Title: Silhouettes
Category: Television Shows » Black Sails
Author: And The Moment's Gone
Language: English, Rating: Rated: T+
Words: 3,255
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2 finale. You don't need to see it, but you need to know what happened.

Official Disclaimer: All Black Sails characters and plots belong to Starz, and Michael Bay, I do not hold stock either the company or the man. Charles Vane, Eleanor Guthrie, and any other character featured are NOT mine. The title comes from the Of Mice and Men song Silhouettes and I don't own that either.


Quick Author's Note: This fanfic would not be made possible without truegodofthearena's 8tracks playlists (seriously folks, go check them out), and realmofvane listening to my justifications. If you do tumblr, and your don't follow either of them, do it now.


With Flint and what was left of the Walrus's vanguard in the Captain's cabin, Vane didn't hesitate to commandeer the Navigation Room. He'd never handled sleeping in the hold with the rest of the crew well, the smell of stale sweat and the too close walls fraying on his memories like a blade on rigging. Teach had been the first to allow him to sleep above deck, on a cot in the forecastle deck, provided that he take the last watch of the night, and kept himself in line during the day, and more often than not, Jack would find him there in the dark hours of the morning on the Ranger, giving just enough warning for him to slip back into his berth in time for the crew to come alive.

It never occurred to him that he hadn't thought to ask Flint for this, their fledgling agreements sustaining their need for speech until the settlement was nothing but ash, and the men seemed to be able to work together without incident, for the time being. Once they'd made way after the destruction of Charles Towne, the one concession that he'd offered was that his room also housed as many of his crew as could fit without him feeling crowded.

It was the easiest way to ensure that no one wound up stabbed to death in their sleep, and that he was able to pretend to keep his men's counsel in route to Tortuga.

He didn't bother to question why they'd all fled after they'd received word of Nassau, and what had befallen Eleanor Guthrie. He'd been told later – by a very solemn Flint – that the second the idiot at the tavern relayed the news and raised a glass in 'good riddance to the bitch' that he'd behaved rather tamely, extricating himself from the whore on his lap, smashing the poor sod's ale into his face - undoubtedly breaking one of his arms - before growling to Bixby to keep the men's fucking mouths shut and stalking off into the night.

He'd had worse reactions to bad news, after all.

Other than to make sure that he was physically all right after the altercation, Flint left him to his own devices, handling the restocking and regrouping of the crew, assigning Bones and Scott to work out the quartering of the men and delegating jobs, and plotting the course back to Nassau.

After his second hangover, a two-day long affair that rendered him unable to hold the simplest of foods down, Vane decided that he'd been long overdue some manual labor. He informed the men that he was going to be working with the rigging crew, repairing the foremast and handling the topsail.

It had been years since he had thrown himself into the day to day of a ship. While he had always been hands-on with the crew of the Ranger, never asking more from his men than he would be willing to do, and never allowing the vanguard to risk themselves without him, he had never voluntarily stepped onto the deck to share the work after he'd been made captain. The men had needed someone to lead them, to give the orders and see that they were obeyed. Sharing the load would have confused them.

If Flint was bothered by the role he chose to play during the daylight hours on the ship, he said nothing. It kept him from being drunk, kept him from picking unnecessary fights, and kept him busy. After all, before they could find a way to bring Nassau back from the brink of chaos, they needed to get there.

By his count, they were two days to home on the first truly calm night they'd had since leaving port. The masts had been secured, sails rehung, and men amiable when Vane retired to his cabin, taking an ewer of water and his dinner plate with him. He ate in silence, focusing on the tasks awaiting him on deck, the job ahead of them once they reached shore, and the promise of strategizing with Flint in the morning.

He spent the next hours with inkpot and parchment, drawing up the repairs that needed to be made to the fort by his best recollection, the division of the island, and how best he and Flint could establish dominance when they returned.

The knock on the door didn't faze him. He'd asked for the helmsman to alert him to last watch. No matter how he exhausted himself during the day, sleep hadn't come easy since they had docked in Tortuga, and if he could aid the other men in shifts, and ensure that they weren't bedraggled and fatigued when they reached port, all the better.

He didn't look up from the table to bellow, "Enter."

Starkson, the cabin boy they had picked up at port usually opened the door just enough to give him the news, or to relay a message before scurrying off again, most of the time forgetting to close the door behind him. So when Mister Scott carefully slid through the wooden door, bottle in hand, it took him a good moment to realize that this was probably the first time since Charles Towne that he had actually looked at the man. "I found this in the galley, hidden behind the water barrels." Scott set the bottle on the navigation table beside Vane. The captain didn't ask what the bottle contained before lifting it to his lips, nor did he really think that Scott actually knew. But it burned going down, and he found himself in desperate need of that.

It didn't occur until he set the bottle back between them that while almost everyone on the crew of the Spanish Galleon had had a working relationship with Eleanor, it was not only he and Flint that knew the woman for what she was.

Vane didn't invite Scott to sit, didn't acknowledge that he was still in the room for the most part. They partook in the drink with a less than companionable silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

"Eleanor had always been a serious girl."

He'd almost forgotten that Scott was in the room with him when he spoke, an hour later. The older man was on the other side of the navigation table, facing the large window, eyes unfocused. "From the day her father placed her in my care and quit the island, she knew who she had to be, and what she had to do to be it."

The first time he'd seen Eleanor on the beach she was thirteen and fatherless, having been that way for the past five years of her life. Her considerable education had come from the tutor that Richard Guthrie has employed in order to be able to see her suitably married off – no doubt in hopes that there could be some profit from it – and what she learned at the knee of Mister Scott in the warehouse. She excelled at sums, mastered languages, memorized ships and captains and hulls and hold space. By the age of twelve she knew which crews camped where on the beach, recognized ships and banners, and had a firm grasp of which captain valued discretion amongst his crew, and which sailed by reputation alone. Eleanor worked in the tavern the next year, managing the books and pouring drinks, and by the winter of her fourteenth year, she had established her office on the ground floor of the building, where Mister Scott allowed her to sort through the leads and warehouse ledgers, actively participating in the decisions regarding the business.

Some captains adored her, encouraging her tenaciousness, boasting of her to her father. Some captains hated her, cursing the girl for being exactly what she was and not apologizing for her ambitions. Charles Vane was riveted. He saw a tiny, seemingly fragile woman made of steel: willful, passionate, and every bit as intense as her male counterparts.

"You tempered that."

Vane's eyes flashed cold for a moment, contradiction on his lips. Eleanor Guthrie had been a great many things: fire and ice, a typhoon enclosed in pretty packaging, with an iron will, a sharp tongue, and a willingness to wield both in her quest for creating something more than she had been given.

But she'd never been tempered.

Even in the darkest corner of his tent when it was just him and her and the night, she had never allowed him to see all that she was. That was a weakness that she couldn't afford to show, and he wouldn't have been able to pretend not to see.

"I know you are thinking that that was impossible," Scott didn't acknowledge that the look on his face damn near shouted it. Just kept standing and looking out of the large window onto the water. "That Eleanor Guthrie could not be tamed; refused to be controlled.

"But you calmed her spirit." Scott took another sip of the bottle. Although it was entirely likely that Vane wouldn't know this, the first time he and Eleanor had fought – over the fact that at age fifteen, she didn't believe that she needed the protection of the men that Scott had retained for such a purpose and how if she kept prancing around like she wasn't a young girl on an island of pirates, he would have no choice but to assign members of his crew to her that wouldn't take 'no' for an answer – his Guthrie charge had raged and fumed in the confines of her office for hours before sleeping longer and harder than she had in weeks.

And every time after that, every argument where he pushed her for the sake of letting her push back, every chance he gave her to make her feel strong and protected only stoked the fire.

And the nights after that…

"You quieted her thoughts." Scott realized as soon as Eleanor had fought for full control of the warehouse that the days of her pretending to follow his guidelines were numbered. He tolerated her rebellion with as much grace as he could afford, but the first time he had to send men to retrieve Eleanor from the Ranger camp in the middle of the night, he'd implored to Vane on behalf of her safety for their dalliances to be moved to her room at the Inn if they were to continue. More often than not, they complied. "And regardless of what she did to you, or what she let you do, she loved you so fiercely that she defied her own logic and reasoning."

That was something that Charles didn't have to be told. Especially since she hadn't been alone in that. The list of things that he did to ensure her safety after they'd parted ways was second in ferocity only to the list of things that he did in defense of her while he was allowed to consider her his. From plundering ships that refused to do business with a woman and tried to take their prize elsewhere to finding a compelling argument as to why the man who had publically threatened her needed to die horribly, his sins were great.

"And when she ended it. When business prevailed over her wants, it physically pained her to let that go."

It was a move that had been in both of their best interests at the time. Rumor had started among his men that Vane had gone soft, that he catered to the needs of a woman over the crew, and he had to threaten twice as many men and work twice as hard to keep his crew in order, despite the leads they were given, the prizes that they took. On Eleanor's part, the situation hadn't been that different. The Ranger's prizes were second only to the Walrus and the men that had praised her for her tenacity and strength suddenly began to taunt her for playing favorites with her favors.

When she'd told him of her decision, he'd fought against it.

He could handle his men. Those that wouldn't fall in line, or decided to subvert his captaincy would be replaced. The scores that they plundered, and the rush of the chase would be enough to keep the men that he wanted anyway. Eleanor Guthrie was the only thing on the entire earth that he had allowed himself to keep. He wouldn't allow her to throw that away for fear of appearing as if either one of them'd gone soft.

But the little girl had been cleverer than he had given her credit for. And she locked him out of her bed and her heart in less time than it had taken his crew to go hunting their latest prize.

And when he fought her on it – and oh how they fought – his crew stopped receiving leads. Then his usual terms were revoked. Mister Scott had told him that it was just business; that if he brought in a few more good hauls his percentages would return to where they were. Eleanor refused to meet with him in any capacity. And up until the moment when she was so pissed at him over his interference in the Walrus's vote that she punched him in the middle of her own tavern, he never thought he'd see the fire in her eyes – the uncompromising passion that she reserved only for him- again.

Truth be told, even when examining the woman that he would be forced to retaliate against, he seemed to find himself picturing her as she'd been when he'd last seen her.

Not the woman who had locked him in the fort, blue eyes shining with the tears that even then she couldn't shed. It wasn't even the woman that had called him on his words; when he laced his plea for her to let him keep the girl – and his pride – with the thinly veiled threat that they both knew he would rather die than see through.

No, the Eleanor that he reconciled in his mind, the one that he'd sworn to his men would give them their due, or pay dearly, was the one that had waltz into his room in the fort and demanded that he not 'say a fucking word,' and 'just sit there and listen.' It was the haughty woman who was so sure that she was right that she didn't stop to consider what her way would do to anyone else. It was the woman that had gotten it into her head that taking Abigail Ashe down the hill, and creating a 'legitimate' New Providence Island was the only way to prosper, that he wanted to make pay.

Charles Vane could see both women in his mind's eye now; slowly melding into the deity that he'd literally killed to keep safe.

"The fuck's it matter now?" The words were drenched in anger, but they lacked the bite that should have followed. The only thing that Mister Scott accomplished – in whatever the fuck this trip down memory lane was – was to force him to reconcile that the woman Hornigold had handed over to the Royal Navy was most likely the first of the two Eleanor's, not the second. Her strength was her mask, the persona that she paraded down the beach in hopes that the men didn't see that there wasn't a moment that she wasn't afraid they would realize that her power hung by a thread. "We're two days from port. Almost two weeks behind the Scarborough." Vane could have been shouting now, it was very hard to tell. "And even if there was a ship ready to leave the second we arrived, and I could convince Flint to let me supply and chase after her, I wouldn't have the ordnances to go against what the Scarborough has at its disposal!"

Scott chose his next words carefully. The captain that sat on the cot in front of him was not the same man that wandered the decks. Vane's control was tenuous at best, and Scott didn't want to be around when it finally snapped. "I never meant to suggest that you go after her."

"Then what the fuck are you doing here?" He was on his feet now, stalking across the room to avoid the temptation of planting his fist in the middle of Scott's face. No matter the satisfaction that it would bring, the frustration that such an action would tamp, he didn't think that it was something Flint would be able to overlook.

And it amazed the shit out of him that he had enough faculties to recognize that point.

"What possible purpose could you have of coming in here and waving the past in my face if not to try to get me to go after her?" Vane shuttered at the sound of the bottle breaking against the wall. He didn't even remember taking it from the table.

Scott didn't even seem to notice.

"The men are under the assumption," he started in the same tone that he'd held throughout the whole conversation. "That your anger stems from losing the opportunity to bring Eleanor to heel yourself."

It was actually the tamest of the rumors that had spread with the current mood of the Galleon's two captains. Flint was seething in private, stoic with the crew, and penitent in the presence of those he trusted most. He should have seen Hornigold's betrayal and circumvented it, not left Eleanor alone on an island threatening to swallow her whole. Vane's manicism was borderline hysteria, never stopping, never stilling in front of the crew.

After allowing a breath for his words to be taken in, Scott took a step forward, cautiously. "I do not presume to know what thoughts you have." It was a sentence that both men knew that he had uttered frequently in his years in the Guthrie's employ. "But I know what I think." He paused, his next breath soft and his eyes firmly on Vane's face. "And if you are going to try to hate her for putting herself into this position, for putting you in this position," he corrected. "Then I thought it warranted for you to remember why it could be no other way."

There was a quiet moment, when Scott seemed to be either trying to find a way to dismiss himself, or waiting for comment, before he nodded, uncrossing his arms. He gave the Captain a wide berth as he moved around the table back to the door. And as a final thought, one hand on the catch he said, "Eleanor would not expect you to come for her, not because she did not think you capable, but because she could not endure the thought of you captive beside her."

Vane didn't hear the door shut.

He didn't hear Mister Scott telling the boy that he would not be on deck for the watch.

The navigation table thundered to the ground as he slammed into it, candles and maps and implements skittering across the floor. His cot was next, physically ripped from the floor to be launched across the room. Chairs and charts and the ewer, nothing was safe from the typhoon once it started.

He didn't stop until there was nothing left; until the whirlwind told him that he had nothing left.

Then Charles Vane collapsed to the floor, and finally let himself sob.