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Izzy Hands never smiled. Occasionally he got a cruel twist to his mouth that substituted as one, but his cheeks never voluntarily lifted of their own accord. Roach watched him sneer through meals, scoff at conversations, and menace the crew day in and day out, taking out every foul mood on the people around him. At best he was a distant rumble of thunder and at worst a full blown tempest.
Until the crazy motherfucker got a piece of curried chicken into his mouth.
Curry powder wasn't an easy spice to procure, but the captain had a weakness for it, so when he spotted a small bottle being sold in Antigua by a fellow with the biggest, most luxurious black mustache Roach had ever seen, he bought it so the crew could be served a genuine treat.
And it caused Izzy Hands to smile .
Roach grabbed his best filet knife and nicked a finger to make sure he was still alive, watching the bubble of blood in relief.
Nudging Buttons, he jerked his chin toward Blackbeard's surly first mate. "Am I imagining that?"
The scot squinted over Izzy's direction across the mess. He sat by himself while others clustered at the tables, enjoying their rich meals with hums of contentment and low chatter, a noise that usually puffed Roach up with pride. Izzy ate apart. Even Ivan and Fang avoided him, preferring to squeeze in next to Lucius and Black Pete where they could spin their yarns without the dark glares from their boss every time they leaned in to brag.
Buttons dropped his fork, eyebrows shooting skyward. "Nay, not unless we've both been hoodwinked by the wee folk. Didn't know he could do that."
Izzy continued to smile to himself, chewing slowly and methodically.
Madness.
Roach nicked another finger, just to be sure, and Buttons made a sign with his hands to ward off evil.
"You don't s'pose he's sick?"
Narrowing his eyes, Roach studied Izzy in the dim light of the mess. No signs of flush or sweat on his cheeks and brow, no yellow in his eyes, no trembling in his gloved hands as he scraped his plate clean and licked the fork and moaned .
Buttons cast a frantic look back at him. "What did ye curse him with?"
"It wasn't me. I just added the curry."
On a normal day, Izzy would have shoved his plate back with half-finished rations still on it. He didn't do more than peck at most of his meals before leaving the plate behind for Roach to collect. He would stomp over to smack Black Pete, insult Swede or Wee John, shout at them all to quit dallying, then storm out of the mess. Today, he picked his plate up and quietly deposited it at the kitchen bar separating it from the mess.
"Work to do," he remarked, no longer smiling, but still frighteningly placid. He strolled back out, whistling a few notes from Drunken Sailor . Fucking whistling.
"Did anyone else just see that?" Lucius asked, jaw swinging.
Frenchie snorted into a bread roll. "Surprised the cranky shit can carry a tune."
Swede made the fatal mistake of trying to take advantage of the distraction to get his hands on the yet untouched roll on Jim's plate and nearly got a knife through his hand. Jim charitably missed, instead slamming their blade in the space between his fingers.
"Weird, definitely," they said without missing a beat, prying their knife from the scarred up old table while Swede yelped and threw himself back so far he toppled off the bench. "Maybe he's sick?"
Roach seared his gaze into the door where Izzy had disappeared through. No, not sick. Full. Content.
Was it possible that Izzy Hands was such a bastard because he was hangry?
At that moment life changed for Roach. He prided himself on a lot of things–fine quality meals, first-rate surgical skills, a stylish beard. Today, he discovered a new purpose. Roach knew how to solve a lot of problems with violence, but he loved it when he could solve problems with food.
Feeding Izzy Hands became a challenge in that Izzy Hands refused to be fed. Roach started with giving him larger portions and even stopped spitting in his food before serving him, but without added curry, Izzy went back to nudging his food around with his fork, sampling a few bites, then shoving it all away in disgust before hounding the rest of the crew back to work. The persistent thundercloud that hung over his head refused to be dispersed.
Not one to give up a challenge, Roach changed tactics.
He waited and lurked, pockets stuffed with bits of bread and tack and slices of fresh and dried fruit. The sea had been chopping for days now and Izzy passed no opportunity to screech at and berate the crew. His hoarse voice grew thinner and reedier, if such a thing were possible.
At various intervals, Roach scuttled forward across the rocking deck, plucking one of the many snacks from his apron, and offered it to the first mate at every turn.
"Apple ring?"
"Cracker?"
"Date?"
"Orange?"
"Walnut?"
"Fish stick?"
"Baked potato?"
Izzy mostly sneered and ignored him. He smacked the baked potato right out of Roach's hands. He made a mental note to avoid putting potatoes into Izzy's meals.
Clearly, stalking his moves and trying to sneak snacks to him wasn't going to work.
"You're coming at this all wrong," Lucius remarked when he retreated to the kitchen to regroup after the potato incident.
Roach had nearly tripped over him and Black Pete where they'd slid off a pile of empty burlap sacks that once held onions and needed to be rotated out. He was used to the occasional bout of aggressive fucking in his areas and his gaze slid off them like water over rock. At least they had their clothes on, although Lucius had a hand down Black Pete's pants.
Roach stepped over them. "I don't need to hear what's wrong with your hand jobs."
"Not me. You. Trying to force feed Iggy at every turn. Buttons told me you're trying to cure his crankies because you think he's hungry." He batted his eyelashes. "And my hand jobs are immaculate."
"I'll say," Black Pete huffed, head dropping back onto burlap.
Lucius kissed his cheek and extracted his hand, sitting up to regard Roach. "He's not hungry because he's nauseous. He hides it well, but ever since Fang let it slip that they call him Izzy the Spewer, I started noticing. He's definitely more of a bastard when the waves get rough."
"I like it rough." Black Pete laughed at his own innuendo.
Ignoring him, Lucius continued. "You need to settle his stomach first. Then he'll eat."
Roach dug his fingers into his beard and tugged on it while mulling it over. There were seasickness remedies a mile long, but he didn't keep many of them on hand. Usually people either got over it or they gave up.
"You sure you want to do a nice thing for him? He hasn't earned it."
Pete raised his eyebrows. "You invited him to a threesome last week."
"That was to get a rise out of him, not to make him happy. Though I do think he'd be less of a bitch if he got laid once in a while."
"A rise. Right ," Pete drawled.
Lucius shoved him away and hopped to his feet. “Captain keeps a little tincture of peppermint oil in his desk. It’s not for ingesting, but it wouldn’t hurt to splash a bit on him. I hear the smell of peppermint can be soothing. I’ll go fetch it.”
After pawing through latched cupboards and hanging nets of vegetables, Roach managed to procure the end of a ginger root and some molasses. He didn’t have much to work with, but he still managed to turn it into four perfect ginger snap cookies. Lucius and Pete continued to loiter and chat, drawing up a full list of complaints about their afflicted first mate and the mounting evidence that all he needed in life was a settled tummy and a full meal.
“The curry day was practically a flat sea. Maybe he doesn’t even like curry. Maybe his stomach just wasn’t upset,” Lucius suggested.
Pete shook his head, folding his arms and leaning against the wall adjacent to him.“He scraped his plate. There have been other calm days and he’s never done that.”
“I asked Captain if we could go back to Antigua to find more of the curry, but he told me it would have to wait. Then I asked Other Captain and he didn’t know what I was even talking about. I told him it was for the curry, and he thought I was talking about a fruit.” Roach slapped Lucius’s hand when he tried to reach out to snag one of the cooling cookies. “This is the last of the ginger. I’m going to need every cookie to tame the beast.”
He rolled his eyes. “I still don’t think we should be nice to him.”
“This isn’t for him, it’s for all of us.”
He used one of the nice china plates to carry the four little brown cookies, hoping a nice display would make them look more tempting, and pocketed the vial of peppermint oil Lucius had pilfered from Captain’s office. He wasn’t yet sure how he wanted to deploy the oil, so settled it in among the other discarded snacks he’d tried to slip into Izzy’s hands. Delicate plate in hand, he ascended to the upper deck of the Revenge to track down the first mate.
The two captains were standing together near the foremast, Stede talking animatedly with his hands. Ed stared at him with stars in his eyes and Izzy Hands sulked nearby with hunched shoulders and the curl to his lip he got any time his captains were focused entirely on each other.
Roach tried to act casual as he sidled up, hoping Ed and Stede would remain gazing at each other long enough for him to get a cookie or two into Izzy. He finally made his last scurry in, popping up at the first mate’s elbow and coughing to get his attention.
“What?” the other man barked.
Roach held up the plate. “I made you something.”
Dark eyes darted to the plate, to Roach’s face, back to the plate. “The fuck is it?”
“Cookies. For you.”
“Why the fuck would I want to eat your cookies?”
Roach very deliberately chose not to pursue the obvious joke there, grateful that Black Pete wasn’t anywhere nearby. “They’re…uh…very good.” Obviously, but he’d never had to pressure anyone into eating his cooking before.
Much to his annoyance, Stede turned toward them, dressed in full regalia of aquamarine and white, gilded hair perfectly coiffed. “Those look delicious, Roach. I’d take a crack at one.”
He snatched the plate away before his captain could get his greedy little hands on it, curling it into his arms protectively. “No. I didn’t make these for you. I made these for Izzy.”
The thundercloud over the first mate’s head seemed to darken as his black eyebrows snapped together and he sneered up at Roach. “The fuck are you trying to do to me? What did you fucking put in them?”
“Nothing,” he protested. “I thought you might like a cookie, I made you a cookie. Cookies. For you.”
“I’m not fucking eating your fucking cookies!”
“Yeah, they’re definitely fucked with,” Edward muttered.
Roach gasped, splaying a hand over his heart, but his captain leapt to his defense. “Roach would never! He is beyond reproach and his cooking is incomparable. He would never tamper with any person’s nutrition aboard this vessel.”
He puffed up slightly at that. “Yeah!”
Striking a stubborn pose, Izzy bared his teeth. “Fine then. Feed a cookie to your captain, dog, and see how well it goes down.”
He looked down at the little plate and its small batch of cookies. Jaw locked, he reluctantly held it out to Stede, who selected one of the small ginger snaps, gazing at Roach with doe-eyed trust. It was probably a good thing he hadn’t done anything fucked up to the cookies.
Stede never got the cookie to his mouth before Ed’s hand clamped down around his wrist. “Yeah, I’m not letting you eat that, mate.” Plucking the ginger snap from his fingers, he pitched it overboard. He took a few quick strides forward with his long legs, crowding into Roach’s space and grabbing hold of the plate. He forcibly yanked it out of his hands to toss overboard next, cookies pattering into the sea.
“Not my cornflower pattern china!” Stede wailed.
Plan B then.
Roach reached into the pocket of his apron, shoving aside plain biscuits and dried apple rings and finally extracting the little bottle of peppermint oil. Yanking the stopper out with his teeth, he let out a cry and flailed his arm at Izzy, splattering his leather vest and black sleeves, getting a bit in his beard. Before the first mate could react–which would have probably been with a knife–Roach scuttled away, fleeing back toward his kitchen and cackling in his victory. He heard a faint, “What the fock ?” carry on the wind behind him.
“How’d it go?” Lucius asked, looking up from where he’d been sucking on the side of Pete’s neck.
“Terribly. I had to use the peppermint oil.”
“Can’t win ‘em all,” he sighed. “But maybe the peppermint will help.”
Pete snorted. “Five doubloons says it doesn’t.”
“Easiest five doubloons I’ll ever make.”
Roach left the two of them to bicker over it, deciding it in his best interest to go lurk around Jim for a little while, just in case Izzy caught up with him while he was still feeling knifey about the peppermint.
Maybe the peppermint oil worked, maybe it didn’t, but Izzy felt targeted by Roach and barely ate anything for the next week, treating all food with suspicion. His temper took a turn for the worse, even as the seas cooled and the ship’s rocking smoothed.
But after that week, when he’d given up his plot to cure Izzy of his rage through his stomach, the first mate stormed into the kitchen and dragged a stool up for himself to perch on, twisting a dagger menacingly between his hands. His clothes carried the sharp scent of peppermint and probably would until he got rid of them.
Dark eyes simmering with bottled rage, he gestured to Roach with the knife. “Make me something to eat.”
“Really? You…you’re hungry?”
“Would I fucking ask you if I wasn’t? Make me something, but know this, I will be watching every single fucking move you make. Don’t even think about adding in something…unsavory.”
Nodding, Roach flew about the kitchen, whipping together the world’s fastest fish pie under Izzy’s thunderous supervision. He remained planted on his stool the entire time, knife in hand, his entire focus on Roach’s hands as he pulled ingredients.
It made him late to start the Captain’s meal, which would also derail the crew’s, but it was worth it to see Izzy Hands shovel every bite of fish pie into his mouth. He didn’t scrape the dish, but he did finish it.
He shoved the plate aside and stood. “Good. Don’t you ever fuck with my food again or I’ll bake you into a pie next.”
“Would never dream of it.” Then, deciding to push his luck, he said, “You remember the curry I made? Got it in Antigua, in case we ever go back. I can do a lot with curry, you know.”
“The fuck I care about curry?” But the rage in his eyes had settled and he didn’t quite stomp as he moved to leave, the ghost of a smile fighting its way to his face.
At the edge of the kitchen, turning to go, he bumped into Swede trying to get in. Swede flinched back, preparing for the blow or biting remark that never came.
Roach chewed the tip of his thumb as he tracked the first mate’s exit. When they next restocked, he would get more ginger and start lacing Izzy’s food with it. Maybe try and find mint to use in more of his dishes overall. God as his witness, Izzy Hands would never have an empty belly aboard the Revenge again.