Work Text:
Ed tugs off the fancy shoes, hooks his fingers through the laces, and scurries to the crow’s nest in stockinged feet, getting himself a little closer to the moon. High up and alone with the horizon, he sags down against the mast.
Gently, gently, he picks the flowers from his hair and brings them to his nose.
There’s not much call to have flowers aboard a ship. Ed hasn’t seen anything like these in an age, and he wonders for the hundredth time where Stede even found them: delicate things, as frothy as a white cap. All for Ed.
Maybe they sprout up in Stede’s footsteps. The though pops whole into his head, and his stomach swoops, his skin prickles, his cheeks get hot. He shoves his whole face in the spray of flowers and swallows down a flying whoop! of a noise.
He wants to crow into the night, and the flowers smell so sweet, and he waits for that ancient, scabbed over reality of Blackbeard to rise out of the depths but he’s too high up right now, it can’t reach him here.
Ed has never felt like this in his life.
He thinks of Stede. Stede, and his perfect gold curls, wearing a jacket so beautiful Ed had spent half the night resisting the urge to pet it. Stede, and the handsome hook of his nose and the look, the look in his eye as he said, “You wear fine things well.”
There’s something too big in Ed’s chest, and it may be his heart. He can feel it racing.
Stede.
Ed imagines what would have happened if he’d tipped the rest of the way forward, down there on the deck. If he’d caught Stede by his lapels and pulled him close. He grasps for an image of it, and at first that image is rough, both of them staggering, back, tugging and grabbing, all the way to the captains quarters, and…
But that’s not it, is it? Ed’s been a sailor all his life, he’s had those sorts of fantasies plenty of times. Even had them come true sometimes.
This is something else.
This is Stede reaching back for him, cupping his face, touching one careful hand to the silk over Ed’s heart. This isn’t a plundering, it’s a promise, and Ed’s breath quivers as his eyes fall shut and he imagines the delicate brush of petals against his lips is Stede. Yes, just like that.
This should be embarrassing. What sort of pirate wants to be kissed like a maiden in the moonlight? What sort of pirate needs another man to defend him from a bunch of fluffy ponces? What sort of pirate…
But the answer is Ed. Oh, Ed does. And he doesn’t feel embarrassed. He feels like he’s sprouted wings and is riding the sea wind all the way to the moon. After all: he wears fine things well.
The ship sways, and Ed breathes in the flowers, and for the first time in decades the whole world stretches out below him.