Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pete loved Blackbeard. Not in like a physical way… how could he? They’d never actually met. Yeah, the stories he told the others were just lies. But, well, he loved Blackbeard all the same. He loved him like the ocean, or the wind or the feel of a sword in his hand. In his mind, Blackbeard was piracy and piracy was Blackbeard, there was no separating the two great loves of his life. No overcoming them.

He loved everything about Blackbeard, had heard every story there was to tell, and when those seemingly ran out  he started making his own.  He even loved Blackbeard’s crew.

Alright maybe love was a little strong, but the stories about Izzy Hands were cool. The best sword in the seven seas, right hand man to Blackbeard himself, total badass. He wouldn’t say he loved the Izzy Hands of legend in quite the same way he loved Blackbeard. No, really it was more that Pete wished he was Izzy Hands. Or rather that instead of the legend of Izzy Hands, there was the legend of Black Pete, true first mate to Blackbeard. He wished he was the greatest sword on the Seven Seas, but he just…wasn’t. He was just Pete, and no matter what colour he put in front of his name, he would never be the man that Izzy Hands was.

And then he met Izzy Hands, and you know what…there was something that all those stories, those countless tales of Blackbeard and his savage first mate Izzy Hands left out. Because Izzy Hand wasn’t a man at all.

Izzy Hands…was a hobbit.

They had met on a beach…well a jungle next to a beach really, but the first way sounded more poetic and like something that would happen in a Blackbeard story so that was what he was going with him. They met on a beach, Black Pete and the hobbit. Okay so technically Captain Bonnet and Oluwande had been there too, but like neither of them were really the kind of people you found in Blackbeard stories so like Black Pete felt comfortable leaving them out of his retelling. Whatever it didn’t even matter who was there, and who wasn’t there, Jim! The thing was, Izzy Hands, the great Izzy Hands, was not so great. Izzy Hands, the great Izzy Hands was nothing more than a short, angry little Hobbit.

He was like three feet tall, with large, bare feet all covered in hair and cute little pointed ears. Yet, people went on and on about him like he was an actual human pirate, like he was actually something to be afraid  of. And to Pete, that was the funniest thing ever.

***

While Pete had found the notion of Blackbeard letting any hobbit, let alone one as small and thin as Izzy Hands run anything on his ship, ridiculous…he didn’t hate the hobbit. It was just funny really. No, the hate didn’t start till later. Till the angry little first mate started a fight with Lucius, demanding that the scribe complete chores around the ship, which obviously Lucius was too wonderful and too soft to do.

When they had first begun their affair, Pete would not have thought he would come to love Lucius at all.  Let alone enough to hate another on his behalf, and yet here they were. And Pete didn’t think he hated anyone as much as he hated stupid, little, Izzy Hands. He had been thrilled when Lucius had fought back, had not allowed Izzy to hold Fang’s sketch over his head. Had even gone so far as to blackmail the first mate with his own shameful secret.

Not that Lucius had been able to keep mum about the spewing story once the hobbit had been forced to back down with his metaphorical tail between his legs. Still Black Pete couldn’t help but hate the hobbit for the look on that round pinched face of his, the look of hate and bitterness. The look of someone who wanted vengeance. That spiteful little look he threw at Lucius’ turned back, made something hot and angry spike in Pete’s gut.

He couldn’t believe that this was the thing that Blackbeard, the great and cool Blackbeard, chose as his first mate. Someone really needed to put him in his place. He even said as much to Lucius, who winced at the word thing, but Black Pete was too pleased at the idea forming in his head to notice his boyfriend’s discomfort.

***

It had been easy to convince Stede to let him tell one of his tall-tales at story time. The Captain had been all too happy to oblige, he had always enjoyed Black Pete’s stories before, and well, now they had actual Blackbeard here to hear them.

It would be quite something to tell one of his stories in front of actual Blackbeard, Pete thought, already imagining the great pirate sitting listening with an impressed look on his face. Or, his insecurities whispered, maybe he’ll just laugh at you. Probably best not to focus on that.

At story time all the crew sat in their usual places and Stede and Blackbeard himself sat amongst them, whispering to each other and giggling. One look at Lucius’ smile to gain courage and then the lisping pirate could begin. Okay Pete, all on you now. Go.

He told a story that at first was very similar to all the other stories he’d told before now. Lots of fighting, Blackbeard was cool and kicked the Navy’s ass, there was a mermaid or two because of course you had to have a mermaid in a good pirate story. It was a requirement. But soon the real purpose of the tale became apparent to the listeners, the crew of their aptly named ship. It was not to show off how cool Blackbeard was, of course he was cool in the story because he was Blackbeard, he was always going to be cool, but that wasn’t the point of the story.

No, the point of the story was how pathetic Izzy Hands was. He spewed during a storm, he cried when the mermaids attacked, he soiled himself when the Navy Ship was spotted. He was in fact every kind of weak willed stereotype Pete had ever heard about hobbits, including the one about their giant appetites. How they could never stop eating even when others needed the food more than them. Demonstrated when he had the Izzy of the story eat all the supplies on the ship. He knew that last one couldn’t be true with how thin and tiny the hobbit was, but it was a story, who cared? And of course he was out done in everything by the hero of the tale - a character who only greatly resembled Black Pete this time.

It had felt a bit much to put himself in the story right to Blackbeard’s face when…he’d never actually sailed with the pirate before now. Not that he thought Blackbeard would give his lie away but like…he didn’t want to force the great pirate into that position. It wasn’t the point of the story anyway. No the point of the story was to see that red look on the halfling’s face.

Izzy had been sitting off to the side when the story began just like he did every night, pretending he was doing something with the ropes or discussing something with Fang or Ivan. Each night he was always there, pretending he wasn’t listening to the story.

Well, from that angry look on his face he was certainly listening to it tonight. Good. Show him what they really thought of him. And not just Stede, or the crew either, because Blackbeard…yes Blackbeard himself, laughed along with them all. On some level, he must be coming to realise that he could do so much better than a hobbit for his first mate. He could have a real pirate by his right hand, he could have Pete.

***

After everyone had settled down for the night, Pete had gone to relieve himself over the side of the ship. It was a habit he’d developed while on other crews, it was fine, no one even knew it was him anyway. He was just pulling up his britches when he heard the voices coming from further along the deck, their owners hidden by the shadows growing in the night.

“I’m going to kill him.”

The first voice, took him a moment to identify for it was filled with more passion then he’d ever heard in it before. It was Ivan.

“I’m going to kill him, I’m going to throw him over the side of the ship.  Or…or stab him in the gut the next time he looks at you funny. And I’m not the only one, Fang…Fang didn’t like the tale either!” His voice wavered slightly as if even he did not believe what he said.

Pete couldn’t see Ivan killing a crew mate, not on his own whim at least. Maybe if Blackbeard ordered it, sure who would say no to Blackbeard, but Ivan wasn’t a killer. Not like that, not for himself. At least Pete didn’t think so. And clearly neither did the high, very recognisable voice that answered the young pirate.

“You will do no such thing.” Said Izzy Hands, with more authority in his voice than he had dared to use around the crew since the spewer story had come to light.

“But Boss…” Began Ivan, but he was cut off abruptly by the hobbit.

“Did you hear him laugh?”

Ivan scoffed. “Yeah, a high crack of a sound like…like a hyena…or…or…a British Officer’s chuckle. I tell you Boss, I really wanted to break his nose. Black Pete, what a stupid name as if the Captain would have ever taken him on as a sailor if he weren’t already Bonnet’s crew. More like Brown Pete, what with those skid marks he leaves over the side of the boat.”

Pete was hurt, he had thought Ivan had liked him, had liked his story… he couldn’t understand this…he just…what had he ever done to Ivan?

“No, not Black Pete Ivan, Blackbeard. Did you hear Blackbeard laugh?”

Ivan went quiet for a moment before he said. “Yes.”

“Well,” said Izzy with finality in his voice. “Then you leave Pete alone, Ivan. You know how this works, you’re not a child anymore. Till the Captain loses interest we don’t get to kill any of Bonnet’s clowns. Bonnet will be dead soon enough, don’t act before then, don’t bring the Kraken’s wrath down on you.”

“But the things he said…” began the younger pirate.

“A bedtime story, Ivan, you gonna get yourself killed for a bedtime story? For something children tell each other to warn off the boogyman? I don’t care what Black Pete says about me, he’s a deadman walking. A dog, the Kraken will eat whole the second that fop’s body is cold. And if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him myself when the time comes. You are not a toy, you are useful to him, don’t throw that away to go after something, someone who doesn’t, who will never matter to Blackbeard.”

Pete’s heart shattered at those words, and he quickly shuffled away from the bickering pair. Climbed into the hammock he shared with Lucius, and clung to his boyfriend desperate for the comfort the sleeping Lucius could never provide. Well, maybe not so sleeping, for Lucius’ arms were suddenly around his waist and he was pulling him closer, whispering in his ear.

“I think you went a bit too far love, Fang was a bit hurt by your story.” He hadn’t thought about Fang, had just assumed he’d be on board with putting that hobbit…that…that Izzy down a peg or two. A stupid oversight he saw now.

“Yeah,” he said to Lucius’ cheek. “Sorry about that. Didn’t think what Fang or…Ivan would think about it. I’ll apologise to them tomorrow. Love, I think Izzy Hands just saved my life.”

And Lucius far too close to actual sleep to have understood, just smiled and yawned. “That’s nice.”

And as for Pete, he just lay there and held Lucius all night long, till the sun rose the next day. He didn’t sleep at all. Wouldn’t let himself. Izzy Hands’ words ran through his skull  - I’ll kill him myself, when the time comes. No flair, no dramatics, just a statement of fact that no one hearing it could ever deny. Pete thought on these words, on those terrible words, and for the first time in his life he realised that you could be afraid of a hobbit. You could be very afraid.

Chapter Text

Frenchie had beliefs, strong beliefs, they might not exactly have been derived from one particular religion or even rational thought, but he had them.

These beliefs had guided him his entire life. Had guided him onto this ship even. They had seen that ship through choppy waters and days, weeks, months with no wind. And of course these beliefs, these ‘superstitious’ had kept the crew safe and alive even through Stede’s less than ideal captaining. I mean Frenchie might be a little odd, he could admit that, but he was pretty sure that Stede Bonnet was actually insane. And it had only gotten worse since Blackbeard had come onto the ship.

Like that time Blackbeard had wanted to go to a fancy party on a boat. Fine, they had gone, it was all fun for the first hour or two - Frenchie and Oluwande had swindled some extremely rich, extremely racist people out of their ill gotten gains.  And then apparently Stede and Blackbeard had gotten into a snit and set fire to the ship. Frenchie understood they were pirates, and stuff like that was going to happen. But surely the better thing to have done was to wait until both your crew and your treasure was off the ship before you burned it.

As it was he and Oluwande had almost died, and the couple of Blackbeard’s crew that had joined them on the trip actually had. They had been young too, barely more than kids. He found out later one of them had only been twelve. Apparently Mister Hands had thrown a fit when he had heard they were joining the expedition, but he had been over ruled by Blackbeard who had said this wasn’t a raid, just a party. Guess he had changed his mind on that front half way through dinner.

Frenchie wondered ideally what Mister Hands’ reaction had been when he learned of their deaths. Frenchie hadn’t stuck around long enough to see, he had just gone under the deck to cry. From that day on he was throughly convinced of the bad luck of having children on board. He was astounded he had not seen it before, they were so soon out of their mother’s wombs and everyone knew women were bad luck. On a ship anyway. Therefore something that came out of them must be bad luck too. It was just science really.

The Captain should never have let them on board.

And then there was that time that Stede had wanted to teach Blackbeard how to waltz… no, no, it was too terrible to recount. Too terrible to think about. And all it really proved was that Frenchie had been right, it was just too dangerous to dance on the high seas while you had a frog in your pocket.

Fortunately he was jolted out of that memory by the sound of the Captain’s voice. Not as it usually was raised in laughter, or excited chatter with Blackbeard or the crew but in anger. It was not shouting, but it was scolding. Stede Bonnet was scolding somebody. And it didn’t take very long to realise who that somebody was.

Izzy Hands.

Stede was standing there, towering over the small first mate, snarling down at him for some reason. Maybe he was berating him for something…something he had done maybe…or maybe something he had let happen, it was unclear from this distance. Either way Izzy Hands did not look remotely intimidated by the man that leaned down over him speaking in slow deliberate tones as if the hobbit was a particularly stupid child.

“I don’t care what you think,” said Stede Bonnet. “I don’t care what you want, or what you think was right and proper for a Pirate to do ‘Mister Hands’.” Frenchie had never heard the man sound so angry before, and he wondered what Izzy could have possibly done to provoke such a look of hate on the usually gentle, and kind man.

“We are sick of you, Ed and I, and we don’t want to see you for the rest of the day, do you hear me. So you are going to get up on that crow’s nest and you are going to stay there until… until the sun sets below the waves. Do you understand?”

Izzy Hands looked almost bored with the command, he didn’t even look at Stede as he nodded his head. Instead his unnerving green eyes were locked with Blackbeard’s and they seemed to say ‘really? This guy?’. But Blackbeard made a twitch near his mouth, and Izzy Hands bowed his head in acknowledgment of… something. And then he turned his back on Stede Bonnet and began to scuttle up the rigging as quick as a spider.

The whole terrible scene made Frenchie feel sick. To send a hobbit up there, so high, where any witch could grab him? The Captain really had gone mad.

***

Hobbits were a gentle race, that was what they said back home anyway, they were a gentle race, almost child like in their sweetness and their kindness. Although to be honest Frenchie had grown up with a lot of kids in that orphanage of his, and none of them had been sweet and or kind in the least.

Still, he could buy that the hobbits were a species built more for the gentler roads of life, after all they were so small. Most of them only came up to a person’s waist.

So no wonder it was said that the laughter of a hobbit could sweeten even the sourest beer, or that a touch of their hand upon your cheek could cure a toothache. It made sense. Just like it made complete sense that women were bad luck on ships, the crystals in their bodies attracted bad luck. It was just science. He wondered if hobbits had the opposite problem, maybe they were too good luck. Which was why witches tries so hard to steal them from their beds so often.

He’d never asked Izzy Hands this, although the First Mate was the only hobbit he had ever met in the flesh. At first it was because they didn’t really know each other well enough, and it seemed rude to ask someone exactly how many witches had tried to kidnap them in a day when you’d only just met. And then they had gotten to know each other, or at least familiar with each other - and well…it had seemed detrimental to his own health to inquire.

Mister Hands was so easily offended. Frenchie had only ever tried to be gentle with the hobbit, but it seemed whatever he said would anger the poor creature. They’d had more than a few blow ups already by the time of their most recent altercation. That time Frenchie had tried to pull Mister Hands away from the side of the boat less he drown because everyone knew hobbits couldn’t swim, and in thanks had been thrown over the side himself. After that the two had began to just avoid each other. But this?

No, this was a danger too much to ignore. He made the decision there and then to follow the first mate into the crow’s nest. No one was getting snatched by a witch, not on his watch.

He had had to wait until the Captain had lost interest in making sure that Mister Hands stayed in that crow’s nest. Which, really hadn’t taken that long - a patient man Stede Bonnet was not. And what with the presence of Blackbeard taking up so much of his time these days, it was less than ten minutes before the Gentleman Pirate had turned his back on the whole sorry mess. He’d had to wait a little longer for the rest of the crew to stop looking that way - it was after all a big thing to see a First Mate, even someone else’s first mate who you neither liked or respected, ordered up to the crow’s nest.

But even in the most scandalous of things, everyone loses interest eventually. Especially when there seemed no sign of Mister Hands in the Crow’s Nest although he had to be there. Frenchie had seen that look shared between the hobbit and Blackbeard, he would be staying up there until ordered otherwise.

Still fifteen minutes Frenchie had had to wait and it was a terrible wait. Fifteen minutes of hell imagining all the terrible ways a witch could come upon the ship, flying fast through the air and scoop the hobbit up where he slept. Because of course he must be sleeping. Or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was awake and trying to fight her off. Frenchie had to get up there and help him, had to…it wasn’t right to leave a crew mate, even a crew mate who hated you, to such a fate.

And so after fifteen minutes of waiting Frenchie decide he didn’t care who was looking anymore. He set foot on the rigging and began to pull himself up towards the crow’s nest. He didn’t care that Pete was watching him, with that sad worried look on his face again. Frenchie had gotten really good ignoring that look on Pete’s face. After all, he never took the time to explain it so why should Frenchie care anymore.

***

It was quite a small crow’s nest as far as such things usually went. A full grown man would have had trouble fitting his legs inside the things, let alone sitting down. Which was why Frenchie usually let his legs dangle out and thwack against the side - much to Lucius’ annoyance.

Izzy Hands did not have to do this, he fit perfectly within the half round barrel shape that made up the nest. He sat now with his back facing Frenchie, staring out to sea in utter silence. It was an image that was half peaceful, half extremely sad. And for a moment, Frenchie lingered at the edge of the nest, one leg haphazardly thrown over the side and the other dangling off it. He wanted to say something then, something that would make everything alright but… but what was there to say, he didn’t even know what  the matter was with Mister Hands.

True it was not nice to be screamed at, Frenchie knew that well from all the times that Izzy himself had screamed at him. And yet, Izzy Hands had not looked bothered at the screaming. It was like anything Stede Bonnet said to him bounced off those slight shoulders as if it didn’t matter at all. Because Stede Bonnet did not matter at all to Izzy Hands. Izzy Hands was not up here because Stede Bonnet had ordered him here, he was up here because right now Blackbeard wished it.

But clearly he’d paused too long in contemplating this, for suddenly the nest begun to tip under the weight of his frozen leg. Sending Izzy Hands toppling away from his pose on the other side of the thing, and into the stalling Frenchie. This knocked Frenchie just enough to make him lose his already precarious balance upon the side of the nest.

He might have toppled then, and fallen to the deck below. Nothing left of him but a broken body, with a snapped neck, a hollow, soulless shell of the living man he had once been. But suddenly a hand had grabbed him by the wrist, and then another hand and Frenchie looked up into the furious face of Israel Hands.

“What the Frodo, do you think you are doing?” Snarled the sharp faced hobbit. He often said things like this - he would never say ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘crap’ or anything else that might be a swear, but instead would say some name that meant nothing to the rest of the crew. It must be a hobbit thing, for Frenchie had never met a human who said such things.

“Sorry, sorry!” Squeaked Frenchie, coming back to reality when said hobbit squeezed the wrist he was holding the bard almost painfully tight. “This was an accident.”

It was strange, Mister Hands still looked furious with him, but he also looked a little like he wanted to laugh. Maybe he wasn’t so angry after all, to be honest it was a little hard to tell what he felt under that goatee of his. 

“Well, I could have guessed that,” hissed the hobbit in question. “What are you doing up here, you Fool of a Took? Trying for an early death?”

“I’m here to help you with the witches.”

“Witches?”

“Yes, the witches. They come and snatch hobbits to have their evil way with them. Everyone knows that.”

“I can promise you, they don’t.” Hissed Hands as he tried to pull the taller sailor up and into the crow’s nest. But his poor hobbit arms were clearly just not strong enough for the task. 

“Yes, everyone knows it. Hobbits are too gentle and sweet to protect themselves from such things, so I came up to protect you. It weren’t right for the Captain to send you up here, by yourself.” 

This was Frenchie could admit in hindsight, while he lay recovering on Roach’s surgery table, not the best thing to say to someone like Izzy Hands. In fact it was probably the worst thing he could have said.

“Mister French, I don’t need protection.”

“But you do, Hobbits are too little for the sea, and their hearts are too big for their chests, everyone knows that.”

No, never mind, that was the worst he could have said.

Frenchie’s wrist slipped from Hands’ grip then, and he went tumbling down towards the deck. He wasn’t sure if it had been an accident or not, but the look of rage that had been on the hobbit’s face right before he lost his grip made Frenchie suspect that it had probably been deliberate.

But it was alright, Frenchie didn’t die like he thought he would. Instead he landed on Pete, who had been standing underneath staring at the hanging pair like an idiot. So Frenchie only broke one of his arms and slightly bruised his back.

Pete did not have to start yelling that Izzy Hands had tried to kill them, because neither of them were dead. Pete really was a silly man sometimes. 

***

The scene before Frenchie was a familiar one by now. Was a familiar one to most of the crew. Someone was getting screamed at. The only difference now was who was doing the screaming, and who was being screamed at. Usually it was Izzy Hands doing the screaming, and one of the crew the unwilling recipient of it.

Now it was Blackbeard who was screaming, and Izzy Hands who was standing there letting it happen. Letting his Captain scream and berate him for his stupidity, for his cruelty and thoughtlessness. It was a shame thought Frenchie, to do such a thing to your first mate in front of the whole crew. Stede would have never done so to Mister Buttons. But then again Stede Bonnet didn’t really scream at anyone like this, so loud, and so angry, like he wanted nothing more than to unhinge his jaw and swallow the poor hobbit before him whole. He may not have liked Izzy Hands, and been not afraid to say so right to the hobbit’s face but he would never had done this. Never done this vicious tirade, this brutal list of all of Izzy Hands’ faults. In fact, as he stood behind Blackbeard even Stede began to seem slightly uncomfortable with this scene.

The look in Blackbeard’s eyes was manic and something else, something that Frenchie couldn’t put a name to. It was like Blackbeard was telling a joke, that no one else could see yet, not even Izzy Hands.

It made Frenchie shiver something terrible.

Beside him Lucius’ hand rested gently on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” soothed the scribe. “He won’t dare touch you after this. Why I bet old Dizzy Izzy will be afraid to even look at you funny after this.”

He seemed to believe what he said but even Lucius couldn’t really pretend that it was Izzy Hands who frightened him after this.

“He deserves it you know, he deserves it. He could have killed you with that trick. He could have killed you.”

Maybe Lucius was right, maybe Izzy Hands did deserve this - maybe he even deserved a lot worse than this. But  that wouldn’t stop Frenchie from wincing with every bellow, and cruel word that left Blackbeard’s mouth. Because the truth, the real truth was that Frenchie… Frenchie couldn’t hate anyone. Even if they did deserve it.

Besides he was pretty sure that threatening to gut a hobbit on the high seas was bad luck. It had to be bad luck, certainly going into such vivid detail on how you would gut the hobbit on the high seas could not in anyway be good luck.

Right?

Chapter Text

Lucius had had a plan for this morning, a good plan. He would get up early, before anyone else was awake, and he would watch the sunrise - and more importantly, he would sketch that sunrise.

Lucius was an artist, he’d been an artist long before he’d ever been a scribe. And so that was the way he saw the world, through the splash of paint, or the sketch of a pencil. He didn’t just see a sunrise, or an interesting expression on one of his crew mates faces, he saw a painting in waiting.

He loved the crew and all their little oddities. Frenchie’s nose scrunch; Oluwande’s round cheeks; Pete’s eyes. Little John’s height, he loved them all.

Well, maybe love was a little strong a word when it came to some of them.

His eyes followed Izzy Hands as the hobbit made his way up from below deck, to begin the various chores that always seemed to have been finished while the crew slept. Lucius stared at the hobbit, he couldn’t help it, Izzy Hands always made Lucius’ sketching hand twitch.

He may not have loved the hobbit, far from it, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring either. From letting his artistic eyes take in every little oddity of the creature moving below him.

The face (handsome but lined with years of worry and rage), the ears (pointed and precious), the feet (bared for all to see), and the tattoo on his neck (a sparrow, such a pretty bird for such a nasty little hobbit to choose). Lucius was so busy detailing all of the hobbit’s attributes in his head that he completely missed the sunrise, but really he no longer cared.

He’d found someone far more interesting to sketch this morning.

***

The first sketch was terrible. He’d barely managed to get the outline of the hobbit down before Hands had disappeared off to do something else at the other side of the ship. Damn him, damn him and his furry feet to … well, to somewhere not nice. How hard was it for someone to just keep still? Maybe fall asleep in the sun, with his feet propped up just so, so Lucius could get a good clear outline of him. Everyone else on the ship seemed to find the time!

But not it would seem, Izzy Hands. Oh no, Izzy Hands was far too important to sleep, or rest, or pause in his fast little steps around the ship. It seemed if Lucius was going to have any opportunity to sketch the hobbit, he was going to have to ask him to actually to pose for him. He hated the idea, hated the idea of asking Izzy Hands for any kind of favour but really what other choice did he have?

How often was he going to get the opportunity to sketch a hobbit? While working on a ship? This was basically a once in a hundred year chance. He would just have to man up and ask, what was the worst that could happen after all?

The worst it would seem would be almost getting one of his fingers cut off.

He made his request to Izzy Hands, he’d even been polite about it which Lucius had felt was rather big of him considering what a shit Izzy Hands had been to basically everyone currently sailing on the Revenge.

The tip of the hobbit’s dagger had lodged inches away from his left index finger, in the gap between it and the next finger over. It was a good thing he had been spreading them so wide on the side of the boat as he had been leaning down to talk with the hobbit. Otherwise he was certain he’d now be one finger short, and for an artist that was no good thing at all.

After having done this, Izzy Hands had then proceeded to tell the scribe that he could go to Mordor - wherever that was. A bit upsetting but not really that surprising in hindsight, considering his reaction the first time Lucius had asked to sketch him.

What was, was Ivan’s reaction. Ivan, sweet Ivan who kept himself to himself and usually had to be prodded to say anything to the crew these days. He and Fang had been standing near by when Lucius had made the request, he didn’t know why - maybe they had been trying to talk to Izzy Hands too. And after Izzy had yanked his dagger free, and sulked off to do whatever he did when he wasn’t in view of the crew, Lucius had looked over to the pair - expecting to share an exasperated look with them. Share the frustration on how silly a First Mate’s pride could be. Instead what he found, what he saw, was Ivan being restrained from hitting him by Fang. And Fang telling him - that was Lucius - to just walk away.

Later, when even the sun had gone down to its great hammock in the sky - as he’d heard Frenchie call it one day - Lucius had discussed it with Pete.

“I’d just leave it, if I were you, Babe.” Advised his boyfriend.

“Blackbeard’s crew aren’t the sort of people you mess with lightly.”

Lucius couldn’t help snorting at that.

“That’s a bit rich, coming from you, Love. What do you call that story you told a few weeks back, light banter?”

Pete’s expression suddenly shuddered, and he looked like he was in actual pain.

“Yeah, and you remember the apologies I had to make the next day. Ivan still can’t look at me without picturing his knife going through my eye.”

“That’s not true,” said Lucius with more confidence than he actually felt. Especially considering Ivan’s reaction to his own misstep.

“Yeah well, I still don’t think a single sketch of Izzy Hands is worth all the trouble it’ll bring you, Babe. Just find someone else to draw.”

And with that he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep so fast that Lucius was almost convinced it was some sort of act. But no, there was no way Pete was that good of an actor. Really he knew he should heed the warning his lover tried to give.

But the muses had caught him in their sway with that first sketch, and he couldn’t give up now. 

***

Really this was a stupid idea. It was perhaps the stupidest idea he had ever had. He should go back to his hammock, cuddled up with Pete and forget this nonsense. Let the idea of that sketch of the hobbit fade out of his mind like so many of his other dreams had. And yet, it was slightly harder to do that, to walk away once you had actually broken into someone else’s cabin. Once you were standing over your sleeping shipmate, with your pencil and notebook clutched in your hand, it was hard to turn back then.

Even if he did turn away now, he still might be caught. And if that was going to happen anyway well … he might as well just sit down and get something before the consequences of his actions caught up with him. Yep, he was pretty sure this ship had finally driven him mad … but oh well, at least he’d get a good picture out of it.

Izzy Hands lay half out of the bunk he had claimed as his own when Blackbeard and his crew had first come aboard the Revenge. It was a bunk for a human, Stede Bonnet never having even seen a hobbit before Izzy. A hobbit should have more than fit his entire body into that slim bed. And yet, one arm and one leg ending in a deeply hairy foot swung loose and free over the side. Izzy had half his face pressed into his ugly little pillow, his mouth open in a snore, which was annoying, Lucius would have preferred to get the whole face in his sketch. But then he supposed, something was better than nothing, and nothing was exactly what he would have gotten if he dared to rearrange the hobbit into a far more drawable pose. Less than nothing if his reaction yesterday was anything to judge by.

Lucius began to sketch.

Thin body, half hidden under the blanket - usually slicked back hair loose and wild about his head in the kind of curls you expected on a hobbit creature. It was the only element of Izzy Hands that seemed to fit the gentle round hobbits of fairy stories. His face certainly didn’t, it wasn’t ugly by any stretch of the word, but it wasn’t … it just didn’t fit a hobbit. It seemed too big, and too lined with worry and anger even in sleep. Even illuminated by the thin light of the moon that seeped in through the door it was not a peaceful face, it was not a kind face. Maybe on a man it might have been handsome but on a hobbit … it just wasn’t right.

Still, made an excellent sketch for his book.

And there it was, Lucius had his picture.

It wasn’t a painting, certainly not, he was not stupid enough to stay that long within the lair of the beast with all the knives. But it was a fair sketch, something that would give him a good base to work off of when they made harbour and Lucius could finally buy some new paints. All in all, an excellent night’s work.

He stepped out of the room, and back onto the deck ready to go back. Maybe catch a little sleep cuddled up in the arms of Pete, he thought he had gotten away with it.

That was until the voice stopped him.

“Funny, I thought you were all about choice.”

And the most horrifying thing about the voice, was that it wasn’t Izzy Hands that spoke. No, if that had been the case Lucius could have ignored it, could have pushed it aside as … as unimportant. After all, Izzy Hands had hated Lucius from the very beginning and nothing he did would ever change that, so why shouldn’t he get what he needed out of the association before the hobbit finally snapped and stabbed him. But the voice didn’t belong to Izzy Hands.

It belonged to Fang.

Fang was a big beautiful man, round and plump in all the best ways. Really, though he was a man with a beard and everything, it was he who better represented the kind of gentleness that should have been a hobbit’s. But as he stood before Lucius now, bathed in the full power of the moonlight, arms crossed over his bared chest, Lucius could not see that gentleness anymore in the soft curves off his sometimes lover’s face. All he saw was the disappointment and underneath that, the rage.

Lucius tried to make his feet move, tried to just ignore that look of abject disappointment etched on his friend’s face. He tried a lot of things, but as was so often the case, he failed. And so instead all he ended up doing was standing there, standing there just beyond the edge of Izzy Hands’ door, feeling like he was shrivelling inside with shame at what he had just done.

“When you asked me if I’d ever been sketched, or if I wanted to be sketched - I thought that was so nice of you. Not the sketching me, but the asking. Not many people ask in our line of work. Pirates take what they want, they always have, that just the way of things. But I thought here, it was different.” 

“It is,” began Lucius but his voice sputtered out under the derision in Fang’s gaze.

“Funny, because I was pretty certain I heard Izzy tell you no. He didn’t want to be sketched.”

“Well, he didn’t actually say the words.” Began Lucius, already feeling that it was a pathetic excuse. Really, he knew what he’d just done was a violation of trust … but it was Izzy Hands. No one liked Izzy Hands, no one wanted him here, not even Izzy himself. And … and he was an arsehole to Lucius and everyone Lucius loved.

“I had to talk Ivan out of gutting you this afternoon, did you know that?”

He hadn’t, but it wasn’t exactly surprising given Ivan’s reaction to the request.

Fang held out his hand, and Lucius like a helpless guppie handed him his sketch pad. Just like that, no more prodding than a hand held out in silent expectation. And then the picture, Lucius’ longed for picture was being ripped out of that sketch pad, crumpled into a little ball of paper and thrown over the side of the ship. It must have landed in the ocean. Lucius couldn’t bring himself to rush over and check, he just stood there and accepted the notebook back, one less page whole.

“I like you Lucius,  I really like you. I think you’re a good person, but the Boss told you no. He told you he didn’t want to be sketched, I don’t know how he could have been more clear. And the fact that you couldn’t respect that, tells me maybe you wouldn’t have if I had said no either. Which is not a nice thought to have about someone you like.”

Lucius would have liked to say that that wasn’t true, because it wasn’t. If Fang had told him no then Lucius wouldn’t have pushed it, of course not, what would be the point in that? He’d only asked him, so he didn’t have to continue scraping off the barnacles on the side of the ship. But he was not stupid enough to admit that right to Fang’s face, especially with how naked they’d gotten both during and after the sketch. He didn’t want Fang to think … to think it hadn’t meant anything to him. But he should have said something, because that silence, that silence didn’t sound good either.

“Well, I suppose that answers my question. Look, it’s fine, it was a nice moment let’s not go over and ruin it. But I’m here to warn you, I catch you doing something like that again Lucius, and the next time Ivan tries to deck you - I’m not holding him back.”

And then he was gone, and Lucius was left alone with nothing but the empty notebook for company. Under the shine of the moonlight, he couldn’t help feeling petty and very, very small.

***

Sleep was not enough to shake the disquieting feeling of shame that the conversation had left in the pit of his belly. 

He had never thought that Fang would think those things, let alone come right out and say them … and yet he hadn’t been wrong had he? Oh, they made a big fuss on this ship - well, Stede did but Lucius had been quick enough to follow - about how  they were different than other pirate ships. They were kinder, gentler, they respected each other, their Captain paid them -  and yet when the time had come for Lucius to actually live up to those ideals he had stumbled, and fallen most pitifully.

And why? 

Because it was Izzy Hands.

And you didn’t have to be kind or gentle to Izzy Hands, you didn’t have to respect his boundaries, or take his consent seriously.

Lucius didn’t want to think it was just because Izzy Hands was a hobbit. No, clearly it was because he was an asshole. An asshole who, barring Ivan and Fang, everybody on the ship hated. And yet … it was because Izzy Hands was a hobbit that he had so badly wanted to draw him. Wasn’t much of a leap for someone to conclude then, that it was because the First Mate was a hobbit that Lucius had thought he could without Izzy’s consent. That the artist had thought he could just take what had not been given. Just like any other pirate.

The next morning, after a restless night tucked away in Pete’s arms, Lucius had sat down in his usual spot - a box near the corner of the deck - to sketch the crew. Except today his notebook sat untouched on his lap, and his eyes remained fix on three, no four figures, near the bow of the ship.

Four very recognisable figures.

Ivan, big and almost as round as Fang but younger, much younger. He was probably around Lucius’ age but it was difficult to tell with the beard. But that was where the similarities between them stopped, for Ivan was a pirate while Lucius only worked on a pirate’s ship. Ivan was blunt force and strength while Lucius was all talk and wile. Ivan respected Izzy Hands, enough to try and gut someone on his behalf, while Lucius …  Lucius didn’t.

Next to him was Fang, beautiful Fang, who was lovely in bed but who wouldn’t even look at Lucius anymore. He had his back to him, and Lucius was almost certain that had been a deliberate choice on behalf of the older pirate. Nothing that Blackbeard said could truly be that interesting after all.

And there was Blackbeard, wild hair, mad eyes, hands flapping about his head in some attempt to explain his latest brilliant yet some how still moronic scheme to his poor crew. Yeah he was pretty impressive when you first met him, but after the second time he almost killed you on a whim some of the sheen wore off pretty quickly. He didn’t know, maybe he just never quite got Blackbeard like Stede and Pete did.

Finally, sitting on the side of the ship in the middle of Blackbeard’s crew, was Izzy Hands himself. It was strange, the stories on the high seas always spoke about the prettiness and the beauty of hobbits, and yet Izzy Hands - the only hobbit Lucius had ever actually met was really neither. He would be good looking enough by human standards but he wasn’t what had been promised by the stories. And looking at him now, angry and tired under the light of the sun, Lucius began to wonder if any of the tellers of those many, many stories had ever actually met … or even seen … a hobbit in real life.

And that was the four of them, all huddled up and discussing something.

Blackbeard and his crew of brigands. 

And Lucius realised then, as that name came into his mind, that although he may have shared a tumble with Fang, and thought he had been on friendly terms with Ivan, or even now could picture every detail of the sleeping face of Izzy Hands bathed in the sparse moonlight of last night, that was all he pretty much knew of them. They were strangers, he had been pretending to know. But they’d only been on the ship a few months. He didn’t really know them at all.

Blackbeard least of all.

Maybe it was time to stop pretending.

Chapter Text

John Feeney was a big man, in every sense of the the word. He was the tallest amongst the crew of the Revenge, in fact he was the tallest man on any ship he’d ever served aboard. Granted that was only about three of them if you counted the Revenge herself. He really wasn’t a very experienced sailor, not when compared to the likes of Buttons or … well it was difficult to name another really experienced sailor on the ship that wasn’t just a huge prick.

 Okay, he guessed Fang was pretty decent but like they never really talked, and sometimes especially lately Fang felt like he was purposely distancing himself from the Revenge’s crew. Almost … almost like he thought they weren’t going to last, like this ship, and the brief glimpse of real friendship and decent people he’d gotten to know, were nothing but a minor diversion on the great epic that was living under Blackbeard. He’d gotten pretty close to Lucius, but then something had happened between them and now Fang wasn’t even talking to the scribe anymore. Or at least so the rumour mill said anyway, again he didn’t spend enough time with Fang to tell for sure himself.

He supposed all of Blackbeard’s crew were experienced sailers - but most of them had either died during the fight with the Spanish, or they had just disappeared mysteriously one day never to be talked about again. By this point other than Fang, there were only two of Blackbeard’s original crew left.

There was Ivan, who was at best a prickly little cunt to most of the crew. Sure he had started out quite easy glowing, and likeable - at least compared to the other surviving member of Blackbeard’s crew - but then Pete’s stupid story had happened and well, Ivan just couldn’t seem to forgive the rest of them for laughing.

And then there was Izzy Hands.

God, there were no words to describe Izzy Hands.

Okay that wasn’t true. There were in fact, lots of words to describe Izzy Hands. Lots of very descriptive words , but John had just used the best of them to describe the lesser of two evils, so to use any of the others now would feel like a bit of a cop out.

He couldn’t even really use the word hobbit and mean it, because he’d only just realised that Izzy Hands was a hobbit at all. And that was … embarrassing in hindsight.

Look the thing was, being someone who was so very big, and so very … there … all the time, sometime the little things passed him by. He was bigger than most men he had ever met. Bigger than … humans, bigger than the people who didn’t wake from night terrors during childhood where they suddenly became one of those man eating giants. The ones the kids in the playground teased you about, the kind that your father … your father must have been before he left. Whatever, the point was that because he was so very, very big everyone around him seemed small anyway. So when he had first met Izzy Hands the fact that the First Mate of Blackbeard was three feet at most, really didn’t register with him. Everyone looks like they’re three feet tall when you’re walking around at ten.

And plus he had been really just focusing on not falling off the ship back then, like he did on the last boat he had sailed on. He’d been so focused on that, and a hundred other things that came up when your Captain was shot by the Spanish and one of your friends turned out not to be quite as much of a man as you thought they were, that he only realised the first mate was a hobbit at all a couple of weeks back. During a conversation with Jim and Oluwande, when they had explicitly called him a hobbit.

And even then they had to point to his ears, and his feet, and his pointed strange face to convince Wee John they weren’t just having a laugh. Oluwande had asked him why it wasn’t obvious to begin with … and Wee John, who had spent so long hiding the fact that he was not completely human, that he had become blind to the tell-tale signs of someone else being less than human… became embarrassed. So embarrassed that he made up a lie on the spot.

It was a stupid lie, didn’t  really make sense. He said that when he was little his mum had told him that you could always hear a hobbit coming from behind you. Because their feet were as hard as rocks, so they always made a clicking sound even when they weren’t wearing shoes. They both bought it, not that hobbits had hard feet, that was obviously bullshit, but the fact that Wee John’s Mum told him something so stupid sounding.

Really it was kind of insulting, how quickly they had bought it.

***

It soon became a bit of a joke amongst the crew of the Revenge. All the noise that Izzy Hands made when he walked, because of course he didn’t make any noise at all.

Maybe if it hadn’t been for the joke, the joke that Wee John had started, he never would have noticed that. The lack of noise around the hobbit when he walked. After all, with all the noise that the rest of them made, it was easy enough to forget which voice was which amongst the din. Which shoe thudded heaviest against the squeaky board at the bottom of the stairs coming below deck. Whose knife scraped loudest against their plate in the mess hall. Who banged their drum hardest during jam session. Next to that, what was one hobbit that didn’t make a noise at all?

Wee John had been on the Revenge the longest, you would think he would know this all by now. But he didn’t, couldn’t have picked any of their voices out of the din. The noise was too much, too much for his giant ears, and sometimes it was all he could do not to curl up in a dark corner of the ship, with his hands over his ears and cry. Cry until everything else went quiet and numb, and nothing hurt anymore, well, hurt worse than a regular headache anyway. 

It was at times like that, when he felt like his brain was bleeding out from his giant freak ears, that he would sit down and start his knitting. Or pick up one of the crew’s shirts to mend ‘em. A good pirate needed to know how to sew, and that was the truth of it, no matter what Black Pete said. And sewing, knitting, stuff like that had always come easy to him. Best thing for drowning out the rest of the noise, the sharp click clack of his knitting needles.

Well, that and the bang of a cannon ball, but he was not quite thick enough to think everyone would be fine if he let off a cannon ball every time things started getting too noisy. Every time everyone started talking over each other. They didn’t have near enough canon balls for a start. Or he could punch someone, that was good for making the noise stop too, but no he couldn’t do that outside of a raid, not to his own crew. He’d kill them. Needles, needles were the safer option.

So, that was where he was now, sitting at a corner of the deck, his knitting needles click clacking over the argument down stairs. He forgot what it was about this time, might have something to do with the bright orange cake he had seen being carried into Steed and Blackbeard’s quarters earlier that day.

Maybe in a different life where … where he could have stood the noise, he would have stayed downstairs, lent his voice to the din. Because really fucking forty oranges for a glaze to a cake? And then another ten for the cake itself? On a ship, with no other form of citrus about? Fecking lunacy. But this wasn’t that world, and any way what good would it have done?

He didn’t really think Stede cared if the crew got scurvy, not in a way a person who understood piracy, or sailing in general, would have. It was that thought he was dwelling on, the stupidity of it all, when the feet appeared on the stairs next to him. 

Big, large even for a man, and hairy. Big, hairy feet that made no sound at all when they walked around the deck - hobbit feet. And there was of course, only one hobbit on the Revenge.

Izzy Hands.

Wee John let the usual defensive anger settle across his disproportionately sized features. He left the argument because he couldn’t stand the noise, he certainly wasn’t in the mood to be screamed at for being a lazy fecking wanker. But it seemed Izzy Hands wasn’t here to yell at him, not today at least. 

No, Izzy Hands lowered himself to sit down beside the knitting half giant, reached into his pocket and took out a pipe. A thin thing made of clay. He filled that pipe with something from a small pouch around his neck, and lit it.

Then he inhaled and blew out a smoke ring, but not just any smoke ring, no. Not one of those stupid little, oblong things you saw the like of Steed Bonnet trying to make when he thought no one was looking at him when he smoked, that would have been too much to hope for the likes of Izzy Hands. No, his smoke rings were a thing of beauty. Giant round, actual rings of smoke that wafted over the deck of the ship as if they had been carried not on a stray breeze but by the sheer force of will from the smoker. As if Izzy Hands could bend reality to his whim. The pretty thing didn’t even break apart, it just drifted away and out to sea.

And only then, when that ring was finally gone from sight at last did Izzy Hands say a single word to Wee John. 

“You’re Giant Blood, aren’t you?”

***

Wee John instantly got defensive and tried to deny it, but Izzy Hands was having none of it.

“ Taller than all the rest of the crew put together, big hands, big ears that can’t stand the squabbling downstairs. A skull made for smashing through stone blocks, feet made for crushing bones? You, human? You’re having a laugh.”

The whole thing made Wee John want to curl away from the hobbit, and make believe that he wasn’t there at all.

And then Izzy Hands said … “I don’t care what you call yourself, human, giant, the Lady Goddess of the Sea, it’s all the same to me. But Blackbeard cares, or at least he cares what you can do. That strength, that size, might make you useful to him. He’s never had a giant on his ship before.”

“He’s not got one now, we’re on Captain Bonnet’s ship.” Wee John didn’t know where that surge of loyalty had come from, he certainly hadn’t been feeling it before the hobbit had sat down.

“Are we?” Said the hobbit, without a note of smirk or mocking in his voice at all. It almost seemed for a moment like he was genuinely surprised that this was still Bonnet’s ship.

“We’ll, that won’t last. It never lasts, you think this is the first ship Blackbeard’s ‘helped’ with? The first time he’s gotten bored with plain raiding and savagery? The first fuckery he’s pulled?”

Another pull from the pipe, another elaborate smoke ring.

“What the feck are you even talking about?” Said the half giant, his knitting now forgotten on his lap. But the hobbit didn’t pay him any mind at all.

“This is a good enough ship, bit bigger than a proper pirate ship should be, but with the right crew it could keep him amused for at least the next seven years. Imagine that, almost a whole decade without this stupid farce. Course most of you lazy wankers are gonna have to go, when he’s down from this high Blackbeard’s not going to have the patience to wait for you anymore. Not when we already have the crew of the Queen Anne waiting in reserve. But he might keep a few of you, he does that with every ship, how did you think we got Fang? Tells me to pick a few to live, and the rest to go to Davey Jones Locker, where ever that is. So far the only one I planned to keep was the cook, but a man with Giant Blood might be useful.” 

And then Izzy Hands turned and looked at Wee John.

Izzy Hands, with his pipe clutched between his teeth, and the unnerving green eyes of a snake. Eyes that looked at John as if they were assessing him. Weighing his strength, his sewing skills and his blood against, well everything else. It was a look that Wee John did not like, it was a look that made him angry.

An old rage, a rage born of years of earning his keep in various freak shows across England bubbled within his chest then and he wanted to reach over, grab that clay pipe between the hobbit’s lips and snap it in half. Then he wanted to wrap his hands around the hobbit’s throat, and squeeze, and squeeze until he heard a snapping sound.

Then he wanted to heave the limp body over the side of the boat with a single fling from one of his great arms and pretend he had never met Izzy Hands at all. But a memory arose inside him then, a memory of his mother, of sitting with her and learning to sew. To mend the dresses of the women of the village they had lived in back then. Before people had begun to look at him, at his great height, and bumbling limbs like he was something … something monstrous.

Back when he had still been just small enough to pass for a normal, fully human, child. He had always held the needle too tight, and even then his strength had been great, and he had snapped many of them in half before his mother had stopped him. Before she had shown him how to lay your finger just so upon the needle, to keep his grip just light enough to not snap it. Be gentle, my Little John, she had advised. You are a seamstress, your touch must always be gentle or you’ll tear the entire thing in half. 

He thought of Blackbeard then, of Blackbeard who the Captain was so enamoured by that he followed him around like one of those sad puppies in the street, looking for a scrap of meat from your plate. He thought of the man’s intensity, of that strange mad look in his eyes when he thought someone had insulted him. He imagined that look on his face when he realised that his first mate had been murdered and thrown over the side of the boat like a useless sack of potatoes.

Who would he think did it if Wee John didn’t come forward then? How many people would he kill just to get at him once he did know? Be gentle, his mother’s voice whispered again in his ear, or you’ll tear the whole thing in half. And so he didn’t act on those violent thoughts of his, he didn’t grab the hobbit by the throat and squeeze and squeeze until he was dead. He just leaned over, until he was right into the hobbit’s personal space and snarled down at him.

“Feck off, you wee little Fecker.” And then he did something that he would come to regret very quickly … he smashed his boot down hard as he could on one of the hobbit’s feet. But it wasn’t Izzy Hands who came away screaming, clutching his foot tightly to his chest like something sharp, and heavy had just smashed down upon it.

It was Wee John.

For hobbit feet were not like the soft feet of humans, there was a reason hobbits had never invented any form of shoe after all. He had been right, the joke … the lie had been right. Hobbit feet, or at least he amended silently as he sobbed and held his own surely broken foot with all the tenderness of a mother to her infant son - Izzy Hands’ feet were as hard as rocks. He turned then and staggered back down the steps, knitting forgotten, and left that leather clad fecker sitting there, laughing at him. They were always laughing at him.

He didn’t turn round to see the scowl on the long, and lined, face of the hobbit. Didn’t see him yank the pipe from his mouth and snap it in half, as clean as a neck in the grip of a giant’s fist.

He certainly didn’t see the hobbit rise and throw it over the side of the ship. Or the rage and exhaustion upon his face as he turned to the pirate at the wheel of that ship. Didn’t see the look that passed between them then, between Izzy Hands and Fang, the look of regret and failure. And even if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have understood it.

Chapter Text

Stede thought perhaps … possibly the reason he was so enchanted by Ed was that the man was beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful man he’d ever met. It had been a thrill to learn pirating at the feet of such a man. He was a great pirate, but beyond that it was the gentleness of the man that drew him. It was the loveliness of the man that made something deep inside of Stede’s chest go pitter pat.

Maybe it was his heart, maybe it was his soul, but whatever it was it left him almost breathless in the presence of the man. He must love being a pirate, for he had not felt anything like this before. This joy inside of him when he looked at Blackbeard … at Ed lying with his waves of grey hair free and loose across the pillow. They’d slept late, perhaps a bit too late considering all the things he had wanted to do today but ah well, this was worth the loss. Just this here, being beside this man it was … it was a dream. And nothing, no storm, or English navy officer, could hope to break him from this dream. And that was when he finally heard the knocking on his door.

It was probably the crew, they were always knocking for something, particularly now that Ed was here. They probably just wanted to catch a glimpse of him, the great Pirate Blackbeard, but were too shy to say so out loud. So they kept making up ridiculous reasons to come and knock on his door. Out of rope, out of hardtack, we need to stop at the next harbour and restock on all our provisions or we are going to have to start eating rats.

I mean that fit they had all thrown when Roach used up the last of the oranges to make that cake for Stede and Ed. They acted like it was Stede who had done it, Stede’s fault that the poor Swede’s teeth had fallen out. It was clearly a matter of Roach’s bad shopping habits, he hadn’t planned for Ed never having eaten an orange cake before. Forty Oranges in the glaze alone and it barely tasted of the fruit. Much too much sugar. Really, sometimes Stede couldn’t help but feel like Roach’s cooking abilities were a bit over stated by the crew.

He was good, but Stede’s cook back at his plantation could have made a thirty orange cake and have it taste like a fifty orange cake. Perhaps in hindsight he shouldn’t have said this to the cook, he had taken on a somewhat demented look after Stede had let that slip. And he had held his meat cleaver just a tad too tightly, so tightly the metal almost vibrated under his grip. Stede was certain Roach was thinking of cutting something of Stede’s off then, and it wasn’t his nose, so he had beat a quick retreat back to his cabin.

God, if this knocking was Roach coming to finish him off at last well … well Stede would scream and wake Ed up if he had to. But he didn’t want to, so he really hoped it wasn’t Roach after.

He opened the door, gradually, just in case anyway. It was not in fact his angry cook, but who it actually was, was almost worse. 

Izzy Hands.

It was amazing that such an angry, bristling, little fellow could ever be considered of the race of hobbits.

It was not true that Stede Bonnet knew nothing about hobbits. He, in fact knew quite a bit … it had just all come from books before now. And the hobbits of his books, the soft round cheeked cherubs that more often than not led the hero of the tale to their secret treasure in an underground pool - he didn’t know why it was always specifically an underground pool, but there you go - were nothing like Izzy Hands.

Izzy Hands had a beard for one thing, well something very much resembling a beard anyway. And he looked a great deal older than the giggling, child like creatures of the children’s picture books. He was also not particularly pleasant either - he was a bitter little thing. Always blowing up at Stede’s crew for seemingly no reason at all.

Just a few months back he had almost killed poor Frenchie by throwing him out of the Crow’s nest, Ed had had to step in to discipline the feral creature, not that that did much good in the long run. After only a week, of somewhat polite stiffness from the horrible little gremlin he had tried to stab poor Lucius. Stede had told Ed at the time that the hobbit was an arsehole and he didn’t know why Ed, such a kind and really caring man as was Ed, kept him around at all. Really at this point it would just be easier to throw Izzy off the ship than spend or rather waste, the amount of time needed to retrain his First Mate for sensible company.

 Ed had just smiled at that, and patted Stede’s cheek. He hadn’t answered of course, he never answered when it came to Izzy. Never even told Stede how they had met or came to sail with one another, even though Stede was certain it must have been quite a story. 

I mean sailing with a hobbit, even a sad second rate hobbit, as was Izzy Hands, had to be quite a high sailing adventure. None of the stories mentioned it, mainly because none of the stories ever mentioned that Izzy Hands was a hobbit at all. Ed didn’t really want to talk about it and Stede supposed he should respect that, after all he didn’t really want to talk about … Mary and the kids.

“Is Blackbeard awake, I need to talk to him.”

It was a demand, not a question. As if Izzy Hands found the notion that he had to ask Stede Bonnet about Blackbeard’s whereabouts to be not only humiliating, but absolutely ridiculous. Something about that tone, that sneering little tone out of the hobbit, riled Stede up more than anything else today had. More than Roach and his meat cleaver, more than the crew and their oranges. He hated Izzy Hands right then, hated him more than he had ever hated anyone. Even his childhood bullies paled in comparison to the hate he felt right then, looking at that angry hobbit’s face. 

Which probably went a long way to explaining why he said what he said next.

“No, he’s not awake right now. And quite frankly Izzy, when it comes to you, he’s never awake. Please leave and find something else to occupy your time. Maybe swab the deck, it’s looking filthy.” 

And then he slammed the door right in Izzy Hands’ face.

***

Stede was almost certain that Izzy Hands was stalking him.

Everywhere he turned lately he was confronted with the hobbit, the hobbit and his unnerving stare.  In fact if he was being truly honest with himself he found almost everything about Izzy Hands kind of unnerving. Not simply because he was a violent pirate where one would expect to find a peace loving creature of the earth and the soil. No, Stede left his comfortable life to become a pirate Captain, he was not quite so easily spooked as all that. It was something beyond that, something felt wrong with Izzy Hands. Something like … maybe demonic possession. 

No, no, he refused to believe in possession.

Besides, it would simply be too easy an answer. Of course Izzy was possessed, I mean how else do you explain how he was always there watching? No matter what part of the ship Stede happened to be at the time. Always standing there, just an arms length out of reach, watching as Stede talked to the crew, as he trotted across his deck, as he made orders for his and Ed’s midday meals. It was well … it was damn annoying was what it really was, but maybe a little bit creepy as well. I mean didn’t the hobbit have anything better to do with his time than glare at Stede all day?

Okay, so he had slammed that door in his face and had been so far successfully keeping Ed from having to even look at that nasty little gremlin anymore, but still you’d think he could just get over it. Ed had never said he and Izzy were lovers so, no harm. He was … he was just his first mate, and one that was a tad too clingy even by first mate standards. Maybe Izzy wanted more, maybe he felt more for Ed than that but it all amounted to naught. Ed did not want Izzy, so maybe Izzy should just put them all out of their misery and move the fuck on.

It was better to focus on his anger, his own injured pride, than come to grips by just how scared of the hobbit he’d become. 

 Maybe it was his walk, ghostly in its silence - allowing for the strange first mate to easily sneak up upon his targets of scorn without any warning . Or perhaps it was his temper, again he had almost stabbed poor Lucius a few weeks back over less than nothing. Or possibly it could be the strength, the strength such a small person should never possess - how else could you explain how he was able to hurl Frenchie from the crow’s nest. A miracle the man hadn’t been killed, really. And of course there was the kind of hypnotic control he retained over Ed’s original crew. It was the only way Stede could explain the strange kind of loyalty that remained in even sensible people like Fang. Put altogether and you were left with a feeling of wrongness in your gut. He was almost certain the crew, his crew, felt the same.

They didn’t show it, bless  them, but he was certain they must see it too. I mean this couldn’t all just be in Stede’s head, and if it was what did that say about him? Was he really such a coward? He didn’t think so, not … not in the way that he would make up reasons to be afraid of something. If he was afraid of something it was because it damn well deserved to be afraid of.

If he dwelled on it any longer he was going to have a panic attack - he needed something to distract himself.

You know all of this reminded him of a story he read to the children once. About a hobbit that was not a hobbit anymore, because … because he had been corrupted by greed, symbolised by a gold ring in the story anyway. He lived in a pool too, if memory served. Stede was certain he had that book on the ship, somewhere. The crew might like that, they must be getting pretty sick of the story about the wooden boy.

***

That night Stede Bonnet read to the crew. He didn’t read the story about the puppet who became a real boy - didn’t a read a story of blue fairies or judgmental ghost crickets. Instead he read a story of deep caves and long forgotten pools. A story of evil rings, and jealousy that gnawed down to the bone. The story he read them was ‘The Cave Hobbit and the Magic Ring’. 

“And what is a Cave Hobbit, you ask? Why it’s a magical creature that lives only in a cave.” Said the Captain, in theory addressing the entire crew but in actuality his eyes remained locked on Ed’s face. Ed looked back at him with a dreamy kind of wonder. As if he had never seen anything as wonderful as Stede Bonnet was at that moment, sitting on a box reading to his crew by the light of a flickering candle. It was an intoxicating feeling to be the centre of somebody’s … anybody’s world.

Even if it didn’t last, even if the very next day Ed packed up and left him - a thought that made something twist and convulse inside his chest - it was something just to have felt that once. Back in his family’s home he had never had that. Not as a child forced to stand off to the side and watch as his father slaughtered animal upon animal. Not that he wanted to be slaughtering the animals himself, he just wanted to go back inside and read his story books. Maybe even just not have blood splattered all over his face. And then he had grown up, married Mary, they’d had the kids and you would think having a family of his own, even one who he had never really wanted in the first place, he could be the centre of attention at least once.

But no, once again he was shunted off to the side - stuck at the other end of the table, and cut out of the conversation entirely. Well, at least on the ship that couldn’t happen, he was the Captain, people had to listen to him. People had to stop pretending he didn’t matter.

All the while as he was spiralling down this rather depressing line of thought he had been speaking. Speaking about something that had almost nothing to do with the small boy with blood all over his face, or the husband who could barely mention his favourite horse without getting dirty looks from his family. He spoke about magic, the old kind of magic that used to exist in the world before men built their stone houses, and their towns and cities, and stomped all the life out of it. The kind of magic you could only really find in a ring.

“Once upon a time,” began the story. “In a land we can’t find anymore, there lived a hobbit. And like most hobbits he lived underground, but unlike his neighbours he didn’t live in a nice round, warm hobbit hole. No this hobbit didn’t really live in a hole in the ground at all, he lived in a cave.”

And from there he expanded, told them all about the hobbit who lived in a cave - how he had run away from home because his Mummy and Daddy hadn’t loved him enough. He always skipped over the line that claimed that of course his Mummy and Daddy had loved him a whole a lot and were terribly worried when he ran away, because it had never really resonated as true for Stede. Besides the story only got really good once you were past the backstory and moved on to the finding of the magic ring. Which the little grey hobbit found in a pool at the edge of his cave.

Of course this ring wasn’t just a magic ring, oh no, it was an evil magic ring. That granted wishes. But of course being an evil magic ring, those wishes would always end up slightly screwed up. Like once he wished for eggs to suck, and a bird laid an egg right on top of his head. He wished for a new waistcoat, and it turned out to be itchy and really made of straw. He said he wanted a fish and a fire to cook it on  and was almost burned alive. Eventually even the little grey hobbit realised that making wishes on the ring was not something that would grant him a long  and happy life, and despite living in a cave and unable to see the sky at all, he still wanted to live. Wanted to continue not dying thank you very much.

So eventually he gave up wishing, placed the ring in his loincloth and decided to just keep living … without wishing. He didn’t need sunshine or company, or cooked fish - he just needed the ring, and for a long while that was enough for the little hobbit who had became old even by the counting of hobbits. He lost all his hair, and his eyes grew as round as saucer plates. His bones become frail and everything became harder, but still he knew that he must never wish on the ring because that would just make everything so much worse.

And he kept that promise to himself, day after pathetic day. And then one day many years later he was sitting by his pool, waiting to pounce and catch his fish dinner when he heard a strange sound. It almost … it almost sounded like music, No more than that even, it almost sounded like some one whistling.

***

It was, it was some one whistling. Someone in his cave, whistling. And that whistling, why that whistling was getting louder and louder. It was so loud that it was making the poor little grey hobbit’s ears ring. So he hid himself behind a rock and watched the stranger approach.

It was a beautiful hobbit, the most beautiful hobbit he had ever seen - with a shiny buttons of gold alone the middle of his aquamarine waistcoat and a jacket made of silver pure and true. And a white cravat wrapped around his throat. Surely this glorious sight must be that great and mythical being, a Gentleman. A Gentlehobbit if you would.

Such a fine fellow as that poor, sad little creature had never seen before - not even when he was young and still yet lived up above, in the sun. And staring at him from his spot behind the rock, that sad little grey thing was filled with a sort of wishful sadness then. 

 Oh how he … how he wished that he could be as fine as fellow as that gentlehobbit who stood by that pool now, staring at the fish below its surface. How he wished that he wasn’t as he was now, that he could stand under the sun with those softly bouncing curls upon his head and have all the love that must surely come to such a lovely fellow as that. And maybe that fine gentleman might know what it was to be him, to know what it was like to live your whole life in the darkness. Never to see the sun again even when you felt like the blackness of the cave was going to drive you mad. Oh, how he wished. And you see that was the mistake there, for the ring in his pocket was always listening, always waiting for that one magic phrase to work its will.

It was a horrible thing to watch, the sight of that great gentlehobbit twisting and turning and screaming as he slowly morphed into an exact copy of the ugly, smelly, grey hobbit. Loincloth as all. And it probably would have been quite awful to watch the same happen to the little grey hobbit. To watch him twist and turn and scream until he looked nothing like himself anymore. Until he looked instead like the fine, upstanding gentlehobbit he so wished he had always been.

The creature now at the edge of the pool let out a great wail then, it was a pitiful sound. The gentlehobbit crouching behind the rock couldn’t help but sneer at it. What a terrible beast, he thought with contempt, quite having forgotten that he had never thought such a thing before in his life. Quite having forgotten that such a beast had been him not seconds ago. I must go and alert the villagers, and we shall run this creature out of town.

And that my dear reader, is exactly what the young gentlehobbit with the magic ring did. 

Stede looked up from the story book to meet the faces of the fairly unimpressed crew.

“Can we hear the one about the little wooden boy again?” Said Wee John, with that quite recognisable whiny burr in his voice. The others joined in with a chorus of agreement, and Stede sighed and went to go get the other story book. Every night the same God damned story, even the children hadn’t been this stubborn in their devotion to their favourite stories. 

And then just as he was getting up to do so, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

He saw two figures standing a little way away from the rest of the crew, one was clearly Ed, beautiful Ed, lovely even in only shadow. And the other, was a hobbit … so it was obviously Izzy Hands. 

Ed looked like he was telling Hands about something and Izzy Hands looked really … really annoyed. He almost looked betrayed. It was a strange look on that alien hobbit face. He wandered what that was about. Maybe … maybe the hobbit was offended by the story, like some of the crew had tried to claim he was with Pete’s Blackbeard tale. Maybe Ed was telling him to calm down. 

Or maybe … maybe it was something more … maybe … but Stede didn’t have time to stand there and guess because suddenly he was being elbowed aside by Jim of all people.

“Out of the way, Bonnet,” they growled at him.

 Oluwande then squeezed past Stede, a look of worry on his young, round face.

“You don’t want to hear the wooden boy story, with the others?” Stede yelled at their backs when he recovered himself enough from the start to speak again. And from the depths of the ship Jim’s voice rose high, laced with more hate than he had ever heard in it before.

“I’ve had enough of your fucking stories for one night.”

Chapter Text

“Count the Rings. Count the Rings, and all will be well in the Land of Mordor.”

Whispered the slim figure in the dark of the Cabin.

“One - Bronze for the Scholar, Poet of Mahal.”

They ran their thumb over something attached to their neck by a thin, ever so slightly frayed cord.

“Two - Silver for the Martyr, who went over the seas to rest at last.”

A second something, round and slightly shiny seemed to flick into existence next to the bronze ring already placed - temporarily -   on the index figure of the figure lying on their thin bunk in the darkness of the cabin.

“Three - Black for the Fallen, the shaker and slinker in the dark.”

A flick of the fingers, and another ring popped onto that index finger from where it had previous hung from the cord around their neck. But no one would have known it if the figure had not said so, for no one would have ever seen that midnight black ring in the darkness of the cabin.

“Four … Four … - Gold for the One … the Silmaril Born.”

“That’s a pretty rhyme,” said the young man sitting on the tail end of the figure’s bunk, his hand resting comfortingly on their booted ankle. “What’s it mean?”

“It’s a hymn to the Ringbearers, so they will protect me and you on this voyage.”

“That’s good … we need a lot of that with those two upstairs playing idiot peekaboo.”

“You think it’s a joke,” snarled the person on the bed, letting their hand flop away from the cord tying the rings to their neck and subsequently snapping it in two.

“I don’t,” said the young man with a firmness and tiredness in his tone that had not really been there before. 

“Yes, you do, you think it’s just a fairy story - a tale of a sad little hobbit in a cave that you can twist for your own sad purposes. That you can make it all about your romance with that delusional serial killer up-top.”

“When did I start romancing Blackbeard?” Said the young man his round face becoming pinched with frustration. “I think you’ve got me mixed up with Stede Bonnet, mate.”

“All humans are the same.”

“Jim, I hate to say this because you might not be in a place to really hear it right now - but I can’t stop myself if you’re going to say crap like that. You are human.” Said Oluwande, raising his voice just a fraction from the low cheerful bell it usually was.

Jim sat up on the bed, tears welling in their eyes, and snarled at their friend.

“I know that!”

Then they flopped back down again, and covered their face with one of the beaten down pillows on the bunk, and repeated themselves in a more defeated and watery tone.

“I know that.”

***

Jim was a man. 

Most people were confused by this statement - because well, Jim didn’t have a beard and they were pretty sure they had breasts too. But that was the typical Man thought of everything, always assumed that when you said “man” it was something to do with your gender. As far as that went Jim was pretty sure they didn’t really fit with either male or female, both felt somehow equally right and wrong, but humans were always expecting you to choose.

Humans, that’s what they had meant when they said that they were a man. They meant they were of the race of Man. Their Father, their mother, their sisters and brother had been of the race of man. Most people would find this so obvious a fact, that it didn’t need to be said. But most people were not Jim, they had not grown up where Jim had, on the Isle of Oranges - they hadn’t grown up with Jim’s grandmother.

They could accept now, that she probably wasn’t their real  Grandmother - after all, the rest of the family had been human. Solid human without a pointed ear or metal coloured eye in sight - but not Nana. Nana had been a hobbit. In fact most everybody on that little island full of oranges, and orange groves, was a hobbit. It had been Jim’s family that had been the outliers, the only humans in an otherwise entirely hobbit community.

As a child it had been easy to make believe that that wasn’t so, that even if they weren’t whole hobbits - there had still been some blood of Hobbick flowing within the veins of their father or their mother. It had been easy to pretend that Nana was really their grandmother and not just the matriarch of the community, that had taken them under her wing when their family had been murdered by those bandits.

They were as hobbit as the other kids on the island - the ones that had giggled at their height, and pointed at their bare hairless feet when they walked by. They were of Hobbick’s Seed, just as much as any other hobbit on the island. 

They had convinced themselves of this fact, so throughly that they had even dared to say it out loud, to say it before Nana herself. Nana had waisted no time in correcting them. No, they were not a hobbit - and no, she was not their Grandmother by blood. Games like that did not go on in her house, if they had shared blood she would not have left it a question between them. 

“Do not lie to yourself.” She had told the child that Jim had once been. “Your purpose, your vengeance,  is too great for that. You must not let yourself be distracted by such fantasies.”

And then Jim, or rather the child that they had been, burst out crying then and Nana - never having a heart as cold as she had always claimed it to be - gathered them up into her arms and stroked their then long hair out of their face.

“Hush now, hush - my child. There is no shame in it, your father may have been human by blood and birth but he was still blessed by them.”

“By who, Nana?” The child had sniffled.

“Why by the Ringbearers, my child.”

***

The majority of men - the majority of humans - that Jim had ever had the displeasure of meeting had developed some very strange conceptions about the people that had raised Jim. There were of course the absurd stories of Nana’s people being ‘magical’ - sure there were the Ganymen and the Magicians, and the Food Wizards - but the notion that every single hobbit was able to summon a pot of Gold from their mid drift was the height of absurdity, Stede. 

However those tales were almost bearable next to some of the absurd ‘facts’ that Jim had heard spouted about the Children of Hobbick. That they were just smaller humans was one of the most ridiculous, although it was the one often spouted by people pretending to be sensible about the whole situation. That they were a people cursed by the Christian Devil was also ludicrous - there was no such thing as a hobbit Christian, so how could a creature from its mythology ever touch them? And yet compared to the idea that hobbits as a whole had no concept of religion at all, that notion was practically lucid.

They did have religion.

They had a great many of them.

They had had religion long before humanity had crawled its way out of the mud.

 Most had something to do with the Ancient Hobbits, and the various cults and sects that had grown up around them. Like the Cult of Marry - a fabled hobbit lass tied into marriage to a wicked elven king by her greedy father, before she freed herself on her wedding day by chopping off the head of her intended. Or the Sect of Mobius - the fabled leader of the Hunt of Mobius, most hobbits agreed that his followers were a little nuts. Willingly seeking death in battle so that they could join his Spiritual Hunt after said death. The Faith of Barnabas, the fabled first Halfling born on mortal soil - they had toyed around with quite a few prayers to that ancient figure when they had been a child and still struggling under the delusion that they were a Halfling themselves. Half Hobbit, Half something else entirely.

Then of course there were the older Gods, Gods that it was said came from the time of the Ancestors, those ancient people that had come before the children of Hobbick - those children of Mahal, whoever they were. The Blue God of Magic. The One Eyed Pyramid God of Madness. The Great Endless God of the Narrative. Then there were the Wishers - nothing but hobbit fairytales now of course, little flying creatures who granted wishes to the hobbit child lucky enough to catch them in a butterfly net, but ancient legend went that they had once been gods themselves.

Still, when it came to the religions of hobbits, there was really only one that truly mattered in the long view of things. Only one that moved and shook the hobbit world, as surely as the Christ faith had shaken large chunks of the human one. And that was the faith that Nana followed … the faith that Jim followed.

That was the faith of the Ring-bearers.

Nana was a nun, but certainly not one of the Christian Faith. Not one of those gentle human creatures that had cloistered themselves away from the world. There was nothing cloistered in Nana’s nature. The faith that Nana had followed, had pledged herself to long before Jim had even been conceived, was older than that. Far older. Older than the Upper Earth itself.

Nana’s temple, at the back of her house, had been smaller than most of her order would have approved of, but the truth was it didn’t need to be the great grand things that were held up as right and proper on the mainland - it was big enough all by itself in Jim’s memories. Jim could remember the incense that had hung so thickly in the air within it that sometimes it felt like you could hardly breath. They could remember the red, velvet carpet on the ground and how good it had felt between their bare toes as a child - for they had never worn shoes as a child. And they could remember the altar at the centre of that small temple, and more importantly what had stood on it.

Four busts, of four hobbits.

At the edge of the altar was a bronze creature with a round face, a cheeky smile and the the approximation of hobbit curls upon his head. Bronze for the Scholar, Poet of Mahal. He, whose descendants often claimed the name of Baggins though he had no legitimate children of his own.

Next to him stood a bust made of silver, the face of this hobbit was somehow younger and older than the first. Silver for the Martyr, who went over the seas to rest at last - the heir of the bronze hobbit.

In the middle of the altar, sat a bust of a sad bald creature, with wide eyes and terrible pointed teeth - it was made of black marble if Jim’s memory served them well, which it so often did. Black for the Fallen, the shaker and slinker in the dark.

The last of the busts was bright gold, and in his plainly carved face to serve for his eyes Nana had placed the most wonderful of emerald jewels. Gold for the Silmaril Born, he who will return to serve his people to the end of his days.

Jim thought of Nana’s temple a lot lately lately - ever since they had met … Izzy Hands.

***

Blackbeard’s first mate was a hobbit. The rest of the crew made a big deal about this, like it was inconceivable in their minds that someone that short, with such big hairy feet could ever take up a sword, or a knife, and fight for their Captain. Ooh, how strange a hobbit who didn’t smile sweetly as they brought you your ail or slice of bread.

But really there was nothing strange about a hobbit who snarled, and spat instead. Most hobbits, if a human had bothered to actually ask them, would have done that. Or at least every hobbit that Jim had ever met. Yes, even the ones who looked sweet and round, with glowing pink cheeks, and careful curls all around their faces. The orange farmers, and the orange farmers’ husbands, of Jim’s home had not kept their island secure and flourishing by being sweet, or kind, or accommodating to the human sailors who would sometimes drop in on occasion. They were fighters, they fought and bit and sliced their blades just where no man would ever wish them to go. And yes, that time Jim had meant the gender. 

Oh how distressing would Stede Bonnet find it to discover that no hobbit had ever existed that naturally fit the stereotype that humans tried to force upon them.

Would he cry? Yes, Jim, really hoped that he would. They hoped that he would weep so hard and so long, that he would choke himself with his own tears - to think twisting the tale of the fallen Ringbearer into something … something like that. It had been worse than Pete’s stupid story, at least that had come out of the idiot’s own head. Steed’s tale had been something out of a book, something that a human - maybe long dead now - had sat down and written. Had sat down and told to their children, it made Jim feel … more than sick, more than disgusted, it made them feel dirty.

The legend of the Ring, that magic ring - which had never granted wishes, Stede, humans were idiots - was part of a sacred account of the past. A history of Jim’s people, of the world that they had inhabited before the sky had become the earth, before the seas had risen and covered the land, before the Middle had become the upper world. It was part of the last account that they had of that world, and for it to be so bastardised as to be nothing but a tale for human children - it made the rage in Jim’s belly squirm. It made them seriously consider killing the Captain - they’d thought about it long and hard during that first day hauled up in their and Oluwande’s cabin. Thought about stabbing that stupid, smiling face right through the eyes with one of their knives and watching as the blood poured down over his rosy cheeks.

Maybe it would have been satisfying in the moment, and yet actions always had consequences and there was Blackbeard to contend with. He would have been a dangerous obstacle, even without his infatuation with Bonnet. And Jim wasn’t afraid of him, no because well … Jim had not been raised to be afraid of angry, tattoo covered, emotionally compromised pirates. So no, Jim was not afraid of Blackbeard - they were just realistic about the outcomes of their choice, and not currently suicidal. 

And so, after three days lying alone in their bunk, shrouded in the dark of their cabin - stewing on the injustice that was the very fibre of a human run pirate ship - Jim had stepped out and back into the sunlight. Had tried to pretend they had not basically disappeared for more than twenty four hours. But they still got looks for their trouble. Most of them tinged with worry or pity - Oluwande, in an attempt to cover for them had apparently implied that they had had some kind of very short lived sickness. The kind that meant you had to shut yourself away from all human contact for a couple of days. He had apparently not been specific about the disease, but no one had wanted to probe too hard.

Although Jim suspected that at least two people on the ship had not bought the excuse for Jim’s sudden disappearance at all. The first was of course Roach, who often gave Jim slightly knowing and irritated looks. Roach was the ship’s surgeon, as well as the cook, so it made sense that he wouldn’t buy someone recovering from such an infectious disease in three days. Besides which he always seemed to have the knack for knowing things he was not meant to. It must have been a gift granted by his own Gods, whoever they were. The second person was Izzy Hands.

***

Izzy Hands was a strange hobbit. Yes, that was the truth of things not even Jim could really deny, but they would never admit that he was a strange hobbit because he was a pirate, that was just … dumb, Stede Bonnet. Although there weren’t many hobbits sailing on the Caribbean Seas these days, but that had more to do with the over abundance of men on the seas, rather than any delicate sensibility.

No, Izzy Hands was a strange hobbit because … well for all the reasons that you could never say out loud. Never even think unless you wanted to die, and your body to burn with the words of the Ring-bearer beaten onto your brow. It was the eyes, the eyes were unnatural - those green, ever seeing orbs were not the eyes of a regular hobbit. Only one family of Hobbits had ever had Green eyes, and the notion that one of the Ringbearer’s descendants could have wound up sailing under Stede Bonnet, no matter how indirectly, was too sickening to even contemplate.

Too sickening to believe even when the proof of the matter stared at you from across the deck of the ship.

Izzy Hands had not believed Jim’s story of a strange sickness, of that much was all too clear to the assassin when that strange hobbit sought them out that night, three weeks after their re-emergence? It was the night of the Fuckery, the night of the sword fight , that night where everything would change. And Izzy Hands had chosen that night to finally speak one on one with Jim for the first time since Blackbeard’s crew had arrived on the ship.

“So,” said Izzy Hands from out of the shadows behind Jim. “Not a fan of Bonnet’s Fuckery techniques, I take it?” And Jim who had been sharpening one of their favourite daggers, who had in fact sought out this quiet secluded part of the ship so they wouldn’t be disturbed in this task tonight - spun around and flung that dagger straight at Blackbeard’s first mate. They hadn’t really planned to, there would have been so many better ways to kill Izzy Hands if they had ever wanted to - so many ways that wouldn’t have directly pointed to Jim as the culprit. It was just instinct. But it didn’t matter, for Hands stepped to the right and the dagger lodged harmless in the ship wall behind him. Hands plucked the dagger out of the wall with a grunt, and stepped out of the shadows to where the light of the moon seeped in through the small window above their heads.

Izzy Hands in the moonlight was a terrible thing,  it showed him as a strange and crooked creature that perhaps should never have been allowed onto the ship at all. But his eyes, oh Mobius, his eyes were the worst of it. Green eyes, as green as the old forests below the ground, below the deepest depths of this newer world’s sea. The golden bust of Nana’s temple had tried to capture that green, that terrible green colour by lodging dark emeralds for the eyes of the bust but it had failed. Jewels were nothing, little green rocks next to the real, the awful, truth.

“You’re Ringblood.”

The words had left Jim’s mouth before they had time to think them through at all.

Izzy Hand’s smile was awful, his teeth were white and almost sharp in the moonlight.

“Ringblood?” Said the grey and grizzled hobbit before Jim. “Now, that’s a strange word, don’t you think? Why do you think we call them ring blood?” As he talked, Izzy Hands advanced in a lazy kind of strut that should not have been intimidating to anyone, yet Jim still found themselves backing away unconsciously as they replied.

“You’re a descendant of the final Ring bearer. He whose name may not be spoken, the golden locked one, the Silmaril reborn. He who is who fated to return, life after life to the mortal world, until the shell of the upper earth cracks, and the world becomes what it should have always been - just earth.”

“I’d say that really depends.” Said Izzy Hands casually tossing Jim’s dagger into the air.

“Depends, on what?” Jim was more scared now than perhaps they had ever been in their life - and that was truly saying something considering their history.

“Your definition of descendant, I’d suppose. I’m no Greenhand, Gardner, Gamgee or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. No crown, either of ivy or gold, has ever lain on my parents brows. I’m a pirate Jim, and whether by water or air that’s what I’ve always been. I think you’ve let your imagination get the better of you - dangerous thing to do on a Fuckery night. It’s a dangerous night to be on this ship anyway, for all pirates who don’t know their fucking way on the sea.”

He threw the knife at Jim then, and the younger pirate caught it by its handle and held it to their chest, their heart beating hard. They wanted to yell back at him then, to tell him that he was talking crazy - he had the eyes of the Ringbearer, what else could he be but Ring Blood? But they couldn’t make their tongue move, and so they stayed  silent as Izzy Hands smirked up at them.

“You know the old tales well, I’d imagine I’d quite like to meet the hobbit that told you them.”

Was that a threat? It was difficult to say, but even the hint of the steel in the hobbit’s voice made Jim tremble in protective rage. If he even thought about … no, no, she could handle herself, Jim had always known that and there was something here, a mystery that had yet to be solved and Jim, Jim couldn’t lose their temper until they knew the truth of it.

“Who are you?”

Izzy Hands didn’t answer, instead he scowled and said.

“Blackbeard’s lost his head over Bonnet,” the way he popped the ‘B’ on Bonnet’s name was not a comforting sound and yet Jim was not particularly inclined to worry. Not because there wasn’t danger in Izzy Hands’ hatred of Captain Bonnet, but because well Jim hated Captain Bonnet right now and they weren’t particularly inclined to care much about his safety.

“He wants to put it off, the plan, the same thing we’ve done to every ship that’s been stupid enough to take us on board for the last twenty or so years. Used to hate what we did, hated the sneaking and the play acting - much preferred an honest boarding, no bullshit in that. Every one knew their place then, join us or die, but now it’s over I don’t know if I can cope.”

Was … was he drunk? Because Jim … Jim didn’t think they had ever heard Izzy Hands say this much in one go to anyone, let alone Jim themselves.

“He won’t even just leave, just cut the crap and go back to our own ship, with our own crew. He wants to stay, he … what was it he said… wants to try to be that fine gentleman the honest way. He’s tired of being the little grey cave hobbit, with his grasping broken fingers. I told him it was just a bullshit fairytale, and do you know what he said to me then? Said I hadn’t understood the story - me not understood the story of the One Ring. My whole fucking life is that story.”

His whole fucking life, his whole fucking life. Oh Barnaby, oh  Mobius and Cosmo, it couldn’t be.

 “Then he said I just didn’t want to be happy, as if happiness could only be measured in the silks and the pastries you shoved into your gob at second breakfast. But then I can’t exactly argue with him can I? Can’t get him to leave, he’s my captain. And he’s under a terrible spell. All I can do is break the spell, and best way to do that is by gutting the fool that cast it in the first place.”

Jim should probably tell someone Izzy Hands was saying this, and if they could have brought themselves to care enough about Stede Bonnet’s life they might have even tried to. But they didn’t care and so they didn’t try, instead they just stood there as Izzy Hands turned his back on them and stumbled away into the darkness. And as he did so, he hummed a tune, an old hobbit tune, an old hobbit hymn. The very first one that Nana had ever told Jim. And Jim, why Jim couldn’t help but to mutter the words, the words that every hobbit child knew as well as their own family names. 

“Flesh of the gentle
Heart of the strong
Give thy form for Bread and Bone
And lay thy head in Mother’s Womb.
Seek thee now where bond is strong
I give thee now, thy Mortal Form.”

It would probably not be considered a very good  song by most people’s standards but then it wasn’t really intended to be one anymore. After all who would dare to sing of the Last Ringbearer - the beast whose soul was forged from a Silmaril and cursed to return to mortal life time and time again - outside of the temples and prayer chambers? Certainly not Jim’s folk, certainly not any hobbit who still had his wits with him. Maybe Izzy hands was mad, but no … no even intoxicated there was too much cohesion in his reasoning. Perhaps mad humans could fake such order in their speech but Hobbick’s Seed had always been of a more honest stock then that.

Which meant … which meant what he had hinted at … the thing he had basically said out loud to Jim was true. What hobbit had the Ringbearer’s eyes but had not his blood flowing through his veins? Why, the Ring-bearer himself of course.

Jim felt sick, and weak, and like they would like nothing better than to curl up in the dark of their cabin for another week. And yet they could not be so weak as that - no one else on the ship knew what Izzy Hands … what he was. At least, Jim doubted it, for they were too human for that. Too much creatures of the here and now, they did not sing the old songs of the time that had come before. They did not even remember them, not in any true form anymore.

Maybe this Ringbearer would satisfy himself with the death of the Captain, and honestly Jim still couldn’t bring themselves to care about Stede’s impending death. But, could they really afford to risk Oluwande’s life on that assumption alone? No, no, they had to tell him … tell him something anyway.

Maybe not the whole truth, not yet anyway - he wouldn’t have understood it in time, but a bit of it maybe. That Izzy Hands was a dangerous creature no one of any sense could deny. That he hated Stede Bonnet, was apparent to even the clueless. That he was more than capable of killing the man if he chose to, yes, Oluwande would believe that without question. So that would be the truth that Jim told him this night, as for the rest of it - well, the truth behind such stories was meant to be forgotten. Was meant to be nothing more than a fairy story for children. That wasn’t true, that would never be true, but maybe just for one night Jim could trick themselves into believing it.

***

They had been too late - by the time they had found Oluwande standing on the deck of the ship along with the rest of the crew, Izzy Hands had already made his move against Stede.

He had challenged him to a sword fight.

A sword fight that he had lost.

Granted on a technicality, by getting his sword stuck in the gut of Stede Bonnet, but still it was almost enough to make Jim laugh. Perhaps if they hadn’t known, hadn’t seen the truth behind the green, unsettling eyes of Izzy Hands, they would have. At the very least they would have joined in the titters of the rest of the crew as Izzy Hands, Izzy Hands the bastard, the First Mate of the Great Blackbeard was kicked off the ship in disgrace. Sent off in a little dingy with nothing but one of Roach’s sandwiches to stave off the hunger that was likely to have driven him mad in the time it would take to row to shore. 

But Jim wasn’t like the rest of the crew, for Jim had been raised by a hobbit, had been raised as a hobbit - although Nana had never pretended they were of blood. Jim knew the truths that hid under the  deepest levels of this world’s oceans. The tales of the land that had come before, of the Middle Earth - and the Ringbearers that had once walked it.

And so Jim did not laugh when they looked into the dark green eyes of Izzy Hands, as he was gently lowered down into the water below. They didn’t laugh because they knew enough to be afraid. To be afraid of what would come next, for creatures of the old world, why their vengeance was a terrible thing to behold. And when it came to Ringbearers well … death was usually the greatest mercy they could offer you.

So it was almost kind of a relief when Izzy Hands sicked the British Navy on them. He could have done so much worse, he could have destroyed them down to their very souls. Snuffed out the spark of their existence, erased them from all living memory, with a single click of his fingers. He must have really loved Blackbeard, to restrain himself to this - Jim mused as they were tackled to the ground by an over eager British Navel officer.

Maybe for once, Stede Bonnet had a point, painful as that was to admit.

Love really was, their saving grace.

End