Page 124 of Rears & Vices

D’Arcy tugged at his left hand, wrapped it in his own. “With you gone? Yes.”

Vitaliy pulled away, not far; Everard fell backward, made a noise of discomfort. “Oh, God. I want…” Vitaliy leaned in to listen. “…I want very badly to not be lying down, please.”

This was remedied, four hands pushing-pulling at him, Everard panting with effort and dizziness at the end of it regardless. He laid his skull back against the cot’s headboard and squinted at his two men. Vitaliy looked just the same, handsome and concerned and faintly exhausted; D’Arcy, barring the silken-lashed hazel eyes, was practically a different man.

“They gave me up? The Lafittes?”

Vitaliy suddenly looked wary, fidgety, as though he strained against physical retreat from his side. He nodded once.

“After all that effort to starve me out?”

“Eventually. With some convincing,” D’Arcy added, when it was clear Vitaliy wasn’t elaborating. He snuffled at intervals, but his voice was hard. “Two hundred fifty guns of it.”

“Two hun— What?” Everard, stunned, did the maths. That was the Sévère, the San Telmo, the Enemistad, three more of the eighteen-gunner brigantines, at the least, unless Vitya had prized yet another man-o’-war he wasn’t aware of.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that not in a thousand years would he have thought Vitya would bring one ship for him.

“You did… You brought…”

But the fleet? The fleet entire? For one man? For him? He stared.

Vitaliy broke his gaze and bowed his head in profile. He returned the stare in little flicks, anticipatory, guilty, eager, like it scared him to see Everard watching him. One plush lip beneath the other, he seemed to be holding his breath.

D’Arcy was oddly silent, stroking at the palm of Everard’s hand, no help at all in translation. Everard wondered deliriously if his new quiet was the beard’s influence, and found that kissing aside, he hated it on those grounds alone.

“But why?” he exclaimed. He glared at D’Arcy. “Had you threatened to shoot him?”

D’Arcy laughed faintly. “Ever.” He shook his head. Put his face in his palm. “You’re such an i-idiot.”

Good God, Everard thought, bewildered. D’Arcy was crying again.

Vitaliy distracted him by lowering himself to the cot, a big cat settling down to curl round and sleep. He picked his way over, mindful of feet and knees and bone-thin thighs, and straddled Everard’s lap, suspending his whole bulk carefully so that none of his weight touched down on aching bones. Thankfully, those bones had not shrunk; the two of them still fit.

Vitya put his forehead on Everard’s, put them nose to nose, and whispered. “You are mine, matelot.”

Everard inhaled. “Yes.” Agreement was pulled from him like compulsion.

Vitaliy’s eyes were wide, and earnest, and so, so dark.

“Without you, I am dust. Nothing. A skeleton at the bottom of the sea.” He stroked thumbs across Everard’s cheekbones, where the skin still felt thin and raw, pressed lightly in the hollows beneath. “Did you know?”

“Reasonable,” Everard said, nonchalant as he could manage; it was a hard thing, with one’s mouth so close to Vitya’s, breathing him in. He still could not believe he was awake and this was real. “I did rather save your life.” Why the devil was talking so difficult? Was he still so weak? “You r-returned the favor.”

“Only just.” Vitya’s hands threaded back, into Everard’s hair, around his ears, causing gooseflesh to tremble up everywhere in their wake. “Only just. But that’s not what I mean.”

Everard’s heart skipped. “Oh?”

Vitaliy lowered his mouth and traced lips, velvet-soft, over Everard’s. “Without you, it is nothing. Varfolomey. The Sévère. The fleet. I would risk it all again, the whole fucking thing. I would risk it to see you fully hale now.” He pulled back. “It makes me unabashedly a villain⁠—”

“Pirate,” Everard corrected fondly; D’Arcy snuffed a laugh into an elbow.

“—but I would do anything for you,” Vitaliy said. “Anything. I don’t care what you have or haven’t done. You could do whatever, go anywhere, love whomever you like. Regardless, you are mine,” he said fiercely. “You do not need to be someone or do something in order to be worthy of my, or Varfolomey’s, or anyone’s love. Do you see?”

“Oh,” Everard breathed. Speechifying. “Vitya. I shouldn’t have left…”

“No, no. You tried to tell me, with the lieutenant.” Tears rose in Vitaliy’s eyes, and Everard panicked a bit, as two of them crying would soon mean three. “And I know now what you meant, that he is yours. I’m sorry. I didn’t then. Truly. These hands”—his fingers twitched over Everard’s scalp—“are violent ones. They must be. But not at that cost. Your cost. His.”

“Vitya, I understand why you had to⁠—”