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Out on deck, the air is balmy, and still. The waning moon washes everything out to the fine grey grain of newsprint. Standing there, Ed watches the sweep of filmy clouds across the moon’s pale face, feeling the dull throb of Izzy’s words work their way through him. Edward better watch his fucking step, he thinks, and feels something hot and barbed begin to take hold.
He’s always been slow to anger, but he can feel it gathering now. Like a storm rolls over the sea, it moves through him; bruise black clouds, lightning flashing in their depths, a greedy, desperate, clinging roil. Gathering up all the hurt and the anger that’s collected in all the corners of his body; the flotsam and jetsam of the last forty years suddenly narrowed to a dull club of fury. The purple spread of bruising under his mother’s eyes. The back of Stede’s head as he turned away. Izzy’s snarl; catch of firelight in the spit on his teeth. The tension of rope in his fists, the struggle on the other end of them so fierce his hands were bleeding when he dropped the rope.
Scarred palms. No life line to speak of anymore; nor love, fate, head. Ed doesn’t realise he’s gripping at the rail until it creaks. Until his knuckles strain so hard against his skin that they begin to ache. From behind him, comes a voice.
“Captain?” And then: “Ed?”
Lucius, his voice thick as if he’d recently been asleep. Ed doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. He just uncurls his hands from their grip on the rail, and flexes them until the knuckles pop.
Again: “Ed, are you okay?”
The night is very quiet, save for the rushing of Ed’s blood in his ears. He turns. Lingers. Advances.
Whenever he looks at Lucius, he thinks of Stede. He thinks of how things were. How things can never be again. In his head, Izzy’s words: I should’ve let the English kill you. Ed flattens his palm to Lucius’ chest. That storm rising inside of him; burning, raging, all-consuming, pushing at the borders of his skin until all Ed can hear is the racing of his own heart; the heaving of his own breaths; his world narrowed to a red-hot needle’s point —
Lucius is smiling, quizzically. Something sardonic in his voice when he says, “Captain, all due respect, I’m not playing gay chicken with you right now.” His teeth catch the moonlight. “I’m pretty sure I’d win, and something tells me you’re not in a good place to lose right now.”
Ed blinks at him. Lucius’ chest rises and falls under his palm; his face open, amused. Unafraid. Ed takes his hand away. Stares at it, and then at Lucius’ perplexed expression.
“Lucius,” he blurts, bewildered by his own reaction. “Do you think people can change?”
A beat of silence. Lucius’ smile falters. “Is this a you thing or a fictional character thing?”
Well, isn’t that the whole fucking problem, Ed thinks. Out loud, he admits: “A me thing.”
A look of sadness flickers across Lucius’ face; gone as fast as it came. Something about it makes Ed’s skin crawl, still feeling tender from all the things Izzy spat into his face. Whatever you’ve become is a fate worse than death, he thinks, and, don’t pity me, Blackbeard isn’t pitiful, he —
“Yeah,” Lucius says, shoving his hands deep into his pockets as he swings his gaze out across the midnight sea. A wrinkle forming between his brows. “Sure. Anybody can change; even big bad pirates.” Then he flashes Ed a grin, and something about the gesture, about the warm tilt of his words, unlatches something inside of Ed. Something he didn’t even know he was holding tightly closed. He doesn’t even realise he’s moved until he hears Lucius make a small, startled noise, and then Ed is pressing himself to the broad warmth of his chest. Burying his face down against his shoulder; pinning Lucius’ arms to his side with his embrace.
Lucius — despite the midnight hour and Ed’s oscillating mood and the strangeness of their conversation — pats awkwardly at Ed’s back. Says, “Oh,” and, “there, there?” as Ed presses his nose against the seam of his coat and breathes out shakily.
Silence, between them. Just the slap of waves against the hull; the distant call of some lonely seabird. Ed wonders just exactly what brought Lucius up on deck at this hour. He wonders what turned him out to the night air just the same. But Fate has a funny way of stringing people together; Ed’s been a victim of her whims more times than he’d like to count. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to dwell on it.
———
Back in his room, Ed throws the windows open. Lets moonlight and cool sea breeze flood the stuffy space; thick with hot air and the smell of empty bottles, his own deadened sadness. He washes his face. Works his fingers into his eye sockets and the space behind his ears, over the wash of stubble across his jaw until his skin is smarting, but clean. Then he regards himself, hands curled at the edge of the washbasin, water dripping from his chin and making feathery dark spots in the silk robe slung around his shoulders. Sees the dark rings under his eyes. The sallow cast to his skin. Sees something weary and soft and split open, and very very tired.
He thinks of the page Izzy thrust into his face. That man inked onto it with his name. Manic black eyes and a huge dark thrust of a beard; curl of a crazed smile in its depths. Indistinct though his reflection might be, reflected in the bronze face of Stede’s old shaving mirror, Ed can’t see that man anywhere he looks. All he sees is silver stubble. His eyes are brown.
Anyone, he thinks. Even big bad pirates.
He finds the page easily, a pale shape amongst the bottles on his desk. Izzy must’ve carefully laid it there like some perverse ship’s report. Standing there, edging his thumbnail through a pale scar on the desk’s marred surface, Ed regards it. Thoughtfully, like he may trace the face of the moon to see its waxing or waning.
He burns the thing over a candle. Lets the fire eat that mad imposter’s face away, until all that remains is a handful of soft ash; easily tossed overboard.
——
The next day’s dawn comes pink and fragile, inching across the dirty wooden boards to find Ed already awake, washing his hair in the en suite. Combing it, oiling it, using all the fancy little bottles Stede left behind. Thick glass with delicate stoppers; a whole world of scents at his fingertips. Gardenia and myrrh and ambergris, delicate jasmine. Fuck him, Ed thinks, and then says it aloud too: holding each bottle under his nose and then, when it isn’t the one he’s looking for, upside down over the washbasin. A pool begins to form. An oily, stinking mixture the colour of straw. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.
Stede used to wash his hair for him; every Sunday. Would spend an hour untangling it, soaping it, rinsing it. But now Ed can’t find the oil he always liked to use after. A pale, slow-moving liquid that smelled bright and wet and verdant and reminded Ed of summer storms. So he dumps them all out in a fit of misdirected frustration. Regrets it a heartbeat later; staring down at that puddle of the last things that smelled like Stede; his hands slick and smelling like a dozen different, dissonant scents.
His head is pounding. Hair wet and cool against his bare back. Even after he soaps his hands five times, he can still smell it all when he brings them to his face: a greenhouse of flowers, tucked away under his fingernails.
People do weird things when they’re sad, Lucius told him, some time ago. Ed dries his hands on his thighs. The room is aglow with that faint dawn light; rosy, creeping, glowing in all the brass fixtures. Standing in the middle of it, with the smell of Stede on a dozen different days in the air, Ed wonders exactly when he’s going to stop being so sad. He thinks taking a step back from that dark, defensive place he’d found himself in last night was a start. But now he’s floundering; no sign of land in sight.
So he does what he’s always done when adrift and needing some comfort. He reinvents.
Inside Stede’s closet his clothes hang as if he may walk through the door any moment now. Tidily; expectantly; in a riot of pastel colours. Ed spends so long in there that his hair is half-dry by the time he steps out on deck; curling and flyaway, clean for the first time in a while. The clothes he’s wearing — a pair of sleek black pants, an off-white cotton shirt with lace and small, embroidered florals edging the cuffs and throat — draw a few stares, despite their plainness. Maybe it’s because they’re so clearly Stede’s. Maybe it’s the cravat he lingered over for some time, before knotting around his throat before he could talk himself out of it.
Or the fact that you’re out in the daylight at all, that helpful part of his brain reminds him. Clean and shaved and sober.
For now, he retorts, internally, just seconds before a familiar voice rings out across the deck.
“I thought I shook all that bloody frilly shirt shit outta you with our talk last night, Ed.”
Izzy. His voice riding the edge between something mocking and true annoyance so hard that Ed expects to see sparks. Their eyes meet across the expanse of the ship; the crowded deck suddenly quiet, and still: everyone frozen in place, as if afraid to draw attention by moving. Izzy, his black eyes haughty; amused, and then — afraid. The fear of a lion tamer realising that the animal he has pressed beneath his heel for so many years has teeth and claws and, worst of all, red hot intention.
Ed doesn’t have time to wonder what expression must be on his face if Izzy can’t hide his fear. He’s too busy stalking across that empty deck, past all the wide-eyed faces of Stede’s crew; that storm that had ebbed in him the previous night now alive again, and raging. All he knows is the strike of his boot heel to the groaning old wood; his vision turned into a tunnel, Izzy’s dear, familiar face at its mouth.
In his mind's eye, Ed sees the burning paper curling and turning black over Blackbeard’s eyes. He sees his face in the oily sheen of all those wasted perfumes. When he reaches for Izzy, his hand goes for the man’s throat. For that frightened leap of an Adam’s apple; salt and pepper stubble; that blasted grey swallow, brother to his own.
Ed pins him to the mast by his throat. Ignores the scrabble of the man’s fingers to his forearm, the flex of his neck muscles under his fingers. Behind him, someone whistles. There’s a polite smattering of applause. Ed ignores them. The storm is beating so hard against the sides of his head he can barely hear his own voice.
“Don’t speak to me like that,” he hisses, the words ground out through his teeth, Izzy’s fingers catching in the lace at the cuff of his sleeve. Just to make his point, he shakes him, Izzy’s face the colour of sand. “You’re my oldest fucking friend, Iz. But I’m not letting it happen anymore.”
Silence. Just the creak of the mast, the crying of gulls. Izzy’s face is red: his eyes wide and pinned on Ed’s face. Slowly, Ed releases him. The fight has left him, and now all he feels is slightly cold. Ed straightens Izzy’s collar; pats at his chest as he adds, softer now, “I’m sorry to grab you, mate. I don’t wanna be that guy anymore.” The unspoken, but if I need to be I will, drifts between them.
They stare at each other. Izzy’s mouth is parted; his hair has fallen into his eyes. Ed steps away, fixes the cuffs of his shirt. “And I like this stuff,” he adds, and tips his chin up. “I always have.” The crew is conspicuously quiet behind him. From the corner of Ed’s eye, he sees Jim lean close to Oluwande, and whisper something in his ear. Izzy is still frozen in place. Ed prods him. “Okay?”
“Fine,” he mutters, quiet and grudging. Then he straightens up, and he’s Izzy again. Lip curling, tugging his waistcoat straight as he snaps, “Jesus, Ed, fine. Are you done?”
Ed smooths a hand over his front, glancing out at the crew; assembled around them both, their faces a mixture of emotion. Surprise, amusement, vague concern. “I’m done,” he says to Izzy, to them all. “I’m done.”
———
The weeks slip by with little to anchor them. Bluesky days; short June nights, where dawn coats the horizon almost as soon as the sun sets. Ed finds he sleeps less, which is no great pain. He likes to watch that pale promise of a new day bloom into true dawn. He likes being awake while all the others are asleep; likes to have the whole sea just to himself, even if it's for a very short time.
When he dreams, he dreams of Stede. He dreams of his mother; of his child-sized hands sifting through the things in her jewellery box. He dreams in red and black and wakes gasping with a mouth that moments ago had been a kraken’s rigid beak. So he prefers the horizon. Prefers quiet mornings and late nights alone with the snap of the sails.
After his confrontation with Izzy, a fragile sort of peace rules the ship. Izzy skulks around: sullen and moody and quiet, lashing out at whoever is fool enough to try and placate him. Ed leaves him to it. The tides of Izzy’s moods are as familiar to him as the tides of the sea. It won’t be long before they circle back around to one another.
In the meantime, Ed experiments with Stede’s wardrobe. He spends time sifting through Stede’s library, just to see the cramped handwriting that fills the margins of the books; feathery pencil markings pressed so close together that Ed, with his limited ability for reading, can’t decipher them. He keeps himself clean-shaven; preferring the touch of sea air on his bare face. Liking how he looks without the beard too. When he was a child he’d been a doughy creature of indeterminate gender, with huge eyes he never really expected to grow into. Now he sees age has chiselled his mother’s face out of all that baby fat: has only realised it thirty years too late. He spends a lot of time peering at himself in the mirror. He spends a lot of time wondering if it’s normal, to find oneself so pleased by trace amounts of femininity.
“No,” Jim tells him, when he asks them in the most roundabout, sidelong way possible. It’s been two, three months since he burned that picture of Blackbeard and scattered his ashes to the North Sea. A little longer since Stede left him to wait alone on that dock for him. “For anyone else, sure. For you?” They shrug.
Ed says, “Oh.” Rubs the back of his hand against his mouth, where he can still taste traces of the rouge he’d smeared there in the early hours of the morning. He’d found it in Stede’s dresser; half-dried and the colour of a pale woman’s nipple. He’d been curious, and half-lit; drunk on exhaustion and Stede’s good cognac. When he’d awoken after a night of fitful, vivid dreams in which he sprouted hothouse flowers from his pores, he’d scrubbed it off with a kind of guilty panic. “So what now?” he adds.
Jim crosses their arms over their chest. Throws a glance over their shoulder, to where Oluwande is speaking to Frenchie, silhouetted against the morning sky. “I don’t know.” Their eyes are jet black even in the early light. It gives their expression a cool, impenetrable sort of distance. “I’m not the ship therapist.”
No fear of anybody thinking that, Ed thinks. But still, the next time they find themselves back on the Republic of Pirates, Jim takes Ed to Spanish Jackie; who hasn’t seen him in so long she refuses to believe it’s him, not until he shows her the tattoo she’d given him two decades ago — a crude jack of hearts on his arsecheek. Afterwards, she warms back up to him. Gets him drunk; puts him in one of her dresses; confides that she’d once been exactly where he was, when she was just a kid.
“The one good thing about this life is that we’re outside of expectations,” she says, and laughs. Her dark skin shining in the candlelight glow; radiant, happy, free. “You best take advantage of it, Teach. Start with shaving that beard.”
Ed keeps the beard: most of it. He keeps the dress she laced him up in too; Jackie citing that it was too small on her anyway, though Ed saw the shine in her eye when she thought he wasn’t looking. He takes it home and presses it in a cedar chest, folds it all up very carefully. At night, when the room is dark and Ed is lying there on the edge of sleep, he swears he can see the glow of it under the door.
——
All roads converge before long. It’s a lesson Ed learned decades ago, and one he’s reminded of every time Jack manages to sail back through his life again. But Ed’s been waiting for this particular coming together since their roads diverged. Has been dreaming of it, dwelling on it, and secretly — when the night is dark and dawn is still a distant promise, and all around him the crew are sleeping soundly — wishing on it. The cold light of the North Star; The Great Bear’s starry fragments; Cassiopeia’s bright arches. They’ve all heard his sorry little pleas.
Now, the metal of his spyglass warming in his eye socket, Ed wonders which one of them had listened.
Some time after breakfast, Buttons sidled up to Ed and informed him that he’d sighted an unfamiliar skiff on the horizon. Rowing like the devil was on him, captain. Ed, who has trained himself out of the knee-jerk reaction toward hope when hearing these things, laughed, finished his tea, and said, “Drop anchor. See which devil’s the baddest; the one he’s running from, or the one he’s running toward.”
And so they drifted, a dark speck on the glassy blue sea, orbited by the smaller black speck of that mysterious skiff. Ed, he went below deck and washed, dressed. Deliberated for so long over what salty scrap of a t-shirt went with what grubby-and-turning-grubbier cotton petticoat that by the time someone thought to tell him what was going on, the skiff was in sight and the deck above his head was caught hard between elation and anticipation.
When he emerged into it, the first thing he heard was Roach taking bets. Five to one that the captain kills him! Ten to one that he tosses him back into the boat? Anyone up for a little action? And Jim’s voice, rising over the noise: I’ll take that bet.
Then Lucius handed him the spyglass. And Ed, sighting through it, saw the catch of sunlight in blond hair. The flex of a pair of broad shoulders, rowing. Sunburn sheen; the surprising fullness of a reddish blond beard; that unmistakable determined brow. Then the face turns up, and through warped glass, pale sunlight, salty sea air, their eyes meet. Ed feels the flutter of his skirt against his calves — wonders for one dragging, breathless moment what Stede must be thinking as that little skiff stalls amongst the waves. But then the wind changes direction. It blows Stede’s hair into his eyes. And he beams.
Ed, out loud, to Lucius: “I’m gonna throw up.”
Lucius, not very reassuringly: “Yeah, that won’t make him turn that boat around.”
“Maybe I want him to.”
“So maybe you should throw up.”
They watch in silence as Stede scrambles to his feet and waves, the boat rocking with the force of the movement. His face alight, burning through the watery morning sunlight as he grins and calls something indecipherable across the distance. A small pale shape hangs in the crook of his arm, radiating a certain feline displeasure that’s hard to mistake. Ed, his heart in his throat, the whole scene beginning to shimmer as tears spring to his eyes, croaks, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. D’you think he’s brought me a cat?”