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The first real pain Stede feels that isn’t his own is the sharp, lasting sting of rope burn all along his hands and a dull, lingering ache in his heart.
There have been smaller ones throughout his childhood, of course—little nicks, splinters, the impact of a bruise, a sharp slap now and then—but this is the first to stay. This is the first to feel out of the ordinary, to tell Stede something unique about his soulmate’s experiences, though he hasn’t the slightest idea what it is. Still, he treasures the nebulous knowledge, even as he finds his own heart aching for whatever it was that caused such distress.
In the years that follow, the injuries become worse, and most of them begin to leave scars.
The first time he feels a vicarious stab wound, Stede truly thinks he’s dying; it’s only once the pain begins to ebb, leaving behind a scar on the left side of his abdomen—silvery, with almost a glow to it, indicating that he isn’t the one who received it—that he realizes what must have happened. He cries that night (much to the scorn of the other boys in his dormitory), to think of his soulmate being dealt such pain. He wonders if they know that Stede is feeling their pain, aching for them, and hopes someone is there to comfort them.
The more injuries he feels, the less likely that seems. He feels knife wounds—stabs, slashes—the lash of a whip, the sting of a bullet's graze, and endless signs of other physical altercations—slaps, punches, kicks, even bites. Slowly he accumulates a collection of silvery scars, primarily across his torso and back (easily hidden), but some on his arms and legs, and those are always viewed with suspicion, even outright disdain. The marks that make it clear that whoever his soulmate is, they’re not of his social class—what member of the gentry, after all, would have led a life so rough?
It’s even clearer that this must be the case when Stede starts feeling little pinpricks of pain in different places—mostly across the line of his right arm, sometimes across his back or chest—and occasionally sees vague shapes forming in those places, lines that disappear almost as soon as he sets eyes on them, pictures he can almost but never quite make out in full. Tattoos, he thinks, fascinated, wishing every time that they lingered long enough for him to actually tell what each was supposed to be. Another sign of his soulmate’s status—no one of a higher class would have such a variety of prominent markings, either.
None of it bothers Stede, of course. The tattoos intrigue and delight him, and as for the wounds, if he were ever lucky enough to meet his soulmate, he’d like to think he would meet their suffering with compassion rather than scorn. At times he’s even ashamed of himself, that his life has been so easy (so utterly uninteresting) when his soulmate’s has been so hard—that any scars he has aren’t the sort that show on the skin—but other times he’s grateful that of all the pain his soulmate has survived, they don’t have to bear Stede’s alongside it.
His only fear is that with such a dangerous life, with so many injuries, his soulmate might die before Stede has a chance to meet them. He knows there’s little chance they would ever meet anyway—with such different lives, it isn’t as if their paths would cross by chance—but still. There’s something to be said for simply knowing they’re still in the world.
“Only peasants marry their soulmates,” Stede’s father sneers, and Stede knows—knows that for their class, marriage is more about alliances and land than love—but as he and Mary say their vows, he still aches.
It’s even worse during their wedding night, where Mary’s disrobing reveals two thin silvery scars—one at her shoulder, one just below her knee. It makes the whole thing so much worse, that he isn’t the person she’s meant to be with, that in binding herself to Stede instead she’s lost the chance to find her own soulmate. That both of them know, as they perform their perfunctory, unsatisfying consummation, that their souls are both intended for another’s.
As the years go on, Stede keeps accumulating vicarious hurts—new wounds, new fleeting pricks of tattoos, a pain to his knee so blinding it still aches sympathetically whenever storms brew. And he wonders anew, with each scar, what the story is behind it. And he wonders anew, with each one, exactly what kind of person his soulmate is.
Someone living a dangerous life, clearly. Someone doing something that’s highly likely to cause injury. A solider? A mercenary? A highwayman?
A pirate?
Of all of the options, that’s the one that lingers with Stede the most. Perhaps because it’s the one that appeals to him most—a life entirely apart from all of the expectations and restrictions of society. A life of freedom. A life fraught with danger, but rife with the potential to make one feel more alive than anything else ever could.
The more time Stede spends in the life expected of him—as a husband and a father, as a gentleman and very little else—the more the alternative, any alternative, appeals to him. And the life of a pirate is the one that speaks to him above all else. He thinks that that might mean that’s where his soulmate’s life lies too, but either way, he knows that he can’t keep going with what he has now. Something has to change.
Stede knows leaving Mary with just a letter is cowardly, but he knows that if he doesn’t, he’ll never find the courage to leave at all.
Find him, he thinks about writing, find your soulmate—one of us should be happy, at least. But he loses his nerve, and leaves while he’s still able to cling to the rest of it.
He should regret it, he knows, and occasionally he does; he thinks sometimes of that letter with shame burning in his heart, especially on the days when he truly feels like the worst pirate to ever set sail. The voice in his head that often sounds like his father demands, from time to time, what kind of man abandons his family to go gallivanting off on some fancy boat chasing some fancy dream? But the truth is that he feels he should regret it far more often than he actually does, because being at sea is the finest thing he’s ever experienced.
The ship he’s painstaking crafted is more of a home to him than the house where he grew up, the house he’d shared with his family—every detail put together to his own interests, every part of it exactly what he wants, no one else’s needs or likes requiring compromise or accommodation. It took him some time to get used to being at sea, but he adores it now—the wide expanse of water before him like another world, as if it’s the only world that exists, as if the world he left behind never was. It makes him feel alone in the best possible way, and at the same time deeply present in the world around him. Even the storms, even the seasickness, even the times he stumbles or feels off-balance—physically or emotionally—he still feels more alive than ever before, just as he'd once thought. It's everything he dreamed it would be.
It doesn’t take him long to become deeply fond of his new crew, either, the ragtag band of pirates he’s cobbled together out of anyone mad enough to set sail with someone like him. He wondered at first, absurdly, hopefully, if maybe he’d managed to recruit his soulmate onto his ship—but within weeks he’s seen most of them in various states of undress, and can confirm that though he has several scars in common with a few of them, and the placements of a few tattoos here and there seem familiar, none of them match up perfectly. (A bit of a relief, that. He hasn’t felt a particular pull toward any of them, either, and it would have been disappointing to discover there really wasn’t anything between him and his soulmate, after all this time.)
So—it’s a hard life, and it’s easy to feel discouraged or anxious or scared, but except in his darkest moments (Nigel Badminton collapsing, sword stabbing right through the eye, horror and fear and shame coursing through him as he realizes what he’s done), Stede doesn’t regret it. When the fog clears and the confidence has returned to him in full and he can see his course ahead of him, he knows it’s the best decision he’s ever made.
And of course, meeting Blackbeard—the Blackbeard—is an adventure unlike anything Stede could have possibly imagined.
Although, even with the legend surrounding him, even with the ample piratical talents he displays every single day, it’s hard to truly think of him as anything other than Ed. Not only because that was how Stede first met him, but because that’s simply who he is, beneath the swagger and the artistry and the leather. It’s strange to feel like the most well-known pirate in all the seven seas is something of a kindred spirit, but it’s how Stede feels. And it makes him even more confident that this is the life he’s meant to lead.
He wonders, at first, of course—as he has with every new pirate they’ve encountered—Ed does have the brace around his knee and an abundance of tattoos, after all, and surely a multitude of scars hiding beneath his clothing. But he dismisses the thought almost as soon as it occurs—no, surely not, not Blackbeard of all people. It must just be what he’s seen with so many others, a few commonalities that so many pirates share, nothing more.
But he does realize fairly quickly there’s a good chance Ed might know his soulmate. Surely he’s met a wide range of pirates and surely he’s at least passingly familiar with some of their scars (might have even given them one or two of them, Stede thinks, though he shies away from that particular thought; he doesn’t like to ponder the possibility of Ed hurting his soulmate). But of anyone he’s ever met, Ed might be his best lead in terms of actually figuring out who it is, finding them, maybe even meeting them.
He thinks that maybe, at some point, he might ask. For now, he’s just enjoying the time they’re spending together, and that’s enough.
It’s one thing to set sail out into the sea with a brand new ship and a brand new crew and dedicate himself to the task of reinventing piracy. It’s another entirely to feel as if he’s teaching Blackbeard himself something new. (Not about piracy, granted, but—about life. That’s far better than nothing, and it’s far more exciting than anything Stede could ever have dreamed of.)
There’s something absolutely delightful in the process of walking Ed through all the finer points of high society, teaching him all the mannerisms and the etiquette and the clothing, talking him through how to dress for the party they end up crashing (Ed insisted on putting the ensemble together himself, even though it really would have been easier with Stede’s assistance—and of course there were a dozen things Stede had to adjust once Ed emerged in all his finery, but he’d still done an impressive job all on his own, and Stede takes a good deal of pride in his initiative). And—well, perhaps the night doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch, but Stede thinks there’s something to be said for Ed’s first foray into high society ending with Stede demonstrating some skills from his old life in a particularly piratical way, if he does say so himself. It’s a prime example of the effect they’ve had on one another.
When Stede tucks the scrap of red silk into Ed’s pocket—and who would have thought Blackbeard, of all people, would cling to something so sentimental, so purely ornamental yet so beautiful? Yet another sign that they just might have more in common than Stede ever could have expected—and tells him that he wears fine things well, it’s both because it’s true (the leather suits him, of course—dear god, does it suit him—but the fragile beauty of the ornamentation and the richness of the heavy purple coat made him look regal and delicate all at once) and because he so clearly needs to hear it. A month ago, it would have felt absurd for him to give Blackbeard a compliment so soft. Now, Stede looks into Ed’s dark, fathomless eyes, wide with an emotion he can’t name, and feels the heavy, precious weight of giving him exactly what he needs.
When Ed moves forward, Stede barely has a second to spare for the thought that maybe it’s in order to kiss him—an absolutely wild thought, of course, but such are the thoughts Ed inspires—before the moment dissolves into simple camaraderie, the two of them exchanging farewells and parting ways. And when Stede walks away, he can’t help turning back, just for a moment—just for one last sight of Ed on the deck in his fine clothes—and he sees Ed looking back at him, as if drawn by a magnet. A brief moment of connection, profound all of out of proportion with how fleeting it is.
Or so Stede thinks before Ed says his name, so low he probably shouldn’t have been able to hear it—but he does, loud and clear.
“Yes?” he says, feeling a bit breathless.
Ed hesitates a moment, then asks, “Can you give me a hand with getting all this fancy shit off?”
For a brief, blistering moment, Stede wonders if it’s an overture, a couched request for something else entirely. But—no, surely if Ed wanted that, there would have been better times to ask, and surely he wouldn’t be so circuitous in doing so. And clearly putting the clothing on had been a bit of a struggle for him; it’s reasonable that he’d want some help in removing it.
So he smiles, and he says “of course,” and he leads Ed to the captain’s quarters, lighting a few candles before opening up the auxiliary wardrobe.
Stede turns as they stand in the doorway, watching the low candlelight gently illuminate Ed, whose expression is serious. He finds himself short of breath again as he touches the froth of lace at Ed’s throat and murmurs, “May I?”
Ed dips his chin in a nod, and Stede gets to work, patiently undoing the complicated knot of the lace and setting it aside before unbuttoning Ed’s waistcoat; Ed extends each arm in turn as Stede takes it off, carefully hanging it up before turning to the shirt.
Surely Ed doesn’t actually need his help with this part; surely he can simply unbutton it himself. But Stede raises his eyes to Ed’s, and Ed nods, so—Stede begins slowly, carefully, unbuttoning.
His fingers, he notes as if from a great distance, are trembling. The entire scene has the feel of a dream: the stillness of the ship around them, the flicker of the candles, Ed silhouetted by the dim glow, more and more of his skin bared with every button Stede undoes. He can’t stop his fingertips from catching against Ed’s chest, and every time it happens his breath catches, too.
Ed, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be breathing at all. Stede can’t bring himself to look him in the eye, but he can feel the weight of his gaze, knows it’s unblinking and unwavering. He can’t tell what it means. He can’t tell what any of this means. He just knows he doesn’t want to break the spell—not just yet.
When Stede finishes unbuttoning the shirt, it feels a little like he can finally exhale. In a bolder gesture than he would have thought himself capable of, he peels the shirt back, exposing the full of Ed’s chest—and he freezes.
It isn’t the beauty of the expanse of Ed’s skin newly revealed, the sheer poetry of each dip and curve and hollow of muscle and bone, though any other time that might have fully enchanted him. It’s the truth that’s clear even in the low light of the candles—the scars drawn across Ed’s shoulders and stomach and chest. Knife wounds, slashes and stabs, lashes from a whip, grazes from a bullet—scars Stede could map out blindfolded, because they’re the same ones he sees every day on his own body.
Not just a few—not an occasional coincidental overlap. Every last one. And if there was any doubt at all, a single silvery line across his abdomen—a twin to the stab wound Stede had taken the day the two of them met.
Stede raises his eyes, wide and agonized, to meet Ed’s. His gaze is steady, and Stede can’t read the expression on his face: resignation? Shame? Disappointment?
The day the two of them met, Stede was stabbed and nearly hanged. Ed must have felt both wounds immediately (the scar from the rope must be hidden beneath his beard and hair)—must have known right away. And if he hadn’t been certain, the days he’d sat vigil at Stede’s bedside—seen him unclothed, seen his own scars mirrored in full on Stede’s body—would have confirmed it.
Ed’s known from the start. He’s known, and he hasn’t said a word.
“Why?” Stede breathes, anguished, his fingers moving as if of their own accord to rest against the square of red silk in Ed’s pocket, right over his heart. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Ed shrugs, more of a reflexive gesture than an answer. “I’m Blackbeard,” he says, and for a moment Stede is actually bracing himself for some extremely un-Ed-like dismissive answer about connections like this not mattering to pirates—but then Ed's eyes skate away from Stede’s, and he says, more quietly, “Most of the time that’s all I am. I didn’t know if you’d… really see me.”
And because Stede is starting to, he lets his hand press down more firmly against Ed’s chest—against his heart—and he says, very softly, “Were you afraid I wouldn’t see you—or afraid I would?”
Ed opens his mouth, then looks a little startled to realize that an answer isn’t emerging from it.
It doesn’t matter what it would have been; Stede kisses him anyway.