wildehacked:

Okay, this isn’t QUITE what you wanted, but it’s what I got. 
—————-

When Eleanor sees Charles off in manacles, her face hard as stone, he thinks: all right. This is how it ends. 

But of course that’s not the end. He’s shoved into the brig of an English ship next, and an unpleasant journey follows. Charles doesn’t mind the hard-tack, or the stale water, or the thin light and miasmic air. There are worse things. He spends the weeks of his voyage thinking about Eleanor, the woman who is killing him. He remembers the softness of her mouth, her legs wrapping around his hips, her fist connecting with his jaw. 

On the fourth week, the English get themselves caught in a shipkiller. Charles swallows the frustration of knowing he can’t do anything about it–if their incompetence kills him, well, he was going to die anyway–and does his best to make peace with it. 

He’s a good deal less peaceable when the water starts rising in his cell. Pouring in from cracks in the hull that he can’t staunch with his shirt, ripped into hasty strips. He bellows for help, but of course no one hears him. He wrenches at the bars with all his might, but of course it’s to no avail. The water is up to his chest when a terrible sound resonates through the ship, and an enormous spar comes crashing through the hull, missing Charles by a foot and sending the full force of the Atlantic ocean crashing in to grab him. 

The ocean swallows him up, and in the dark fury of its grip Charles thinks: at least now she won’t have killed me. 

*

He doesn’t expect to wake, but he does. He’s on the deck of a strange ship, men he doesn’t recognize staring down at him. There’s a faltering interrogative in clumsy Spanish, and Charles shakes his head, pushes his way through the agony of bruised muscles up to his elbows. He hears English spoken in the background, so he responds in English. Explains that his ship was lost–he doesn’t know how he’s still alive. 

They’re cautiously sympathetic. The storm did him some good, in ripping up his clothing and battering him senseless. He looks like a man who has suffered, instead of like a pirate. He’s permitted to stay, if he works his way. Charles has no objection. 

He tells them his name is Charles Rackham. He doesn’t think Jack will mind the theft of his name.

* 
They’re sailing back to the Carolinas, which suits Charles fine. 

It’s a restful month. 

Sometimes Charles finds his hands shaking on the line, for no reason at all. His fellow sailors give him pitying looks, and it takes no effort at all to make certain his face is impassive. 

He still can’t school his fucking hands into stillness. 

* 

They put in to resupply at Port Royal, and Charles disappears into the port.

Jamaica is crawling with pirates. It would be an incredibly simple task to find someone he knows, earn himself some money, make his way back to Nassau and Eleanor and Flint’s war. 

His hands tremble on the glass of rum he’s just paid a stolen penny for. He stares at the shivering gold liquid, and thinks about Eleanor howling with grief. 

He knocks the glass back, swallows it: cheap and hot and sharp. “That’s an end to it,” he says out loud, though his hands don’t still. 

He doesn’t go back to Nassau. 

* 
The Spyglass takes him on, pays him a decent wage. He makes sure no one mistreats the girls, or stiffs his tab. 

He hears that Eleanor Guthrie was murdered by the Spanish, that Blackbeard was keelhauled by the governor, that Captain Flint was killed by his quartermaster. He hears that Calico Jack is wreaking merry havoc on the Spanish main under the skull and crossbones, with a ship manned entirely by bloodthirsty women. 

He hears that Charles Vane is dead in the ground, that Charles Vane took up Blackbeard’s post and is ruling now from Okracoke, that Charles Vane boiled Ned Lowe into a stew and ate him up, that Charles Vane sails a ghostly galleon that only appears in open water, under the light of a full moon. 

Lying on his cot in the dark, drunk and dosed into a stupor that might let him sleep, he thinks that last one might be closest to the truth. 

* 

He hears that Barnet caught up with Calico Jack, that Anne Bonny and Mary Read pleaded their bellies, but Rackham is like to be hanged down at the dock on Tuesday. 

This is conveyed to him with laughter and jokes about his namesake. Charles glances down at his hands, pulling up a crate of fresh bottles.

They’re perfectly steady. 

* 
“There’s a treasure still to be sought,” Jack says, much later, in a laughing, breathless rush, looking at Charles with dark fond eyes, like he’s still alive, not a ghost at all. “I’d almost caught up with Hamilton. It could be in our hands within six months.” 

Charles doesn’t say anything, but Jack still knows him, even after all this time, because an odd, gentle smile quirks at his mouth. “That is,” Jack adds, with deliberate casualness, “if you’re ready to begin again.” 

“I’m here, aren’t I,” Charles says after a beat, and he means to sound annoyed, but it comes out rough, an admission. 

“True,” Jack says, and his voice is a little rough, too. “That’s true.” 

Charles checks his compass, nudging Jack with his shoulder in the process. 

They begin again.