PART TWO: Fail-Pirate!Eddie/Castaway!Steve (Pirate AU)
🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊
Chapter Two: A Most Compelling Gaze
CHAPTER ONE // Chapter Three on 28 March 🌊
also on ao3
He might be a piss-poor pirate, but Eddie’s not an idiot. He knows this was intended as a test—for the both of them, according to the Captain:
To test your loyalty after so many missteps, Munson, can’t help but doubt your commitment to this ship Reefer Rick had cackled at him through those rotting teeth of his; and to tease out the worth of the heftiest catch you’ve managed to date!, and they’d all laughed then, the whole of the crew, even those Eddie counted as the closest thing he had to friends, though their bellies shake less, their chuckles carry less an echo, and that’s something, maybe.
Maybe.
So yeah: Eddie’s well aware it’s a test, setting him up to babysit the castaway? It’s also to have a fucking laugh; probably more geared toward the latter, if only because they won’t fucking stop.
Because it’s one thing to imply attraction to the 'pretty-boy flotsam that was too big for even you to miss, Munson', because one, they’re pirates, degeneracies of all stripes were in their natures, Eddie’s known preferences being the very least of the lot and certainly far from unique, and two: fuck but yes indeed, even Munson couldn’t miss the heaven-sent vision who was now resting in his care, or capture, depending on who was asked.
Eddie didn’t see much difference, if his heart fluttered when he looked upon that face each time; if his pulse eased and the sun shone brighter through grimed window panes like sorcery, when Eddie watched the man’s chest rise and fall: alive, color back in his cheeks, his lips, and gods be good or cruel in turns, those lips—
But the crew, of course, can’t stop with the obvious; oh certainly not.
No: they have to cackle and ask more lewd lines of implication, most egregious—and of course most popular—being variations on oh yes, yes, too big for even the Merry Moron Munson to miss, but is the catch big elsewhere, hmm? Did you stick him with your pole, forwent the hook altogether? Or maybe he’s so large even you could have snagged him by his coc—
Eddie does his best to ignore all that, and just stand watch over their formerly-waterlogged not-quite-prisoner, scooped from a not-quite-wreckage, as in: no wreckage. None anywhere near, and the Captain had demanded they look and look hard, not chancing leaving unclaimed booty on the water but—nothing. The man came from nowhere. The crew’s more suspicious than curious.
But that’s another thing Eddie never fit in with, when it came to his shipmates.
And if—if, in the purely hypothetical instance—but if Eddie does retreat from the taunting behind the closed cabin doors where they’ve laid the mystery man to recover, and hopefully soon wake? Maybe Eddie retreats to the room he's babysitting in part because...he blushes easy, alright?
That’s not a crime, save one of his birth; nothing he can do to fight against it. So much as learned well in his youth: he knows keenly when it’s best to run.
Behind the doors to the cabin where the pretty mystery man too large to miss is lying in an oddly-clean bed for the vessel. That’s just a happy coincidence of the sort Eddie doesn’t normally stumble upon, so he’s got no interest now in staring the gift-washed-up-on-his-metaphorical-shore in the mouth.
“Your mouth will get dry.”
Eddie startles hard enough at the bedside of the Mystery Man to splay on the floor, knocked to bruise: he hadn’t realized he was gaping.
The sprawling as he stares up from the floor doesn’t seem to…incline his jaw to closing.
Mystery Man—who’s awake, good god, he’s awake, alive and awake and dry and warm, Eddie scrambles to pull himself up on the bed frame and he can feel the man’s warmth, and his skin’s got a golden sort of gleam that Eddie hadn’t noticed before but oh hell that does absolutely nothing to stop the stirring in Eddie’s trousers, holy fucking hell—
And oh. Oh, then the Mystery Man is reaching, slowly, blinking just once before he slips a fingertip under Eddie’s chin and nudges his lips closed with a pop.
He feels so warm. Eddie cannot goddamn swallow.
“Sorry,” the man’s turned half on his side, half on his stomach now, peeking almost adorably, almost shy but no, no: far more coy the way he looks down at Eddie, sitting up but still on the godsdamned floor. “I’m just kind of really partial to not drying out.”
Eddie blinks, stares, tries to parse the words around the echo of the touch; mouth. Dry. Right.
Right, he…right.
In hindsight, it’s either a very odd or very suggestive comment, but Eddie doesn’t intend to have access to hindsight any time soon, certainly not soon enough for it to matter, because the Mystery Man is blinking at him, and his lashes look like the patters on the hard outsides of a scallop, so long and previously delicate, fanned out to cast their own shadows, catch their own light.
“You’re awake.”
Which: obvious. Idiotic to state plain. No wonder they call him ‘moron’ as a rule on this ship, he does nothing to prove it wrong, though in fairness here and now: how in every hell imaginable is he supposed to be anything but dumbstruck by the eyes open, fixed on his, close-on to glowing with the amber shift of them, like fine whiskey he’d never had the coin for but has once or twice proven light enough fingers to snag. But they’re more than that, even: the same color but caught inside the sunset-meeting-moonrise where it lilts along the water, the copper starburst of it with the soft shift of the waves in greens, bare hints of blues—intoxicating.
What else can Eddie be but a fool, in sight of those eyes?
“Mmm,” Mystery Man hums with a quirk to his lips and stretches between the linens as if they were silks, rather than hole-ridden, and quite suspiciously stained; “for a bit.”
Eddie halts, pulse kicking a little extra hard because—
“A bit?” And his voice doesn’t squeak. It doesn’t squeak.
The way the man’s mouth curls upward calls Eddie out as a bald-faced liar.
“Your friends are,” the man licks his lips as he seems to consider his words; “quite colorful in their attempts at humor.”
Good god, the things, the things they’ve been saying, that this man has heard, about Eddie, and, and—
“You’re stuck here with me?” Mystery Man tips his head, half askance but also almost half apology which: in light of the moment, it’s the oddest thing to concern himself with.
In light of the man’s everything, it is the most absurd concern Eddie has ever been led to entertain.
“I wouldn’t say it quite like that,” Eddie manages to speak almost-evenly, with his heart still thudding loud enough to muffle his own words back to his ears. He’s almost proud of the effort made.
He’s absolutely proud of how it seems to be at least part of what provokes a full smile out of the Mystery Man, and if Eddie’d thought his eyes could, did glow? Gods above: this smile itself, but then compared in turn to the warmth that rises through Eddie to see it, a soft banked fire that rises from his toes and licks around his limbs, swells in his chest: oh.
Just, just oh.
“Good,” the man grins at him, sounds the like warmth Eddie feels, with an extra hint of satisfaction, a gilded edge of teasing maybe, even: “I wouldn’t say I’m stuck with you, either.”
Eddie let’s himself have a moment, even two or three, just to bask in the light of it, the way his pounding heart’s shifted to fluttering: no less frantic but more like how flames can dance, erratic but so clearly life-giving, evidence shone inside their light. He lets himself have the moments before he clears his throat, and tries so best to act like a grown man with some shred of dignity. Only a shred.
He’s not asking for miracles, here. Or: none beyond the vision wrapped above him in a pirate’s best bedding.
“How are you feeling?” Eddie finally manages to ask a question of import.
“Oh,” the man almost startles, or else his brows quirk a touch in something close to confusion before he seems to take stock of himself.
“Mostly alright,” he concludes with a nod; “I’d just gotten,” he chews his lips and oh, perhaps Eddie asked after the well-being of the wrong person in his room, his heart back to drumming because all hells, but that is a sight.
“Disoriented,” the man settles on; “the water was,” but he stops short, cuts himself off and something in what’s not said feels important and Eddie may have chased it if not for how shiny the man’s lips still looked.
“I’ll be fine,” the man smiles soft, then, assured him genially; “you needn’t—“
“They’re suspicious,” Eddie blurts, suspects he lands on it like a die rolled at random in the hopes he’ll say something other than you’re exquisite or the like. At least he rolls random but safe, not to mention true.
“You,” Eddie narrows his gaze, means to nod down to the unexpected quality of the man’s clothing and—
Meets the tufting of chest hair where the bedclothes end beneath the throat. Oh.
“You wore finery,” Eddie manages, and barely that, maybe not even that because his eyes catch the careful drape of the white cloth softer than anything Eddie had ever felt, drying as best as possible across mismatched seating, hoping to catch sunlight when it couldn’t be trusted just to the deck for the breeze, but however it drapes: it is very much drying. And very much not being worn. Which, which means—
Eddie might start believing in the deities for the simple fact that he hadn’t fully processed until this very moment that the beautiful Mystery Man was wholly bare beneath an ownerless shift that someone had scrounged up when they’d stripped his sodden form, drenched from the waters after rescue—and that, aside from the longshirt?
The man was nude under the sheets in front of him.
Especially given his height—about to Eddie’s own but even lying down, hells; even sleeping his frame was more impressive, more expansive somehow—but either way the shift was from a woman once braved back to the vessel, clearly, and it didn’t stretch far past the Mystery Man’s waist and—
Oh, oh, Eddie may have chosen the exact moment to consider belief in the gods just so he could wish them fire and damnation and a swift death for the way his blood rushes southward, the way his eyes dart to the line visible under the coverings where the shift has tucked even higher, under the clear peaks of firm but unbothered nipples—that peek through the linens very much as if they should be bothered, nay, worshippedas a gods-damned rule—but the line of the shift runs just below those tempting buds now, and Eddie is going to damn all the gods to their own hells because of course his eyes drift lower, to where the line was expected to fall; lower to where a different line of a clear curve and shapebetrays itself with an almost casual grace beneath a single thin covering, so close to Eddie’s face, Eddie’s lips—
“This?”
Damn all the gods to every conceivable hell.
Eddie tries to suck in a steadying breath when he looks up, grateful the man’s eyes are cast down but cursing the deities to burn in punishing flames for eternity when he sees the man’s hands near his throat, the linens pooled closer to his waist and the shift pulled down to betray more of the thatch of curls at his chest, but his fingers are threaded through something shining, something metal: a chain, not good but brighter, the likes of which Eddie’s never seen, not Pirate’s gold with its enchantments but similarly beguiling; otherworldly.
How did he still have it, where none of the crew had pocketed it before they left him in Eddie’s charge? How had Eddie missed it in the hours between?
“They think you royalty to ransom,” Eddie chokes out as the man tucks the pendant under to the shift he pulls back up just the slightest bit, and Eddie wills himself not to dwell on what that means for its too-short hem; reveals to his own heart that his will is lacking in the extreme before he barely sighs out: “or some competition to send to the plank.”
Because the clothes, even without the adornment at the neck, betrayed wealth, either by birth or business. Neither was particularly kind or tolerated by a pirate crew.
And ostensibly it was part of Eddie’s job, here, to discern to which the man belonged.
But before Eddie even has a chance to collect himself to something more pressing, if not imposing, the man takes it in his own hands to turn serious in a way that…that feels weighted, heavy in the air. Like the clouds hand spread palms to press upon mere mortals, Eddie none to be spared.
“There is no one who would pay my ransom in any manner you’d deem fit,” the man speaks solemn, but resonant, even if he’s tone is just above a whisper; the words themselves are honest, and that pangs deep in Eddie’s heart—who could not miss this man? Who could not desire nothing more in this world but his safety, his return to their side?
Unthinkable.
“And I swear to you upon all that I am,” and it’s the resonance, again, the way it almost shakes intangible things in the air around them, as if the vow it in as power somehow, or else isn’t actually the important piece of the statement at all:
“I do not deal with, or approve of, the trading companies that pollute these waters,” and there’s a pause, and it strikes heavy too; somehow mournful; “and so many others.”
The man’s voice dips then, there’s no clear reason for the way an echo rings but it does. It rings inside Eddie’s bones.
“I believe you,” Eddie breathes, a little shaky with it just for the gravity still in the room; “but that means we will have to concoct an alibi to get you safely back to shore."
Because Eddie believes him wholly, even if he cannot articulate the why—still, though.
The crew saw tell of riches. They will need a reason—not a particularly ironclad one, none of them are especially sharp—but some means of convincing them to let the beautiful man return to his home. No matter how Eddie wishes he wouldn’t, and not only for his own selfish, foolish wants—if it’s true they’d pay no ransom, Eddie can barely stomach the notion of returning this near-heavenly creature to such people who cannot see his worth.
He begins to ponder, concoct a tale, but then the man intervenes, definitively:
“I did not intend to get to shore.”
There’s something certain in his tone, but something strange likewise in his words. Eddie isn’t sure if it’s their cadence, or their order, or maybe the words themselves.
“You are very curious,” Eddie doesn’t hesitate to say, when an answer eludes him for enough heartbeats in a row.
“I am aware,” the man smiles crooked, but his eyes dance, prismatic.
“You have the most compelling gaze.”
Eddie has to blink a good many times, and swallow around his galloping pulse, to realize he hadn’t spoken. Longer still to process the words hedid not speak.
When it hits him, though, the curse of his easy flush sets his cheeks aflame.
And the breathtaking mystery man smiles wider, stealing breath he’s already taken entire: greedy.
Eddie is flooded with heat, with; with want.
“Does your compelling gaze have a name to match?”
Eddie nearly chokes on the thump of his heart because, how is a man so suave and charming real, and how is he mostly-baker, barely covered laid out before Eddie Munson?
Unfathomable.
“Eddie,” he coughs out, like the syllables get knocked by his riotous heart; “and,” he
does not squeak, he
stammers at a particularly high pitch:
“And you?”
“We are…where?”
Not an answer, nor a question Eddie expects. It must show, because the mean leans his chest, and his wholly unreasonable patch of curls between his pectorals just a little bit closer to ask anew, as if to clarify:
“Where would the stars place us in the night?”
Location. Bearing. Right, yes.
“New Providence is far in our wake by now,” Eddie answers in truth, which was part of why the man’s appearance made so little sense, especially in absence of a wreckage.
“Hmm,” the man hums, and strokes his chin—which should not be attractive, which should not somehow find a new way to ramp up his heart rate, and yet.
Eddie can feel the wild pumping graze the neck of his shirt.
“I am known by different names in different places but, no matter,” the man shakes his head and smiles before the first half of the sentence has a chance to make as little sense as it deserves; before he speaks but not just speaks, reaches for Eddie’s hand where it’s still gripping the edge of the bed where he still sits on the floor and Eddie thinks he means to shake it.
No.
No, he lifts it swift to his lips—so >i>soft—and kisses quicker than a blink before giving back Eddie’s hand and smiling oddly…oddly genuine—
“Eddie of the most compelling gaze,” that’s the genuine thing, he means that and Eddie marvels for it; “call me Steve.”
Steve. Steve. The name flows, sings, swims a little like the man’s own eyes. It suits so true.
“In our alibi,” Steve picks up, and it’s unfair for Eddie to call it sudden; it >is>feels sudden, but he has no concept of how long he’s sat and tried to brand to feeling of lips on his knuckles, perhaps minutes at least; “do you suppose there’s a tale to be woven that could keep me aboard with you, for a time?”
And it’s a surprise, but Eddie’s learning: this man, this Steve, is steeped in secrets and surprises. And maybe Eddie wants to devour him entirely.
Asking to be kept here? To stay, near Eddie, where he may have some chance to try and catch him in actual fact, instead of laughable happenstance?
Oh; he’ll give the deities another chance, in that case.
“You’re in luck, fair Steve,” Eddie chances a little hint of a flirt, mostly in heat, for show, but Steve lights up and he lets himself hope as he stands only so he can bow a bit theatrically and look up through his curls with a wink when he says:
“Weaving the perfect tale just so happens to be my strongest skill.”
And he thinks that’s the end of it, that he sticks on a high note but then Steve’s eyes drag across him, up and down where he’s stood in full height before him for the first time and those eyes: they expose him before those lips quirk at the corners and the voice speaks simple and clear but strikes somehow, inexplicable, like a pie down Eddie’s spine as Steve breathes deep, sighs smooth:
“I do not doubt you in the slightest, noble bard,” he says with feeling; “but I find myself unconvinced you’re not selling the rest of your attributes short.”
At which point Eddie may or may not turn on his heel and make for the deck to fetch water for his charge before the blood-rush to his cheeks sets some precarious too-parched woodscrap to flame and put fire to the whole fucking ship.
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