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Six days. That’s all it took.
Ed shouldn’t be surprised. He’s been doing this since he was fifteen, sixteen, maybe—thirtysome-odd years. He’s mostly disappointed at how disappointed he is, because honestly, he fucking knows better.
There’s just something about the new year he can’t resist, you know? Something about the starting-overness of it, the blank-slatedness of it, the endless-possibilities-new-resolutions-just-do-itness of it, makes him think, this year, maybe this year, things can be different.
This year, he’d wanted it to be different. He’d wanted himself to be different.
So he’d done like he always does. He’d gone out and bought a notebook with a pretty cover and a planner with all these boxes on the pages to divide information up and a set of colored pens, and he’d written out lists and goals and habit trackers and even little inspirational quotes, and despite none of this ever having changed anything in the past, he’d really thought that this time—
Well.
He’d thought that last time, too.
Ed sighs, looks over the carefully plotted week in his planner. So carefully plotted, so deliberately scheduled. He’d tried to be reasonable about his expectations for himself this time, tried to be honest about what he really was or wasn’t capable of getting done.
Only about a third of the things he’d written in have been checked off.
Not honest enough, it seems.
Maybe he could still catch up. Tomorrow’s Sunday—he could do it. If he gets up early, hits the ground running, just keeps his focus, yeah, he could do it. If he really tries.
It’s only been six days. Less than a fucking week into the new year, and here he is again, sitting here bargaining with the minutes and hours of his days like it’s not his own fucking fault that he just lets them slip away like fucking water through a sieve.
The guilt is less like a wave and more like a river: a never-ending rushing through.
Other people can do this. Other people do this all the time, and more. There’s no fucking reason Ed shouldn’t be able—
“Stop.”
A hand lands in the middle of the page Ed’s studying, blocking it from view. Stede has appeared on the other side of the coffee table. He’s wrapped in one of his fancy robes, already in his jimjams; his voice is quiet, eyes creased with concern.
“M’fine,” Ed says automatically, which is of course a dead giveaway for not being fine, because if he were fine he’d have no idea what Stede meant. He sighs again, flops back against the sofa. “I’m mostly fine.”
Stede makes the face he makes when he’s trying very hard not to arch his eyebrow. “You look like you’re trying to light this page on fire by staring at it.”
“I could do that. If I wanted.”’
“I’m sure.”
“I have a very powerful gaze, mate.”
“Yes. Your deflection skills, on the other hand, could use a bit of work.”
Ed scrunches up his whole face. It’s nice, he swears it’s nice, to be so utterly and entirely known by another person; it’s just also fucking mortifying sometimes.
Stede doesn’t seem very mortified, which is very unfair in Ed’s opinion. Instead he seems calm, and a bit concerned, and like he’s very ready to Practice Empathy and Compassion. That’s also pretty unfair; Ed’s not in the mood for empathy and compassion. He’s in the mood to be shaken like a stuffed animal in the wash stuck on a spin cycle until his brain realigns and finally starts to work properly.
Unfortunately, Stede is wonderful and not very prone to shaking. It’s a real hardship.
Ed stares up at the ceiling, and listens as Stede flips the planner closed, as he shuffles a few things—putting the notebooks aside, probably, and arranging the pens back into proper rainbow order. There’s the rustle of Stede’s dressing gown as he moves about the sitting room, and the heavy pwhip sound of a blanket being shaken out of its folded state.
God, don’t be nice to me right now, Ed thinks, but he can’t bring himself to say anything around the heat in his eyes and the fist in his throat. It’s Ed’s favorite blanket too, he realizes, when it settles over him. He clenches his hand into the fabric, gathering it closer. Fuck, but Stede’s wonderful.
The end of the sofa dips where Stede must have sat—close enough that Ed can feel the reverberation of him, but far enough that they aren’t touching. He’ll wait for Ed to make that move when he’s ready. If he becomes ready. It’s terrible. Horrible. Ed loves him so much it hurts.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Stede’s voice is still soft, even. He’s really asking, not demanding with a question mark. Ed shakes his head.
“Nothing to talk about, really. Just—stupid. I’m fine.”
“You can be stupid and still not be fine. People do it all the time.”
That makes Ed laugh a little, more of a huffing breath than anything, but it eases the tightness in his throat. “You’re not going to tell me I’m not stupid?”
He hears Stede shrug on the other end of the sofa. There’s a smile in his voice this time. “Just meeting you where you are, darling.”
“You’re such a prick,” Ed says with another huff, not meaning it at all. A smile tilts the corner of his own mouth, and he looks over across the sofa to find Stede looking back, eyes all soft with affection.
Just the sight of him settles Ed back into his body, though, and he slides across the back of the sofa sideways, folding down until he feels Stede’s hand guiding him down to the welcoming pillow of his thigh. Ed pulls his legs up after him and turns so he can press his face into Stede’s lower belly, curled up under the blanket.
“There you are,” Stede murmurs absently, slipping his fingers into the hair at Ed’s temple. “There you are.”
Stede’s warm, and his dressing gown is the yellow one Ed really likes, the one with the fancy embroidery on the trim he likes to trace with his fingers. It’s close, and cosy, and Ed has a million things he ought to be doing right now, but—he inhales the tea and lavender scent of Stede, the sweet-salt smell of their bed lingering in his pajamas, and feels like he can breathe for the first time all day.
They’re quiet together for a long time.
Ed counts the gentle sound of Stede’s breathing, counts his own out deliberately to match, lets the feeling of Stede’s hand in his hair and the soft heat of his belly crowd out everything else. Stede hums in the back of his throat, must be reading something on his phone, but he says nothing, no pushing or prying. He doesn’t even really seem like he’s waiting. He’s just giving Ed the space.
He’s wonderful. Fuck, but he’s wonderful.
Eventually Ed comes back to himself, a little, and it feels easier now with all this space around him. He rubs his cheek on Stede’s thigh to get his attention before mumbling into his stomach. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Stede says easily, like loving Ed’s no problem at all. Like all the half-finished things and forgotten errands and all-or-nothing focuses and evenings spent quietly shut out on the sofa are no big deal.
Ed must make a noise, or maybe Stede’s just a fucking mind-reader, because he taps one finger against Ed’s temple where his hand is still in Ed’s hair, and says, “None of that, now. I think you’ve beat yourself up enough for one night.”
“Not very successfully,” Ed mutters.
“It’s not ever going to be successful. That’s not how it works.”
“Works for everyone else.”
“It doesn’t, first of all,” Stede points out, which Ed knows, rationally, is true, even if something in him rebels against the idea. How else do people manage all the time? “And you’re not everyone else. Which is a good thing, by the way.”
“Mm. Is it, though?”
“I haven’t managed to fall in love with anyone else, so it’d be a damn shame if you weren’t you. Then who would I be married to? Someone not nearly as funny, or kind—“
“Worse hair, probably—“
“Which would be tragic, because I couldn’t bear to be with someone who’s hair isn’t as a good as mine, and they wouldn’t be half so brilliant—“
“They’d remember things, though,” Ed says, finally dropping the blade through to the heart of the matter. There’s a pause, and he can practically hear Stede thinking, ah, there we are. “Yeah, all right, you know, I can do things, I can do all this and that, but there’s all this other stuff too I just—I don’t know. I can’t get it done, or I can’t get it done all the way, or I end up doing a dozen things I wasn’t even supposed to be doing. Here, look.”
He twists in Stede’s arms, reaching long behind him for the planner he’d been studying when Stede came in. He flips to the first weekly spread, the one they’re still fucking in, the days filled in with all the things he meant to do on each of them.
Days long gone, now, and things unfinished.
“I wrote it all out,” he tells Stede. “I did, what, less than half of this? It’s all written down and I still can’t get it right. Went to the shops, sure, but I forgot your rosemary. I told Iz I’d have a new test menu to him two weeks ago, still haven’t got it done yet. Last night I was supposed to rearrange the records in the study, would’ve taken all of ten minutes, and instead I just—I don’t even know, just loafed around on the sofa all night. I can’t even remember the date right sometimes—“
“That’s what I have a calendar for,” Stede says sharply, finally cutting off Ed’s rant. “Not a husband.”
He takes the planner out of Ed’s hands, gentle but firm, and closes the pages without even looking at them. He tosses it back onto the coffee table, then coaxes Ed back to him, back into the relative safety of his arms, his tummy. His scent. His warmth.
“I don’t care about the rosemary,” Stede whispers, close to Ed’s ear like he’s telling a secret. Maybe he is, for all Ed’s been tearing himself up about it. “Or about the records, or about the test menu. I care about you. All that—it’s just noise. We can handle it. You’re all right, darling. You’re all right, I’ve got you.”
The next breath Ed goes to take is shaky, harsh with pressure, and the fist is back in his throat, hard and solid and terrible. Stede’s hand smooths up and down his spine, and Ed tries to breath with it, tries to let Stede guide his breath; it takes a long, long moment before he can say anything.
“I wanted to do better,” he confesses, which is so shit to say, to admit that he knows he’s been failing. Of course he knows. “I wanted to be better, to have my shit together, for you and the kids and the bar, for—for fucking Izzy, even, god knows he could use less stress in his days—“
“Izzy likes being stressed, you know that.”
But Ed’s past banter, past being able to break through the tightness under his ribs with the odd joke. “I’m just so tired, Stede. I’m so tired.”
Stede folds himself down over Ed, covering him like a shield. He presses a kiss into Ed’s hair, hard. “Then I’ll carry you,” he says, fierce and determined and unbearably tender, and Ed’s breath catches again. “That’s the promise you made me, Edward Teach—that you’d let me carry you, when you couldn’t walk any further on your own, and that’s the promise I made too. All right? You don’t have to struggle with this alone, so don’t.”
He finds one of Ed’s hands, presses a kiss to the back of his fingers, since Ed’s face is still pressed tight to his belly. “I’ve got you. You don’t have to fight so hard anymore.”
Ed waits for the protest to rise in him, for the fight to take up arms—this is his shit to handle, his own problem to deal with—but Stede’s warm, and he’s here, breath fanning out over Ed’s fingers, hand steady and solid against Ed’s back, and Ed—
Ed’s tired, and more than anything, he wants Stede with him, wants Stede on his side. And Stede’s right here, asking to be.
Ed lets the fight go.
It’s another hour before they make it up off the sofa. Stede talks for a bit, suggests a few things they can do immediately to ease the load—readjusting the priorities on Ed’s list, when the suggestion of getting rid of it entirely sends a surge of panic through him, hiring a bit of help around the house, promoting Frenchie to assistant manager at the bar. They talk about therapy, and about support; they talk, at Ed’s insistence, about support for Stede as well, and about boundaries, and about check-ins that soothe Stede’s anxieties without making Ed feel like a child.
“Come on,” Stede says finally, jostling Ed a little bit. “You’re half-asleep as it is, and as much as I’d love to, I don’t think I can carry you up the stairs.”
“Come off it, you totally could,” Ed argues, just for the sake of arguing. The edge of a grin has found its way back to the corner of his mouth. “Big beefy guy like you? You carried me across the threshold, once.”
“Across the threshold is a far cry from up the stairs.”
“Mm. It was pretty sexy though. Maybe we should get married again, if that’s what it takes to get a ride around here.”
Stede rolls his eyes, and shimmies out of his yellow robe, wrapping it around Ed’s shoulders as he helps him off the sofa. “Hush, now,” he says, when he sees Ed about to protest. “I want to because it makes me feel better to take care of you, yes?”
He looks up, and he’s earnest, so earnest it makes Ed’s chest ache again but in a way this time that feels like it’s expanding, opening up, like a hot air balloon rising. Ed lets Stede wrap the robe around him, then folds Stede into his arms so it covers the both of them.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
“I love you,” he says, voice creaky and rough. His toes are cold on their wood floors; Stede slips one foot over one of Ed’s, covering them. Still wearing socks, the madman. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“I know,” Stede answers.
It settles something in Ed to hear it, to know that Stede knows, and yeah, all right, it is mortifying sometimes, but sometimes being known is just—breathtaking.
Ed has to kiss him about it, just a little. Slow and promising, careful and just as tender as Stede’s been with him all night. I know, I need you to know. I’ll always know.
“Up to bed,” Stede says, when they part. He taps Ed’s bum, all habit and no intent. “Ready?”
Together they click the lamps off, check that the doors are locked, fill glasses of water to take up to bed. The routine is familiar, as much a comfort as Stede’s dressing gown, as the soft sound of his socked feet. At the bottom of the stairs, Ed stops to make sure he’s got everything he needs: phone, water, and—
He looks back, sees the light from the stairwell reflecting off the glossy cover of the planner.
He leaves it behind.
*