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“Brought you something!” Ed announced as he strolled into the captain’s cabin, one hand carefully hidden behind his back. “If you’re done being a grouch about not getting to come on the raid.”
(Stede had been placed in Roach-mandated raid timeout earlier that week after pulling a muscle in his calf quite severely during fencing practice. “Unless you want it to get worse,” Roach had said with a shrug, favorite meat cleaver clasped in his hand. Stede had taken the hint, and the bed rest. Which did not preclude a certain amount of pouting when they’d come upon a heavily-laden and poorly-armed merchant vessel almost immediately thereafter. He’d gotten to help with the planning as usual, but still.)
“Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” Stede countered, with an attempt at a haughty sniff that was completely undercut by the barely-concealed eager grin that followed it. “It takes a lot to make up for being abandoned here while everyone else is off having fun…”
“So, not done then.” Ed pulled his hand around front, revealing a large book bound in green leather, which he tossed (gently) into Stede’s lap. “There, see if that’s up to snuff!”
Stede studied the gold lettering on the cover of the oversized volume, tracing a finger along each word as he translated. “‘Being a Botanical Study of the Many and Divers Flora Particular to the Tropical Climes of the Caribbean Isles and Neighboring Lands, with Special Attention to—’”
“Yeah, yeah, knew you’d be able to read it, Mr. Do-You-Think-They-Speak-Ecclesiastical-Latin,” Ed teased, fondly. “These posh titles do go on a bit, don’t they? All those words when they could’ve just said ‘Plant Book’ and been done with it, save everyone a lot of time.”
“Yes, they do tend to be rather unnecessarily verbose.”
“More pageantry?”
“Afraid so.”
“Ah well. That's not why I grabbed it, anyway.” Ed twirled his finger in the air a few times to mime turning a page. “Go on then.”
Stede obliged. There was a pause and then—just as Ed had expected, anticipated, hoped—a fantastically dramatic gasp, followed by Stede’s whole face scrunching up in delight. “Oh, Edward!” On each page of the book was a set of full-size, intricately rendered illustrations of the life cycle stages of a different flower or plant. Though the book itself was printed, the illustrations had been painted by hand after the fact, in colors so vivid and lifelike it was almost hard to believe one couldn’t just reach down and pluck a velvety petal right off the page. “This is beautiful!”
Ed watched Stede for a few moments as he pored over the book with dreamily starstruck eyes and fingers fluttering excitedly just above the surface of the pages, clearly torn between wanting to take the time to savor each illustration and needing to see them all right now. “Yeah, it is.”
“What’s that?” Stede muttered, distractedly, eyes still fixed on the painted plants.
“I, um. Thought you could maybe tell me about them, if you wanted.” Ed suggested, in a soft voice. “All those ‘Many and Divers Flora’. I reckon you know more than that book, anyway.”
Stede did look up, then, meeting Ed’s eyes with a startled-but-hopeful expression on his face. “Really?”
“Of course!” Ed insisted. “Fucking love listening to you talk. I want to hear everything, all of it.”
“You might come to regret saying that,” Stede joked, with all the casual self-deprecation of a man used to being too much, of having to squeeze himself into a box so he wouldn’t be shoved there.
Ed grabbed Stede’s reading glasses and positioned them carefully on his nose, adding a solemn boop to the tip for good measure, then nestled up against his side so they could both look at the book, currently open to a cluster of bright red flowers labeled Plumeria rubra. “Never.”