Chapter Text
Well, there were certainly worse ways to go than this. Alma once knew a guy who had been mauled by a jungle cat, run over by a carriage, and crushed by a piano, or so the legend went. She tried not to think about him for too long. It wouldn’t make her own demise go down any easier.
“Any last words, stowaway?” the quartermaster leered.
If she lived long enough to stowaway on another ship, she would have to pick one with a less leery crew. Maybe they were better when you got to know them, but she didn’t want to stick around and test her theory.
She did her best to put on a cowardly face.
“It’s just that your–” she broke off into a choked noise, barely able to hide her self-satisfaction at the accuracy of the ruse.
“Spit it out, we don’t have all day,” the quartermaster huffed.
“Your shoe’s untied,” Alma finished.
Whether or not the quartermaster’s shoe even had laces was his own business, but it certainly distracted him enough for Alma to land a kick in his gut and slip the ropes off her wrists.
Before she could even begin to worry about the seamen charging her way, the deck bucked under the ear-splitting snarl of a cannon.
She would have time to laud the theatricality of these new foes at a later date. For the time being, she had a parlay to worry about, and more pressingly, a number of swords coming at her from a number of angles.
There was a certain benefit to being a stowaway on an attacked ship. On the one hand, you could more easily beg for your life in the case of an enemy victory, which, given the looks of things, seemed more and more likely by the moment. On the other hand, you were everyone’s adversary.
The quartermaster went down without much of a fight. It might’ve been a cannonball that dealt the final blow, but Alma still decided to take credit for the sake of her own self esteem. Given that the next several shots failed to hit anything at all, she had a feeling she was striking with slightly more purpose than the cannoneer anyway.
“Jesus Christ,” she shook her head.
“I told Wee John not to close his eyes,” a nearby pirate simultaneously lamented, then glanced her way.
“Don’t be so hard on him. We all have to learn somehow,” she suggested lightly.
The pirate raised an eyebrow.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“A stowaway,” Alma replied.
The pirate nodded, though his gaze was elsewhere, tracking the path of a flying machete the way one watches a particularly beautiful goose migrate overhead. Once the machete had gracefully embedded itself in a nearby skull, the pirate turned, gave its thrower an enthusiastic thumbs up, then returned his almost disappointed gaze to Alma.
“Hate to break it to you mate, but they all say that,” he said, already going for his sword.
“Had a bad feeling that might be the case,” Alma sighed, drawing her own weapon once again.
The pirate did her the courtesy of letting her strike first, setting a moderate pace for the duel. For all his casual attitude, he was a wicked swordsman, his strikes as clever and as deadly as his blade.
“I have to ask,” Alma began after a sidestep, “are you trying to not kill me? Because if this is some sort of chivalry complex–”
“Nah,” her adversary shrugged, “you just look a little young to get impaled.”
“Then don’t impale me.”
“Builds character,” he laughed.
Alma had to admit, the fight was a challenging one. Every strike felt as much like playing chess as dueling. However, there was a bizarre amount of focus in the face of her adversary, as if he was struggling to summon an aggravatingly forgotten word. Whatever bothered him seemed to do so to a nearly detrimental extent, for she noticed he hardly moved to strike her when the banner thrashing above the enemy ship’s mast caught her eye.
“Christ,” Alma breathed.
She didn’t remember the bleeding heart from her childhood storybooks, but the spear-wielding devil was clear as day. Back when she was too young to parse out all the words on the pages without her father’s help, she remembered spending hours tracing her fingers over the pictures, and even more hours being told by her parents that this was the reason she gave herself nightmares.
“Nah, that’s just Roach,” the pirate replied absentmindedly. “I get the mix up though, they’ve kinda got the same look, give or take an apron. And a machete.”
“You work for Blackbeard?” she asked, demanding an answer with a very near blow to her adversary’s side.
“That’s one way of putting it,” the pirate laughed.
Alma furrowed her brow.
“Was it not obvious enough?” the pirate wondered aloud. “Because we just upped the size of the flag a few years ago–maybe it’s faded a bit, I could have Frenchie take a look at that.”
“You are the least bloodthirsty pirate I have ever met,” Alma huffed. “And that’s including the one who kept a library.”
“You sound disappointed,” the pirate returned, though a curious look crossed his face.
“I am,” Alma snorted, half in frustration at the long-running duel, half in amusement at the bizarreness of the situation. Here she was in a death match against one of Blackbeard’s crewmen, and he’d spent the last few minutes chatting as if they were stuck next to one another in line at the store. “Blackbeard was my favorite when I was a kid.”
The pirate looked almost hurt.
“I’m not that old,” he huffed.
It took all of Alma’s resolve not to lose grip of her sword.
Suddenly, she was eight years old, stealing a book from her father’s desk just to get another glimpse at the wild-eyed prints of the dread pirate. Her heart would race from then until she crawled into her parents’ bed, making up some poor excuse about a generic-enough sounding nightmare. Mary would shoot Stede a glare, but a brief and silent argument would always result in their agreeing to hold her until she fell asleep.
There was no bed to crawl into. Hell, it hadn’t even been Mary and Stede’s bed since she was a little girl.
She had no refuge of childhood to shield her now.
“I beg your pardon?”
Alma expected a mirthless laugh or a blade to the neck, but instead, the man just sighed. She couldn’t tell if he looked bored or offended.
“First of all,” Blackbeard grimaced, punctuating each word with a strike, “if you wanted a bloodthirsty monster, good luck fucking finding one outside one of those books of yours. Second of all, they shouldn’t print that stuff for kids.”
“They don’t,” Alma gritted out with the force it took to parry the blade, “my father just believed in freedom of information.”
This time, Blackbeard did laugh. There was an oddly pleasant warmth to the sound.
“Bet your mum loved that,” he chuckled, then forced himself back to his initial point. “Third of all, I haven’t killed you yet because you’re young and I’d feel bad, but I’d feel worse if you beat me. Got it?”
“I’ll pretend to,” she nodded.
Their mutual understanding solidified, they went back to trying to maim each other.
As they fought, Alma tried to take in the living legend before her. He was older than she anticipated, though it made sense in hindsight. His career had been the stuff of myth years ago. He cut an imposing figure, certainly, but it was constantly undercut by reassuring shouts or nods to his crew as they went about their tasks.
The books all told the same story of a villainous, unflappable fiend without a kind bone in his body. However, a brief once over of her opponent told a very different story.
There was no murder in his eyes, nor was there a pervasive cloud of hellfire at his heels. If anything, he struck her as remarkably human.
The books all painted such a tall tale that she was embarrassingly shocked to see signs that he had lived a life outside of legendary piracy. He wore a knee brace and what might have been a wedding band, not to mention half his hair back in a functional bun. He was a person who had lived and aged and had someone who loved him.
“You’re married?” Alma asked as she cast his blade back.
“Engaged,” he returned, and just for a second, his face softened. “Not like it’ll be proper or anything, but when the fuck did pirates ever start caring about rules, you know?”
“Guess not.”
That was a thought. Maybe without all the nonsense of so-called polite society, people like him got to marry for love. Maybe this man who had been portrayed as nothing more than a demon lit up when someone brought him breakfast in bed or got a little fuzzy headed when they kissed him on the nose.
Alma reminded herself that they were trying to stab each other, and she dropped the thought. Seafaring was a dangerous lifestyle to romanticize. She’d been learning that the hard way all day.
She still couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person could make her childhood nightmare soften like that. She had a good feeling she never wanted to meet them, if just for her own safety.
She was distracted from her thoughts by an odd look Blackbeard gave her, as if there was something incredibly annoying on the tip of his tongue.
“Anyone ever told you you looked like the Gentleman Pirate?” he finally asked.
Alma blinked.
“Excuse me?”
Blackbeard paused in thought nearly long enough to lose an extremity.
“Ah, yeah, dunno how far that name’s made it,” he shook his head, then tried again. “Stede Bonnet, maybe?”
“Why the hell do you want to know?” Alma snapped.
Blackbeard shrugged.
“It’s kinda uncanny, that’s all.”
Alma parried his strike with enough force to send him stumbling backwards a few steps.
She couldn’t seem to care about their friendly duel anymore. She didn’t exactly know what to believe about the man before her, but didn’t trust him enough to feel good about her father’s wellbeing.
“He’s my father,” she finally spat out. “Of course I look like him.”
Of all the ways she had ever won a duel, this had to be the oddest. However, Blackbeard’s sword and jaw dropped in tandem, and for a moment, she could almost believe it wasn’t some sort of trick.
She had spent a few too many months in a hostile environment at sea to trust anything that nice that quickly. Maybe those books hadn’t told her a single fact, but if the strategic genius they all agreed on had any basis in reality, she didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Instead, she finished knocking his sword from his hand and raised her own to his throat.
“You’re going to give me safe passage to Port Royal,” she began.
“You’re not in a great strategic bargaining position, but yeah, might as well,” he nodded as much as he could.
She gritted her teeth. He didn’t even have the decency to look worried.
“And you’re going to swear you’ve never laid a hand on my father,” Alma finished.
Blackbeard’s only response was a wide-eyed wince.
“About that.”
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” Alma put slightly more pressure on the sword.
“Yeah, yep, he’s doing great,” Blackbeard grimaced, motioning for her to ease up so he could speak. “It’s just that–I–well, I don’t really know how exactly you’re gonna feel about this, and if you feel bad about it, I’m sorry, I really am–”
Alma’s heart sank.
“Spit it out.”
“He’s alive, it’s just that he and I—“
Before he could get another word out, Alma felt the familiar chill of a knife to her neck.
“Hey love,” Blackbeard grinned.
There was that soft look again. This time, it almost seemed to be cut with worry.
“Unhand him, or I will be obliged to–”
Alma’s face fell at the all too familiar voice.
“You said your name was Alma, right?” Blackbeard prompted.
The knife drew away from her neck in an instant, while Blackbeard covered his mouth to stifle a laugh.
“I’m a dead man,” her father realized. “Your mother is going to kill me.”