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Captain Stede Bonnet feared battle. And murder. And blood. And the English. But he wasn’t afraid of drowning. Long before he ever stepped on a boat, he taught himself how to stop breathing.
It hurts, of course. Or it does at first. But like a starved stomach, Stede finds the lungs shrink with what they’re fed. A man can learn to sustain himself on tight sips of stray breath instead of gulping for lungfuls that never quite satisfy the emptiness in his chest.
This is a good thing. This is necessary. First, for understanding that the initial pain in the chest is expected. Then for normalizing the strain it puts on the heart. Finally, for inviting a kind of numbness in and letting it carry you until eventually even the tides give you up.
This skill takes time.
It takes the time his father took his hand for a walk and Stede skipped along beside him. They went through the gardens, past the boat house, beyond the game yard, all the way to the furthest reaches of the Bonnet estate where his father told him to wait while he mended the fences.
Stede had never seen his father mend a fence, but at six he’d not yet seen a lot of things.
He’d not yet seen a ghost orchid in bloom, or a pink sand beach. He’d not yet seen the way his mother had stopped coddling him when his father scowled. He certainly hadn’t seen it coming when the sun started to set and his father had neither mended a fence nor come back to collect him.
He knew the direction of the stable and the house and his mother. Generally. He knew if he put his back to the fence and held his arms out before him they were all just out that way somewhere beyond his hands.
He moved away from the fence, just by a step. Not far enough yet to take his fingers off it. Would his father be proud if he returned on his own? Or was staying put like he’d been told the lesson here?
He’d wait.
Stede closed his eyes and held his breath against the rising dark until his chest hurt. As the sunny colour of the flowers sunk away in the shadows, Stede knew he’d drown in them too if he stayed. He wheezed as he ran through any path that offered itself to him. Still foolishly filling his lungs with some painful hope that his father’s towering figure would appear over the next rise or the next one— conjured by his crying the way fathers who cherish their sons can be.
Stede ran until the familiar scent of the stables and the snuffling of horses promised enough safety to catch his breath, but even so, it only came to him in deep racking sobs that shook his slight shoulders until he fell asleep in the hay.
If he hadn’t struggled so hard when the world slipped out of reach his lungs wouldn’t have burned so badly. If he’d held down all the air it took to cry for a man who wasn’t coming, the hurt might have snuffed itself out.
These things become clearer with time.
Like the time a pair of boys, with matching jackets and mischievous smiles, shuffled into the pew on either side of him.
“Can you keep a secret, Bonnet?”
Stede nodded. He was great at keeping secrets.
Their secret was not a very interesting one. Just that they knew where the clergy kept the communion wine. Stede didn’t like wine and hadn’t really wanted to go snooping for such an unpleasant treasure. Especially not through the tight halls of the rectory that never got enough sunlight or open air to lift the old, dusty smell from the tapestries. Just being in there made Stede feel heavy with the guilt of something he hadn’t yet done.
But he followed them, dutifully. Because he was great at keeping secrets. And he’d never had anyone else’s secrets to keep before, and maybe if he did a good job of it they’d invite him to keep more of their secrets. Maybe they’d keep some of his.
Stede had his mouth to the spout of the cruet when the creaking door sent Chauncey and Nigel scattering like mice. The wine, heavy in the belly of that big vessel, sloshed clumsily towards his lips and down the front of his shirt.
“We were just—”
“We?”
Stede didn’t spend more than a glance looking for evidence of his friends. There was no evidence of Chauncey and Nigel. Because Stede was good at keeping secrets. And because he had no friends.
“I meant— me.”
The priest’s correction bit him a lot harder than the sharp, tinny communion wine that soaked into his shirt.
He did better though, Stede thought. Better than the last time he’d been left adrift. He didn’t sob or scream for someone who wouldn’t come for him. He held every bitten little breath tight in his chest until his lungs burned more than the strap on his skin.
He’d master this yet, Stede thought. He’d tighten up his lungs so much before the waves took him under that maybe his heart wouldn’t even need to beat. He’d just go still and numb all over.
Next time.
The summer before his 14th birthday, Stede found a flower and a slip of paper tucked into his saddle. Whoever snuck into the tack room had known him enough to reach his heart through his imagination because the note he unfurled simply read:
I like you Stede Bonnet.
Stede smuggled it into his pocket like contraband and thought on it for days. The milkmaid, maybe? They smiled at each other. Did she know how to write? The Hornsby girl from Bridgetown proper? She knew her way around horses. The stable boy? The stable boy. Stede was certain that leggy young man who’d shot up another four inches since last season didn’t know how to write either, but Stede watched him intently over the whole summer anyhow. Just in case.
Stede did write back. Eventually. Though he wasn’t certain what to do with it at first. In the end, he left his note in the same spot he’d found the first one, pinched under the saddle skirt with a different flower this time.
Stede wrote only, Why?
A few days later; Because you’re perfect.
Stede scoffed. That’s just silly. Plus, it’s not even a good reason to like someone. In books, perfect seeming people always turn out not to be. Then again, people can feel a lot like perfect when you fall a little bit in love with them. So maybe his secret admirer wasn’t the most well read. Or poetic. It didn’t matter. He could carry this conversation himself if he had to.
And he did. Stede wrote back often and at length. First about the perils of thinking anyone is perfect. Then about his favourite horse, and his favourite thing to play on the harpsichord, and he felt giddy when his admirer claimed those as favourites too. He wrote about preferring fall and winter to spring and summer, mostly for the wardrobe. He wrote about never having kissed anyone and how he hoped it was as nice as he’d read about in books.
He’d felt his heart in his throat for two days when it was his admirer who asked to meet first, even though he’d not so subtly hinted at wanting the chance to admire them too.
It stayed there, his heart, lodged behind his Adam’s apple until the barking laughter of schoolboys cut it out of him.
Marry me, Baby Bonnet, read the sign slung around the old mare’s neck. Stede dropped his fistful of wildflowers, clenched something deep in his chest, and let the undertow drag him away from there.
It hadn’t even hurt that time, he thought. When he bit back his breath, his lungs just felt cold and quiet, like a dead thing on the ocean floor.
Only later, when he came up for air, did he cry a bit while retracing his steps to see if any of them had stabled that old mare when they were done with her.
It took time, but he’d mastered this skill.
He confirmed it when he stood alone before a church full of people, in a suit someone had insisted he looked perfect in, listening to the minister, and his parents, and his would-be-in-laws, whisper about where Mary might be. Then about how they couldn’t find her. Then that she just wasn’t coming.
A case of cold feet, someone said. Stede wasn’t offended, or even surprised, that she’d fled from him. Kind of admirable really. If he’d been as brave as Mary there’d be no bride and no groom and maybe all these people wouldn’t have noticed a wedding was meant to happen at all.
He’d meant to tell her that too, in the days that followed, that he thought she was brave. But you can’t speak without breathing, and Stede was certain he hadn’t dared to take a breath in days. Not from the first whisper of cold feet until the second time they gathered to be wed on a flat, grey day by the sea. A more modest attempt with a smaller crowd. Quickly, and quietly just to get on with it. Stede saw his name etched on a gravestone when the deed was done and that seemed fitting because after three days without feeling any life in his chest he’d likely be needing one of those.
It had taken a lifetime of practice. Every heavy wave and swift undertow that wrung the air out of him helped Stede Bonnet forget what clean air even feels like to the very bottom of his lungs.
Until Ed, of course. Until Ed, the wonderful distraction, made him forget for a moment why he practiced so hard to go numb.
He’d almost sobbed into the open air the night Ed dropped off his deck like the edge of the world.
“Wait. You’re leaving? With him?”
The moment he gave up a breath to that stupid question Stede caught himself struggling instead of keeping still like he should. The need to beg so high in his throat it takes a whole night of fighting to knot the last ribbon of air tightly enough in his lungs that it won't be loosened by an urge to cry, or panic, or scream.
He does it though. Barely. He gets a hold of himself and manages to go still inside. Almost long enough for the numbness to come.
Then Edward Teach flops over his gunwale. Dripping with sea water and wailing for a white flag.
Stede had never practiced for this— someone coming back for him.
He breathes by accident. Crisp, cool air floods in instead of salt water and sorrow. It shocks him. It shakes loose the urge to cry again, and it doesn’t even hurt. It doesn’t even hurt to gasp his name.
“Ed.”
He says it like it's the first full breath he's ever felt.
“Better alive than dead.”
Is he?
Maybe.
Maybe this time.