The Way He Needed Like No Convincing To Upend His Entire Life. - Tumblr Posts
COME WITH ME, he says, like it's the easiest thing in the world. like izzy could just step over the railing & into the waiting tender & desert his post & never look back. like he could leave this ship — the only place he had ever felt that he belonged to something — & sail into the night with the most beautiful man he’d ever seen & not the faintest clue of what might wait for them tomorrow. ❝ me ... go with you ? ❞ he repeats, his disbelief plain. surely it couldn't be that easy. offers like this weren’t extended to men like him.
but edward teach is still lingering there in the starlight looking at him expectantly, like he actually wants izzy at his side. & he is right, after all — if his superiors discover that he had helped their prisoner escape, he would hang for treason. even if they didn’t, failing in his duties as night watchman was likely to earn him twenty lashes. izzy had accepted the price all along; it had been just another inevitable cost of life under the crown. but when he is offered another course, it’s as if the tethers that had been holding him aboard are severed in an instant. & izzy pulls himself over the railing to let himself drop into the rowboat in a single decisive movement, the descent line still in his hand. ❝ you know, something tells me i might be fucked either way, ❞ he says, even as a smile comes to his face, wide & wild. & izzy gradually releases his grip, the small boat lowering into the dark water below. ❝ but going with you will probably be more fun, eh ? ❞
edward breathes in the night air as the man speaks, eyes closed, already tasting freedom along with the salt on his tongue. he doesn't appear to be, but he is listening and closely at that, his gut telling him that his improbable saviour is right ( even the navy happens upon decent sailors once in a while, it seems ). when edward opens his eyes again, it's sudden, the look of someone startled out of his wits and is not quite grasping what's going on. it has nothing to do with the pain lancing up his leg in steady waves and everything to do with the man still standing behind the railing, up on the ship. his half delirious brain must have taken quite the leap without his mouth following through, simply assuming he wouldn't have left there alone, and is now struggling to catch up to speed.
'' hey, no. wait. '' jaw clenches as he struggles to pull himself on his feet again, hanging on to a rope secured to the side of the hull. for some reason, the way he used we sits like an anchor weighting on his sternum, pressing down and not supposed to be there. '' this fucking place is a cage, don't you see it? '' oh he could throw dirt on his majesty's flag all night long, but they don't have that much time so edward will have to make do. '' come with me. you're fucked if they find out what you did, anyway. ''