HAHAHAHA OKAY SO I’m not gonna reblog the meta I just read because I get that everyone is entitled to their own opinions about who fictional characters are in love with even if I strenuously disagree with them and this was in no way directed at me and I don’t want to be an asshole, BUT ALSO just so we’re all aware:
the idea that James was not romantically in love with Miranda is, just. JUST. !!!!!!!!!!! DID YOU NOT SEE THE WAY HE LOOKED AT HER? DID YOU NOT SEE HIM COMMUNICATING WITH HER WITH BOOK-PRESENTS, DID YOU NOT SEE HIM SMILING AT HER LIKE SHE WAS LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD TO HIM (BECAUSE SHE WAS), DID YOU MISS ALL OF TOBY STEPHENS DOING THE ACTING. IT WAS SUCH GOOD ACTING. THE VERY IDEA. THAT HE ISN’T IN LOVE WITH HER. THAT HE LOVES HER LIKE A MOTHER (OH MY GOD, IT WAS A METAPHOR, I AM DYING, DREAM MIRANDA ALSO CALLED HERSELF HIS MISTRESS AND HIS WIFE, AUGH.) DID YOU NOT SEE HIM IN THAT VERY SAME DREAM SEQUENCE LOOK AT HER WITH ALL THE LOVE IN THE FUCKING WORLD ON HIS FACE AND MURMUR I’M RUINED OVER YOU. WHAT. THE FUCK. AND. the idea that James is gay and not bi and isn’t sexually interested in Miranda when footage of him giving Miranda that wolfish fucking grin in the carriage exists is so STUPENDOUSLY, WILFULLY, TREMENDOUSLY WRONG that I want to go scream like a banshee on the moors just to try to cope with the enormity of the degree to which it is wrong.
I get that the show is open to interpretation, and that it doesn’t label anybody’s sexuality because hey oscar wilde hadn’t gone to trial yet and so there were no labels for anybody’s sexuality, but, LIKE, OH MY GOD, if you don’t think James and Eleanor at the very fucking least are bisexual you are RECKLESSLY reading against the grain and this bitter bisexual actually does kind of hold it against you.
wildehacked asked: DEFINITELY write the tragic soulmate AU. 1000%.
Okay but see it would be great terrible.
James McGraw grows up being told that he’s lucky, so lucky, he has three soulmates and it’s wonderful. Everyone tells him that the world has so much love for him.
Thomas and Miranda meet and she has his words on her skin and she doesn’t care that he has someone else’s because HE doesn’t care, and they’re so happy, and then they meet James McGraw, who has them both, and Miranda tells herself (and it’s truth, at the time) she can live with this, she can live with being James’ soulmate while James is Thomas’ soulmate. Because James adores them both. And God, she loves Thomas, and he loves James, and James loves her, so it’s all okay. They lie in bed and giggle together like children, wondering about the third line of words on James’ skin.
Things go horribly awry. Miranda is still one of James’ three soulmates, but he is not hers and she cannot quite stand to call him hers when her soulmate is gone and her soulmate’s soulmate is sinking into dark water.
James meets his third soulmate. It is a strong contender for the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s certainly in the top five. James swears to himself that he will never, ever let on the truth.
John Silver meets his soulmate. It is certainly the worst timing he has ever experienced. Captain Flint, scourge of the seas, doesn’t bat a goddamn eye, and Silver decides that this match must be unrequited, because the universe hates him so goddamn much. When Madi, proud Madi with her unmarked skin, touches the words and asks, an unusual tender moment, he tells her (and it’s the truth, at the time) that his soulmate bond is unrequited.
At some point the truth comes out. There is angry sex. I do not have the plot figured out past this.
Other miscellany: Anne Bonny is Jack Rackham’s soulmate and he is also in Something (no one is crazy enough to call it love) with Vane. Anne is in love with Max, whose soulmate is Eleanor, much to Max’s profound distaste. Eleanor and Max had the potential to be the only functional soulmate bond in this whole mess until Eleanor fucked it up, because Max is also Eleanor’s soulmate. Anne’s soulmark leads her to a man who is actually a woman who has Anne’s words on her ribs, and Jack is only a little bitter that Anne is not bound to him as visibly as he is bound to her. Anne has never shaved her head, and so they do not know that words are written, neat and small, at the base of her skull.
I’m gonna do this for black sails, since nothing was specified!
3. and ur really trashy im-going-to-hell ship
…………..I really am not ashamed of anything. Maybe Charles/Teach?
13. what is your heart-breakingist head canon
The heart can break an infinite amount of times, and so I have an infinity of heart breakinginst head canons, but here’s a recent one:
Jack’s ship is taken. He’s given a short trial in Port Royal, where he eloquently argues in Anne and Mary’s defense. “They’re both carrying my sons,” he tells the judge, buying Anne as much time as he can, his last and most important act on earth. “Hang me, hang my men, but don’t allow innocents to suffer the sins of the father.”
The judge grants him Anne’s life, and Mary’s, and one final request. He asks to see Anne.
”What the fuck, Jack,” she says in a cracked voice, hurtling herself into his arms.
”It’s no use, my darling,” he says into her hair, and oh, his voice comes out odd, too. “It’s no use. I’ve already saved you.”
”Didn’t want you to save me,” she says, and her hands dig into his back, hard. “I wanted––” she breaks off, giving him that wide, furious stare that means she can’t bear to say what she must. He finishes for her.
”You wanted me to fight with you,” he says gently. She wants to go into the ground with him. Always has. “Yes, I know. Better to fight like a man than hang like a dog.”
”Fuck you,” Anne says, and she means she loves him, so he kisses her.
”Live for me,” he says against her mouth. “That’s all I ask.”
The next day, Jack is taken to the gallows. His last thought isn’t of Anne, after all, but of Charles Vane, dead so many years ago. By all accounts he did this part very well, and Jack wants to be like him in this, Jack wants––
Max bribes Anne and Mary’s way out of prison a week later. When they sail away from Port Royal, Anne won’t let Max coax her belowdeck. She stands at the rail when they pass the cay, and the last thing she sees of Jack Rackham on this earth is his body swinging from a gibbet.
14. what is ur crackiest crack ship
Given that I treat Charles/Jack like the secret sitcom romcom happening on a murdery drama show, probably Charles/Jack.
researching 17th century piracy tonight. came across this:
One popular pastime amongst pirates was the mock trial. Each man played a part be it jailer, lawyer, judge, juror, or hangman. This sham court arrested, tried, convicted, and “carried out” the sentence to the amusement of all. (x)
how widespread could this have really been? how would it have gotten passed from ship to ship? can you imagine a pirate crew at a tavern, bragging to another pirate crew about how good they are at playing pretend? why was their go-to game “legal system”? were they performing incisive satire? is this some sort of pirates-only inside joke that’s been lost to the ages?
update: the mock-charge in the mock-trial was piracy
they used to pretend to try each other for piracy
as a stress relief
ok but it’s got to have been a lot of fun to be the pirate defense lawyer, for the pirate accused of piracy, to attempt to argue to the pirate judge, in front of a jury of pirate peers, that your client could not possibly be a pirate
!!!
“Look, matey, I know a pirate when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”
“No no he’s not a pirate, he’s, he’s law abidin’! Remarkable man, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!”
Mr. Hamilton asks her to marry him so often it becomes a game. “Marry me, Miss Barlow,” he’ll say when they step together in a dance, smiling at her as the dance separates them.
“I couldn’t marry you today,” she’ll reply when the music joins them again, and his palm presses lightly against hers. “You will note the stormclouds.”
“The rain would not do,” Mr. Hamilton will agree, hers for a few more measures. “Perhaps next week, when the weather clears?”
“Certainly not,” Miranda will say, and caress his thumb briefly with her own, risking the scandalized eye of Lady Heyward. “I could never marry under clear skies.”
2.
James books their passage under the names of Mr. and Mrs. McGraw, and although she understands the necessity–she won’t be parted from him, any more than he’ll be parted from her, and not even the relaxed atmosphere of a merchant vessel bound for Port Royal will allow Mr. McGraw and Mrs. Hamilton to share a cabin–she hates it. James is not her husband, although she’s never loved him more than she does now, the way misery loves grief.
She’ll never have a husband again.
1.
Miranda refuses to marry Mr. Hamilton twice at the opera with the Dudleys, much to their amusement, but she takes his arm and arranges things so the two of them are side by side in the Dudleys’ box. He murmurs softly to her for the duration of the play, clever and wicked by turns, and she had him only the day before, on his knees in Duke R––’s library, but she’s already desperate to have him again.
“Oh, marry me, Miranda,” he says with amused frustration when the night is over, but the conversation is not. “Come home and talk with me until we’ve put Caccini thoroughly to bed.”
“Perhaps tomorrow, Mr. Hamilton,” Miranda says gently, and hopes that her eyes are promising him what she cannot, in their company–that she will give him whatever he likes in private, but she is clever enough to recognize the jaws of marriage, its unyielding bite. She has a few years yet before she must step into the trap.
2.
On the ship from Port Royal to Nassau, no one cares what their names are, or who shares her bed. She lies in the living dark of the ship at night–the men at watch walking above her head, the groaning communion of the ship and sea an endless chorus–and smooths her hand over James’s hair, mindless and repetitive. He’s awake, but quiet, his breath warm on the bare skin of her stomach.
The last thing Thomas said to her was Take care of James.
“I love you,” she says to the man in her bed.
1.
“I would never trap you,” Thomas swears in her bed, tender and relentless. “Would you trap me?”
“Never,” Miranda says, pressing a brief kiss to his knuckles. “But it would not be the same. You would always have power over me.”
He looks at her, very serious. “Would you like power over me?” he asks.
2.
James Flint murders a man at her word, and then returns to her, like an animal at the end of its chain.
He tells her that Alfred Hamilton begged for his life. He tells her that her mother-in-law was there on the ship, too, and he did not spare her. His voice shakes in the telling, and she kisses him for it.
Thomas died alone, in a cold, dark place. Captain Flint is bloodstained and grim in her arms, and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.
1.
Thomas gives her a ring, a household, the promise of a title, and a small bundle of letters that would ruin him utterly if they fell into the wrong hands. He places them in hers with terrifying ease. “Come live with me,” he says, grinning like he’s won, like she’s won, like they’ve triumphed over an enemy together, “and be my love.”
A year into their marriage, Miranda throws the letters into the fire.
2.
James comes home after a two month voyage and kisses her clumsily at the door, purple shadows under his eyes. She manages to get him to take off his boots before he falls into bed, but he’s too exhausted to remember his belt, or his coat. He’s asleep almost as soon as he lies down, and she sits down beside him, feels a rush of affection so strong it feels like fury.
Oh, she thinks, looking down at the wounded face she knows as well as her own. You are all I have in the world.
The affection dims under the weight of the thought.
They were used to bleed patients, back when virtually every illness–mental and physical–was treated with bloodletting, purging, and blistering. It punctures the skin at many points and draws the blood like a syringe, so the doctors could measure how much blood they were taking. It was considered more scientific and more humane than a knife, a blood stick, or a real leech, which were also in use. They were used at Bethlehem Royal Hospital in the 1700s. They were, of course, medically useless, although no one knew that at the time.
There are pink starbursts on the inside of Thomas’s elbows. The scars trail up the vulnerable skin of his inner arms in perfectly even rows.
“You weren’t sick,” James grinds out, fingers digging into that tender skin.
Thomas looks utterly vacant for a moment, his breath slow and steady. “They believed they were helping me,” he says after a while.
