Work Text:
When your person leaves you, nothing makes sense anymore.
Trite words: Ed didn’t think he’d ever fucking revert to those, would’ve preferred to gut himself in the right place before he ever did, but turns out that in those stupid old adages, there’s some fucking truth. Who’d have thought?
Wiser men than him had thought: and they’d been right. The world stops making sense.
Still, he tries. He sits down and he writes, and he sings, and he writes and sings. He lets it out. When self-loathing creeps up his throat to choke him—he’s gasping for breath every other minute—he lies there, broken, salt in his mouth and wetting his bunched up cheek that’s pressed to a pillow, and he tries to argue back. “’m not alone,” he whispers into the heat of the pillow fort while his body is wracked with shudders, “got my crew, got the guys. ‘m not alone.”
Before him in the dark somewhere are scraps of paper with his own words in Lucius’ hand on them. He can’t read them.
You are. Look at you, a ship wreck at the bottom of the sea. Who’d dive down that deep to ever retrieve you? The Kraken should’ve stayed at the top of the ocean, that’s what you get for fucking believing you could ever be worth anything other than what you are.
“Shut up.” It comes out hushed. “Shut up.”
You should’ve shut up. Go to fucking China? With that bare face and that bare self and that bare fucking everything? What’ve you got to offer?
“Shut up,” Ed rasps, and it comes out as a whine; breathy; high; hysterical. “Just shut the fuck up—”
Ed isn’t fucking alone. He isn’t.
Another shudder seizes his body, sobs caught up in his throat and leaking through his eyes.
I’m not alone, Ed thinks, desperately, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his face into the damp pillow as the tears begin to flow like a fucking never-ending flood. The hole in his chest gaps like a maelstrom, sucking in everything that’s left of him. I‘m not alone. I’m not.
In the darkness, the scraps of paper mock him. He can’t even read them. But he knows what they say, he created what’s on them: Lucius helped him. He’s Ed, he’s got his crew, he’s still here, he didn’t get whipped away by a storm like a whimsy flag. He’s still here, he’s alive, he’s fighting and he’s trying, he’s fucking trying. It’s more than what he would’ve done before.
Hang on.
Hang
on.
Ed hangs on until he’s desert-dry and bone-tired, lying there with his face slack and mouth open and damp face, feeling nothing. But he hangs on, eyes closed.
Until Izzy happens, and who opens his eyes again is Blackbeard.