#rackhanne

neither of them had lived this long having never seen blood, but after their first real prize they had been soaked in it, choked on it. they had seen that it could flow from ocean to ocean across the riverbed of the deck. they had learned just how much of it there could be.

who knows who reached out first. anne remembers only flashes of touch and breath and desperation; holding jack against the floorboards behind a stack of barrels in a rocking room now half-empty with with half-sober sailors, fumbling with shaking hands to slip inside each other’s clothes to check for signs of breath and heat and beating hearts.

here, jack’s soft hands digging into the flesh of her waist where a mountainous man had clutched and tossed her against the taffrail. there, anne's open mouth blessing the place where he had almost been pierced through the heart.

the room smelled of rum and rust. outside it was raining.

she remembers only that jack was grimy and sticky and bleeding from his arm and so, so warm with a lust for life that anne had wanted, since the moment she first saw him with the knife in his hand and her husband's hair in his fist, to steal from him and swallow whole. that the first time she ever killed she had killed six men. that in the middle of battle she had looked across the deck and seen him witness the moment she acquired a taste for slaughter, mouth open and eyes shining, and she had known, then, that she was going to fuck him.

she could tell that he had never fucked before. she decided that neither had she. jack had cried.

she remembers that it had been clumsy and humid and natural, like how blind newborn things know to seek survival in each other's warmth. that it had been painless and good. like warm bread when hungry. like soft beds when tired. like her own hands in total privacy.

no one yet knew anne wasn't a boy. they had had to be as quiet as the dead bodies above. and he'd licked the palm of her hand and she had bitten his.

when she came she pressed her bloody fingers into his mouth like james bonny used to do, until he gagged and she was done, and instead of biting down jack had sucked them clean and moved onto the next pair.