GIVE ME HELL, IT'S A MERRIER PLACE

“When you said pirates, I thought you meant some futuristic-spaceships-roaming-the-universe kind of pirates.” Leo's voice is strained, a clear sign that he's really making an effort not to blame everything and everyone for the situation they're currently in. And considering they're tied up one against each other on the floor of a vessel, maybe they all should appreciate his attempt at being reasonable for once.

Pete sighs. “That's another instance, Leo.”

“So we have the spaceship thing?” It's incredibly easy for Leo to forget they could just probably die when other possible universes get brought up in the conversation. He just can't help but ask questions after questions about this or that world. He's keeping a list of it on his tablet and it keeps getting longer and longer because the universes are literally infinite. He's even trying to make some sort of timeline which now cover a wall in his office room. Blaine has seen the drawings, the dates scribbled on tiny pieces of paper or on the wall itself when there were none around, and the long pieces of red thread going from one point to another. It was a little scary, to be honest, but sometimes Leo gets obsessed over things and he needs to be involved in them as much as possible before letting them go forever.

Not that there's any chance they will ever let go of this multiverse thing, but still. Blaine can hope for some balance in Leo's passion for the other versions of themselves.

“Yes, you have that instance too,” Pete answers, with another resigned sigh. Somewhere along the way he just stopped asking Leo not to ask questions. There was no point in that. Leo couldn't be stopped. And Pete found out it was easier to give him quick answers and be done with it anyway. “You have all the instances. All of them. It's like dealing with Barbie dolls. You can be animal doctors, plumbers and ballerinas. Here you are real 1600's pirates. Your 1600.”

“Well, that's good to know,” Blaine says, speaking for the first time since they were brought in what it's supposedly the captain's cabin. “Thank God you told us, I hadn't noticed the ship while we were dragged in here by kinda stinky, bandana-wearing men with one or two missing limbs each.”

“How can we be real pirates?” Leo asks again, totally oblivious to the matter at hand, which would be surviving. “If we love each other here, shouldn't we be dead or about to? But we must love each other because otherwise the worlds would be in danger again. Or is it why you brought us here? Is one of us dead?”

Pete lets out another desperate sigh. “You don't know much about pirates do you?” He says. “It gets lonely on a ship full of men for months. They're not so picky about sodomy as the rest of the world. Plus, no one in his right mind would tell this Blaine not to have sex with anybody.”

Blaine grins. “Am I dreadful?”

“You're batshit crazy,” Pete says. “The skinning people alive just for fun kind. Leo's the only one who can deal with you.”

“So, it's like in real life,” Leo says. “Except that here he's the psychopath.”

Blaine's hand automatically reaches out for his husband's. He knows Leo jokes around his mental health problems to hide the fact that they upset him sometimes. “One more reason to get out of here,” he says, trying to change the subject. “What do we do now?”

“Nothing,” Pete says, perfectly calm. “Unless you want to be brutally murdered by Adam out there.”

Leo tries to stand up, momentarily forgetting that he's tied up to two other men. “I can talk to him,” he manages to say before falling back on his ass.

“No, you can't,” Blaine and Pete says at the same time. And then Pete adds, “Last time you tried to speak with an Adam, you almost drove him mad. Leave the poor guy with the machete alone.”

Silence falls again while they all contemplate the situation. Pete is used to analyze every detail of a particular scenario and acting accordingly – that's why he chose not to do anything this time, because the consequences of their every possible action is apparently death or something that comes very close to it. Blaine has stopped analyzing anything around the first or second time they went on a trip like this. He's usually a man who thinks things over and finds solutions, but crossing universes is not his cup of tea and he considers himself lucky enough to have finally managed to understand the process of actually leaving one place in space and time to reach another one. So he leaves the problem solving to Pete entirely. Leo, on the other hand, is and has always been thoughtless, so he's not really worried.

He strongly believes that since they are constants that the entire structure of the multiverse needs to survive, the multiverse itself – like a sentient power – will not allow them to die outside of their world of origin and by the hand of some other version of themselves. And that despite Pete told him several times that it's entirely possible for them to die anywhere and whenever, just like any other human being. Leo refuses to believe that and Pete doesn't willingly bring up the discussion because that leads to Leo asking him if he knows when and how they're gonna die.

Ad that's something Pete doesn't want to talk about – which means that he knows very well.

“So,” Blaine clears his throat and turns to Pete. “I don't want to insist but isn't waiting here doing nothing a little risky? Shouldn't we at least try not to get killed? Just in case.”

Pete doesn't have the time to answer because the door opens and the cabin is suddenly too crowded when three boys and a girl come in. Pete, Blaine and Leo do what they usually do when they first meet people in another universe: establish who's who.

Quite predictably, the girl is Annie. It could have been Sam, but she's usually way louder when she makes her entrances. Annie wears a pair of leather pants tight as gloves, and her ass could easily revive the dead. Her long red hair is especially wavy and stands out against the black of her corset that nicely present the upper side of her milky white breasts. She's even more beautiful than she usually is, but she also have a dagger bigger than Blaine's head, which makes her very threatening.

With the boys you never know. They could be everyone. One of them is Adam, who's pretty much like their Adam, except for the machete, the longer hair and a scar that runs along his right cheek from eye to chin. It makes him look tougher but the kid's so handsome that the scar doesn't manage to ruin his face. If anything, it makes him more intriguing.

The second boy is Matt. It's rarely Matt, so that's a nice surprise. Deep down Blaine was hoping for Cody, but Cody is not exactly the pirate type. Casey would have been more like it – but it's not always pleasant to meet him. Here Matt is his usual tall and skinny self, but he's got a skull mask tattooed on his face and hands. He looks scary even before you see the chains of teeth hanging from his neck. His eyes scan the room twice and then land on Blaine, who swallows and looks away.

“Move away.” The third boy pushes the others aside and, once they all have made room for him, they can see that he's Leo. He looks in his late twenties, his hair and general appearances are the same, but his eyes are colder. He wears a loose, dirty shirt over dark trousers and a pair of boots high to his knees. He is buffer – which is nice – but he moves more briskly, and yet not nervously, as if he lacked that kind of patience they'd need right now. He stops a few inches from their lot on the floor and looks down at them. Blaine doesn't fail to notice the ring hanging from a chain at his neck. It's rawer and darker with grim, but it's the same wedding ring he wears on his finger. “So, it's true. You do look like me,” he says, looking at the real Leo on the floor. He's got a bit of an accent. “What is this sorcery?”

“It's not sorcery, captain.” Pete steps in before Leo can say anything. “If you would be so kind as to let me, I could explain.”

Pirate Leo slowly turns to Pete and his eyes scan him for a long time before he speaks. “I'm never kind,” he finally says with the softest, most detached voice that ever came out from Leo's mouth. “So I suggest you to shut up, unless you're spoken to.”

Pete nods quickly and looks down. In other circumstances Blaine would joke about Pete's total subservience to Leo in every form. But this is not the case. He feels the threat behind those words too. And the fact that Pete is so quick to obey makes him wonder if this is really the time when they're all gonna die for sure. He doesn't want to panic, but now he feels entitled to.

“So?” Pirate Leo asks the other Leo once again. “Why do you look like me?”

Usually, Leo would start asking the person in front of him if they are familiar with the theory of the parallel universes, but in this case it's pretty obvious that pirate Leo can't be. So Leo clears his throat and fidgets. “It's not sorcery, captain,” he repeats Pete's words, hoping they were the right ones, just said by the wrong person. “As strange as it may sound to you, I am you but from a land far far away from here.”

“Witchcraft!” Matt hisses at the captain's side. He takes a step back and holds up a cross made of bones.

The captain seems unfazed by Matt's reaction, but he doesn't look convinced either. “How can you be me if I am here?” He asks. He pronounces every word in a very controlled way. It sounds like he's trying to show Leo how stupid what he said was, which it must be from his point of view.

Leo looks at Pete, but there's nothing he can do. It's happened before that Pete was not around to fix things for them. Leo is used to take care of everything by himself – and besides some minor mess he made, he's even good at it – just not when his other self is so strongly suspicious about him. Or he can't possibly understand what's going on. When your other self is more inclined to think witchcraft instead of fraud, you might start worrying.

This is the reason why he decides to go with honesty. “I'm not sure I'm able to explain that,” he says.

“Well, that's unfortunate,” the captain says, grabbing a preposterously frilly chair and sitting on it. “Because if you can't explain that to me, I will just assume you are a threat either to me or to my ship, which in both cases will result in me forcing you to walk the plank. So, would you like to think about that explanation again?”

Last time he checked, Leo was sure pirates talked with a lot of arr and matey. But this Leo speaks like he came straight out of a book, which is a bit disconcerting. He pushes him to speak in the same way and he's not very good at it. “I'm many things, captain, but I'm certainly not a threat or an enemy. As you can see, I'm harmless and unarmed. Me and my friends, we're here by chance. We... took the wrong route and ended up here against our will. If you just let us go back to our ship, you won't see us ever again. I promise.”

This is actually the truth, even tho Leo is not sure that what Pete's ship follows can really be consider a proper route. They were heading elsewhere and Pete just inserted the wrong number. Apparently because Leo distracted him with his chitchatting.

“And where is your ship?” The captain asks. “As far as I know, my men brought you here from land.”

“They were on the docks, sir,” Adam says, looking at Leo with such hatred, as if he was accusing him to deny his captain's existence by his mere presence. “The only ships there were ours. He's lying.”

“I am not lying, Adam,” Leo snaps.

Adam's eye grow so big that he's almost ridiculous. “How do you know my name?”

“Witchcraft!” Matt hisses again. “Told you.”

Leo sighs. “It's not witchcraft,” he repeats, refraining to reveal that he knows his name too. “Listen, we don't have a proper ship. It's just... a mean of transportation of sort. Point is, it moves and it takes us places. If you let us go back to it, we can be out of your way in an instant.”

Captain Leo seems to ponder his words for a moment and then he sighs too, the same way Leo just did. “So, let me get this straight. You are me, but not exactly me. And you came here from a place without name on a ship which is not exactly a ship,” he summarizes. “Am I correct?”

“Of course if you say it like that, it just...”
“Am I correct?” The captain asks again, clearly showing that he's very quickly losing his temper.

“Yes, you are, captain,” Leo replies, equally annoyed. “But--”

“Then, do you know what I think? I think that you're messing with me and I don't like that,” the captain says. “I have no idea how you can look like me, but ultimately I don't care. If you are witches, you are gonna drawn. If you are not, the sharks will eat you. Either way, my problem is solved. I have no time to waste after you lot.”

Sensing that they are not going anywhere, Blaine steps in, risking it all. “He is telling the truth,” he says in his calmest, most soothing voice. The same that resonates inside every Leo in every universe they ever visited. “If you don't want to trust him, trust me, Leonard.”

Captain Leo turns to him and he seems to really see him for the first time. Typical Leo not to notice anything unless is strictly related to himself. The captain's eyes, surprised as they are, grow softer at the sight of him and for a long moment he stands still just looking at him.

Blaine smiles at him, appealing to that string that he knows it's inside captain Leo's heart too. Every Leo is different but they are all built the same way. There's a part of them, a series of keys, that makes a certain music only when it's Blaine pressing them. And the other way around of course. So, every Leo is perfectly tuned with his Blaine but it works perfectly well with another Blaine as well. And the fact that captain Leo's expression just visibly changed is proof enough of that.

“You are not him,” he says.

“No, I'm not,” Blaine shakes his head. “And yet I am. Just think of me as a reflection of the man you know as he looks himself in a body of water. We look the same, but since I'm made of water I change constantly and I can do you no harm.”

Captain Leo shakes his head. “No, you don't understand,” he says, and there's the slightest trace of nervousness in his voice this time. “You can't be him.”

Blaine would like to explain further but a scream stops him. The four pirates turn to the door and all four of them seem to know exactly what's going on. Suddenly, there's commotion on deck and they hear another loud, piercing scream.

“Captain,” Adam says. There's alarm in his voice.
The captain doesn't move. He looks at the door and it's clear that he knows it's gonna open and dreading the moment it will.

“We can't take care of him.”

Captain Leo doesn't turn to him. “No, you can't.”

That's when the door opens with a slam and Blaine shows up on the threshold. He's pretty much the same age as the real Blaine on the floor, but he's got an hunted expression that makes him look younger and wild. His hair are long, unkempt and stuck in dreads here and there. It looks like he's dressed like his Leo, but his clothes are in tatters.

He quickly scans the room and throws himself at Leo the moment he sees him. He grabs him by his shirt and pulls him up from his chair to slam him against the wall. “Where the fuck were you?” He hisses, inches from his face.

Both Adam and Annie step forward but Leo raises a hand. “Back off!” He orders, his eyes darting towards them just for split second. Then he turns to look at the raging man who's keeping him pressed against the wooden wall of the cabin. “I was right here, Blaine. Merely ten steps away from you.”

“You said you weren't going to leave the room. You lied!” Blaine hisses, wickedly.

On the floor, Leo shivers. There's something wrong in this Blaine, he can feel it. Something broke inside him and turned him into a person Leo doesn't like. And he never dislikes any Blaine.

Captain Leo doesn't flinch, tho. He keeps looking at his man with the sweetest look in his eyes and speaks as softly as Blaine growls at him. “I had to. We had problems with some prisoners,” he says, carefully explaining the situation to him as he would do with a child. “I was going to come right back to you. As I always do, Blaine.”

Blaine's expression changes. Rage seems to dissipate and leave room to something that looks a lot like nervousness mixed with fear. “They came back, Leo,” he whispers against Leo's lip.

“Who came back?” Leo strokes his hair.

“All of them.” Blaine nods. His eyes never leave Leo's. “They came for me, Leo. They're gonna take me away and you weren't there.”

Leo takes his face in his hands and rests his forehead against Blaine's, sighing softly. And just like that, he shuts the rest of them out, like they were not even there. “They're not real, love. Nobody's coming to take you. I wouldn't let them.”

“But they are! They are coming, Leo!” He shuts his eyes, murmuring those words over and over and over. “They're coming. And they're gonna take me. I'm doomed. I'm doomed. I'm doomed.”

“You're not.” The grip of Leo's hands around Blaine's head tightens. “Look at me. Blaine, look at me.”

When Blaine looks up, he's grinding his teeth as if he was in pain and his eyes are watery. “I can feel their voices in my head,” he whines, slamming his open hand against the side of his head. “I can feel their hands on me at any time, any time, any time.”

“I won't let anything bad happen to you,” Leo says, the expression on his face is calm and assured but his eyes speak of a great sorrow. On the floor, Blaine instantly knows that in a recent past Blaine wasn't like that. And he knows that because there was the same expression on his own face looking at Leo some time ago. It's the same desperation of having to deal with someone that it might be ruined beyond any repair.

Pirate Blaine nods and rubs his face against Leo's. “Please, stay with me,” he whispers softly.

The Captain turns to look at his men and nods towards the door. “Leave us alone,” he orders. “Take the prisoners below deck.”

Adam blinks. “But...the plank, sir?”

Leo kisses Blaine twice on his lips gently, and only then he seems to acknowledge Adam's words. “I'll take take care of it later, Adam,” he says. “Now get out of here. Everyone.”

There's a clear threat under the surface of his calm voice and nobody fails to notice that. Adam nods, quickly. Then, he and Matt pull up Blaine, Leo and Pete from the floor and push them unceremoniously out of the door.

Before leaving the room for good, Blaine glances over to Captain Leo and he's not surprised to find him already looking in his direction. He understands now why he couldn't be his Blaine, because the Blaine he knows is so far gone right now that he can't come back. Not even with sorcery.

He needs love, he thinks. You will get over this. You always will.
Blaine would like to tell him this, but he doesn't. This Leo would not understand how he knows and there's no point in making him lose his temper now.

He keeps watching him until Annie closes the door on him, and then he hopes that they will really work as they always work, in this time and place as everywhere else.