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Ace stopped on the doorway and scrutinized the scene inside. It was peaceful, somehow, despite the incessant beeping of the machines and the snoring, which was loud enough to make the walls rumble in protest. Edward Newgate slept in his bed, unmoving, his head bobbing ever so slightly with the gentle swaying of the ship. Ace followed it with his eyes. To, and then fro.
He was almost sorry to disturb him.
“Wake up, old man,” he bellowed.
Newgate cracked an eye open – sharp and powerful and, Ace felt sometimes, all-seeing. He would have noticed him at the door before he’d spoken. Before, perhaps, he even started moving towards it in the first place.
“Time may have made you stronger, son,” Newgate murmured, digging his elbows onto the mattress to sit up, “but not more polite.”
The wood creaked slightly as Newgate moved in a valiant effort to hold the body of the captain. Ace could do nothing but admire its stubborn sturdiness.
“You’re cranky,” he observed. A question lied within his voice, buried haphazardly underneath a coat of teasing. “Slept well?”
He didn’t, sometimes. It did not happen often, but certain moods would befall him and, for a day, he would become dangerous. He’d pace the ship like a caged beast, thunderous, barely keeping up the crackling storm at bay underneath eyes made of steel. Ace had only seen him like that twice – once, way before he was allowed into the captain’s private lodgings. The other, he would rather not remember.
In a strangely charitable surge of honesty, Newgate had once explained it to him.
“I have dreams,” he’d confessed, slowly, through gritted teeth. Something rumbled buried within his eyes as he spoke, enticing and dangerous. Ace remembered holding his breath.
“Of the past?” he’d asked.
Newgate had paused at the question. Then, marginally, the flash of a smile appeared on his face.
“No,” he’d answered and that had been that.
The captain nodded, now. “Come in, Ace,” he greeted.
Ace maneuvered around the captain’s body, large as it was, to reach the elongated table on the other side of the room. Newgate watched in pleasant silence as he set to work. First, he put a pot of water on the fireplace, leaving it to boil and then he took the instruments from his bag and laid them out, one by one – the needles first and then the cannulas. Afterwards, he took out the dried herbs. He broke their leaves off, careful to leave out the stem, into the mortar and ground them with the pestle as well as he could.
He poured the herbal dust into the water and then onto a glass, stirring lightly and letting it cool.
“Here goes, old man,” he said, turning to the captain.
He swallowed it in one big swig, wordless despite the fact that the smell alone was enough to make Ace gag.
There was something in the older man’s gaze – something heavy, large enough to suck the air out of the room. His eyes followed his every move, traced the patterns of his fingers as they unhooked the IV bags and checked the tubing, studied Ace’s face as he flickered through the machines, reading the series of numbers that had only recently started making sense for him.
The room was submerged in a cacophony of low, gentle noises: the crackling of the fireplace shedding warmth, the distant rumbling of the sea against the ship, the steps of their comrades echoing around the sturdy wooden structure that housed them. And above them all, Newgate’s breathing – laborious and metallic through the machinery, and yet constant and steady. Ace let it envelop him as he worked.
“You look worried,” Newgate said then. His voice rumbled gravely, deep and potent, and it sent a shiver down Ace’s spine.
“Someone has to,” he replied. He coated his voice with enough playful reproach that his concern didn’t choke him. It burned, still, on its way out.
“Are you still on about that, Ace?” Newgate asked. There was only the smallest trace of ferocity behind his words, but it could still bring a man to his knees. Ace remained unfazed.
The New World was a ruthless and callous mistress, her blessings fickle and often illusory even if you were as powerful as Edward Newgate. Perhaps, particularly, if you were as powerful as Edward Newgate.
The recent battle shouldn’t have been as hard as it was – and it hadn’t been, according to the crew or the captain himself. Their victory had been unquestionable and resounding. But it had tired him. Ace knew it had tired him. Marco, he suspected, did as well, despite his recalcitrant silence on the matter.
Ace surveyed the numbers on the machines and searched the graphs they lazily drew for answers, for the smallest of hitches. He didn’t know what he expected to find: an erratic beating of the heart, perhaps, or slower breathing; a failure to produce corporal heat, even – something, anything to put words to the sinking feeling on his gut that didn’t let him sleep or eat.
“I told you never to have pity for me, Ace,” Newgate said. He was angry, now – or at least, halfway there. “You’re bordering on insubordination.”
Ace turned, incensed.
“They hit you, old man!” he shouted.
Newgate growled. He moved quicker than his size and age should let him, nimbly, as if his long and heavy limbs were weightless. He looked Ace directly in the eyes, put his face up close to his, and frowned.
Ace had become the burning fire. It was easy to become lost in that headless power. It served him right to remember, sometimes, that Newgate was the earth itself, unmovable and unshatterable; that the wrath of the planet ran through his veins.
“Do you believe me weak enough, pathetic enough, to fall to that? To fall like that?” he asked, very slowly. “To a crew whose names I’ve already forgotten?”
Ace tried to turn away in anger and Newgate stopped him with a raised hand. He watched it move towards him, strong and immense, its fingers stretched outwards, unthreatening, all of its raw power contained and trapped into a cage of sinew and bone.
Newgate placed his hand in the hollow of the other man’s neck and ran his thumb across his jaw, tracing the outline of the bone. Ace felt trapped underneath its weight, despite the unbearable tenderness of the gesture or, perhaps, because of it. He feared his knees would buckle and he swayed in place.
His grandfather used to tell him folk stories from Baterilla, even long after he’d forgotten everything of the island save for this: the port, humble little thing, opening outwards to the sea and his grandfather’s ship lazily sailing into it. He’d told him, once, about the monsters that inhabited the bowels of the Earth, bigger than the mind could understand. One of them, he’d said, held the world firmly upon his shoulders, stopping it from plunging into eternal darkness.
He thought of the story now, pinned to the ground by Newgate’s hand. His thumb drew lazy circles, thick enough to cover most of Ace’s jaw in gentle strokes.
He felt it, then: exhilaration. And beneath it-
“You’re not shaving,” the pirate observed, tilting his head quizzically as he traced the light peach fuzz under his hand.
Ace blinked, bewildered by the sudden shift in mood. He reeled, gathering his scattered wits in an attempt to compose himself.
“Yes, well,” he replied, cleverly. He cleared his throat.
Newgate smiled. He didn’t see his lips move, buried by his exuberant mustache, but the wrinkles on the corner of his eyes deepened ever so slightly in a way that he had come to identify.
The pirate moved then, reclining backwards once more and depriving Ace of his touch. He shivered at the unbearable emptiness it left behind.
It took him a few seconds to remember he still had a job to do.
The process was simple, really, if time consuming. His body acted on its own, his muscles used to the motions even as his mind wandered – he took a piece of cloth and submerged it in the water that he’d left to boil, then impregnated it with the thick, acidic liquid the onboard medic prepared. He took out the needles, then, and cleaned the area with the cloth before inserting a new one.
His hands had shaken on the first day he’d done it until Marco had threatened to take over. He’d jabbed the captain with the needle several times, breaking through thick skin, before finding his running blood. Newgate had looked at him the entire time – intensely, immensely, from above.
“Put your arm up,” he instructed in a low voice. Newgate did, granting him better access. His skin tingled where he’d touched him.
He observed Newgate’s arm as he worked. He had tanned skin, roughened skin, covered here and there in discordant patches – scar tissue here from a battle no one remembered here and salt there, adhered almost irreversibly to him after decades on the sea. And fresh wounds, and healing wounds, and peeling forearms from burning under the sun, and thick blond hair covering his chest.
Underneath it, he felt the muscle, the tangle of sinew and bones that shaped such incredible power, that turned the strength and ire of the rock-solid earth into something tangible and unleashed it upon the seas.
Ace knew, with a certainty that choked him, that Edward Newgate had the power to shatter the world. And yet he contained it all, shaped it into a human thing, a knowable thing and bent it, infusing it with kindness and using it, all of it, to caress his face with utmost delicacy – as if Ace deserved it, as if his blood wasn’t rotten and in his fate laid anything but oblivion.
His eyes filled with tears.
“King,” he murmured, putting his forehead to his feet. He felt overcome, undone. His hands trembled as they closed around the captain’s ankles. “My king.”
Newgate’s eyes were set on him like stones.
“Rise, Ace,” he ordered. “No son of mine will bow so low.”
Kneeling before him, his back bent under the weight of his devotion, Ace begged.
“Let me take care of you, my king.”
“I am your father.”
Ace pressed a kiss to his thigh hard enough to imprint the ghost of his teeth. A brand, he thought, repulsed at his own elation at the idea of marking him as if he was his own.
Edward Newgate belonged to no God but the tides, no man but the seas, and especially not to Ace.
And yet-
“Father,” he repeated. “Let me take care of you.”
A father dealt in mercy; the old man had taught him that. He’d thought it ridiculous once – a father, he’d had guessed, dealt in strength. A father hardened so that you would not shatter, so that you would not stray. And yet this man, this colossus before him, seemed content to indulge and to forgive, time and time again.
Even here. Even like this.
Newgate parted his legs and Ace scrambled between them, wasting no time in undressing him. His ever-hungry hands reached underneath his captain’s – his father’s – cloth and felt his skin.
Newgate’s cock was soft, limp against his thigh, thick and sturdy. Ace swallowed, feeling himself harden at the mere sight. A strangled whimper escaped him when he put his lips to him, taking in the already familiar softness of the skin, the furnace-like heat. His body trembled, overcome by the idea of taking Newgate in his mouth time and time again, of making him grunt and moan, of making him feel a pleasure that would echo throughout the immensity of his body.
Somewhere, buried underneath the roaring fire within his chest, within the enormity of that dreadful desire that twirled and curled inside him, he found a spark of annoyance: at himself, for making this about his own pleasure and at Newgate, for looking down at him so kindly, so leniently, as if this was some great act of fatherly indulgence.
Want this, Ace demanded in his mind. His heart plummeted through his chest as he opened his mouth, taking in as much of Newgate as he was able. I need you to want this. Come on, old man. Want this.
It did not take all that long for Newgate to harden. Ace felt it as the skin grew terse when he licked it, swelling ever so slightly. His cock twitched over his tongue and he could not suppress a wolfish grin of triumph.
“You’re a sight to behold, aren’t you?,” Newgate murmured as if to himself.
He spoke calmly, serenely, like a marble statue bending to bow at passersby. And yet there was a crack in his perfect visage, a ripple in his voice, an undertone that burnt like the heart of the earth. Ace, made of fire, was drawn towards it.
Want this, Ace thought again, wretched. Want this, father, want me.
He looked up through pleading, half-lidded eyes and, mouth watering, gave a sequence of playful lips. As if he’d heard him, Newgate placed a hand over his head, tangled his thick fingers on his locks and moaned.
Ace found himself moaning as well, mouth stretched around his captain’s cock. It was hard to breathe like this, and yet he took it; even as Newgate’s hips buckled, pushing into his throat hard enough that he choked. He broke apart to cough and he dug his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood when Newgate’s heavy hand guided him, almost immediately, back towards his cock.
“You’re so good,” Newgate groaned. “My son.”
Ace tasted salt on his tongue. Around him, enveloping him, Newgate’s muscles clenched rhythmically on his powerful thighs. He was close, Ace knew.
Pleasure was more obvious in his features now – his brow was furrowed and his jaw was clenched tightly shut. His hips, despite his obvious efforts to still them, buckled sometimes, overwhelming a grateful Ace.
Ace looked at him upwards through hazy eyes and understood, for the first time in his life, the act of praying.
“Are you close?” he asked, because a lifetime of training hadn’t kicked the childish impatience out of him and because he needed to hear him say it – that physical pleasure built inside him, unstoppable, and that Ace was the one to do it.
“Touch yourself, Ace,” was all that Newgate replied. He’d commanded all of the might of his captain voice into one single, simple order: touch yourself. Despite the groaning, despite the sweat pooling on his forehead, despite the older man’s cock dripping with Ace’s saliva, burying itself time and time again in his throat, Ace found it impossible to disobey.
He shuddered when he took himself in his hand. It would not be long, he knew. He was nearly painfully hard already and it could not be long, like this: with Edward Newgate’s taste filling his mouth and his nose and his heart until everything, but this, turned to cinders.
It was easy to touch himself to the idea of Newgate. He’d found it inescapable ever since he’d boarded the ship – even before, perhaps, if he were to be honest. At first he’d tried to avoid it by conjuring other people and their limbs would be blurred, hazy, and Newgate’s prominent jaw and forceful eyes would flash on his mind, uninvited, at the zenith of his pleasure. He’d surrendered to it, afterwards, and voided his mind of anything and anyone else, letting his imagination tempt him time and time again.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
“Look at yourself,” Newgate said. He caressed Ace’s sweaty hair with a sentimentality unbecoming of their mounting pleasure, parting it to look at his face. “Look down at yourself, Ace. You’re beautiful.”
Ace’s answer came out unintelligible, half-mumbled and half-moaned, buried on Newgate’s hard, twitching cock. A single tear rolled down his cheek – from the effort of his jaw and from the searing light of his pleasure that grew and then, suddenly, broke, letting him fall.
He swayed as his orgasm blinded him with its strength for a moment. Newgate’s eyes widened and in a single burst of hurried, ravenous movement and he pulled on Ace’s hair, seeking the full view of his face as his subordinated succumbed to pleasure and then, with an air of haunting inevitability to it, he took himself in hand.
The captain’s orgasm came as soon as Ace’s had settled, leaving him a breathless, boneless mess and held up only by Newgate’s hand now.
Ace felt him come in the way his teeth gritted together as bliss rippled through his body, in the crinkling on the corner of his eyes, closed shut. Newgate grunted and Ace marveled at the sight – a behemoth, a titan of the seas coming undone, unraveling just because of him and because of his undeserving touch.
“Father,” he murmured, awe punching the air out of his lungs.
He opened his mouth in delight as Newgate reached his climax, famished and desperate and eager to claim this, to walk well beyond what he was owed and avidly ask for more.
He’d once believed pirates were the freest creatures in the world, bound to nothing but themselves and their whim. His grandfather had shook his head in displeasure when he’d told him.
“No, Ace,” he’d said. He’d rarely seen his grandfather’s eyes as clouded as in this moment. “They are but slaves to their own selves, their own greed. No man can be free like that.”
He thought of those words, now, a lifetime away, as the man who had made himself his father, who had taken in a feral directionless beast and fashioned him into a man filled his mouth, his face, and found it didn’t matter. His greed, his half-forgotten oath, his dream; none of it mattered but this.
His birth had been nonsensical: monstrous and unwanted and paid for in blood. The selfish whim of a monster that had terrorized the seas. His death, however – Ace figured, looking at Newgate in unruly adoration, at the contentment reflected without pretense in his kingly face – would at least serve a purpose wherever it found him, because it would find him at the service of Edward Newgate.
Ace wiped his mouth, reluctant to let go of the older man’s taste, and smiled.