Archive of Our Own ^beta

But the re-formed crew has been giving him looks. He noticed it immediately, but it’s gotten worse over the weeks. Jim and Frenchie are comprehensible, if disappointing; the guys they stole from the last ship, he gets, even; but it’s Ivan and Fang too. Fang in particular — he could swear Fang almost looks sorry for him. He certainly doesn’t seem scared of him. The way he stares when he thinks Ed isn’t looking — the muttering he does when Ed has finished dealing out his orders and has turned his back. It’s getting on his nerves; and yet he can’t bring himself to do anything about it. Can’t find the verve. 

Part of that may be the drinking. Ed’s definitely doing too much of it; but how else is he going to sleep? In Stede’s bed, in Stede’s rooms. He’s hollowed them out, but they’re still haunted. Throwing out the painting might exorcise them. Maybe. He isn’t willing to try. He’d been a lighthouse with him, once. He’d thought it might have lasted — the glow of it. They’d been untouchable, alight. He still doesn’t know exactly how he’d lost that. He’s sea-buried Stede’s things, but he can’t bear to give up the ghost of that night; it’s all he’s got left.

So, of course, the evening they come in sight of shore and drop anchor off the harbor in Honduras, preparing to haul in supplies for the next months’ bloody run, he’s already settled in with a bottle of bad rum. He’s a third of the way in with no plans of stopping when Fang knocks at his door. 

“Come in,” he mumbles, automatically, and looks up vaguely to find Fang standing in the doorway, staring at him with that look on his face. “What the hell do you want?”

“Can I talk to you, Boss?” Fang says, at the same moment as Izzy comes hustling up the corridor — he can hear the cane slamming along the hall, and wasn’t that a stroke of genius, making Izzy audible? He can always hear him coming now. Can’t take Edward Teach by surprise.

“You have some fucking nerve disturbing him!” Izzy roars, as he rounds the door, but Fang doesn’t flinch, only holds up a hand.

“Can I talk to you?” he repeats, unflappable. “Alone.”

Ed stares at him. This is, against all odds, interesting. Intriguing. He has not been interested in anything for weeks.

“Yeah, sure,” he says, as Izzy grinds to an incredulous halt. “Get the hell out of here, Hands.”

Izzy wavers, outraged, astounded, and Ed rises to his feet, unsteady, but suddenly furious. “I said get out.”

There it is: Izzy’s will surrenders visibly. He declaws; draws back, and quietly closes the door. There used to be a time when Izzy would never have shown him his claws. And Ed had never needed to bare his teeth to him then. That was before Izzy had sold him out and then bargained him back, and made it clear that came with expectations. He waits until he hears Izzy’s cane tap-tap-tapping away. He sits back; folds his hands on the desk and stares Fang down.

“Go on,” he says. He wants to hear this. That’s something.

For another long moment Fang only looks at him. Then he says, abruptly, “Ivan and I want to stay ashore.”

“That’s all?” He’s let down. “What the fuck are you telling me for? Tell Hands.”

“No, I mean — Boss, we’re quitting. We’re leaving the crew. We wanted to let you know.” He sounds completely calm — resigned, almost. But his eyes are on Ed’s shaking hand, which has drifted to the knife in his belt without his volition; his fingers are clenching and flexing on it. He watches Fang watch him. 

But he’s already drunk, and he’s so fucking tired.

“Okay. Fuck,” he says, and sits back; collapses, more, and lets the chair catch him, barely; stares at Fang some more, for lack of anything more interesting. “What do I care? Go on, I can press-gang some more guys from anywhere. Pull them over from the other ship. They’ll probably be more grateful.”

“Um. Okay?” Fang doesn’t look resigned, now, more startled, and something else — sad? Is he sad?

“Maybe — maybe don’t mention it to Hands,” Ed says, and snorts a little laugh. “If you want to get to shore in peace.”

“Ha. Izzy the Spewer? Dizzy Izzy? I’m not scared of him,” Fang says, and he’s not moving. Ed would have expected him to flee, if he’d expected any of this. If he had any fucking clue what was happening.

“Dizzy Izzy? What?” He peers at Fang, standing easily there in the shadows, smiling a little now. Still sad.

“It’s a little nickname me and the boys have for him,” Fang shrugs. He’s studying Ed. “Ever since he puked up his guts, all over himself, that one time — well. You’re really going to let us go?”

“You’re really not scared of him?” Ed’s feeling nauseous, now. He hasn’t been sleeping much, even with the drinking — it’s leaving him off-kilter. “You’re not afraid of Hands.”

“Hell, no. Not scared of him. Just can’t stand him any more. That’s, uh, that’s why we’re leaving. You’re — the two of you have gotten a little too much alike. Taking yourself a bit too seriously, Boss. We don't need another one of him aboard.”

“He told me — ” Ed’s feeling a little bit breathless. “He told me he was keeping this crew together. He told me he’d been talking you all around every time you’d wanted to turn on me.”

“Him?” That’s incredulity — no, scorn. “Maybe when it suited him, but he’d gripe about you just as often. We knew you weren’t in a good way, and that was before — well.”

“Before what?” 

“Before you took up with Bonnet,” Fang admits, and finally cringes a little. “He got worse then. When you fucked off we’d have thrown him overboard if you hadn’t come back.”

Ed really can’t breathe, now. He’d believed — he’d taken for truth what Izzy had told him, that Ed couldn’t hold a crew’s loyalty; that the best he could hope for was Izzy keeping them contained till the next trick he could pull to get back their attention, when really —

“You okay, Boss?” Fang says. He sounds concerned. Ed nods, barely.

“So why did you all stay with me?” he says. He hears his own voice from a distance; like a stranger’s voice. “If it was that bad?”

“We trusted you,” Fang says, like he’s commenting on the weather. Like it’s that obvious. “Sometimes. You were good at getting us through all this — you were wild as hell, at your best. You knew the sea. You knew a good show. You were — a little bit magic. But — ”

He takes it like a blade to the chest; manages to nod. “Bonnet. Bonnet changed me.”

“Sorry, no.” Fang’s shaking his head. Ed understands nothing. “No. We liked how you were with him. You were better. No more skulking in the shadows. You opened up. We were okay with how things were after he left, even. I was — I wanted to do that talent show.” 

Fang pauses, but Ed can’t say anything. Fang blinks at Ed sadly, then says in the strangest, softest voice, “Whatever happened after, that’s what changed you. Dizzy started limping and you haven’t been right since. I hope you’ll get it sorted, sometime; if you did, I might even like to see you again.”

— Ed had been so sure that he would never cry in front of anyone else again —

There was a shout, aboveboard; the sound of running footsteps. A pause.

“We’ve been boarded!” someone cried, and then everything began to happen at once.

Fang turned sharply toward the sound; started forward and flung open the door. Izzy roared, “What?” from somewhere nearby, and, belated, Ed lurched out of his seat. He was more drunk than he’d thought; he felt as though he was walking through a surging tide, struggling for a forward trajectory, fumbling for the knife at his hip. 

There was more shouting audible, now that the door was open, and the scent of smoke drifting in the air. 

They plunged out together onto the deck and into hell. Flames were rising from the storage area, and shadows ran and collided amid the smoke, knives out, into terrible configurations, ugly two-headed monsters grappling in the dark and flame; someone nearby screamed and then groaned deeply. Ed was moving through the dark on faith alone, no sense of balance, no thought, no clarity; the adrenaline hadn’t cleared the rum from his mind, only offered him access to the muscle memory necessary to draw his knife and brace for impact. He felt the breath knocked from his lungs as the first oncoming blade caught his shoulder, but not the pain — that would show up later. He raised his knife again and struck out, and again; felt rather than saw when it caught on solid flesh and tugged. Then something else drove into his leg from behind — there was a hum in his ears, a white flash across his vision as his bad knee gave way completely. Pitching sideways, he barely caught himself on a barrel; pushed himself back to standing. Raised his knife again; struck blindly into the stinging, shifting smoke, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, except that he didn’t actually want to die, now that it came down to it, not yet —

He didn’t feel the final impact, only saw the stars burst before his eyes. He choked on the roiling darkness rising up to meet him, and then there was nothing at all.

* 

He doesn’t wake gently; he’s being jostled, carried along in a rush, and there are blazes of scalding pain running up his limbs and through his heart. He can’t get his breath; the heat and the sickness pulls him back under. 

Next: he wakes splayed across something hard, unyielding, faces looming above him; something leathery and thick shoved into his mouth, and as he clenches his teeth in it alcohol is poured through, soaking down his chin and into his shirt, burning down his swollen throat. He knows what this is. He braces. Flesh being pierced, skin scorching, the old familiar bloody nightmare. He endures. 

After the stitches are pulled tight, merciful shadows rush up over his mind again.

Next: daylight. Ivan, maybe, bent over him, pouring drops from a bottle of something bitter into his mouth. He squints: definitely Ivan. “Thank you,” he murmurs, and gets a funny sound in return, almost a laugh; the edges of his eyesight are blurring and wavering, bathed in the too-brightness of the day and more all-obliterating pain creeping in over the edges of sleep-numbness. “Am I dying?” 

“Don’t think so,” filters in through the waves washing over him, and he smiles, and then he snarls and cries out as something is poured into the pool of pain in his shoulder. Again, across his hip; then an apology, and the covers are drawn up over the fire of his broken body. This time the darkness doesn’t come quickly; he lies and burns, and burns, shaking, until someone else (Fang?) sits down beside him and lays a cold, wet piece of mercy over his head, and under its blessing he drops down into nothingness again.

Next: twilight. Mind a little clearer. Pain not all-encompassing; his head aches horribly, his shoulder feels fucked, and his hip and side are still on fire, and his knee seems swollen to hell and ready to kill him if he tries to use it. But. Awake. Warm, in bed. Moonlight in the window. Warmth coming from — from beside him — warmth like a soft hand laid down on his uninjured shoulder —

There is a hand on his shoulder, there’s someone beside him, there’s Stede.

Stede Bonnet is sitting there on the bed beside him, crumpled over against the wall; soft, disheveled, breathing slowly, sound asleep. Shadowed and faceless, hair soaked in moonlight. 

Unreality crashes over him: a cold wave of terror. He’s lost it. He’s dying. He’s dead already and haunted past the grave. He scrambles sideways and immediately regrets it; everything in his body hates that. He collapses back against the pillows, with a cry, and Stede shifts — surges up.

“Ed, oh, Ed,” Stede gasps, and his voice is rough and warm and horribly affectionate and Ed can’t handle this at all.

“No,” he says, “no, no, no,” and he screws his eyes shut against that sweetness, the good ghost of him, turns his face away and tries to breathe. “No, you’re gone, you left, you’re not here — he’s not here — ”

“I’m here,” Stede says, “darling,” and his voice is breaking into pieces, and it sounds so unlike Stede has ever sounded that Ed opens his eyes again.

“No,” he says again. He can’t seem to find any other word. He can hardly find a breath. Stede closes his eyes hard; nods a quick little nod; his eyebrows are twisted up with emotion. He doesn’t look unreal. He looks so real. He opens his eyes.

“I’m supposed to give you your medicine,” he says, very quietly, and then, “I’m sorry I surprised you,” and Ed would laugh, or scream, at the suddenly calm and courteous tone, except that his heart is going to kill him if the lack of sense doesn’t, so he doesn’t say anything at all while Stede (Stede?) reaches into the sill, opens up a shining little bottle with steady movements, and says, “Can I touch you?”

Ed can’t answer; he raises his chin. Stede, oh God, catches it in one warm, soft hand and raises the open bottle to drip into Ed’s helpless mouth. Then while Ed is barely managing to swallow with a throat that’s too stiff, Stede takes up a little glass of something else clear and bright and brings that to his lips, too. 

“There’s sleeping stuff in that,” he says. “Better than the rum, maybe. I hope it’ll give you better dreams.”

Something is already smoothing the edges of the pain along Ed’s broken body; whatever had been in that bright little bottle. He opens his lips again; accepts the cup. No part of him wonders whether it’s poison. Every part of him thrums with unreality, but that he’s sure of: whatever it is is good.  

He drops under again with a hand in his hair and a feeling that if nothing is real, at least the dream is kind.

Next, of course, is clarity.

He’s alone when he wakes, soaked in the inescapable mid-morning blaze of light from the window beside him. His head throbs; his stomach aches with emptiness. His mouth is dry as hell. He raises a hand gingerly to the sore shoulder, feels rough stitches prickling beneath his shaking fingers. Smooths the hand down his side, encounters the edge of a weeping ooze under a mess of linen. Doesn’t try to move his knee at all; something warns him away from testing the depth of the ache there. He groans; stretches his one good arm slowly above his head; rolls the hot, heavy, useless head to the side and checks the sill. 

There is a bright little bottle there, and an empty glass. 

He’d dreamed it. He has to have dreamed it.

His hand goes to his lips; he remembers the feel of the cup there. The hand in his hair. 

The door opens, and he jolts toward the sound; groans at the reverberation of that jolt through his joints, his dizzy head. It’s Ivan — of course it’s just Ivan. He’s — smiling?

“You’re awake!” he says, and he sounds pleased. “How are we feeling today?”

“Like hell,” Ed says through the beat of his heart. “How’s the ship?”

“Fine as fuck,” says Ivan, and settles down on the edge of the bed. He’s carrying the ship’s bag of apothecary shit. “Bit toasted, but it’s surface damage. You need more laudanum, or should I just get down to it?”

“Laudanum,” Ed admits; grabs the bottle and drips it into his own mouth, thank you, “and water, and maybe some grub? Feels like I haven’t eaten in a week.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ivan grins, and he’s peeling back the linen at Ed’s side, and fuckshitfuck that feels horrendous, and he hasn’t even poured anything into the burn yet – “y’kind of haven’t. I’ll send Bonnet up with something when he’s done.”

“You’ll — what. What? What — ” Ed’s frozen, but then Ivan starts to clean the burnt flesh and he’s galvanized, suddenly aflame, curling both hands into the sheets and trying not to scream aloud. “Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” he says through his teeth, perversely grateful for the utterly clarifying nature of pain. This is, in fact, real. 

“Yeah, pretty much,” Ivan laughs, “that’s a nasty burn, there,” and he’s putting the bottle back and still smiling, and Ed uncurls his hands and tries to breathe.

“You said. You said — you said 'Bonnet'? Not — Stede Bonnet?” He’s not in control of his voice. It’s a good thing he’d be expected to sound shaken, post-bloody-burn-cleaning.

“Yeah, Boss.” Ivan pauses in putting away his things, frowns at him. “He said you saw him last night?” Ed can only gape at him, and Ivan stands, frowns. “You okay?”

“What is Stede Bonnet doing on my ship?” 

“He came to get his people back. That bunch is awfully attached to each other. I did think he might show up, sometime, but I’d have thought he’d at least fight for them.”

Ed catches his breath enough to say, “He didn’t?” 

“Nah, he surrendered himself instead. Trade of prisoners, he said, standard rules. ‘No more bloodshed, we can do this in a decent fashion’ — cheeky bugger. He seemed awfully cheerful about it. Fang has him down in the kitchen.”

“He can cook?” That isn’t what Ed meant to say. He has no idea what he means to say.

“Him? Ha! No, he’s on dish duty. Fang let him take nights with you, but he’s got to put in his hours down there same as the rest of us. I’ll send him up with some rations soon.”

Something else is occurring to Ed, now. “You’re still here.”

Ivan, in the door with his bag, pauses. “Yeah, Boss.” 

“Fang said you were leaving.”

“Yeah, well. Weren’t going to leave you like this, were we?”

He’d have thought it would be fantastically easy to leave him like this. He’s no closer to finding something to say when Ivan shrugs and goes.

When the door opens again, after a long and dizzyingly puzzled while, he needs a moment before he can bring himself to look up.

It’s Stede — really, truly — sunburned and ruffle-haired and wrapped in a leather fisherman’s apron, and — fuck, his eyes are beautiful and bright and he’s staring straight at Ed. Not a glance round at the gutted, joyless room. Not a quiver of his hands, not a falter in his quiet face.

“I brought breakfast,” Stede says. He comes toward Ed; lays the plate on the edge of the bed. Gruel, hardtack, standard stuff. No orange cake. Stede stops looking at him long enough to lift the bottle of laudanum and check the level. It’s low. “D’you think we need another one?” His voice is steady. 

Ed can’t bring himself to answer; his voice won’t be.

After a moment Stede nods, decisively. Gives the edge of the bed a little pat. “I’ll be back for the plate in a bit,” he says over his shoulder, and he’s pausing at the door, giving the room one long look round. He isn’t in his shiny little satin-tied shoes; he’s got work boots on. Smudges on his trousers. And then he’s stopped, staring at something over Ed’s head; his soft mouth has dropped open a little and it trembles. Ed drags his gaze away to look up.

It’s the fucking lighthouse.

“No,” says Ed, “no, no, you don’t get to look at that — you don’t — it isn’t yours now, you gave it up — ”

“I shouldn’t have,” says Stede, and the timbre of his voice takes Ed’s breath. He’s standing there in his rough work clothes, honest-eyed, and he sounds absolutely certain.

“Then why — ” It’s a whisper; his tight throat won’t let him say it louder. He could have shouted it, roared it, wept it. “Why come back for it now? When everything’s — over?”

“Everything?” Stede’s stopped leaving; he’s fucking coming back again. Ed can’t stand looking at him. And yet —

“Isn’t it? You didn’t want it. I asked you. You didn’t — you didn’t come.”

“I am so sorry,” says Stede, simply, and he’s right at Ed’s bedside, now, and he drops down to his knees; lays his hand on the cover, beside Ed’s. He doesn’t have a knife on him, nor a gun, nor a gold ring. “I thought I could save it for you. I was wrong.”

“Save what for me? What the fuck did you save?” 

“All of this.” Stede breathes out a shaky breath; gestures wide around the ruined room. “Your happiness. Your reputation, your protection. The ship, the open sea. I thought I could keep you safe — I could set you free — I could save it all for you, if not for me.” 

“But I didn’t ask for that! Not for any of this! I asked for you — !” and then he can’t be seen any more, he can’t be looked at like that, he needs to get away, but his side is on fire and his knee is on fire and he can’t fucking fight, and he can’t fucking run —

The moment Ed’s face drops into his shaking hands he feels the bed dip down, and then there’s a hand on his shoulder again, firm and warm and real.

“Breathe,” Stede’s murmuring, softly, “breathe, love, that’s the way, it’ll pass — it’ll pass — ” His hand tightens on Ed’s good shoulder, and he keeps it there; Ed wants very badly to fling it off, but he's saving all his energy to keep his skin together. Stede keeps murmuring things Ed can’t believe. He doesn’t understand at all. But Stede isn’t leaving.

When Ed sneaks a glance at him through his fingers, Stede’s face is grave, almost stern. He doesn’t look unsure of anything. He looks dead set on some secret horizon.

“I was wrong,” Stede says again, and his hand tightens once more on Ed’s shoulder, and then he drops it back in his lap. The midday’s unstinting sunlight pours over him in a radiance, softening the weary lines under his eyes, the sober fold of his soft lips. After a moment he looks up at Ed, sideways, and there’s something else there: an inner light, equal to the other, a glimmer of something perversely glad in his eyes. It goes right to Ed’s gut, that gladness, like a blade. “I’d like to make it right,” he says, and stands; Ed almost groans at the sudden emptiness beside him, even as he feels he can breathe again. Stede folds his hands in front of him. “If I can.”

Ed still can’t bring himself to look him full in the face, but he finds the voice to say, “Are you going to leave me?”

“No. Never. Not unless you tell me to.”

“Go on, then, that’s enough for now,” Ed says hoarsely, “don’t keep on fucking staring,” and doesn’t move until he hears the door close; and keeps it silent when he cries. He’s gotten good at that.