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“A surprise party,” Edward says decisively. Then he wavers. “You think he’d like a surprise party, Iz?”
“I think Stede fucking Bonnet would like anything where he gets to be the centre of attention,” Izzy grumbles, continuing with the humiliating (if somewhat soothing) job of alphabetising Bonnet’s books. (“By the last name of the author, if you please,” Bonnet had said. Izzy is doing it by title. The other way, clearly, is stupid, and Bonnet will thank him in the long run.)
“Aw, c’mon,” Ed says, standing up and ruffling Izzy’s hair. He’d managed to get out of the bookshelf organising job by batting his eyes at Bonnet, but had stuck around anyway, evidently to torture Izzy. “One of these days you’re gonna have to stop pretending you don’t like him.”
“I don’t like him,” Izzy mutters, patting his hair back into place. Sure, he sleeps in Bonnet’s bed and eats regular meals with him and Edward and, on occasion, allows Bonnet’s outbursts of truly disgusting affection—but that doesn’t mean he likes him. Of all the ridiculous notions.
“But you’ll help me plan his birthday party?” Ed asks, leaning against the bookshelf that Izzy is trying to organise. Izzy jabs the book he’s holding into Edward’s stomach, but Ed takes no notice.
Izzy sighs. “I’ll do it,” he says.
“Fab,” Ed says—one of those awful mannerisms he’s picked up from Stede. He darts forward and captures Izzy’s lips with his own, briefly, before tipping his head back against the bookcase and grinning. That’s another Bonnet-mannerism, but. Well. Some of them aren’t so awful.
Edward, Izzy knows, is a man of many and varied gifts. Event planning is not one of them.
“Please,” Izzy says, a quill poised over a blank page of parchment, “tell me what sense throwing a pirate-themed party on an actual pirate ship is supposed to make.”
“Use your imagination, man,” Ed says from the bed. He’s lying there, draped altogether indecently in Izzy’s green robe, and it’s making everything worse than it would otherwise be. If Edward wanted Izzy in bed with him, he shouldn’t have set his heart on the most ridiculous birthday party of all time. “I know you’ve got it in you.”
“I really don’t,” Izzy says. “Choose something sensible, like ‘under the sea’. Or we could throw a party without a theme, because we’re not children.”
“Ooh,” Ed says, “what if the theme was music?”
“The concept of music?”
“Yeah,” Ed says, and opens his mouth to say more—
Izzy throws down the quill and stomps over to the bed, because sometimes the only option with Edward is to kiss his stupid face.
They end up scrapping the theme idea, unless the theme of the party is just ‘Stede’. Izzy supposes it might be, come to think of it.
“And that weird slimy cake he likes,” Edward says, sloshing more tea into his cup. They’re eating breakfast without Stede—a rare occurrence, but Stede had begged off, claiming he wanted to eat with the rest of the crew this morning. Probably because he knows full well that Ed and Izzy are planning something. Izzy wouldn’t put it past Ed to have flat out told him about the party, by this point.
“The cheesecake?”
“Is that what it is?” Ed wrinkles his nose. “What about drinks? He likes—”
“The brandy we got from the Vaillante, I know,” Izzy says irritably. “And for snacks I’ve spent our weight in gold on fresh fruit. Because god forbid his lordliness—”
Ed kicks him under the table. “You fucking love the strawberries, mate, don’t even try it.”
Izzy scowls at his pancakes, which are covered in a damning layer of sliced strawberries.
“We’ll have to come up with an excuse for him to get all dressed up,” Izzy says. “Tell him there’s some sort of—I don’t know—fancy outing.”
“Will we, now?” Ed seems amused. Izzy flushes.
“Well, can you imagine if we let him go underdressed to his own bloody party? We’d never hear the end of it,” Izzy fumes, crossing his arms. Then he uncrosses them, because the pancakes really are delicious, and he’s not going to let them go to waste just because Edward’s being a twat. “Suppose you and I should wear something—” His mouth twists. “—nice, too, come to think of it.”
“S’pose we should,” Ed says. He’d left his foot where it was after kicking Izzy, and he’s now sort of running it up and down Izzy’s shin. “He’s been wanting you in velvet for months.”
“It’s a thousand bloody degrees,” Izzy says. “I’m not wearing velvet.”
He decides to wear velvet.
Frenchie and Wee John carry out the alterations on a ridiculous, decadent outfit they’d been planning to sell, so dark blue it’s almost black, and Izzy has to stand there and take it: staying completely still while two imbeciles stick him with pins.
Edward manages to stay for a while, but then he gets bored and Izzy’s forced to resist his murderous impulses all by himself. It gets worse when Wee John starts cooing about how wonderful he looks, and how much the captain will like it.
Hopefully, Izzy thinks, Bonnet will like it well enough to tear it off at the end of the night, causing irreparable damage to the garment.
Izzy is almost offended by how well the crew follows direction when it comes to decorating for a fucking birthday party. They’re still bumbling fools—Frenchie drops the tray of cucumber sandwiches, then starts trying to reassemble them there on the deck, and Lucius lazes against the bulwark with his sketching pad all morning on the basis that he’s drawing a present for Captain Bonnet—but they manage to get the deck clean and set up in record time, by their own standards.
Ed’s below deck, keeping Stede occupied, and so it is that Izzy gets away with threatening the crew en masse that if the party doesn’t go well, he’ll rip all of their eyeballs out and feed them to the gulls.
“Aw,” Lucius says, “that’s sweet.”
“It’s not sweet,” Izzy says. “I will literally mutilate you all.”
“Yeah,” Lucius says slowly, as though Izzy is being particularly dense, “to make sure Stede has a good birthday party.”
“No, it’s—” Izzy looks around at the meticulously decorated deck, at the trays of all the foods and drinks he’d selected because he knows Stede likes them, and then down at himself and the stupid, posh velvet jacket that he’s been steadily sweating his way through since he put it on. “Shut up,” he finishes, weakly.
“Here,” Lucius says, pulling him aside. The rest of the crew’s chatter starts back up, and Frenchie begins plucking at his lute. “It’s Stede’s present, but I thought you might want to see it.”
He flips the page of his pad, and for a moment Izzy considers grabbing the thing and throwing it in the ocean.
“Thought I told you not to sketch me,” he says, and it’s to his own surprise that he doesn’t sound angry when he says it.
“You did,” Lucius says. “But that was a while ago. And it was a sweet moment, so.”
Izzy, reluctantly, agrees. The drawing depicts a scene from a couple of months ago, from right after the raid that had netted them the brandy Stede likes. The Vaillante had been better armed than they’d expected, and a brawl had broken out. In the midst of it, Izzy had taken a hit meant for Stede. It had been nothing, easily one of the more minor injuries Izzy has ever sustained. The bleeding had stopped after all of ten minutes. But Stede had insisted on practically carrying him back, and Ed had, of course, indulged the entire charade, taking the other half of Izzy’s weight for what had been—quite literally—a scratch of a cut just over Izzy’s knee.
Then again, once they’d gotten him back to their cabin (Izzy’s resistance, he can admit now, had been perfunctory) Stede had touched Izzy’s face, slowly, hesitantly, and drawn him into what had been their first kiss. And Izzy had been forced to blame the injury for the way his legs had gone weak, and after much cooing and unnecessary wound cleaning, he’d ended up in his captains’ bed, both of their arms around him, feeling very much as though he’d suffered a blow to the head rather than a stab to the thigh.
What Lucius has captured is some part of the journey to the cabin: Izzy, propped between Edward and Stede, his face curiously absent of ire. In the drawing, his leg is pouring with blood—artistic license, Izzy’s sure—and Stede seems to glow with benevolent determination, while Edward looks on adoringly. In the drawing, it’s not quite clear who Edward is looking at.
Izzy has to turn away. “He’ll like it,” he says to Lucius.
“I think he’ll frame it,” Lucius says, never one to fake humility. “Might put it up in the captains’ cabin, even.”
Izzy imagines looking at the drawing every morning. He doubts he’ll be able to stop himself from pretending…
“He’s looking at Bonnet,” he mutters, mostly to himself.
He feels Lucius’ hand on his shoulder. “You idiot,” Lucius says. “He’s looking at both of you.”
Stede is terrible at faking surprise. When he emerges from below deck, dressed to the nines with his hair like stupid spun gold, he bugs out his eyes and stretches his mouth wide, and Izzy—Izzy just laughs. He feels like something is floating out of his chest.
“Izzy,” Stede says, his mouth going soft again. “You did this?”
“Edward helped,” Izzy says.
“Barely, mate,” Ed says from behind Stede, smiling brightly. He’s wearing what must be a ladies’ purple corset over a black silk shirt, diamonds shining in his ears. Izzy feels a little faint. “I didn’t even know you could put cheese in cake. I mean, it’s fucking bizarre.”
Some of the crew murmur their agreement.
“Oh, is there cheesecake?” Stede simpers. “You absolute darling.”
Stede grabs Izzy by his jacket, and Izzy knows that he could pull away, preserving some small part of his dignity. He could wrench himself out of the pull of Stede’s hands and escape below deck, and then he wouldn’t have to deal with everything that’s buzzing inside him: the pride and the contentment and the other thing—the word he’d not ready to use about Stede, not just yet. Stede would let him go, if Izzy was overwhelmed, and then he’d make sure Edward did the same.
Instead, Izzy decides to just go with it.
The crew cheers when Stede kisses him, as though they haven’t seen it happen at least a dozen times by now (one of Stede’s many flaws being a complete lack of discretion). Izzy lets it happen, both the kiss and the reaction, because at a certain point, learning to live on this insane ship, he’s managed to stop fighting.