A Pirate's Life For Us

Chapter 5 - Birds of Prey

After the meeting with Ed where their plan was hatched, Jim was returned to their cell. Frenchie was allowed to stay out and had duties to attend to with the new, fearsome crew. But Izzy knew better than to let the knife-wielding assassin roam free.

Izzy accepted that Ed had a use for Jim, and out of all the idiots on Stede Bonnet's crew, they were clearly the most competent - the one with the most potential. But for now, they were a threat and he was going to treat them as such.

"Go and feed the cranky one," Izzy ordered one of his new subordinates as the crew loaded up plates of gruel and hard tack. "But don't hurt them."

The pirate, a towering man with a severely broken nose who went by Wheezer showed his dismay at that order by spitting on the deck, just barely missing the plate for Jim.

Izzy watched the man with shadowed eyes, then turned back to his own food. The problem with men like the ones he'd recruited was that every scrap of loyalty had to be earned with violence and blood. Normally, he liked his crew to be a bit more...submissive and cowed by power. But Ed needed a crew he needed to dominate if he was ever going to return to his old self.

Izzy watched the crew as they retreated to distant spots on the ship, away from each other. He could already tell there was animosity, but that was natural as a bunch of domineering pirates sorted out their pecking order. There'd already been a few fistfights and a near-death, and for the most part he was content to just let it play out.

A few minutes after he had sent Wheezer on his errand, he heard the clatter of a metal plate and a hard thump.

"For crying out..." muttered Izzy as he dropped his hard tack and sat down his own plate. He wiped his mouth, took a deep breath, then moved towards the source of the commotion.

He heard the long list of insults pouring from Jim in Spanish as he opened the door.

Wheezer was snarling at Jim and clasping his bicep. A rivulet of blood streaked down his arm and onto the floor.

There was gruel everywhere and Izzy's foot hit the metal plate as he stepped inside. "What the hell..." he boomed, then realized it was best to not draw too much attention, "...is going on?" he asked more quietly.

"I tried to give her the food and she fucking stabbed me," muttered Wheezer. "This is why women shouldn't be on ships."

Jim had a welt on their face that would bruise in the coming days. They were wielding a sliver of wood that had been peeled away from the hull.

"Call me a woman again. I fucking dare you," growled Jim.

"That's not a woman," Izzy husked. "And even if they were, you were given an order not to harm the prisoner." He dropped his voice to a low, threatening gravel as he stepped up to Wheezer. The other man towered over him, but he knew how to make himself larger through aura alone.

"Well it ain't a man," spat Wheezer.

Izzy tilted his head to look at Jim for a moment. He didn't quite understand the dark-haired assassin, but he knew that Jim was no woman. They were unpredictable, skilled, competent and with a hell of a temper.

"If you can't follow a simple order like 'don't hurt the prisoner,' then you might be on the wrong..." Izzy got right up in Wheezer's personal space, "...ship."

For what felt like forever, Wheezer stared Izzy down with just as much intensity. But he eventually broke, and turned to go with a snarl.

After Wheezer left, he bent over and grabbed the plate, then slopped up the gruel and hard tack onto the plate, making sure the food contained bits of dirt and shrapnel that Jim would have to pick around. He walked over and pushed it through the slot while making eye contact.

Jim stared him down, but then with a sneer, grabbed the plate and pulled it in. They picked through it, flicking bits of debris onto the floor before biting into a bit of hard tack. "Why'd you do that?" they muttered. "I don't need you to defend me."

"Oh, I know I don't," said Izzy as he paced into Jim's line of sight. "I didn't intervene for you. I did it for him." He nodded to the spray of blood on the floor. "You would have killed him."

"Damn right," said Jim.

"Blackbeard also wants you alive. And I serve my captain." Izzy shifted forward and he saw Jim's hand go to where they had hid away the wooden shiv. "Keep that. If any of them try to lay hands on you again, you have my permission to stick it in their eye."

"I don't need your permission," retorted Jim as they spat out a rock that had gotten mixed in with the gruel.

"No. You don't. But what my permission means is I wouldn't mount you to the mast and let the boys throw knives at you if you did." Izzy grunted, then turned towards the door, leaving Jim to wonder just what his angle was.

Izzy didn't rightly know. His gut told him Jim was more trouble than they were worth, and that any familiar faces would stop Blackbeard from returning to himself. But in spite of everything, he sort of liked them. Out of everyone from Stede Bonnet's pathetic crew, they had the most in common.

"That's going to cause problems for you," called Jim.

Izzy paused, looked over his shoulder and then simply said, "I know."