eye out for her in every port. Still, leaving her unguarded was hardly any better. The first thing anyone with sense would do upon finding an apparently abandoned ship would be to find a cart and play Finders Keepers.
"We buried it."
"You what?"
His brains bash against the inside of his skull as he rolls over to reach for his crutch. Fucking hell, he would have thought Fang at least would have some sense. They might as well have thrown that treasure overboard, for all their chances of finding it before someone else does. They might as well have—
"Hey, calmate." The room lurches sideways and keeps on spinning as Jim pushes him back onto the bed, pinning him down with a hand square on his chest. “What else were we going to do, bring it here? Nana’s not a fence, and she’d know where it came from. Best case, it gets donated to the church. Worst case, she makes us get rid of it all for being filthy blood money.”
He grabs Jim's wrist, trying to wrench them off him and failing piss-miserably. Likely case, some local twat finds the big fucking hole that lot just dug in the woods, takes all of their loot, and brings the law down when someone notices said twat's sudden newfound wealth.
But the corners of Jim's mouth are quirking. It's an aggravating expression, but it gives him pause all the same. When that one has something to be smug about, there's a decent chance it's warranted.
"This had better be good," he growls.
"There's a place near here. It's...my land. No one else has moved in, at least. No one's been there for years. We put it there."
"Someone will have noticed you're back."
"We dug the holes long and narrow and stuck some wooden crosses on top. That was Frenchie's idea. If anyone comes by, which they won't, they'll figure we buried some of our crew there."
All right. It's not half bad, he has to admit. You can't rule out grave robbers, but this place knows sailors. Sailors will leave what they have to their people or their best mate, or they'll be picked clean before they’re cold if they're unpopular. No one would expect much but pox or plague from the resting place of unlucky sailors.
"Frenchie's got a devious mind," he says.
"Yeah. It's great."
"What about the ship?"
"Fang and I picked up some more work down at the docks. We'll see about buying more sailcloth and wood, but in the meantime I think just making sure everyone's recovered is step one."
"If I'm recovered, everyone's recovered."
The look they give him is sharp and succinct.
"Fuck off," he says.
They turn their hand and smack his chest with the back of it.
"Get some sleep, jefe. We've got this."
Izzy jolts awake, wrecking on the rocks.
For a moment, in the darkness, it's Ed at the door. The glint of something in his memory—shears, a pistol. The mercy of believing this might have all been a dream.
His heart is pounding. His tongue is stuck to the floor of his mouth.
Then the door opens. Candlelight spills in. The Sister follows it, with a sound of general disapproval at the state of him.
The taste of metal in his mouth recedes, if only slightly. He's more than a little afraid of her, but that's only the proper and respectful reaction to nuns, midwives, and every other woman who shepherds life into the world and lays out the dead.
She pulls the blanket down to his bandaged thigh and then ungently turns his head this way and that as she looks him over. Her cool palm briefly settles on the side of his brow that isn't split in two. The other side gets slathered once more with some sort of salve that smells like the time he sicked up after too much sack. He instinctively leans away from it, but she grips him tightly by the hair and holds him in place.
Even in the meagre glow of a single candle, he can see the resemblance between her and Jim. Not natural kin, maybe, but the cultivated kind at least. It’s in the way they carry themselves—how they move and how they hold themselves motionless. The way they find the shadows even when they’re holding a light. He briefly meets the Sister's eyes and thinks, not for the first time, that she's likely seen more blood of man than blood of Christ.
When she takes out the bottle of laudanum, his stomach recoils and his jaw clamps shut. He shakes his head. No more.
She narrows her eyes. "Do you want to die?"
For a moment, Izzy wonders what she can offer him in that department. He wonders if she knows about the bread and the beer. They're big on magic, papists. Big on bribery too.
Up until now, he's never really believed that paying some poor sod to eat and drink at a funeral really took the sin off a corpse. That was just the natural end of what those with money would try to get those without to do for them, and if taking that bread and beer and sixpence was a bloody stupid idea on the sin-eater’s part, it was only for the shame of letting the payer get away with it.
Does he have any shame left? He wonders what would it hurt to ask—if any of it's real, if she doesn’t need Ed’s body to make it work—if she knows the workings to give him Ed's sins to swallow. If she'll let him have them, make them his own to bear, and let him die here so Ed will be forgiven.
He wants...
Only it's not a matter of wanting, is it. It's never been a matter of what he wants.
He thinks instead about Fang and Jim, Frenchie and Archie. Out there working for their ship. Upstairs working for their keep. Burying fucking treasure like fairytale pirates.
He pries his tongue loose.
"There's things that still need doing," he says.
She nods gravely. Then she raps him on the chin with her little medicine-spoon.
He obligingly opens his mouth. The tincture is just sweet enough to almost fool his gorge, but then the rest of it hits and his whole body shudders.
"You'll live," the sister pronounces.
If it sounds more like a curse in her mouth than assurance, that only makes him more inclined to believe it.
Night has truly settled the next time Izzy stirs. Maybe it's the same night. Maybe it isn't.
There's no telling the hour by the light in this room, not really. But he can hear the lateness, the way you can always hear it on land: a sort of hollowness, a stillness when people are working by the whims of the sun instead of by the equal measures of a bell.
And, in here, the sounds of breathing.
One, two, three, four.
Frenchie is lying beside him on the bed again, curled in on himself, this time with a leg thrown over Izzy's. Fang is a dark mound against the far wall, half sitting up on the floor with his chin down against his chest as he snores. His back is to the door, blocking anyone from coming in unannounced. Jim and Archie have spooned up together on a pile of blankets and overclothes in the scant space between the Fang and the bed. If Izzy were to let his hand slip from the mattress, he might be able to feel the warmth coming off them.
He does. He can.
On the other side of him, Frenchie fidgets, snuffling against his shoulder. Slowly, carefully, Izzy eases his arm around him so that neither of them falls off the fucking bed.
The darkness pulses around him in time to the throbbing in his head and in his leg. The pain is dull and distant, something he's towing along behind him. His mouth tastes of laudanum, but the edge of it is softened by the smells of good soap, worn clothes, and sweat. He closes his eyes again, breathing deep, and lets himself be carried along to wherever sleep will take him.
