I'm going to be a little shit and say soft Gunnbones bc yeah ❤
SAMMMMMMMMM YOU LITTLE - listen i take no responsibility for this.
Also I am 90% sure these sound nothing like them but in my defense I have literally never paid attention to Ben Gunn in my life and Billy doesn’t even know what Billy sounds like. (Also on AO3!)
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“The task I am giving to you is of the utmost importance. Deliver Flint, then find the cache and return with it.”
The words echo in Ben’s head and he feels fear grip him again. The threat in Silver’s voice - with it or not at all - sends him further into the forest. It’s even more eerie than it had been the first time he’d seen it. Now, there is no battle, no war. No one to run from. Just him, alone - in a forest filled with an increasing number of ghosts - and a nearly impossible task.
He’s been here a week already with no sign of even a shovel mark. He’s had to remember the trapping his father taught him - snares and watching for game tracks and how to make a spear from a knife.
Those memories had served him well when he’d attempted to escape the maroons, and he’d been thankful for them.
Now he wishes he hadn’t ever told the crew of the Walrus about his ability to survive.
He knows he’s never going to be able to find the cache. He knows that, at least. There are too many places Flint could have hidden it and as good as he is at surviving, hunting has never been his forte.
He just hopes that maybe he can stay here long enough that John Silver will forget about him, as he wants the world to forget about Flint.
“And I’ve got a long fucking memory-”
The snap of a twig too heavy to be a deer makes him spin - and he almost loses his footing when he gets tangled in the foliage that snakes the ground.
When he looks up, at first, Ben thinks he must be done for. Surely -
“Ben?” Billy Bones lowers the knife.
“What are you doing here?”
It’s an all too familiar feeling - his life in Billy’s hands. Ben remembers the last time, being so sure he was dead in that water that smelled like burning powder and blood, only to somehow come out alive.
- Or not at all -
“Mr. Silver sent me here to find the cache.” Billy’s mouth hardens and Ben wonders again if he’s about to meet his end at the hands of - well.
“Sent you here to die, more like it.”
As punishment.
“What do you mean?”
“Flint’s the only one who know where it is, isn’t he?” Billy seems like he wants to say more, but instead he just shakes his head. “Nevermind. Come on. Might as well stick together.”
Ben wants to ask why. Why didn’t you shoot me? But he follows silently. He knows when not to tempt fate. Unsurprisingly, Billy has more than enough food to share. Ben had taught him when they were on Nassau and living between the town and the plantations how to trap. It had been hell trying to hide and not get caught and feed everyone and still somehow fight a fight he didn’t understand - but somehow it had felt less like hell than when he was alone in the cage, back on the maroon’s island.
He still has nightmares about that.
But right now, as they sit around the small fire Billy has started and wait for the rabbit to cook, it’s not that near death experience that’s weighing on his mind.
“Why didn’t you shoot me?”
His voice is soft - in truth the words barely come out. Billy looks up from the spit.
“What?”
“In the water. When the Walrus sunk. Why didn’t you shoot me, too?”
Billy stares at him, and then back at the fire. Ben knows it isn’t, but it feels like an eternity before he speaks.
“Out of all of them. Every one of those men that I fought and bled alongside, not one of them would disobey him to help me. I propped him up, tried to help him get rid of Flint - what we all wanted - and in the end he betrayed me and took everyone with him. Except you.”
The intensity of Billy’s gaze has always scared Ben, a little. He usually feels small and insignificant in the face of that intensity at the best of times but now, it feels different. Now he feels like the center of it and he feels almost too big for his own skin.
“You were the only one who cared if I lived when the Spanish raided Nassau. That meant something to me.”
“It just wasn’t right.”
It feels like an excuse for the real reason he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of Billy dying tied and beaten. The real reason he had - for possibly the first time in his life - stood up against something he thought was wrong.
Now when he thinks about all that Silver has done to see his own ending be the one that gets told, he’s more terrified than ever of John Silver - even though he knows the truth and not the story.
Even though he knows the truth he’s still terrified of the man who managed to weave such a convincing lie it stopped what had seemed like an unstoppable war, dead. Cold. That kind of power reminded him too much of the unshakeable and unquestionable authority the queen of the maroons had used to kill his shipmates - that his captain before that had used to keep them all in line. The kind of power he’s been subject to all his life.
Ben has been running from power for so long but in that moment he had defied John Silver in freeing Billy. And somehow Silver had known and sent him here in a fruitless search for what it had cost him.
That Ben would do it again if it meant saving Billy Bones’ life - that didn’t feel like powerlessness.
“It just wasn’t right.” He repeats.
Billy exhales, tilting his head in agreement. “Well.” Ben waits, but there isn’t more to the thought. The rabbit is done; cooked until the skin has just started to burn on the outside, and Ben’s mouth waters at the thought of food. When Billy pulls out a soggy but mostly intact chunk of cheese to slather over the meat, it seems almost an impossibly decadent feast.
As they eat, Ben can see Billy thinking. Finally, “What happened?”
He looks up, confused.
“After they defeated Rogers. I assume if you’re here looking for the cache, Flint isn’t giving up the location to Silver.”
It hits Ben, then - that Billy doesn’t know. Doesn’t know the truth or the lie and it’s in Ben’s hands, which he learns. He thinks back, to trust. To sparing Billy, and Billy sparing him in return. To powerlessness and power over a story. In another small act of defiance against John Silver, he tells Billy Bones the truth.
“The war’s over. Mr. Silver sent Flint to a plantation in Georgia. He’s there, I assume for good from what it sounded like.” Except he’s got - well...
Ben thinks about that too. Seeing the man he had come to fear second only to John Silver himself weeping openly, kissing the blond man who’d been in the field, there. Thomas Hamilton.
“You make sure that Flint sees Thomas Hamilton.”
Ben hadn’t understood that part of the instructions. Why this Hamilton was so important his presence would stop Flint from fleeing, in Silver’s mind. But then he thinks about what he had seen in that field, and about how John Silver is still on the island with the Maroons. With his Madi.
And Ben looks across the fire to Billy.
“You’re telling me that Silver expects Flint to stay put - after he betrayed him and sold the Flint’s war out from under him, just because an old lover is there?”
Ben shrugs. He hadn’t known Flint long enough to know, either way.
“He seemed certain of it. Told me to make sure Flint saw that Hamilton fellow and then come back here, for the treasure.”
“Without a map.”
“I did ask.” He’d asked only once - just before they’d reached Georgia. Asked Flint if he’d give up the location now that he was being given what he’d been promised. His end of the bargain.
Flint’s answer had been a puzzle Ben is still trying to figure out.
“Already?.”
It had seemed both cruel and sad, somehow, but Ben hadn’t gotten a chance to ask for clarification before Flint’s attention had been drawn completely elsewhere.
“He’ll be back for it.” Billy’s voice interrupts his memory.
“Huh?”
“Flint would never let something like this go.”
“Silver said he wouldn’t - couldn’t - be seen again. That he’d stay where Thomas Hamilton was.”
“Flint’s never cared about anyone enough to give up this war before. He’s addicted to getting something from it.”
Billy seems so certain, but again the image of Flint - looking so wholly different than Ben had ever seen him, leaning against Thomas Hamilton - enters his mind.
“Well either way I’ll be here for years - trying to find the cache without a map.”
Billy looks over at him again, seems to be measuring something. What, Ben isn’t sure.
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t look for it. You’re safe here. Silver won’t come back, not if he hasn’t already. Don’t look for it till I bring you the map.”
