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Ed is painting his nails.
He thought it was odd, too, given the events of the last few days. Standing between Stede and a firing squad, signing the act of grace, folding laundry, kissing Stede (kissing Stede , his heart flutters), escaping the British once again (well maybe that one wasn’t as big of a deal), waiting on the dock all night, realizing he couldn’t wait any longer, and coming ho– coming back to the Revenge.
And now he was painting his nails.
It was methodical. Comforting. Shaking the bottle, twisting the top off, contemplating the glob of polish on the brush, removing the excess on the edges of the glass, the slow drag of colour covering the bed of his nail; a quick few strokes to fill in the side and another dip back in the bottle. The repetition, compounding the colour on top of itself, getting darker and darker, disguising his nail all the way down. Ed wonders how thick he could make it; if he used the whole bottle how high would the polish pile?
I have been jilted and now I’m painting my nails, he thinks, feeling a little deranged. Yesterday, when he had moved from crying on the couch to crying on the floor by the fireplace, he noticed the bottom of the bookshelf was extremely dusty. Stede must not have tasked anyone with dusting the bottom shelf. Or, more likely, he had, and the person assigned to that chore had skipped out (Lucius, his brain supplied). There was a small pouch on the bottom shelf and before he could think about what he was doing he crawled over to it, curious. He didn’t remember noticing it before. He had the pouch in his lap and before he could open it he realized he was still crying. I’m crying on the floor about Stede, and now I’m opening a mystery pouch that was sitting on an undusted shelf that I’ve never noticed before, he had thought. And he noticed himself having the thought, as if there were multiple Eds watching this scene from different points of view. There was the Ed that was sad and crying, the Ed who noticed the dust, the Ed who crawled over to the shelf and grabbed the pouch, and the Ed who had noticed himself doing all of these things. And each Ed was overlapping each other to create this Ed, the Ed who was sitting with the pouch in his lap, tears drying on his cheek, thinking about how there were multiple Eds.
Ed shook his head. That’s too many Eds right now, thanks .
The nail polish was inside the pouch, is the point. And now he was painting his nails.
There were only three colours to choose from: black, red, and a very pale pink. Ed chose black; it went with his whole aesthetic (the heartbroken aesthetic and the badass aesthetic, thank you). Ed tried to think if he could remember Stede wearing nail polish. He remembers Stede handing him tea, Stede cutting dinner with a fancy, polished knife and fork, and Stede tying his cravat. He definitely remembers noticing Stede’s fingers (thick, soft) but he couldn’t recall what his nails looked like. He could see Stede’s nails with and without polish in his mind. His breath caught in his throat at the thought that he was already forgetting details about Stede, afraid of not remembering moments correctly. It had only been three days since he’d last seen Stede, and somehow his memory was already beginning to fade.
(His heart ached for that Ed, three days ago Ed, who was full of hope and excitement and joy at setting sail with Stede by his side. The Ed who didn’t know what waited for him at the dock: disappointment, sadness, and the relentless passage of time)
Anyways, Ed is painting his nails. He finishes all ten fingers (left hand neater than the right, which is not frustrating at all). He places the brush back in the bottle and puts his palms on the desk. He spreads his fingers out wide, as if they need a wide berth from each other to dry properly. He adjusts himself in his seat, settles in to wait for his nails to dry. The top of the desk had been cleared of Stede’s knick knacks. Ed imagines Izzy sweeping his arm across the table and knocking everything to the floor, watching things break with that twisted smile on his face; he can see Izzy laying out maps and star charts and his letter of pardon (or commendation or whatever ) with that smug ceremonial reverence he has when he feels powerful, when things go his way, when he gets things right. He can see Izzy so clearly, a manic excitement set behind his eyes, his entire body taut like a string on a bow.
Izzy , his mind echoes. Something should probably be done about him. He knows the crew was in the process of a mutiny when he had climbed up the side of the Revenge. And then there was the whole selling-Stede-out-and-colluding-with-Jack thing. The Ed before, Blackbeard , would probably already have a plan, something moderately gruesome and horrifying, but ultimately not debilitating. Just wicked enough to ensure Izzy remembered his place, and for the rest of the crew to know that he wasn’t to be trifled with. Ed sighed. Later , he thought absently. That Ed, Blackbeard, feels too far away to call back right now.
He closes his eyes briefly, gives his head a small shake, and glances up and looks at the book shelf. There’s three books missing from the top shelf, Ed thinks, but he can’t think of which ones. His eyes trace the room: Stede’s lighthouse and portraits of his children are still on the mantle of the fireplace, the chairs still in their spot in front. The little mannequin for the auxiliary closet door is still upright and in place. Ed sees them that first day: Stede, a nasty pale colour, hobbling over to the mini mannequin and pulling the latch, the auxiliary wardrobe door popping open with a creak, and Ed’s heart is pounding in his ears. How was that only a few months ago? Ed feels like he’s slipped and fallen into another plane of existence entirely, like if he could just figure out how to peel back the layers of time, wipe each day off clean from the room like removing a layer of dust, he would be able to find himself and Stede in this room again, happy. It’s like he’s seen and also never seen this room before, like he’s trying to remember a memory he’s already remembered, but his brain doesn’t remember he’s remembered. Or something.
His hands strain trying not to dig into the desk, the pad of his fingers squishing into his nails. He can feel his eyes fill with tears that immediately threaten to spill over. He sniffs and shakes his head, tosses his hair back, and squeezes his eyes shut, keeping his hands planted firmly on the desk. He takes a deep steadying breath down into his belly and lets it out slowly through his nose. No , he thinks to himself, willing all the small and large questions that float through his head, all the reasons and explanations, to stay away. No .
He gingerly sweeps the pad of his right index finger over the nails on his left hand. They’re not tacky anymore, but they’ll probably still chip or smudge if he does anything too involved. He keeps his palms down on his desk and moves his fingers a normal distance apart, feeling all at once that they’re too close, the polish is too fresh, like he’s going to ruin all of his careful work with one thoughtless action.
Ed startles when someone knocks at the door. He holds his hands out in front of them and watches them as he gets up from the chair and walks slowly to the door. Roach opens it a crack before he gets there.
“Captain Blackbeard, sir?” he calls.
“It’s just Blackbeard.” Ed reminds him, but as he says it the name feels fuzzy on his tongue, like it got stuck to the roof of his mouth on its way out.
“Right, yes, sorry, Blackbeard, sir. I have tea if you–”
“I’ll take it. Thanks” Ed grabs the tray as quickly as he can, his mind fixed on protecting his nails. He doesn’t shut the door on Roach, but it’s a near thing. Ed holds the tray in his hands by the door and doesn’t move, looks at the room from this angle.
There’s barely anything different about the room, truly. The window dressings and furniture are the same and, yeah, Izzy did clear the desk off, but most of the decor is still in place. The brandy is full, the glasses are clean, the bed is made. The past few weeks play out in front of his eyes again; he can see their ghosts, his and Stede’s, past versions of themselves, mulling about the room, drinking brandy, flipping through books and maps, Stede showing off his robes–
Suddenly Ed gets an idea.
❖
Ed thought he understood what Stede meant when he said “clothes horse,” but evidently he had deeply underestimated the man. There were so many robes! In so many different colours and fabrics! Ed had spent the rest of the afternoon carefully slipping his hands through the sleeves of as many robes as he could. In the end, the one that fit the best, was the most comfortable, and the most comforting, was the pink one he’s seen Stede start to favour after Izzy had left.
The fabric is a soft velvet, the pattern more intricate than he remembers. He runs his hands carefully down the fabric on his chest, sweeps them over opposite shoulders. He bunches up the fabric in his hands and twirls about, loving the way the fabric floats around him when he stops. Suddenly, he remembers that he painted his nails, and yes they were dry, but they weren’t set, they were still at risk of smudging. Ed feels his breath come shorter as he checks each nail carefully: nothing is smudged. He exhales a sigh of relief.
He is surprised at how much his spirits have lifted from just putting on something that was comfortable and cozy. His muscles in his shoulders and neck relax (he didn’t even know they were tense). He feels his limbs move more fluidly, and he can feel his belly soften. Ed knew that Stede was a creature of comfort, but he didn’t know how good it could feel to be one himself. Suddenly there’s this wide open space in his brain, not always thinking about the leather sticking to his legs in the heat, the hard outlined shoulders of his jacket weighing on him, adjusting his weapons to be accessible, or the sweat dripping down his ass crack. He feels himself smile.
And that’s weird. He was jilted not three days ago and now he’s painted his nails and he’s smiling about a robe?
He considers the smile on his face. It’s different. It’s not like the smiles he felt with Stede, he knows that instantly. Those smiles came easily, without thought. They were bright, light, and expansive, usually followed by a giggle or laugh. He could feel his entire body hum when he smiled with Stede. This smile is quiet, confined to his face, maybe trickling down into his chest a bit. It’s warm, and it feels…durable, somehow. Like there’s maybe something that could be permanent about it. Like his body is generating it rather than getting it from someone else. That thought seems to urge his smile to grow, and now he’s stuck in a positive feedback loop; the more he thinks about the small, quiet, warm smile, the bigger, louder, and warmer the smile gets (and the more it trickles down his chest). His eyes well up again. He coughs-laughs at himself. What is this?
❖
Ed needs a new place to sleep. He spent last night on the chaise again, wrapped up in Stede’s robe. He’d shuffled over there once he was certain his nails were dry and set, and flopped down inelegantly. He doesn’t think he’s gotten more than 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep since he got back to the Revenge. At first it was because of the sadness, the ache in his chest that wouldn’t relent. Eventually though, his body had had enough and his knee was seizing up more than usual and his shoulders and neck felt so stiff it was more physical discomfort that kept him awake than emotional ache.
It was the robe; he just feels so comfortable in it. He can’t bear another night on the chaise, or the floor, or leaning over the desk, making his body feel more stiff and uncomfortable than it already is. He needs to be horizontal and he needs to get more than 3 broken hours of sleep per night. He looks around the room and sees the pillows and bedding piled on the bed. He feels his body tense.
When he first arrived back on the Revenge he made a beeline to the cabin. He barely looked around the room as he marched directly towards the bed, trying to hold back a wail and tears until he reached it. He wanted to slam his body into the mattress and never leave. Until he remembered: Izzy had been captain in the days Ed was at the academy. Izzy would have claimed the cabin as his own. Izzy would have taken meals in here and– Izzy might have slept in the bed. The bed would smell like Izzy instead of– Ed had stopped dead in his tracks and stood stock still in the middle of the room for an undetermined amount of time, barely breathing. It’s just a bed , he tried to tell himself. But he couldn’t get the thoughts of Izzy out of his head. Before he knew what he was doing, he turned and fell onto the chaise, feeling immediately numb, his tears dried up.
Comfort , Ed thinks, bringing himself back to the present. This is about comfort . When he had first gotten back to the Revenge it was about survival. His chest had felt so swollen with everything. He had felt like he was carrying every reason why Stede never showed up right beneath his sternum. Did he not want to go to China? Did he get a better offer? Was it because Ed mugged a guy for the dingy? (It wasn’t even a real mugging, maybe a half-mug at the most; the guard was drunk and looked like he did not get paid enough to stop Ed). Maybe the guard never woke him up. Maybe he just slept through the whole night and was late. Maybe when Ed had reached the horizon in the dinghy is the exact moment when Stede had shown up on the dock, just missing each other by seconds. The maybes ebb and flow through his mind as he rowed; by the time he made it back to the Revenge his arms and his heart were heavy with fatigue.
Ed runs his hands over the soft material of the robe methodically. He tries to force himself to climb into the bed, to think about how much he would enjoy the mattress and blankets and pillows, to think about the softness of the fabrics and the warmth they could provide; he tries to convince himself to move, to make some sort of definitive action. But something in his body stops him, his muscles feel frozen in place. He can’t– but what if…
❖
When Roach comes back to collect the tray from the forgotten tea, Ed asks him for a broom, or a stick, “just something tall enough that it could hold up a blanket.” He gives credit to Roach for not looking at him like he’d lost his mind; Roach just nods and says, “I’ll do my best, Captain Blackbeard, sir.” (Ed’s brain halts at the name again and feels “Blackbeard” fall on his shoulders like an unwanted heavy blanket.)
While waiting for Roach, Ed moves the furniture. The two chairs by the fireplace come to sit near the bookshelf, their backs turned toward each other. Ed takes the bed sheet and drapes it over them, then stuffs the long end under some of the books on the bookshelf. He smiles again, that quiet, durable smile. This is gonna work .
Roach brings him a broom quicker than he expected, and Ed uses it to prop up the main portion of the blanket fort he’s built. He pulls up a footrest and a small side table in front of the two chairs and drapes another blanket over those and the broom. He fiddles with a few more blankets, making sure there’s no holes in the “roof,” adds a few more blankets and pillows, ties some corners down with a few cravats (not the nice ones), and then suddenly it’s done.
Impressed (but not surprised) by his blanket-fort-building skills, Ed moves the remaining blankets, sheets, and pillows into the fort. He grabs a candle, some books, and a jar of marmalade and shoves them ahead of himself as he climbs in. It’s a bit ungraceful: the robe and the blankets tangle together and almost make him knock the entire front end of the blanket fort over. And then the robe catches him on the shoulder when he accidentally sets his knee down on the sleeve while crawling in. After swearing and rearranging, he’s able to settle himself amongst the pillows and wraps the robe and a blanket around himself. He lays back, sets the jar of marmalade on his stomach and dips his finger (nails unchipped, he checked) into the marmalade. He smiles to himself (that durable one again, what the fuck ) and pulls the blanket up to his face. He inhales, breathes deeply without meaning to with the blanket scrunched up under his nose, and suddenly he feels overcome. The blanket smells like lavender, like sandalwood, like something close to but not quite citrusy, like flowy linen shirts and sturdy but soft breeches, like teacups and treasure maps and an entirely too fancy and intricate dagger. Stede .
The smile fades. Suddenly he’s on the dock alone. He’s at the terrible French boat party, watching it burn. He’s on the deck in the moonlight barely breathing. He's sitting with his legs through the rail on the side of the ship, looking over at Stede; he’s everywhere they’ve been together and nowhere all by himself. Ed feels his heart break again, a pressure in his ribs, like an orange is lodged behind them, like there’s roots growing through his chest to keep him anchored to this moment, to this feeling. Tears run freely down his face and Ed gives in; he lets his thoughts flow, releases the dam.
There’s always an escape , his own words echo back to him. There is always an escape, and Stede found it. His mind floods with all the things he’d meant to say, things he’d meant to do, and things he did say and do and wished he hadn’t. His focus bounces from one to the other before the previous one finishes, certain that this time, during this breakdown, he’ll be able to find the root, the small fracture, the deciding factor for Stede, the one thing that made him stay away.
He can’t find it. He can find a thousand different maybes, like maybe it was when Jack mentioned burning that crew alive, or maybe it was when Ed shaved his beard, or maybe it was because Ed folded his fucking stockings. Each maybe feels simultaneously more ridiculous and more plausible than the next. His mind is racing but he can’t stop it until he exhausts all possible maybes, until he runs out of road and sees the truth staring him in the face.
There wasn’t one thing that made Stede leave. There was just Ed; Ed and the accumulation of maybes, a build up of small moments, small decisions, layered on top of each other, with Ed at the center. Ed was too much, too excited, and moved too quickly. And a truth that Ed has always known, known deep in his marrow, in his soul: there is something dark and unspeakable in Ed’s core, something rotten, and Stede had finally smelled it.
The blanket scratches and the pillows are lumpy. Nothing feels comfortable anymore.
❖
What if it’s not a death? What if life just begins again.
Lucius crawls out of the blanket fort with a surprising amount of grace. Ed almost asks if he has experience, if he’s made a blanket fort before. (And if so, when? And why? And what materials did he use, and does he think Ed’s is nice? Or is it just average?)
Ed doesn’t know how long he lays in the blanket fort after Lucius leaves. He can’t see the light change outside, but he assumes it’s early afternoon by now. Izzy came in at one point. Ed could hear the look of disdain on Izzy’s face. He started in about the crew, the plan, responsibilities, and Ed didn’t care. Doesn’t care. He’d interrupted Izzy and asked for tea again, just to get him to leave.
He looks at his nails again. They’d made it through the fort building, and survived the marmalade, and the playing with the candle. He can see a few spots he missed on the sides of his nails, places where he didn’t go over it enough times to cover up his nail bed. I should repaint, fill in the cracks , he thinks, but find he doesn’t feel the same urgency he had when he first painted them.
He thinks back to his song again. Lucius didn’t seem that bothered by his lyrics. He’s a little surprised, if he’s honest. Ed understands the meaning behind them, knows why they’re raw and powerful and brilliant, but he had assumed Lucius wouldn’t get it, would tell him it was shit and leave him to wallow. But he didn’t. He stayed. And he was patient. He let Ed cry, let him spit out more lyrics, and wrote them down diligently (and eventually he got it). Has Lucius ever had his heart broken , he wonders. He should have asked. Talk it through as a crew , he thinks and hates himself for it.
But it had helped, was the thing. Talking it through with Lucius had made him feel better, as much as he had fought it. The pain and the worry and the sadness were still there, still present, but they were outside of him now. They were still concerning, if Ed was being honest. They were dark and heavy and took up a lot of space in the room. But at least they were no longer inside of him, trying to replace his bones.
He really should have asked Lucius if he’s been heartbroken, maybe help him let go of his feelings in the same way.
❖
Ed gets back to the cabin after loosely confirming some details for the talent show. He feels impossibly lighter. Again. He thought he felt light before, after putting on the robe, after building the blanket fort, after talking to Lucius. But this is lighter still.
He’d felt nervous walking out on deck and approaching Frenchie about adding music to his lyrics. His heart fluttered in a familiar way, expecting mocking or rejection. But instead Frenchie had just said “alright,” and strummed a few chords. And then suddenly Ed was performing. Singing out loud. In front of people. Where they could hear him. And it felt… freeing. And then the applause and compliments, that felt good too! And Ed isn’t stupid, okay, he knew that they were a little forced, a little over-reaching, but the other parts felt genuine. And no, he didn’t 100% get Buttons’ “pure tone” performance, but it was still hauntingly beautiful, and an expression of who Buttons was as a person. Ed understood. He understood that personal brilliance didn’t always translate to a more widely recognized brilliance, that’s okay.
He stops in the middle of the cabin and stares. He waits for the anger, or sadness, or disappointment, or for some form of negative feelings coupled with self loathing. But there’s…nothing. It’s there in his body somewhere, he knows that if he really searched for it he could pull something up (maybe something hiding in his liver, maybe that’s what it did: stored the negative feelings). But no. There’s just that silly quiet smile that hasn’t left since the crew applauded his song. That smile is becoming dependable now, resilient. Maybe a day ago Ed would have found it annoying, would have questioned it, wanted to know exactly where and why it was there. But this Ed, today’s Ed, just feels gratitude. Thankful that he can still feel positive emotions, thankful for the space in his brain awarded by the comfortable clothing and blankets and pillows, thankful for talking it through . The smile moves past his shoulders and chest and settles into the pit of his stomach, a pleasant constant kind of presence. Not pressure or fluttering, just… presence.
He looks down at his nails, and one is chipped. And he’s okay.