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hitlikehammers · 8 months ago

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PART ONE: Fail-Pirate!Eddie/Castaway!Steve (Pirate AU)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter One: Man Overboard

You’ve gotta understand: the truth about Eddie?

He’s shit as a pirate. Like: an absolute disgrace. Of all the bad names associated with the trade, if trade is what it can be called?

He might just give it the worst.

So, y’know. That’s nice.

Like, he knows his knots, he is excellent with his hands thank you kindly, and he ties those motherfuckers like a pro, too! So what if he just sometimes confuses his hitch for his stopper, they’re both knots, they both do the job of knotting.

(Mostly. They only lost a boat the one time.)

(As in lost-lost, not the ones that were retrieved in time but landed Eddie on scut anyway.)

Which doesn’t touch on his absolutely abysmal record at the looting end of things. He doesn’t mind taking from the well-off, but he does mind adding it to the ship’s take every time they make land; he maybe lies about how bad he is at the stealing, the all-important plundering of the job, because he ends up finding the people outside the center of town at every port, the ones who line the edges and he drops what he takes with the ones who need it there, where they can’t escape on the water, can’t live in motion on the whims of the waves and find their needs in the flux of a life unanchored.

So he’s not the worst thief, for the right victim. But his spoils never make it back to the ship so: it probably makes him pretty shit at the job to hand, in the end, either way. Add a mark to the tally.

And then, gods: don’t get him started on the taking of…other things. Who aren’t things, they’re fucking people and they deserve respect not…what the other people sailing under his colors seem to believe them useful for instead.

Eddie’s been sick over the edge of the stern, hidden by shadow even if it’s unnecessary because fuck, the rest of the crew is full-occupied with their plundering, and that’s the reason he spews over in the sea, the waves always feeling a little extra angry for his pollution of their waters and that’s fitting. It’s fitting that he’s defiling something sacred with the weakness of his stomach—but not his soul, not his morals or his sense of humanity, fuck’s sake, so: at least there’s that.

He guesses.

Admittedly, though: Eddie doesn’t care so much that he’s a shitty fucking pirate. It’s not piracy that led him here, that charted this course for his life.

It’s the Ocean.

Which, sure, that may strike either cliche or obvious, too soft and poetic or else just downright pointless to underscore because he made a conscious choice to live at Sea, especially given the laundry list of reasons he’s absolutely abysmal at the life-on-the-water thing. But it is the truth. The best and biggest truth he’s ever known, rooted deep enough to fuel his steps and guide his path to here, right here, being exceptionally bad at luring fucking fish in a tiny little dinghy that the crew who hates him decided was perfectly fitting for the anticipated catch and okay, fine, if you were going to base expectations off of prior performance then maybe, and also, also maybe being here, ending up precisely right here—laughingstock of his profession, maligned by his crew, foisted upon barely-a-boat to catch barely-a-fish because y’know what, he’d have become a goddamn fisherman in the fucking first place if he was any good at that—but maybe right here, like this would look like failure to anyone else, to everyoneelse but, y’see—

Eddie Munson was a boy, once.

And he remembers, crystal clear, from the touch of his mother’s hand on his shoulder to the smooth slide of the menacing-but-magical looking shell, with its pointy end for tiny hands to grasp and hold to, and it’s big spiky cone of a head to hold to his own, up against his ear as his mother guided his elbow up and whispered just listen, you’ll hear the ocean tell you its secrets—and he loved the ocean, loved the feeling of the soft foam of the tide on the hidden sands far from the harbor, loved the little creatures that scuttled in and out of the water when the waves crept up, loved the hint of a big fin, maybe real or maybe just imagined something that big, that dangerous, that beautiful breaching the horizon: Eddie wanted to know all the ocean’s secrets.

And when he’d held the shell of his ear, he’d heard them: whispered close and roared fierce alike and he’d felt weightless, giddy; just just floating.

Magic, like the shell in his hands.

And it didn’t matter when his father found him years later, stumbling drunk from the tavern where he spent money they couldn’t afford, finding Eddie with the conch pressed tight to his ear, almost too small now as he’d grown but still desperate for the secrets, the sound of the waves that seemed to reach out and know when they needed to break louder, faster to drown our the shouting, to wash over the way his father had hauled him up and thrown the shell to break a window and sneered your idiot secrets, boy, there’s no ocean in that fucking shell, s’the echo of your own coward heart that you hide in, there, stupid fucking—

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, not because Eddie got knocked to the floor much like his shell, after; not because it made a kind of sense, because if the secrets of the ocean were the mirror of his heartbeat then of course they were faster and louder when his father came home drunk, sometimes he chest got sore over how his heart raced on those nights; and not because when he finally gets his feet back under him, when his father’s wood-sawing snores signal the coast is clear and he can creep out and search in the dark for his shell and find it, cracked from the spin of the handle-like bit so he just has to cradle the wide bell careful in his palm and ignore the slice of the spires into his skin, ignore it for the sake of finding, finding—

The waves. The secrets. His own heartbeat like the thunder in a storm and it doesn’t matter because if that sound is his own heart, then, then it’s like the ocean’s secrets are in his own chest, a little.

Like if the ocean had a heartbeat, there’s something of it pressed inside his own.

And for all that his father tried to whip that wonder away from him, straight out of his hands? That reality is somehow more magical. And Eddie’s been drawn to the pulsebeat of the sea—devoted, even, almost like a lovesick longing—ever since, so.

Failing at pirating, including the fishing part? Isn’t a failure.

Because he’s on the Sea. And that’s all he’s ever really wanted.

It’d help his pride if he got like, one fucking fish, though. Even a tiny one. Though they’d probably mock him worse for a minnow than for nothing so: small mercies, maybe, that he’s pulling up untouched bait.

Still he sighs, and takes a moment, rakes his gaze over the setting sun on the water—they’re far enough out now that there’s no sight of land, just the ripples nearby that smooth into pure water stretching aft and aft further out and Eddie doesn’t have a shell but if he presses his hand to his chest and over his ear at once it’s almost, almost—

He both hears and feels his pulse jump, like the secret is a warning, and he believesthat’s it’s both because it’s the only explanation for the way he turns, at that precise moment that the water moves uncannily agitated, and lifts up something weighty, a heavy shadow, and—

“Man overboard!” Eddie’s voice cracks as his hands reach for the oars and he rows before he thinks because the Ocean told him to look—and maybe it’s childish, and foolhardy, and a silly winsome fantasy he should have left behind ashore long again but…

He can’t tell if the man—because it’s a man, indeed, he can tell now that the water has calmed, and how else to explain its sudden surge to command Eddie’s attention, to call him in close and then ease the way to the waterlogged body—but Eddie can’t tell if the body moves at all save at the water’s own whim, can’t see yet if the flesh is too pale or worse, too blue, and—

“Man overboard!” he cries out with feeling, now; he’s far from the ship but not so much that no one will hear screaming if not yet discern the words and he just needs them to know, needs them to be ready, especially if it’s somehow one of their own and he just repeats it, too of his lungs, shrieks it to the sky as he reaches the man’s form, facedown in the water, and that alone seizes in Eddie’s chest—why tell him a secret if it’s only a heartbreaking one, yet he cannot, will not be picky, he will never reject the confidences of the Ocean no matter how it chooses to disclose its mysteries, even its tragedies; he curses his crewmates for the pitiful size of his little vessel, a joke upon his lacking hauls but now he has need for size and sturdiness as he reaches for the body—broad and leant further mass by the water itself and far more precious than a hundred fish for feeding and for trading, this is a life and he strains to balance the boat and heave the man aboard so not to capsize them both and leave the circumstances worse for his help—

“Man,” he manages to screech before he tumbles back, but with the man in his arms to drag along into the dinghy and he knocks his own breath a little for the fall but the man’s here, and they’re upright, and Eddie scrambles on his knees toward his new charge and he—

Should not have wasted time trying to steady his lungs, really, because this man, on his boat, dragged from the waters, he, he is—

He’s absolutely breathtaking.

Eddie gapes at him, at the play of the sunset on his soaked hair, his skin—pale, but not blue, not dead yet—he is stunning even like this, what unimaginable beauty must be possess when he’s not—

Oh hells, yes, right; he—

Eddie probably needs to fucking check if the breathtaking man is breathing, before he contributes to losing something at sea far more precious than an improperly-knotted boat.

>>>CHAPTER TWO

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