Work Text:
It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees, they’re putting up reindeer, and singing songs of joy and peace, and Stede Bonnet is fine. Really. It’s — yes, of course it’s difficult, the mad dash to the end of the year and the complete absence of sunlight, and the school holidays destroying his beloved, tightly run, deeply necessary schedule, but he’s fine. He will be fine. And no, he hasn’t spoken to Mary beyond what’s strictly necessary to organize logistics in quite some time, and she’s always smiling at her phone these days, and has taken quite an interest in her painting hobby, but that’s fine, too. To everything there is a season and whatnot, and marriages are surely on the list of things to which there is a season, and this particular season happens to be a fallow one. Has happened to be a fallow one for several years now. But it’s fine. Everything is fine because it is Christmas and one is expected to be happy at Christmas, not deeply, skin-crawlingly, catastrophically depressed, so Stede Bonnet is absolutely fine, thank you very much, he’s just lying with his knees hooked over the arm of the sofa listening to Joni Mitchell for a bit of a respite from wrapping Christmas gifts for various second cousins of Alma and Louis whose names he can never remember because Mary’s family is a Gift-Giving Family.
They’d done a spot of marriage counseling a few years back, and the topic of love languages had come up. Mary had mentioned then that gift-giving was important to her family, and Stede had filed that away under Important Things: Allambys, and had made a bit more of an effort on the gift-giving holidays from that point forward. Thoughtful gifts, extravagant gifts. One year he’d gone so far as to commission a model ship for her, a replica of a merchant vessel that her ancestors had owned, and she’d smiled a tight, brittle smile that hadn’t reached her eyes, and the ship sat in Stede’s study, collecting daydreams and dust.
Wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly…
Stede sighs. He’s fine. He will be fine.
“What’s this we’re listening to?” Mary asks, breezing in with paint on her flushed cheek.
“Joni Mitchell,” Stede says. He thinks about rearranging himself to make room for Mary, but doesn’t, because he’s comfortable, and because Mary probably wouldn’t take the space he offered, and he can’t face the sting of that rejection.
“I can’t believe you still listen to Joni Mitchell.”
“I love her and true love lasts a lifetime. Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your emotionally stunted husband how to feel.”
“Did she? Oh, well, that's good, I must write to her and say thanks.”
Stede absorbs the words, moves with them like taking a punch, lets them slide away as he sits up and swings his legs down.
“Right,” he says. “Which body lotion set for your cousin Karen? The one that smells like a sorority house or the one that smells like your grandmum?”
***
They brave the mall a few days later, against all sense and reason, because somehow there’s still shopping to do. It makes Stede a little queasy, the light and the motion and the Christmas music that’s absolutely everywhere, but also the mindless consumerism, people scrambling to buy useless rubbish for people they don’t particularly care about. He watches a woman try to stuff four fuzzy throw blankets into a shopping bag and bites back a smile when the bag splits down the middle. He’s fine.
They split up, agree to meet by the escalator in half an hour. Stede goes up to the shoe department and purchases Mary a pair of clogs in an iridescent mermaid scale pattern because she’d admired a similar pair on the street a few months back, and then goes to browse Juniors for something for Alma. He’s unsuccessful, because two-thirds of what’s on the rack looks like it was designed for very small prostitutes, and the other third has a floral sort of sister-wife vibe that is antithetical to Alma’s carefully curated disheveled coolness. He looks at his wrist out of habit, remembers for the seventy-third time that week that his beloved wristwatch had finally broken beyond repair the week before, and pulls his phone out. He’s got to hurry if he’s going to meet Mary in time.
He catches sight of her lurking near the men’s jewelry counter as he descends the escalator, and he walks backwards up the stairs to maintain his position for a precious moment. He sees her accept a small white box from the clerk and tuck it into her coat pocket. Stede looks at his wrist again and smiles, genuinely, for the first time in a long time. He’s fine.
And yes, okay, maybe he peeks, just a bit. They spill into the house in a flurry of cold air and coats and scarves, and Mary’s dashing up the stairs, desperate for a pee, and he picks her coat up from the hallway floor to hang it on the coat rack. He doesn’t mean to peek, but the box is right there, and it’s the work of a moment to pop it open.
The watch is lovely. Not quite his style, a little young, a little flash, silver instead of gold, but it’s the thought that counts, and it touches him, unfurls something deep in his chest. She’d noticed his naked wrist, and she’d taken the time to address it. He’s fine.
***
Christmas Eve, and the tradition of each opening one gift. They do it late this year, because the children’s pageant has taken up most of the evening. Stede goes for the small square box immediately, rips into the package like a man possessed, with none of his usual care to preserve the wrapping paper for next year. It’s —
It’s not the box. The box is wrong. This box is black instead of cream.
And inside —
“Wireless earbuds!” Mary chirps. “So you can commune with Joni Mitchell in solitude!”
“Oh! Yes. Goodness! That’s great!”
“My emotionally un-stunted husband.”
“Ah… yes. Actually, do you mind if I absent myself for a minute? I’d love to — I think I’m just going to take a walk. Pop these in for a minute, give them a whirl. Could you make sure the children are ready for bed? Back in a minute.”
Stede’s certain his facial expression is betraying him, but Mary has already moved on, is tidying away wrapping paper and helping Louis figure out the charging system for his new handheld gaming console, and Stede slips into the hall, laces his boots, shrugs on his coat. He does actually pop the headphones in, more for plausible deniability than anything, and he opens his Joni playlist, and closes the front door gently behind him. It’s snowing, just a bit, and he sets off down the road.
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way —
Had he, though? Ever? Had Stede Bonnet ever, once, felt that dizzy dancing way? He thinks back to the early days of their marriage, about Mary turning away from him in bed after they’d finished making love, about the space between them growing denser every year with unspoken resentment. He’s never known how to fix it, hasn’t figured out why he’s never been enough. Maybe it wasn’t the wrong box. Maybe it’s him that is wrong.
He walks, and the snow is driving now, pinpricks of ice against his hot, damp cheeks. He hates earbuds, hates that Joni’s voice is echoing in the bones of his skull so it feels like she’s in his head.
Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day.
He thinks about Mary’s painting instructor, Doug, how the last few times they’ve run into each other at cocktail parties or art shows, Doug hadn’t met his eye. He thinks about Doug’s style, a little flash, a little young, silver instead of gold. He thinks about the looks Mary’s friends had given him: knowing, pitying. He thinks about the life he and Mary have built together, thinks about the structures and routines and the secret language that develops between two people who have lived nearly twenty years in parallel. He wonders what secret language Mary is developing with Doug, wonders what truths can be uncovered when you let yourself intersect with someone.
He walks.
He’s striding along, blinded by tears and the snow, and when he collides with a dark, solid shape on the corner, when he goes flying and lands in the slush in the gutter, when one of his earbuds pops out of his ear and rolls into the sewer grate, he loses it completely.
“Fuckin’ — shit, mate, are you okay?”
Stede is crying so hard he’s afraid he’s going to rupture something important, but he’s also laughing, replaying the perfect arc of the earbud against the night sky, like Santa’s sleigh all chrome and shiny against the clouds, the little dink it had made as it glanced off the grate.
There’s a curtain of black and silver hair, then, and a pair of warm, brown eyes, brow furrowed in concern, and the person has their hands on Stede’s head, is pressing their fingers gently – so gently – along the base of his skull, searching for a bump or a fracture, and Stede struggles to his elbows.
“I’m fine,” he gasps, and the person looks unimpressed behind his beard. “I’m fine, I’m — uninjured. Really.”
“You’re crying.”
“I was crying before. I’m fine.”
“Crying before doesn’t seem ‘fine,’ man. C’mon, can you stand?”
Stede finds himself pressed against a warm, firm body, and he clutches, just a bit, the forearm that’s offered to him. He brushes himself off, aided by this stranger.
“I’m fine,” he says a fourth time, and then there are those eyes again, and he finds himself saying, “Well, no, I’m not fine, I think my marriage is over, but I’m – fuck,” and then he’s crying some more because he said the words out loud and somehow Joni’s still in his other ear, crooning
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life
I really don't know life at all.
He wrenches out the earbud and throws it into the sewer along with its mate, which does nothing to make the man standing in front of him look less concerned.
“D’you – okay, come on,” the stranger says, and takes him by the elbow.
“What?” Stede hiccups.
“Gonna – here, come on, it’s fine, I know the owner,” the guy mutters, and they stagger down the block, the stranger's hand still cupped around his elbow, and Stede leans a little, just because he can, and all soon he finds himself in a deserted pub. There’s a short man with a goatee drying glassware, and absolutely no one else. He allows himself to be peeled out of his wet coat and steered to a seat near a dying fire. The man goes to the bar and has a whispered argument with the bartender, and when he comes back, he presses an overlarge glass of brandy into his hand.
“Thanks,” Stede says, and takes a large gulp.
“No problem,” the guy says.
“I’m sorry,” Stede says, apologizing for the collision and the breakdown and the fact that he's dripping slush water onto the pub floor, but also for, you know, existing.
“Hi, sorry. I’m Ed.”
Stede laughs, and it feels like surfacing after being underwater for too long, and he’s not fine, but maybe… maybe he will be.