Fic: Edward Teach Don't Have Nothing On Me (J2 AU)
Title: Edward Teach Don’t Have Nothing on Me
Pairing: J2
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: Jared is the middle son of a wealthy South Carolinian planter on his way to Oxford, when pirates hijack his ship. Being kidnapped and held for ransom definitely wasn't part of the plan.
Notes: Temporarily un-beta’d. Information about pirate ships is from Brethren of the Coast, while my justification for homosexuality in the navy and on a pirate ship comes from The Washington City Paper
Wordcount: 4995 words
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, never happened.
When Jared was about five, he’d declared that he wanted to be a pirate (“Jus’ like Blackiebeard!”). His nursemaid had given a suitably shocked gasp and spanked him soundly for such wicked thoughts.
This is a little ironic, now, because the last place he wants to be is on a pirate ship. Admittedly, his childish vision had included more swashbuckling adventures and hardly any instances of being roped to the mast, but still.
If Jared is completely honest here, and when one is tied to a pirate ship mast there isn’t really a reason to be anything but, this whole series of events was kind of his fault. No one had forced him to accompany his father’s rice exports from the colonies back to grand old England. His mother had done quite the opposite, weeping and wailing about how his father hadn’t needed to go to university to become one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, until Jared had finally called for smelling salts. Still, father had agreed to pay for Oxford, had encouraged it even, and so Jared had blithely ignored his mother’s wishes and set sail for what was technically his homeland.
All that had gone to pot when the sailor up in the birdsnest had seen a small, wickedly fast sloop flying black flags over their sails.
“So, how bad do you think this really is?” Jared asks conversationally, directing the comment over his shoulder. He can’t see his companion-about all he can see is the bustle of crew around them as the ship tacks hard right in the wind. He can feel the ropes around his torso shift up and down slightly, though, as the person tied behind him shrugs.
“Honestly? We’re pretty damn fucked,” Chad responds, and although Jared can’t see him, he can exactly picture his expression. “Pardon my French, but this might even be worse than the time when your father caught us spying on his guests’ daughters while they changed.”
“And that was your fault too,” Jared comments, “I told you we were going to get caught.”
“What do you mean, ‘too?’ How’s this my fault?” Chad protests. “I’m not the one who thought Oxford was a good idea!”
“Yes, but if you hadn’t yelled, ‘watch out, Padalecki!’ no one would have known who we were, and we wouldn’t be held for ransom,” Jared points out.
“Pardon me for warning you about the pirate leaping at you from behind, sword in hand,” mutters Chad, but Jared does have a point. The entire crew of the merchant ship had been released, albeit without the majority of their supplies and valuables, and nearly the entire shipment of rice from the Padalecki plantation. Chad and Jared, unfortunately, were on the list of valuables.
By the time someone comes around to pay attention to the two captives, Chad has been mostly silent for a good hour, and Jared thinks he might have fallen asleep. Jared himself has been somewhat fascinated watching the sailors at their various tasks, though Jared can’t put names to more than half. Finally, though, a well-dressed younger man approaches with a purposeful air, and goddamn if he isn’t just about the hottest person, male or female, that Jared has ever seen. He halts just in front of Jared, with the crisp snap of someone who has served time in the queen’s navy.
“You know, you won’t be getting any ransom for either of us,” Jared says, before the man has time to say anything. “You might as well tell your captain that now. My ma will cry a lot, but my da won’t believe that even if we are ransomed we’ll come back alive, and I’m not next to inherit, anyway, so I’m expendable, and the Murray’s don’t have any capital left, the crop blight hit their plantation real hard last year, so we’re not really worth much. At all.”
“You’re babbling,” Chad observes from behind him. The man frowns at Jared, clearly a little bemused.
“…I’m Commodore Ackles,” he says finally. “You’ll understand if we attempt a ransom anyway, it’s no skin off my nose if it doesn’t pan out.”
***
The next few weeks are interesting, to say the least. Jared and Chad are assigned the most odious of ship-ly duties to earn their dinner, like scrubbing the bilges, but sometimes Commodore Ackles lets them do more interesting tasks. Jared especially likes getting sent up into the birdnest.
Chad fits in surprisingly well with the pirate crew, although he bemoans the lack of women regularly. At least here he can’t get in trouble for sullying the neighbor’s virginal daughters, which has happened several times before. A lack of women aside, though, Jared thinks one day that a scarcity of baths and an admiring audience for his off-color jokes is probably close to Chad’s idea of heaven, as he watches his oldest and best friend teach a man with one leg and an equal number of eyes how to burp the alphabet.
It is a neat trick, though.
***
On the twenty-second day they’ve been aboard the pirate ship, Chad comes to Jared, an earnest and serious expression on his face.
“Oh god,” Jared says reflexively. “Who’s pregnant?”
Chad punches him, much harder than the comment warranted, Jared would like to note. “You know you’re just jealous because I get all the attention here,” he says, while Jared rubs his shoulder ruefully. “Seriously, though, I’ve been thinking about this whole ransom deal. And how it’s not going to happen.”
Jared nods agreement.
“Right, so, what we should really do is sign on as proper sailors. Get paid for all this work we’re doing,” Chad says, starting to wave his hands around a little like a windmill, as if that’s more convincing than just standing around. Jared gapes a little.
“No, look, it could actually work well,” Chad insists. “Crazy Eyes Mike says hardly anyone planns to sign on, even Commodore Ackles was kind of an accident, and he’s one of the best pirate captains on the water-“
“Crazy Eyes Mike maybe isn’t the most reliable source,” Jared interjects, “we call him Crazy Eyes, after all.”
Chad keeps talking over Jared. “And the food’s decent, any capital gets split fairly evenly; with a good haul I could double my entire family’s current assets, and it’d be fun! Cheap liquor every night and breaking the law for our job!”
“I didn’t know you knew what assets even were,” Jared comments, and then gets more serious. “You sure you want to do this? No take-backs on this one.”
Chad scoffs. “Mama was planning me to marry Sophia and get some grandchildren by New Years; apparently getting chased off the neighbor’s property in my skivvies for the third time was too much for her to handle. This is way more fun.”
Jared pauses another beat, then grins, big and wide. “I was thinking the other day how fun it would be to do this for real,” he says gleefully. “Come on, let’s go harass Ackles about it.”
“Maybe he’ll let me have a parrot,” Chad comments thoughtfully.
***
“You want to do what?” Commodore Ackes exclaims incredulously, once Chad and Jared have laid out their proposal in an admittedly jumbled way. “You can’t sign on, you’re our prisoners!”
“Yeah, but, see, no one wants us back home anyway,” Chad explains.
“Or well, they don’t want him,” Jared says. “My parents still love me. And I did the calculations, you owe us a lot of backpay for all the work we’ve been doing. Consider it our dues!”
“Chad owes me almost a month’s worth of pay for the damage he did to my mainsail last week,” Commodore Ackles points out, and this is true. Chad shrugs apologetically.
“I don’t know if I’m really accountable for my actions if I can’t remember them in the morning,” he says, and Commodore Ackles snorts.
“Yeah, good try,” he says. “So, the thing is, I just got a pigeon this morning from the man I sent out with your ransom notes, and your families said, in a nutshell, ‘shit happens when you sail across the Atlantic.’ We can’t really let you go, though, because there goes all our street cred, but if you really want to sign on, that kind of solves our problem.”
“Brilliant,” says Jared, and that’s the end of that. He and Chad sign something about the ship’s code of honor, Commodore Ackles shakes their hands solemnly and tells them to call him Jensen, and that’s it. They’re officially pirates.
“This is going to be even better than that time with the frogs and the cooking sherry and the dresses,” Chad says. Jared agrees, because that hadn’t been very much fun after they sobered up, and hopefully this will still seem like a good idea in the morning.
***
Jensen had had trouble talking for a minute when he first met Jared, because he hadn’t been sure he’d ever seen someone make being tied to his mast look so fucking hot. This is something he understands is wrong, but he also came to terms with it a long time ago, and he mostly just tries to ignore those things these days. For the most part, being a pirate is good for this, because everyone has their secrets, and most of them are a lot worse than Jensen’s. People tend to live and let live.
Jensen had recognized from the first second Jared opened his mouth that ‘ignore it and maybe it’ll go away’ wouldn’t work with Jared.
So, with all that in mind, Jensen knows that he shouldn’t agree to adding Jared and Chad to his crew. It’s stupid. He has friends with their own ships who would love a tall, broad-shouldered recruit and probably wouldn’t even care that Chad came as a package deal. Hell, Steve would take them just because Jensen asked, no matter how able-bodied they were.
Somehow, that all doesn’t matter when Jared bounds up into his cabin with his ridiculous hair flapping, Chad a half-step behind, babbling about owed dues and torn sails and Blackbeard and, bizarrely, parrots.
He wishes Chris were here to remind him how stupid this is, because that’s practically Chris’ job these days, but Chris is off doing real work, delivering ransom notes and bartering Carolina gold rice for supplies. Chris will laugh his ass off, though, when he gets back just in time to watch this all go up in flames, Jensen can just feel it.
Fuck.
***
Once Jensen’s officially added Chad and Jared to his motley gang, everything seems to change. The rest of the crew he’s known for years, knows their quirks just as well as they know his. Chad fits right in, does well with the work and even better with the boozing, even if he does look mildly ridiculous in the hat with the feather. Jared, though-- Jared changes everything.
“Whatcha doing?” Jared says, popping up behind Jensen and making him jump.
“Jesus, Jay, warn a man before you come up like that,” he grumbles, dabbing at the ink he spilled on his shirt.
“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound very sorry at all. “Hey, what’s this?” he adds, reaching around and grabbing Jensen’s parchment out from under his arm.
Jensen grabs for it but misses, and then Jared is turning it around curiously. He stares for a minute, then shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a star chart,” Jensen explains. “Don’t worry about it, though, Mike’s the only other person on the boat who knows how to read them.”
Jared frowns at Jensen, who can just tell that Jared isn’t going to play nice and go away to let him study his star charts and trade routes and weather patterns. “Well, that’s fool’s talk if I ever heard it. What if you’re incapacitated when Mike’s in one of his moods? We’d all be lucky to get out alive.”
Jensen shrugs. “No one else ever wanted to learn.” It’s a little irritating, though, that Jared is pointing out this flaw in his system. It’s something that has occurred to Jensen before, because he prides himself on running an efficient ship that doesn’t rely on any one person.
“Well, teach me,” Jared says, like it’s obvious, and Jensen stares. No one he’s met ever wants to learn about star charts and weather patterns, they’re complicated, and Jensen’s system is, while effective, less than straightforward.
“You sure you want to?” Jensen asks cautiously.
“It can’t be too hard, you know how to do it,” Jared teases, and that’s that. With Jared, it all really is that simple.
***
Things fall into a rhythm pretty quickly, after that. Jared learns how to read the star charts and the brand new octant, and is interested enough in navigation that Mike teaches him how to use the lead line and Tom lets him help measure knots.
Once Jared is competent with the steerage, which takes a surprisingly short time, Mike trades a couple night watches for dinner duty, which makes everyone happy, because Jared can apparently burn even water. Jensen starts staying up late with Jared, just the two of them and the waves against the sides of his ship when the sea is quiet, and one night, finds himself talking about how he became a pirate.
“I grew up in Massachusetts,” he says, loose and relaxed from the bottle of homebrew they’ve been passing back and forth for a while now. He sees Jared sit up a hair straighter when he starts, because Jensen has avoided talking about his past in any real way even when Jared pushes. “Wasn’t much for two sons to inherit and still have a decent dowry for my little sister, so I joined the navy instead. Told ‘em I was eighteen before I even turned sixteen. Good times. I like sailing.” He goes pauses, and then loses track of what he was saying.
“That’s where you met Chris, right?” Jared prompts after a minute.
Jensen grins lazily. “Chris, and Steve, too. Steve’s got his own boat now, real nice brigantine he calls Three Blind Mice because he thinks he’s clever. Yeah, we sailed together for a long time, on the HMS Danube. Good times. Anyone ever mention Jason to you?”
Jared shakes his head.
“Figured not.” Jensen knows somewhere in the back of his head that this is a story that should not be told, that he’s kept this secret for almost seven years and it should stay that way, but he must be drunker than he thought, because he keeps talking. “Jason signed on when I was… almost eighteen, I think. Yeah. ‘Bout then. We got real close. Too close, I guess. Steve and Chris knew, and that’s all.”
Jensen can see out of the corner of his eye that Jared doesn’t really know what he means, but he’s not about to stop and explain this for some naïve rich boy. Still, he wants Jared to hear this, because he thinks he’s getting ‘too close’ again, and Chris isn’t here to put this back in perspective and he needs something to stop this before it goes too far.
“Except, someone saw us getting real close, and there’s rules about that. Might not have made it out if Steve and Chris hadn’t been around after; they deserted and smuggled me out, and got us on Old Man Kripke’s manifest. Owe them my life, maybe. Still don’t know what happened to Jason.”
Jensen dares a glance sideways over at Jared, whose mouth is gaping wide. He flushes and ducks his head, still not sure if Jared really understood what he was actually talking about. “So, yes. That’s me,” he says awkwardly, and heaves himself to his feet. “Should probably stop distracting you, though. Don’t want to crash.” He knows somewhere in the back of his head that he isn’t talking in full sentences anymore, and he only does that when he’s really off-kilter, or drunk, or both. It’s definitely time to go to bed.
“Jensen, wait-“ Jared starts, finally, but Jensen doesn’t stop to listen, doesn’t want to hear it anymore, so he leaves Jared sitting there gaping and goes to sleep this off. Maybe in the morning he’ll be lucky enough to wake up and find out that this didn’t actually happen.
***
In the morning, Jensen wakes up with a pounding headache, and knows he needs to do something about what happened last night. Admittedly, he hadn’t really given Jared a chance to respond to his little confessional, but Jensen is going to assume that he’s going to have a minor incident on his hands, because he’s been burned before and it’s easier to just prepare for the worst.
Before he comes to any decisions, though, someone is pounding on his door, and Danneel throws the door open.
“Commodore, birdsnest reports an approaching vessel,” she reports formally, saluting, and then grins. “Chris is back!”
Within the hour, the Ocean Burial had pulled up along the starboard side of the Aquarius Rising, and the bustling crew on the other ship slid a thick, wide plank between the two.
Jensen is one of the men tying down this end of the plank, and so gets to be the first one to greet Chris as he dances across the boardwalk like some kind of fucking monkey. Jensen is on him the second he jumps off onto the deck, and Chris hugs him tightly before pulling back and holding him at arms length, examining him critically.
“Doesn’t anyone make sure you eat around here?” Chris asks reproachfully, and Jensen grins apologetically.
“Sorry, mother.”
Chris slings an arm around Jensen’s shoulders, and Jensen feels himself relax in a way he hasn’t relaxed since before Jared fell into his life. There’s something to be said for having someone around who knows all your secrets and is your friend anyway. “So, I assume you got my note about the ransom; what’ve you done with the captives?”
Jensen grimaces sheepishly and points at Jared, picking him out easily, and he knows it’s not just because of his height-although damn is that boy tall. “We somehow ended up adopting them.”
Chris whistles. “Well, damn if he isn’t one tall drink of water.” His gaze flicks to Jensen, and then freezes, and Chris looks momentarily surprised. Jensen flushes, and wonders just what Chris saw in his expression. He’s afraid he knows.
“I think we have some catchin’ up to do,” Chris says quietly in Jensen’s ear, before he’s whisked off to greet old friends and, presumably, meet Chad and Jared.
Things get chaotic for a bit while pirates catch up with friends whom they haven’t seen in over two months, and Jensen takes the opportunity to disappear for a while. He won’t be missed; the two ships usually sail together unless they pull a large haul, or one that needs to be sold right away, as was the case with the rice from Jared’s ship, and everyone will be distracted for some time yet.
***
“So, boy, you going to tell me what’s been going on since I left?” Chris asks, settling into settling into one of the chairs bolted to the floor in Jensen’s cabin.
Jensen avoids meeting Chris’ eyes, reaching for the bottle of whiskey Chris brought with him and taking a long swig. “Nothing much. Saw one merchant ship, but it was too well-manned for the half-crew.”
Chris is looking at him, Jensen knows, even though he’s taking every excuse to avoid doing the same.
“I’m calling your bluff on this one, sonny,” Chris says, sounding amused. “That boy out there ain’t nothing. I’ll be damned if he knew port versus starboard before he set foot on our ship, much less knew how to man the tiller well enough to take nightwatch. That means someone’s been teaching him.”
Damn. Jensen had forgotten that Jared was taking the night shift tonight.
“You getting yourself into trouble when I’m gone making us a living, Jenny?” Chris asks, and Jensen finally looks up from his examination of the whiskey bottle, and grins sheepishly.
“Maybe a little,” he admits finally, because Chris knows him too well to try and lie about this. “But nothing special. Nothing to write home about.”
“Nothing to write to Steve about, is what you mean,” Chris observes. “Well, you’re damned lucky that it’s me you share a crew with and not Steve, because he’d laugh his head off at you. I, on the other hand, am going to help you.” Chris sits back, looking supremely pleased with himself. Jensen has a bad feeling about this.
“I don’t need help. This is fine how it is.”
“You just don’t want to rock the boat. Err, ship. I think this could be good for you, though. You need to get laid, you’re too uptight.”
“I am not!” Jensen squawks, and Chris laughs at him.
“Come now, Jenny, don’t try to pretend you haven’t imagined tumbling that boy of yours into bed a dozen different ways. Don’t worry, though, I’m on it.” He heaves himself up and takes another swig of the whiskey before winking at Jensen and striding out of the cabin, swaying in the peculiar gait of long-time mariners.
Jensen groans and grabs for the bottle of whiskey, intending to get very, very drunk.
***
The problem with his friends, Jensen muses, lying on his back while the room spins pleasantly around him, is that they like shake things up just for the heck of it. Jensen like the status quo, because when things stay the same they tend not to go wrong. The status quo has always served him well. It’s… it’s like his very best friend, Jensen decides through the haze of whiskey, never gets him in trouble or anything.
The real problem is Jared. Yeah, that’s the problem right there. Jared comes on his ship, all tall and messy and cheerful, and Jared is very quickly working his way under Jensen’s skin in a way that Jensen isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to fix. Jared is nice and funny and good, and Jensen likes him more than he’ll admit even to himself, even under the influence of that entire bottle of whiskey.
Jensen tells himself stubbornly that the status quo is a great thing to maintain. Jared is a great friend, and he’ll be damned if he fucks that up for some stupid crush.
“So there, Chris,” Jensen says out loud.
***
The next morning, Jensen’s head is even worse than the day before.
“Whiskey is the devil’s drink,” he says hollowly to Mike, who laughs at him.
He tries Chris for sympathy next, flopping down on the deck of the Burial next to Chris, who is yelling out orders to his crew.
“Shouldn’t you be manning your ship?” Chris says, frowning down at Jensen.
“No, because my head hurts and I hate you,” Jensen whines, and pretends that was a coherent sentence.
Chris laughs at him too. “You’re such a fucking girl. We didn’t even drink a quarter of that bottle.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, technically you could say I drank the rest of it on my own.”
Chris raises an eyebrow. “Technically?”
“Shut up.”
“Yeah, yeah. So, have you seen Jared today?” Chris asks, tone deceptively light.
Jensen rolls onto his back and glares up at Chris. “What did you do now?” he demands, and Chris laughs again.
“I didn’t do anything,” he says, “just talked to him about this big fat girl I know named Jenny, who is, coincidentally, too much of a big, fat girl to anything that would make himself happy.”
“Have I mentioned how much I hate you?” Jensen says.
“Yes, actually. What I thought was really interesting, though, was how Jared knew pretty much all of how and why we deserted.” Chris pauses and looks expectantly down at Jensen.
“So?” Jensen says defensively. “It’s just a little bit of history. It’s not like I went and bawled my eyes out and confessed my everlasting love or something.”
Chris looks down at Jensen, who crosses his arms over his chest stubbornly. “Jensen, you ain’t told anybody about that before,” he says patiently. “From you, that practically is a declaration of everlasting love.”
“Have I mentioned recently how much I hate you?” Jensen said finally, and pushed himself up off the deck. “I’m going back to my own ship. Where people aren’t mean to me.”
***
With the return of Chris and the Ocean Burial, Jensen could turn his attention to finding a merchant ship to target, and past time. The crew was itching to do something substantive.
“I think our best bet would be to go south and intercept a ship coming from the Caribbean, because they’ll be running rum to England along with sugar,” Jared says, pouring over Jensen’s notes on shipping routes and seasons.
Jensen nods agreement, and steadfastly ignores how close he is to Jared. He still doesn’t really know what Chris told Jared that night, but Jared acted exactly the same when he finally managed to catch up with Jensen. If anything, Jared is even more enthusiastic about learning everything Jensen is willing to teach him about sailing, and talks a mile a minute about absolutely anything. It’s confusing, to say the least.
“I’ve always wanted to visit Antigua,” Jared comments thoughtfully, apparently oblivious to Jensen’s minor existential crisis over here in the corner. “It sounds awfully exotic.”
“We don’t get to visit, we just intercept ships coming from the West Indies,” Jensen shoots back, falling back into their easy banter with some relief.
Jared frowns at him. “You ruin all my fun. If we can’t go to Antigua, I want to at least get dibs on threatening the captain with walking the plank.”
“You’ve read too many novels,” Jensen says. “Novels are for the devil.”
“So is drinking, gambling, and thievery,” Jared replies, “And I’ve watched you participate in all three and more.”
***
The Hinchingbrooke is a large, three-masted squarerigger ship, and she has sailed back and forth between England and the West Indies almost three dozen times since her owner paid a fancy british shipyard for her. Her size and reliability, though, make her slow and clumsy.
“Raise the sails!” her captain commands anyway, one eye fixed on the twin sloops rapidly approaching their portside. Both ships are flying black flags, and he knows it’s too late to save his cargo even as his crew wrestles their giant sails up the masts.
***
“Prepare to board!” Jensen yells, standing with feet set apart near Mike as Crazy Eyes brings the Aquarius up alongside the squarerigger they’ve targeted. He can watch Chris doing the same with the Burial on the other side of the merchant ship.
His crew throws grapnel ropes across the space between the two ships and pull them tight. The most eager shimmy across the ropes while the more prudent take the time to lay boards across the gap. Jensen waits a moment, watching the crews of all three ships tussle, before he follows the forerunners across and shoots his pistol, aiming up into the air. The noise is loud enough that the fighting ceases for a moment.
“Who’s captain here?” he yells into the resulting silence, and a shortish, messy man steps forward, or rather, is pushed forward.
“I’m Captain Edlund,” he says, managing to sound more angry than afraid, and Jensen has to give him credit for that. He supposes he’d be pretty damn scared if his ship had just been boarded by two gangs of pirates looking for a good fight.
“Lovely!” Jensen says, baring his teeth. For him, this part is just like acting. No matter how reserved he might be on his own deck, once he boards another ship, it’s like pulling on a mask. He pretends to be Blackbeard, or Calico Jack, or Henry Morgan, and it works like a charm.
“Now, my crew’s just itching to throw a few men overboard, but I tell you what. I’m in a good mood today; we’ll let you lot sail off, safe and happy, if you don’t mind watching us carry your cargo off.”
Edlund gulps, but manages to say, “no deal!” without too much of a tremor.
“Make him walk the plank!” Jared bellows out behind him, and he has trouble keeping his face straight Jared’s attempt at a menacing pirate voice.
A few of his crew laugh at this, but they at least manage to sound suitably intimidating, and apparently that’s a little too much for Edlund, who babbles out his
agreement and fumbles out keys to the galley.
“Beautiful!” Jensen exclaims, and waves Tom, Jared, and a few of the other big crewmembers forward to collect.
***
As soon as Jensen is back aboard his own ship, he’s attacked by almost fifteen
stone of Padalecki.
“That was so much fun!” Jared exclaims, and then, before Jensen completely has time to react, Jared is kissing him Right there. On the deck. In front of the entire crew, practically.
Jensen pulls away, surprised beyond words. Jared’s face collapses almost immediately, and he looks horrified.
“Fuck, Jensen, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking,” he babbles. “I just-I mean, you said, and then Chris said, and then-Fuck.”
He’s backing away, and Jensen may not me the king of emotional maturity but he’s also not an idiot, and this is exactly what he’s been wanting, and didn’t let himself hope for. So he doesn’t let himself think about what he’s about to do, and just reaches forward and grabs for Jared’s jacket, pulling him in close.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he says solemnly, and Jared’s face goes brighter and happier than Jensen’s ever seen him. And then they’re kissing again, out in the open for god and the world to see.
“Took you long enough,” Chad grumbles in the background.
Pairing: J2
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: Jared is the middle son of a wealthy South Carolinian planter on his way to Oxford, when pirates hijack his ship. Being kidnapped and held for ransom definitely wasn't part of the plan.
Notes: Temporarily un-beta’d. Information about pirate ships is from Brethren of the Coast, while my justification for homosexuality in the navy and on a pirate ship comes from The Washington City Paper
Wordcount: 4995 words
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, never happened.
When Jared was about five, he’d declared that he wanted to be a pirate (“Jus’ like Blackiebeard!”). His nursemaid had given a suitably shocked gasp and spanked him soundly for such wicked thoughts.
This is a little ironic, now, because the last place he wants to be is on a pirate ship. Admittedly, his childish vision had included more swashbuckling adventures and hardly any instances of being roped to the mast, but still.
If Jared is completely honest here, and when one is tied to a pirate ship mast there isn’t really a reason to be anything but, this whole series of events was kind of his fault. No one had forced him to accompany his father’s rice exports from the colonies back to grand old England. His mother had done quite the opposite, weeping and wailing about how his father hadn’t needed to go to university to become one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, until Jared had finally called for smelling salts. Still, father had agreed to pay for Oxford, had encouraged it even, and so Jared had blithely ignored his mother’s wishes and set sail for what was technically his homeland.
All that had gone to pot when the sailor up in the birdsnest had seen a small, wickedly fast sloop flying black flags over their sails.
“So, how bad do you think this really is?” Jared asks conversationally, directing the comment over his shoulder. He can’t see his companion-about all he can see is the bustle of crew around them as the ship tacks hard right in the wind. He can feel the ropes around his torso shift up and down slightly, though, as the person tied behind him shrugs.
“Honestly? We’re pretty damn fucked,” Chad responds, and although Jared can’t see him, he can exactly picture his expression. “Pardon my French, but this might even be worse than the time when your father caught us spying on his guests’ daughters while they changed.”
“And that was your fault too,” Jared comments, “I told you we were going to get caught.”
“What do you mean, ‘too?’ How’s this my fault?” Chad protests. “I’m not the one who thought Oxford was a good idea!”
“Yes, but if you hadn’t yelled, ‘watch out, Padalecki!’ no one would have known who we were, and we wouldn’t be held for ransom,” Jared points out.
“Pardon me for warning you about the pirate leaping at you from behind, sword in hand,” mutters Chad, but Jared does have a point. The entire crew of the merchant ship had been released, albeit without the majority of their supplies and valuables, and nearly the entire shipment of rice from the Padalecki plantation. Chad and Jared, unfortunately, were on the list of valuables.
By the time someone comes around to pay attention to the two captives, Chad has been mostly silent for a good hour, and Jared thinks he might have fallen asleep. Jared himself has been somewhat fascinated watching the sailors at their various tasks, though Jared can’t put names to more than half. Finally, though, a well-dressed younger man approaches with a purposeful air, and goddamn if he isn’t just about the hottest person, male or female, that Jared has ever seen. He halts just in front of Jared, with the crisp snap of someone who has served time in the queen’s navy.
“You know, you won’t be getting any ransom for either of us,” Jared says, before the man has time to say anything. “You might as well tell your captain that now. My ma will cry a lot, but my da won’t believe that even if we are ransomed we’ll come back alive, and I’m not next to inherit, anyway, so I’m expendable, and the Murray’s don’t have any capital left, the crop blight hit their plantation real hard last year, so we’re not really worth much. At all.”
“You’re babbling,” Chad observes from behind him. The man frowns at Jared, clearly a little bemused.
“…I’m Commodore Ackles,” he says finally. “You’ll understand if we attempt a ransom anyway, it’s no skin off my nose if it doesn’t pan out.”
***
The next few weeks are interesting, to say the least. Jared and Chad are assigned the most odious of ship-ly duties to earn their dinner, like scrubbing the bilges, but sometimes Commodore Ackles lets them do more interesting tasks. Jared especially likes getting sent up into the birdnest.
Chad fits in surprisingly well with the pirate crew, although he bemoans the lack of women regularly. At least here he can’t get in trouble for sullying the neighbor’s virginal daughters, which has happened several times before. A lack of women aside, though, Jared thinks one day that a scarcity of baths and an admiring audience for his off-color jokes is probably close to Chad’s idea of heaven, as he watches his oldest and best friend teach a man with one leg and an equal number of eyes how to burp the alphabet.
It is a neat trick, though.
***
On the twenty-second day they’ve been aboard the pirate ship, Chad comes to Jared, an earnest and serious expression on his face.
“Oh god,” Jared says reflexively. “Who’s pregnant?”
Chad punches him, much harder than the comment warranted, Jared would like to note. “You know you’re just jealous because I get all the attention here,” he says, while Jared rubs his shoulder ruefully. “Seriously, though, I’ve been thinking about this whole ransom deal. And how it’s not going to happen.”
Jared nods agreement.
“Right, so, what we should really do is sign on as proper sailors. Get paid for all this work we’re doing,” Chad says, starting to wave his hands around a little like a windmill, as if that’s more convincing than just standing around. Jared gapes a little.
“No, look, it could actually work well,” Chad insists. “Crazy Eyes Mike says hardly anyone planns to sign on, even Commodore Ackles was kind of an accident, and he’s one of the best pirate captains on the water-“
“Crazy Eyes Mike maybe isn’t the most reliable source,” Jared interjects, “we call him Crazy Eyes, after all.”
Chad keeps talking over Jared. “And the food’s decent, any capital gets split fairly evenly; with a good haul I could double my entire family’s current assets, and it’d be fun! Cheap liquor every night and breaking the law for our job!”
“I didn’t know you knew what assets even were,” Jared comments, and then gets more serious. “You sure you want to do this? No take-backs on this one.”
Chad scoffs. “Mama was planning me to marry Sophia and get some grandchildren by New Years; apparently getting chased off the neighbor’s property in my skivvies for the third time was too much for her to handle. This is way more fun.”
Jared pauses another beat, then grins, big and wide. “I was thinking the other day how fun it would be to do this for real,” he says gleefully. “Come on, let’s go harass Ackles about it.”
“Maybe he’ll let me have a parrot,” Chad comments thoughtfully.
***
“You want to do what?” Commodore Ackes exclaims incredulously, once Chad and Jared have laid out their proposal in an admittedly jumbled way. “You can’t sign on, you’re our prisoners!”
“Yeah, but, see, no one wants us back home anyway,” Chad explains.
“Or well, they don’t want him,” Jared says. “My parents still love me. And I did the calculations, you owe us a lot of backpay for all the work we’ve been doing. Consider it our dues!”
“Chad owes me almost a month’s worth of pay for the damage he did to my mainsail last week,” Commodore Ackles points out, and this is true. Chad shrugs apologetically.
“I don’t know if I’m really accountable for my actions if I can’t remember them in the morning,” he says, and Commodore Ackles snorts.
“Yeah, good try,” he says. “So, the thing is, I just got a pigeon this morning from the man I sent out with your ransom notes, and your families said, in a nutshell, ‘shit happens when you sail across the Atlantic.’ We can’t really let you go, though, because there goes all our street cred, but if you really want to sign on, that kind of solves our problem.”
“Brilliant,” says Jared, and that’s the end of that. He and Chad sign something about the ship’s code of honor, Commodore Ackles shakes their hands solemnly and tells them to call him Jensen, and that’s it. They’re officially pirates.
“This is going to be even better than that time with the frogs and the cooking sherry and the dresses,” Chad says. Jared agrees, because that hadn’t been very much fun after they sobered up, and hopefully this will still seem like a good idea in the morning.
***
Jensen had had trouble talking for a minute when he first met Jared, because he hadn’t been sure he’d ever seen someone make being tied to his mast look so fucking hot. This is something he understands is wrong, but he also came to terms with it a long time ago, and he mostly just tries to ignore those things these days. For the most part, being a pirate is good for this, because everyone has their secrets, and most of them are a lot worse than Jensen’s. People tend to live and let live.
Jensen had recognized from the first second Jared opened his mouth that ‘ignore it and maybe it’ll go away’ wouldn’t work with Jared.
So, with all that in mind, Jensen knows that he shouldn’t agree to adding Jared and Chad to his crew. It’s stupid. He has friends with their own ships who would love a tall, broad-shouldered recruit and probably wouldn’t even care that Chad came as a package deal. Hell, Steve would take them just because Jensen asked, no matter how able-bodied they were.
Somehow, that all doesn’t matter when Jared bounds up into his cabin with his ridiculous hair flapping, Chad a half-step behind, babbling about owed dues and torn sails and Blackbeard and, bizarrely, parrots.
He wishes Chris were here to remind him how stupid this is, because that’s practically Chris’ job these days, but Chris is off doing real work, delivering ransom notes and bartering Carolina gold rice for supplies. Chris will laugh his ass off, though, when he gets back just in time to watch this all go up in flames, Jensen can just feel it.
Fuck.
***
Once Jensen’s officially added Chad and Jared to his motley gang, everything seems to change. The rest of the crew he’s known for years, knows their quirks just as well as they know his. Chad fits right in, does well with the work and even better with the boozing, even if he does look mildly ridiculous in the hat with the feather. Jared, though-- Jared changes everything.
“Whatcha doing?” Jared says, popping up behind Jensen and making him jump.
“Jesus, Jay, warn a man before you come up like that,” he grumbles, dabbing at the ink he spilled on his shirt.
“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound very sorry at all. “Hey, what’s this?” he adds, reaching around and grabbing Jensen’s parchment out from under his arm.
Jensen grabs for it but misses, and then Jared is turning it around curiously. He stares for a minute, then shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a star chart,” Jensen explains. “Don’t worry about it, though, Mike’s the only other person on the boat who knows how to read them.”
Jared frowns at Jensen, who can just tell that Jared isn’t going to play nice and go away to let him study his star charts and trade routes and weather patterns. “Well, that’s fool’s talk if I ever heard it. What if you’re incapacitated when Mike’s in one of his moods? We’d all be lucky to get out alive.”
Jensen shrugs. “No one else ever wanted to learn.” It’s a little irritating, though, that Jared is pointing out this flaw in his system. It’s something that has occurred to Jensen before, because he prides himself on running an efficient ship that doesn’t rely on any one person.
“Well, teach me,” Jared says, like it’s obvious, and Jensen stares. No one he’s met ever wants to learn about star charts and weather patterns, they’re complicated, and Jensen’s system is, while effective, less than straightforward.
“You sure you want to?” Jensen asks cautiously.
“It can’t be too hard, you know how to do it,” Jared teases, and that’s that. With Jared, it all really is that simple.
***
Things fall into a rhythm pretty quickly, after that. Jared learns how to read the star charts and the brand new octant, and is interested enough in navigation that Mike teaches him how to use the lead line and Tom lets him help measure knots.
Once Jared is competent with the steerage, which takes a surprisingly short time, Mike trades a couple night watches for dinner duty, which makes everyone happy, because Jared can apparently burn even water. Jensen starts staying up late with Jared, just the two of them and the waves against the sides of his ship when the sea is quiet, and one night, finds himself talking about how he became a pirate.
“I grew up in Massachusetts,” he says, loose and relaxed from the bottle of homebrew they’ve been passing back and forth for a while now. He sees Jared sit up a hair straighter when he starts, because Jensen has avoided talking about his past in any real way even when Jared pushes. “Wasn’t much for two sons to inherit and still have a decent dowry for my little sister, so I joined the navy instead. Told ‘em I was eighteen before I even turned sixteen. Good times. I like sailing.” He goes pauses, and then loses track of what he was saying.
“That’s where you met Chris, right?” Jared prompts after a minute.
Jensen grins lazily. “Chris, and Steve, too. Steve’s got his own boat now, real nice brigantine he calls Three Blind Mice because he thinks he’s clever. Yeah, we sailed together for a long time, on the HMS Danube. Good times. Anyone ever mention Jason to you?”
Jared shakes his head.
“Figured not.” Jensen knows somewhere in the back of his head that this is a story that should not be told, that he’s kept this secret for almost seven years and it should stay that way, but he must be drunker than he thought, because he keeps talking. “Jason signed on when I was… almost eighteen, I think. Yeah. ‘Bout then. We got real close. Too close, I guess. Steve and Chris knew, and that’s all.”
Jensen can see out of the corner of his eye that Jared doesn’t really know what he means, but he’s not about to stop and explain this for some naïve rich boy. Still, he wants Jared to hear this, because he thinks he’s getting ‘too close’ again, and Chris isn’t here to put this back in perspective and he needs something to stop this before it goes too far.
“Except, someone saw us getting real close, and there’s rules about that. Might not have made it out if Steve and Chris hadn’t been around after; they deserted and smuggled me out, and got us on Old Man Kripke’s manifest. Owe them my life, maybe. Still don’t know what happened to Jason.”
Jensen dares a glance sideways over at Jared, whose mouth is gaping wide. He flushes and ducks his head, still not sure if Jared really understood what he was actually talking about. “So, yes. That’s me,” he says awkwardly, and heaves himself to his feet. “Should probably stop distracting you, though. Don’t want to crash.” He knows somewhere in the back of his head that he isn’t talking in full sentences anymore, and he only does that when he’s really off-kilter, or drunk, or both. It’s definitely time to go to bed.
“Jensen, wait-“ Jared starts, finally, but Jensen doesn’t stop to listen, doesn’t want to hear it anymore, so he leaves Jared sitting there gaping and goes to sleep this off. Maybe in the morning he’ll be lucky enough to wake up and find out that this didn’t actually happen.
***
In the morning, Jensen wakes up with a pounding headache, and knows he needs to do something about what happened last night. Admittedly, he hadn’t really given Jared a chance to respond to his little confessional, but Jensen is going to assume that he’s going to have a minor incident on his hands, because he’s been burned before and it’s easier to just prepare for the worst.
Before he comes to any decisions, though, someone is pounding on his door, and Danneel throws the door open.
“Commodore, birdsnest reports an approaching vessel,” she reports formally, saluting, and then grins. “Chris is back!”
Within the hour, the Ocean Burial had pulled up along the starboard side of the Aquarius Rising, and the bustling crew on the other ship slid a thick, wide plank between the two.
Jensen is one of the men tying down this end of the plank, and so gets to be the first one to greet Chris as he dances across the boardwalk like some kind of fucking monkey. Jensen is on him the second he jumps off onto the deck, and Chris hugs him tightly before pulling back and holding him at arms length, examining him critically.
“Doesn’t anyone make sure you eat around here?” Chris asks reproachfully, and Jensen grins apologetically.
“Sorry, mother.”
Chris slings an arm around Jensen’s shoulders, and Jensen feels himself relax in a way he hasn’t relaxed since before Jared fell into his life. There’s something to be said for having someone around who knows all your secrets and is your friend anyway. “So, I assume you got my note about the ransom; what’ve you done with the captives?”
Jensen grimaces sheepishly and points at Jared, picking him out easily, and he knows it’s not just because of his height-although damn is that boy tall. “We somehow ended up adopting them.”
Chris whistles. “Well, damn if he isn’t one tall drink of water.” His gaze flicks to Jensen, and then freezes, and Chris looks momentarily surprised. Jensen flushes, and wonders just what Chris saw in his expression. He’s afraid he knows.
“I think we have some catchin’ up to do,” Chris says quietly in Jensen’s ear, before he’s whisked off to greet old friends and, presumably, meet Chad and Jared.
Things get chaotic for a bit while pirates catch up with friends whom they haven’t seen in over two months, and Jensen takes the opportunity to disappear for a while. He won’t be missed; the two ships usually sail together unless they pull a large haul, or one that needs to be sold right away, as was the case with the rice from Jared’s ship, and everyone will be distracted for some time yet.
***
“So, boy, you going to tell me what’s been going on since I left?” Chris asks, settling into settling into one of the chairs bolted to the floor in Jensen’s cabin.
Jensen avoids meeting Chris’ eyes, reaching for the bottle of whiskey Chris brought with him and taking a long swig. “Nothing much. Saw one merchant ship, but it was too well-manned for the half-crew.”
Chris is looking at him, Jensen knows, even though he’s taking every excuse to avoid doing the same.
“I’m calling your bluff on this one, sonny,” Chris says, sounding amused. “That boy out there ain’t nothing. I’ll be damned if he knew port versus starboard before he set foot on our ship, much less knew how to man the tiller well enough to take nightwatch. That means someone’s been teaching him.”
Damn. Jensen had forgotten that Jared was taking the night shift tonight.
“You getting yourself into trouble when I’m gone making us a living, Jenny?” Chris asks, and Jensen finally looks up from his examination of the whiskey bottle, and grins sheepishly.
“Maybe a little,” he admits finally, because Chris knows him too well to try and lie about this. “But nothing special. Nothing to write home about.”
“Nothing to write to Steve about, is what you mean,” Chris observes. “Well, you’re damned lucky that it’s me you share a crew with and not Steve, because he’d laugh his head off at you. I, on the other hand, am going to help you.” Chris sits back, looking supremely pleased with himself. Jensen has a bad feeling about this.
“I don’t need help. This is fine how it is.”
“You just don’t want to rock the boat. Err, ship. I think this could be good for you, though. You need to get laid, you’re too uptight.”
“I am not!” Jensen squawks, and Chris laughs at him.
“Come now, Jenny, don’t try to pretend you haven’t imagined tumbling that boy of yours into bed a dozen different ways. Don’t worry, though, I’m on it.” He heaves himself up and takes another swig of the whiskey before winking at Jensen and striding out of the cabin, swaying in the peculiar gait of long-time mariners.
Jensen groans and grabs for the bottle of whiskey, intending to get very, very drunk.
***
The problem with his friends, Jensen muses, lying on his back while the room spins pleasantly around him, is that they like shake things up just for the heck of it. Jensen like the status quo, because when things stay the same they tend not to go wrong. The status quo has always served him well. It’s… it’s like his very best friend, Jensen decides through the haze of whiskey, never gets him in trouble or anything.
The real problem is Jared. Yeah, that’s the problem right there. Jared comes on his ship, all tall and messy and cheerful, and Jared is very quickly working his way under Jensen’s skin in a way that Jensen isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to fix. Jared is nice and funny and good, and Jensen likes him more than he’ll admit even to himself, even under the influence of that entire bottle of whiskey.
Jensen tells himself stubbornly that the status quo is a great thing to maintain. Jared is a great friend, and he’ll be damned if he fucks that up for some stupid crush.
“So there, Chris,” Jensen says out loud.
***
The next morning, Jensen’s head is even worse than the day before.
“Whiskey is the devil’s drink,” he says hollowly to Mike, who laughs at him.
He tries Chris for sympathy next, flopping down on the deck of the Burial next to Chris, who is yelling out orders to his crew.
“Shouldn’t you be manning your ship?” Chris says, frowning down at Jensen.
“No, because my head hurts and I hate you,” Jensen whines, and pretends that was a coherent sentence.
Chris laughs at him too. “You’re such a fucking girl. We didn’t even drink a quarter of that bottle.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, technically you could say I drank the rest of it on my own.”
Chris raises an eyebrow. “Technically?”
“Shut up.”
“Yeah, yeah. So, have you seen Jared today?” Chris asks, tone deceptively light.
Jensen rolls onto his back and glares up at Chris. “What did you do now?” he demands, and Chris laughs again.
“I didn’t do anything,” he says, “just talked to him about this big fat girl I know named Jenny, who is, coincidentally, too much of a big, fat girl to anything that would make himself happy.”
“Have I mentioned how much I hate you?” Jensen says.
“Yes, actually. What I thought was really interesting, though, was how Jared knew pretty much all of how and why we deserted.” Chris pauses and looks expectantly down at Jensen.
“So?” Jensen says defensively. “It’s just a little bit of history. It’s not like I went and bawled my eyes out and confessed my everlasting love or something.”
Chris looks down at Jensen, who crosses his arms over his chest stubbornly. “Jensen, you ain’t told anybody about that before,” he says patiently. “From you, that practically is a declaration of everlasting love.”
“Have I mentioned recently how much I hate you?” Jensen said finally, and pushed himself up off the deck. “I’m going back to my own ship. Where people aren’t mean to me.”
***
With the return of Chris and the Ocean Burial, Jensen could turn his attention to finding a merchant ship to target, and past time. The crew was itching to do something substantive.
“I think our best bet would be to go south and intercept a ship coming from the Caribbean, because they’ll be running rum to England along with sugar,” Jared says, pouring over Jensen’s notes on shipping routes and seasons.
Jensen nods agreement, and steadfastly ignores how close he is to Jared. He still doesn’t really know what Chris told Jared that night, but Jared acted exactly the same when he finally managed to catch up with Jensen. If anything, Jared is even more enthusiastic about learning everything Jensen is willing to teach him about sailing, and talks a mile a minute about absolutely anything. It’s confusing, to say the least.
“I’ve always wanted to visit Antigua,” Jared comments thoughtfully, apparently oblivious to Jensen’s minor existential crisis over here in the corner. “It sounds awfully exotic.”
“We don’t get to visit, we just intercept ships coming from the West Indies,” Jensen shoots back, falling back into their easy banter with some relief.
Jared frowns at him. “You ruin all my fun. If we can’t go to Antigua, I want to at least get dibs on threatening the captain with walking the plank.”
“You’ve read too many novels,” Jensen says. “Novels are for the devil.”
“So is drinking, gambling, and thievery,” Jared replies, “And I’ve watched you participate in all three and more.”
***
The Hinchingbrooke is a large, three-masted squarerigger ship, and she has sailed back and forth between England and the West Indies almost three dozen times since her owner paid a fancy british shipyard for her. Her size and reliability, though, make her slow and clumsy.
“Raise the sails!” her captain commands anyway, one eye fixed on the twin sloops rapidly approaching their portside. Both ships are flying black flags, and he knows it’s too late to save his cargo even as his crew wrestles their giant sails up the masts.
***
“Prepare to board!” Jensen yells, standing with feet set apart near Mike as Crazy Eyes brings the Aquarius up alongside the squarerigger they’ve targeted. He can watch Chris doing the same with the Burial on the other side of the merchant ship.
His crew throws grapnel ropes across the space between the two ships and pull them tight. The most eager shimmy across the ropes while the more prudent take the time to lay boards across the gap. Jensen waits a moment, watching the crews of all three ships tussle, before he follows the forerunners across and shoots his pistol, aiming up into the air. The noise is loud enough that the fighting ceases for a moment.
“Who’s captain here?” he yells into the resulting silence, and a shortish, messy man steps forward, or rather, is pushed forward.
“I’m Captain Edlund,” he says, managing to sound more angry than afraid, and Jensen has to give him credit for that. He supposes he’d be pretty damn scared if his ship had just been boarded by two gangs of pirates looking for a good fight.
“Lovely!” Jensen says, baring his teeth. For him, this part is just like acting. No matter how reserved he might be on his own deck, once he boards another ship, it’s like pulling on a mask. He pretends to be Blackbeard, or Calico Jack, or Henry Morgan, and it works like a charm.
“Now, my crew’s just itching to throw a few men overboard, but I tell you what. I’m in a good mood today; we’ll let you lot sail off, safe and happy, if you don’t mind watching us carry your cargo off.”
Edlund gulps, but manages to say, “no deal!” without too much of a tremor.
“Make him walk the plank!” Jared bellows out behind him, and he has trouble keeping his face straight Jared’s attempt at a menacing pirate voice.
A few of his crew laugh at this, but they at least manage to sound suitably intimidating, and apparently that’s a little too much for Edlund, who babbles out his
agreement and fumbles out keys to the galley.
“Beautiful!” Jensen exclaims, and waves Tom, Jared, and a few of the other big crewmembers forward to collect.
***
As soon as Jensen is back aboard his own ship, he’s attacked by almost fifteen
stone of Padalecki.
“That was so much fun!” Jared exclaims, and then, before Jensen completely has time to react, Jared is kissing him Right there. On the deck. In front of the entire crew, practically.
Jensen pulls away, surprised beyond words. Jared’s face collapses almost immediately, and he looks horrified.
“Fuck, Jensen, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking,” he babbles. “I just-I mean, you said, and then Chris said, and then-Fuck.”
He’s backing away, and Jensen may not me the king of emotional maturity but he’s also not an idiot, and this is exactly what he’s been wanting, and didn’t let himself hope for. So he doesn’t let himself think about what he’s about to do, and just reaches forward and grabs for Jared’s jacket, pulling him in close.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he says solemnly, and Jared’s face goes brighter and happier than Jensen’s ever seen him. And then they’re kissing again, out in the open for god and the world to see.
“Took you long enough,” Chad grumbles in the background.