Of all the things that Billy had found himself wanting on his trip back to Nassau, the thing that clawed its way to the forefront of his mind once his feet hit the sand was a decent night’s sleep. It was all he could bring himself to think about and lull himself toward when he’d sat down with his drink in the tavern. 

And yet he had still found himself wide awake even after Abigail had drifted off to sleep in the bed beside him. By the time her eyelids had grown too heavy for her to keep fighting, she was tucked against Billy’s side, her arm slung across his ribs and her head resting against the side of his chest. It was exhaustion that had eventually taken her under, but the steady thrumming of his heartbeat had helped guide her towards sleep as well. 

Billy hadn’t been ready to sleep anymore when she slipped from consciousness. Instead, he made a point to lie as still as possible so as not to disturb her, going back and forth between staring at the ceiling above them, and getting as good of a look as he could at her face as she slept. He could still see the little pieces of youth in her face that time hadn’t stolen away yet. Saw it in the softness around her eyes and the rounded edges of her jaw. Features that made her look to be as kind of a person as he knew her to be.  

Even safely under the veil of sleep, it didn’t take long for her hands to ball into fists, clutching tight the loose fabric of Billy's shirt as though she was the only thing that was keeping him from drifting away. In stark contrast, his arm that was cradling her, keeping her close to him, was resting gently along her back. He allowed himself to trace mindless patterns into the thin cloth of her dress, his touch so gentle it didn’t cause so much as a twitch from her. It was a pleasant surprise to him that he still had that kind of delicacy stashed somewhere deep in the recesses of his chest. Time hadn’t stolen everything away from him, either. 

It was only when the night sky outside his window began to shift from the inky black that he’d become so well acquainted with, to the grey that signaled the dawn, that he finally drifted off to sleep as well. Head turned towards hers, his nose and lips just barely grazing the crown of her head, he went to sleep feeling the rise and fall of her breathing underneath his palm that was still pressed to her back. 

When he woke, it took him a moment to recall the events of the night. He couldn’t remember the last time he had woken to the feeling of another body pressed so closely and comfortably to his. Close quarters and limited space in all of the unfortunate places he’d found himself with his men over the years couldn’t ever compare to the comfort, the true closeness of waking up to someone holding onto him as he slept. It took him a few moments to remember what had happened, and a few more still to believe it. It felt like the type of dream that would slip from your memories a few minutes after waking up, the kind you couldn’t recall no matter how hard you tried. 

But she didn’t slip away. Abigail was fast asleep against him still, and she looked so peaceful. Billy remembered the last time he saw her, the fear that had seemed to deeply etched into her features he wondered if it would ever go away. Looking at her now it was difficult to believe he had ever been concerned about such a thing. Her grip on his clothes had eased, her hand now simply hanging off his side. At some point while they’d both been asleep, she’d managed to hook one of her legs over one of his, tangling fabric of her dress be damned.  

Unable to stop himself, Billy brought his hand up and gently toyed with the loose curls that were falling around her shoulders. As carefully as he could manage, he moved the locks of hair that had fallen in front of her face. Just the ones that fluttered each time she let out a drowsy exhale. He let the ends of her hair curl themselves around his fingers an act of intimacy that could not have been more foreign to him and yet in that moment it felt like the most natural thing in the world. A comfort he wasn’t sure he was owed, but he wasn’t going to let it pass him by either. 

It wasn’t until the noise and chatter outside the inn started to pick up that Abigail began to stir. She woke slowly, and Billy found himself wringing out every second for all it was worth as they passed by. Her eyes fluttered open, her arm that had spent all night warming a strip along Billy’s torso brought her hand to her face, wiping the remnants of sleep from her eyes. Much like he had when he first woke up, Abigail gave herself a sliver of time to put together all the pieces from the night before. 

She rested her palm flat against his chest then. Her fingers pulled lightly at his shirt like she was making sure he was real and there, the same way he had with her not long before. When she finally tilted her head up to see Billy, she found him already looking at her. He wasn’t smiling, not quite, but there was an ease in his features that she could only assume hadn’t been there in a long time. 

“Did you sleep at all?” Abigail asked, voice still raspy from slumber. 

He nodded. “I did.” It wasn’t a lie. Even though it hadn’t been much sleep, it was more than he’d been getting most of the time. The number of hours aside, it’d been the best sleep he’d gotten in quite some time. It was the closest thing to real rest that he could remember. 

She smiled, would’ve laughed too if her mind hadn’t still been shrouded in a haze. “That’s good.” 

After another moment of being able to do nothing besides stare up at him, Abigail used the hand on his chest as leverage to help start sitting herself upright. She didn’t make it very far before she felt resistance, pressure keeping her from detaching herself from him. The look on Billy’s face hadn’t changed but she could feel the way that his palm, the pads of his fingers, were pressing into her back so that she couldn’t slip away from him. 

Abigail had no interest in fighting it, not wanting that badly to get away at all anyway. She settled back down against him once more, this time with her head resting on the pillow right beside his rather than on his chest like when she’d fallen asleep. She couldn’t feel his heartbeat against her cheek anymore, but now she could look him in the eyes. 

He looked so tired. Not just because Abigail had swooped in and so easily derailed his plans for rest the night before—the exhaustion in his eyes, etched into the corners of his face, went far, far deeper than that. Abigail’s gaze traveled over every inch of his face, and he didn’t look away from her for even a moment all the while. Her hand slowly slid up his chest, stopping when her fingers were able to reach and curl over the curve of his shoulder. Never before had Billy thought the cloth of his shirt acted as such an intolerable barrier. 

Tracing her thumb back and forth over the fabric, Abigail held his gaze without hesitation as she asked, “Where have you been all this time, Billy?” 

Her voice was no longer heavy with the last of her night’s sleep, but the words still fell softly. For everything that she and Billy had spoken about the night before, none of it provided a clear answer to the question that she had just asked. He’d told her about the moments of his journeys that were palatable enough, things that wouldn’t shock her so thoroughly that it would mar whatever image of him she had in her head all those years. Whoever that man was, whoever had been occupying that precious territory in her mind, Billy wished that he was him. The man that she thought he was, was the type of man that was worth waiting for surrounded by strangers in Nassau, with no guarantee of his return. Billy wanted to be that man, the one deserving of the softness and curiosity that Abigail had in her eyes, but he wasn’t. If he ever was before, he certainly didn’t think that he was now. 

However true that may have been, he didn’t let the knowledge make him recoil away from her. He slid his hand from her back to her side, then down to her hip. He held onto her in much the same way her hand clung to his shoulder. It would’ve been so easy to pull her in just a bit more, erase the tiny gap left between her face and his and avoid the conversation altogether. But she deserved the answer to her question. He wished that he knew how to sum it up in a way that was meaningful, in a way that would make sense and wouldn’t take the rest of their lives to tell the story of it all. 

“What have you heard?” he finally asked. 

She shook her head, a brief flicker of a smile. “The tales I’ve heard over the years about the fate of the Walrus crew were fantastic. Almost unbelievable.” 

“Almost?” 

“Everything you hear feels far more believable once you’ve lived your own stories that are beyond most people’s comprehension.” 

For a moment her words made him remember the fear that had been in her eyes back then, the worry. She’d taken all those feelings, the things that had happened to her, and turned them into something else entirely. He could see flickers of it in the concern that was now filling her eyes the longer she waited for him to respond. The pause dragged on, a silence that was thick with consideration, and then he said, “It all became such a fractured, messy thing. It wasn’t supposed to be. On the outset it had all been so…so clear. The story we had all been writing somehow went terribly far off-script. There was no getting it back on course.” 

Abigail could see that even though Billy was looking at her, even though she could feel the ghosts of his breath against her face, that he was countless miles away in that moment. Wherever he was, far and away from their room at the inn, was the birthplace of the tiredness in his eyes. She wondered if that distance was what made his voice so quiet. 

Bringing her hand up from his shoulder, she placed it tenderly on the side of his face. No amount of gentleness in the world would’ve stopped him from flinching at the contact, the shock of being transported back to the here and now. Abigail knew that, but still felt a small pang of guilt. She smoothed those feelings away for both of them as her fingertips ran through his beard. It was an earnest thing now, no longer just the scruff resulting from being a man with no consistent means of shaving. It changed his whole face in a way, she thought. The beard as much as the ghosts in his eyes and the scars on his face. He looked the part now, in a way that he hadn’t before, at least not to her. 

Thumb grazing along his cheekbone, she repeated her question. “But where have you been?” 

His eyes wandered from hers, unable to hold in one spot as all of the different answers he could try to spin her began rush to the forefront of his mind. The thoughts battled with the feeling of her holding him the way that she was. For years and years, the only time a hand other than his own touched his face was as an act of brutality. But not this. Not her. Abigail Ashe with all of her curiosity, her gentleness, her honesty. Brutality had been inflicted upon her but she never rebottled it and passed it along to the next person. Tenderness was a virtue that she was well-versed in. 

The soft warmth of her palm pressed to his cheek permeated throughout the rest of him, dredging up the thoughts and feelings he’d buried because there was never the time or space to address them. They were the type of things that would make him go truly mad out there alone on that island. Now, though, like high tide in the harbor, her touch came and flooded out the memories that only ever played out when he’d slipped from consciousness and lost control of the lock and key that he kept them under. 

Finally focusing once more on the present moment, he was met with the worried frown on Abigail’s face. Her eyes darted back and forth between his, taking in the glassy state of them that she hadn’t ever seen before. Taking a deep, steadying breath he realized how tightly he’d begun to hold her and managed to ease his grip. 

“The places I’ve been are ones that I no longer have any interest in going back to. They are places that have nothing left for me.” 

 She wondered what he meant by nothing left. Was there nothing left in the way that there had been nothing left of Charles Town? Nothing left because Billy, or his men, burned it to the ground to make it so? Or was there nothing left like she had felt in London? A place that simply no longer fit the need, a place that he’d outgrown and no longer found usefulness in? If history served to speak to the present, the answer would be the former.  

“I heard men say,” she spoke, choosing her words carefully, “that you had reached lands so far that they can’t even be found on the map.” 

He huffed out something akin to a chuckle, just enough to sound amused while still managing to convey the deep and aching exhaustion he felt over it all. “It has very little to do with the distance of those places. Much more with the fear of them.” 

“Your fear?” 

“Any sensible man’s.” 

If the stakes had been lower, Abigail would’ve made a quip about whether or not Billy truly considered himself to be a sensible man. But she didn’t have to ask, in earnest or in jest, because she could see it in his eyes that no matter how she may have asked the question, he would have been conflicted about the answer. Whatever demons he’d succumbed to or defeated while outside the reaches of Nassau, of London, they’d all left their marks on him. If not ones she would see on his body, ones that showed themselves in the words he spoke, in the wariness of his gaze. 

“I spent a long time alone,” Billy said, “thinking that it would always be that way. When I was on that island, the one that you won’t find on any map, I thought I was going to die alone there. All the times the ocean spat me back out, refused to take me under like it had taken so many others, I thought to myself that in a horrible twist of fate, the island was the place that would finally…” He cleared his throat. “But it didn’t.” 

There was the softest, barest hint of a smile on Abigail’s face as she said, “Billy Bones,” her fingers trailed along his jaw, “the man death cannot touch.” 

He hummed in amusement. The particular brand of grandeur in her notion felt like something he’d hear from someone else he’d known. “Certainly can’t seem to finish the job, anyway.” 

“Suppose it wasn’t done with you quite yet—the sea, I mean.” 

The first feeling that her words inspired in him was fear. Not because that was her intention, or even because of her tone. The clawing, prickling feeling that was making its way down his spine because that notion, spoken by anybody else at any other time in his life would have been a warning if not a threat. One doesn’t spend as much time on the open sea as Billy did, as the men he sailed with did, without developing a healthy fear of what she could do to a man if and when she saw fit. The best that anyone could hope for was that when she was done with them, she’d finish them off quickly. Billy had begun to think that each of his long, arduous trips back from the brink of death were the penance the sea was making him pay for all the things that he’d done over the years. At this point, he wouldn’t even try to say that he didn’t deserve it—they all had to live with the choices they made, after all. He’d just wished that it would be over. 

Fear subsided, giving way to a curiosity that bordered on hopefulness as he watched Abigail. She dragged the pad of her thumb across his cheekbone. It wasn’t a smile on her face, per se, but even as she laid there waiting for him to decide how he wanted to respond, her lips still had an upward tilt to them. The kind of look that exuded hopefulness, doled it out in droves. It was like a muscle that she’d spent years strengthening in stark contrast to how life had caused Billy’s to atrophy. 

He tried to allow himself not only to feel it, the weak little wisps of it that he had, but he tried to believe it too. The longer he looked into Abigail’s eyes, the less of a struggle it seemed to be. The longer he looked, he could also see that she had questions dancing on the tip of her tongue that she was holding back from asking. It was his turn to continue the exchange.  

Unable to come up with anything better in the moment, he settled on the truth of his hesitancy. “I don’t think that’s ever been a sentiment backed by kindness.” 

“I don’t doubt that.” 

Her easy agreeance to his words got a chuckle out of him. A reminder that her hopefulness was not to be confused with delusion. Realistic even in her unique brand of optimism. Taking his hand from her side, he brought it and wrapped it around her forearm. His grip was gentle, a wordless encouragement for her to remain as she was, smoothing out the scars and worry lines on his face with her fingertips. 

He allowed himself to close his eyes, have a moment of pure vulnerability. Then, as though he was a tide being pulled along by the moon, he drew in closer to her. Forehead to forehead, nose to nose, Billy could still picture in perfect clarity what Abigail’s face looked like even with his eyes closed. Her fingertips dusted along his cheek. 

The words started to tumble past his lips without him even realizing that he was saying his next thought out loud. “This may be the first time in a long while that I've been grateful for it.” 

It was easy to hear Abigail’s quiet sigh in the silence of their room. He felt the warmth of it too. Small intimacies that he’d gone so long without that he truly couldn’t recall the last time he’d experienced them. Even if his recall had been better, if his choices hadn’t wiped out so many pockets of his memories, he had no doubt that moments like this in the past ever managed to bring the comfort that he felt now. The knowledge that he might not deserve this kind of peace after everything he’d done should have soured the moment, but it didn’t. He wasn’t about to allow anything to steal it away from him. 

The peaceful silence lingered for another minute longer before Billy ventured to ask, “How long would you have waited?” He felt the vibrations of held-in laughter run throughout her body as she gathered her answer. 

“As long as it took, I suppose.” Each word she spoke caused her lips to barely graze his, contact so light one could argue over whether it even happened at all. 

“How were you so certain?” 

The truth of it was that there was no other option, at least not in her mind. She came back to Nassau for Billy, and that’s all there was to it. Allowing herself to dwell on the alternatives wouldn’t have done her any good. It wouldn’t have made the days go by faster, wouldn’t have soothed the dull ache that she’d carried around in her chest for so long. She no longer wasted time and energy on thoughts that didn't do her any good. 

“Because I wasn’t done with you yet either.” 

There was so little space left between them now that Billy could feel her smile form, pressed against his skin when she was done speaking. The action was one that was impossible not to mirror. Smiles gave way to quiet laughter and suddenly the entire thing felt miraculous and ridiculous all at once. Somewhere between soft breaths and trying to hold each other just a little bit closer, Billy found his lips pressed against hers in earnest.  

She kissed him back with the kind of ease and hunger he wouldn’t have been bold enough to dream about receiving from her. Her hands slid down and she tangled her fingers into his shirt so that she could keep herself pulled tight to him. His fingers brushed up her arm and then against the side of her neck until he finally ran them back through her hair the way that he’d been thinking about this entire time. He cradled the back of her head, fingers threaded through her long, loose curls. 

He’d expected his heart to be thundering clean out of his chest, but each time Abigail’s lips caught his, he found himself sinking farther and farther into that feeling of comfort that had eluded him for so long. The warmth of her was all over him, seeping into his skin and spreading throughout each strained muscle fiber that had so long been begging for relief. He knew the risk of it, letting people devolve into ideas inside his head, but this time he wasn’t left wanting because of it. If anything, the idea of her that had existed in his head all this time paled in comparison to the woman beside him now. He’d never been so thankful for his own errors, thankful that Abigail wasn’t the type to be reduced down to a simple image in the mind of a man. 

Every breath they ended up sharing made the rest of the world, all the messes he’d ever made and left in his wake, disappear farther and farther into the background. It took no time at all for it to seem like the world ended right at the door to their room at the inn. Fewer people knew better than they how untrue it was, but as Abigail pulled Billy so that he was on top of her, and Billy let his lips trail down along her jaw, he figured it was far from the worst lie he’d ever allowed himself to believe. 

From the moment that she’d set foot back in Nassau again, Abigail knew that nearly everything was different. The island was different, and so was she. She knew that the man sharing her bed was different too. Time had turned them all into something other than what they had been the last time they were in the same place. As she felt Billy’s scattered scars beneath her fingertips, she knew that many of that those changes hadn’t come easy for either of them. And yet they still managed to find a feeling of familiarity in the midst of it all. 

That’s all that she had been wanting, really, that feeling of knowing and connection to something, someone that she hadn’t felt in years. But she felt it now, had been feeling the blooming sensation of it since she laid eyes on him the night before. She wasn’t going to take the time to stop and ask now, but if the way that Billy’s rough, calloused hands managed to handle her so gently said anything, it was that she was not alone in that feeling. Which was all he wanted, all he could ever ask for. The rest of it could come as it may. 

(divider by @firefly-graphics 💞)