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Izzy comes back.
Ed catches sight of him through the spyglass and it’s like everything—these past few months, the years that came before—disappears. He takes what feels like his first full breath since the morning he’d woken up to find Izzy missing, all his stuff gone apart from the ring.
“Fuck,” he gasps, his eyes swimming so he can barely see through the glass at all, so that Izzy becomes a blurry dark smudge on the horizon, coming closer. He grabs onto the bulwark, shoulders heaving, crying the way he hasn’t let himself until now. He feels a hand on his back: Stede, rubbing between his shoulder blades in soft circles. “Stede, he’s—”
“He’s coming home,” Stede says.
By the time Izzy’s climbed aboard the whole crew’s gathered to see him, and Ed’s just about managed to stop crying. Still, it must be visible all over his face because the first thing Izzy says is, “Christ, you look terrible.”
“Fuck you,” Ed responds, staunching his runny nose on his sleeve. “You look like shit, too.”
It isn’t a lie: Izzy looks older now than he did when he left, even though it’s only been a few months. There are punches of purple circling his eyes—Ed honestly can’t tell whether they’re the result of too many sleepless nights or if Izzy’s been getting himself into fights. Plus his hair’s grown out long, his beard’s stretching unevenly over his whole jaw, and there’s nothing at his hip: no sword, no gun.
“Yeah,” Izzy says. His gaze is fixed on Ed's neck: where the ring sits in the middle of a golden chain. “I’d say so.”
Ed swallows. “You come back for a visit, or…?”
“For good,” Izzy says, voice soft enough to crack in the middle. “If you’ll have me.”
Ed nods frantically, and from the renewed prickling in his eyes he realises that he hadn’t believed it—he’d thought Iz was coming back to give him a final telling off, or maybe for a quick visit for old times’ sake. He’d thought, when he’d seen the ring lying there in Izzy's emptied-out cabin, that he was never going to see Izzy again. And now he’s here, real, looking like shit. The tears bubble up, spill over.
“Christ,” Izzy says again. “How do I make him stop doing that?”
He’s talking to Stede, Ed realises. And with barely a trace of loathing.
“Perhaps you should give him a hug,” Stede suggests.
Izzy visibly stiffens. “What.”
“A hug,” Stede says. “I’m sure you’ve heard of them. And it’s customary, when two loved ones have been parted, for them to—”
“Not helping, mate,” says Oluwande, nudging Stede with an elbow.
“I thought you wanted me gone,” Izzy says to Stede, accusatory. “I thought—you all wanted me gone.”
“Well, it’s been three months since then,” Stede says. “A lot has happened.”
“He’s been like this the whole time?” Izzy asks.
“No,” Ed says, at the same time as the crew says, in chorus, “Yes.”
“He’s been a wreck,” Stede says. He sounds a little pissed off about it. “You should have said goodbye, at least.”
Izzy looks down, chastened. “He would’ve convinced me to stay.”
There’s no riposte; Ed knows, deep down, that if Izzy had come to him with the intention to leave, he wouldn’t have let it happen. He’d have strung Iz along with promises of leaving him the Queen Anne, or empty platitudes about making Stede’s crew respect his authority. Or he’d have used Izzy’s feelings for him, the way he’s done a thousand times. He would have held eye contact, touched him just this side of too much. If none of that worked, he would’ve told him he’d hunt him down and cut his fucking hands off if he left. All that, and he'd never thought to call it love 'til the moment Izzy left for good.
He moves closer, stopping an arm’s length from Izzy, and he lowers his voice. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, too quiet for anyone else to hear. He doesn’t want Iz to think this is for anyone but him. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Izzy’s eyes turn reflective with gathering tears. He mutters, “stupid fucking Stede Bonnet,” and then his arms are around Ed, tight enough to feel like suffocation. He smells quite honestly like Jack on one of his worse days, but that doesn’t stop Ed from pressing his nose into his hair, breathing him in. He cups the back of Izzy’s skull with one hand and rubs the length of his spine with the other. Both of them are crying, but Izzy’s shaking with it, tears landing hot on Ed’s collarbone.
“I can’t,” Izzy says, “I can’t be without you. I tried. I really fucking tried.”
“You don’t have to,” Ed promises, holding him. “I’m not letting you go.”