Mini fic grab bag! PintelxRagetti
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--there was too much blood, too much fucking blood, it was running down the deck it was creeping towards his boots, it was—
There was something wrong with his eye --
Ragetti stabbed the sandbag with his knife and coarse yellow sand spurted out like a slit artery, hitting the deck and he threw the bag blindly into the fray and it hit the bo'sun in the back of the head and the pirate slashed across his throat with his cutlass and the bo-sun hit his knees in the boards clapping a hand over his throat trying to stop --
Man in front of him. Ragetti ducked, a pirate cutlass chopped into the bulwark behind him and Ragetti scrambled away, boots slipping in the blood and sand barely giving any tooth at all and there was all the screaming and the smoke and the dying and –
(there was something wrong with his eye)
--and the blood oh fuck he couldn't fight Ragetti could barely fucking SEE there'd been an explosion with the cannons and the powder still burned on his face and there was something wrong with his eye something had come spurting down the side of his face like a popped blister and it wasn't blood--
-- The Royal Navy it had been a surprise for both ships he hoped, the Black Pearl catching them in the wind like a zephyr and they weren't carrying anything not that he knew of they weren't carrying one fucking thing the pirates could want and—
--"RAGS!" somebody shouted behind him and Ragetti spun around to see a cutlass pulling back to kill him on the spot and suddenly the man was bleeding, the pirate's legs buckled and Pintel pulled his cutlass out of the man's jaw (he'd run him right through from behind and he'd hit that artery and--) Pintel grabbed Ragetti's hand ripped him away from the bulwarks and pushed him, making him move, making him get AWAY and oh Holy Mary he'd almost died and there was blood on his coat and there was something wrong with his EYE—
Ragetti, half dazed, reached up to touch, probing the burnt skin on his blind side feeling the bone of his orbital his fingers sliding right on through into his socket and touching the damp, painful muscles of the wall–
"PINT! ME EYE'S GONE!" he shrieked, gut wrenching up in a new and personal horror and Pintel put him behind him, pushing Ragetti back to safety with one arm and the other hacking away, trying to stay alive against the odds and oh fuck they were losing they were LOSING—
"RAGS!" Pintel shouted over the chaos, back against Ragetti, Ragetti's back to the forecastle wall and the man pinned and protected behind him. Pintel made his opponent lose a finger and Ragetti was making a shrill sound, a panic sound, blood smeared up his boots, it was on his coat and his face still burned and was damp and sticky with the vitreous fluids of his EYE his god damned EYE and he was only 17 he didn't want to be in the navy what was he doing here what was he DOING here—
"Rags, listen to me!" Pintel was shouting and Ragetti strangled on the panic noise, coming out in little bleats and trembles "You're not gonne die!" Pintel shouted, getting a gash on his forearm from the man trying to kill him. Blood on Pintel's coat. "You're not gonna die so take a deep breath, calm down and DO SOMETHING!"
--and
--and blood. The man against them lunged and pierced and the tip of the cutlass ripped into the meat of Pintel's shoulder and Ragetti saw the point press out through the back of the coat saw the blood leap out around it and Pintel HOWLED and slashed and suddenly the man had his arms around his stomach trying to hold his intestines inside and Pintel gave one more slash and blood—
"PINTS!"
Ragetti grabbed him from behind as Pintel's knees locked, the sudden loss of so much blood making him dizzy. Ragetti shoved Pintel back against the wall and switched places, gut aching with terror, but Pintel had been hurt trying to protect HIM. He took Pintel's cutlass from him and went at ready, nearly sick, but out on the deck someone cheered.
Their Captain had just surrendered his sword.
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There really was no damned point to it.
In the dark, on Dog Watch, they snuck away from the rest of the crew (it was the only time the hold of the ship was empty). And they hid in the crates of goods headed for the island, safe in blind darkness, and safe from the curse. As safe as they could be. Pintel would kiss him roughly in the dark, calloused hands pulling at his shirt, running over the cold flat of his stomach, his ribs, his chest. Pintel would fumble Ragetti's belt free and slip his trousers down on his hips, catching hold of an erection that wouldn't do either of them any good, that would only begin to hurt as Pintel fucked him there against the crates, kissing his shoulders and the back of his neck, muffling his own noises as it began to hurt.
Pintel would stop, unsatisfied and aching, and his arms would stay wrapped around him, face pressed to the crook of the man's neck and breathing shallow as he waited for the ache to stop. He'd just hold him there, in the dark, for maybe ten minutes or an hour, just holding him and aching and needing, and it was the only time they had. It was the only feeling they had.
Sometimes, it seemed like that ache was all they'd EVER been able to feel.
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"Ye'd best quit yer belly-achin." Pintel snapped, sitting down on the bench next to the scrawny young man. Dinner (hard tack and weak tea, until further notice) was sitting untouched in his lap. "Yer in the navy now and the sooner ye get it in that empty little head o yours, the better."
The boy looked at him sidelong, one of his eyes still nearly swelled shut from the pounding he'd just taken. And Pintel half suspected he'd been crying again, too.
"Puttin' up a fuss isn't gonna make em turn around and take ye home, ye know." Pintel grumbled, gnawing on his own tasteless food (and he was pretty sure that was a weevil in there. He'd learned it was best not to look.) "They're just gonne beat the brains outta ye."
The boy, who'd been legally a part of the British Navy for a week now, turned his pathetic kicked-dog expression onto him. It was a look that would get Pintel into trouble. "But ye don't understand, I CAN'T be in the Navy." The boy explained, like it would somehow make a difference if someone just understood his plight. "I was kidnapped! Me Mum… she'll be needin' me! An' she's worried, by now! I've got to get home!"
Pintel snorted. "Ye really don't get it, do ye lad."
The boy just stared at him, wet eyed.
"Ye've been volunteered." Pintel said, and gave a cruel grin. "Welcome to the Royal Navy."
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It was the early days, the best days, the days when he was silly and stupid in love; a dangerous combination. It was the days when he hummed under his breath, a little tunelessly (music was not one of Ragetti's stronger points) It was the days his chest felt too tight, the days he would wear a stupid grin at any task. It was the days he almost didn't care about discretion, when he wanted to climb up on the rail and shout that it was good, that it was right, and that finally, just finally, he was in love with somebody who loved him to, and what could be more right than that?
It was the early days. And he was in love. And it seemed like maybe, finally, everything was going to be alright.
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"Eh, it's all a bunch of shite, anyway." Pintel was grumbling, drunk and dirty and smelling like he'd just rolled out of a whore house. Ragetti looked at him from across the table, toying with the neck of a rum bottle in his hands and looking only slightly more sober than his friend.
"What is?"
Pintel made a vague gesture towards one of the men, who was trying his damnedest to woo the barmaid, an honest woman. He was telling her how beautiful she was, how much he adored her, loved her, and how cruel she was to deny him.
"That 'love' thing." He snorted. "Just an excuse to dip yer wick for free."
Ragetti stared at him. "Wot d'ye mean?"
"Well," Pintel tried to straighten up and look slightly more intelligent. "Ye see the girl, right? She's pretty, she's charmin, ye go head over heels for 'er." He explained. "Ye'll do anything for 'er. An' when ye finally get 'er in to bed, POP." He snapped his fingers. "Ye go off and yer done with 'er. Can't figure out what ye ever saw in the witch in the first place."
Pintel took a swig. Ragetti gave him a sullen look. He'd been giving him looks like that since he'd wandered back into the pub, reeking of sex and smoke.
"Yer wrong." Ragetti said simply, still fiddling with the mouth of the bottle.
Pintel frowned at him. "How d'ye figure?"
"If that was all it was, I'd've been done with ye last night." Ragetti said simply.
Pintel stared at him.
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It was dark, it was night, and there was something wrong with him. Pintel realized this the moment his eyes opened, lungs feeling too small and an ache bolting out from his chest, creeping down his shoulder and into his arm, turning his hand into a claw. As he lay there, staring up into darkness with wide eyes and gasping, the ache crept out further, down his ribs, towards his leg.
The heart. There was something wrong with his heart.
Terrified at the personal betrayal, Pintel rolled in his hammock and fell out onto the boards with a thud, jarring the bones that weren't as young as they used to be, making the pain in his arm and now his leg jump up at him, throbbing and burning and insistent.
No one woke up.
Pintel choked and clawed for the hammock above his, catching the hem of a coat instead and pulling on it, the moonlight catching only slivers of things.
Ragetti snorted in his sleep and tried to shift away, swatting vaguely at Pintel's hand, and Pintel dragged on him, panicked and unable to make the words come out of his throat. Eventually Ragetti groaned, half sitting up in the hammock. "Whaddaya want?" he mumbled groggily, scrubbing at the empty socket where his eye used to be. "Pinters?"
Too long. It hurt too much and things were getting soft around the edges. Pintel choked again, feeling that, of the thousands of ways for a pirate to die, that this would be his was remarkably cruel. He couldn't go on his way to Hell yet. He had to see him. He had to tell him.
He had to tell him…
The moon went out completely, and it was silent.
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He was nothing that Pintel was attracted to. He was all sharp angles and pointed ribs, beard stubble and grease. There was nothing attractive in that rotten toothed grin, or that clumsy, unselfconscious hand clawing his shoulder. There was nothing attractive about the noises he made (Good Lord, the noises he would make) or the stupid things he would say or the way his mouth pulled down in a grimace that almost looked like pain while he was fucking him, or the way he insisted on kissing his afterwards, or the way he looked when he fell asleep on his lap those rare nights in port, or….
Or….
There was nothing there Pintel was attracted to.
Nothing at all.
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"Do ye love me, Pint?" Ragetti asked, toying absently with the fur on Pintel's chest. Ragetti was laying with his head on his shoulder, already spent and comfortable.
"No." Pintel said flatly, covering that fidgeting hand to still it.
"Why not?"
"'Cause you're an idiot."
"So you don't love me, then?"
"Exactly." Pintel said.
Ragetti, nonplussed, thought about it for a moment.
"I don't believe you."
Pintel just grunted.
"You wouldn't tell me you loved me even if you did." Ragetti said.
"Got it in one. Shut up and settle down."
Ragetti smirked, and did as he was told.
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