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Edward doesn’t blush.
Not really, anyway. Sure, he gets super flushed sometimes but he doesn’t get properly pink, only a really hot blush bleeding through the brown of his cheeks. Other people get pink, like Stede, when he’s adorably fucking flustered for various fun reasons. Ed’s seen how fancy people like Stede get pink to make themselves dolled-up. Pretty girls, especially, all done up fancy-like so they’re blushing like they’ve all got a fucking fever. All big bright spots on their faces.
Rosy-cheeked, Stede called it, to suggest health and, uh, signaling fertility, typically, in the ladies.
More like they’ve got the plague is what it signals, Ed had countered, it's not actually healthy to be that red.
Fucking weird. Still. Rosy-cheeked is a fancy thing, to make yourself look like you’re blushing at someone. To be honest, Ed thinks it's adorable when girls do that thing where they tuck a curl behind an ear, a duck of the head, color rising up to show they're flattered. Something about the grace of it, the easy charm. If Ed ever did that, he'd look like he was taking the piss, making a crude fucking mirror of the gesture. It's not so charming when you're a tatted-up pirate bloke with a big bushy beard. Pirate seduction, one of swagger, of daring, of saying what you want and looking a man in the eye, isn't really the place for giggling behind your hand. He's not adorable by any fucking stretch of the imagination - he's fucking Blackbeard.
Edward Teach isn't cute either.
Not that it matters.
Cause it doesn't.
What would he do with rosy cheeks anyway?
Edward finds the tin of rouge almost by mistake. It’s a fumble through the bottom of a shoebox Stede’s got in his fancy fucking auxiliary clothes closet - the mad bastard - hunting for a comb. It must’ve been his wife’s, Ed reasons (ignores the weird little pang behind his ribs at the word), tumbled into the luggage by mistake. For some weird reason, Ed opens it up. The stuff inside is some kind of rouge, coral-colored, with a tiny little mirror in the lid. Convenient as hell. He props it up on the shoe boxes and, cause he’s gotta stick his fingers in anything new, he traces the pad of a finger over the smooth mound.
It’s creamy, like clay under his touch, the calluses snagging up a dollop of the stuff. He’s sort of tempted to taste it but when he raises the clump to his mouth, a little flutter sweeps through his stomach. It’s fine, right? Just fucking around.
Instead of tasting the stuff, Edward smears a streak of it across his lips. It’s crooked, clumpy, all wrinkled up on the dry crevices, but he works it in, mostly to get rid of the annoying texture. Smooths it out, swoops it over the peak of his upper lip, fancy-like, until it’s nice. Ed’s tongue darts out to wet his lips and he tastes clay. His mouth has gone dry as fuck. Seized by curiosity, he dabs the leftovers onto his cheeks. Scrubs it out in big, sweeping circles (like he’s seen a whore do at a tavern) until he doesn’t look like a fucking clown. He can’t stop staring at the pink of his mouth, open and soft as rose petals.
Huh.
Ed, dragged along by the swell of an impulse, unwinds the tie from his bun, shakes his hair out over his shoulders. With the black-and-silver curls falling all around his face he looks- if he weren’t himself he’d almost say he looked kind of…almost…sort of pretty.
Is Stede’s wife pretty? Does she glow pink like Stede does? Soft and coy and ready to be wooed.
Edward does something weird. He pulls his scrap of red silk from his pocket and up, up, until his neck, his jaw, is hidden. Until only his mouth peeks out shyly, cheeks glowing in the glass. He squints a bit to blur his edges, hard lines warping like smoke, angling his hands every which way until they form just the right frame. He brushes a curl behind his ear and his wrist brushes over a line of stubble blooming in over the smooth space of his cheek: the friction makes him squirm. He hasn’t…ever seen that look on his face before. It’s like…he still looks like him. But…not. Like seeing himself backwards and upside down, like in the water off the edge of the ship. His eyes are so big and brown and with his long fucking lashes catching the lamplight, he’s-
Christ, his eyes are his mum’s. Her cheekbones, high and proud, sitting more clearly in his face with the color. He really looks like her.
Edward snatches his hands away from his face, heart pattering away hurriedly in his chest, quick-quick-quick, startled feet scurrying down a corridor, and slams the lid of the box shut, shoves it back where it came from into the dark corners of the shoe box. He should probably...throw it away. Yeah, that'd be smart. But there's no reason to, is there? No reason to toss the makeup into the sea (no reason doing so makes him feel weirdly heavy).
It’s fine, isn’t it? Just a bit of fun. Whatever, nobody has to know about it. No fucking harm done.
Edward fumbles with the scrap of silk, shoving it clumsily back in his pocket. Scrubs the shit off his cheeks, his lips. He tears some skin off his bottom lip and tastes the sharp burst of copper, cursing as metal floods his mouth, takes away the creamy earthiness of clay caught on his tongue. He doesn't know why his knees are all land-wobbly when he gets up, why his voice catches when he calls to Stede that he couldn't find a goddamn comb. Doesn’t know why his hands are so fucking itchy and his skin burns under the places he scrubbed away. He swallows and tastes only blood.
A smear of rouge stains his thumb and he wipes it, aggressively, against his thigh, until the black leather of his trousers swallows up the color, like it wasn’t ever there at all.
He didn't look good with rosy cheeks anyway.