Chapter Text
She wasn’t sure when it happened, but at some point, as Stella’s heart was tucked back beneath her ribcage, she began to bleed. Her chest had been hollow, her ribs pale, like they’d been left to bleach in the sun. Her heart fit straight into the hole. For a moment, her body was still. Then, blood spilled from the gaping wound like it hadn’t when John Jack shot her three times. And Stella, who leaned nonchalantly against the wall of her cabin finally tensed and groaned, as she remembered what pain felt like after ten years without it. She bit down on the linen Scully had given her and closed her eyes to the scene.
Scully clenched her jaw. It was easy enough to perform a surgery on Stella when she knew it wasn’t hurting her. But now, looking at the wound, the blood, what it had to be doing to Stella now that her heart was pumping life into her again, she swallowed bile in the back of her throat. She had to work fast.
“Mulder,” she snapped. He dropped to her side. His eyes were on the ground, afraid to look the carnage head-on. “Give her your hand.”
It was something she’d seen midwives do. Give the woman stick to bite on and a hand to squeeze through the pain. It couldn’t be that different, with what little doctor’s training she’d had. Mulder hesitantly offered his hand to Stella and she caught his wrist in a vice grip. Scully thought of what Anderson had told her—of the first time Stella had done this, singing ‘Hoist the Colours’ in her cabin, bearing the knife herself. She wondered if this was easier for Stella, or if it was harder, not to be alone in pain.
Scully pressed the wound closed as best she could. Stella’s open shirt stained red as she bled into the cabin. But as it left her, it thinned and lost its color, and Scully breathed the smell of salt as the ocean itself spilled from Stella’s veins. Mulder stared wide-eyed at the pool of water that now soaked into the knees of their trousers. He gaped at her, and Scully tried to focus. It was one thing, she knew, to believe in Davy Jones. It was another to see the Dutchman’s curse ebb away and a leave a living woman behind. To feel Stella’s body sew itself shut beneath her palms, the scar that once adorned her chest reform into a thick line. To see Stella breathe like she actually needed the air.
It seemed hours before Scully sat back on the cabin floor, her hands covered in seawater and her hair sticky with sweat. The iron tang of blood had long since faded into the air. Stella leaned against the wall, her chest bearing no open wound but another ugly scar across the first. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed evenly, and to Scully she seemed asleep. The stick was on the floor, bitten into two pieces. She had certainly earned the rest.
Craning her neck, not bothered to get up off the floorboards, she saw Mulder sitting in a dining chair. He snored softly, his head lolled to one side. She didn’t know when exactly he’d left the scene, but somewhere in the slow transition from blood to water, pain to rest, biting down to slow deliverance, he had grown tired. They all had, once it was clear Stella would live. Scully looked down at the knife in her hand. Yes, that was it. Slow deliverance. And she too fell asleep to the rock of the boat.
* * *
The days hummed by like the piano at a rowdy bar. She fell back into the routine of the Flying Dutchman, but this time it took hours of labor to keep the Dutchman sailing. They took turns at the wheel, hauled sails, prepared rigging, all of the tasks Padgett’s crew of trapped souls had once performed at the snap of Stella’s fingers. Mulder navigated them slowly back to Port Washington with a lucky tailwind nudging them along.
“We need a crew,” Scully huffed as she lowered the sails and the tattered Jolly Rodger. Their ship was tucked away near the Port of Tortuga, and they had prepared the barrels for fresh food and water. They waited only for sundown.
“I know.” Stella stood behind her, the taut rope wrapped around her fist. It took at least two to move a sail—all three of them in a heavy wind. But Mulder was high in the crow’s nest, studying his charts and presumably keeping a lookout. He needed those moments to himself, Scully suspected, and she didn’t blame him.
“Maybe the Ophelia is docked there again.” Even as she said it, she knew it was a long shot.
Still, Stella hummed wistfully. “Maybe,” she allowed. Her hand slipped over Scully’s. “Knot it like this,” she instructed, “with an extra turn, just to be sure it won’t come loose.”
“That’s now how my father did it,” Scully muttered.
“Pirate’s life,” Stella said matter-of-factly, as if that sufficed as an explanation. Then— “The Navy doesn’t need the extra turn. We do.”
“Psssshh,” said Scully. “Superstitions.” Mulder had yet to tease her mercilessly for her skepticism—no “I told you so” or “I was right about curses” since the day she’d rescued him. He was still solemn, and she supposed the danger and death were still too near for joking. His capture and the wearing months of his life had changed him irreversibly, but his mood was slowly lightening.
She still felt some way about the curse of the Dutchman. The first time she’d touched Stella’s skin after waking, she had nearly jumped at the warmth. The cold of death, the handed down name of Davy Jones had become such a part of the character that was Stella, that it was strange to see it gone. But now, without the ghostly hum of the Dutchman’s crew doing its duties, she sometimes forgot the change. She had kept the knife, just to remind herself it existed.
Stella’s rough hand on hers shook her. “Don’t just sit here worrying yourself until dark,” she murmured hoarsely. She tugged Scully’s hands off the rope and lifted them over her head.
It was an open invitation, impossible to resist lately. She shifted, encouraging Stella to pin her wrists against the mast and closed her eye to the feel of Stella’s body pressed against her. Stella was warm now, and Scully no longer shivered at the touch of her skin. She kissed hard and quick—it wasn’t always that way, but it was when they were outside. They didn’t feel untouchable anymore.
Stella unbuckled the scabbard from Scully’s waist and untucked her shirt, sliding her hands underneath the loose white linen. “Comfortable here?” She asked, running her fingers along the waist of Scully’s trousers.
“Comfortable enough,” she said breathily, “but a little discomfort is part of the fun.” There was something undeniably sexy about being pushed against a pole and ravished at some ungodly hour, with the slightest threat of being discovered. She blushed as Stella’s hand slipped into her trousers and teased her inner thigh.
“We should be quick,” she whispered.
Stella chuckled, her breath tickling Scully’s throat. “Who would catch us?.”
“Mulder might wake up.”
He won’t. But it’s the transgression, the risk-taking that makes her tingle.
“Then I suppose—”Stella pressed two fingers inside her.— “that we should hurry.” She pulsed, and Scully’s knees trembled. She locked her arms around the mast as Stella’s other hand slides behind her head to cushion it against the wood.
“Quick enough?” Stella asked, thumbing Scully’s clit. It was sudden and intense, sending a brief shock through her nerves.
“I don’t know,” Scully said between quick breaths. She leaned into Stella’s touch. Her head crooked forward, chin resting on Stella’s collarbones. She barely carried her own weight; it was Stella and the mast that held most of her up. “We might still be caught.”
“Oh?” Stella’s hand curled inside her, and she gasped. Then, Stella pulled away, angling her body so they were shoulder to shoulder. Stella’s forehead touched the cracking wood as she let her catch her breath, just for a second. They huffed unevenly and watched the hot mist rise. Scully closed her eye. She was still throbbing, still sensitive, and she moaned quietly.
Stella circled her labia, starting slow but speeding up before Scully had fully understood the feeling. She shivered and knew she was far gone. It was funny; Stella finished her so much quicker now that she was living. They acted touch-starved, despite the many nights they’d fallen into bed together before they reached the island. She wondered what Stella’s heart had changed about her body, that Scully felt but couldn’t see.
She cried out as Stella traced her clit, bracing herself on the pole. It was a sharp orgasm, dizzying but quick to subside, and her muscles trembled upon relax. She rested her forehead on Stella’s sternum. Stella withdrew her hand from Scully’s trousers and wrapped it around her waist instead. They stood out of alignment, not quite facing each other but tucked together at an angle like jigsaw pieces. Scully breathed heavily into Stella’s chest. She felt the scar brush her cheek.
When Scully had recovered, she had returned the favor of a quick orgasm. It had been loud and visceral, and when she finished, Stella tried to look into Scully’s eyes the way she always had but instead had thrown her head to the stars.
“The sex is better now,” Stella mused after, tossing her head Scully’s way and smirking impishly.
“What was it before?”
“I didn’t need it the way I had before the curse, or the way I do now.” She fiddled with the loose folds of Scully’s shirt, tucking them back into place. “I felt it more in the chest than between the thighs,” she quipped. But her face had turned almost grave.
These days, Stella was almost methodical in lovemaking, and rarely spoke but to ask if it was good. She always saw to Scully’s needs first, letting the heat and sweat of her love squirming beneath her bring her to the edge. Only then did she allow Scully to finish her, roughly and sloppily. And she’d let out a breath she’d been holding in for ages.
When they finally went to bed, sleep didn’t come. They sprawled on their backs, bone-tired but unable to rest. It was too hot in the cabin to lay in each other’s arms.
* * *
“Sail with me,” Stella murmured one day, almost absently. The noonday sun blazed. The Dutchman glided on a lucky tailwind, and Stella held a scope to her eye, hoping to catch Tortuga by sundown.
“Where?”
Stella lowered the scope. “Wherever you want to go.”
Scully bit her lip. “What about Port Washington?”
“We’re on course for it. But—”
“But you can’t stay there,” Scully finished. “I wouldn’t ask you to. I have family I need to see, lost time I need to make up for. But after that, if the Dutchman is willing to come back for me…”
“The Dutchman will always come back for you.”
Scully chuckled, letting her head roll back on the rail. “Stella Gibson, are you asking me to become a pirate?”
“You already are.”
“I’m the daughter of a Navy man.” She was almost teasing, but there was weight to her words. If she chose this life, she couldn’t be honest about it, not even to her mother.
“So am I.”
She’d forgotten that about Stella. And suddenly everything she’d refrained from asking poured to the forefront of her mind. My father loved England. And I loved my father.
“Ten years at sea,” said Scully, “and you came to Los Barriles.”
“What?”
“After ten years on the Dutchman, why didn’t you go back to England? Why didn’t you see your father?”
Stella stood stone still, squinting into the horizon. “I worried that I’d be coming back to a different home. I couldn’t imagine how it had changed since I had been gone, how much older everyone had grown, and left me behind. It was easier, I suppose, not to see him at all. I—I wasn’t certain my father was even living, and if I stayed away, I could just imagine him as old and happy. The same as I imagined the feel of dry earth and the bustle of a port.”
“Would you go back now?”
“Perhaps.” Stella’s eyes glistened. “In many ways, Miss Scully, you are braver than me.”
* * *
They took turns rowing to shore. None of them spoke, just huffed and strained their muscles against the waves. Only Stella broke the pact of silence to mutter between breaths, “It was easier when a ghost did it.” The full moon glanced off her shoulders, polishing her days-old sunburn. Their little boat would never be noticed in a busy port like Tortuga; still, Scully felt exposed. Mulder shifted uncomfortably beside her, his long legs folded awkwardly in the tiny boat.
They hauled the boat onto a secluded shoreline just beside the only spring in Tortuga and tucked it into the pricker-bushes. Stella winced as she disentangled herself from the branches. She reached for a stem and jerked back her hand at the touch. Blood sprung in beads from her fingertips, and for a moment she just stared at it. Then she sucked the tip of her thumb and shook away the blood.
Stella set down the first empty barrel and waited for Mulder to carry in the second. “If we fill these up we’ll have enough water to take us to Los Barriles,” she said, popping open the lids on the barrels. Then she adjusted the strap on her holster, bringing her pistol into plain view. “I’m going into town to find us a crew. Or rather, one or two delinquents looking for a job.”
Scully furrowed her brow. “It’s dangerous to bring strangers aboard.”
“Not if they’re strangers we can take in a fight,” Stella retorted. “It takes all of our manpower to stay on course in fair weather. Without a crew, we’ll be thrown adrift if a storm so much as breathes on us.”
Scully crossed her arms. She opened her mouth to protest, then stepped back. They had talked about hiring a crew when the ropes blistered their hands, when the wind changed and everyone rushed to make the proper adjustments, but doing it—inviting a couple buccaneers from Tortuga to sail with them—was another hurdle. Stella was right, though. Without ghosts, they needed more people to keep the Dutchman sailing.
“Don’t get John Jack,” Scully said flatly, in lieu of a real protest. “And be careful who you trust.”
“You don’t have to tell that to me, Scully.”
“I’m just reminding you that you’re no longer invincible. Or alone.”
Stella’s lips tightened, and she offered a curt nod. She stepped forward with intention, and cupping Scully’s cheek, kissed her quickly. “I’ll be back.” Then she vanished into the bush.
Scully pushed her first barrel under the spring. The water splattered loudly, and she felt almost self-conscious watching it. Mulder sat down next to her. He wore the tattered button-down of his Navy shirt, wrinkled and stiff even after he had washed it. Several buttons were missing on the coat, and the insignia were so tattered they were unrecognizable. His hair had grown out, and he’d lost the hat long before Scully found him. He no longer looked a Navy man, even from afar.
“We’ll be getting home soon, Scully,” he said, but he didn’t sound sure. He wrung his hands at his lap.
“We will.”
Mulder rested his hand on her knee. “Are you going to stay?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Would she stay? She pictured the bustling port, the Governor’s hall, her home on the cliff. Her mother, a grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders as she hurried out of the house to meet her tattered, one-eyed pirate daughter. Would she gasp? Would she even recognize her, at first? She was nervous, almost embarrassed to think of it.
“Not for long,” she said. She turned to look at Mulder, and tears sprung in her eye. He too was weathered by the sea. Neither of them could go contentedly back to Port Washington and return to life as usual. I have to see to my mother, she’d told Stella. I have to show her I’m all right. But she couldn’t imagine staying for too long, waiting in her father’s office for a good husband to find her. If she stayed at all, she’d have to do something productive. She’d have to ruffle some feathers to get what she wanted.
Mulder grabbed the rim of the water barrel and hoisted it out of the spring. Water sloshed over his boots and trousers. He steadied it on the shore with a huff, and Scully knocked the lid tight with her elbow.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, fetching the second barrel and placing it under the spring. “You left home once with a case of wanderlust. Will you be content there when you get back?”
Mulder frowned. He sat against the full barrel and drew his knees to his chest. “No,” he confessed. “but I don’t know where else to go. I found the legends I was looking for; I witnessed the curse of Davy Jones broken, but I was kidnapped, betrayed, and nearly killed. The truth is out there, Scully, but after what I’ve seen I’m not sure the life of a pirate is for me.”
“Mulder, we’re both adventurers at heart. I’ve learned that, in the last few months. And you have a full archive of adventures. If you dig up another legend, I’m coming with you.”
Mulder sighed. “It’s not that simple, Scully. You can say that because you’ve built a life at sea, a life that doesn’t fully involve me. And I don’t begrudge you that. You should have a life that doesn’t involve me, even if you are a right proper pirate.” He chuckled fondly. “But it’s not fair to any of us if I spend my days with only you and Stella. I need something else—someone else, just the same as you. It doesn’t mean we part ways, at least, not for good. When I stumble on new cases, new legends, you’ll always be the first person I talk to. But I don’t think this adventure will end with the three of us on the same ship.”
He was right, of course. If she wanted to be with Stella, she had to live like a pirate. She could be arrested for loving a woman, much less a woman who escaped death row in England and captained a notorious ship.
Scully wrung her hands. “How do I tell my mother?” she blurted out. “How do I tell her I’m going to disappear for months on end, just the way my father did, but there will be no commanding officer to deliver the news if I die?”
“It sounds like you’ve made up your mind after all.”
Slowly, she nodded. “I’ll go home for a time. Stella will disappear. And when the Dutchman comes back for me, I’ll climb aboard.”
“Will you now?” Scully’s hair stood up on the back of her neck. The voice didn’t belong to Mulder. It was too smooth, too punctuated, and suddenly Scully was aware of the crackle of boots on undergrowth. The puffing breath, the rustle of clothing, a third shadow stretching ghast-like in the moonlight. She swallowed and met Mulder’s eyes before daring to face the intruder.
She stared down the barrel of Jim Burns’s pistol.