Work Text:
The first time Stede feels the first stirrings of that old, familiar insecurity is while watching Ed style her hair. The two of them tucked away together below deck, the candles in the sconces lit early and pushing hard and golden against the feeble twilight. Purple and milky, lying cool and pale on the windowsills; flushing dark violet in all the folds of Ed’s skirts. Above their heads, Stede can hear music: Frenchie and his guitar, Wee John and the drums he’d bought in Tortuga. Just loud enough to bend the air; just distant enough for Ed’s noisy raking through her pins to drown it out.
“Bastard things,” she mutters, more to herself than to Stede. Her hair a dark waterfall down her back; the pale twilight coming in through the window picking out the silver in all that grey. The candlelight catching her face on the other side; a woman caught between day and night, baring her teeth at her reflection as she wrestles that great mass of hair into submission.
Stede, half-nude in only his breeches and stockings, thinks, curiously: she does it just like Mary. The pins and the little twists, the single coiling lock of hair left to cover one clavicle. It’s an innocuous thought, but one he regrets thinking the moment it passes through him. Like a cold wind. Something that leaves him feeling distinctly chilled. Something which has him looking down at himself; his bare chest, the satin of his breeches a bright turquoise damask that shines in the dregs of the day’s light. On the door hangs a matching frock coat; a hot orange waistcoat tucked within. The brilliant white frippery of his shirt; boiling at the cuffs with lace. Picking them out an hour ago, Stede had been excited. Now looking at them makes his stomach curdle with a strange feeling; somewhere in the ditch between dread and shame.
Ed’s dress is more understated than his own clothes. A simple calico thing; darted at the waist and left to bloom pale and lacy all the way down to its hem. Stede stares at it, worrying his teeth at the inside of his cheek, while Ed finishes her hair and her face and begins to move through the room, trailing the scent of power and hair oil. Staring at it until he’s sure he’s about to burn holes through it; two evenly spaced little smoking dots, burrowing deeper and darker until the whole thing catches and takes Stede’s outfit along with it —
“You going up looking like that?” Ed’s voice cuts through his reverie; has Stede tearing away from his fixation on the dress with a small, startled noise. The inside of his cheek is sore, hot, metallic. Ed is smiling at him, quizzically, fingers working the buttons closed on her frock. “Now I won’t complain,” she continues, “but I think a few members of the crew might not wanna see your nipples, mate.”
Stede looks down at himself. He looks up at Ed. Then to the rest of his garment, waiting for him there, shining technicolour through the gathering gloom. It’s insane, he realises, with a little jolt. Prettier and more colourful than all of Ed’s girl clothes. He’d spent an hour selecting just the right garments to go together, and now he can barely look at it without thinking of something Mary had once said; years ago, in another life. Carelessly, flippantly, her eyes on her reflection as she’d coiled her hair around a wicked silver pin: you take more care of your appearance than a woman does. Stede remembers watching the pin slide home. Remembers the way he’d been admiring the way the red and pink brocade dress she wore caught the light. Then she’d added, it’s unattractive, you know.
He switches out the turquoise outfit for a navy blue affair; the lace shirt for something more simple. After all, they’re only getting dressed up for a little fun: to celebrate Roach’s birthday on dry land. Stede tries to find pleasure in the plain clothes. Tries to find pleasure in how beautiful Ed looks on his arm; her dark eyes edged with kohl, making them seem bigger and blacker in the gathering twilight. Isn’t that his role, as a man? To serve as some solid, masculine figure from which Ed’s own femininity can bounce?
“I do like this colour on you,” she says, tugging teasingly at his cravat as they stand together in front of the mirror. She pats his chest, lingering there. “Very handsome.”
“Ah,” he murmurs, and tries to look pleased. Straightening his cravat, trying not to think of the satin pieces he’d tucked carefully back in the wardrobe. “Handsome only because I’m near you, sweetheart.”
She wrinkles her nose at him, smiling, but they don’t loiter over his smooth sidestepping of her compliment. Instead they go, drink, make merry. And if Stede finds that he’s holding himself a little stiffly; hyperaware of the way he’s standing, laughing, holding his ale, he tries to ignore it. Just as he tries to ignore that creeping insecure feeling beginning to seed through him; as familiar as it is unwelcome.
———
It didn’t really start with that moment in front of the mirror. But Stede supposes that’s the first moment he became aware of it. Really, he can track it all the way back to the start; maybe a week or so after Ed came to him and — in her usual roundabout, obfuscating way — came out to him. Watching her sleep next to him, the moonlight catching at all the high points on her face, pooling in her hair and in the necklaces at her throat. This was months ago, nearly a year. Back when her chest was still hard and flat and the galleon sailing there was not yet warped by the breasts that were to come. Stede remembers watching her, and thinking, I would pull apart the world itself for her.
And then, a voice — one Stede knew intimately, for it was his own but not his own, some mean shade of himself that haunted his marriage with Mary. Well, you can’t, it said, very matter-of-factly. You couldn’t pull apart an apple, old chap.
The voice is a malignant dark knot inside of him. The voice convinced him he was a bad husband, a terrible father, an even worse man. The voice, for the most part, had been largely silent since Stede righted things with Mary and faked his own death, reunited with Ed and set course for a new start. But there, in that pocket of midnight with Ed sleeping soundly at his side, Stede felt that same cold chill that would go through him almost a year later, watching Ed style her hair.
He supposes he expected to find that his masculinity would bloom beside Ed’s femininity. That by the act of her growing into herself, he might do the same. As if a knack for the more masculine things in life could be forced from the body like breasts on a flat torso. But as Ed’s skin softened, as she cried more easily and gained weight in new places, took on some new inner glow, Stede found himself in the same place he’s always been. Staring at a woman through her mirror, wanting so badly to be the man she deserves.
Ed is still unrepentantly herself. Leather-clad and sharp-minded, equal parts petulant and irreverent and achingly vulnerable. A long, well-muscled shape, warm brown tattooed skin. Stede loves her like he hasn’t loved anything or anyone. Loves her enough to fret about it. Anxious that Ed — hitting her stride, finally her full self — might one day look at him and begin to pick him apart.
The truth is he loves Ed so desperately that he’d become anything for her. Even something she’s never really asked for.
———
Ed tends to wake with dawn’s first light; is emerging from the bathroom with hair dark and wet at the ends by the time Stede is ready to drag himself through a cup of strong black tea. She chucks him under the chin as she passes; the gesture unconscious and sweet, the smile behind it warm.
“Morning,” she says. Stede yawns, covering his mouth with the rim of his teacup as he watches her pace nude to the wardrobe. The light catches at her like clinging fingers; shining in the scars on her hip, in the lone earring buried in her hair. “Sleep well?” she adds, glancing over her shoulder at him, and — when she sees the way he’s looking at her — winking.
“Well enough,” he says, and tucks his legs up underneath himself. “You?”
Ed makes a distracted noise, her back to Stede as she begins to shift through the hanging clothes before her. “Ha,” she says, “after the working over you gave me?” He watches the shift of muscles in her back, the flex of her lean little ass as she goes onto her tiptoes to reach something at the back. “Yeah. I slept pretty well.” And then, “I fancy something a little frilly today. Where’s that linen thing, love? The shirt with all the,” she mimes things shooting from her wrists, eyes wide and guileless in the cool morning light. “All the shit on the ends.”
“Ah,” Stede says, after a beat. “The linen thing is in the auxiliary, I believe, Ed.” He watches her cross the room, duck inside, and find the shirt, judging by the ah ha! he hears. A moment later she’s emerging, tugging the thing straight over her front, looking rather ridiculous with her soft cock bouncing bare below the hem. Normally the sight of her half-nude like this would press all of Stede’s buttons — he’s always had a thing for being semi-clothed — but this morning he finds himself cold. Distant, like he’s watching himself through another’s eyes.
“What d’you think?” Ed asks, shaking the frilly cuffs of her sleeves at him. “Was thinking about this in the bath, Iz wants me to spar with him today and I thought they’d look good while I —” she mimes some cutting and slashing actions, and then stops abruptly, and frowns at him. “Hey. You alright?”
Stede startles, not prepared for the sudden force of her attention on him. On his knee, his teacup wobbles in its saucer; its rattling loud in the sudden quiet. “Oh,” he stammers, “just listening to you, darling.”
Ed, frowning. “No, you weren’t. You’re normally boring me about stitching and the virtues of bloody bobbin lace over crocheted lace —”
“Crocheted lace isn’t a true lace,” Stede interjects, and Ed gestures at him.
“See? So what’s the matter?”
Stede stares down into the surface of his tea; the lone lemon slice in there spinning in slow circles. If he could put a word to it, he would say he’s embarrassed. What kind of man has a wardrobe his woman can raid? But he doesn’t want to admit it aloud to Ed.
“I’ve just woken up with a little headache,” he says, eventually. Glancing up from his tea to level a smile Ed’s way. “That’s all, sweetheart. You know I’m slower to start than you.”
Ed doesn’t look convinced, but she lets it go. The morning passes; they eat breakfast together, and Stede makes slow work of dressing, as Ed seems determined to shed every item he puts on in favour of pawing at his bare skin. By the time they emerge onto deck, buttons pushed through the wrong holes, distinctly rumpled and soft about the eyes, noon is on the horizon. The day is warm, and growing warmer. Buttons is up behind the helm, steering them steady. And there, little more than a distant speck on the horizon —
“I have an idea,” Stede says, first to Ed and then, as the idea grows wings, louder, to the crew at large. “Everyone! I have an idea!”
Here we go, he hears someone mutter, a someone who sounds so much like Jim that Stede decides to ignore it. The deck is draped in the type of languor late morning brings; everyone milling about, playing cards, soaking in the sun before it grows too harsh. But Stede’s all full up with his brand new idea; still sore from his private embarrassment of the morning, but inching towards a way to soothe it. So he barrels on ahead.
“We should take that ship.” He glances around at everyone’s upturned, unenthusiastic faces, and forces a grin. “Shouldn’t we? Could be fun.”
Lucius, without looking up from his sketchbook: “Eh. Pass.” The crew makes general sounds of agreement.
Stede draws himself up. “Nonsense,” he says, trying to inject something firm and captainly into his voice. “We’re doing it.”
There’s a murmur of discontent, but after a beat, everyone starts moving. Lucius, groaning, says rather loudly to Pete: we should’ve mutinied when we had a chance. Stede ignores them. Ed is looking at him strangely, standing there in a silk petticoat with the wind blowing it against her legs. Beautiful, and uncertain. All Stede wants to do is prove himself to her.
The universe, of course, has other plans.
Not once between seeing that fleck of a ship on the horizon, and calling on Buttons to set course for it, did Stede really pause to think the whole mad idea through. It’s become an unfortunate habit of his. And it’s how Stede finds himself within spitting distance of the Spanish galleon; close enough to see the faces of the other crew — with no plan in sight. His own crew milling about half-heartedly; Roach smoking a cigarette, Lucius with his arm slung around Pete’s shoulders, Frenchie glancing nervously between the two decks as Jim, at his side, twirls a blade between their fingers.
Ed, in his ear: “Think we should leave this one, mate.”
“Nonsense,” Stede says again, with a little less conviction this time. Then, loud enough for the Spanish crew to hear: “Ah — prepare for us to board, gentlemen.”
There is the noise of several rapiers unsheathing at once. The opposite deck suddenly bristles with cold steel. From behind Stede, he hears a long-suffering sigh. This is the point that I back down, Stede thinks to himself, a strange sort of clarity descending on him. Right now, or there’s no going back.
He opens his mouth. Thinks, now — even as he hears himself call: “Forward!”
And into the fray they go.
Stede has never really become accustomed to a fight. Isn’t that part of the whole problem? Boarding the Spanish ship, he’s aware of just a few things. The weight of his sword in his hand, Ed’s teachings in his mind, the press of her hand to his shoulder. His own nervous sweat, the bulk of his crew behind him, the wall of Spanish ahead — the sight of a gull, wheeling through the pale blue sky over their heads.
And then the two sides clash; like a frothing tide to a stubborn shore. Stede catches sight of Ed, blazing, hair caught by the wind — and then he feels it. A push, a split, a sick, slick give. Twist of pain so absolute it makes his stomach lurch. He knows steel in his belly when he feels it. Still, he looks down to see. Isn’t that just human nature?
And there it is. The blood. Saturating his shirtfront, pooling near-black in the cup of his palm, spiderwebbing the lines there. Someone jostles him, and it spills. His throat works around a word that never comes up. The sea air fans salty hands at the cold sweat on his brow.
———
When Stede wakes, the first thing he’s aware of is Ed’s presence at his side. Her hair loose around her face, the way she wears it when they’re alone, framing the gentle worry in her big brown eyes. “We’ve really gotta stop meeting like this,” she says, and the rest of the world begins to filter through in increments. Bedsheets, sunlight, the smell of antiseptic. The scene is so familiar that for a moment Stede experiences a dizzying moment of dissonance. Bleeding in bed with a stranger watching him, daylight in silver hair.
Ed touches his hand. Settles her broad palm over his knuckles. Stede reorients, all at once. Tries to sit up, only to find her hand turned to steel; pinning him in place.
“Stop,” she says, still smiling. “You bloody idiot.”
Stede sinks back without a fight. His side really does hurt now that he’s awake and lucid enough to feel it. “What happened?” he croaks, eyes flicking around the room as if it holds the answers he wants. There’s nothing out of place. Just Ed, smelling like gunpowder; blood on her shirt, her hand on his hand.
She pats it. Says, blithely, “Oh, I called it off.” Stede gawks at her. “Yeah, truce. Never seen a crew so confused. But really,” she shrugs, “no harm came to anyone. I think I pushed over a ship’s boy. Buttons bit someone.”
Stede, haltingly: “And I got stabbed.”
Ed inclines her head. “And you got stabbed. Pretty expertly, really.” Her hand withdraws from his, and flips back the covers; shows Stede his pale belly, blood matted into the hair there, a white bandage affixed to his hip. A rosette of blood blooms in its centre. “See? Exactly like I taught you.”
Stede stares down at himself. At his wound; at Ed’s hand on him; the sunlight sliding through the rings on her fingers. Feels the hot pulse of his own failure throb through him. The one thing he devised to make himself more of a man in Ed’s eyes — backfired, spectacularly. Stupidly, he realises his eyes are wet. Unshed tears, teetering on his eyelids, blurring his vision until Ed is nothing but an abstract shape all made up in grey and gold.
“Oh, Stede,” she says, when she realises. Her hand coming up to cup his jaw, to swipe a thumb through the tears that are beginning to spill down his cheeks. “What’s going on with you, love? Please, talk to me.”
Stede can taste salt. His own tears. It hurts to cry hard, so he does it silently; side throbbing, face wet, cheek turned into Ed’s warm palm as he finally lets it out. All of it. The inadequacy, the insecurity, the embarrassment. All those leftovers from childhood, from his youth, his marriage to Mary. By the time he’s finished, his voice is rough. His tears are dry. And Ed is staring at him, bewildered.
“I love you,” he adds, embarrassed by how his voice cracks. “And I don’t want you to become bored with me when you realise I can’t be a real man for you.”
Ed blinks at him. Her face is slack with confusion; the line of her mouth soft, open. “That’s what’s been bothering you?” she asks, after a beat. “That you’re not man enough for me?”
Stede shrugs. It does sound ridiculous coming out of Ed’s mouth. “I suppose so,” he hedges, and watches Ed’s expression soften.
“You silly man,” she murmurs, thumb edging at the lines around Stede’s eyes. “Silly, handsome man.” Her eyes rove over his face, a smile tugging at her mouth. “You know what I thought when I first saw you, in all your get up?”
Stede shakes his head. His face feels tight with salt from his shed tears. Ed grins: shows all her teeth.
“I thought you looked like one of those princes in fairytales. Y’know, with all the frills and the dreamy hair.” She thumbs at his jaw, affectionately. “What’s more manly than that, hey?”
Stede snorts, drops his eyes to his lap; his hands twisting together on top of the sheets. “Really?” he asks.
“Really.”
The daylight in their room is warm and yellow; the glow of late afternoon in June. Ed’s hand drops from Stede’s face to his hand again; catching at his fingers, touching at the lines in his palms. Pale against the freckly suntan that browns the backs of them. Someone, at some point, must’ve washed them. Sponged the dried blood from his skin. Stede touches her back, feeling wrung out and sore but — for the first time in a while — oddly light.
“Here it doesn’t matter,” she adds, eyes on their linked hands. Her blurry old tattoos; the blond hair on Stede’s knuckles. She brushes her thumb over them, and Stede watches the corner of her mouth lift. “Here we can be whatever we want to be.”