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Captain Anne Bonny was tall and round-hipped, with an enchanting combination of skin the same shade as Ed’s but spattered with freckles all over. They collected especially over her nose and cheekbones, but Ed could see them all down her arms and over her neck before he blushed and looked away. She handled a broad-bladed sword in her left hand with ease, occasionally getting a shot off with her right from one of the guns strapped to her side. Ed had never seen anyone carry so many guns before. Her hair was shorter than Ed’s, pulled back into a ponytail from which stray curls were always escaping, and her coat whipped around her as she strode through the carnage. The raid was nearly over– it had been an especially bloody one, with neither Bonny’s nor Hornigold’s crew feeling inclined to extend mercy to the French merchants whose ship it was, and most of the crew were now dead or well on their way. Still, there were enough left for Ed to narrowly avoid death himself when he nearly dropped his sword watching Anne Bonny snap her boot to the French captain’s chest, lean down, and tear open her shirt as her sword plunged into the man’s throat.
The freckles went all the way down over her small breasts, Ed saw now without hindrance, which were speckled also with fine, soft-looking hair that sparkled in the sun. He only realized that his mouth had fallen open when blood spattered into it from Jack’s strike over his shoulder, taking out the stray Frenchman that Ed hadn’t even noticed was aiming at him. Ed pulled a face, spitting the blood out on the now-downed Frenchman’s shoe.
“Thanks, mate,” he said to Jack, nudging him with one shoulder. Jack cackled and shoved him back.
“Like something you see?” he teased, jerking his chin to where Bonny stood, foot still propped on the dead captain and shirt still carelessly open as she wiped down her blade.
“No– fuck you, shut up,” Ed said, his patchy beard not thick enough to hide his flush. He dropped to one knee on the deck and made an effort to get suddenly very interested in checking through the dead sailor’s pockets, to little avail.
“She likes them to know it was a woman killed ‘em,” Jack said. He was eating some kind of cheese, chewing loudly with his mouth open. It would have been more off-putting if he hadn’t passed Ed the other half of the soft wheel of Brie. Ed immediately put it in his mouth, mainly so nothing else stupid would come out of it. “Kinda hot, right?”
“Right,” Ed echoed vaguely. He tuned Jack out, watching as a white, equally freckled red-headed woman pounced on Bonny from behind, almost knocking her off balance. Bonny caught herself, laughing as she shoved the other woman back and they fell into a good-natured mock fight. Ed was only brought back to himself when Jack’s boot landed behind his knee, with a muttered “shit, Captain’s coming,” and it became very important to make themselves scarce in a hurry.
When Ed came to Bonny's cabin later that night, he was barely aware of how he got there, wandering through the faint starglow as if drawn on a string. She smiled at him and welcomed him in as if he was expected, poured him a drink and kicked back on the couch with her legs loosely draped over the lap of the red-headed woman from earlier. Ed gulped down a sip as Bonny watched him with her deep brown eyes, a faint smile creasing up the lines that gathered at their corners.
"Hi," Ed said once the warmth of the rum was in his belly. "I, uh. Saw you out there today. Figured I would– come by and get some tips before you leave, you know?"
"Of course, sweet pea," Bonny said. The nickname and the laugh in her voice would have caused Ed to bristle from any other mouth, but somehow from her he knew it wasn't a challenge. There was no condescension in her tone, only an invitation– to what, Ed couldn't figure out yet, but he already knew he wanted to take it. "But first, why don't you come sit with us and drink a while?"
It didn't take long for Ed to loosen up with the two of them, Bonny maneuvering him deftly to comfort and blush-cheeked laughter. The redhead's name, he learned, was Mary, though he was otherwise referred to like a man would be. The casual contrast lit a fascination in Ed, as did the way Mary and Anne sat with each other, trading touches and glances like it was as easy as breathing.
It wasn't that they were two women (because, per Mary's explanation, he was still a woman, no matter how he was referred to) that was the novelty. Two women on a ship was a bit of one, fair enough, but two women fucking, or acting like they were fucking, was not a new concept to Ed. It was the way they looked at each other, the way that even their playful slaps and shoves had a tenderness to them, that was new and strange to see. Sure, Ed supposed the fairy-tale concept of love in a relationship had to come from somewhere, but wherever that was Ed had always assumed he would never see it. And now it was unfolding in front of him, as simple as you please. It made something ache in his chest, though it wasn't entirely a bad way to feel– there was longing there, but there was a bit of bright red hope too, just a scrap.
And there were only more mysteries to unlock as the night loosened all of them up and they started a lazy tumble in a pile of unwound silk bolts from the raid. Ed finally got his mouth on Anne's perfect tits while Mary lazily petted him from behind, his mouth open on Ed's bare shoulder, and when Ed's leg slipped between both of Anne's he felt a swell there that he hadn't expected. She smiled at him and wiggled the rest of the way out of her robe, showing off a soft, leaking cock, and soon Ed had his mouth on that as well, marveling at the beauty of her.
He asked about it after, with his head on her thigh and her hand in his hair.
"Pretty cool, right?" Anne said, cupping one of her own tits proudly. "A guy on Tortuga sold me some crystals, said if I swallow them I could get my body more how I wanted it. To be honest, I thought he was full of shit, but here I am!"
"Wow," Ed said, with honest awe. Something about Anne's eyes softened as she watched him. She didn't move them from his as she called out to Mary, who was packing Anne's pipe across the room, "love, I think Ed wants one. Would you bring her one too?"
Ed knew that Anne saw how that one word hit him like lightning, but she didn't say anything more, not when they sat up to smoke and not when Ed slipped out that morning between sixth and first watch. He could almost have pretended it never happened, if he didn't want to cling onto it like it was the last lifeline over the rail and he was never going to get this chance again.
She could almost have pretended it never happened. Even thinking it to herself was incredible, like a homecoming she never thought she would have. And no one could see her thinking it, she realized, just like no one could see the red silk scrap she kept tucked into a hole in the lining of her leather vest. It was even safer than the quiet crying jags Jack pretended not to hear her on when it was her mother's birthday (as she did for him when he cried over whatever secrets he held close). So maybe this could be enough, she thought. I will make this enough, she insisted to herself, when she saw Anne and Mary off and turned down their offer to come along, refusing to let the tremor in her heart hit her throat as she did. She laughed and punched Jack hard enough to bruise when he ribbed her about having a crush, cleaned guns and mended sails and jumped off the yardarm into the chilly waves every morning, and no one knew that something had permanently changed shape inside her.
–
It was a slip, when she referred to herself that way the night of Stede's fuckery. But one of the perks of the Blackbeard mystique had always been that when she did slip like that, everyone took it for drama or eccentricity or simply assumed she was referring to someone else. So much of what Blackbeard did could be taken for any combination of those, which is why she let Izzy, and the Izzies that had come before him, carry on thinking they were the brains of the ship. She could weave so much of herself into Blackbeard this way and nobody would notice, or if they did, they would be too afraid to ask.
It was an all right way to live, she told herself, whenever she said something true and got back amusement or disbelief, terror or silence. It was enough that she knew her own mind. Nobody else needed to. And when it frustrated her enough, she could dole out a light maim or chew someone out until they cried and no one questioned that either.
Except that she wanted Stede Bonnet to know her, so badly. She had wanted him to open her up like one of his books, so much that she couldn’t even watch as the crew hauled them all off into the sea. She had wanted him to split her open and to let him inside, to all of her soft and bloody secret parts, in a way she had never wanted with anyone. And she had, for a while, carving out pieces of herself and handing them over without a second thought. She never felt it as a loss, only as a slow and aching blossoming– until he left her behind.
Alone on the dock– that was when she realized how close she had come to letting Stede really see her, the core of her, and when she realized how much she had been looking forward to letting the light in there. She tried to hold onto that feeling on the long slow journey back to the Revenge , tried to coax it into growing on its own, until Izzy Hands reminded her who she had to be to survive alone.
This time, sealing herself back up was like severing a limb.
–
They didn’t really talk about it after Stede came back at first, not in so many words. Even without the turbulence that came with learning to trust each other again, Ed wasn't sure she would even know how to talk about it out loud. But for all of Stede's attachment to talking it through , he was also remarkably good at sussing out the unspoken when he stopped to pay attention to it, perhaps especially where Ed was concerned. And the fact was that, without really trying or even wanting to, over time, Ed had dropped enough breadcrumbs for Stede to begin to get the shape of things. The shape of her .
He started slipping in words like wife and lady and lovely girl when they were alone, watching when Ed soaked them up like a parched sponge. Then he'd begun to contrive ways to refer to her in the third person, still just between them, his careful eyes always watching for her reactions.
At first it had scared Ed. As much as she had wanted to let him in on this part of her before, she was gun-shy with it now. Even without the sound of water lapping against an empty dock echoing in her ears, hearing another person reflect what she had only ever kept to herself rang at the alarm bells she had built, the ones that spoke in voices that sounded like her father’s and like Hornigold’s and like Izzy Hands’s and like her own in the times when she hated herself most. She had underestimated how dangerous it would feel to have this secret in someone else's mouth.
Past the danger, though, it felt momentous; a divine shift. Over the old alarm bells, Ed had new instincts now, too, ones that knew that Stede already had his own secret places inside her, sun-drenched terraces built from his touches and sweet words. Even if he hadn't, though, Ed thought she might have felt safe with him, given some time. Stede was not like her, not in the same way, but in his own queer way he held space for people like her with arms flung so wide she felt the urge to step between his exposed underbelly and the world behind her, to shove him back into safety. He would never have gone, even if she tried, and that, she thought, was the most magical thing about him.
–
Stede was dictating the day's notes to a bored Lucius. They'd been at it for some time now, and Ed could almost feel Lucius's impatience from where she stood across the room sugaring her tea. She suppressed a little laugh to herself, just basking in the sound of Stede’s voice, until a sentence rolled out right over Ed's alarm bells and froze her shoulders in place above the tea service.
"--and let's shift our heading a few degrees west tonight, Ed was saying earlier she didn't like the look of the clouds coming up on our current course."
Ed waited for the world to collapse. She regretted being dressed in silk and velvet, her gun and knife uselessly across the room; her palms itched for them. Her heart was in her mouth the way it was when she was halfway across the lines to a ship under raid, her senses sharpening almost to the point of pain in the same way.
“Okay,” Lucius said, in the exact same bored tone he’d said it eighteen times already.
“Very good, thank you Lucius. You can go.”
“Thank god,” he groaned, closing the logbook with a snap. “Bye, captains.”
“Bye!” Stede said cheerily. The door fell shut before the syllable faded.
In the silence left behind, the teacup shattered in Ed’s hand. She abruptly returned to her body, the spell broken.
“Fuck!” she swore, shaking out her now-bloody hand, trying to dislodge the shards of porcelain. “Shit, shit, shit, fuck–”
“Ed!” Stede hurried around the chaise and reached for her hand, arresting the motion halfway when she jerked away from it. “What happened?”
“Nothing, fuck off,” she mumbled, no heat behind it. She cradled her bleeding hand close, shoving it into her shirt without thinking, then swearing again at the spreading stain.
“Here,” Stede said, grabbing a napkin from the table and holding it out. “Can I?”
“Yeah, all right,” Ed said, surrendering her hand to him, eyes focused down on her feet. She hissed over Stede’s murmured apologies as he plucked out shards of porcelain. The napkin pulled tight around her palm; she only looked up when Stede touched the knot with his lips. It was impossible to be mad at him when he was so painfully sweet.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Stede asked, eyebrow arched. She made a face at him, tucking her hand back into her chest.
“You didn’t notice?” Ed wasn’t sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, the idea that anyone would fail to notice that stupid little word that still rocked her world every time she heard it seemed impossible. On the other– was it really so natural that Stede could say it and not even notice? Did she really fit there so well that to say it was nothing at all?
Stede was still looking at her like she had gone around the bend. Ed huffed a laugh.
“You called me… in front of Lucius. You said– you know.” This was one of the moments where Ed wished for her old beard to hide behind; the faint haze of silver she maintained on her jaw left all her blushes and embarrassment wide out in the open to see.
“Was that not all right? I’m sorry, love. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking,” Ed said wonderingly, then reached for Stede when his face creased with guilt and worry. “No, no, baby, I just mean– you didn’t think about it. It’s that– that simple, huh?”
“Well, yes.” Stede’s face relaxed into a slightly bemused smile, his palm coming up to frame Ed’s cheek. “But we can still keep it between us, if you want. I can be more careful.”
Ed just nodded, overcome, and let Stede squeeze her uninjured hand gently.
–
It was weeks before Ed brought it up again, weeks of remembering what it was like to starve for those words, the tiny linguistic recognition that should not, Ed kept insisting to herself, mean so much. Stede had avoided it entirely since slipping in front of Lucius, even when they were alone, and Ed knew he was just trying to be careful with her, but she couldn’t find the words to ask him to stop, to go back to how they had been. She wasn’t able to seize her chance until Stede slipped up again, in bed with her one night, calling her my most beautiful lady and then abruptly pulling back, all careful concern. Ed yanked him back, burying her face in his chest so that she didn’t have to look at him as she summoned up the courage to tell him as much of her truth as she could.
She told him about being a child too small to understand why her hands were slapped and her gait straightened whenever she fell into her natural rhythms, about her slow realization that there was something inside her that shouldn’t be. She told him how she hid it away, how she took over the duty of keeping herself in line, so that it would not fall to her mother, who had more than enough to be dealing with. As she told him about her night with Anne and Mary, she was able to shift around so that her head rested on Stede’s shoulder, and even to slip into her storytelling voice as it became less like dredging up her darkest secrets and more like telling Stede any other tale from her past. She told him about stolen moments trying on perfumes and swishing loose bolts of fabric around her waist before leaving them to be sold with the rest of the loot, just to see what it might look like.
“What I’m saying is, you don’t have to stop,” she finished, finally looking up at him. His soft smile and slightly teary eyes were blinding. “Please don’t stop.”
“All right, love,” Stede said, his hands soothing over Ed’s bowed back so carefully. “Just tell me what the rules are. Only with us?” And then Ed had to screw up more of her courage than she’d had in years to say, finally, “no.” Her eyelids wavered as she adjusted to the idea that, impossibly, this too could be hers. That, at least, was a familiar feeling around Stede. “No. Just– don’t let them make it a big thing, okay? The crew. I don’t want to sit around fuckin’, explaining myself. I don’t care what you tell them. But– I’m still me. Ed, Blackbeard, captain, whatever. You know?”
“I think I do,” Stede said, thumb sweeping gently over her cheek. “You’re all right here, Ed, you understand?” Ed thought of their crew, made up of all the cast-off corners of the kinds of crews she’d grown up with, thought of Stede’s talking stick and his bedtime stories and the easy ways in which the crewmembers loved and touched one another and the steel in Stede’s voice, that time he told Jack to get off his ship.
“Yeah,” she said. She folded herself back down into the sheets, dragging Stede with her, smiling wildly like she was at the helm, skating the edge of a storm. “Yeah, I get it.”
In the end, Ed wasn’t sure who had spoken to who, or what was said, but true to Stede’s word, the crew didn’t make it a big thing at all. The closest she ever saw anyone come was the first time Stede casually referred to her in front of Lucius, Frenchie, and Black Pete, when Lucius suddenly and viciously stomped on Black Pete’s foot. In Pete’s defense, he hadn’t looked like he was going to say anything, but Ed appreciated the enthusiasm.
–
The skirts were a hurdle that Ed cleared all by herself. Hidden in her half of the auxiliary closet, she’d been collecting them, soft dyed linens and printed silks. She would try them on by herself, swishing them around her ankles as she took peeks at herself in the mirror, getting used to the sparks the sight set off inside of her. She didn’t hate how she normally dressed– she’d loved the Blackbeard outfit, the first time it had fully come together, tearing off the sleeve was the revelation that really tied the whole look up. It wore on her over time, but now she wore it very rarely, going around instead in breeches and loose linen pants and soft, billowy shirts with clever little ties at the wrists and neck, all picked out herself and carefully paired. But there was something about a dress, the curves it would lend to her hips, the flash of ankle when she walked, the way that, sometimes, putting one on made something in her feel so right it was like the release of a cramp she didn’t realize she was carrying, in a muscle she didn’t know she had. For a while, it was a little pocket of joy for her alone, on a ship safe enough that even hidden away in her skirts, she wasn’t primed to leap to violence whenever the boards creaked.
It helped how quickly the crew had taken up the new way of referring to her, though she did have to threaten the Swede and Wee John out of calling her Miss Captain for a while. But it had been weeks and still no one had ever misstepped in a way that hurt, and Ed was finally starting to feel less like the slightest brush against her would shatter her. So, on a night when Frenchie, John, and the Swede were hosting a dance, she put on a set of deep blue skirts over lighter blue petticoats, tucked her lavender-dyed shirtsleeves into the waistband, and went up on deck that way.
The first steps felt new and exciting and dangerous, watching the late afternoon light shift over fabrics she’d only ever seen lit by candles. Still, though, her spine was stiff and braced at first, her knife heavy and reassuring against one thigh. Stede was still off somewhere, fussing over the hors d’oeuvres, she thought, so she sat down alone on a barrel, legs spread and one hand subtly resting on the handle of her knife. She thought of Anne Bonny, tearing her blouse open at the end of a fight; thought of Mary Read, punching the breath out of a man who made a lewd comment about his ass; thought, suddenly, of Jim and their air of cool menace, keeping any stupid questions at bay. Ed held the knowledge of all of them inside her chest and, carefully, breathed.
There was, in fact, a flurry of whispering and nudging that rose up from the corner where the musicians were setting up, ending with the distinct thunk-ow-fuck of someone getting kicked in the shin. Wee John, who looked to be the kick-ee, extricated himself sheepishly from the scuffle and shuffled over to Ed. She braced herself, but he shocked all the tension right out of her spine when he extended a hand and asked “fancy a dance, captain?”
She did fancy a dance, now that he mentioned it. She’d danced with men before, even danced with John before, but the way her skirts spun around her when he turned her took her breath away. Leaning into his supporting arm, she threw back her head and let her hair flare out around her too, looked up into the sun and laughed. By the time Stede and Roach showed up, carrying trays of food, Ed and John were deeply engrossed in a conversation about the embroidery work on her hems.
“Maybe I could pick one up, next time we’re on shore,” John said thoughtfully, one fingertip following the shape of an embroidered flower. Ed squinted at him suspiciously.
“You fucking with me?” she asked. Wee John shook his head, eyes wide and honest.
“No! I just mean, if you can wear a dress out and it’s fine, why not me?”
“Oh.” Ed turned that over in her mind, heard Anne’s voice saying would you bring her one too? in her memory. “Yeah, of course. Why not you?”
John grinned, then got drawn into conversation with Frenchie and eventually pulled away to be put back on percussion. Ed sat where he’d left her, lost in thought, until Stede settled at her side, bumping her shoulder companionably with his.
“You look beautiful, sweet,” he murmured. Ed shot him a grin, tucking herself into his side. “You know, I never thought I’d have a wife again.”
“And how do you like it?” Ed asked. Her heart wanted to explode into fireworks already, but she held it back with a thin layer of trepidation, thinking of the last time Stede had had a wife. But Stede turned to her and beamed and pushed her hair back behind her ear so that he could kiss her, bending her backwards and doing so far, far too thoroughly for polite company, to her surprised and undignified squeak.
“Best thing that’s ever happened to me, I think,” Stede said when he’d finished, both of them out of breath. Someone in the crew was wolf-whistling at them, someone else was gagging theatrically– Ed was pretty sure the latter was Lucius– but she and Stede stayed fixed on each other, noses still only a breath apart.
“Fuckin’ better be,” she muttered, bullying him back up to standing and leading him into the next dance, matching grins on both their faces.
–
Everything else was easier now, Ed found, now that she’d shot down all her old walls and nothing catastrophic had happened. She could wake up every morning and dress however she wanted, put her hair up any which way, go outside and be called to cheerfully by people who had seen her unfettered and didn’t despise her for it. It was hard to imagine, sometimes, why it had taken her so long to get here, why she had fought so hard for so long only to make her hiding places more and more impenetrable. She didn’t quite regret it– she knew that her ability to be open with herself now was a result of stumbling into the most bizarre environment to ever call a pirate ship home, and that everything she’d done before had been in service to keeping herself safe long enough to get here. But she did wonder who she might have been if she’d gone with Anne and Mary when she was young, if she’d been set free sooner.
She’d heard Mary was dead now, that he and Anne had been captured and brought up on piracy charges. The word was they’d pleaded their bellies and escaped hanging, but that Mary had died of fever before they’d gotten out of prison. Anne had disappeared soon after, and no matter how many sources of rumor Ed probed she couldn’t find a single breath of where Anne might have gone.
The news brought her down for days. She knew that people were worried about her, but Ed couldn’t explain to them what was wrong, not to people who had only ever known the legends of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, dread pirates of the female persuasion. Ed knew she had only known them for a short time, that there must be people out there who knew them better than she did and missed them more, but on this ship, at least, her memories of their quick smiles and easy kisses felt terribly lonely.
They had ventured further south than normal this year, chasing the warmer weather through the North Sea down to Trinidad. Ed shooed Stede off with the rest of the crew to go shopping and drinking, with the vague goal of taking a walk on her own. She shaved and put her hair up and went out in full women’s kit, knife and gun prominent on her hips to ward off any unwanted attention, and wandered until she found a cafe to loiter at over tiny cups of strong, sweet coffee.
The man who brought out the tray was solidly-built and gray-haired, dressed in pants and a waistcoat with a faint tinge of rust still clinging to the roots of his hair. He grinned at Ed in a way she didn’t understand, gazing after him in vague bemusement as he turned to go back inside. A few minutes later, he reemerged with a woman on his arm, tall and wrinkled, walking with a cane and covered all over in freckles. The pair of them beamed at Ed as dots connected and her mouth fell open.
“Hey, stranger,” Anne said, accepting Mary’s hand as she lowered herself into the seat across from Ed. “You heard of this retirement thing? Really great for the health, you know.”
“Heard a bit, here and there,” Ed said, voice a little thick despite herself. “I’ve been thinking of trying it out, you know. Got any tips?”
“Aw, what do you need tips for?” Mary teased, reaching over to chuck Ed under the chin like she was still twenty and green. “Looks like you’ve got it pretty well figured out on your own so far.”
“I do, don’t I?” Ed said, tipping her chin up proudly. Seized by an idea, her eyes lit up and she reached across the table to grab one of Anne and Mary’s hands in each of her own. “Oh, c'mon- you guys gotta meet my crew.”