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FIC: Fidelis (Our Flag Means Death, Fang/Izzy Hands)
Title: Fidelis
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Fang/Izzy Hands
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~5600
Content Info: This fic is set in the afterlife. There is major character death referenced, but the characters in question are still present in the story.
Summary: Izzy has spent the last decade on a small island in the middle of nowhere with only a dog for company. One day, an old friend comes to call.
Notes: Inspired by the ‘Fang’ and ‘Water’ squares of my 2025 Izzy Hands Bingo card. Also available on AO3.
The dog was kicking up a fuss when Izzy awoke that morning. He sat up blearily, shaking off the remnants of a dream about someone weeping at a party, and watched in mingled annoyance and amusement as the terrier raced around the cottage in an overexcited whirlwind that wrote off any further sleep.
Onto the bed, off the bed, onto the bed and off it. Bark, bark, whine, whine.
Later, Izzy would realize he should have paid more attention to this. But the dog was a dog, and the idea of this day bringing anything meaningfully different from all the ones before was so far-fetched that Izzy couldn’t entertain it.
“Oi,” he said, scruffing the creature on its next leap onto the bed and giving it a shake.
The dog immediately rolled onto its back in clear solicitation of ear-scratches and belly-rubs that only an utter mug would provide after being so rudely awakened. It whined again, wiggling against Izzy’s hip and trying to swim backwards like an otter into his lap. The little thing was always heavier and hotter than Izzy expected, a furry warming pan with a madly wagging tail, grunting in entitled canine satisfaction as the mug obliged.
Izzy had never been able to remember the thing’s name, but he wasn’t about to start feeling guilty about that. Animals didn’t really have names, at least not in the way that people did. It wasn’t as if they were christened, unless the upper crust were doing even dafter things with their pampered pets these days. A name for a dog was only a way to call it home at night. Hand it over from one master to another and it would answer to something else soon enough, and just as readily to a whistle or to the sound of a dish of scraps hitting the ground.
Still, a lingering awkwardness had kept him from renaming it. “Oi” and “You” got the job done fine, and what reason did Izzy have for calling it home anyhow? The island was small, and the lazy thing inevitably turned back up by late afternoon to nap on the porch until dusk.
“Come on, trouble,” he said, giving it a thump on the haunch. “Time to get to it.”
He got out of bed and let the dog outside to make its rounds. The door was left propped open afterwards, a habit passed down from Izzy’s mother, who had always insisted that close air was bad for the constitution. Not that it mattered here, but what did it hurt? Izzy had a wash out of the basin, got dressed, made up the bed, and then headed out back to the woodshed.
They didn’t go through much fuel, the two of them. Days on the island were uniformly mild, and the nights were still. The sun rose and set behind the endless cloud cover with the sober and steadfast habits it kept around the equator, and Izzy followed its example. He only really found himself in need of firelight for the short stretch between what he arbitrarily thought of as suppertime and when he went to bed, when he sometimes sat up and whittled.
But there was a woodshed made to be filled with wood, and there were hours made to be filled with work. So he went, axe in hand, to spend the morning bucking and splitting logs to the rhythm of the waves breaking on the craggy shore.
An hour passed in the usual way, or maybe two. Who could really tell, with the sun behind the clouds? All he knew was that the sea was washing the rocks at its regular pace. The heft of the axe was the same as it always was. The wood split. The muscles in his back stretched. Nothing consciously struck him as being amiss until the tenth or twelfth time he had to push his hair out of his eyes.
He paused then, squinting as he identified the cause. The breeze from the north had given way to a westerly one. He fixed his hair again and had split another two logs before he realized: the winds had never changed since the day he’d arrived.
Izzy straightened up and examined the overcast sky. The low, flat clouds had parted slightly at the seams, letting through a measure of a strange, thin light he associated with sun showers.
A yip sounded from down by the water, and he swivelled to find the dog on the dock, a wiggling blur of rough coat on the weathered wood. Its attention was fixed on the horizon. Izzy shaded his eyes and followed its gaze. You couldn’t spot any shore from the island, but the distance from where you stood to the horizon still never looked quite right. It was too close sometimes, too far away at others. But whether the edge of the world was its proper three miles off or not wasn’t his concern right now.
His concern was the boat.
The axe fell from his hand and landed in the grass with a dull thump. The vessel was only a dark speck on the pale grey water, but Izzy knew the way a dinghy moved under the power of a strong rower. Same as he knew, deep in whatever heart was left to him, who was holding the oars.
He bent down to recover the axe, an act interrupted by the dog racing over to bark excitedly at him.
“I see him,” he said, nudging the animal away from the axe-blade with the toe of his boot out of sheer habit. “I see him.”
The dog dashed back to the dock, and Izzy drove the axe into the splitting stump with a heavy thunk. The westerly breeze stirred again, and he shivered as it fluttered down the back of his collar.
He stood there for some time, watching the speck on the horizon grow larger, eyeing its progress to make certain it was on course. Then, swallowing hard, he turned and went to draw a pail of water from the well. He carried the bucket into the house, where he filled up the kettle. Hospitality had never been his strong suit, and it wasn’t as though he’d had any opportunity to practice if he wasn’t going to give into madness and throw a tea party for the dog. But he could at least fix some coffee, or the next best thing.
Not much grew here besides a few twisted trees that never stayed felled, but chicory clung to the path that ran from behind the cottage down to the cove. It replenished itself in what seemed like the usual course of time whenever Izzy pulled some up, although he’d never once seen it flower. Now he fished a little of the dried root out of the sack that hung by the fireplace. He sat down at the table and started the work of chopping it up fine before grinding it in the mortar and pestle.
His movements were unhurried; it was some ways to shore. At least it had been for him.
He listened to the sea, grateful to have something to occupy his hands as he waited. Eventually, the sound of oars breaking the surface of the water drifted up to the cottage. It grew clearer minute by minute, punctuated by the dog’s increasingly desperate whines. Then came a shout, in a voice he hadn’t heard in waking hours for a very long time. The splash of someone jumping into the shallows. Barking, barking, barking.
Izzy got up and built a fire. He put the kettle on to boil. His eyes travelled over the line of battered tin cups on the shelf, but he refrained from presuming to take two down until he could hear footsteps.
They were faint, but after so long with no one on the island but him and the dog, he could almost feel them. He closed his eyes, picturing pebbles shifting on the shore. The dry, pale grass lying down under a heavy tread. The faint new depressions on the hard-packed trail that led up to the cottage, spreading over the ones he’d worn in it.
His body shook as the grey light in the doorway darkened.
“Izzy?”
He turned, mouth opened to reply, but anything he’d rehearsed was strangled out of him as Fang strode inside and yanked him into a crushing bear hug that lifted him straight off his feet.
"Izzy!"
Fang was still carrying the dog in his arms, and the animal was pressed into the embrace with no more warning than Izzy. It squirmed, whining, little paws scrabbling in protest before it surrendered itself to its fate with a huffy sigh and gave Izzy’s cheek several sympathetic licks.
“Christ,” Izzy wheezed. If the dog was a warming pan, the effect of Fang’s embrace was like being plunged into a hot spring.
The heat spread through him, sinking through flesh and bone, reviving the memory of living. The ground returned to meet his feet as he was set down and held at arm’s length, Fang’s grip tight on his shoulders as dark, teary eyes swept over him.
It hadn’t occurred to Izzy to wonder what he looked like here. There was no way of being certain anyhow, not with the sea so restless and the well-water so clear under an overcast sky. Besides, vanity had a short shelf life when your only company rolled in sargassum and licked its own bollocks.
All he knew was that nothing about his body felt particularly pressing, in the way he’d taken for granted after the growing pains of his youth had calmed down and the aches of middle age hadn’t set in yet. His left leg was made of wood and gold paint, but he walked on it with thoughtless ease no matter how long the day was. His eyesight was good, even at dusk, and his ears hadn’t rung once in however long he’d been here.
As for Fang…he was older. And younger. Exactly the way he’d looked when Izzy had first met him in Port Royal, and exactly the way Izzy had pictured him in his dreams with a few more imagined years under his belt after those last days on the Revenge. Both things were true at once, in the same blurry way that the horizon was always both too near and too far away.
"It's been a long time, Izzy," Fang choked out, as if he were the one who’d just had his ribs milled to dust.
Izzy turned away, running a hand through his hair and clearing his throat. The heat tingled in his arms and around his back where Fang had held onto him. “There’s coffee, if you’re not in a hurry,” he said. “It’s chicory, but you’re dead, so beggars can’t be choosers.”
It was only as he said it that he realized Fang might not know he’d died. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be breaking any shocking news. Fang smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“That sounds nice.”
With that, the second chair that had sat empty for as long as Izzy had been here was occupied. Near-ceaselessly patting and dropping kisses on the little dog, Fang gazed around the cottage with an overabundance of interest as Izzy fixed two cups for them at the butcher’s block and drank in the sight of him in return.
“How long’s it been, then?” Izzy asked.
“Ten years. Almost eleven.”
That answered that, he thought, spoon clinking against the inside of a cup as he stirred. Ten years here, almost eleven.
“What got you?”
Fang shook his head. “Felt a bit dizzy earlier today. I went and sat down. Closed my eyes just for a tick. The next thing I knew, I was out on the water rowing.”
“Worse ways to go,” Izzy said. It wasn’t the kind of death that anyone was going to tell stories or sing drinking songs about, but he’d had a good amount of ending during which to think about the topic. There were a lot of worse ways to go.
“We were ashore at Roach’s place,” Fang said with a happy sigh. “I’d had a big bowl of his chicken stew, the kind with the bits of salt lemon in it. The kiddies were running around the yard, and Captain was strumming on his guitar.”
“Captain?”
“Frenchie, I mean.”
That was funny. Frenchie was always the captain in Izzy’s dreams, although he’d never been able to say why.
Ed no longer being in the business, that made sense. Hard though it had been to imagine sailing under anyone else, Izzy had spent his last days on earth hoping that Ed would find whatever it was he’d been casting around for. That he’d be content ashore, maybe even happy. And it stood to reason that if Ed left the sea behind, then Bonnet would follow. That man had never really been looking for a crew anyhow.
Still, he’d have thought his sleeping brain would put Oluwande back in the position. Or Jim. Jim had it in them, he knew it. But for some reason, on those nights that he dreamed, it was always Frenchie on the quarterdeck, hanging off the rigging, chasing sky.
“Sounds...” A reflexive dull as dishwater warred with nice and in the struggle tipped over toward better than getting gut-shot. He faltered and finally just said, “Yeah.”
“Then I was here, and I could see little Nosey on the dock–”
‘Nosey?’ Izzy mouthed at the dog, who didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed as it lounged on its back in the crook of Fang’s arm.
“–and I knew wherever I was, it was someplace good.”
Izzy set Fang’s cup down in front of him and took the other chair. “It’s not a real place, this. It’s only an island. A sort of…stopover, near as I can tell. Like how we used Porkfish Cove or Little Breakneck back in the day.”
The sort of place where no one lived, but where you might pull in to refit, fill up your water barrels, and lie low for a while. Somewhere to catch your breath.
“It’s pretty.” Fang blew on his coffee, sending up an eddy of steam. Then he took a sip, and unsurprisingly a crease appeared between his eyebrows.
“It isn’t,” Izzy countered. “Just like that coffee’s only piss-warm, even though you saw me pour the water straight from the kettle. Just like it only tastes of something when you pay attention. Nothing is much of anything here. Not warm, not cold, just…something.”
Fang frowned and reached across the table to lay his hand on Izzy’s forearm. His brow immediately lightened. “You’re warm. So’s Nosey.”
“Exception that proves the fucking rule.”
The halo of heat spread as Fang squeezed his arm, and lingered long after he let go.
“At any rate,” Izzy said, having a job to do and intending to do it right. “This isn’t a place you’re meant to stay. There’s a boat down in the bay on the far side of the island. Nice little sloop rigged fine for sailing alone. It should take you the rest of the way when you’re ready.”
Fang looked out the window, and Izzy knew his eye would be drawn just like his was to the west. You couldn’t miss that current, not if you’d spent your life at sea. It ran like a silver road over the grey water, and you couldn’t help but trace the straight shot of it to the edge of the world, where the sky was…
…different.
There was no putting into words how the sky looked different out in that direction, and Izzy’s head itched like it was full of sand fleas whenever he tried. The best he’d ever managed was that it felt like a double ration of west. As if you could see a trade wind written on the air, even when you couldn’t feel it blowing. You knew that there was only one way to go, and that it would take you eventually. That there would be no changing course once it did.
“You came back?” Fang ventured.
“Never left,” he said shortly. He took a drink of his coffee, eyes fixed on the rim of the cup. The weight of Fang’s gaze on him was almost palpable, but he was at least spared whatever look of confusion, pity, or worse that surrounded it.
He sniffed sharply and shrugged in a jerky attempt at casualness.
“Figured I might as well wait around a little while in case any of those twats went and got themselves killed. Fucking…running their ship aground the first time we met them. Half of them still couldn’t tell a reef knot from Mummy’s apron strings when I died. Seemed like someone ought to be here to make sure they didn’t fuck things up and get the sloop stuck on a sandbar.”
He knew what it must look like, staying here all these years, but he wasn’t afraid of facing what was waiting for him on the other side. He had lived his life the way he’d lived it: killer, sodomite, thief. A liar when he’d needed to be. A coward when he shouldn’t have been. But he’d been useful, on his better days. The way he saw it, he might as well be useful one more time.
Fang was still watching him when he looked up, nodding solemnly. Izzy’s shoulders eased. He should have known. If he could count on anyone understanding, it was always Fang.
He cleared his throat. “And I figured you’d be along eventually to collect your fucking dog.”
Fang clutched Nosey closer, petting him tenderly. The tears standing in his eyes looked poised to spill over as he gazed down at the dog’s cheerfully oblivious face.
“I thought he might be mad at me,” he whispered. “Do you think he remembers what happened?”
“Dogs don’t remember things like that. They don’t have it in them.”
Fang’s whole chest heaved, but by some mercy he didn’t start sobbing. He gathered Nosey up and kissed him on the head, laughing through silent tears as the dog licked his nose. “Have you been taking good care of your Uncle Izzy? Giving him lots of cuddles?”
“He spends half the day patrolling for rats that aren’t here and half the day snoring on the porch,” Izzy groused.
But admittedly, it was going to be a lot quieter around here without the snoring. Even now, it felt strange to be at the table without the animal lying next to his foot.
“It was only the dog here, when I made land. House was empty. Didn’t–” He shook his head and just got on with it. “I haven’t seen Ivan, or any of the old crew from the Queen Anne, if you were wondering.”
Fang nodded, smiling tightly. “Ivan wouldn’t have waited around. He was a good lad. He always said his prayers.”
“Yeah,” Izzy said, some weight inside him shifting at the reminder.
Sometimes, especially in a bad patch he’d hit a few years in, he would start doubting any of it had been real. As if he’d been here forever and the dreams were all he’d ever had. Just imaginary people he glimpsed while he was sleeping and the stories he’d made up about them.
Ivan had said his prayers, though. He remembered that. Could almost hum them still. And Fang remembered it too.
“Blackbeard.” Fang put the word out there quietly, carefully. “Ed. He and Stede live up in New York these days.”
“Yeah?” He said it just as carefully. “They’re doing all right, then?”
Fang nodded. “Busy, always up to something. Just...didn’t want you to think you’d missed him.”
Izzy had spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time wrestling with the idea of whether he was waiting here for Ed. In the end, he’d pinned it. There was no point, for one thing. Edward Teach was going to beat the devil and chart his own course into the hereafter. If Ed ever came this way, it would be from the west, captaining a stolen ship of his own crewed by fresh recruits from Execution Dock. And it wouldn't be because he was looking for Izzy.
The ache of that lingered, a little hole in his chest remaining where the one in his gut had disappeared, but that was all right. A bit of pain was what made you feel like you were still alive.
“Nah,” he said. “I figured they'd have things well in hand.”
Fang’s eyes lingered on him, soft and searching.
“What?”
“I missed you, Izzy.”
He looked away, and not even ten years being dead and buried could stop the habitual scoff.
“To the end of my days,” Fang went on, always having been deaf to the sound anyhow. “There were some hard days in there, but they were mostly good ones. And I’d wish you were there, on those good ones. I’d get to thinking about how it would be even nicer if you were. I’d wish things could have been different. That you’d had more time.”
“Fuck off, you soppy twat. I had two brothers and a sister never make it out of the cradle. I got more than my share of time.”
Time there, and time here. More time than a man who’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger should have found himself with, he often told himself.
Even if he’d almost believed, for a little while, that there could have been something else. Some new life still left ahead of him, if he was willing to put in the work. Some way for gold paint to stick. Somewhere else to belong, someone else to be.
Well. There had been some good days, at the end. Hard ones, but good ones. Some people were born lucky enough to get chance after chance in life, but the best the common man could hope for was buying himself a little time–or stealing it–before someone eventually came to collect.
And hadn’t he done just that, in those last days? Gone out like a proper outlaw, stealing the kind of life that God had never intended for the likes of him? Freedom. Love. The chance for it all to mean something more than lining some rich fucker’s pockets or starving in the street.
“But I…didn’t need to spend so much of that time being a prick to you,” Izzy said. He had practised speeches to everyone he knew over and over again throughout the years, but now that it came to delivering, it was like coughing up pebbles. “I should have…treated you better.”
Fang’s hand covered his, warm again, thumb stroking his wrist. “Me too.”
They sat there, quiet. Izzy sipped his coffee. Fang did too, around an awkward armful of terrier. The dog huffed and sighed every time it was jostled, but it wasn’t vexed enough to move. Waves broke on the rocks. The silver road on the sea shimmered on the other side of the window.
The cottage felt like the cabin of a ship, watertight and gently rocking. Like the forecastle during the afternoon watch, where you might sit mending your socks or passing the time making something, silent but not alone.
“We were good sailors,” Fang eventually said. “Knew our navigation and all that.”
“Better than most,” Izzy agreed. Then, thinking of Ed, he had to amend for honesty: “Not like some.”
“No,” Fang agreed. “But we got where we were going.”
“Did we?”
“We were getting there.” He suddenly looked bashful. “Weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Izzy said after a moment, taking his meaning. He had no number on hand for how many evenings he’d sat up remembering the weight of Fang’s arm around him. Remembering how it had felt to lean back on his unsteady leg and find Fang’s chest there waiting for him.
They had fucked, the night of Calypso’s Birthday, for the first time in a couple of years. Right out there on the deck, behind the scant privacy of the buffet table, under the stars, the paint smearing off his lips onto Fang’s skin, leaving his mark on him. And the next morning, as the sun came up on the ridiculous, hungover mutual mess of them, it had briefly felt as if something lay ahead of them instead of only behind them.
He slowly turned his hand over under Fang’s and held it.
“Got a lot to catch up on,” Fang said. “Everything everyone got up to after you left.”
Izzy nodded. “Yeah.”
“I could stay awhile.”
Izzy nodded harder, not entirely trusting his voice. He could stay for a bit, yeah. A few days. A week.
“I reckon it might take a while, telling all those stories. You wouldn’t believe some of them.” Fang chortled at whatever tale seemed to come to mind, shaking his head. “I might as well wait here with you until the rest come by. I can’t just take that sloop by myself and leave all of you with a dinghy.”
Izzy shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Things…come back, here. The trees. Whatever the fuck you set fire to or toss into the sea. The sloop wasn’t a sloop when I got here, it was barely two steps up from a raft, and then one day it wasn’t, and I know what kind of madman I sound like, but it’s so.”
“Either way,” Fang said peaceably, “I could wait. Then you and me could set sail together. It’s always less than half the work with two. Three if you count Nosey.”
Ten years ago, maybe Izzy would have knocked the hard lump in his throat loose by way of bile. Said something shitty. Laughed as ugly as it was possible for a person to laugh.
Now, he only smiled humorlessly and tried to say it as gently as he could. “We’re not going to the same place, Fang.”
That was the long and short of it. He had known Fang half his life, and that man had only ever done what he needed to in order to get by in this world. There wasn’t any real bastardry in him. A bit of bitchiness sometimes, enough to keep him interesting, but no malice in his heart.
He braced himself for an argument or worse, tears, but Fang only hummed.
“We went to China, you know. A little after you died. We brought Zheng and Auntie back to the rest of their people, and we stayed for a few months on the coast of Guangdong.”
“Yeah?” Izzy took a drink, glad for the change of subject. “What was that like?”
“Oh, you should have seen it, Izzy. All these blue, blue bays and little green mountains, and pretty white houses that let the breeze in all nice and cool…”
The image flitted through his mind of a courtyard in the middle of a noisy gaming house, lit red through paper lanterns.
“All the good noodles you could eat. Roach learned how to make this rice porridge with fish, and we cooked it all the time when we got home…”
Someone saying, ‘Needs more salt.’ Laughter.
“And the boats! The hulls on them, tight as anything, even when they built them flat on the bottom. With these battens like, like…”
“…like window frames,” Izzy finished, another image sailing through on canvass that was light as air.
“That’s it,” Fang said. “How did you know that?”
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to scrub the strange half-memory out of his head. “I don’t know. Fucking…dreamed it once.”
Fang seemed to consider that, nodding slowly as he scratched Nosey behind the ears.
“My mum used to say that if you thought about someone enough after they died, you kept them close to you. She said they could see you when you were remembering them or wondering what they’d think about something. I remember, when I saw one of those ships, I was thinking about how cranky you’d get in bad weather, on account of being worried about the boys climbing the mast and hanging off the spars in the wind. How you’d like sails like that, where you could bend them to yard and boom right from the deck.”
“They’re just dreams,” Izzy said. “I’ve dreamed all sorts of tosh over the years, and not just about you.”
It was admittedly Fang the most often. But it was Jim too, pulling on his old glove or sitting somewhere dark and quiet, sharpening their knives. Frenchie, strumming his lute and singing an old song. A dizzy, drunken round of faces at a party.
Ed, sometimes. Not often. Just standing on the shore, looking out at the sea.
“We all thought about you a lot, Izzy.”
“Fuck off,” he said reflexively, the words punched out of his chest and squeezed through a tightening throat.
Embarrassingly, the dog knew that phrase in that tone. Even worse, it knew what he meant by it and immediately started clambering over the table to try to lick his face.
“Fucking hell.” Izzy scooped the creature up. “What is this, you little shit? Fang comes back for all of two minutes and all of a sudden we don’t have any rules? No dogs on the table.”
Nosey paid the rebuke no mind, tail wagging as he was pulled into Izzy’s lap and brusquely patted.
“I told Auntie about Nosey once, when we were in China,” Fang said, gazing fondly at the beast. “About how sad I was, knowing that he’d gone to Doggy Heaven and I wouldn’t ever see him again.”
Izzy exchanged a look with the dog, hoping to convey the importance of staying off the furniture when it came to getting into the good part of the great beyond.
“She was a wise woman. Terrifying, but wise. She’d been all over the world, and she said that in plenty of places, people don’t go to Heaven or Hell at all.”
Izzy frowned. “Where the fuck do they go, then?”
“She said in some lands, the dead all end up in the same place together, same as they were on earth. In some, they turn into dreams. And in some, they get born again. You just finish one life and roll into the next. I like that one. That’s how it is at sea—if a thing breaks and you can’t mend it, you find something else to turn it into. It’s a waste, otherwise.”
None of that sounded very likely to Izzy, but he did have to concede that things worked differently in different lands. You wouldn’t know, if you’d never crossed the equator, that there could be stars you’d never seen before. You might not even believe the world was round, if you hadn’t sailed over its curves.
“You think any of that’s true?” he asked.
Fang shrugged with the ease of a man who could haul half the weight of the world on his shoulders and roll it gently off again.
“It’s nice to think about. But this is nice too.”
“This?”
“Yeah,” Fang said, looking around with a smile. “Cozy little house. Sweet company. Looks like there’s good fishing in that cove down there.”
“There are no fish in that water. Just…shadows.”
Fang’s smile only broadened, and he leaned closer to confide: “Good fishing’s not about catching any fishes. It’s just about the going.”
Izzy snorted. He was about to point out the stupidity of this, but only just barely managed to bite his tongue. He was a man with a full woodshed, after all, in a place that never really turned cold, in a house where a single meal had never been cooked. And he could imagine being out there in the morning, axe in hand, setting to work and looking down the hill to see Fang in the cove, napping on the shore with a fishing rod propped up next to him. Company in the evening as they sat by the fire and talked about old times, the ones Izzy was there for and the ones that he wasn’t. Climbing into bed together in the still, quiet night.
“You’re full of fucking philosophy today.”
“I think maybe dying will do that,” Fang mused.
“Yeah,” Izzy said, one corner of his mouth lifting. “It will.”
There would be time enough to argue later about where they would be going after those who needed seeing off were seen off. There was nothing but time in a place like this. Time and a roof over their heads. Company. Good fishing, and decent work, and shitty coffee.
“You want another cup?” he asked.
“Yes, please, Izzy,” Fang said.
He set the dog down gently and tugged on Fang’s hand to pull himself upright. He reached forward to take Fang’s cup, and when Fang wrapped an arm around his middle, it was as easy as breathing used to be to lean in and kiss him on the mouth. Heat spread from his lips, down his throat and into his chest. The tastes of tobacco and salt lemon stirred in his memory and on the tip of his tongue.
Outside, the northerly breeze took up again, rustling the dry grass. The sea lapped at the shore, and the sun—or something like it—moved in its arc behind the soft curtain of cloud. Inside, the kettle was put back on to boil and a small terrier settled in between his masters’ feet under a kitchen table as words it couldn’t understand in a voice it knew better than anything drifted gently over its head.
“So there we were, sailing southwest to New Granada...”
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Fang/Izzy Hands
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~5600
Content Info: This fic is set in the afterlife. There is major character death referenced, but the characters in question are still present in the story.
Summary: Izzy has spent the last decade on a small island in the middle of nowhere with only a dog for company. One day, an old friend comes to call.
Notes: Inspired by the ‘Fang’ and ‘Water’ squares of my 2025 Izzy Hands Bingo card. Also available on AO3.
The dog was kicking up a fuss when Izzy awoke that morning. He sat up blearily, shaking off the remnants of a dream about someone weeping at a party, and watched in mingled annoyance and amusement as the terrier raced around the cottage in an overexcited whirlwind that wrote off any further sleep.
Onto the bed, off the bed, onto the bed and off it. Bark, bark, whine, whine.
Later, Izzy would realize he should have paid more attention to this. But the dog was a dog, and the idea of this day bringing anything meaningfully different from all the ones before was so far-fetched that Izzy couldn’t entertain it.
“Oi,” he said, scruffing the creature on its next leap onto the bed and giving it a shake.
The dog immediately rolled onto its back in clear solicitation of ear-scratches and belly-rubs that only an utter mug would provide after being so rudely awakened. It whined again, wiggling against Izzy’s hip and trying to swim backwards like an otter into his lap. The little thing was always heavier and hotter than Izzy expected, a furry warming pan with a madly wagging tail, grunting in entitled canine satisfaction as the mug obliged.
Izzy had never been able to remember the thing’s name, but he wasn’t about to start feeling guilty about that. Animals didn’t really have names, at least not in the way that people did. It wasn’t as if they were christened, unless the upper crust were doing even dafter things with their pampered pets these days. A name for a dog was only a way to call it home at night. Hand it over from one master to another and it would answer to something else soon enough, and just as readily to a whistle or to the sound of a dish of scraps hitting the ground.
Still, a lingering awkwardness had kept him from renaming it. “Oi” and “You” got the job done fine, and what reason did Izzy have for calling it home anyhow? The island was small, and the lazy thing inevitably turned back up by late afternoon to nap on the porch until dusk.
“Come on, trouble,” he said, giving it a thump on the haunch. “Time to get to it.”
He got out of bed and let the dog outside to make its rounds. The door was left propped open afterwards, a habit passed down from Izzy’s mother, who had always insisted that close air was bad for the constitution. Not that it mattered here, but what did it hurt? Izzy had a wash out of the basin, got dressed, made up the bed, and then headed out back to the woodshed.
They didn’t go through much fuel, the two of them. Days on the island were uniformly mild, and the nights were still. The sun rose and set behind the endless cloud cover with the sober and steadfast habits it kept around the equator, and Izzy followed its example. He only really found himself in need of firelight for the short stretch between what he arbitrarily thought of as suppertime and when he went to bed, when he sometimes sat up and whittled.
But there was a woodshed made to be filled with wood, and there were hours made to be filled with work. So he went, axe in hand, to spend the morning bucking and splitting logs to the rhythm of the waves breaking on the craggy shore.
An hour passed in the usual way, or maybe two. Who could really tell, with the sun behind the clouds? All he knew was that the sea was washing the rocks at its regular pace. The heft of the axe was the same as it always was. The wood split. The muscles in his back stretched. Nothing consciously struck him as being amiss until the tenth or twelfth time he had to push his hair out of his eyes.
He paused then, squinting as he identified the cause. The breeze from the north had given way to a westerly one. He fixed his hair again and had split another two logs before he realized: the winds had never changed since the day he’d arrived.
Izzy straightened up and examined the overcast sky. The low, flat clouds had parted slightly at the seams, letting through a measure of a strange, thin light he associated with sun showers.
A yip sounded from down by the water, and he swivelled to find the dog on the dock, a wiggling blur of rough coat on the weathered wood. Its attention was fixed on the horizon. Izzy shaded his eyes and followed its gaze. You couldn’t spot any shore from the island, but the distance from where you stood to the horizon still never looked quite right. It was too close sometimes, too far away at others. But whether the edge of the world was its proper three miles off or not wasn’t his concern right now.
His concern was the boat.
The axe fell from his hand and landed in the grass with a dull thump. The vessel was only a dark speck on the pale grey water, but Izzy knew the way a dinghy moved under the power of a strong rower. Same as he knew, deep in whatever heart was left to him, who was holding the oars.
He bent down to recover the axe, an act interrupted by the dog racing over to bark excitedly at him.
“I see him,” he said, nudging the animal away from the axe-blade with the toe of his boot out of sheer habit. “I see him.”
The dog dashed back to the dock, and Izzy drove the axe into the splitting stump with a heavy thunk. The westerly breeze stirred again, and he shivered as it fluttered down the back of his collar.
He stood there for some time, watching the speck on the horizon grow larger, eyeing its progress to make certain it was on course. Then, swallowing hard, he turned and went to draw a pail of water from the well. He carried the bucket into the house, where he filled up the kettle. Hospitality had never been his strong suit, and it wasn’t as though he’d had any opportunity to practice if he wasn’t going to give into madness and throw a tea party for the dog. But he could at least fix some coffee, or the next best thing.
Not much grew here besides a few twisted trees that never stayed felled, but chicory clung to the path that ran from behind the cottage down to the cove. It replenished itself in what seemed like the usual course of time whenever Izzy pulled some up, although he’d never once seen it flower. Now he fished a little of the dried root out of the sack that hung by the fireplace. He sat down at the table and started the work of chopping it up fine before grinding it in the mortar and pestle.
His movements were unhurried; it was some ways to shore. At least it had been for him.
He listened to the sea, grateful to have something to occupy his hands as he waited. Eventually, the sound of oars breaking the surface of the water drifted up to the cottage. It grew clearer minute by minute, punctuated by the dog’s increasingly desperate whines. Then came a shout, in a voice he hadn’t heard in waking hours for a very long time. The splash of someone jumping into the shallows. Barking, barking, barking.
Izzy got up and built a fire. He put the kettle on to boil. His eyes travelled over the line of battered tin cups on the shelf, but he refrained from presuming to take two down until he could hear footsteps.
They were faint, but after so long with no one on the island but him and the dog, he could almost feel them. He closed his eyes, picturing pebbles shifting on the shore. The dry, pale grass lying down under a heavy tread. The faint new depressions on the hard-packed trail that led up to the cottage, spreading over the ones he’d worn in it.
His body shook as the grey light in the doorway darkened.
“Izzy?”
He turned, mouth opened to reply, but anything he’d rehearsed was strangled out of him as Fang strode inside and yanked him into a crushing bear hug that lifted him straight off his feet.
"Izzy!"
Fang was still carrying the dog in his arms, and the animal was pressed into the embrace with no more warning than Izzy. It squirmed, whining, little paws scrabbling in protest before it surrendered itself to its fate with a huffy sigh and gave Izzy’s cheek several sympathetic licks.
“Christ,” Izzy wheezed. If the dog was a warming pan, the effect of Fang’s embrace was like being plunged into a hot spring.
The heat spread through him, sinking through flesh and bone, reviving the memory of living. The ground returned to meet his feet as he was set down and held at arm’s length, Fang’s grip tight on his shoulders as dark, teary eyes swept over him.
It hadn’t occurred to Izzy to wonder what he looked like here. There was no way of being certain anyhow, not with the sea so restless and the well-water so clear under an overcast sky. Besides, vanity had a short shelf life when your only company rolled in sargassum and licked its own bollocks.
All he knew was that nothing about his body felt particularly pressing, in the way he’d taken for granted after the growing pains of his youth had calmed down and the aches of middle age hadn’t set in yet. His left leg was made of wood and gold paint, but he walked on it with thoughtless ease no matter how long the day was. His eyesight was good, even at dusk, and his ears hadn’t rung once in however long he’d been here.
As for Fang…he was older. And younger. Exactly the way he’d looked when Izzy had first met him in Port Royal, and exactly the way Izzy had pictured him in his dreams with a few more imagined years under his belt after those last days on the Revenge. Both things were true at once, in the same blurry way that the horizon was always both too near and too far away.
"It's been a long time, Izzy," Fang choked out, as if he were the one who’d just had his ribs milled to dust.
Izzy turned away, running a hand through his hair and clearing his throat. The heat tingled in his arms and around his back where Fang had held onto him. “There’s coffee, if you’re not in a hurry,” he said. “It’s chicory, but you’re dead, so beggars can’t be choosers.”
It was only as he said it that he realized Fang might not know he’d died. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be breaking any shocking news. Fang smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“That sounds nice.”
With that, the second chair that had sat empty for as long as Izzy had been here was occupied. Near-ceaselessly patting and dropping kisses on the little dog, Fang gazed around the cottage with an overabundance of interest as Izzy fixed two cups for them at the butcher’s block and drank in the sight of him in return.
“How long’s it been, then?” Izzy asked.
“Ten years. Almost eleven.”
That answered that, he thought, spoon clinking against the inside of a cup as he stirred. Ten years here, almost eleven.
“What got you?”
Fang shook his head. “Felt a bit dizzy earlier today. I went and sat down. Closed my eyes just for a tick. The next thing I knew, I was out on the water rowing.”
“Worse ways to go,” Izzy said. It wasn’t the kind of death that anyone was going to tell stories or sing drinking songs about, but he’d had a good amount of ending during which to think about the topic. There were a lot of worse ways to go.
“We were ashore at Roach’s place,” Fang said with a happy sigh. “I’d had a big bowl of his chicken stew, the kind with the bits of salt lemon in it. The kiddies were running around the yard, and Captain was strumming on his guitar.”
“Captain?”
“Frenchie, I mean.”
That was funny. Frenchie was always the captain in Izzy’s dreams, although he’d never been able to say why.
Ed no longer being in the business, that made sense. Hard though it had been to imagine sailing under anyone else, Izzy had spent his last days on earth hoping that Ed would find whatever it was he’d been casting around for. That he’d be content ashore, maybe even happy. And it stood to reason that if Ed left the sea behind, then Bonnet would follow. That man had never really been looking for a crew anyhow.
Still, he’d have thought his sleeping brain would put Oluwande back in the position. Or Jim. Jim had it in them, he knew it. But for some reason, on those nights that he dreamed, it was always Frenchie on the quarterdeck, hanging off the rigging, chasing sky.
“Sounds...” A reflexive dull as dishwater warred with nice and in the struggle tipped over toward better than getting gut-shot. He faltered and finally just said, “Yeah.”
“Then I was here, and I could see little Nosey on the dock–”
‘Nosey?’ Izzy mouthed at the dog, who didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed as it lounged on its back in the crook of Fang’s arm.
“–and I knew wherever I was, it was someplace good.”
Izzy set Fang’s cup down in front of him and took the other chair. “It’s not a real place, this. It’s only an island. A sort of…stopover, near as I can tell. Like how we used Porkfish Cove or Little Breakneck back in the day.”
The sort of place where no one lived, but where you might pull in to refit, fill up your water barrels, and lie low for a while. Somewhere to catch your breath.
“It’s pretty.” Fang blew on his coffee, sending up an eddy of steam. Then he took a sip, and unsurprisingly a crease appeared between his eyebrows.
“It isn’t,” Izzy countered. “Just like that coffee’s only piss-warm, even though you saw me pour the water straight from the kettle. Just like it only tastes of something when you pay attention. Nothing is much of anything here. Not warm, not cold, just…something.”
Fang frowned and reached across the table to lay his hand on Izzy’s forearm. His brow immediately lightened. “You’re warm. So’s Nosey.”
“Exception that proves the fucking rule.”
The halo of heat spread as Fang squeezed his arm, and lingered long after he let go.
“At any rate,” Izzy said, having a job to do and intending to do it right. “This isn’t a place you’re meant to stay. There’s a boat down in the bay on the far side of the island. Nice little sloop rigged fine for sailing alone. It should take you the rest of the way when you’re ready.”
Fang looked out the window, and Izzy knew his eye would be drawn just like his was to the west. You couldn’t miss that current, not if you’d spent your life at sea. It ran like a silver road over the grey water, and you couldn’t help but trace the straight shot of it to the edge of the world, where the sky was…
…different.
There was no putting into words how the sky looked different out in that direction, and Izzy’s head itched like it was full of sand fleas whenever he tried. The best he’d ever managed was that it felt like a double ration of west. As if you could see a trade wind written on the air, even when you couldn’t feel it blowing. You knew that there was only one way to go, and that it would take you eventually. That there would be no changing course once it did.
“You came back?” Fang ventured.
“Never left,” he said shortly. He took a drink of his coffee, eyes fixed on the rim of the cup. The weight of Fang’s gaze on him was almost palpable, but he was at least spared whatever look of confusion, pity, or worse that surrounded it.
He sniffed sharply and shrugged in a jerky attempt at casualness.
“Figured I might as well wait around a little while in case any of those twats went and got themselves killed. Fucking…running their ship aground the first time we met them. Half of them still couldn’t tell a reef knot from Mummy’s apron strings when I died. Seemed like someone ought to be here to make sure they didn’t fuck things up and get the sloop stuck on a sandbar.”
He knew what it must look like, staying here all these years, but he wasn’t afraid of facing what was waiting for him on the other side. He had lived his life the way he’d lived it: killer, sodomite, thief. A liar when he’d needed to be. A coward when he shouldn’t have been. But he’d been useful, on his better days. The way he saw it, he might as well be useful one more time.
Fang was still watching him when he looked up, nodding solemnly. Izzy’s shoulders eased. He should have known. If he could count on anyone understanding, it was always Fang.
He cleared his throat. “And I figured you’d be along eventually to collect your fucking dog.”
Fang clutched Nosey closer, petting him tenderly. The tears standing in his eyes looked poised to spill over as he gazed down at the dog’s cheerfully oblivious face.
“I thought he might be mad at me,” he whispered. “Do you think he remembers what happened?”
“Dogs don’t remember things like that. They don’t have it in them.”
Fang’s whole chest heaved, but by some mercy he didn’t start sobbing. He gathered Nosey up and kissed him on the head, laughing through silent tears as the dog licked his nose. “Have you been taking good care of your Uncle Izzy? Giving him lots of cuddles?”
“He spends half the day patrolling for rats that aren’t here and half the day snoring on the porch,” Izzy groused.
But admittedly, it was going to be a lot quieter around here without the snoring. Even now, it felt strange to be at the table without the animal lying next to his foot.
“It was only the dog here, when I made land. House was empty. Didn’t–” He shook his head and just got on with it. “I haven’t seen Ivan, or any of the old crew from the Queen Anne, if you were wondering.”
Fang nodded, smiling tightly. “Ivan wouldn’t have waited around. He was a good lad. He always said his prayers.”
“Yeah,” Izzy said, some weight inside him shifting at the reminder.
Sometimes, especially in a bad patch he’d hit a few years in, he would start doubting any of it had been real. As if he’d been here forever and the dreams were all he’d ever had. Just imaginary people he glimpsed while he was sleeping and the stories he’d made up about them.
Ivan had said his prayers, though. He remembered that. Could almost hum them still. And Fang remembered it too.
“Blackbeard.” Fang put the word out there quietly, carefully. “Ed. He and Stede live up in New York these days.”
“Yeah?” He said it just as carefully. “They’re doing all right, then?”
Fang nodded. “Busy, always up to something. Just...didn’t want you to think you’d missed him.”
Izzy had spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time wrestling with the idea of whether he was waiting here for Ed. In the end, he’d pinned it. There was no point, for one thing. Edward Teach was going to beat the devil and chart his own course into the hereafter. If Ed ever came this way, it would be from the west, captaining a stolen ship of his own crewed by fresh recruits from Execution Dock. And it wouldn't be because he was looking for Izzy.
The ache of that lingered, a little hole in his chest remaining where the one in his gut had disappeared, but that was all right. A bit of pain was what made you feel like you were still alive.
“Nah,” he said. “I figured they'd have things well in hand.”
Fang’s eyes lingered on him, soft and searching.
“What?”
“I missed you, Izzy.”
He looked away, and not even ten years being dead and buried could stop the habitual scoff.
“To the end of my days,” Fang went on, always having been deaf to the sound anyhow. “There were some hard days in there, but they were mostly good ones. And I’d wish you were there, on those good ones. I’d get to thinking about how it would be even nicer if you were. I’d wish things could have been different. That you’d had more time.”
“Fuck off, you soppy twat. I had two brothers and a sister never make it out of the cradle. I got more than my share of time.”
Time there, and time here. More time than a man who’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger should have found himself with, he often told himself.
Even if he’d almost believed, for a little while, that there could have been something else. Some new life still left ahead of him, if he was willing to put in the work. Some way for gold paint to stick. Somewhere else to belong, someone else to be.
Well. There had been some good days, at the end. Hard ones, but good ones. Some people were born lucky enough to get chance after chance in life, but the best the common man could hope for was buying himself a little time–or stealing it–before someone eventually came to collect.
And hadn’t he done just that, in those last days? Gone out like a proper outlaw, stealing the kind of life that God had never intended for the likes of him? Freedom. Love. The chance for it all to mean something more than lining some rich fucker’s pockets or starving in the street.
“But I…didn’t need to spend so much of that time being a prick to you,” Izzy said. He had practised speeches to everyone he knew over and over again throughout the years, but now that it came to delivering, it was like coughing up pebbles. “I should have…treated you better.”
Fang’s hand covered his, warm again, thumb stroking his wrist. “Me too.”
They sat there, quiet. Izzy sipped his coffee. Fang did too, around an awkward armful of terrier. The dog huffed and sighed every time it was jostled, but it wasn’t vexed enough to move. Waves broke on the rocks. The silver road on the sea shimmered on the other side of the window.
The cottage felt like the cabin of a ship, watertight and gently rocking. Like the forecastle during the afternoon watch, where you might sit mending your socks or passing the time making something, silent but not alone.
“We were good sailors,” Fang eventually said. “Knew our navigation and all that.”
“Better than most,” Izzy agreed. Then, thinking of Ed, he had to amend for honesty: “Not like some.”
“No,” Fang agreed. “But we got where we were going.”
“Did we?”
“We were getting there.” He suddenly looked bashful. “Weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Izzy said after a moment, taking his meaning. He had no number on hand for how many evenings he’d sat up remembering the weight of Fang’s arm around him. Remembering how it had felt to lean back on his unsteady leg and find Fang’s chest there waiting for him.
They had fucked, the night of Calypso’s Birthday, for the first time in a couple of years. Right out there on the deck, behind the scant privacy of the buffet table, under the stars, the paint smearing off his lips onto Fang’s skin, leaving his mark on him. And the next morning, as the sun came up on the ridiculous, hungover mutual mess of them, it had briefly felt as if something lay ahead of them instead of only behind them.
He slowly turned his hand over under Fang’s and held it.
“Got a lot to catch up on,” Fang said. “Everything everyone got up to after you left.”
Izzy nodded. “Yeah.”
“I could stay awhile.”
Izzy nodded harder, not entirely trusting his voice. He could stay for a bit, yeah. A few days. A week.
“I reckon it might take a while, telling all those stories. You wouldn’t believe some of them.” Fang chortled at whatever tale seemed to come to mind, shaking his head. “I might as well wait here with you until the rest come by. I can’t just take that sloop by myself and leave all of you with a dinghy.”
Izzy shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Things…come back, here. The trees. Whatever the fuck you set fire to or toss into the sea. The sloop wasn’t a sloop when I got here, it was barely two steps up from a raft, and then one day it wasn’t, and I know what kind of madman I sound like, but it’s so.”
“Either way,” Fang said peaceably, “I could wait. Then you and me could set sail together. It’s always less than half the work with two. Three if you count Nosey.”
Ten years ago, maybe Izzy would have knocked the hard lump in his throat loose by way of bile. Said something shitty. Laughed as ugly as it was possible for a person to laugh.
Now, he only smiled humorlessly and tried to say it as gently as he could. “We’re not going to the same place, Fang.”
That was the long and short of it. He had known Fang half his life, and that man had only ever done what he needed to in order to get by in this world. There wasn’t any real bastardry in him. A bit of bitchiness sometimes, enough to keep him interesting, but no malice in his heart.
He braced himself for an argument or worse, tears, but Fang only hummed.
“We went to China, you know. A little after you died. We brought Zheng and Auntie back to the rest of their people, and we stayed for a few months on the coast of Guangdong.”
“Yeah?” Izzy took a drink, glad for the change of subject. “What was that like?”
“Oh, you should have seen it, Izzy. All these blue, blue bays and little green mountains, and pretty white houses that let the breeze in all nice and cool…”
The image flitted through his mind of a courtyard in the middle of a noisy gaming house, lit red through paper lanterns.
“All the good noodles you could eat. Roach learned how to make this rice porridge with fish, and we cooked it all the time when we got home…”
Someone saying, ‘Needs more salt.’ Laughter.
“And the boats! The hulls on them, tight as anything, even when they built them flat on the bottom. With these battens like, like…”
“…like window frames,” Izzy finished, another image sailing through on canvass that was light as air.
“That’s it,” Fang said. “How did you know that?”
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to scrub the strange half-memory out of his head. “I don’t know. Fucking…dreamed it once.”
Fang seemed to consider that, nodding slowly as he scratched Nosey behind the ears.
“My mum used to say that if you thought about someone enough after they died, you kept them close to you. She said they could see you when you were remembering them or wondering what they’d think about something. I remember, when I saw one of those ships, I was thinking about how cranky you’d get in bad weather, on account of being worried about the boys climbing the mast and hanging off the spars in the wind. How you’d like sails like that, where you could bend them to yard and boom right from the deck.”
“They’re just dreams,” Izzy said. “I’ve dreamed all sorts of tosh over the years, and not just about you.”
It was admittedly Fang the most often. But it was Jim too, pulling on his old glove or sitting somewhere dark and quiet, sharpening their knives. Frenchie, strumming his lute and singing an old song. A dizzy, drunken round of faces at a party.
Ed, sometimes. Not often. Just standing on the shore, looking out at the sea.
“We all thought about you a lot, Izzy.”
“Fuck off,” he said reflexively, the words punched out of his chest and squeezed through a tightening throat.
Embarrassingly, the dog knew that phrase in that tone. Even worse, it knew what he meant by it and immediately started clambering over the table to try to lick his face.
“Fucking hell.” Izzy scooped the creature up. “What is this, you little shit? Fang comes back for all of two minutes and all of a sudden we don’t have any rules? No dogs on the table.”
Nosey paid the rebuke no mind, tail wagging as he was pulled into Izzy’s lap and brusquely patted.
“I told Auntie about Nosey once, when we were in China,” Fang said, gazing fondly at the beast. “About how sad I was, knowing that he’d gone to Doggy Heaven and I wouldn’t ever see him again.”
Izzy exchanged a look with the dog, hoping to convey the importance of staying off the furniture when it came to getting into the good part of the great beyond.
“She was a wise woman. Terrifying, but wise. She’d been all over the world, and she said that in plenty of places, people don’t go to Heaven or Hell at all.”
Izzy frowned. “Where the fuck do they go, then?”
“She said in some lands, the dead all end up in the same place together, same as they were on earth. In some, they turn into dreams. And in some, they get born again. You just finish one life and roll into the next. I like that one. That’s how it is at sea—if a thing breaks and you can’t mend it, you find something else to turn it into. It’s a waste, otherwise.”
None of that sounded very likely to Izzy, but he did have to concede that things worked differently in different lands. You wouldn’t know, if you’d never crossed the equator, that there could be stars you’d never seen before. You might not even believe the world was round, if you hadn’t sailed over its curves.
“You think any of that’s true?” he asked.
Fang shrugged with the ease of a man who could haul half the weight of the world on his shoulders and roll it gently off again.
“It’s nice to think about. But this is nice too.”
“This?”
“Yeah,” Fang said, looking around with a smile. “Cozy little house. Sweet company. Looks like there’s good fishing in that cove down there.”
“There are no fish in that water. Just…shadows.”
Fang’s smile only broadened, and he leaned closer to confide: “Good fishing’s not about catching any fishes. It’s just about the going.”
Izzy snorted. He was about to point out the stupidity of this, but only just barely managed to bite his tongue. He was a man with a full woodshed, after all, in a place that never really turned cold, in a house where a single meal had never been cooked. And he could imagine being out there in the morning, axe in hand, setting to work and looking down the hill to see Fang in the cove, napping on the shore with a fishing rod propped up next to him. Company in the evening as they sat by the fire and talked about old times, the ones Izzy was there for and the ones that he wasn’t. Climbing into bed together in the still, quiet night.
“You’re full of fucking philosophy today.”
“I think maybe dying will do that,” Fang mused.
“Yeah,” Izzy said, one corner of his mouth lifting. “It will.”
There would be time enough to argue later about where they would be going after those who needed seeing off were seen off. There was nothing but time in a place like this. Time and a roof over their heads. Company. Good fishing, and decent work, and shitty coffee.
“You want another cup?” he asked.
“Yes, please, Izzy,” Fang said.
He set the dog down gently and tugged on Fang’s hand to pull himself upright. He reached forward to take Fang’s cup, and when Fang wrapped an arm around his middle, it was as easy as breathing used to be to lean in and kiss him on the mouth. Heat spread from his lips, down his throat and into his chest. The tastes of tobacco and salt lemon stirred in his memory and on the tip of his tongue.
Outside, the northerly breeze took up again, rustling the dry grass. The sea lapped at the shore, and the sun—or something like it—moved in its arc behind the soft curtain of cloud. Inside, the kettle was put back on to boil and a small terrier settled in between his masters’ feet under a kitchen table as words it couldn’t understand in a voice it knew better than anything drifted gently over its head.
“So there we were, sailing southwest to New Granada...”