Chapter Text
Stede had been in love the whole time.
Unfortunately, he hadn't realized it, because he didn't know the proper name for what he had been feeling.
Love.
It was love the whole time.
Stede had felt the presence of it, like hitting a petrified orange under the dirt, surprising despite being hoped for, but he had called it so many other things. Friendship, excitement, comfort, belonging, happiness...
And he had never really understood it until it was cracked open for him.
Love.
How sad that he had never known love before meeting Blackbeard.
How wonderful that he could feel love now.
How wonderful... And how dreadful.
Because he had fled from it.
Because he had always been a coward.
His feelings for Ed... without knowing what they were, they had been... terrifying.
He had struck something under the dirt, and sought the edge of it, and found something too immense for him to handle by himself.
He had found the buried treasure he had been searching for, real and right there and ready to be claimed... And he had run screaming from it because someone who hated him told him that he didn't deserve it.
Why had he listened?
The shameful truth was that flight was Stede's nature. He fled. From his feelings, boundless and unfathomable as the sea... From his guilt over taking Blackbeard away from a life they both enjoyed so much... From the deafening rapport of the gun that had taken the life of an honest man...
But he couldn't run away from his problems forever. Not even if he were running with Ed. No, he needed to start making things right. So he stopped running away and started running back.
He had thought that making things right began with returning to his wife and children. He could not have imagined that they actually were better off without him. That one of his biggest regrets, one that he nearly took to his grave with him, had actually been a good idea for all involved. And as he realized that he did regret leaving them... he realized that he was coming to regret leaving Ed, as well.
He had to find his way back to Ed. But he had to do so carefully. In such a way that no one would chase him down. He would be a dead man, a ghost, a memory. He had to be careful. He needed a plan.
He needed some fuckery.
After a long night, he had it: he would make a public apology to his wife, restoring any of her honor that he had tarnished; he would kill Stede Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate; he would go back to the dock where surely Ed would be waiting... and if he wasn't there when Stede arrived, he would return at the next twilight, and the twilight after that, and so on until Ed saw him in the offing and they could run away together, two dead men who loved each other.
On to the next adventure. Together.
Forever.