Work Text:
“Over-egged the pudding a bit, if you ask me,” Izzy said, his voice raspier than usual, at the sound of a familiar footstep coming up behind him. “The leg and the cutlass, sure,” he continued. The unicorn figurehead had had two legs, after all, and it wasn’t as though a Navy cutlass like he always carried would have been difficult to source. “But that?” He flicked the scrap of black cloth. They’d managed to dig up a ring that looked pretty convincing—the design of the band was a little different, but there weren’t many who’d had a close enough look to know. “If you took the real one off of me, I’d come back to haunt you.”
“Maybe I wanted you to,” Edward suggested, falling into place beside him.
“Hm,” Izzy said, not sure how to feel about that. When he’d thought he was really dying, getting Edward into some kind of state to move on without him had seemed like the most important thing.
“We had a funeral for you and everything,” Edward continued.
Izzy, who had until now kept his eyes fixed on the makeshift grave marker, glanced over at him. “Why?”
“There was a merchant ship passing.” Edward was dressed like when he’d been playing fisherman, or whatever it was, with his hair half pulled back. He looked…peaceful. Good. “Figured we might as well take advantage; put on enough of a show to get them to spread the word.”
Izzy nodded. They’d told him earlier—possibly a few times, while he’d been half out of his mind with fever and morphine—that with Prince Rickey No-Nose vowing revenge on him personally, they’d thought it best put it about that Izzy had died of his wounds. “So what’s this plan you’ve been going on about?” That, too, had been mentioned several times: Edward had a plan, and they’d discuss it later.
Now that Izzy was up and about—granted, for the first time since his injury—he figured later had arrived.
“Oh, well,” Edward said, looking down at the grave. He picked up a coin that was lying there. “You know, people have been coming here to pay their respects? A few people from the old days, a lot of strangers.”
“That’s nice; what’s the plan?”
“Leaving you little trinkets and stuff. Liquor, sometimes. I drank a lot of it, but I saved a couple of good bottles for when you’re better.”
“Great; you said something about a plan?”
Edward sighed. “The point is, you’re about halfway to being a legend already. Everyone’s all riled up about what the Noseless Wonder did, and you getting taken out in the raid that drove him out of the Republic is quite a story.”
“I take it we’re not telling people it was a stray shot he only got a chance to make because we didn’t search him well enough to find his holdout piece,” Izzy pointed out, dryly.
“Yeah, we’re leaving that out. There are a couple of versions circulating; we can decide later which one we want to lean into. No, so, here’s the plan. You’re really going to like this.” Edward did not sound particularly convinced of that, but spread his hands in a dramatic gesture. “The plan is…ghost ship.”
“Ghost ship,” Izzy repeated, dubiously.
“Uh-huh. The unquiet spirits of pirates massacred by Prince Ricky-Ticky, coming together from beyond the grave to avenge themselves and generally fuck up that noseless twat’s shit.” Edward’s hesitation was so slight that anyone but Izzy would have missed it. “Led by the greatest of them all, Izzy Hands.”
There it was. “Where are you, in all this?”
“Well,” Edward said, “it turns out I’m hanging in chains at the execution dock in Port Royal.” At Izzy’s puzzled look, he explained, “Steak Knife. He got kind of burned up, in the chaos, head smashed in, the whole bit. And you know how people always say they thought I’d be taller.”
They did say that. And that explained why Ed was dressed like he was; they would have used some of his things to decorate the body. “He’d like that. Steak Knife, I mean.”
“Yeah, it seemed fitting,” Edward agreed.
Izzy waited. Blackbeard being believed dead wouldn’t stop him from captaining a ghost ship, of course, so there had to be more. Finally, when Edward didn’t supply it, he said, “Where are you really?”
“Here.” He gestured at the shack behind them, where Izzy had been convalescing for the last several weeks, amid various home-repair and decoration projects. “Innkeeping, selling tacky pirate-themed souvenirs. No one will ever guess.”
Izzy swallowed hard. He’d known this was coming. It had been coming, in slow motion, for years. He’d held it off longer than he should have, and the ending they’d been cruising toward before Bonnet came back was much worse. “I see.”
“That and…” Edward looked away. “Working on myself. Trying to figure out who I am if I’m not Blackbeard. I’ve been a legend long enough, Iz.”
“I don’t….” Izzy didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He’d never wanted to be a captain, not really, because the only way he would ever be one was if Ed was gone. This was…a gentler way for it to happen. Better than they had any reason to expect or deserve.
“I know,” Edward said. “But…look. If we could do it all over. Be sixteen again, fighting our way to the top. I’d do some things differently, but. Yeah. I’d take that deal in a heartbeat, as long as you were gonna be there.” Unobtrusively, Edward wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “But that isn’t how it works. We aren’t sixteen, and you don’t want to be an innkeeper. Or a fisherman, or—”
Izzy opened his mouth to speak, and Edward held up his hand.
“I know, you’d do it if I asked you to. That’s why I’m not asking.” He rested his hand on the grave marker. “What you said, when we were…you know, on deck. About the crew. You got it backwards. They aren’t my family—they’re yours. They barely tolerate me, because Stede asked them to. It’s you they love. You should—have that. Find out who you are, when you’re not a part of me.”
Izzy remembered saying A rotten leg’s got to come off. He shook his head, not even sure what he was denying.
“Hang on, I didn’t get to the best part yet,” Edward continued, pointing towards the sea. “You see down there, those two rocks? Sail between those, at high tide, and you end up in a little blind cove, completely invisible to any passing ships. Perfect place for a ghost ship to disappear. When the ghost captain wants to rest in his grave for a bit.”
Oh. That…helped. A lot, actually. “I—suppose a ghost captain would need to do that pretty regularly, then?”
“I’d think so. Not many places a ghost ship can go for supplies, repairs, anything like that.”
“No,” Izzy agreed. They could get some resupply from raids, and take on water from uninhabited islands, but they’d still need to go to port sometimes.
“We’re thinking, de-ghostify the ship in the secret harbor, then some of the less-recognizable crew can take it to port for supplies and news. Give us plenty of time to catch up.”
Put like that…he supposed it didn’t sound too bad. Though he had to bite his tongue not to point out, acidly, that it seemed Bonnet was staying.
Edward continued, “Lots of details still to work out, but you’ll be healing up for weeks yet; plenty of time. The other took the ship out, anyway, to gather supplies and help Zheng look for survivors from her fleet. Once they get back, probably a couple more weeks to get it fixed up to look like a ghost ship, figure out everybody’s costumes. I have lots of ideas about that. “
Izzy heard what he wasn’t saying: they’d work together one last time, setting up this final fuckery, before everything changed for good.
“So,” Edward said, looking at him like he might be really be planning to listen to the answer. “What do you think?”
Taking a deep breath—even though it hurt his wounded side to do it—he nodded. “It’s a good plan. Solid. I mean. You’re hanging in chains at execution dock; of course I’m fucking coming back from the dead to avenge you.”
“Exactly,” Edward said, clapping him gently on the back. “No one would expect anything different.”
Izzy nodded, the future starting to take shape in his mind. Edward not a part of him, joined at the hip, but something he circled around and came back to.
Almost like a home.