Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
The first words from Everard’s mouth were inadequate. Far from worthy of the endless hours of dream and hallucination he’d put towards this moment: the one where he would awake to sparkling Gulf reflections upon pale blue panelling, feeling the push of waves beneath him. Home.
“Not again,” he groaned.
But it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t real. It was illusion, like all the others.
“English!” D’Arcy gasped to his right, startling him.
Then Everard felt his weight send them gently swaying in the cot.
His mind was very good at recreating this feeling, which must have been what it was like to be in-womb, warm and contained, anchored in the back-and-forth rhythm made by his own gravity…
D’Arcy was still speaking: “—else? At least Vee gets a word out of ten from the Catalan. Go on, love, do.”
Everard furrowed his brow. Go on? What more was he supposed to say? “I do apologise.”
The hand at his cheek jerked away, came back.
“Christ, you’re actually awake.” D’Arcy laughed giddily. “Of course you are—only because I’m nearly about to go—”
“No,” Everard corrected. “Not awake. ’S’not real.”
“Oh, no, it’s very real.” Bristly, damp kisses fell over Everard’s forehead, his nose, his cheek, his lips. “Missed you.”
Everard wrinkled his nose. “Beard?” D’Arcy was one to get away with a bit of stubble, now and again, but never something so undignified as a beard.
“That’s real too.” His voice was thick.
Everard shuddered with sudden chill. More proof; the greatcabin was never cold in reality, not in the Gulf.
“—hates it too. But don’t you move; I have to fetch Vee.”
“Mm.” Move? Everard was baffled. Even if he hadn’t been fettered and manacled, he couldn’t have moved from the dirt if twenty soldados had drawn upon him and demanded he do so. Too weak. They’d have to shoot him right where he…
… Fetch Vee? From where? Port-au-Prince? D’Arcy himself was a commonplace sight in his hallucinations—albeit clean-shaven—but Vitaliy’s presence was too unbelievable for his brain to try and conjure.
But, gad, the sound of D’Arcy’s heels on the deck seemed lifelike this time, so maybe it could.
“Don’t,” he tried to whisper, far too late; D’Arcy was long gone. It was useless, anyway, as the imagined Preston never stayed.
Although this time, D’Arcy had said he’d go… go where?
He slit open his eyes—milagro, he seemed to at last possess ones that worked as he bid them—and gazed up.
The reflected sunlight was very bright around him, threads of wavering shimmer setting the weave of mosquito-net canopy sparkling.
He watched it for a moment, waiting for the dream to fade and shift.
Nothing faded. Everard scowled.
The least it could do was make the time pass unfelt.
Nothing. Time crawled. A salted breeze pushed forward and sucked back the netting: once, twice, thrice.
Footsteps approached, heavy steps made with ordinary, serviceable boots, boots that wore through socks like wet paper cloth—
He shut his eyes quick.
“No” was murmured from the companionway, a single word jumping out from a muddled jumble of others. Vitya.
Everard’s stomach lurched, and so too did the dream. His heart thumped hard. There he had been before, Vitya standing over his shot-through corpse, his beach-bleached skeleton, staring down impassionate—Vitya.
He held his breath. He needed to awaken now, even if it was to the earthwork fort.
“Matelot?”
Everard writhed, felt rather than heard his manacles clink softly. “Don’t. For God’s sake. Please go—I don’t want to see the rest!”
D’Arcy murmured something wavering and short.
“No,” Vitaliy said. “He is, I think. This…” His voice slid away into blur. “…nightmare-caught.”
A hand pushed beneath his shoulder, lifted slightly, pushed him over, and then his world was sideways, righted, spinning; Everard’s arm came from somewhere—unmanacled?
—and caught himself from falling onto his stomach.
Vitya’s hand was there, too, holding him upright, rubbing between his shoulder blades, the too-thin flesh covering them.
“Holy God,” Everard gasped, and coughed, and his eyes were open, and everything was solid again.
“Christ,” D’Arcy said. “It worked.”
Everard remembered—he remembered, and it was as real as this: every time Vitya slept on his back, he would shift and moan until Everard shook him awake. His terrified, surfacing gasps after sounded like the ones Everard was making now.
Vitaliy spoke, quiet and rapid.
“Matelot. You feel the linen beneath your fingers? You’re here, in the greatcabin of the Sévère, and Preston and I are beside you. We are at nineteen degrees, fifty-six minutes north, eighty-six degrees, twenty-eight minutes west. It is April the thirteenth, 1817, and you are safe.”
“April,” Everard mouthed without sound.
That made sense. It wasn’t outrageous. Shocking, but not outrageous; actual and precedented, nothing made-up but somehow rational, like Novemby-may the forty-second, or some such fairy nonsense. The coordinates too: somewhere southeast of the Yucatán; this checked out.
However…
“Imposter,” he whispered. “Since when… d’you call him Preston?”
Vitaliy chuckled. He leaned and put his forehead on Everard’s temple, weightless; his breath was warm and relieved on Everard’s ear. “When he needs it.”
“Which is often,” Everard agreed, a little slurred.
D’Arcy tugged at his left hand, wrapped it in his own. “With you gone? Yes.”
Vitaliy pulled away, not far; Everard fell backward, made a noise of discomfort. “Oh, God. I want…” Vitaliy leaned in to listen. “…I want very badly to not be lying down, please.”
This was remedied, four hands pushing-pulling at him, Everard panting with effort and dizziness at the end of it regardless.
He laid his skull back against the cot’s headboard and squinted at his two men.
Vitaliy looked just the same, handsome and concerned and faintly exhausted; D’Arcy, barring the silken-lashed hazel eyes, was practically a different man.
“They gave me up? The Lafittes?”
Vitaliy suddenly looked wary, fidgety, as though he strained against physical retreat from his side. He nodded once.
“After all that effort to starve me out?”
“Eventually. With some convincing,” D’Arcy added, when it was clear Vitaliy wasn’t elaborating. He snuffled at intervals, but his voice was hard. “Two hundred fifty guns of it.”
“Two hun— What?” Everard, stunned, did the maths. That was the Sévère, the San Telmo, the Enemistad, three more of the eighteen-gunner brigantines, at the least, unless Vitya had prized yet another man-o’-war he wasn’t aware of.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was that not in a thousand years would he have thought Vitya would bring one ship for him.
“You did… You brought…”
But the fleet? The fleet entire? For one man? For him? He stared.
Vitaliy broke his gaze and bowed his head in profile. He returned the stare in little flicks, anticipatory, guilty, eager, like it scared him to see Everard watching him. One plush lip beneath the other, he seemed to be holding his breath.
D’Arcy was oddly silent, stroking at the palm of Everard’s hand, no help at all in translation. Everard wondered deliriously if his new quiet was the beard’s influence, and found that kissing aside, he hated it on those grounds alone.
“But why?” he exclaimed. He glared at D’Arcy. “Had you threatened to shoot him?”
D’Arcy laughed faintly. “Ever.” He shook his head. Put his face in his palm. “You’re such an i-idiot.”
Good God, Everard thought, bewildered. D’Arcy was crying again.
Vitaliy distracted him by lowering himself to the cot, a big cat settling down to curl round and sleep.
He picked his way over, mindful of feet and knees and bone-thin thighs, and straddled Everard’s lap, suspending his whole bulk carefully so that none of his weight touched down on aching bones.
Thankfully, those bones had not shrunk; the two of them still fit.
Vitya put his forehead on Everard’s, put them nose to nose, and whispered. “You are mine, matelot.”
Everard inhaled. “Yes.” Agreement was pulled from him like compulsion.
Vitaliy’s eyes were wide, and earnest, and so, so dark.
“Without you, I am dust. Nothing. A skeleton at the bottom of the sea.” He stroked thumbs across Everard’s cheekbones, where the skin still felt thin and raw, pressed lightly in the hollows beneath. “Did you know?”
“Reasonable,” Everard said, nonchalant as he could manage; it was a hard thing, with one’s mouth so close to Vitya’s, breathing him in.
He still could not believe he was awake and this was real.
“I did rather save your life.” Why the devil was talking so difficult?
Was he still so weak? “You r-returned the favor.”
“Only just.” Vitya’s hands threaded back, into Everard’s hair, around his ears, causing gooseflesh to tremble up everywhere in their wake. “Only just. But that’s not what I mean.”
Everard’s heart skipped. “Oh?”
Vitaliy lowered his mouth and traced lips, velvet-soft, over Everard’s. “Without you, it is nothing. Varfolomey. The Sévère. The fleet. I would risk it all again, the whole fucking thing. I would risk it to see you fully hale now.” He pulled back. “It makes me unabashedly a villain—”
“Pirate,” Everard corrected fondly; D’Arcy snuffed a laugh into an elbow.
“—but I would do anything for you,” Vitaliy said.
“Anything. I don’t care what you have or haven’t done.
You could do whatever, go anywhere, love whomever you like.
Regardless, you are mine,” he said fiercely.
“You do not need to be someone or do something in order to be worthy of my, or Varfolomey’s, or anyone’s love. Do you see?”
“Oh,” Everard breathed. Speechifying. “Vitya. I shouldn’t have left…”
“No, no. You tried to tell me, with the lieutenant.” Tears rose in Vitaliy’s eyes, and Everard panicked a bit, as two of them crying would soon mean three.
“And I know now what you meant, that he is yours. I’m sorry.
I didn’t then. Truly. These hands”—his fingers twitched over Everard’s scalp—“are violent ones. They must be. But not at that cost. Your cost. His.”
“Vitya, I understand why you had to—”
“You are mine,” Vitya said again. “So, to answer you with the truth: Preston didn’t threaten me. He did not have to. We came as soon as we could. We flew.”
“And then nearly flattened Galveztown,” D’Arcy said cheerfully.
Vitya shook his head. But he was smiling his tiny smile.
“We shot into the water—no casualties.”
“There is generally a line,” Everard agreed. “Murder is a good one.”
“Generally,” D’Arcy muttered.
“No casualties,” Vitya said. “Except… almost…”
D’Arcy’s hand on Everard’s squeezed.
Except almost him.
Vitya pressed close again, breathed out shakily. “I understand now what I did to you then. The worst thing. And—”
“Vitya,” Everard said. “It’s done. It’s past. Thank you for rescuing me. I love you. Kiss me, please.”
Lips brushed his again, this time with the faint promise of a sweet, warm tongue. It was not nearly enough.
D’Arcy seemed to agree. “Vee,” he groaned, in a shattering plead; Vitya drew back, leaned onto one hand, and, eyes closed, accepted D’Arcy’s hand in his hair, his hard, frantic kiss.
Everard stared up. “Hell.” He swallowed. Really, he needed his blood elsewhere than… “Did this happen… often?”
“You left us,” D’Arcy said, at last, breathless.
“I— You— I did. But I… I regretted it from the second I stepped off the Sévère. And every day thereafter. Every minute. Every—”
“No,” Vitya interrupted. “Not often.”
He leaned and kissed Everard once more: a gentle transference of passion, no less powerful for its delivery.
“But yes,” he murmured. “Don’t leave us behind again, please.”