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When Stede answers the frantic knocking at his door sometime in the night, it’s to find Blackbeard, his chest heaving with labored breath as if he’s scrambled straight-down from the crow’s nest and run here as fast as he can.
“You know,” Stede starts, his initial alarm passing as he notes that the animated excitement in Ed’s eyes is one of apparent joy rather than of We’re being raided , “you don’t have to–knock like that. You sleep in here nearly every night, you can just come in.”
Ed waves his hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. Look, you have to see something up on deck. C’mon.”
Stede grimaces, clutching the neck of his robe together. He’d very recently been fast asleep, actually, having nodded off with a particularly good book against his face. “I mean, it’s rather late. What is it? Is Frenchie doing his body contortion tricks again?”
“Nah, better you see for yourself.” Ed’s eyes light up further, if possible, always so expressive that they more than make up for the obscuring nature of his beard, and he adds excitedly, “A surprise!”
“Well... “ It’s only been a few weeks since Ed came aboard The Revenge , and already Stede finds it difficult to refuse his strange whims.
Ed takes him by the wrist, starting to pull him along.
“Wait! Wait! My shoes–”
“You don’t need shoes mate, c’mon.”
Stede puffs up, digging his heels in. “I rather think I do– God knows what’s on that deck, I’m not going out in my damn stockings. It’ll just be a few minutes, let me–”
He tries to turn back to his quarters, and finds in a flurry of disorientation that Ed is picking him up with a grunt, tipping him back to carry bridal style as if he weren’t a substantial middle aged man but rather a maiden or small child.
“Ah! What–” He cries, only to find Ed already maneuvering rather awkwardly to head towards deck, his biceps flexed taught against where they support the crook of Stede’s knees and his upper back.
“This way your feet won’t get dirty,” Ed shrugs (awkwardly, considering he is carrying a full sized human up slick wooden stairs on a gently rocking ship,) as if this is a perfectly reasonable explanation for his behavior.
They emerge above deck into the cool night air and the slant of shadow from the moonlit mainmast, and Stede’s banyan and nightgown move gently as they’re caught on a breeze.
“But your knee!” Yelps Stede, arms scrambling to lock over and around Ed’s shoulders more firmly, feeling distinctly that he’ll be dropped any moment now.
He hasn’t been lifted– carried –since he was a boy, and truthfully those instances were not particularly happy memories as far as he can recall– his father, roughly hoisting his slack body up like a sack of flour when he’d been immobilized by fear on their first birdshoot, a precursor to the goose incident. The other boys at boarding school, catching him as he’d fled, lifting him in a twisted kind of teamwork to tie up and deposit in the hollow trunk of a tree, abandoned for nearly a full day to be discovered only by a groundskeeper, hungry and shivering and having wet himself shamefully.
Ed grins down at him, and while he doesn’t seem to be struggling as he strides across the deck with Stede in his arms, his voice is still clearly strained with downplayed effort, and each step is heavy and deliberate. “Nah mate, ‘s fine. Only certain angles that it” He freezes suddenly, his face twisting with pain “– oh christ there’s one of those angles fuck–”
Stede’s mouth drops open in shock, fingers slipping where they try to grip more tightly to Ed’s leathers. “Oh! Put me down Ed, put me down!” He braces instinctually for the inevitable drop. Instead, there’s just the bounce of Ed’s stomach pushing against him with laughter as they resume moving forward.
“Nah, just fucking with ya.” He winks down at an indignant Stede, and by the end of the little drama they’ve somehow navigated around the clutter of amidships and reached the prow.
Stede huffily waits to finally be set down. Instead, Ed kind of props Stede against the intersection of a barrel and the railing, kicking his knee up to join his arms in supporting a flustered Stede.
“Really Ed–”
“Shh.” Ed lifts his finger to his lips, and the crinkle of his eyes reminds Stede of the first time he’d shushed him in this manner, in the auxiliary wardrobe. How feline and mischievous his eyes, deep and dark here in the night. He points out over the prow, and Stede turns his head with exasperation to follow the gesture.
“Oh,” he breathes. “Wow.”
And wow is right. Past the bowsprit and figurehead, as if an extension of Ed’s finger pointing straight in its direction, is the moon. And it is splendid. Big and full, and having surpassed silvery to fully luminous against the muddled blue-black of the night sky.
But what is truly breathtaking, what stops Stede’s breathe in his chest, is not the moon.
It is the dozens of stars that appear to be falling like rain, streaking across the sky, leaving brilliant trails in their wake to slowly wink from existence. They come in groups, slowly tracking a downward descent, brilliant as any gem Stede’s ever seen.
“See them?” Ed asks, his breath a warm puff against Stede’s cheek where he ducks closer, almost conspiratorial.
“I’d have to be bloody–blind not to,” Stede manages, remembering again to breathe. “Beautiful.”
Ed’s responding nod drags the thicket of his beard over Stede’s shoulder, tickles his collar-bone where his banyan has slipped open. He realizes he’s stopped worrying about falling–he trusts Ed to hold him here, ridiculous as the whole thing is.
Another round of meteors criss-cross the sky, and the only sound is the gentle lapping of waves on the hull below them, the soft steady inhale of Ed’s breath just behind his ear. The only word for this feeling in his chest, enchantment.
He remembers the star charts he’d consulted as a child, his love of the sky just as tangled with his love of the sea, both of them twin infinities stretching out into a horizon he could only dream to reach. Stede admittedly had never quite absorbed the knowledge, only stared at the beautiful illustrations of the night’s sky and yearning.
To see this, with Ed, with the sharp fresh smell of salt spray around them, it’s like he is waking in the glade in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ; questioning if this is the sweet perfume of sleep, or if he is truly awake.
“I– You know I read about something like this once. Saw a drawing of it too, though it was a bit of a fumbling attempt to capture such a thing in black and white.”
“Oh?” Asks Ed, and as always it warms Stede from deep within to hear the genuine curiosity in his tone; his actual interest in hearing what Stede has to say.
Still, it feels somehow wrong to talk with this sacrosanct event before them, and as he breathlessly continues he finds himself whispering, leaning even closer towards Ed’s heat. “Yes, I– think it was called the ‘burning tears of Saint Lawrence. ’”
Ed’s responding hmm of consideration is a rumble. “What, so this saint guy is supposed to be crying fucking–stars up there, or something?”
Stede laughs, glancing back at him. “No, I mean, well- the Italians called them that, because they happen around the festival of Saint Lawrence, generally. Although–that’s in August, I think, so I don’t imagine that’s what this is.” He continues watching, mesmerized, only distantly registering that Ed is still leaning so close despite Stede’s weight safely resting on the barrel at this point, as if Ed’s chest pressed to his shoulder is still needed to support him when clearly it’s not.
He swallows. “Have you seen something like this before, Ed?”
Ed tips his head. “Well, you see the odd one shooting off sometimes, y’know. But this many, coming from the same point like that? Only once. I was just a boy on a ship then, and I thought the damn sky was falling apart–the crew all laughed themselves silly at me for waking ‘em up in a panic–must’ve been thirty years ago. Before Blackbeard.”
Stede smiles, and despite the beauty in front of him, finds his eyes turning just enough to catch a glimpse of Ed’s face. His eyes gleam with the light of the stars, and there’s that same look of boyish wonder Stede has often caught in his own reflection. Ed is a man who appreciates beauty.
Yearns for it.
Stede’s heart rises in his throat. He feels the desperate urge, not for the first time, to tangle his fingers in that dense silvery hair and press their lips together. But then Ed’s eyes catch his, just for a moment, and he quickly turns his gaze back to the display above them, heart hammering.
“How lucky,” he breathes. “To see such beauty twice in one life.”
Ed pauses, beside him. “I reckon, yeah.”
They’re quiet for a long time after that, but it’s so companionable , in a way Stede has never known. He genuinely liked Mary, but their silences had always felt fraught–his mind racing, certain he should be saying something, and something different from what inevitably tumbled from his lips.
It’s nice, he thinks dreamily. And coupled with the light of the gibbous moon, and the stars streaking down above them, perhaps one of the most beautiful moments of his life.
“I should really–I should wake the men,” he says halfheartedly after a while. “Honestly don’t know where they are, must’ve all fallen asleep in the jam room again…”
Ed’s grunt is noncommittal, and Stede finds, guiltily, that he doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to share this moment, wants to hoard it greedily away, to be recorded later, written himself–not even given up to Lucius’s ears for dictation. Something just for him.
It’s hours–nearly til dawn–when the final streak of light passes across the sky. They’ve talked easily, now and then, conversation ebbing and flowing naturally like the tide, Ed sometimes sinking to sit against the barrel, sometimes standing to lean again by Stede, and though Stede is barely able to prop his eyes open he’s still deeply giddy inside. It’s just like the night of their Lighthouse escapade, really–how can he feel this feeling so often, with Ed?
He sighs, contended. “That was wonderful,” he murmurs when it’s clear the spectacle is over, the first blush of pink dawn creeping in on the horizon. “Really splendid.” He turns his eyes back to Ed and twists to clasp his hand. “Thank you, Ed–truly. That may be the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.” He knows that it is.
Ed ducks his head, clearly delighted. “Yeah, well–Thank the sky or whatever. I just carried you out here.”
“Which was very unnecessary, but very sweet,” Stede adds. “Now really, no need to carry me back to bed–I’m willing to get my feet a bit dirty after that. More than worth it. Should’ve trusted you from the start.”
He moves to lower himself from the barrel, but finds Ed holding him in place with a firm grip of his shoulder.
“What if I want to, though?” He mumbles. And he’s looking at Stede with a strange intensity, one that freezes him stock-still.
“Want to…?”
There’s a long moment where he thinks a reply won’t be forthcoming before Ed says soberly, “Carry you to your bed.”
“That’s–I’m a grown man, Edward, and not a particularly light one. I can walk–”
And then Ed leans in, slow and telegraphed as if giving him all the time in the world to escape, and just as he’s getting the smallest inkling that the previous statement may have been an innuendo, Ed is kissing him. A leather gloved hand raises so gently to his neck, to press into the base of his curls. Ed’s beard and mustache are all over Stede’s face, and his lips are warm, and Stede’s breath pushes from his nose in a long exhale that feels like his soul leaving his body.
They don’t pull apart–just tip, their foreheads pressed together, breathing shakily.
“What a night,” Stede murmurs, his heart fit to burst. And Ed laughs.
Far behind them from the surface of the poopdeck comes a cry of “Ahoy, cap’ns! Ye see the stars last night? An ill portent, mark my words–piss o’ the devil!”
They draw apart quickly, though Ed’s fingers still hold the edge of his banyan tightly, as if he’s afraid to fully let go, and in tandem they raise an arm towards Buttons in greeting.
“Forgot Buttons, er, was in charge of the helm last night.” He says lightly, wincing at the nudity even from this distance and turning back to Ed. “And, ah, moonbathing, as well, it seems.”
Ed is watching him, carefully. Waiting for something, maybe a rebuke, and Stede still isn’t certain what the kiss could mean–is only now sussing out why Ed has made his stomach feel so fluttery ever since waking with him by his bed–but he finds the bravery to clasp his hand over Ed’s, where it holds him.
“To answer your question, you don’t need to carry me there. But–As I’ve said before, my cabin is at your disposal.” His cheeks color gently, “and so am I.”
The surprise on Ed’s face quickly slides into a grin.
“But maybe for now, some–some sleep.”
“Some sleep,” Ed parrots, voice husky.
The crew is beginning to trickle out onto the deck now, mumbling between themselves and yawning as they emerge. And as Stede pushes to the ground, he thinks that maybe, just maybe–if he stays near to Ed, beautiful moments like last night–maybe they could be as boundless as the sea.
Over Ed’s shoulder, as they turn to greet the crew, he does see one final straggling star–barely visible in the morning light and arcing out over unending waves. And he smiles.