Chapter Text
Charles Vane hated being dead.
At first, it had been a relief. The pain in his leg was gone, for one thing. The waiting was over, for another. He’d always meant to look death in the eye and meet it on his own terms, but so did most men. Now, he didn’t have to wonder if he’d have the strength to see it through. He’d seen the faces of the people in the crowd around his gallows. He’d seen Billy understand what it was he intended to do for Nassau. He’d seen the worry that made Eleanor’s stony face a lie.
It was good, knowing he’d died well, but the satisfaction soon wore thin. The crowd dispersed, many muttering angrily, a few with pinched, priggish faces that proclaimed Nassau well rid of him. No one saw him standing by his own body. He could see his own hands when he held them out in front of him, but he was the only one.
He stayed by the body that had been his until nightfall. Charles hadn’t believed in anything other than his own strength in life, but now that he was dead and faced with proof of the afterlife, he had started thinking about how it might work. Maybe he needed to stay close to where he’d died. Wait for a guide, or a call into whatever lay on the other side of death. But nothing came.
He didn’t seem to be tied to his corpse in any way. He had taken a few experimental steps at first, testing whether he could walk away from it, and he felt nothing holding him back, so when the street darkened and the torches were lit, he walked away from the gallows. He could still feel the street under his feet, the grain of the wood of a passing cart he reached out to touch. He could smell salt from the ocean and rum and piss and sweat in the tavern, but when he tried to grasp something in his hands, he slipped right through it. It was as if, just for him, the laws of nature had been suspended. He could put his hand on a bottle, feel the glass pitted beneath his fingers, but if he tried to lift it, his hand went into it. He could feel the glass in his hand, and the rum, as if the insides of him had a sense of touch, same as the outside.
People passed right through him, too. He found that out the hard way. Out of habit, he avoided walking into people at first, moved out of their way when he saw them coming because he knew they could not see him. So, it was Eleanor who taught him how it felt to have a living person walk through him and out the other side as if he wasn’t there.
He had sought her out for a host of reasons. Part of him had gone to her to see if there was any regret under all of her fury. Lots of people in Nassau were mourning what he’d meant, but he wanted to see someone who knew him better mourning who he was, and despite everything, he knew she would be. If their parts had been reversed, if he’d been forced to end her, he’d still be grieving. Another angrier part of him had gone to her to see if she was afraid of what he’d started. To see if, though she thought she’d won, she had any idea of the smoldering fury she’d unleashed when she ordered his death. Ghosts often had unfinished business, he remembered, and if he had any, it was with her.
When he found her, she was in the governor’s rooms (there was a certain satisfaction in being able to go where he wanted, even through doors were closed against all others). She was shaken. That was certain, but he was not the only reason, and that realization made jealousy flare up so white hot it felt like he was about to burn up from the inside. Eleanor was worried for Rogers, and not just out of self-interest. He knew her well enough to know true affection when he saw it, and the look on her face as she sat at Rogers’ bedside was genuine. The governor looked half-dead, which only made Charles more convinced that his own death was entirely on Eleanor’s head. Part of him wanted to frighten her more, to be the vengeful, vicious ghost from stories that broke dishes and ripped her thick curtains to shreds and destroyed everything in her rooms that was civilized and fine.
He tried to pick up a teacup, to dash it against a wall. Before, he’d been testing the limits of his new existence. Maybe anger, feeling, that was what was needed to affect the world he was no longer part of. He concentrated hard, willing his hand to be solid enough that the porcelain wouldn’t pass through his fingers, but nothing happened. He might as well not have been there at all.
Unable to get her attention that way, he planted himself in her path when she rose from Rogers’ side and spoke the first words he’d spoken since the hanging.
“This is what you chose?”
Eleanor paused in the doorway and looked back over her shoulder before gently pulling the door shut behind her.
“He is the world that threw you in that cell, and because he’s the one who let you out of it, you thank him for it?”
She was walking toward him now, and he didn’t move. She would have to walk through him. And then, surely she would feel something, there would be some indication he could do more than watch time pass around him.
“You’re better than this, Eleanor,” he said, just before she walked through him. Her body merged into his for a second, and the way he saw it, she disappeared inside of him before walking out the other side.
This was different than passing through doors or bottles. Those things didn’t have life. He couldn’t feel the pulse of their heart, the structure of their bones, the warmth of their skin in him but separate from him. Those things didn’t have feelings. Eleanor did. As she had passed through him, he had felt, just for a moment, the roiling mixture of grief for him, anger at herself for feeling grief for him layered over grief for her father, worry about the governor, and a determination that was so perfectly her. It was achingly intimate, and he never wanted to do it again.
For the first time, Eleanor seemed to react to him. She turned sharply and looked behind her, and he looked her in the eye for a moment before she shook her head and went to the governor’s desk, where she seemed at home searching through stacks of paper and scratching notes on the correspondence there.
He tried to summon up the fury he’d felt a few moments before. The sight of her, so clearly allied with those who would enslave Nassau, should have made him hate her. But the moment when she passed through him had drained it all away. He knew what she felt, and she wasn’t selfish or vengeful. She was determined despite her fear, and he remembered that he’d loved her for that, once, and even though he hated the path she had chosen, he couldn’t find fault with her commitment to it.
He walked around the desk until he was standing behind her. There was surely a wealth of information spread out in front of her, but there was no one he could relay it to, so he didn’t bother reading any of it.
Careful not to pass through her, he caressed her cheek with the back of his hand, leaned in, and whispered, “You made your choice. I respect that. Now you’d best be ready for what comes next.”
It was advice kindly given, and Eleanor seemed to sense it because she put a hand to her cheek and turned so quickly he barely had time to react. Her face narrowly missed passing right through his, and he found himself across the room. He hadn’t walked there, he was just… there. He had wanted to be away from Eleanor but still in the room, and so he was.
He felt like a ship whose anchor had been weighed after too long at harbor. He’d said his piece to Eleanor, and whatever business he had with her was done. He could have stayed, but for what reason? He didn’t hate her, and he remembered loving her too much to watch her tend another man. There were other people he’d rather see.
Once he was outside the governor’s house, he tested his new-found ability to wink between places just by thinking about them. He went to the tavern, the brothel, the wrecks, the Ranger’s old campsite, and Mrs. Barlow’s house (which was not empty, though the men inside had taken pains to keep the lights from showing through the window). Charles saw familiar faces, especially at Flint’s woman’s house, but not the two he was looking for. Finding Jack and Anne was going to be harder than he’d thought. Of course they weren’t in Nassau any more. It was for the best, but if they were somewhere he hadn’t gone, he couldn’t join them. That seemed to be how this worked. He could go to places he’d been in life, or places he’d seen in drawings or heard described. (This is how he ended up in front of the British Parliament building, which he told to go fuck itself before jumping back to Nassau.)
Ships were the answer. They didn’t stay still, but the Queen Anne’s Revenge looked very much the same in Nassau as it did anywhere else. She was easy to find. All he had to do was think of what she looked like below decks, and he was on board. He had hoped that Blackbeard take him to the rest of the pirate fleet, but it didn’t take Charles long to figure out that Teach had gone ashore at one of his out of the way camps and didn’t plan to set sail any time soon.
He had more success with Flint’s Spanish warship. He did not know her as well as the Revenge, so when he appeared on the deck of a ship at anchor just off shore of an island he’d never seen before, he wondered if he’d found the right place. A long, white beach stretched inland until it turned into thick jungle, and a few tents and fires spread out along the high-tide mark. There were pirates and smugglers here, sure enough, but were they the ones he sought?
Now that he could see the island, a thought brought him to it, and as he wandered through the camp, he saw faces he knew, but no Jack or Anne. He watched for a while, and waited. There weren’t nearly enough people on the warship or on the beach, and half of those who were on the beach weren’t Nassau men. The strangers were, to a man, black, and there was a wariness between the strangers and the pirates that spoke of a recent partnership without much trust. But where were the rest of them? Some of them had to be inland. Eventually, Charles listened in on enough conversations to know there was a village well-hidden in the interior, and another of Flint’s men did him the favor of mentioning that Rackham and Bonny were in the thick of the planning for any assault by the British, which meant they had to be nearby.
Near midnight, one of the maroons set off down a barely visible path into the jungle, and Charles followed him. He tried not to keep too close to his guide. He didn’t want the man getting spooked, and he’d learned that people were most likely to act like they knew he was there when they were alone, or it was dark, or they were scared, or all three.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” Charles said. “I just want you to lead me to my friends.” He knew the man couldn’t hear him, but perhaps speaking the words would put his guide at ease.
After close to an hour of walking a twisting, treacherous path that would have been a hard climb for him if he’d still been alive and wounded, the jungle opened up before him, and he saw the maroon village for the first time. It was larger than he’d thought it would be, and for this many to hide inland with no sign of their presence visible from sea was no small feat. If these were the allies Flint had found, they were well worth having.
Most of the pirate crews were camped on the outskirts of the village, and all Charles had to do was seek out the site he would have chosen if he’d been there. Somewhere protected, dry, good vantage points even if they were among friends. Sure enough, the flag Jack had been fretting over for months flew over a tent that backed up to a cliff that would be hard to scale and had a clear view of all approaches. Jack and Anne were sitting outside, backs against an overgrown fallen tree, feeding the small fire near their feet.
Jack looked well. Not healed completely, but the cut on his face wasn’t red or angry, and he didn’t move like a man who’d survived a wreck of a carriage a few weeks earlier. Anne looked like she always did, which was such a comfort to Charles he felt himself smiling for the first time since he’d died.
“Good to see the two of you are getting on without me,” he said, sitting carefully beside Anne. He could, with effort, sit on things rather than sinking through them. Neither of them even looked his way, which was all right. He didn’t need the two of them to notice him, for now. He’d found them safe and whole, and if he imagined it was a night when he didn’t have much to say, things were very much as they had been.
In the days that followed, Charles stayed with his former crew members when it suited him and explored the village or the camps or the beach when it didn’t. Once, he went out with Flint and his crew, half Walrus men and half maroons, but not being able to take part in the action was maddening. Better to be with friends, if he could just let them know he was there.
Anne sensed him first. It made sense. Jack always relied too much on the evidence of his eyes. Anne was willing to be still, use her instincts to feel a situation out. Even so, when she turned and looked right at him, a pained expression crossing her sharp features, he was startled.
“Yes. I’m here. I’m sorry it pains you, remembering I’m dead, but I need you to know I’m here,” he said, but she looked back at the fire as if he hadn’t spoken at all.
He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever get her attention. One night, he decided to try making himself part of their conversation, a third voice they couldn’t hear. He asked, “You hearing this shit, Anne?” when Jack’s stories strained belief, and he agreed loudly with Jack that Blackbeard was impossible to work with, but necessary. “Fucking right he is,” Charles said.
After Jack had gone to sleep, Anne still sat up, toying with her knife, and Charles sat across from her. He’d missed this, just the two of them, sitting after a long day, not talking, just being.
Without warning, Anne looked up and stared straight at him. “I know you’re there,” she said. “Come sit with us whenever you want.”
It was easier with Anne after that, as if all of their silent conversations while he was alive had gotten them ready to understand each other when one of them was dead but lingering. Jack, though… he was going to be difficult. He knew Charles was there. That much was obvious from the speed with which Jack made an about face whenever Charles came up behind him and said, “Ignoring me? Fuck you, Jack.” But Jack refused to do anything to acknowledge Charles’ presence. If he hadn’t heard Jack’s go on at length about his disbelief in god or ghosts more times than he could count, Charles would have been hurt.
When Anne started leaving out rum and tobacco for him, Charles was pleased. For one thing, he didn’t know until she did it how much he’d been craving things that were his. For another, the pointed way Anne glared at Jack the whole time she was setting out his things was her way of forcing the issue, and Charles was grateful for it.
Jack didn’t say a word, though, and Charles just shrugged and settled next to Anne, wishing he could smoke some of the tobacco she’d left out. He settled for passing his hand through it. He’d found that moving through food or drink or other things he couldn’t have was the next best thing. “You tried,” Charles said. “It’s not your fault he’s stubborn.”
Later, he was grudgingly grateful that Jack held out so long. If he hadn’t, Charles would never have figured out how to touch the living without passing through them.
“If you walk out of this cabin without looking down, you’re leaving the best behind,” Charles said idly, pointing with the toe of a boot at the strange looking knot in the wood of the prize Jack’s crew had just taken.
Jack, as usual, didn’t hear him at all.
“It’s a good hiding place,” Charles said. “Clever, like you.”
Jack inspected the captain’s desk carefully, and, finding nothing, made some notations in the ledger he carried with him.
“It’s not in the desk. It’s in the floor. I can see it. Come on, Jack. Look down,” Charles said.
Jack was heading for the door now. In frustration, Charles stuck a leg out into Jack’s path, trying to do what he did when he sat in chairs without falling through them. All he had to do was remember where he ended and everything else began. If he could concentrate hard enough, keep that sense of the space he took up in place while Jack tried to walk through him…
Jack tripped, turned, looked around wildly at all corners of the room, and, finding, nothing, the floor. All at once, his eyes lit up the way they did when he smelled money.
“Now you see it,” Charles said.
Not two heartbeats later, Jack Rackham, rational disbeliever in all things spiritual, said, “Thanks for that.”
Charles grinned and clapped Jack on the shoulder. (A gesture that, without Charles’ concentration, Jack couldn’t feel, but it felt right all the same.)
He had to be careful how often he made himself solid. Doing it once in a day was hard enough, doing it twice made him feel so tired he could barely stir from the camp for days afterward.
He found that out the day he saved Jack’s life and broke the glass Anne had given him.
Having discovered he could be more than a bystander when swords were out, he started going along with Anne when she helped take prizes. She was more likely to be in the thick of things, and now he knew he could keep a sword from her back if she didn’t see it coming.
Once, when he came up behind her and looked across the water as they fast closed the distance between them and their quarry, Anne said, “I’m not the one who needs minding. Look out for Jack today, would you?”
Charles had been looking forward to going over with Anne and the rest of the boarding party, and he felt a momentary sting of disappointment, but something on Anne’s face said she wasn’t asking without cause.
“Fine. If you think he needs me, I’ll go,” Charles said, stalking off across the deck to find Jack.
Anne had been right to worry, and Charles got to save Jack’s life and help his friend kill a man twice his size, which was a good day’s work for a man two months dead.
That night, Jack finally admitted he knew Charles was still with them. True, he danced around the subject and piled on more words than were needed, but that was Jack’s way, and for Charles, it was better than being ignored.
However, Jack couldn’t leave a good thing alone.
“You don’t supposed he’s here to ensure I make the best of it…” Jack said, breaking the companionable silence that had descended over the three of them.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charles demanded, and he was glad to hear Anne echoing his sentiment.
In the argument that followed, Charles got more and more angry. He’d died making sure Jack wouldn’t hang. He’d made that choice with his eyes open, knowing what might happen. Fuck Jack for thinking he’d change his mind.
He heard Jack say, “Maybe he’s having second thoughts and making the best of a decision he regrets,” and he was suddenly right in front of Jack, shouting into his oblivious face.
“Sorry I’m dead, not sorry I saved you, now leave it alone!”
Jack didn’t hear him, and he kept talking.
The breaking point was when Jack asked Anne, “It never crossed your mind that this might have been a bad trade? Never wished it had been me instead of him?”
Anne looked like she’d taken a punch to the gut, and if he could have managed it, Charles would have cracked Jack across the jaw hard enough to break it. He barely even hear what Anne said. All he knew was that Jack needed to know how furious he was. And, like remembering how to speak after a knock on the head, he suddenly realized he knew how to do it. It was good that Anne was angry too. He stood next to her and let one of his hands sink just a fraction of an inch into her. He felt her rage, her loss, her fear of being left alone, and he drew on them and added them to his own. He knew what she was going to say last. It’s what he would have said, too.
“Fuck you, Jack.”
All Charles had to do was look at the glass on “fuck,” and it shattered.
Jack’s face went ashen. “I think he agrees with you.”
“Fucking right I do!” Charles said.
“Fucking right he does,” Anne echoed.
Jack bent down and gingerly picked up one of the broken pieces of glass.
“Seems like you need more rum, Charles. One moment.” He tossed the shard into the darkness, ducked into the tent, and came out with another cup (metal, this time, Charles noticed). Without saying a word, Anne handed him the bottle. Jack set the cup in a place he cleared between himself and Anne, and nestled the pouch of tobacco against the fallen log.
“Drink up, my friend,” Jack said, filling the cup to the brim. Anne raised an eyebrow. Her gifts had always been of a more symbolic size. “A peace offering,” Jack explained. “You don’t make a man angry and then give him a thimble-full of rum by way of apology.” He glanced around the fire and patted the ground next to him. “If you’re still there, Charles, spot’s yours, if you want it.”
Charles settled between his friends, and they smiled at each other through him, Jack by way of apology, Anne to let him know he was forgiven. That was going to take some getting used to. He dipped a finger in the rum, feeling it around him and in him. He didn’t know if spirits could get drunk, but tonight seemed like a fine time to find out.