Archive of Our Own

"Get up," Vane said, and he kicked the side of the damp straw mattress upon which Flint was lying. It threw out a cloud of something that smelled utterly foul and made Flint splutter as he breathed it in, face down.

He turned his head and cracked open one eye - the one eye which was not currently so swollen that it wouldn't open up at all - and he looked up at Vane in the waning light of the high, barred window in the wall of their Harbour Island jail cell. There was pain in every breath he took, from ribs that were bruised or perhaps they were broken there beneath his tatty shirt, and Vane regarded him with every fraction the disdain he ever had. Flint's injuries had never much moved the man in the time they'd been incarcerated there together, at least not in that particular manner. Flint supposed he was glad of that. Vane's pity would have been unbearable.

"Get the fuck up," Vane said. "He's waiting."

"Why don't you tell him he can fuck himself," Flint muttered, blood and bile in his mouth, seemingly ever-present. But when Vane snorted his amusement as he stood there over him, as Vane held out one hand down to him, Flint reached up and took it, let Vane haul him bodily to his feet. Vane nodded tersely as he stepped away, back up against the wall of the dank, cramped cell they'd shared the past three months, and Flint grimaced, perhaps because that was all of which he was capable in response. They both knew he'd go. He always went. He didn't have much of a choice in the matter, after all; Flint had had his hand rather savagely if effectively forced.

With Vane's curt assistance, unwelcome but by then it was a grudgingly acknowledged necessity, Flint dressed for dinner. He'd never owned clothing quite so fine even long ago across the sea in England, but the cuts and the scrapes and the bruises - all visible there on his face and on his hands - had long since ceased to seem incongruous. He was practiced at it then. When blood ran down his neck and stained his stark white neckcloth red, the governor waved his hand for them to bring another. One night he'd dislodged a loose molar into his napkin there at dinner and no one at the governor's table had seemed particularly perturbed by this, even Flint himself. That was the way of things there. Besides, their party had never numbered more than three, or four if he thought to count the guard.

"Don't fuck up," Vane said, once they'd heard the guards' customary hollow footsteps in the corridor outside the door, once they'd heard the unmistakable metallic clack of pistols being cocked and the clatter of the keys against the aging door lock. Vane said the same three words every evening just prior to Flint's departure from the cell. Flint had never thought to respond with more than a brief desultory glance in his direction. They weren't friends, after all. They were rarely even allies, though three months chained together had clearly coloured their arrangement in ways it made Flint sick to fathom.

"Be ready," he said that night, lowly, with as cutting an accompanying glance as he could muster. He'd made a decision. They weren't going to stay.

Vane's eyes narrowed. He clenched his fists by his sides. The nod he gave was sharp but sure. Vane understood; he would be ready. In this, at least, Vane could be relied upon. His readiness was, after all, solidly in his own self-interest.

The door swung open, swung in, and Flint departed the cell that day just as he had each day for the three months or more that had passed prior to it, dressed as finely as he believed Thomas Hamilton ever had. Thomas would not have approved his plan but Thomas was not there to give either his approval or his disapproval, and so Flint would do what he must do to survive. The lives of thirty-three other men, pirates and all condemned to death just as he was, depended upon him. He would not see even one more of them dead, not even Vane, though the latter was perhaps a desire born more from spite than moral conviction.

And moreover, he would not allow Charles Vane the bitter satisfaction of being right.

---

It had been eight days since Flint's arrival there on Harbour Island, eight days after his first fight, when they marched Charles Vane out into the courtyard and struck him down to his knees. He fell to the dirt alongside three other men of the Ranger who they'd apparently caught mounting a rescue attempt.

"Well, fuck me if it ain't the Guthrie bitch's pretty wife," muttered one of Flint's men, Kitson, one of the four from his vanguard who'd been taken with him. The marines had shackled them and taken them away one night on the jetty at Nevis, the distraction while their brothers slipped down into the longboats and from there into the mist, back to the Walrus. Flint sighed. Some of his men had not one tenth remaining of the good sense God had given them. Sometimes he felt their dull wits might grind down his own, uncharitable as the thought was, though they were often less dangerous to him than the quick wits of John Silver or Billy Bones.

Just ten more minutes on their knees in the dirt close to sundown, while the men of the governor's commodore's military companies sopped up the dregs of their meal with fresh-baked bread there just across the yard, and then Kitson was paired with Vane for the evening's first fight. Not a single further insult would pass Kitson's lips after that, Flint thought, watching impassive as Vane caved in half the man's teeth, broke his jaw with his fist and left him there bleeding. Vane hadn't required the customary explanation of the rules. It had been clear to everyone assembled there that he meant to put the man down.

Flint fought last that night, with another of the Rangers, and won while all the others watched, while the governor watched across the yard with Eleanor and the commodore seated there beside him. Flint spat blood into the dirt and then the jail guards locked him back into his shackles and the lot of them, all fifty-four of them as there were back then, filed back out of the courtyard's evening sun and down into the dark, filthy half-light of the jail that lay below. They threw Vane in with him, like they'd thrown Flint in with the wizened old Captain Henrikson before his heart had given in at labour in the midday sun. Henrikson had be gone three days by then. Flint hadn't wished for another cellmate.

"You're a bigger fool than I thought you were to be taken alive," Flint said, as he began to untuck his shirt with aching fingers. It was hard to throw and land a blow without skinning his knuckles at the very least, though he'd had quite thorough experience over the years. Even before he'd left England, he'd had more fist-fights than any Navy lieutenant ought to have in a full career.

"Then I'd say that makes two of us," Vane replied. "You look just about more alive than dead, more's the fucking disappointment." Vane went closer, rested his back to the damp, mossy wall underneath the small window that overlooked the sea-sprayed cliffs, and he crossed his arms over his chest as Flint bent to tug his boots from his feet. Vane frowned. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"Dressing for dinner with the governor," Flint replied, directly, as he unbuckled his belt in short, sharp jerks and shoved his worn trousers down about his ankles. He stepped out of them barefoot on the filthy cell floor. "If I don't dress, I don't go."

Vane raised his brows; Flint reached for his freshly-laundered shirt and ignored the look that Vane was giving him, the one that said why should I give a shit if you don't get your fucking dinner with the cunt who's going to hang us? He pulled on the shirt and then he glanced at Vane with lips pressed tight into a line. He knew he didn't owe an explanation but he had already said more than he'd intended, his already grim and irritable mood aggravated by Vane's presence as it was, as it always had been. "If I don't present myself at dinner, no one here eats. That's the bargain."

"I'd rather fucking starve."

Flint tied his neckcloth into place with barely cooperative fingers. "Tell that to the men," he said. "I'm sure they'll understand."

Vane sighed but held his tongue and Flint watched him glower darkly as he watched him dress, as Vane watched him watching him pull on stockings and breeches, waistcoat, a jacket with its polished buttons, buckled shoes. He adjusted the neckcloth at his collar and Vane snorted, amused, derisive.

"Well, don't you look the proper fucking gent," he said.

As the pistols cocked outside the door, as the keys clattered against the lock, Flint gave Vane his hardest, most withering look, and turned his head to show the bruises at his cheekbone to their best advantage.

"Don't be fooled," he said, as the door swung open, as the armed guards took their aim to march him at gunpoint to the carriage that awaited. "They won't be." And he left the room with that, abruptly.

"Don't fuck up," Vane called after him. "I want to eat tonight."

"So much for starving," Flint retorted. Vane shrugged. They closed the door.

Vane was eating when Flint returned, picking pieces of overcooked meat from a near-rusted plate with his fingers because giving the man even the dullest of silverware would have been as good as arming him. He watched Flint with sharp eyes as he undressed and set all the fine clothing aside, as he redressed in his own worn black trousers, black shirt, black boots.

"Was she there tonight?" Vane asked, clearing the last of the food from his plate with a heel of half-stale bread. If the governor didn't feed his prisoners well, he did at least feed them in sufficient quantity, as was their bargain.

Flint nodded curtly then pulled his shirt on over his head, covering all the bruises on his chest again. "She's there every night," he replied, and then settled down on his damp mattress. And she was.

Flint knew, as he lay there stoically ignoring all Vane's further questions, that from the window high up in the wall he could see the whole bay and all the ships anchored in it. The Scarborough he recognised but the rest he'd had to fathom from snippets of conversation overheard during the day as they worked shoring up the walls of the Harbour Island fort, or in the governor's mansion as the captains of those ships came by to share new information. He sat there at the table, night after night, eating from porcelain with polished silver, opposite from Eleanor in her fine English dress who was not so cowed even then that she wouldn't meet his gaze as they ate. Yes, she was there. She spent her days with a lady's maid whose contempt for her mistress was obvious to Flint in the few short moments that he saw her in her company, and spent her evenings eating at the governor's table, but she was just as much the captive as he was, in her own way. The difference was her cage was a mansion house.

And then, early in the morning after thin, scarce sleep, the cycle all began again. The prisoners were marched outside into the fort and set to work in chains. They worked twelve hours in the baking Bahamian sun with sparse and quite irregular breaks for water that were often more dependent on the character of that day's military guard than on any form of schedule, and Flint watched Vane that first day, watched his eyes rove, watched as they lit upon this sword or that musket, almost within his reach.

"Don't," Flint said, in the sparse shade cast by the fort's outer wall as they broke for water just past midday, as he sat down in the dirt beside Vane. Chained to him as he was, there was nowhere else to go. "The Fair Isle's crew lost six in the last attempt. The Bull lost seven before that. You're going to get yourself killed."

"And what the fuck do you care?"

Flint passed him the water. "About you?" he said as Vane swallowed. "Nothing. But those sailors and those soldiers see you die so goddamn cheaply, what do you think that will do for the rest of us?" He took back the water and took another mouthful. "And I don't particularly want to die here."

Vane scowled. Flint could tell by it that he fathomed the point quite ably, for then at least.

At the end of the day, after a single hour's rest, the prisoners were marched back out into the courtyard. Every day, as the garrison at Harbour Island finished their evening meal at long wooden tables beneath broad sailcloth canopies set up to shield against the sun, the prisoners were sat down in ranks in the dirt, shackled to each other hand and foot, to wait. Flint sat beside Vane, shackled to him as he was, to wait. The prisoners would be the men's after dinner entertainment, as they had been since before Flint's arrival. The notion still rankled with him; they called themselves civilised then made their captives fight for sport.

"Flint!" the governor called, his name pulled from a hat but they all knew the draw was rigged to choose him every day. The guard set him free and he stood and stepped forward, into the square that was marked out there in the courtyard dirt, bordered with thick rope from a Navy ship's rigging that was held tight to the ground with thick metal pegs. Inside the square, the dirt was stained with blood. Flint knew some of it was his. He could pick out a patch or two for certain.

"Vane!" the governor called. A clack of metal on metal sounded over the soldiers' chatter as Vane's shackles were struck, and he entered the square.

"What now?" Vane asked, rubbing at his shackle-chafed wrists. Flint knew the feeling well, and hid the marks beneath his lace cuffs at dinner nightly, though Vane had pulled against them perhaps a fraction more than most. Flint supposed he understood the reason why, from what he knew of him.

Flint smiled a distinctly mirthless smile. "Now we fight till one or both of us can't stand," he said. "If the loss does not convince to the governor's satisfaction, the marines will shoot us both dead."

"Then we'd best put on a show," Vane said, and set his jaw, and he looked up at Eleanor there by the governor's side. He didn't look for long but she continued to watch after he'd looked away, and watched the fighting just as she always did. Eleanor was doubtless watching as they stood together, raised their fists and circled. Vane was a hard man, full of pride and anger, strong and sadly also skilled. The fight was not a short one. It convinced.

Afterwards, after the evening's third fight of the usual three, the prisoners were marched back inside and returned to their cells. Flint held himself up against the desk by the wall as he bled and he bled and he bled, and Vane watched as he made an attempt to pull off his shirt, as he groaned, shook his head and failed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Vane asked.

Flint sighed. "Dressing for dinner," he said, and then began to wipe blood from his broken nose with a cloth already caked in the blood of previous days. "If I don't dress, I don't go. If I don't go, no one here eats." He looked at Vane pointedly, blood still smeared across his face. "That includes you."

---

They dressed him like a civilised man for dinner every evening, but if the cuts and scrapes and bruises hadn't told quite another story then the pistol aimed squarely at his head would have done so by itself. A marine in a pristine uniform held it there each night much like the sword of fucking Damocles. The governor seemed to find it amusing.

"Miss Guthrie tells me Charles Vane is the single most dangerous man in all of Nassau," the governor said that night, the night after Charles Vane's arrival. "She tells me I won't take back New Providence while he yet lives. What is your assessment, Captain Flint?"

It was tempting in that moment to throw Vane to the hounds, and he could follow Eleanor's thinking in the matter quite clearly indeed. Perhaps Vane was the most dangerous man in Nassau; he certainly had quite the following, quite the reputation and quite the disinclination both from logic and from reason. Rogers was keeping Flint alive because he believed at some point he would reason with him and they would then come to terms, Flint knew that, but there was no reasoning with Vane. The man did exactly as his own conscience demanded, no more and no less, and there had never seemed much rhyme or reason to it.

"I'm the one with whom you ought to be concerned, Sir," Flint said instead. And he meant it, in spite of his contempt for Vane, because even then he meant to get them off that island and back home across the sea to Nassau. The issue was that he saw from the look on the governor's face that he meant to break him long before he had the chance to leave. He seemed gratified when flint's nose bled into his soup, so Flint just used his spoon to mix it in and carried on his meal. He'd had worse. At least it was his own blood he was tasting.

"Was she there?" Vane asked, as Flint eased off his coat that second night, as he stripped down bare to put his own filthy, stinking clothes back on. He felt perversely cleaner in them, all considered.

"She says you're the most dangerous man in Nassau," Flint replied, flatly, and didn't look to see if Vane found that fact intriguing or flattering or indeed anything else of the like. He knew Eleanor had signed Vane's death warrant with her words, if not quite literally then as near to it as made no practical difference. Of course, all of the prisoners there on Harbour Island had been condemned to death. The ones that weren't shot after an unconvincing fight, didn't die from the heat or the labour or from the fighting itself, would one day meet their end at the end of a rope, and however the manner of their death, their bodies would be strung up in the streets by the harbour and left there to rot in the sun. A warning to all pirates, the governor said; a message to the people, Flint surmised instead. They were telling the story of how they'd rid the Bahamas of piracy, stripping the fear from the people one swinging pirate at a time. It was a somewhat deft manoeuvre, but that fact did not stem Flint's disgust for it.

In the morning, the cycle began again. They laboured in the sun, Flint and Vane chained together at the rocks to split them down, swinging hammers under the ever-watchful eye of the Royal Marines. In the evening, they came back out into the courtyard and the governor called Flint's name just as he had each night since his arrival on the island, as if it were the fault of his poor luck and and not simply the governor's design. He fought and he won that night, but wins or losses had very little meaning either way, he knew that. And then he returned to his cell to wash and dress and leave in the carriage for dinner. Vane watched him wash and dress and go.

Two nights later, Flint's opponent wrenched his shoulder from its socket. Back in the cell, Vane shook his head and took Flint roughly by the wrist. Flint shrugged him off, quickly, brusquely, with a look that said nothing as much as don't fucking touch me, but Vane tried again and this time Flint had the sense to acquiesce. Vane braced one hand up by his collarbone then jerked the whole arrangement swiftly, sharply, agonisingly, back into place, and shored him up for a moment after as his knees went weak with the sudden pain. After, Flint nodded awkward thanks and Vane grimaced his response, then turned away.

Two nights later, Flint's nose had been broken once again. Back in the cell, Vane shook his head and shoved Flint down into their one worm-eaten chair. While Flint grasped tight at the chair's splintered arms, Vane leaned over him to shift the cartilage back into place with his worn fingertips, Flint's blood smearing over his hands. Flint nodded his awkward thanks and Vane huffed his response, then turned away.

Two nights later it was something else, then two nights later something else again, then something else and something else, pulled tendons, strained ligaments, overextended joints, the one small mercy in it all that his back had not yet given out. A fortnight of injuries both new and old became a month became six weeks or more as he and Vane existed in each other's presence. After the second month, Vane ceased to ask about Eleanor. Vane handed him a cloth for his bloodied mouth or his bloodied hands, wrapped his ribs so he could walk without very near immobilising pain, helped him dress when he was so bruised and torn he could barely move, let alone arrange a neckcloth to his satisfaction. Flint fought every night and sometimes won and sometimes lost, depending upon his opponent and the state of his preexisting injuries. Vane fought one night in four, if that, and he won the match each and every time, brutally, emphatically. They hadn't faced each other since that second night. Flint was grateful for that, at least. He was grateful even for the times Vane talked with him at night when he was suffering too much to sleep. They didn't agree on many things but the debate was always lively.

One day Flint failed to clear the square quite quickly enough for their ajudicant's liking and so the bullish marine stepped his bootheel down squarely on Flint's hand. He leaned down to pull each finger back in turn and broke them slowly; though Flint's vision swam from it, he felt it more from the looks on the men's faces as they watched than he did himself, though a shout came up from in him that he muffled in the dirt. Then he crawled, fucking crawled, until he could stagger to his feet and drag himself back to his place in the line, while all the garrison chuckled in a shared sadistic mirth. Their prisoners weren't men, after all; they were pirates.

Later, Vane pulled the rings from Flint's broken fingers. He set them and he splinted them and he helped him dress for dinner where the governor and Eleanor both glanced at his hand with curiosity they didn't try to hide. The following evening, Vane bound Flint's broken hand into a fist while he bit down on the leather of his belt against the pain, and then he went outside to fight.

"Governor says he's a mess," said the guard at the door. "He's to shave before dinner. And do something about his hand, for Christ's sake."

"Bastard couldn't hold a razor if his fucking life depended on it," Vane replied, as Flint ached dully and paid no mind at all.

"Governor says if that's the case you're to do it for him," the guard said. "He's made you responsible, like. You get him to the carriage at night or Woodes Rogers'll start hanging pirates in the square instead of fighting ‘em."

Flint watched the muscle work in Vane's jaw. He saw his grip tighten around the slim handle of the razor that had just a moment ago been handed over to him. He knew the look on Vane's face because Vane had never thought to hide a single bloody idea that crossed his mind in all the years he'd known the man. He was a step away from burying the razor in the first guard's neck with a sickly familiar spurt of hot red blood and damn the consequences, and so Flint reached out, put a hand on Vane's arm. He made him flinch and look his way, and he shook his head. Vane took a breath and sighed it out slowly, calmed himself with it.

"Give me the fucking soap," Vane snapped. The guard obliged, with a shit-eating grin that did nothing for Vane's mood.

Flint settled himself uneasily in the cell's one rickety chair and he tilted back his head as the guards looked on. The first two fingers of Vane's left hand met Flint's chin and pressed up to increase the tilt, then they travelled down, fingertips rasping against his ragged, weeks-old beard, skimming his Adam's apple, resting in the hollow there between his collarbones just for a moment. He closed his eyes.

He heard what came next, and felt it. He heard Vane put down the razor, felt him reach past him to set it down on the desk and then lather the soap in his hands before he smoothed it over Flint's cheeks and his chin and his neck with rough, hard fingertips worn that way with his trade the way Flint's own had been. He'd visited enough barbers in his time to know this did not feel like a barbershop; when he squeezed his eyes shut tighter he could almost have fooled himself to the belief that those hands belonged to Thomas and to one day in the Hamilton household so long ago, when James McGraw had bared his throat. He'd let Thomas shave him with a razor so sharp he would very nearly not have felt the cut if his neck had been slit from ear to ear. Part of him thought then, as Vane began to shave him, the familiar rasp of metal as the razor tugged against his beard, that killing him would have been a mercy to them all. He almost leaned forward against the blade of the razor held there by Vane's steady hand. He'd have felt it, he thought; the blade was dull.

"We could finish this right now," Vane murmured, leaning down close by his ear, but Flint shook his head; the movement was bare but the blade bit down at his skin all the same, with a bright sting of the soap to chase it.

"Don't," Flint said, though his tone said it wasn't his own life that he feared for.

"You're the maddest fuck I've ever met," Vane said. And maybe he was but he wouldn't give Rogers the satisfaction of breaking him to the point of desiring death. One of the men had strung himself up by his belt already and none of them knew what Woodes Rogers would do to them all if Flint died. He was the governor's favourite toy, after all; perhaps the man would have hauled Vane to the table in his stead, but in all likelihood he'd have washed his hands, hanged them all and had done with it. Flint's life may well have been a proxy for that of every prisoner on the island.

"Don't think this means I'm your fucking valet now," Vane muttered as he wiped the soap from Flint's neck, as the guard took back the razor; he hadn't been gentle - Flint would have been surprised if he'd found he had gentle in him - though he had been careful. Flint's jaw was too bruised from the day's fighting for him to feel much like making a retort and it hurt to smile, so he dressed for dinner and then left instead.

"What the fuck do they find to talk about, anyway, night after night?" Vane asked, somewhere toward the end of the second month, when Flint had just returned from dinner. He fairly collapsed down to his rather rank and awful mattress, all his fine clothing barely loosened, let alone removed; he closed his eyes and let Vane push him and pull him this way and that, let him divest him of his clothing and toss their one threadbare blanket over the top of him when he was done with it. He'd dress again in the morning, he thought. Tonight, he could barely move.

"Commerce," he replied, rubbing at his closed eyes with his good hand. "Trade routes. Commodities. Sales. Dancing on our fucking graves when they've retaken Nassau."

"Cheerful fuck, you are," Vane said.

Flint opened his eyes and glanced at Vane. In the pale light of the crescent moon through the bars of the window mixed with the flickering torchlight through the grille in their cell door, Vane looked barely real at all. There'd been times through the weeks when Flint had wondered if Vane weren't just some perverse hallucination, but he'd long since decided even the dark waters of his psyche couldn't have summoned such a persistent irritation as Charles Vane.

"How did you come to be here?" he asked, instead of making any other response.

Vane smiled tightly and he didn't answer. Three nights later, he said, "I was here to rescue you, wasn't I."

"A plan very well executed," Flint said, the words pulling at the newly formed split in his lower lip, and he supposed he deserved it for his unnecessary if quite familiar sarcasm.

"Who else is fool enough to storm a fucking Navy garrison?" Vane continued. "Seemed important at the time. Now I'm wondering why I bothered."

Flint chuckled, coughed, hacked up blood that stained the cuff of his fancy, lacy shirt and the body of his waistcoat, but he simply didn't have it in him then to care. The stains would be simple enough to hide beneath his coat, as he hid his injuries beneath his clothes.

"He's going to kill you, one way or another," Vane said, hauling him up to his feet. Vane's hands lingered at Flint's arms for just another moment. Once, Flint would have shrugged those hands away; now he didn't, though he'd tell himself he simply didn't have the energy to do so. Of course, Vane had been shoring Flint up for a week, a fortnight or maybe more by then; out in the fort in the daytime, Vane laboured twice as hard so Flint could rest, and all Flint could feel for that was an unpleasant mix of bitterness and gratitude.

"He'll kill us all, one way or another," Flint replied. "Or at the very least he'll try."

---

Nothing happens to anyone that he cannot endure, Flint wrote in the dirt by the side of his mattress, then he fell asleep in fits and starts.

In the morning, his words were scrubbed out entirely; in their place was, quite simply, Cunt. Flint chuckled. Vane smiled darkly across the room from his own fetid mattress, though he didn't open his eyes for a second.

That which comes after ever conforms to that which has gone before, Flint wrote in the dirt by the side of his mattress, with his healing broken fingers, like a test of their use before he slept.

In the morning, his words were scrubbed out; in their place was written Son of a whore. Flint chuckled lowly till his bruised ribs ached with it. Vane smiled and then he turned his back, and Flint returned to sleep.

It is crazy to want what is impossible, Flint wrote in the dirt by the side of his mattress, unimpressed with the state of his penmanship but fingertips in the dirt were hard hardly an inked quill in the pages of his log. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.

In the morning, in the thin light before dawn, his words were scrubbed out; in their place was Bastard. Flint chuckled his incredulous chuckle and Vane turned his head toward him on his mattress, opened his eyes, both of them still bloodshot from his last night's fight, his one visible ear still bloody where the ring had been torn out of it. Then he looked away again, and Flint's chuckle ceased abruptly as he watched Vane's hands travel down. Flint had their one threadbare blanket over him so there was nothing there at all to disguise what Vane was doing, how he pressed the heels of his hands down over the front of his worn leather trousers, how he shifted his hips to meet his own touch, how his mouth opened, lips parted, neck arched just like a madam's finest whore. He'd been a pirate long enough to see a few of them, even if he hadn't bought their service.

"Jesus Christ, Vane," he swore under his breath, and Vane's head lolled his way once again, his eyes opened once again. They were heavy-lidded though he looked straight at him, as his hand strayed down under his belt and disappeared beneath the leather.

"Do we have a problem?" Vane asked.

"By all means, carry on," Flint replied, exasperated, and turned his back so at the very least he couldn't watch, or rather wouldn't have to. But he could still hear him, the subtle creak of supple leather, the sound of skin on skin, the catch in Vane's breath and the muted groan as he finished. Flint's own cock stirred like a fucking traitor and he grimaced into his hands. He had no interest in Charles Vane. He'd never wanted any other man than Thomas Hamilton. It was the simple fact of sex itself that stirred him, he thought, because he'd had no opportunity for it since Miranda's death.

"Flint," the governor called that night, then, "Vane." So the guards took off their shackles and Vane stood, took Flint by his wrists and assisted him brusquely in swaying up to his feet. He knew the fight would not be pretty and it wasn't, quite far from it; he didn't have to tell Vane to give it everything he had because Charles Vane was nothing if not filled with his own keen self-interest. He beat him to the ground, painfully, roughly, till he was breathing dirt while blood dripped from his mouth. He wasn't sure how he had blood left in him to bleed, if truth be told, for all the times he'd bled inside that square. Then they returned to the cell and Vane stripped him down while the room spun sickly around him, made him swill his bloody mouth with watered rum and spit it to the ground.

"You look more dead than alive," Vane said, sounding grimly amused, and perhaps he was. One broken toe had swelled up so large Flint's foot had to be rammed into the buckled leather shoe and he threw up bile and water into the slop bucket in the corner of the cell, head down, on his knees. His healing fingers were so raw from splinting then from binding then from fucking punching that they'd swollen, too; his rings were looped onto a leather thong around Vane's neck, against his chest where he kept them like a bloody trophy. He had a gash in his shoulder from falling down against one of the sharp fucking pegs that held the square's border ropes in place and then one of the men had bitten him in just the same place and so he hadn't been surprised that the wound became infected. The fever had made him weaker than any of his other injuries ever had.

"Don't fuck up," Vane said, as he hauled him to his feet, as he clasped him at his arms, as the door opened behind them.

Flint moved away and left the cell without a word. He wasn't sure how he remained on his feet, and hadn't the will in him to speak.

There were things there in the cell when he returned, bandages and a pitcher of water, clean cloths and ointments all spread out over the filthy desk and Vane watched him lean back heavy against the solid wooden door from the dark of his mattress in the corner. Flint shrugged off his coat and it dropped to the floor and when he bent to retrieve it he fell down to his knees, unsurprised that he'd done so but surprised when Vane came across the room to meet him. He was surprised when Vane reached down and ran his rough fingers through the ginger hair that had been growing in across Flint's scalp for quite near three months by then, when he tilted up his chin with the back of his hand. Three months was no time at all at sea, but of course they weren't at sea.

"You'll be dead inside a fortnight," Vane said, the look on his face clearly one of appraisal. Then he eased Flint to his feet, eased him out of his clothes, eased him down on his mattress there under the small, barred window. "I don't know if you think you're saving us all or just saving your own fucking self, but you're going to die."

He brought over a bowl of lukewarm water that had perhaps been steaming hot not long before, he dipped a cloth down into it and he washed him, silently, treated the wound in his shoulder and bound it up tight. Then he saw to the rest of him, washed away the filth that clung to his skin beneath all his fine clothes every evening, started with his back and then shifted him over and swept the warm cloth over the length his collarbones, over his chest, his wasting waist, his hips, his hands, his thighs, the arches of his feet. He washed his broken fingers and his broken toes. He wasn't gentle, but he was careful.

The alum from the shaving kit that Vane used on Flint's cuts made him hiss with the bright, sharp sting of it, but he closed his eyes and felt the ends of Vane's long hair trailing lightly down his abdomen, felt his stomach tighten in response, in puzzled anticipation.

He felt Vane's mouth press hot to the still wet skin just by his navel, along with his three months' growth of beard. He felt one of Vane's hands press down between his thighs and trail the warm, wet cloth over his balls, squeezing him there over the fabric; he felt Vane's other hand wrap loose around his cock, felt him ease back his foreskin and lean in to tease the tip of him there with the tip of his tongue. When Vane took him in his mouth, hot and wet and unsurprisingly tenacious though every other aspect of the situation took him by surprise, very nearly every last inch of Flint ached with it. While Vane sucked him, while Vane's rough hands gripped at his hips, all he could do was pretend that it was someone else entirely. He kept his eyes closed to that end and felt himself a coward that he didn't dare open them. He felt a coward that he didn't make him stop, and didn't wish to.

"Vane," said the governor the following evening, in the breeze blowing in from the sea near sunset. "Flint."

"Flint," said the governor the night after that, as Eleanor Guthrie refused to avert her gaze there by his side. "Vane."

"Flint," said the governor on the next night, too. Flint stood, albeit far from surely; Vane stood beside him before his name was even called. The governor did not deny he'd been readying to call it. Every man assembled had expected it just as readily.

"Don't fucking die," Vane said after, in the cell, rubbing blood from the corner of Flint's mouth with the pad of his thumb. "Don't give him the goddamn satisfaction."

And it wasn't that he intended to die or even come close to it, because had he actually intended to then he had ideas concerning the manner of his death, but he still threw up everything he had in him, down to the last chunk of macerated leek and part-digested mutton, for three days on end, then four, then five. Vane saved him bread for later, for when he was done, made him eat and drink, cleaned his wound and pressed a dampened cloth to his brow. He was there before his fitful sleep and then there again when he woke, a ridiculous caricature of a proper medic with all his scars, the brand at his shoulder, his sharp eyes, his callused hands. He'd never wanted Vane's assistance and he certainly hadn't asked for it, but when his fever finally broke he supposed he was grateful for it nonetheless.

Vane beat him nightly when they fought. Vane hammered him to the ground and he kicked him, yanked his head back by his lengthening hair, scratched him, choked him, smothered him, then after it he hauled him away to the cells. He'd be dead in a fortnight and Vane was the one that was going to kill him, that much was clear, but then Vane dressed him up for dinner in all of his fine clothes that had long since ceased to fit his wasting frame, set him on his feet and waited for the sound of hollow footsteps in the corridor, for the sound of pistols cocking and for keys at the lock. And when he returned, having barely mustered the appetite or the enthusiasm to eat a bite that he was offered at the governor's table, Vane undressed him, dressed his wounds and sucked his cock till he finished with a pained groan, a pained shiver, a pang of self-disgust. It hurt him every fraction as much as it pleased him. Perhaps the pain was why he didn't make Vane stop.

"Don't fuck up," Vane said.

"Flint looked at him with his one good eye, the one that wasn't swollen shut from fighting. "Be ready," he said, and he left with the guards.

He wasn't going to die on Harbour Island. He would simply not allow that a man such as Woodes Rogers use Charles Vane to kill him.

---

When he woke, he was aboard the Gloucestershire, the afternoon breeze through the cracked stern windows blowing over his sweat-damp face. The same breeze was in Vane's long, damp hair as he sat there at the captain's desk, rubbing his face roughly with both hands as if to will himself back from fatigue. If Vane looked up, Flint didn't see it; he was gone again too swiftly.

When he woke, he was lying in the captain's berth in the small stern cabin of the Ranger, swinging lightly with the pitch and roll of the waves there in the bay. Vane was talking by the cabin door, dressed in clean clothes or at least somewhat cleaner, but what he was saying or to whom he was saying it really wasn't clear at all. Flint saw him glance his way before his consciousness faded once again.

When he woke, he was in a bed not his own in the belly of the fort back in Nassau, the room torchlit in the dark that came some time before dawn. Vane was asleep at his desk, snoring lightly with his head pillowed on his arms. Sleep still seemed so very much more welcoming than waking then, and so Flint slept again. He doubted he could have moved had he felt inclined to.

When he woke, he woke to the smell of food in the low light past dusk. Vane was eating at his table and looked up when Flint shifted, when Flint grimaced and then groaned and moved.

"How long has it been?" Flint asked, his voice barely more than an incomprehensible croak.

"Three days, Sleeping fucking Beauty," Vane replied, as he put down his knife. He'd apparently chosen to forego the fork entirely and had consumed half a plate of cheese and fruit with meat from a spit by the fire entirely with the point of a dagger that looked like it had seen vastly cleaner days. Vane stood, filled a cup with fresh water from a pitcher that sat there on the table beside a half-emptied bottle of rum, and he brought it over to him. Flint took it with a curt nod that pulled at his neck and he sipped it cautiously.

"So the plan worked," he said, once he'd spluttered his first mouthful of water back out over the bed and then managed to keep the second down.

Twenty-nine of thirty-three besides us two made it back alive, if that's the question," Vane said, and went back to his table, put his booted feet up on it and set his plate on his lap to eat from. Flint's belly growled as if on cue so Vane chuckled lowly and tossed a hunk of bread across the room. Flint caught it, though his aching shoulders complained bitterly at the catch.

"So the plan worked," Flint repeated.

Vane shrugged. "If you can call it a plan," he said, and speared another piece of meat with his dagger.

He was right, of course; it hadn't been much of a plan at all. But it had, of course, had the virtue of being at least some small semblance of a plan where none other had existed but the direct route to certain death. They would not have lasted very much longer fighting there in the fort for the soldiers' amusement and they'd all known it; sooner or later the novelty would have worn away entirely and the governor would have strung them up by the neck, one by one, though Flint suspected he would have been dead himself of his injuries some time before that could happen. And so, his plan had by necessity formed.

He'd been attending the governor's dinners each evening and for weeks he'd witnessed the guards' encroaching complacency, sat down at the table and taken up his knife and fork for three nights in a row without hearing the telltale clack-clack of the pistol being cocked live behind him. And so he'd taken a chance before death had its chance to take him; he'd turned just as swiftly as he could in his seat, one moment during their fish course, and he'd broken the complacent soldier's arm in two places while he fumbled with his loaded but as yet uncocked pistol. Flint had then gathered that pistol from the floor and he cocked it himself, aimed it, first across the table at Eleanor as she ignored him completely and carried on with her food, and then at the governor himself, albeit fleetingly. He fired into the lighted chandelier, watched as it swung and rained down hot candlewax on the sherry bottle and the tablecloth and a basket full of fruit, and then he sat back down to his meal. The marine wailed on the floor in distress all the while. Flint had heard worse.

Amidst the ensuing commotion, no one noticed that the marine's knife was gone from his belt, that it had been secreted away inside Flint's embroidered coat, or perhaps Eleanor did but she held her tongue if so. And when the guards returned him to the cell that night, past sunset, in the torchlight in the growing dark, he slit one's throat then put the knife into the other's kidney, Vane's hand clamping tight over the man's shouting mouth to keep him quiet. He remembered how Vane had smiled then, viciously, and had stepped over the corpses and out of the cell. As he'd known he would be, Vane had been ready.

"We can't go back for her," Flint had said then.

"Who says I want to?" Vane replied, as he stooped to take a dead man's sword. He didn't need to ask to whom Flint had referred, of course, as they both knew quite well. "For fuck's sake, change out of that shit before someone sees you." He caught one man's body by the shoulders of his jacket and dragged him away into the cell, and then he turned to the other. "I'll go unlock the doors."

Perhaps he shouldn't have spared the time to change but he'd known that if he was to die that night he had no wish to die dressed up as an English gentleman. It turned out in the end that they had the time and more besides because when they left, the alarm had still not been raised. Thirty-five men left the Harbour Island jail and went over the wall they'd been tasked with maintaining, down lines they'd been using to mend the outer masonry of the fort. They went down the cliffs and went down to the rocky beach below; they swam out into the bay in the near-moonless night and they skirted around all the governor's ships till they were out near the harbour mouth, past the watchful eye of the Royal Marines. The Marines' eye was on the Rose, not on the Gloucestershire, that most expendable of all the commodore's fleet; the little Gloucestershire with her ten guns meant so little to Rogers that her night's watch had consisted of just three men, one sleeping soundly on a stray coil of rope arranged there on the forecastle and two so drunk they might have tumbled full over the rail and into the sea should the wind have shifted just a point to starboard. They'd taken her without so much as a shout, never mind a struggle.

Chewing bread while stripped to the waist in a bed there in the fort at Nassau, Flint recalled his order to weigh anchor, recalled how the raggedy, wasting band of buccaneer seamen had aimed their guns point-blank at the Rose's mainmast, recalled Vane's order to fire when he couldn't manage the words himself. The Rose's mast was carried away in a blast of shot and powder at such very short range that they couldn't have missed save for trying, and the Gloucestershire made her run from the bay before the guns of the fort could turn to her, let alone find a shot to strike her - and only her - over the governor's fleet of ships. She was small and sharp and clearly no great hand in a fight at all, but she was spry with her sails trimmed to the wind. They'd left the other vessels hemmed in behind the struggling Rose and headed home, while Flint had stumbled then passed out cold on the quarterdeck. Frankly, he found himself surprised he'd made it even that far from the jail.

For the first night in near as long as he could remember, there was no fight and no governor and no pistol aimed straight at his head, but when Vane finished with his food he still cleaned and dressed his wounds and then resplinted all his broken fingers. He gave him a cup of rum that he drank in short sips till it made him sleep again, though in the back of his mind he was convinced he should be getting up, going out, getting away from the fort and from Charles Vane, finding his own men and the Walrus. He didn't go. He slept.

When he woke in the night with an urgent need to piss, Vane was sleeping there naked beside him in the giant bed belonging to the steward of the fort, which he supposed that Vane still was since he'd deposed Ben Hornigold. When he woke again in the morning, just past dawn, he pretended not to watch Vane touch himself while he sat at the foot of the bed, pretended not to see the arch of Vane's spine, pretended not to hear the catch in his breath as he finished or watch as he crossed the room and poured from a jug on the table to wash his hands afterwards. He pretended his own cock wasn't at least half-hard beneath the sheets because of it. He pretended he had no reason to feel ashamed.

"Why am I here and not with my crew?" Flint asked, when Vane was dressed and seating himself at his table.

"They're not here," he said, simply. "They went out hunting before we got back. They're due in any day."

Flint narrowed his eyes, pleased at least that his swollen eye was now opening though the news of his crew did precious little to lift his spirits. "Who the hell did they go hunting with?"

"Yeah, well," Vane said, looking highly amused. "From what Jack says, your bosun and your quartermaster have been make-believing they're you. Doing a hell of a job of it, too, Jack says. Of course, all you'll take from that is it takes two men to be Captain Flint when he's not you."

Flint sat himself up, albeit with quite the struggle even to rest himself back against the headboard. He supposed he might have been angry except the thought of Captain Flint's reign of terror having continued in his absence did bring him some faint amusement or faint satisfaction, especially under the unlikely candidates of Billy Bones and John Silver.

"There's something else you ought to know," Vane said, abruptly more serious.

"And what's that?"

Vane rubbed at his beard with one hand. "Blackbeard's back," he said, as if this were part way between glorious and dire, and Flint paused to consider it, what it meant, causes and effects, events that Edward Teach's presence could set in motion or to which he might cause hindrance. Then he nodded, sharply, at least partially due to the strain in his neck.

"We need to meet," he said.

Vane groaned. "Fuck," he said. "You have another plan."

But what Vane didn't say was no.

---

With the Walrus away and Flint barely able to stand without assistance, they gave it two days before they sent word to Teach. They let the news of their escape and return circulate amongst the other men there in the meantime.

Vane strolled around the fort and made his presence known while Flint sat in the sun in Hornigold's chair and felt a strain of slightly perverse amusement at it all. He dressed in a pair of Hornigold's old trousers left there after the attack and a shirt he took from Vane, though neither item really fit him. The men said Hornigold had sold himself to England and turned pirate hunter for a pardon, and Flint had heard that same rumour himself before his capture, so perhaps somehow that thought made Vane's taking of the fort seem less unwarranted. Still rash, yes, and still highly irritating, but less unwarranted.

They sent word to Teach that they wanted to meet and suggested he visit them there in the fort; Vane sat down to write the invitation at his table in the evening and Flint crossed the room in those clothes that felt inches too big for him, cinched in three notches tighter on his belt, to hover at his shoulder. Three months on Harbour Island, for all the fine food, hadn't done much for his health at all. For all the fine food, he'd ended gaunt and malnourished, though he was seeing to rectifying that.

"This is barely legible," Flint said, gesturing at the page. "Were you taught to write by dogs?"

"I suppose you can do better?" Flint raised his brows as he leant there; Vane sighed. "Of course you can. Look who I'm fucking talking to."

"Do you actually read and write or is this some kind of joke?" Flint asked.

Vane frowned. He pushed back his chair and stood abruptly. "Of course I fucking do. You've seen me do it."

"I've seen you scrawl profanities in the dirt. That hardly counts."

"Teach taught me. Said it'd be helpful when I had my own ship one day. I'd have charts to read, cargo manifests. All that shit."

Flint shook his head as he glanced again at the paper. "For God's sake, let me do it," he said. Vane just shook his head in plain exasperation and stalked away out of the room as Flint settled himself in Vane's seat to write. His fingers didn't wish to cooperate, but at least the note was legible.

Flint expected to wait for an answer and they did; they waited two days further before Teach sent his reply and the meeting was arranged. The Walrus was still yet to return but the seas had a way of making men wait; he resolved not to worry on that count.

"So, you're Teach," Flint said.

"And who the fuck are you?"

"I'm Flint."

Teach smiled. Teach laughed right from his belly as he stood there, towered there, twice as large as life. "This piece of hammered shit is Captain Flint, you say?"

"Yeah, he is," Vane said.

"I can assure you that's quite correct," Rackham added.

Teach shook his head. "Frankly, I expected more."

"Frankly, I don't give a fuck for your expectations," Flint said.

Flint stood, though he leant hard against the desk to keep steady as he did so. He was nothing close to Teach's height or stature even at his best but Vane drew in at his side, his palm resting there at the hilt of the sword that he'd conveniently neglected to remove at Teach's arrival. Flint, however, had no intention for their meeting to end in violence.

"You stand with us and you'll be rich ten times over," Flint said. "You stand with us and we'll send the Royal Navy home with their tails between their legs, should we decide to let them live. Then we'll make Nassau the buccaneer port of all buccaneer ports and you can die here in very old age with your next wife warming your bed." He paused, he leaned forward and he raised his chin, not quite challenging but a carefully calculated short distance from it. "Or you can get the fuck off our island. I don't much care which."

Teach laughed again. "I believe I'm going to like you, Flint," he said, and he took a seat across the table like he might perhaps have meant it, but his next glance was at Vane. "Now, what exactly did you want me to do?" he asked, as much of Vane as of Flint.

They sent Teach to Hispaniola. They had a job for him there, or Flint did, and he knew the terms of the deal would be hard, but in the end they were accepted. Three days later, the Queen Anne's Revenge passed the Walrus in the bay; one departed while the other one returned. All Flint could do was hope Teach would keep his part of the bargain.

It was Flint that rose earliest the following day, and he went to Vane's table to pour himself water to drink and then to wash. He sat down and he reached for the pitcher but he found his eye drawn to a piece of paper there, to a note sent up from the Walrus and Vane's reply scrawled there beside it. Flint sighed, picked up the quill and wrote a new message of his own, his hand ten times the clearer despite his still healing fingers. He saw the message out the door on its way to the Walrus then returned to the table, added a note to Vane's half-finished message and then returned to the water while Vane slept on, snoring into the mattress.

It took another twenty more minutes at least till Vane finally rose, naked and half-hard; Flint watched from the table as he tipped out half the pitcher of water over his own head and shook out his long hair like a dog, sending drops all over the floor and the desk and over Flint, who couldn't help but look amused though it was hardly his intention.

"It seems my men came for me while I was sleeping," Flint said. "Would you know anything about that?"

Vane ran his fingers through his own hair like a particularly shoddy comb, though Flint suspected he'd seen an actual comb somewhere on the premises. "I couldn't say I thought you'd want your men to see you," he said, and gestured at him as if this were somehow obvious as he dripped water on the floor. "Well, not like this."

"You think they care how I look?" Flint leant forward on the desk. "You think I care if they care how I look?"

Vane shrugged and reached for a cloth to dry himself down. "I meant it when I said you looked more dead than alive. I suggested they'd do better to come back another day."

"They're more likely to care that I'm alive and unwilling to see them, don't you think?"

"They're dutiful fuckers," Vane said. "They'll be back. ‘Specially since I'm damn sure you've already told them to come."

Vane eyed him for a moment, the cloth in his hand covering his groin though that didn't last long; he tossed the cloth back onto the table and went for his razor instead, settling himself in a chair just across the table. Flint was certain he should have made a clearer show of continuing with his work but after the first few minutes, Vane lathering his face then taking the razor to his jaw as he leant close to a mirror he leaned up against the side of the water jug, Flint just sat back and watched him do it.

He took his time and did it slowly, properly, till his face was clean and smooth, and Flint's brows rose when he watched him lather his chest next, watched him follow the contours of muscle under skin with the sharp edge. He watched him go lower still, watched him stand and soap the line of coarse hair that trailed down his belly to his cock, then he shaved it all away inch by inch. Flint could have very nearly laughed from surprise or from something else entirely. He had an urge to touch that could've made him laugh till he fucking cried, but Vane walked around the table and eyed Flint closely, his hands on his hips. His mirth bubbled under then rather than over.

"You need to shave," Vane said, patting his bearded cheek. "You look like fucking death." But Flint's broken hand was far from healed enough to hold a cutthroat razor steady, and so Vane obliged instead.

"Just don't expect to shave my chest," Flint said, and Vane chuckled lowly, right there by his ear. It wasn't until he was finished, till Flint's head was shaved bare and his facial hair styled back into place as well, that he realised he hadn't thought of Thomas even once throughout. He thought of nothing else but Charles Vane's hands on him and the notion that not so long ago each of them would have taken the other's life without a second thought, or a second's remorse. Something had changed.

At the governor's table, the deal had changed daily. Sometimes Rogers had promised he'd give them all a quick and merciful death, sometimes he'd said he'd hang half and pardon the rest, sometimes he'd said he'd let them all go free or he'd shoot them himself and then release Eleanor, or he'd pardon not only them but all of the pirates living out there in Nassau. Flint had never believed him. If he'd given his word to help Woodes Rogers, if he'd given his word and gone through with it, he'd had no trust that Rogers would have seen through his end of it, not entirely. He'd seen desperation in the man and something harder there behind it, driving him. He'd wondered idly what it was but the answer had eluded him.

And then, one day, he'd said he'd kill Charles Vane and Charles Vane only, and he'd let the others go; all Flint had to do was go back to Nassau with the Navy fleet and tell the pirates there they must surrender. Eleanor had set her jaw as she sat there across the table, the most emotion Flint had seen in her in months all conjured up by the simple sound of his name, not even by the remainder of that statement. And Flint had found his stomach turned when he thought of Vane hanging on the gallows.

He didn't know when or why or how the state of play had changed between them but there at the governor's table he'd known he would not allow Charles Vane to die, not any more than he'd allow himself to.

He didn't like the man but maybe he respected him. Or maybe it was something else again.

---

The meeting went well.

Frankly, Flint hadn't known quite what to expect of it. He'd been away so long that he hadn't even been convinced his men would be his men at all by then, but Billy and John Silver came up to the fort and sat down with him at a table in the sun and they told him what they'd done. He was impressed. He told them so.

It was soon quite clear that Silver had taken up the Walrus in Flint's name and in his absence and he'd made a fair job of the captaincy, though from what Flint heard his strikes at the ports had not been quite so bold as they might have been. Billy Bones it seemed had grown himself an ill-fitting beard, put on black Spanish leathers and made himself Captain Flint on land just as Silver had at sea. Between the two of them, they'd upheld the legend, though Billy said before he returned to the beach that he thought John Silver might just make a captain in his own right one day. Flint couldn't say he disagreed with that.

Perhaps he should have gone to the crew on the beach after that and left the fort, but instead he brought the crew up to him, up the hill to the fort looking out over the bay. They hauled their things up, tents they pitched in the yard, belongings, occasional women, took up space that no one else had taken up before as there was quite enough space for Vane's men, his own and more besides. He and Vane stood side by side and addressed their men together, informed them of the situation and ordered them to keep the peace, and though they'd fight, that much was perfectly inevitable, he couldn't see it being much more than the usual petty scuffles involved in the usual crew rivalries. He and Vane were the real killers there, after all, and for once they were in agreement.

And if anyone thought it odd at all that Flint kept company with Vane, except for Teach who seemed to find at least some small amusement in their strange arrangement, they didn't mention it. Vane didn't ask him to leave and Flint didn't offer to go. He tried hard not to question why that was when they could have found him a nurse had he needed one to clean and bind his injuries. Staying there was far from a requirement, and yet there he was.

That evening, Flint sat down to his ship's books at Vane's table and caught sight of Vane's scrawled note at his elbow. Your penmanship is a fucking disgrace, he'd written there like a particularly bellicose schoolmaster, and there below it read You are a fucking disgrace, in Vane's distinct, untidy hand. Vane eyed him across the room from the bed where he was lounging with a cup of rum, clearly amused, but there was a knock at the door before either man could speak. Vane looked at Flint. Flint looked at Vane. Vane sighed.

"Why don't I get it," he said, and pushed himself from the bed. And when he pulled open the door, a woman stepped inside. One of Max's women from the brothel in town, Flint surmised from the look of her, from her dress and the cant of her hip, the coquettish tilt of her head. Vane did not appear at all surprised.

"Where do you want me to start?" she asked.

"Start with his cock," Vane said, gesturing over at Flint. "We'll see where we go from there."

Flint just dropped his head into his hands as she came closer; he didn't need to look at Vane to know the amused look that would be on his face.

He ought to have said no, been firm, sent the girl away or got up from the table and left the room himself, and Vane could have had exclusive use of both bed and whore. Of course, what he did instead was allow the girl to sink to her knees between his chair and the table in front of him while Vane stood by and watched, leaning against the room's bolted door. What he did was let her run her hands over his calves and his thighs, over the front of his trousers, over the buttons that fastened them. He leaned back in the high-backed chair and watched her fingers pluck deftly at those buttons, watched her unbuckle his belt and dip her fingertips inside to brush over his abdomen, to brush down to the base of his cock. Then he pushed back the chair and he stood, looked down at her on her knees.

"What's he paying you for?" he asked her, tilting up her chin with his fingers.

"For whatever you both want, captain," she replied, with a smile that was rather less than coy.

He stepped back. He stepped away, his cock damnably already stirring as he glanced at Vane by the door, standing there with his hands tucked in behind the small of his back, a trace of a smile at his lips and in his eyes.

"Thought you could use some relaxation, didn't I," Vane said, but Flint suspected he'd had nothing relaxing in mind at all.

Flint went to the bed, went before he had the chance to change his mind or stop himself and while Vane watched him, he pushed down his borrowed trousers to his knees and sat himself back against the headboard. The girl followed, all long blonde hair, her skin quite pale for the islands, swathed in unruly skirts that she hitched up to her knees as she joined him on the bed, as she crawled up toward him on her hands and knees. But he still wasn't watching her, not that she seemed to care much about it.

He'd thought his residual pain and residual injuries would have kept him soft but it seemed, as the girl wrapped her slim-fingered hand around him, as she ducked her mouth down to him, that he'd vastly underestimated the force of his libido. If his cock could have stolen away every ounce of the blood from his brain as her tongue teased at him, he could hardly have doubted it would have, and perhaps indeed that was the reason he permitted that it happen at all; for not the first time in his life, he was thinking with parts other than his brain. He knew he knew better but for that moment he was still far too hard and too irritated to care. Vane was still watching him. Vane was still amused.

She was good if a fraction too delicate, not what he wanted if he could just have stomached the admitting of it. Her fingers were a fraction too chilly, her mouth a fraction too hot, her hair all artificial curls and the rouge rubbed off from her lips as they tightened around him. Vane watched from the door for two minutes, three, watched as Flint pulled his borrowed shirt off over his head, as the girl's hands raked over his chest, as her tongue continued teasing, the touch too light, the touch really just maddening. But then Vane came closer, unbuckling his own belt as he went. His gaze barely left Flint's for a moment, not as he dropped his belt to the floor, not as he knelt there on the foot of the bed. Flint felt the mattress dip down. If the girl did, she showed no signs of it at all.

Vane was watching him as he shoved down his trousers. Vane was still watching as he pushed up the girl's skirts and with a languid thrust he was in her, making her gasp around her mouthful of Flint's cock. But Flint wasn't watching her any more than Vane was; his eyes were on Vane as he moved in her, as his hands went tight at her hips and Flint's grasped at the worn wooden headboard, his mending fingers prickling sharply in complaint except he couldn't stop. He couldn't tear his eyes away till they were both gasping breath, till he'd spilled his seed in the girl's pretty mouth and Vane bucked hard and fuck, fuck, even then he couldn't look away, as Vane's lips parted to draw a shuddering breath, as his hips jerked, as he finished inside her. They were watching each other, as if neither cared that the girl were there at all. It seemed neither did. The hard truth of it was he'd rather have been fucking Vane.

"Leave," Vane told her, fairly growled at her, and she did just as she was told, dressed quickly and exited the room with her money and a smile. Vane didn't turn to watch her go. Flint saw her only from the corner of his eye. And then Vane leaned in, leaned down, leaned over him; Vane pressed one hand to Flint's throat as he leant there, straddled Flint's thighs, wrapped both hands around his neck, his long hair stuck loose to sweaty skin. Flint just leaned forward from the headboard into it, pushed against Vane's hands till each breath he took was so difficult he found it even harder to draw the next. He didn't move his hands. He didn't bother to struggle at all.

"Mad bastard," Vane said, but he pressed his mouth to the side of Flint's neck, over the throbbing pulse point there. "I should tear your fucking throat out."

"Then why don't you?" Flint asked, because somehow that idea was preferable to that of what he really wanted. He wanted to touch him. He wanted to take two handfuls of Vane's long hair, push him down, spread his legs and have him then and there. He wanted to hurt him. He wanted him to like it.

"You'll be the death of me," Vane said, his mouth moving against Flint's throat. His hands loosened. He let him breathe.

"But not tonight," Flint said.

He knew that wasn't even close to disagreement.

---

Vane left in the morning, sailing out of the bay on the Ranger. Three days passed, four, and then Vane returned to Nassau. He returned to the fort after dark on the fourth day, returned to the room they shared that somehow wasn't a cell and poured himself a glass of rum while Flint ignored him at the table. He was trying to work and Silver had only just minutes since departed with a frown in Vane's direction, but the way Vane paced the floor made work impossible. In the end he was just going through the motions as Vane's stalking to and fro made the candles all flicker in his wake, and they both knew it.

"What is it?" Flint asked, as he set down his quill.

Vane stopped abruptly and finished his glass. Flint was frankly shocked he hadn't spilled its contents all over himself, the floor, or both.

"I hear Teach got back," he said.

"You're pacing like a fucking lunatic because Teach got back?" Flint said, leaning forward on his elbows on the table, skeptical at best. "You're upset about the cargo."

Vane looked at the glass in his hand for a moment, as if contemplating whether he should throw it straight into the fire or beat Flint about the head with it. He set it down very carefully, very deliberately, on the edge of the table instead, then leaned down heavily on the top with his hands crumpling the edges of the map that Flint had spread out there to work with.

"You knew," Vane said.

"Of course I knew."

"So why didn't you tell me?"

"You know why."

And then Vane did break the glass; he just broke it in his own hand instead of in Flint's face. He cursed and bled all over the table, all over the chart and the floor and himself but sat there passively enough as Flint doused the cut in strong spirits and set to it with needle and thread. Vane watched him do it, watched his face then his hands then his face again as he set his jaw and clenched his teeth as much from anger as from pain as Flint sewed him up.

"The stitches are crooked," Vane said when Flint was done, petulant about it as he walked away.

"Next time, do it yourself," Flint replied, rubbing his aching fingers not yet used to such fine work, and perhaps they never would be.

He still had blood under his fingernails when they went to bed. Vane still had blood all over his hands. It was still there when he woke in the night with Vane's mouth on his cock and his nails digging hard into his thighs. It was still there when they woke in the morning, after dawn.

"I know you don't like it," Teach said as they walked in the fort in bright sunlight, in the usual mid-morning heat the next day. "But it does look like work is getting done."

Vane said nothing. They walked on.

"Rackham's plan does seem to be working," Flint agreed, albeit somewhat grudgingly considering his general opinion of Jack Rackham, though he felt he might be tempting fate by saying anything at all.

Vane said nothing. Teach took his leave and strode away, then they walked on.

He could tell, of course, that Vane was pissed off to high heaven now that Rackham had had him bring in slaves against his will and better judgement. Neither Flint nor Vane were of a truly garrulous disposition, as Rackham had always seemed to be, but Vane had turned particularly taciturn since he'd returned with the Ranger's hold full of purloined slaves. He wasn't listening as they walked through the camp, amidst their new slave workers, a practice for which frankly Flint had found he had no more appetite than Vane did. But Teach was right: it did seem to be working. They'd built up more of the fort's damaged defences since sunrise that morning than their paid workers had in weeks.

"You know we'll free them when the work's complete," Flint said, and Vane glanced at him, a hard look, a disdainful look, then turned to walk away.

"For all the good that does them now," Vane muttered, shouldering his way past, but Flint caught his arm, pushed him in quick steps around the corner, pushed him up against the nearest convenient wall and held him there in place in the shade, out of sight. Vane let him. He didn't struggle for an instant, but the look on his face said he might, he very well might at any given moment. At any given moment, of course, that was a legitimate concern with Vane.

"Be angry," Flint said. "By all means, be angry." He pressed one hand down over the brand there at Vane's shoulder, at the place he knew it lay beneath his shirt. "But not with me. I don't like this any more than you do."

Vane scowled and Flint pushed harder there just for a moment before he let him go, but that night, past sunset, past midnight, in the bed they shared, he ran his rough fingers over that smooth, scarred skin, pressed his mouth there, sucked, bit down until Vane hissed in a breath. He called him a cunt but didn't push him away. He didn't push him away when his mouth strayed lower, either, when he raked blunt nails over his freshly shaved skin, when he let Vane's cock drag against his belly then his chest, let it catch beneath his chin as he pressed his mouth to the smooth-shaved plane of Vane's abdomen, his breath hot against his skin. Vane was up on his forearms, watching without a single trace of shame or of embarrassment in him when Flint took his cock in his hand, sucked hard down by the base, made Vane curse as much from amusement as from the jolt of pain he gave him, quite on purpose.

Vane didn't ask what Flint thought he was doing any more than Flint had ever asked, but in the end Flint supposed his intent was quite obvious. He sucked a bruise into Vane's thigh just for the hell of it and then he put his mouth on him again, sucked him slow and hard till all Vane had left to do was spill into his mouth, Flint's hands pressing down at Vane's hips to keep him still. Vane watched him in each and every moment till Flint pulled back, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, wondered what in the name of all that was holy had possessed him to do what he'd done and decided swiftly that that was quite beside the point because he had done it, and he might even do it again.

After, they lay together, side by side. After, Vane didn't offer to return the favour; he just lay back and watched as Flint finished himself instead. After, Flint rested his hand over the brand at Vane's shoulder and watched him wince just as if it hurt the way it must have hurt the day that he'd received it, all those years ago. Flint understood what it meant, of course, because Vane had neither made a secret of the fact nor tried to - he had been a slave once and so perhaps, Flint thought, it signalled that Vane understood the worth of freedom more than most. Perhaps that was why he'd pulled against his shackles back there in the jail beneath the Harbour Island fort, though he'd had to know they wouldn't break or even weaken, until his wrists had very nearly bled.

He'd heard Eleanor call Vane and his men animals and so they were, Flint thought then, near sleep. And so Vane was, he thought: the wild dog that wanted neither leash nor master, the man who wanted neither oaths nor king to whom he'd have to swear them.

Vane wanted to be free. That night, near sleep, Flint knew he would do everything within his power to see that Vane never knew a leash again.

---

Sacking ports with Edward Teach was a veritable fucking revelation, both to Flint and to the colonies at large. They were good at it. Their strengths and strategies meshed well.

Flint and Teach and Vane all left Nassau together, their three ships in consort, with Jack Rackham left behind to hold the bay in case of untimely incursion by Woodes Rogers and his Royal Navy fleet. Silver argued briefly against it, as was rather expected of his quartermaster, knowing that although Rackham had a solid record in defence of Nassau he was perhaps not the most trustworthy of their allies. Flint agreed, of course, but he trusted none of their allies whatsoever, not Rackham, not Teach, not Vane, not even Silver himself when it came down to it. He'd run out of trust long ago. It was safer to realise that wherever he went, the only man he could trust was himself. Everything else was just a game of chance, a calculation of the probabilities. Trust couldn't enter into it.

Of course, before Flint and Vane had been tucked away neatly in a jail on Harbour Island, Jack Rackham had already organised one successful defence of Nassau. As near as Flint could calculate in terms of time, it happened while the Walrus was fleeing from Benjamin Hornigold, a fact that still rankled even as they raided a port on St Kitts and then turned for Tortuga. Rackham had held the bay with a plan that had unfolded just the way Flint would have hoped himself; the firing line of pirate ships had held its place and the governor had turned instead for Harbour Island to prepare rather than settle in for a lengthy siege outside the bay. Rackham hadn't known quite what to do when Flint congratulated him. Flint thought perhaps that was why he'd done it.

They set up in the back room of a waterfront inn in Tortuga on their arrival, Flint's spirits still high from his return to the water, to his ship and his crew. Flint and Vane and Teach all sat there in their own strange firing line behind their table, like some strange buccaneer triumvirate, like a panel at the Admiralty back in England. Coin and goods looted from St Kitts in their most recent incursion paid for their bread and meat and rum, paid for their men's drink and kept the brothels full from dusk till dawn. The three of them sat there and drank and talked, or Teach said enough for the three of them, and their crews spread the word that the three most feared pirate captains in the colonies were waiting there in the inn.

Four men came in, stepped through the door and made the candles flicker in their wake. The three captains put down their cups.

"We hear you're recruiting," said the first man, apparently the elected speaker for the others.

"We are," Teach said.

"Men for your crews?"

"Crews for our fleet," Flint replied.

"Fleet?"

"We're going to send the Royal fucking Navy back to England and keep the islands for ourselves," said Vane. "Why don't you be good little pirates and let your captain know we're here?"

The men all left, disgruntled, and as they went Flint shared a look with Teach. Vane wasn't exactly renowned for his diplomacy, but Flint supposed the reason neither he nor Teach had said a word to correct his phrasing was they hadn't brought him there for his diplomacy. Charles Vane was there to be Charles Vane. He was effective at it.

The sky outside was brightening a touch on its way toward dawn when they climbed the stairs and went to bed. Teach stepped into his own room and Flint heard the clack of the bolt behind him; Vane's fingers went around Flint's wrist and in the candlelight he pulled him into his room, didn't allow him to carry on to his own. Flint went with him, putting up no struggle, though he was tired and felt quite desperately in need of sleep. They would have more work to do in the morning, or at least he and Teach would have; they rather counted on Vane sleeping late so they could persuade a few more reticent captains to their cause without the aid of the inimitable Charles Vane. Sometimes his directness worked. Sometimes the situation called for something subtler, and when Teach put his mind to it he proved quite the politician.

Vane had a whore in the room, ready and waiting, another pretty blonde who looked like Eleanor fucking Guthrie. Flint sighed and rubbed his eyes.

"I'm not in the mood," Flint said, watching Vane twist his fingers into the girl's long blonde hair. "Enjoy yourself. Teach and I will be down by the beach in the morning."

He left then, went down the corridor to his own room where an oil lamp was already lit, but he'd only just stripped himself down to his shirt and his underwear when the door opened behind him. He'd kept his sword nearby and whipped around with it in one hand, got the point of it to the intruder's throat in a flash, but he supposed he was at least moderately unsurprised to find he was threatening Vane and not some petty thief or godforsaken Navy assassin, sent in by Governor Rogers to end the hostilities by more underhanded methods.

"I might have killed you," Flint said, though he didn't lower the sword for an instant.

"You'd have tried," Vane said, looking faintly amused as he stood there with his back to the open door despite the sword's point there at his throat. He nudged the door closed with his bootheel, though the twist he had to make to do so drew the sharp point over his stubbled skin, drew blood that welled up in a thin, dark line in its wake.

"Careful," Flint said. "Bear in mind I still don't know why you're here. For all I know, you're here to kill me."

Vane smiled darkly, the lamplight picking out every contour of his face in stark relief, stubbled hollows, bones, scars. "You know why I'm here," he said, and he met Flint's gaze. He knew why he was there, yes, but wondered for a moment what Vane would have done had he feigned ignorance, had he sought some form of clarification from him. He wondered what Vane might have said, if anything, if pushed to it, if Flint had broken their strange tacit agreement not to push, not to discuss, not to strain to name it. Perhaps Vane would have turned away and left the room, returned to his whore had she not already returned to her brothel. Perhaps the result would have been something else entirely, and perhaps in the end Flint did not truly wish to know for sure.

In the end, he didn't say he knew why Vane was there. He said nothing more at all, just turned aside the sword and returned it to its sheath, then removed what remained of his clothing just as if Vane had not been there at all. He went to bed, settled in it and turned down the lamp, ignored Vane completely or at least he likely seemed to. He listened as Vane undressed after him, as he dropped his boots heavily to the floorboards, as his belt and his sword and his thick leather trousers followed, then his shirt and whatever else might have been left. Then he pulled back the sheets and he joined Flint in his bed.

He didn't notice the knife till it was at his throat, till Vane was lying half on top of him with one side of a double-edged blade catching at his stubble like an ill-honed razor. His pulse quickened. His cock stirred.

"It seems you're in the mood after all," Vane said, and that was the last he said. He pushed the knife up tighter to Flint's throat; when he swallowed, it broke the skin and made Vane laugh and set the knife aside on the cabinet there beside the bed, so he could rub away the blood with the pad of his thumb then lick it from his own skin. It stung but Flint had had so much worse, had felt so much worse, especially as Vane's cock was pressing up hard against his hip. If his purpose hadn't been obvious before, it would have been then.

Vane leaned over to the lamp and extinguished it quickly, plunged them into darkness behind the shabby curtains that screened them from the very little pre-dawn light outside. Vane shifted, went up on his knees; he fumbled for Flint's wrists, tugged, pushed and pulled until they were both on their knees and all Flint could see in the near-dark was the vaguest suggestion of the shape of him, a smudged outline, indistinct from shadow except the shadow had strong, hard hands that skimmed his thighs, warm skin that brushed his as Vane moved, as he settled close. And then those hands closed on Flint's erection, one hand squeezed there while the other guided Vane's own cock up against him. Vane caught them both together, side by side. Vane rubbed the length of himself against the length of Flint and made Flint's breath catch traitorously.

The fact that the light was out seemed to help, if Flint could stomach the notion of calling it helpful. In the dark, his hands skimmed Vane's thighs right up to his hips. In the dark, all he could hear was the drunks in the street outside and the sound of Vane's tight breath. His hips pushed against Vane's hand, against the length of Vane's cock, made him grit his teeth and set his jaw and clamp down hard with both hands over his own thighs to refrain from humiliating himself any further, but that didn't last; as Flint's stomach tightened, as his muscles went taut with it, as his head fairly swam with it, one hand found Vane's thigh, his hip, his waist, the small of his back, the line of his spine; his other hand squeezed down over Vane's hand, joined it there over their cocks, the pressure of it making them both gasp out loud. Vane's mouth was pressed tight to the crook of Flint's neck. Flint was glad he couldn't see him.

There had never been much chance of them lasting beyond a handful of minutes once begun, and neither did. Vane pressed his forehead to Flint's, his free hand at the back of Flint's neck as his hips jerked, as his strokes quickened, as he came. Flint finished after, in hot bursts against Vane's taut abdomen, and they knelt there breathless after, knelt there with Vane's hand still up at Flint's neck, Flint twisting one of Vane's braids around his roughly-healed fingers in the dark to hold him where he was. He knew they'd never heal the way they ought, that they'd always be stiff, that his rings would never fit him over the warped bones of his knuckles, but at least he had the use of them. And even then his rings were still hanging from that same leather thong around Vane's neck. He had no use for taking them back, so didn't.

Vane didn't make to leave the room and Flint hadn't the force of will available in his complete exhaustion then to even try to make him, so he stayed. The bed was really too small for two full-grown men to lie there in it side by side but afterwards, stretched out beneath rough sheets, it didn't seem to bother Vane so Flint could hardly let it bother him. After all, they were pirates, they'd both lived half their lives at sea in close, near-claustrophobic quarters, sleeping in hammocks that swayed with the roll of the waves. After all, he'd grown used to Vane's snoring and to waking tangled with sheets and with Vane's unruly limbs. So they slept, the two of them attempting to occupy the exact same space at the exact same time just the way all physics said they couldn't. Flint didn't sleep well but that phenomenon was hardly new, though waking there with Vane in the morning just past dawn was new.

He woke on his side, pressed tight to Vane's bare back. He woke with one arm slung around Vane's waist and the length of his half-hard cock pressed up to the crack of Vane's arse. He was very nearly breathing in Vane's hair till it choked him and as it was he suspected he had the ends of a few stray hairs tickling the roof of his mouth and he knew, even in the moment between sleep and daylight consciousness, that he should move but he didn't. He remained there instead, quite still, wondering tensely how it had come to this, how mutual disdain, dislike, distrust, had led somehow to a bed in Tortuga.

He remained there in the morning sunlight that the curtains at the dirty window barely dimmed at all and wondered instead how Vane would react if he rubbed his cock between his cheeks instead of just pressing up against them. If Vane had just pulled up his knee as he lay there on his side, Flint could have pushed the head of his cock up against his hole and rubbed there till he finished. If there had been some kind of grease or oil in the room that wasn't just the sort meant for lighting lamps, he could have pushed slick fingers there instead and pressed the tips inside him. He could imagine it quite clearly though he knew what he was doing then was drawing on his memories of someone else entirely, the only man he'd ever had that way, the only man he'd believed he'd ever want to. But there he was, his breath quickening against Vane's neck, his cock hardening against Vane's arse.

The strange truth of it was that he wanted him. The truth of it was he was imagining having him right then and there, pushing into him, that arm around Vane's waist shifting to take Vane's cock in hand to make him groan the way he sometimes did, so fucking unrestrained in even that, and push back to take him deeper. He was thinking of fucking him slow and hard, a deep, tense grind that would make sweat stand out on their skin in the warm Tortuga morning in just minutes, make them slick with it against each other. He was thinking of fucking him as the moist tip of his now erect cock pressed up to Vane's coccyx. And Vane wasn't snoring, Flint realised then, through the haze of his obvious arousal. Vane was awake. Vane was awake. And so Flint pulled away just as quickly as he could, jerked away, practically fell out of the bloody bed on his flight across the room.

"Fuck," he cursed, under his breath, as he leant hard on both hands against the table there beneath the window. "Fuck." He didn't have to turn to know Vane was watching him and so he didn't turn at all, he just splashed water on his face then dressed then left, willing his erection to diminish as he did so.

He had work to do. This idiocy with Vane was just a distraction.

---

Sacking ports with Teach may have been a revelation, but hunting with him was strangely more amusing. Of course, by the time they returned to Nassau, Flint's mood had dropped considerably.

He'd met Teach by the beach three days earlier with a wilting erection and a look like an approaching storm; Teach introduced him to a man named Ashton, quartermaster of the New Horizon, who had some interesting news to put to them. They made their way back to the inn just in time to find Vane breakfasting on rum alone at a darkened corner table. They joined him, much to his apparent chagrin.

"We spotted Hornigold yesterday afternoon," Ashton told them. "Chased us halfway to the fucking Carolinas before we got the wind on him and slipped away. We're betting they dropped anchor in Port Royal and they'll head back to the governor's place from there. You could catch ‘em."

Teach looked at Flint with a smile like a black-bearded goddamned wolf and Flint nodded. They might have been planning to head home before but they had quite another plan in mind by then; in a few short hours, they set out to hunt the pirate hunter.

They caught up with Hornigold just past dawn on the following day and even his old wiles weren't quite enough to shake their little party from his trail. The Walrus played bait and before Hornigold had chance to realise the danger he was done for; the Ranger and the Revenge both joined the fight to catch her. There was enough time, just, for Hornigold to fire off three quite ineffectual broadsides that did more damage to the Walrus's already shot-torn brightwork than to anything at all essential, and then Flint boarded from one side and Teach from the other, while Vane hung back reluctantly in guard.

"You've been looking for us," Teach said to Hornigold, when the privateer men had been secured in the ship's waist at gunpoint.

"That we have," Hornigold replied. "The governor wants you all dead and sent us to see to it."

"Then I'm afraid he'll be disappointed," Flint said.

Hornigold just looked past them both and out to sea. Dufresne, the quartermaster at his captain's side, rubbed the bridge of his nose just by the bridge of his eyeglasses. Flint wasn't sure if he regretted having Dufresne aboard the Walrus of if he felt a perverse sense of pride in what he'd made of himself, even if he'd betrayed all his brothers to do it. After all, Flint knew all about betrayal.

Then Teach took one of the pistols from his holsters and put it up to Hornigold's head. Flint cocked his own and put it to Dufresne's.

"Shall we?" Teach asked.

"By all means," Flint replied. "After you."

Perhaps the men expected more fuss, expected pleas, expected bargaining, but there was none of that. Hornigold stood up straight and looked Teach straight in the eye while Dufresne removed his eyeglasses and tucked them away neatly inside his coat.

"He's going to string her up," said Hornigold, but neither of them had the patience to hear much more, even if their curiosity was somewhat piqued. Teach pulled the trigger and stopped Ben Hornigold's mouth; Flint fired just a moment after. He heard Dufresne's glasses break with a crunch as his body struck the deck.

But, of course, Hornigold's men told the self-same story: Rogers planned to have Eleanor marched to the gallows. He'd set a date for it, they said. The men were looking forward to seeing the bitch's body swing.

"Max heard from a girl who knows a girl who knows a girl on Harbour Island," Anne Bonny confirmed when they came back ashore in Nassau.

"Intelligence of the very highest order, then," Rackham muttered, with a disdainful shake of his head, and ordinarily Flint would have agreed, had they not had nigh on a full crew of men tell that same story not five hours before.

"They're going to hang her," Teach said, not that he could find the requisite enthusiasm in him to sound as if he cared at all.

"We can't allow that to happen," Flint said.

"Why not?" Teach asked, though he was only putting voice to the sentiment so many of them shared.

"It would send the message that we don't take care of our own," Flint replied, "that Nassau is divided and all they have to do is drive the wedge in deeper, then we're theirs to take." He pushed back his chair from the table there in the room at the tavern, where they'd all sat with Eleanor so many times before, and stood, leaned down on the tabletop to make his point. "Nassau is not divided. We do take care of our own. And whatever judgement Eleanor must face, she must face it here with us, not there with them."

"So, we save her from the British to hang her here?" Rackham said. "That's impressively perverse." But the lesser captains were apparently persuaded by the thought of stringing up the Guthrie girl above their own harbour and not the new pretender to the crown's. So they dispersed, their minds made up, their consent given; Flint and Teach and Vane and Rackham would formulate the plan and see it done and they'd continue to protect the bay while they did so.

When the others had filtered out from the room, when Teach had given them his sternest glance and exited the same way as the rest, Flint and Vane finally departed too. The walk up to the fort was not a long one but for the most part passed in silence that made the walk seem somehow longer; it was perhaps the quality of the silence that made it so, since Vane's essential nature was hardly inclined to the talkative, but Vane's expression was oddly impassive, impenetrable, odd indeed for a man who usually wore his emotions quite openly for anyone who cared to see.

When Teach and Rackham came up to the fort toward nightfall, Flint and Vane already had their plan. They all agreed it, albeit with some reluctance. It was likely a trap and they all knew it, a rumour Rogers spread to lure them in, but Flint knew if it were true then they couldn't let it happen. And he knew whether or not it were true, Vane would go to find her anyway. He'd yet to find a suitable substitute for the woman who'd betrayed him more than once.

Vane had the usual whore visit them that night, the blonde who looked nothing like Eleanor but Flint suspected that was precisely who she was meant to be for him. Vane had her up against a wall while Flint worked at the table, marked charts, checked his calculations, pretending he didn't hear the artificial way the girl moaned or the rasp of Vane's voice by her ear, the things he said to her that just made Flint feel somehow old and tired though his strength and his usual weight had been returning to him quickly since their miraculous escape. He'd lost two back teeth and the nails of three toes and somehow the ringing in his ears, put there by long years of rattling gunfire, had become yet more profound, but he was improving in all the ways he could. Vane carried her across the room, spread her out on the table on top of all Flint's charts and Flint just sat back in his seat with a consternated, exasperated sigh.

"If I'm pissing you off that bad, why the fuck don't you just join in?" Vane said, and both Vane and the girl looked up at him expectantly. Flint took a breath through his gritted teeth and he stood and walked away. He took the inkwell from the table with him, just in case; he knew Vane wouldn't care if his charts were ruined, would likely find it fucking hilarious, but Flint hadn't the stomach for this and indelible black ink spread all over his work.

Most of his belongings had found their way there to that room in the Nassau fort. There were books there from Miranda's house and clothes there from the Walrus, not that he owned much else that wasn't just his jewellery, his pistol and his sword, perhaps the charts and instruments in his cabin but he supposed that they more rightly belonged to the ship, or to whomever was the captain of her.

There was no bookcase there, perhaps they'd torn one down and used the books for fires over the years, or perhaps the stewards of the fort had just never had much inclination toward reading; his books were piled roughly on the stone floor by a chest of things that were probably all that was left of the late Captain Hornigold. He sat on top of the chest and he leafed through the first few of the books, the words familiar though he found he could pay very little attention to them. Vane was watching him across the room while he fucked the girl whose name Flint thought was Emma or Emmeline, Emily, anything but Eleanor. What Flint wanted to do was bend him double over the tabletop and fuck him while he fucked her. He wanted to beat him down to the ground till his knuckles and Vane's face were both bloody, then step down on his throat with his bootheel and end him. He wanted to hurt him. He wanted to hate him. He wanted to erase every trace of him from the world but there he was, watching him even as he bucked and groaned and finished. Flint didn't look at him. He was looking down at the red leather cover of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He put it down like it was fucking poison.

Flint gave the girl more coin than she'd asked for when she rearranged her rumpled skirts to leave. She left swiftly with a flash of a smile, tucking the coins into the pocket in her skirt. Flint closed the door behind her.

"You're a soft touch," Vane said, pulling up his trousers, buckling his belt.

"She deserves it, dealing with you," Flint replied, and Vane didn't disagree. Perhaps Vane's wants weren't particularly controversial where women were concerned, but he was nothing if not enthusiastic in them.

"You're a moody cunt sometimes," Vane told him, and Flint didn't disagree because he supposed that much at least was true. He took his seat at the table again, rearranged his charts and settled down the inkwell while Vane hopped up to sit on the table edge and swung his bare feet like a petulant child. "Sometimes you make no fucking sense."

Flint looked up from his chart. "Have you ever read a book?" he said. Vane frowned at him so he raised his brows expectantly just to ensure Vane knew he meant it; Vane ran his hands over his hair, all the muscles in his bare chest pulling tighter as he did it, though Flint told himself he didn't notice that at all.

"Have I read a book?" Vane said. "Why would I? You think I went to school and got the education you did? You think I'd even know how to read if Teach hadn't beaten it into me?"

"I had no education to speak of," Flint replied. "I was the son of a carpenter. They don't educate carpenters' sons in England the way you seem to think they do."

"Whatever you say, sir," Vane muttered, and tipped a make-believe hat to him, tense and more than a little sarcastic.

"So, you've never read a book." Vane just glared, and Flint left the table, pushed his chair back abruptly and made Vane frown again. He strode across the room and picked up a book, the book, ran his inkstained fingertips over the embossed letters on the spine and then returned in strides just as purposeful. He put the book down on the table by Vane's hip. "If I make such little fucking sense to you, read this one," he said, and sat back down in his seat.

"Why this one?" Vane asked, but Flint didn't reply. Vane picked up the book. "Besides, chances are we won't live long enough for me to read any of this shit. We leave in the morning. You think I can get through this bloody thing before we get where we're going?"

"You still care for her," Flint said, incongruous, far from answering the question, but there was no need at all to explain the her to whom he was referring, not when they'd just hours before left a meeting they'd called precisely to determine whether they would rescue Eleanor Guthrie or let her hang away from home. He certainly wasn't referring to the girl who'd just departed, Emmeline, Emily, Emma. Even had there been no real context to it, Vane would have understood. There was only one her.

"Of course I do."

"And will you betray us all for her?"

Vane glanced at him, sharply. "Do I strike you as the type?" he asked.

"Frequently."

Vane shrugged at that, half-smiled. "Maybe I will," he said. "I don't suppose we'll know till I do it." He cocked his head. "Good enough?"

Flint clenched his jaw. "Good enough," he said.

---

Were it a trap, it was ill-sprung at best.

They set sail in the half-light just before dawn, just the Ranger as she was the swiftest of their vessels and the most conveniently loyal to Charles Vane. The others had perhaps wondered of the plan's necessity, or at least of the necessity that they themselves have any part in it, and so Flint rowed out to the Ranger in their longboat with Vane, pulled himself up on board and wondered, briefly though he thought quite understandably, if they'd made the right decision. They could all be back inside that Harbour Island jail before they saw another dawn, or worse. They none of them had ambitions to end their days at the gibbet.

They stole ashore in the night, a small team of Vane's men and Flint with them, with the Ranger anchored off the rocky coast away from the fort, away from the harbour. The rocks made the landing treacherous, but the night was mercifully calm. And three hours later, one man of their company dead and two injured, eight of the governor's men dead and many more injured besides, they stepped back into the longboat and pulled for the Ranger. Rogers had no time to set the fleet away after them and so they escaped with Eleanor, blindfolded and gagged and bound hand and foot, struggling against them all the way. Flint had the distinct impression that she hadn't particularly wished to leave. Apparently it had been a trap, but the governor's men hadn't yet been prepared to spring it.

Once safely away in the Ranger, Harbour Island dwindling to a speck there on their horizon, Vane unbound Eleanor's ankles, then her hands. She pulled off the blindfold herself, then the gag, then she slapped Vane across the face with enough venom and enough force that even if the look on her face by some mystery hadn't been enough to make grown men wince, the sound of the slap itself frankly would have been. Then she kissed him with just as much force, as much venom. As Vane returned that kiss, as he pulled her to him, Flint turned and strode away into the captain's quarters. He slammed the door. He'd rarely felt quite as much the fool as he did then, but then the door opened up behind him. He wished he'd had the wherewithal to bolt it.

"What the fucking hell was that?" Vane asked, fairly growled, as he slammed the cabin door behind him much as Flint just had. "We came out here to put on this goddamn rescue and you risk your neck like it's nothing, then you piss off in here when it's done. Christ, and they say I'm unpredictable."

Flint just leaned back against the edge of the captain's table, Vane's table, arms crossed tight over his chest. He wondered idly how Eleanor would fare out there on deck with the crew when neither Vane nor himself was there to stand between them, after all she'd done, and found he couldn't muster the requisite enthusiasm to care at all. Perhaps he didn't exactly dislike her, but he'd had his fill of Eleanor Guthrie's machinations.

Then Vane smiled darkly. "You're jealous," he said, like some great, clear light had just shone on the godforsaken situation. "Of me and her and the way she--"

"Stop." Flint felt his own expression darken as Vane's lit up bright with new amusement.

"What, because I sucked your cock you think we're--"

"Stop."

Vane swaggered closer. "Perhaps you'd like to get down on your knees right now and--"

Flint swung and he hit him squarely across the cheekbone with his fist; Vane touched his fingertips to the spot as he staggered back three paces on the creaking boards, four paces, recovered his footing from the blow with a gruff bark of laughter.

"So that's how you want it," Vane said, and he came back in with his fists raised up.

They hadn't fought since that final night in the fort on Harbour Island, when Flint had already taken too much damage to have ever had the faintest hope of winning. Now they were more fairly matched again, the way they'd always been before it all, both strong and hard and undesirably accustomed to a brawl. Flint's fist connected with Vane's collarbone, Vane's elbow came up under Flint's chin, a blow to Vane's cheekbone that opened up a cut under his eye, a blow to Flint's face that split Flint's lip, more, more, till they were crashing into chairs, pushing each other up against bulkheads, pulled a lantern off its hook that fell to the floor and smashed. Flint caught the front of Vane's shirt and pushed him up against the door. Vane caught Flint's lapels and hauled him closer as he met Flint's gaze. Flint's heart hammered, pulse raced, breath came heavy. Vane pulled him closer still, made him stagger up against him, made him press him up to the heavy wooden door, bruised and hurting but that fact mattered very little in that moment. They weren't fighting any longer.

When they kissed, there was still blood on Vane's hands. When they kissed, there was still blood in Flint's beard and smeared across his teeth. When they kissed, it was an act of pure fucking violence, and Flint had wanted it for months. He had the metal tang of his own blood in his mouth and the dark-sweet taste of rum from Vane's, his hands in Vane's hair, Vane's hands under his shirt, rough nails and callused fingers on his skin. He was fucking aflame from head to toe by the time they pulled back, flushed and breathless, drunk with it, still reeling as much from the fight as from Vane's mouth on his. He hadn't kissed a man in years, since Thomas. He hadn't realised he'd wanted to.

Vane walked him backwards across the room, boots crunching on the broken lantern glass till Flint's thighs bumped up against the table's edge. Vane unbuckled Flint's belt and he let him, unbuttoned his trousers, pushed them down, did it roughly, quickly, no hint of hesitation to it, no hint of surprise to find Flint already hard, already wanting. Vane leaned past him, opened up a drawer on the far side of the table that he leaned across; there was a stoppered bottle of oil in the drawer that he came back with in his hand and Flint knew better than to question its presence in Vane's cabin at that particular moment. He watched as Vane slicked his hands with it. He watched as Vane's slick hands went down to slick Flint's exposed cock with it, till he was fairly dripping in it. Then Vane stepped to one side, stepped forward; Vane shoved down his own leather trousers past his knees and leant down over the desktop; Vane took himself in hand and stroked.

"Do you need a fucking invitation?" he asked, with a glance over his shoulder at Flint. He didn't. He absolutely didn't. He stepped up behind him, let his cock rest against Vane's arse. He shifted his hips and rubbed the length of his cock against Vane's cheeks, spread them with his palms and rubbed himself between them. Then he tucked his shirt up under his arms and he pushed the head of his cock to Vane's hole, pushed against him, pushed into him. Vane groaned obscenely with it, his forehead to the desktop, and all Flint could think was that Thomas had never sounded like that, not in all the time they'd been together, not from anything they'd done. But then again he'd never had Thomas over a desk in the cabin of a buccaneer ship flying Charles Vane's black banner. It was an unlikely proposition at best.

He pushed up Vane's shirt, pressed the heels of his hands to the dimples at the small of his back as he shifted his hips to shift inside him. He slid his hands down, grasped at Vane's hips and shifted again, again, again, and Vane turned his head, laughed there breathlessly with his cheek pressed to the tabletop, his hands gripping the far edge. Vane pushed back to meet Flint's next thrust, took him deeper and made himself curse with it while he stroked his own cock. The whole situation was beyond a joke because neither one of them had thought to bolt the door behind them - any member of Vane's crew or even Eleanor could have walked in on them at any given second and found them there, Flint's hands going down to the rough table, leaning for leverage, Vane stroking himself as he pushed back against him. Maybe the thought of being caught like that made Flint hate himself, made his face flush hot with the shame of it, but it made his cock jerk as he fucked Vane harder, as the cabin filled with the sound of laboured breath and skin on skin. It was heady. It was ludicrous.

Vane came first, over his own hand, with a groan he muffled against his arm and a judder that Flint could feel through his hands, clamped as they were at Vane's hips. He went tight around him, or tighter at least, broke Flint's rhythm but apparently that felt good, that felt excellent, because it was just moments later that Flint found his own release in stuttering, jerking thrusts, his muscles tight and taut and straining. He came inside Vane, slick with sweat and oil and practically panting with it, then Vane pushed himself up on the desk and Flint stepped back, pulled out, took a moment to rearrange his trousers, buckle his belt, before he looked at him.

Vane's cheek was already starting to swell. His left eye was so very bloodshot that very near no white remained to it, but at the very least the cut below had ceased to bleed. Flint had done that to him, all of it, right down to the flush of colour still in his skin, and for that moment he felt perversely proud, but then Vane buckled his belt and pushed himself away from the table. He went closer, rested his hands on Flint's shoulders and Flint had to carefully resist the urge to shrug them off and flee the scene.

"Next time you want to fuck, just say so," Vane said. Then he patted Flint's cheek with one hand and walked away, through the cabin door, back out onto the deck.

When Flint joined him minutes later, Vane wasn't with Eleanor. Vane didn't speak to her, not even for a second. The relief Flint felt at that fact was unwelcome; the bitter fucking shame he felt seemed much more apt.

---

When the girl came to their room that evening, back in Nassau, Flint told her she wasn't needed and sent her away with coin in her hand and a smile on her face. Vane watched him do it from the table with his feet propped up, cigarillo in his hand because he couldn't smoke and smile the way he did both together.

"So, we don't need her?" Vane said when she was gone. He stubbed out the cigarillo and he left the table, went up to the door where Flint was still standing and pushed him up against it, pinned him there with his own body.

"We don't need her," Flint confirmed, as he took two tight handfuls of the back of Vane's shirt. They really did not need a poor substitute for Eleanor Guthrie there between them, Flint thought, when all that it could possibly accomplish was to remind them both that the woman herself currently resided in their dirty, inadequate jail, somewhere in the corridors beneath their feet.

Flint took Vane on their knees on the stone floor, trousers pushed down around their thighs, the stone against his kneecaps very nearly enough to wilt Flint's erection but he told himself wouldn't be defeated by discomfort. He pulled Vane up from his hands, pulled him back against his chest and hooked his hands over his thighs to take him harder, skin on skin as Vane stroked himself to completion, then they washed and they ate and they worked, Flint still despairing at Vane's writing, and then they went to bed. They had a meeting to attend the following day. Flint had determined they'd rest well for it.

The meeting took place in the tavern in town, all the captains there around the table, Vane and Flint and Teach and Rackham all sitting there side by side. They spoke about Eleanor, about hanging, about giving her to the men in restitution, about putting a pistol to her head and pulling the trigger. And in the end, in spite of everyone's clear misgivings on the subject, they finally decided that they couldn't kill her. Of course, they couldn't keep her there in Nassau either: she had to go.

The door opened that night and Flint heard it, woke at it, reached for the knife by the side of the bed. When Eleanor leant over him, he put that knife to her throat. He wished quite thoroughly that they hadn't released her from her cell and given her a bed to sleep in. One more night in the cells would not have killed her.

"I didn't realise you were his guard dog these days, Flint," she said. "Didn't you hate each other?"

He sighed and lowered the knife, set it aside on the cabinet at the bedside. She sat down on the edge of the mattress in too-large clothes they'd given her from Hornigold's old chest, because no one felt inclined to buy a dress for her to wear while the one in which she'd been rescued was properly laundered.

"So, they're right," she continued. "The two of you are…partners."

Flint slapped Vane's side; he woke slowly, grumbled, then opened his eyes.

"What the fuck's the matter with you?" he asked, his voice a hoarse grumble, and Flint took hold of Vane's chin, directed his gaze rather roughly up toward their visitor. "Ah." Vane turned onto his side and propped his head up on one hand, nonchalant or a fair approximation of it. "What do you want, Eleanor? You here to kill us in our sleep?"

"Hardly," she replied, derisively, then apparently reconsidered as the next word from her mouth was, "Perhaps."

Vane chuckled. Flint rested his forearm over his eyes so he didn't have to look at either of them, but then Vane's hand caught his wrist and eased his arm back up. Vane glanced at Eleanor then back down at Flint, his fingers still tight around Flint's wrist.

"She's here to persuade us not to send her away," Vane said. "Right, Eleanor?"

Flint looked up at her. She nodded. "Of course I am," she said. "You know I've never wanted to leave Nassau. I belong here."

"So what's your plan to persuade us?" Vane asked, and Flint had a terrible suspicion that he knew where this was going to go, the turn that it was going to take, but when Eleanor pulled off her borrowed shirt up over her head he was still somewhat surprised by the fact that she'd actually done it. He wasn't surprised, however, that Vane's only reaction was to watch her with a smile, but he was surprised at himself, that he didn't even try to stop her when she stood, when she toed off her shoes, dropped her borrowed trousers to the floor and stepped out of them naked. She was beautiful and it was far from the first time he'd thought of her as such, but it was the first time he'd thought of her as attractive, let alone thought of acting on that attraction. She was pretty and strong-willed and Flint could see how Vane had fallen for her as he had.

He knew nothing good at all could come of it as even should Vane have changed his mind about her destination, he was still outnumbered in the choice and Flint's mind would not be changed. He had no wish to mislead her in that. He had no particular wish to use her, for this or for anything else, bore her no particular ill will. But then Vane threw back their blanket to show her they were both stark naked underneath and apparently that settled it. All Flint could suppose as Eleanor moved to straddle his thighs was that he'd done ten times worse ten times over.

Vane's fingers closed around Flint's cock and stroked him to erection with Eleanor watching him do it all the while. Then Vane's hand moved and Eleanor's took its place instead, stroked him slowly as she shifted higher on the bed.

"Don't," Flint said, but his protest was both lacklustre and rather late as she rubbed the head of his cock against her clitoris, as she eased it farther back, teased her labia with the tip of him or perhaps she meant the tease to be vice versa. Then she settled down, pushed him into her with a roll of her hips and as Flint took a measured breath, Vane laughed out loud right there beside him. Eleanor's pale cheeks flushed pink at the sound of it, perhaps with embarrassment or perhaps just with arousal as she ground down against him, hot and wet and tight around the length of him. He hadn't had another woman since Miranda, at least not in any way that wasn't just a mouth on him, but somehow he could persuade himself that it constituted some great betrayal of her memory, not when Vane leaned in to kiss him hard and slow and deep while Eleanor's hands spread wide against his chest so she could lean there for greater leverage, to ride him harder.

As his breath began to quicken, as Vane pulled away and swiped back his straying hair, Flint pushed and turned and pressed Eleanor down there on her back. He was in her again in a second, leaning down over her, propped up on his hands, hips thrusting hard as sweat began to prickle at his brow. Her legs came up around his waist and she crossed them at the ankle, pulling him in so deep and sharp she gasped out loud with it; her hands went to his biceps and squeezed there so tightly he was quite sure his skin would bruise, but his chest and his hips and his thighs were already a fucking chronicle of bruises that Vane had sucked and pinched and struck into his skin, a chart of everything they'd done in livid purples that faded into reds and then yellows. Whatever marks Eleanor might leave on him would be nothing in comparison.

Then Vane's hands were at his hips, stilling his thrusts, pulling him up onto his knees. Vane knelt there behind him, pulled him back against his chest, his hard cock pressed up to the small of Flint's back. Vane pressed his mouth to Flint's shoulder, to the back of his neck, to the pulse that beat double-time just under his jaw. Vane wrapped one hand around Flint's cock and stroked him slowly, languidly, while Eleanor sucked quickly at her first two fingers then rubbed against her clitoris as she watched them, the two of them, together.

"Why don't you fuck me while I fuck her?" Vane said, murmured against Flint's neck just loud enough that Eleanor would hear him say it, too. She didn't object and neither did Flint though perhaps had he not left all the morals that he'd ever possessed in a bedroom back in England he might have voiced complaint. As it was, Vane pressed a little stoppered glass bottle of oil into Flint's hand then moved around him; as Flint slicked his own cock generously, Vane ran his hands over Eleanor's parted thighs, over her abdomen, her breasts, her sex.

Vane ducked his head to lap at her between her thighs, in all the places Flint had been so recently, and Flint parted Vane's cheeks with his palms, drizzled oil between them, unconcerned that it ran down over his hole and the smooth skin behind it, dripped from his balls to the sheets where it would likely stain. He ran his rough fingers over the path that oil had taken, squeezed Vane's balls and trailed his fingers back, rubbed the pad of his thumb against Vane's slick hole, pushed just the tip inside him. Vane drew back. Vane crawled up the bed and settled over Eleanor, parted her lips and pushed inside her with a groan. And then Flint followed; he pushed up against Vane's arse and with one long stroke, he pushed inside him.

Just like that was how they all finished, once stamina had been exhausted. It was Vane that came first, squeezing so tight around Flint that he almost brought him with him, but Eleanor was second instead, her hips rocking up against Vane as her own fingers brought her to the brink then tipped her over with a stifled moan. Then finally it was Flint, his hands tight at Vane's hips, bucking hard into him till he was most entirely spent. He pulled back, pulled out, and Vane shifted next, dropped down onto his back there beside Eleanor and dragged Flint down with him to the mattress. Flint told himself he closed his eyes against the light of the lantern by the bed but he knew he closed them purely and simply so he needn't see Eleanor watching when he slipped one arm over Vane's slim waist. He told himself the position of that arm wasn't meant to seem possessive, that he felt no jealousy at all for what Vane had had with Eleanor and clearly still had with her then, and for that at least he refused to consider the alternative. Everyone in Nassau knew all about Vane's infatuation with Eleanor Guthrie. Flint had no interest in entering into competition with her. He wouldn't win. He had no desire to.

The following morning, they saw her down to the beach in her freshly laundered dress and she glared like they were her jailors and not her deliverers. They were sending her north, to her family in Boston who may or may not have felt inclined to intervene with the authorities on her behalf, to save her life, but by all accounts they had sufficient power to do so if they wished it. She didn't for a second wish herself to leave but they gave her no choice at all in the matter, so none of the men would be tempted to find her and gut her and string her up for all to see. Of course, their quite legitimate concerns for her continued welfare were met with a slap to Vane's cheek and then one to Flint's after, while Teach looked on in barely-contained mirth. This time, Eleanor was leaving and not him.

"Damn you both," she said, as she boarded the longboat there waiting for her at the beach, then she stepped back down to the sand in the surf up to her ankles and strode back to them. "Rogers is coming here one week from today. And if he fails to take back Nassau for the English and return what's left of the gold you took, the Spanish will raze this place to the ground. He made a deal with them. He has perhaps a fortnight left till it's forfeit and the Spanish come." She glanced at Vane then looked hard at Flint. "I hope you have a plan."

She pressed her mouth to Vane's then kissed Flint too, like an omen, like goodbye, like the kiss of grim fucking death itself in the guise of a pretty young woman. Then she stepped into the boat and she left them there without another word. They watched her go, the breeze and the dawn sun in her hair, and Flint knew he believed every word she'd said. Now he knew precisely why Woodes Rogers had seemed so desperate to take the island sooner rather than later; the Spanish would take New Providence if he failed to, and they'd destroy everything Flint had helped to build there. The English wanted their island and the Spanish wanted their gold.

Eleanor left and she didn't look back. Flint hoped to God they'd never see her again.

---

"You've got another plan," Vane said, when he woke the next morning. Flint didn't bother to deny it; he most certainly did have another plan.

They met the other captains in their ever growing pirate fleet sometime around noon in what had once been Eleanor Guthrie's place of business. Flint told them all what he wanted them to do and although Vane gave him a somewhat skeptical look as he said it, he backed his plan quite vocally, quite openly, from his seat there by Flint's side. Only Teach offered opposition in the end, which was itself an issue; they left the table requiring further discussion, Flint's hackles up.

Flint spoke to his men and they all agreed, even Silver, even Billy. They had to do what they had to do in order to maintain their lives such as they knew them then, in order to maintain their freedom. Teach had argued that they all take the pardons Rogers offered and move away, start again, but Teach was not a Nassau man for all the fearsome deeds he'd done and in the end, would they let England or Spain or any other power in the world take their home away from them? They didn't need to ask the king's forgiveness with fingers crossed behind their backs, Flint told them, because they could win the battle and in doing so win the war. They could take their pirate fleet and rout the Royal Navy and their new would-be governor of New Providence right out of the Bahamas because they had the numbers then to do so. They could sail out to meet the governor's eight ships with their twenty, with maybe twenty-five, all under their black banners, and they'd take or sink them all. They had the edge, he said, the wind in their sails, the upper hand. They could send the English home for good. They'd worry about the Spanish later.

Teach said half the ships would cut and run at the first sign of engagement from the Navy fleet. Teach said they'd be lucky to be left with ten against those eight Navy ships and even then they'd be woefully outgunned. He said they'd die out there if they went ahead, no quarter given, no pardon to fall back upon. Rogers would either kill them there or hang them in the streets of Nassau because in the end, the only man in the colonies who didn't fear them was the only man who mattered. Flint wished he could say Teach was wrong but he knew too well that his plan would end in one of two ways: overwhelming victory, or final, emphatic defeat.

"It's worth the risk," he told Teach the following morning, sharing breakfast in the dusty courtyard of the Nassau fort.

"Is it?" Teach asked. "I don't see how."

Flint excused himself from the table then. He was sure that if he hadn't gone he'd have struck the man or worse, and with Teach's departure would have gone their hopes for a free Nassau. And he'd killed too many men already without murdering Edward Teach at breakfast, cutting his throat over cold sliced ham.

"I'll talk to him," Vane said, when he'd caught him.

"You'll persuade him?"

Vane shrugged. "I'll try," he said, and Flint couldn't say Vane looked particularly pleased by the notion of trying, but he didn't think he'd misunderstood the situation between the two of them, between Vane and Teach, so wholly that he couldn't see Vane was perhaps the only man on New Providence who might have had the power to persuade Teach into doing anything he didn't wish to do, be that another drink, another wife, or an attack on the Royal Navy.

Of course, he knew their story in only the most general terms. Perhaps, he thought, that evening after an hour-long meeting with John Silver, he might have miscalculated just a fraction. Perhaps, he thought, as he and Vane took off their clothes at the end of a long, hot day and washed off the dust side by side, he should have tried at least once more himself to make Teach see the necessity of his plan and not simply the potential for disaster. Perhaps, he thought, as the door of the room swung open in the night, the room he'd shared with Vane after three long months in quite another room in quite another place, he'd made a mistake in ever involving Edward Teach at all. Teach was the one who opened the door. Teach was the one who entered the room.

"I never thought I'd live to see the day," Teach said, coming closer. Flint started to reach for the knife by the bed and Vane stopped his hand, his fingers confusingly, unnecessarily tight at Flint's wrist.

"Well, here you are," Vane said. "Seeing the day."

"It appears so." Teach chuckled. "Now, I wasn't sure if I should believe the rumours about the two of you but here you are." He reached the foot of the bed and paused there for a moment, watching them both, casting an unhurried gaze between the two of them as he held the lantern up a fraction higher. "If I do what he wants, Charles, will you do what I want?"

Flint looked at Vane then, studied the oddly impassive expression on his face that in the lantern light Flint would have sworn masked something Vane wished neither of them to see. Flint almost left the bed, almost replied in Vane's place, told Teach no in the very harshest of terms, but Vane clenched and then unclenched his jaw and glanced at Flint just for a second, cutting off that thought. Then he turned back to Teach. Flint could see his mind was made and he knew he would not sway it.

"I'll do what you want," Vane said. And everything in Flint fairly screamed with the desire to know what that thing was that Teach wanted from him, but he knew better than to ask. He knew better than to ask even when Teach took off his hat and placed it on a chair there by the bed, when he took off his sword and his coat and set those aside with it. When Vane tossed back the blanket just the way he had with Eleanor, Flint supposed he began to understand, but still he didn't question. When Vane leant over to the cabinet there by the bed to retrieve the half-emptied bottle of oil, he supposed the situation made some sense. He pushed back the sheets at his own side of the bed and swung his legs around to the edge, ready to leave, to dress and go out and stand on the wall overlooking the bay till Teach left, if he did at all. He didn't have the stomach to watch Vane fuck another man. He'd barely had the stomach to watch him with a woman, and somehow it seemed to him that Vane and Teach would be worse to see than even Vane and Eleanor.

"Wait," Vane said, his voice uncharacteristically tight and tense. Flint turned back to him; Vane smiled a rather bitter smile. "He wants to watch us first."

"You didn't tell him?" Vane practically glared but it seemed Teach found the situation perversely hilarious. "My apologies, Flint. Here I thought you knew what Charles had agreed to." He put his hands on his hips, not bothered at all to hide his smile. "Should I leave the two of you alone? My crew and I can be out of Nassau by mid-afternoon."

"Don't," Vane said, and he pushed Flint down flat on his back.

Flint wanted to object. He wanted Vane to object, to call Teach a cunt and tell him he could go to the devil and piss off out of Nassau. He wanted to take the knife from by the bed and bury it to the hilt in Teach's neck, let him bleed into the off-white collar of his shirt as he fell to the floor. What he did was let Vane straddle his thighs. What he did was lie there because he knew that without Edward Teach their plan would fail entirely.

He knew the feel of Vane's nails against his abdomen. He knew the feel of Vane's long hair trailing over his skin, the burn of his stubble against his neck, his chest, his cheek. He knew the feel of Vane's teeth biting down at his shoulder almost hard enough to bruise but not to break the skin, knew his mouth sucking hard at his collarbone and that was hard enough to bruise. Vane kissed his mouth and that was familiar, too, the pressure of it, the hint of teeth and tongue, the desperation of it that sparked something in Flint he'd always had the very greatest difficulty in controlling.

He put his hands on Vane then, leaned up into the kiss, let Vane wrap his fingers around his cock because fuck Teach and whatever it was he thought he wanted from them both. He didn't object when Vane unstoppered the bottle and oiled his somewhat reluctant erection. He didn't object when Vane drew up on his knees and guided Flint's cock up against his hole, didn't object when Vane pushed him down, sat back, when he slowly worked the length of him up inside, and Flint just held hard at Vane's thighs as he watched him do it. He was tighter around him than Flint had known him be before. He was tense. He was clenching his jaw even as he shifted his hips and ground down against him. Flint had no idea how to help that or even if he wanted to because Vane had done this to himself, he thought. Flint hadn't asked for this, at least not knowingly. He would not feel guilt for it.

As Vane rested his hands down against Flint's chest and leaned forward then for leverage, Flint pressed his heels hard into the mattress for the exact same reason. He pushed up as Vane pushed down, made Vane groan and Teach chuckled lowly as he watched. Vane tensed so Flint squeezed at his hips, at his waist, the sides of his ribcage; he found the back of Vane's neck with one hand and trailed the other down the length of Vane's spine, fingertips following the line of vertebrae right down to his coccyx, down to the place where Flint's cock pushed inside him. Perhaps he should have thought better of it but he slicked his fingers with more of the oil from the little bottle and then ran them back down, stroked the base of his own cock, stroked the place where he pushed up into Vane, teased there, slickly, pushed as Vane caught his gaze, his face and neck and chest all flushed red with strain, with arousal, perhaps humiliation but Flint still knew too little of Vane's relationship with Teach to be sure of that at all.

Flint worked one stiff finger into Vane, right there beside his own cock, stretched him, made his hips shift back to take him deeper. Vane's breath came only shallowly as Flint rubbed at the hollow at the base of Vane's throat with the pad of the thumb of his free hand and he tilted back his head, closed his eyes, took a breath through his open mouth and sighed it out unsteadily. Flint ran his hand up, pressed it up under Vane's chin, pushed his head back, ran his thumb over his parted lips, let it catch at his teeth and lower lip on the way back down. He'd never wanted Vane more than he did in that moment, Teach be damned. And when Teach unbuckled his belt and Vane's eyes opened, Flint had only rarely hated himself more.

Teach knelt on the bed, still very nearly fully clothed, boots on, shirt tucked up under his arms, trousers pushed down over his hips with his belt hanging open from its loops. Flint twisted the fingers of both hands into the bed sheets and frowned at Vane who just looked away. Then Teach pressed Vane down with one big hand spread out between his shoulderblades, reached for the bottle and oiled his own cock languidly. Flint felt the head of it press up by the base of his own and Flint realised what he was about to do. Then Teach inched forward, one hand gripping hard at Vane's hip and the other guiding his cock up against Vane's arse, guiding it in right alongside Flint's, slow and tight and almost painful for all three of them, Flint was perfectly willing to wager, but Teach remained unflinching. He just pushed in, sure and steady, till they were both balls-deep inside him.

Then Teach moved. He was more or less the only one of them who could and so he did so, slowly at first but then harder, deeper, making Vane's hands press hard to the mattress either side of Flint's shoulders, making him bare his teeth and fairly hiss his breath between them. Then Teach's big hand shifted from Vane's hip to circle his cock and as he stroked Vane almost fucking whimpered with it. His eyes flicked open and he looked at Flint as Teach gathered his hair in his free hand, as he twisted it around his fist and his wrist and pulled his head back, exposed his throat. Flint wanted to stop but didn't, couldn't, maybe didn't even truly wish to as he wrapped his hands around Vane's neck, pressed his thumbs up to Vane's trachea, made his breath hitch, made his own cock twitch a fraction harder. Then one hand strayed down and as his fingers closed over Teach's hand, as he squeezed there to guide him faster, rougher at Vane's cock, Vane gasped in a breath and bucked his hips and came. That was all Flint needed to finish him, too. All Teach needed was another minute after, his eyes screwed shut, and while Flint and Teach were both still pushed up deep inside him, when Teach untangled his hand from his hair, Vane hung his head down low by Flint's chest.

"You can count on me, Flint," Teach said when he pulled back, as he pulled up his trousers, tucked in his shirt. "My men and I are with you." Then he turned and left and closed the door behind him.

Flint didn't tell Vane he hadn't had to do what he'd done. He didn't say he was sorry, and wasn't quite completely sure that he was sorry. He let Vane pull back, let Vane ease his softening cock back out of him, let him settle on his back and close his eyes.

"You should have told me what to expect," Flint said, and Vane chuckled bitterly.

"Teach always liked to fuck," he said. "That's not much of a secret." Vane sighed and pulled up the blanket, over the both of them. "Besides, sex was only part of his deal." He turned onto his side, away from Flint, licked his fingers and pinched out the candle by the bedside, plunged them into darkness as Flint's stomach fairly sank.

"When it's over, I go with him," Vane said into the dark. "That's his price. I think it's fair."

Flint, for once, couldn't think of a single word to say.

---

The following three days before their scheduled departure from Nassau passed with surprising speed.

Flint and Silver oversaw the provisioning of the Walrus on the beach together while Vane, a way away along the sand, saw to the Ranger with his own quartermaster. Teach was somewhere nearby, no doubt, though Flint saw him only fleetingly, in the tavern when the captains all met to confirm their plans, or a tall figure in the longboat rowing out to the Queen Anne's Revenge. Teach was an imposing man but Flint would allow himself to be imposed upon no further. When all was said and done, Teach would leave nassau and Vane's own dubious sense of honour would likely see him leave Nassau with him, to fulfill the deal he'd made on Flint's behalf. Flint didn't even try to persuade himself that the notion of Vane's departure didn't bother him. It bothered him. He kept busy so as not to study why that bothered him with any great assiduity.

The first night, he slept in his tent on the beach with Silver still leading an argument between the men somewhere not too far removed. It had sparked up again by the time Flint woke, crewmen suggesting truly terrible ideas for a new buccaneering name for their Spanish man o' war, things like the Black Squid and the Death's Head and the Bloody Cutlass and Silver came closer, his contrived replacement foot rather ill at ease on the sandy beach, and took a seat there beside Flint.

"Why don't we just call it the Good Ship Cliché and have done with it?" Silver muttered, and Flint hid his amusement with a cup of rum.

The second night, he slept on the Walrus anchored there in the bay, the sway of his hammock strangely soothing though through most of the night he lay awake. He could see the final battle in his head so very clearly, like a chart laid out across a table at the Admiralty, covered in small carved wooden ships. He could see each move of every piece like a godforsaken game of chess, could see every possible misstep, each missed broadside, each unfavourable turn of the wind. His men were pirates, good enough at sea, good enough in a fight to overturn the crew of a whaler or a merchantman, but he knew of course the Royal Navy was quite a different beast. Their greater numbers would not necessarily carry the day against the Milford and the others, not when the Navy had the strength and will and discipline, not to mention the ordnance, to loose three broadsides before a pirate ship had even managed two. It was a keen concern.

The third night, Flint made the long walk up the dusty path back to the fort. Vane was sitting at the table and he looked up as Flint entered, put down his glass from one hand and the quill pen from the other. The leather-bound copy of Marcus Aurelius was sitting by Vane's elbow. Flint crossed the room and leaned against the edge of the table, the wood so heavy that it didn't shift an inch with his weight there against it.

"Did you read it?" he asked. Vane raised his brows as he looked up from his charts. "Did you even open it?"

"I don't need a fucking book to tell me who you are," Vane replied, but he looked away, dragged the book over the tabletop and over his charts to settle it in front of him, and tilted it up to read the title embossed on its spine. "So, who's Marcus Aurelius?"

"He was a Roman emperor," Flint said.

"Sounds about right for you, you arrogant bastard," Vane said, with a hint of a smirk. Then he opened the book, narrowed his eyes at the dedication Flint knew was inked there neatly. "James?" Vane continued. "That's you?" Flint nodded. "And T.H.?"

"Thomas Hamilton."

Vane sat back in his seat, leant back, looking up as Flint began to wonder why he'd ever given him the damned book in the first place. Vane's quill was leaking ink onto a chart and so Flint picked it up, turned it in his hands while Vane watched him.

"So you had a man in England," Vane said.

"Yes," Flint replied, simply, starkly.

Vane stood. Flint watched him move, watching him step in closer, watched him press right up against him there beside the table, one hand either side of Flint's hips pressing to the tabletop. He brought one hand up to the back of Flint's neck then and looked him in the eye, almost close enough for Flint's vision to blur as he attempted to focus.

"Was he the only one?" Vane asked.

"Yes."

"I had Teach before Eleanor," Vane said. "You know what I did to him for her."

"I do."

"So you pretend I'm him and I'll pretend you're her," Vane said.

Flint raised his brows, the beginnings of an amused smile at his lips. "I make a poor figure of a girl."

"You'll do," Vane said, and he seemed so very serious about it that all traces of Flint's smile then disappeared.

He'd spent so long trying to forget every night he'd spent with Thomas Hamilton, every afternoon when they'd undressed each other, every time Thomas had put his hands on him, his mouth, pressed him down against the feather bed and feather pillows, made love to him like the small matters of their sex and Thomas's marriage were somehow infinitesimally unimportant. He'd tried to forget and in trying had only preserved the memory that much more clearly and perhaps, he thought, if he would do for Vane then Vane would do just as well for him. When Vane leaned past him and reached for the rum, as he took a swallow from the glass, Flint decided. He could pretend. He'd have Thomas again, just for one night, if that was what was offered.

Flint kissed him. He leaned in close and he kissed him as Vane put down the empty glass and he missed the table's edge completely, but neither one flinched as the thick glass broke into pieces on the floor. Vane took a handful of Flint's shirt at the small of his back and pulled up, untucked it, pulled up higher till Flint pushed him back just far enough that he could pull off the shirt and toss it aside. Vane did the same and then Flint had his mouth again, hot and slow and sweet with rum. With his hands against Vane's lower back, he could almost imagine Thomas if he tried to. As his fingers went to unbuckle Vane's belt, he could almost pretend it was Thomas's, that worn leather trousers were tailored breeches over fine silk stockings, that the hands disrobing him weren't callused from work and tanned from the sun.

They pulled off their own boots, finished removing their trousers and both stepped back in, caught each other in another kiss. Vane held him tighter to him than he ever had before and Flint returned the favour. He remembered the fervour of his first kisses with Thomas, the halting ardour, how all his self-imposed retraint had been broken in an instant. He remembered the shame he'd felt afterwards, the bitter disappointment he'd had for himself, not least because he'd known he was powerless to stop if Thomas wanted that again, or more. He remembered the first time Thomas touched him, still fully clothed there in his study, but Thomas's hand over his breeches had been enough to finish him in moments, appalled as he was by his own reaction to that touch. And then, three days later, Thomas had undressed him, Thomas had laid him down and had him and after that, later, back in his own shabby room across town, Flint had sat down on his bed and cried. It wasn't for God or law or his own failed morality, or at least that wasn't all of it. What he'd wanted from Thomas had made him question if he'd known himself at all.

They moved. They moved across the room, very little need to see their path as they knew the way so very well, Vane's mouth at Flint's neck, his fingers catching against the stubble of Flint's scalp. Vane pushed him down onto the bed and it was difficult to conjure instead the feel of feathers and not hay. Vane followed him down, settled over him, settled on his forearms and pressed in against him skin on skin from belly to thigh, pressed his mouth softly, slowly to Flint's collarbone, to the side of his neck, the hinge of his jaw, his stubbled chin, the corner of his mouth. Their usual rough desperation had been set aside, there was no trace of it between them, but Flint could not pretend that it was like those times with Thomas, not really, not at all; Vane's body over his was harder, coarser, denser, surer, littered with scars that Flint found with one hand while the other twisted into Vane's long hair that was nothing like Thomas's hair had been, not even like the long wig that Thomas had always professed to hate but had worn with such great style. Kissing him was hardly what he could have called the same, by that same token, and not simply because Vane's stubble chafed against his own when Thomas had always shaved so cleanly, but Vane's mouth tasted of molasses-sweet dark rum instead of good French wine. The thought turned Flint's stomach but by no means did he stop.

Vane moved. He shifted down, his hair and Flint's rings that even then still hung from the leather thong about Vane's neck trailing over his skin just as much as Vane's mouth did, over his sternum, his ribs, his navel. Vane rubbed his bearded cheek against the length of Flint's cock and he chuckled lowly, darkly, turned and pressed his mouth hot and wet just beneath the head. When he took him in his mouth and sucked he did it slowly, torturously slowly, the tip of his tongue teasing the length of the vein there in the underside of his straining erection and Flint's breath came more quickly as he struggled to keep still. Every time before, Vane's mouth on him had been a means to an end, a chart with their destination marked clearly upon it; this time, Vane pulled back before Flint could finish. Vane pushed him over instead, laid him out on his belly and pressed his mouth to the back of his neck. Flint let him. He quite simply wasn't sure what else to do.

For a moment then Vane just pressed his mouth there at the back of Flint's neck. For a moment, he pressed his mouth between Flint's shoulderblades. He trailed down, inch by inch, down the length of Flint's spine, sighed against the small of his back as he rubbed between Flint's cheeks with one thumb. Then Vane's tongue followed and Flint's stomach clenched, Flint's breath caught, Flint's fingers went tight in the sheets. Vane's hands parted his cheeks and his tongue dipped between, licked flatly, wetly, hotly, then he teased there with the tip. It was something that Thomas had never done, something Flint had never thought of doing in his life before but he pressed his hips hopelessly to the mattress there beneath him, rocked against it, hated himself for wanting it again when Vane eventually pulled back. But then Vane's fingers were slick with oil and rubbing against him. Then the first of Vane's slick fingers pushed slowly up inside him. Then there was a second, Vane pressed his mouth to the small of his back, and Flint pushed back against them. And then, Vane pulled back. Flint expected the blunt head of his cock between his cheeks, but Vane sat back instead.

"On your back, James," Vane told him, and so he turned himself back over even as he felt himself flush hotly. His name in Vane's mouth made him harder.

Then Vane leaned in, pressed his mouth to the inside of one of Flint's thighs, to his hip, his chest, parted Flint's thighs wide and eased them up as he knelt there in between them. He slicked his cock and Flint watched, the angle awkward as he did so but when Vane guided himself down between Flint's thighs, between his cheeks, that hardly seemed to matter. Vane pushed inside him, slow, careful though not gentle the way Thomas had been with him, his hair sticking to his sweat-damp skin. Vane pushed into him till he was in balls-deep with his hands clenched at Flint's thighs. Then he met Flint's gaze. He was just as flushed as Flint was.

Vane moved. Vane shifted his hips to move in him, hissed in a breath between his teeth and then did it again as Flint's hands went down and caught Vane's wrists. Then Vane moved again, leaned down, leaned forward and Flint hooked his legs around Vane's waist. He'd never done that with Thomas, either, never face to face the way he was right them with Vane, so close he could feel Vane's breath on his damp skin. He held onto Vane's biceps and Vane moved again, Vane moved in him as their gazes locked. He'd have expected that to feel more awkward than it did, watching Vane's face while he watched him too, while he fucked him, while he built a slow, deep rhythm, while Vane had him the way he'd told himself no other man but Thomas would ever have him, but it wasn't awkward. The look on Vane's face just made his cock swell harder. He let Vane do it. He wanted him to. He wanted Vane to.

He'd have liked to have had him on a real feather bed, he thought, like Thomas's had been back in London, but he doubted Vane had ever been there or indeed that he ever would except perhaps in chains. He tried to imagine Vane on the streets of the English capital, Vane in the fashion of the day or at least of the day that Flint had left, perhaps Vane in Navy uniform since Flint knew the cut and fit of it so well himself, but it all just seemed absurd. Of course, most of the men he knew there in Nassau would have thought it also seemed absurd for Flint, and perhaps it had been all along. He slipped his own had to his cock as Vane moved against him, in him, deep and slow, so he wouldn't have to think of all the things he'd done of which he was so truly ashamed, so he wouldn't think of the life he'd had and lost, so he wouldn't have to think of Thomas after all.

They came that way, Flint's hand at his cock, hot bursts over his fingers and his abdomen that made his hips buck and his jaw clench hard, his whole body tensing, the release so fucking overwhelming that he thought he'd feel it in each one of his muscles for days to come. Vane came that way, biting back a curse with the erratic slap of skin on skin till he shuddered, till he jerked up tight and groaned and came inside him, pulsing with it, bucking with it, till he stilled and drew a long, unsteady breath.

"Did I remind you of him?" Vane asked then, sweaty, half-breathless, thoroughly dishevelled and still very much inside him.

Flint took his hands from Vane's biceps where he was positive bruises would show by morning. "No," he replied. "And you can't tell me I reminded you of Eleanor."

Vane pulled back, pulled out, went up on his knees and wiped his hands stiffly against his thighs, then swiped back his sweat-damp hair too quickly. "Of course you don't fucking remind me of her," Vane said, practically snapped. "Fuck, you still think I want her. Do you think I'm going to fuck off to Boston to find her like there's some bloody happy ending for the two of us? For fuck's sake, you're meant to be the educated one."

He pushed up from the bed and crossed the room, picked up the book from the table and held it up as Flint sat up in bed. "You think I need to read this shit to know you." He opened it up and he tore out the dedication, quickly, messily, and he turned and threw the rest of the leather-bound volume straight into the fire as Flint's head fairly reeled with it. "Fuck that. Fuck you. I know you. I don't need a fucking book to tell me who you are."

"I'm not like you, Charles," Flint said, fucking appalled, and Vane smiled wryly.

"No, James, you're not," he replied. "You're fucking worse. At least the shit I do's ‘cause I want to. You do it ‘cause you've got some grand goddamned plan for us all. No bloody book's going to tell me I'm wrong."

And in that moment, as the book burned there in the fireplace, Flint supposed it wouldn't have. He sat there and he watched it burn and he didn't even think to save it, or to try to, because Vane was right even if it felt like the very end of him to admit it, felt like all the lies he'd told himself split off and sloughed away. There was nothing in Marcus Aurelius that could tell Charles Vane anything of who he was. The book was who he'd once tried to be, not who he was or who he'd ever been, and James McGraw was by then just a fragment of a memory he'd tried so hard to suppress; James Flint was a monster willed up from the sea to take McGraw's place, temporarily in theory, but he could no longer return the name. It was the latter of the two that was the man Vane knew and didn't flinch from. It was the latter that was the man from whom Flint had himself long since ceased to flinch, the day Peter Ashe's man had shot Miranda in the head, though he knew the groundwork had been laid long before that. He'd become the lie he'd told himself was necessary. Perhaps the lie had been more truth than fiction all along.

He left the bed and Vane watched him do it. He walked naked across the room and Vane watched him do that, too. He took the page from Vane's hand and Vane let him, watched him as he read the familiar words that he'd kept in the back of his mind since the day he'd first read them. In his darker moments, he knew he should have found a way to set Thomas free from the asylum and escape with him, not without him. His only true regret in life was ever having listened to Miranda on that point or on any other after it, though as he read the words for the hundredth time he knew, he realised, that familiar as those words were he'd not known Thomas Hamilton quite long enough for the hand in which they were written to be familiar to him. He'd known Thomas, he liked to think, but he hadn't known him long. And whatever he'd felt for Thomas Hamilton, however real he knew that feeling to be, he wasn't sure that they could ever have been partners, ever have been equals. He was Vane's equal, there in a place where he'd be hanged for his high seas piracy before the small issue of sodomy would ever matter at all.

He screwed the page up in his hands and he threw it into the fire, watched the edges crisp and burn, the words vanish from the world. Then he kissed Charles Vane just like a drowning man straining up for air; Flint had almost drowned so many times and so he knew the feeling well. Vane kissed him back, their hands on each other's too-hot skin.

Vane wasn't Thomas; there was simply no worthwhile comparison there to make. Flint wasn't Eleanor; he wasn't attempting to fill her place at all, nor could he have, he thought. They hadn't always agreed, nor would they ever agree in all things, but Flint had always enjoyed a challenge. And so he'd fallen in love with the one man in the world who'd ever seen him for who he truly was and not for who he might be made to be. He'd fallen in love with the worst man he'd ever known.

"Don't leave with Teach," Flint said, eyes closed, his forehead resting pressed to Vane's. Don't leave with Teach, though he knew he was asking him to break his word, and there had been times in Vane's life when his word had been all he'd had. He didn't qualify it, though it would have been easy to. He didn't qualify it, though he could have made it seem anything but the personal desire that it was.

"We'll see," Vane said, and they went to bed.

Flint thought the fact that Vane would even entertain the notion spoke whole volumes. He just hoped he hadn't made the mistake he thought he might have made, that he could see playing out on the Admiralty's chart there in his head, because there was nothing in him then that would have let him take those words back. He meant them. He couldn't say he didn't.

He hoped he hadn't just asked Vane to lose Nassau. He hoped he hadn't just asked him to lose their lives.

---

"I've seen that look before," Teach said, as they stood side by side on the beach and watched Vane's longboat pull for the Ranger. "It's the one he gave me right before he chose the Guthrie cunt instead of me."

Flint couldn't disagree. Of course, neither of them could possibly know which one of them Vane was about to betray. Perhaps, Flint thought, he'd just betray them both. Perhaps that way would be easiest.

He'd spent the very early morning in the fort with Vane, eaten cross-legged in bed with him, dressed, sat at the table as Vane checked the charts again for no earthly reason Flint could think of and scoffed again at his scrawl. Flint's fingers would never be right again but he took the quill and he wrote out the words that Vane had just written, only much more neatly and precisely; by Vane's signature, before he considered the act at all, he signed his name James McGraw.

"So that's what they called you in England," Vane said, then licked his thumb and ran it across the ink of Flint's signature, blurring it out entirely. "Sign it James Flint." So he did, twice, and when Vane leaned across the table to fetch the rum he imprinted a mirror of Flint's signature on the back of his hand, stopped, rubbed at it and didn't bother to retrieve the rum after all. He pulled up his sleeve and held out his arm. "Sign it here," he said, and so Flint did, something stirring in him when he did so, as the nib of the quill dragged against Vane's skin, then he blotted it carefully so when Vane ran his fingertips across it it didn't blur at all.

Vane pulled off his shirt and moved in closer by Flint's chair, inched down the waist of his trousers with one thumb hooked in and tapped there with two inky fingers. "Sign it here," he said, and so Flint signed there, too, blotted it, ran his own fingertips over it, James Flint on Vane's skin in stark black ink. He leaned over and pressed his mouth by it and Vane's fingers curled at the back of his neck then Vane moved, straddled Flint's thighs and settled himself there, sitting on him sitting on the chair. Flint shook his head with a faintly incredulous smile and Vane took the quill and Flint let him, let him pull the collar of his shirt aside and let Vane put his initials on his collarbone, let him blot the ink carefully, let him tease the hollow of his throat with the feather of the quill. He'd have known Vane's writing anywhere, even on his own skin.

It was perhaps an hour past dawn when the pirate fleet weighed anchor and set sail for Harbour Island, expecting to meet the Royal Navy there along the way. As the island came into view on the horizon, Flint began to question if they'd come too early or too late, if their buccaneer fleet's large spread of sail had given warning to a lookout in the Harbour Island fort or perhaps their company had been betrayed. When they arrived, the bay was all but deserted. They turned back. Flint suspected that he understood, though he hoped to God to be entirely wrong.

They took a small French brig of twelve guns that they thought they'd better have than not, to raise the men's spirits, and they crewed her just enough to take her with them, though Flint did have to question the wisdom in their delay. Then they were home, or as near as ordinarily would make no difference, except a man high up in the mainmast rigging of the Walrus called out, "Sail!" and Flint strode to the rail with his glass at the ready. All the captains must presently have seen what Flint saw then waiting there, sitting in the bay in range of the fort's great guns and so the fort must have fallen. All the captains must have seen and presently, Teach sheared away and took more than half their fleet away with him. Flint carried on, committed to the course. Flint carried on, and Vane went with him, didn't go with Teach. And before they saw their move was useless, before Flint truly understood the futility of sailing into Nassau to engage with the Navy, he knew Eleanor Guthrie had betrayed them all with false report. She'd tricked them. She'd wished all along to give Nassau stability; in this action, this one decisive action, she would accomplish that goal at last.

Vane fired the French brig and set it on ahead of them but it was not enough. The Milford and the Rose were waiting there, the Shark and the Buck, and the Scarborough rounded the headland and cut off their escape entirely. Five buccaneer ships remained of twenty and they were most soundly outgunned by the Navy, by the governor, by Woodes Roger who had taken the fort and taken the town, taken the gold and half-sunk the Spanish man o' war there in the bay, and likely killed Jack Rackham in the process. Perhaps Flint had never liked Jack Rackham much at all, but he'd never thought to wish him dead.

The five pirates came to a stop there beside the bay. Flint stood by the rail on the quarterdeck and surveyed the scene; there was a hollowed out place inside James Flint then where he'd kept his anger tucked away throughout his life, but by then it had all spilled out already, by then there was nothing left to carry him forward. They were no match for the guns of those ships in the bay or the guns of the fort there behind them. If they formed a firing line and set off a broadside or two, they might chip at the Milford's pretty brightwork and whistle through her sheets and shrouds, but the Navy's return of fire would tear them, carry off their masts and hull them, sink them where they sat. When the longboat rowed out among them to deliver terms, Flint had all but sunk to his knees at the wheel, depleted. They did not fire their broadside. There was not so much as a pistol shot loosed and yet the fight was ended quite definitively.

"Give up the captains Flint and Vane," the messenger called up, "and the governor gives his word all crewmen will have pardons."

Flint crossed to the side of the deck and looked out at the Ranger, his knuckles white as he grasped at the rail.

"Captain?" said John Silver, stepping up to the rail beside him. Flint knew Silver was bright enough to see that they were solidly outmatched, but also bright enough to know the crew would follow their captain wherever and however he led right then. In this, whatever his order, they would follow him, just as Vane's crew would follow Vane. But John Silver, as so many others, did not wish to lose his life that day and Flint hadn't it in him to ask him to.

"Charles!" Flint called across the water.

Vane stood to the rail of the Ranger. "We done?" he called back.

"We're done," Flint replied, and he unfastened his sword from his waist, pulled his pistol from his belt and handed both to Silver. "Take the pardons when I'm gone and run with them," he told him. "Don't come for us. Rogers wants us dead to the very last man."

All Silver did was nod, for once without words to mount response. Perhaps he'd make a good captain for the Walrus, Billy Bones his quartermaster.

And then, presently, Flint went down the side into the governor's waiting longboat. He gave himself up, just as he'd never thought he would, never once believed he could, and Charles Vane went along with him. All Vane had ever wanted was his freedom, and he surrendered it then to give his men theirs. Thomas Hamilton's dream was coming true a full decade or more too late and as the two of them were rowed away from their ships and their men and the lives they'd known and into English-owned Nassau, Flint came to the bitter realisation that he no longer cared a whit for that dream.

England had taken Thomas and had taken Miranda, taken his career and now his home and in short order his life would surely follow; all he cared for as they rowed away was the fact they also meant to take the life of the wild, incorrigible man at his side. They meant to kill him and to kill Vane, too.

Vane flashed him his usual hint of a cocky smile, defeated perhaps but they'd never change him. For a fleeting moment, in spite of all Flint knew must lie ahead for them, he couldn't help but return it.

---

Nassau could not have carried a real jail in decades, and the fort served ill. The marines on the beach took them both to Eleanor Guthrie's home instead, to the house where Rackham had set up shop, and locked them into an upstairs bedroom once its windows had been hastily boarded and most of its furniture likewise hastily removed.

"No one's coming for us this time," Vane said.

"Last time, you were the one who came," Flint replied. "You said no one else was fool enough." He didn't say he'd told his men not to come. Vane could no doubt work that much out for himself.

They pulled at the planks nailed there over the windows, pulling with all their combined weight, but they didn't move an inch. The door was too heavy for them to shift at all, the lock too damned robust. Then they sat down on the floor with their backs to the wall just by the bedroom door because all the chairs had been removed and Vane sucked splinters from his palms while Flint watched him do it.

"If Rogers offers you terms, you should take them," Flint said, and Vane looked at him, his head tilted back against the wall, his expression withering.

"Would you?" he asked.

"Of course not."

"Then why should I?"

Flint could not quite bring himself to say he wished that Vane would live. He could not quite bring himself to say that if Vane had left with Teach as he'd agreed to, if he'd kept his word and not broken it to go with him instead, he would be sailing to Tortuga to fight again another day. Instead he conceded the point with a small, wry smile and looked away.

Past dusk, the door opened. They heard the key in the lock, heard the door unbarred, and Vane pushed up to his feet. Before Flint had the time to stop him, before Flint had the time to register dissent at all, before the guard there in the doorway carrying their evening meal had truly understood the gravity of his situation, Vane had the man's sword from his waist. Vane pushed that sword straight into the guard's neck with a God almighty roar, pushed with the edge and not the point of it, one hand on the hilt and one hand on the back of the blade itself. The man stumbled back with the force of it, straight back into the two other men behind him, and he dropped the tray of food to the floor with a clatter, eyes wide as his throat yawned wider.

Blood poured over the front of the smart marine's uniform, over the blade, Vane's hands, the floor, the food, and then he fell. And then one of the guards behind knocked Vane unconscious with the butt of his pistol. Vane fell down straight on top of the bloody guard, and so they kicked him off and dragged the dead man from the room. They locked the door. The barred the door. Flint paused a moment, sure that he should be incredulous except he knew Vane far too well for that to function, then he dragged Vane up, hauled him onto the bed that was the only piece of furniture that remained in the room, albeit entirely lacking in linens. He sat down beside him, the two of them on a feather bed at last.

"So much for accepting terms," Flint said, when Vane woke in the dark before dawn.

"He was always going to kill me," Vane replied, and of course Flint knew that was the truth of it. They were both of them marked for death and no terms would be offered. Then Vane sat himself up at Flint's side and leaned back against the four-post bed's quite elaborate headboard.

"I think I had Eleanor in here once," Vane said, and Flint chuckled underneath his breath. "What's funny?"

"She's the reason we're here and you're still fucking pining for her," Flint said, so tired, so bloody exhausted that he couldn't even sound acerbic. "Do you know how ridiculous this is?"

"Better or worse than you and Thomas Hamilton?" Vane asked, at least ten times more biting than Flint had managed to be but Flint didn't even feel like striking him for it. "What happened with you and him? He leave you for a woman? True love only last as long as the sex did?"

"He died," Flint said. "He died and I came here."

Vane sighed. Vane closed his eyes in the thin pre-dawn light and then he opened them again to look at Flint, his ire apparently dying down. "You came here because you wish you'd died instead," he said. "You'd have died for him."

"Yes."

"You think I wouldn't have died for Eleanor if she'd asked me to back then?"

Flint raised his brows, finally mustering a sardonic set of his mouth if nothing else. "I think you still would."

Vane rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "Then what am I doing here?" he said, and looked at him sharply.

Perhaps that was when Flint understood. He'd thought perhaps Vane had seen something in him back there in the jail on Harbour Island, some quality he'd never seen in him before, or that perhaps Vane's wills and wants really were just as fickle and as flighty as they'd always seemed to him. He'd thought perhaps that Vane had thought they'd die there, and once they'd left he'd continued to feel somehow responsible for him, for his care and restoration, as utterly absurd as that did admittedly seem to be. But as Vane clenched his jaw and looked away, as Vane left the bed and walked away, he understood that it was something else, something he hadn't quite considered. So Flint left the bed and followed him across the room.

Vane rested his head and his hands against one of the rough-cut wooden boards that barred the window and Flint stepped in close behind him; he only faltered for a second before his hands slipped over the leather across Vane's sharp hipbones, his arms slid tight around Vane's waist and Flint paused to sweep Vane's long hair forward over one shoulder then rested his forehead down between Vane's shoulderblades. He sighed out a hot breath against hot skin that lay beneath Vane's bloodied shirt. Vane chuckled. Flint's arms around him tightened, Flint's hands went under his shirt and lay against his skin; Vane didn't push him away and that more than anything else told him he was right.

Flint had him like that, Vane leaning hard against the boards at the bedroom window, trousers pushed down just over their hips. All they had was spit instead of oil but Vane said we'll make that work and Flint believed him, did as Vane said and rubbed at him slowly - he ran his hands over Vane's hips and found the place he'd signed his name there standing out in black like a tattoo, over the small of his back, over the curve of his arse, spread his cheeks so he could rub the pad of his middle finger there against the tightly puckered hole. Vane laughed.

"Use your tongue," Vane said. "It'll help." So Flint did, went down on his knees and licked him there, hotly, wetly, no hesitation at all because hell, they'd both be dead by sundown. He sucked on his own fingers, wet them, worked the tip of one into Vane who spread his legs a little wider, leaned down a fraction, breathed out slowly in what Flint assumed was an attempt to steady himself. Then Flint stood, pressed the moist head of his cock between Vane's cheeks and rubbed there, pressed there, pressed one hand by Vane's hand up against the boarded window as he slowly, slowly pushed inside him.

Neither one of them lasted long and Flint supposed that didn't matter as his hand closed around Vane's cock, as Vane's hand closed over his and guided him tighter, harder. Flint rocked up onto the toes of his boots with every thrust, pushing deep inside him, flushed and hard, no care at all that they might be caught together because in the end, on their way to the gallows, what did that matter at all? He'd have him just this one last time before the end, his mouth pressed hot to the back of Vane's neck as they moved together, as they tensed together, as Vane squeezed at his own balls and pushed against him with an arch of his back to take him deeper. He'd have him one last time with one hand tight around his cock and one hand spread at his throat.

When Flint came in him, he wrapped one arm tight around Vane's waist and held himself against him. When Vane came over their joined hands, he pushed Flint back and out just far enough that he could turn and pull him in, pull him up against him, kiss him though they were both still out of breath. Flint touched his fingers to the scar in Vane's eyebrow, to the ear Flint had re-pierced for him one night after the tear from the fight had healed and made him curse with it, to the place where the brand lay under Vane's shirt, and Vane caught his hand, brought it up, pressed his mouth to Flint's wrist, to his palm.

He wanted to ask how many men Vane had had before him, if he'd slept with men while he'd been a slave, if he'd been forced to do it, if his master had had him. He wanted to ask about Teach and what had been between the two of them, if they'd been lovers once and if he'd thought Teach wanted that again, or if what they'd had was sex. He wanted to ask if there'd been others, too, wanted to ask their names if so, though he had no earthly reason to be quite so intrigued by it. He wanted to ask Vane if his preference was for men or for women or for both in equal measure, if he ever felt shame for it the way Flint always had himself.

Before Thomas, he'd been able to tell himself that his desires ran contrary to the laws both of God and of man and so he'd quashed them; with Thomas, he'd found a new law, a new morality entirely, built on strength of character more than it was on any deity. With Thomas, for a while, he'd found joy and hope and aspiration. With Vane, morality seemed trivial and God little more than a story England told to keep them low. With Vane, he found the man he was and not the man he'd hoped to be, but he didn't wish to take that back. He didn't wish to change it. He knew Vane and for once he knew himself.

"We don't have long," Flint said.

"I thought I'd be dead by thirty," Vane replied, with a hint of a smile against Flint's hand, as Flint's thumb rubbed at the place in the palm of Vane's hand where he'd sewn up that wound left by broken glass what seemed like a lifetime ago. "I've been on borrowed time at least the last four years." And Flint smiled in spite of everything, in spite of what he knew was coming.

They sat together side by side, shoulder to shoulder against the wall, and they waited. They could see the light move across the room between the boards there at the window, could see time pass, and no one came, no friend or foe, until the sun was getting low. And then the guards came with guns and with manacles, wary this time, not so easily fooled. They led them away. They led them from the house, down Nassau's familiar winding streets into the square. It was time. Maybe Vane was right and all the time they'd had there had been borrowed only. They mounted the steps. There was a crowd there waiting, dotted with familiar faces, but they were there to spectate, not to rescue.

On the gallows, at the end, Flint glanced at Vane sidelong. They were going to die, no trial required because their sentence had already been pronounced, the governor there in attendance, nooses at the ready. There were no guns to fire and signal their escape this time, no Spanish man o' war out in the bay to spirit them away. Flint knew as he'd always known that it would end in a self-governed Nassau free of England's rule or end at the end of a rope, but damn them all straight to hell if they thought he'd dance on air beneath the gallows for their most civilised entertainment. Damn them all if they thought he'd end in a whimper and not a bang. Damn them all if they thought Charles Vane would, either, and perhaps his anger had not all drained out after all. They'd die with their names on each other's skin beneath their clothes and to hell with all the world.

He turned and Vane turned with him, to him. He stepped in quick with a thud of bootheels hard on the gallows boards beneath his feet and as Vane reached for Flint's shirt, twisted his fingers into it and pulled in close, Flint looped his manacled hands behind Vane's head, fingers in his hair. He didn't give a fuck at all when the crowd jeered as they kissed, didn't stop, just clutched tighter till the soldiers advanced past their surprise and knocked him down with the butt of a musket, the chains that linked his hands dragging Vane down with him till they were both of them down on their knees. Vane smiled wryly. He rubbed Flint's fingers with his thumbs, where they both knew the breaks had been even after Vane had splinted them so very many times. The Navy had done so many things to both of them.

"Do it," Vane said. "If they're so desperate for a fucking show, show them what a pirate's made of."

He didn't need to ask what he meant. He knew the guard at their backs had lingered too close by them, that he was young and green, sneering and unguarded just because his prisoners were chained. Perhaps he'd seen Flint once upon a time on Harbour Island, back when he'd been injured and incapable. Perhaps he expected nothing more to occur that evening except the hangman's arrival for their scheduled executions.

"I'll see you in hell, Charles," Flint said.

"I'll be waiting," Vane replied, with the briefest flash of his familiar smile. Then he tilted back his head. He bared his throat and set his jaw, his gaze steady, his eyes on him. It turned Flint's stomach but he steeled himself straight to his purpose. England would not take either of them if he could get there first.

He had the sword from the soldier's belt in a second or less and Vane's throat yawned bloody in the moment that followed it. Before they even knew to stop him, Flint had drawn the blade across his own damned throat and followed the way he'd sent Vane. They took their last bloody breaths in front of a horrified crowd and as he died, as he fell down to the boards there at Charles Vane's side, it was hard to say where his blood ended and where Vane's began.

Perhaps this was freedom, he thought, at least the only kind for men like them. But in the end, free or no, at least he knew no shame.