Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s no evidence, just a feeling. A bone-deep, chasmic gut feeling. 

And feelings are fucking rare here. Scratch that, feelings are nigh on impossible – unless you count the gnawing boredom. No feelings, no beating hearts or blood rushing around bones. No fucking guts, that’s for sure. Just pixels, far as the eye can see. Pixelly sky and pixelly sea. Pixelly boats to sail on the endless squares of blue. Pixel people regurgitating pixel script to him, over and over and over again. 

But Ed’s got an inkling, based on absolutely fuck all, that ‘Stede’ is not one of them. ‘Stede’ doesn’t feel like one of them. 

He’s this new character with a fancy fucking ship, so detailed that all the pixels in the world couldn’t contain it, and he bested Izzy at swordplay. Something that Ed’s learned since he first got trapped here is that nobody bests Izzy at swordplay. Izzy’s the fucking master of swordplay. The computer basically forbids anyone from besting Izzy at swordplay. 

Oh, but ‘Stede’ did. 

‘Stede’ also told him he could go suck eggs in hell, which just…doesn’t seem like something a computer could come up with, actually.

Fascinated, Ed goes after the Revenge.

He thinks, at first, that the game might prohibit him from doing so. After all, if someone else is human here, locked in the computer like him, then the evil fuckin’ thing that imprisoned them in the first place sure as hell isn’t going to want them to join forces. 

Whether it’s a glitch or a trap, though, he manages to pin ‘Stedeʼ down. Stabbed up in the captain’s quarters, maybe, but Ed hauls his pixelated arse onto that magnificent ship, and he sits himself by ‘Stede’s bedside, and it’s the first time in god knows how long that escaping has felt like it’s on the cards. 

He holds a hand out to introduce himself. I’m Ed, he tries to say, but it comes out as, “I’m Blackbeard.”

“Stede.”

The world around them doesn’t implode when they shake hands, no catastrophic explosion of bytes, no GAME OVER flashing across their eyelids. ‘Stede’ doesn’t turn to flesh and blood under his touch. 

Ed’s still vibrating with hope, though. 

He knows this game intimately is the thing. The missions, raids – whatever you want to call them – they’re all the fucking same, every time. Cannonfire and gunshots, soundbite screams and red, red pixels. Never before has he seen a ship with a fucking library and two chandeliers. It’s just not the kind of feature that’s worth putting into a game about killing people, is it?

There are possible explanations. Somewhere out there, beyond the bidimensional blue of the horizon, back in the real world with its complicated sunny downpours and pocketfuls of crumpled bus tickets and loose change, there could’ve been an update. Ed does consider this, he’s not an idiot. Maybe players complained about how fucking boring the game is – god, it’s so fucking boring – and so the creators chucked this fancyman into the newest level, and maybe Ed’s eventual mission will be to kill him too. Maybe that’ll be the next challenge to earn a bunch of doubloons. He’ll do it just to unlock another coastline, is the truth; just for a new vista, pixelated as it may be.

Only, then ‘Stede’ goes and swaps outfits with him, and when he says ‘Blackbeard’, it sounds like Ed, and it’s not, it can’t be, but– 

Fuck, when he talks it doesn’t even sound robotic. His eyes are so fucking expressive. Ed knows that’s not a thing – he’s scrunched his face up in front of enough mirrors to know that nothing but hollow pixels stare back at him – but there’s an undeniable humanity in ‘Stede’. In all those cubes of blue and green and brown – amber, even, which isn’t a fucking colour in this two dimensional realm but exists in ‘Stede’s eyes. When he looks at him, Ed can see it there.

He’s pretty sure that ‘Stede’ is real when he folds a square of red silk into Ed’s pocket. He goes back on his theory a little when ‘Stede’ gets adamant they go on some jungle mission for gold. He’s pretty sure all over again when ‘Stede’ finds a colourful bug and a petrified orange and declares the treasure hunt a success. 

It’s back in the captain’s quarters of the Revenge that Ed says, “Can I ask you something?”

‘Stede’, all heartfelt somehow, replies, “Anything.”

Are you playing the game too? Ed tries to say. The computer doesn’t let him; the computer translates it to, “Shall we open a bottle?”

‘Stede’ hesitates. He’s still all geared up in this explorer outfit, but he’s lost the hat, and his hair is too fucking detailed, tiny squares a kaleidoscope of gold. “Of course,” he says eventually.

I keep trying to say something, but it won’t let me. “This really is the perfect brandy,” he hears his voice say. 

“Plenty more where that came from,” ‘Stede’ says, and Ed’s so sure that he was trying to say something else there too. 

They drink, no taste to it. 

Ed remembers reality as a distant thing. The mellow slip of a good spirit down his throat. The sea – the actual, physical sea – and how it sparkles under the sun, bends and twists, foamy white, in a storm, how it quivers dull green otherwise. He remembers crunching into an apple, stubbing his toe, the pleasant ache of a good hike, the fresh air easing stinging lungs at the top of a hill. He remembers warmth. Flesh. Skin against skin. The heat of another person’s body against his. He remembers, vaguely, things he would like to do with ‘Stede’. 

Even his pixels are pretty, is the thing. 

It’s plausible that he’s just the latest thing to send Ed over the fucking edge, sure. An experiment in how far a man’s madness can stretch. 

But he looks at Ed like he’s remembering what warmth used to feel like too. 

I think I’m falling for you, Ed tries to say, ridiculous as it is. Far too fucking earnest, clearly – the game twists his words: “Come to bed with me.”

Shooting and stabbing and screwing are fine, but feelings are a no-go. The machine steers them into the safety of a storyline between pirate captains, rather than whatever they really are – two souls adrift in the mainframe, lost at sea; the key, perhaps, to each other’s rescue.

Doesn’t stop the phantom flutter of something under Ed’s pixelated skin. Doesn’t stop ‘Stede’s cheeks turning into a dozen little squares of pink.

That’s not what I meant to say, Ed tries. “Apologies if that’s bold of me.” 

Stupid fucking computer doesn’t even sound like him, and ‘Stede’s staring – fuck, ‘Stede’ is staring like he doesn’t know what to do. Like there’s no scripted programming for this, like he’s unanchored in the pixeled abyss too.

His eyes drop down Ed’s form, taking in all the leather. Because here’s another thing: Ed has only ever had the one outfit, and then in came ‘Stede’ with a closetful, like this is some sort of fucking dress up doll game.

He lingers in front of deep red curtains, a portal to the bed nook, and says, “I’ll see you in the morning, Blackbeard.” And it doesn’t. Fucking. Sound like him. 

Ed wants to ask, What were you really trying to say? Where are you, Stede? How can I get to you?

He’s real, and ‘Stede’ is real – shit, ‘Stede’s got to be real – those are the only things that he knows for sure anymore. No end in sight, all other theories begin to lose track of themselves, a mess of indecipherable conclusions. This could be it forever, some inescapable hell loop, punishment for…everything he did back in his old life – or it’ll just keep going until his body out there has rotted away. 

Grim fucking thought, that, his physical form decaying in the seat of the game booth. 

Did they have to move his unconscious body away from all the kids and their rattling cups of coins? Is he somewhere in a fucking coma, or is this it now? Is that even how it works, he wonders, or did the whole of him just get sucked in? Did the screen consume his skeleton and he just disappeared from existence? 

If he dies in game, does it malfunction and eject him, or does he just…well.

He has tried. He’s not a fool, alright, he’s tried. Steered the ship off into a tempest, tempted crews into mutiny, somehow came out unscathed. He tried to get ‘Stede’ to stab him, for fuck’s sake, like there might’ve been a glitch in the system that kicked them both out of the game if one killed the other. He tried to get Izzy to shoot him, but he refused.

(There’s something in that, probably, as proof. The computer won’t let anyone else even try, but ‘Stede’ sank his sword into his stomach after a little goading.) 

Gory stuff. Couldn’t have got trapped in Candy Crush or fuckin’ Guitar Hero, could he? 

There’s no glitch, anyway. He heals up like magic the next day, and they go on another raid.

Same shit, but it starts to feel more violent. Maybe something about ‘Stede’ has softened him to it all. Or maybe…maybe the game has it in for the both of them. 

Feels like it, when they keep almost dying. Only almost, because Ed knows every trick in the handbook to get out of the increasingly perilous situations they find themselves in. Almost, because Ed’s actually fighting for his life now; because he’s got something to fight for.

Back to back, swords clash and bodies collapse around them. It’s raining. Ed used to love the rain – the cold, wet grey of it, the peaceful ebb of madness it kindled. The shadows of umbrellas and hoods that obscured everyone’s gazes, the rush to get somewhere warm and dry that Ed never succumbed to. Ed used to walk slow through the downpour, head tipped back to the merciless grey. Ed used to go out in a storm just to feel something.

He can’t feel it now, obviously – only knows it’s coming down in spades from the watery distortion of the bloodsoaked scene in front of him, how the boat pendulums back and forth, too rhythmic to be real. The waves toss like the once-every-thirty-minutes simulation at the local pool from Ed’s waterlogged childhood, artificial and predictable, easy to find his footing on. He remembers the sharp smell of chlorine, the sting in his eyes, the pruning of his fingertips; he remembers holding his breath for as long as he can, blinking underwater and imagining living down there with the fish and mystic unknowns of the sea. 

He remembers dreaming of a first kiss there – the deep end of the pool or the immeasurable ocean, he’s not sure anymore, the fantasies fold in on each other. Of water droplets on the skin of some faceless boy, legs brushing as they both treaded water, how the surf would push and pull them into each other. He remembers his real first kiss – under a bus stop, a last minute, panicked press of lips as the X7’s headlights cut through the leaden drizzle. How it was sweet in its own way; how the sea of umbrellas had made it feel safe and reckless all at once.

“I have a plan,” Ed shouts over the noisy battle.

“I thought this was the plan,” says ‘Stede’. “Fight them, get the gold and return to the Revenge for a cup of tea and a biccy?”

“No, I have a plan,” Ed says. He’s got to be careful here. Got to use words that the computer will let him use. Fall in line with the language of piracy. He slices his sword through the legs of an NPC and watches the pixelated bloodspray paint the deck. “I’m not going to let us die.”

“I should bloody hope not!”

God, Ed loves it when he sounds so human like that. 

“Stede,” he says. As much feeling to it as he possibly can. “I’m not going to let us die.”

He hears the soundbite of grunt, the swish and squelch of ‘Stede’s sword tugged from a body, the whip of the wind as ‘Stede’ spins to face him. 

“What’s your plan?” he asks, golden curls plastered back in the cartoon rain, one of his fancy shirts – lilac, like lilac is the kind of colour that exists in the blood and gore of a pirate game – slashed, broad chest on display, the tiny red boxes of minor cuts across his shoulder. ‘Stede’, whoever he really is, wherever he might be, probably can’t even feel them.

Do you trust me? Ed wants to say, but that must be too fucking earnest. “Am I a good pirate captain?” it comes out as, and okay, that works. That can work. 

“The best,” says ‘Stede’. Which is so earnest too, but it slips through the system, because the computer doesn’t know what they’re talking about here. It’s not familiar, Ed doesn’t think, with the concept of love. 

It didn’t know what to do with itself when ‘Stede’ dove overboard after him – all orange and pink pixels, Ed’s boyish daydreams resuscitated, a sparkling scaled tail as though the mermaids in the game aren’t dark sirens in the cavern levels, only there to coax sailors to their deaths. It can replace their words, fine, but it couldn’t touch the way ‘Stede’ had looked at him as they lay on the sunny shore after the grand rescue.

Here, now, to the game, ‘Stede’s words are just one captain complimenting another. 

But Ed hears it for what it is. Doesn’t need ‘Stede’s unfiltered words to know. 

In the pouring rain, he steps forward, one hand clutching his cutlass and the other cradling ‘Stede’s cheek. 

Ed kisses him, and he swears he can almost feel the tingle of it in his fingertips. Strange, since from what he remembers of kissing in the real world his fingertips didn’t ever tingle. Ed kisses him, and something thumps behind his ribcage. Ed kisses him and then feels something hard and unforgiving under his back, a pitch-black dizziness throbbing in his skull, and then he isn’t kissing him anymore, he doesn’t think, but he’s– 

He’s coughing his lungs up a bit, actually. 

It hurts. He laughs in delight, and it hurts.

There’s a pressure on his chest, and Ed scrambles to sit up. It feels like something is helping him, easing the weight of his body – the weight of his fucking body – with strong hands, guiding him to a seat in the darkness.

He blinks his eyes open, and oh. Not something. Someone. 

Someone not made of tiny little pixels; someone flesh and blood, warm and solid; Stede. 

Ed catches his breath – breath in his fucking lungs – and he stares at the man in awe. 

“Hi,” he says, and it’s slightly higher pitched than the computer, there’s a rasp around the edges of it, it’s so fucking human– he’s so fucking human that Ed chokes on a delighted laugh again. 

“Hey,” he wheezes out. “Stede. Fuckin’ hell.” 

Stede’s hand is outstretched, like it had been in that ludicrous cabin of his, and Ed takes it. It’s a cloudburst of sensation; skin sweeping skin, the give of flesh at the edges of their palms, soft fingertips and hard bone of knuckles, the ridges of metal rings, and the warmth. He’s so fucking mind-blowingly warm. 

The handshake stills but clings, fingers and thumbs flexing against each otherʼs in relish of human contact.

They’re in the arcade booth, shadows illuminated by the loading screen that spat them right back out into the amusement centre on Wolfchurch pier, like it was all just one big nightmare. A little message in the corner announces that inserting a pound coin will start the game – fat chance of that happening ever again. 

Ed tips his head to the side to take Stede, in all his humanity, in. 

He’s real, alright, eyes even more unfathomable in the soft electronic glow. There’s so much more detail to him like this – the wrinkles at his forehead and the stubble across his jaw; the dimple in his left cheek and his hair, blond with just the beginnings of some grey, curled under his ears, swooped over his brow. He’s got a burgundy shirt on with a ruffled collar – because it’s Stede, of course he has – and Ed’s so fucking glad to find out that the hoop in his ear wasn’t just some generic pirate game costuming.

Locked in the throng of cyber-programmed people, Ed hasn’t heard anyone actually breathe in fucking forever, forgot just how loud of a thing reality is. The tick-tock of Stede’s pulse is almost audible this close, the torrent rushing through his veins, his eyelashes meeting in each blink, life in surround-sound.

“I knew you were real.”

Stede smiles, big and bright. His incisors are sharp, a little wonky, nothing like that straight mouthed grin from the game, and he has a freckle above the bow of his upper lip. “What gave it away?” he asks, gaze shimmering. 

“Christ, mate, where to fucking begin. The library? The chandeliers? You do know the aim of the game is to kill people and get treasure, right? Not make your fuckin’ Barbie dreamhouse of a ship.”

He shrugs. “We all have our own ways of playing.”

“I like your way of playing,” Ed admits softly. The solid warmth of Stede’s hand anchors him to the moment.

It’s odd, because they’ve technically only just laid eyes on each other. But Ed still remembers the pale squares of moonlight on ‘Stede’s face when he tucked that scrap of red next to his heart, and he still spent what felt like weeks of game-time learning all his idiosyncrasies – the books and the bugs, and how he loaded his ship with marmalade over gunpowder despite not being able to taste a thing.

“Your gameplay isn’t too shabby, either,” says Stede, thumb skimming across Ed’s knuckles. “You got us out of there, after all.” 

Ed huffs. “Don’t know how that worked. Bit too fucking fairytale, don’t you think?”

“Well, if you believe hard enough, I suppose,” Stede says. “And…if you found the absolutely two perfect people.”

It’s an echo of something that Ed said over mocked-up brandy when they decided to captain the Revenge together. The computer couldn’t stop them, because it sounded like a gameplan, but it was really a love confession. 

At least, it felt like one in the pixels. Here, unfamiliar with the beat of his heart in his chest and the way that Stede looks at him, Ed’s not so sure. 

“Co-captains,” he whispers, testing the waters. “We beat the machine together.”

Stede scrunches his nose up. “Well, I don’t know about all that…”

“Mate, I couldn’t have got out there without you. You…you saved my life.”

Stede blinks at him. Unable, and maybe unwilling, to deny the truth of it, he says, “You saved mine too.”

It hangs between them. Ed can’t quite look at Stede now – the intense vividness of being known is so fucking much. He stares at the screen instead, harmless behind glass. He separates his fingers from their entanglement with a pat to the back of Stede’s hand, touch wandering to the console. Drifting over the coin slots, the neon green START buttons, everything sticky and clunky and innocuous. He almost marvels at it, this benign hunk of metal and plastic that became a pixelated penance for his soul. Trapped him as ‘Blackbeard’, a man that felt all too familiar to the darkest parts of his brain.

“I’m Ed, by the way,” he says, because that’s the part of him that he wants Stede to know.

“I know,” Stede says. 

Ed’s gaze snaps up to meet his. “What?”

Stede looks down at fidgeting, unheld hands in his lap, a very real flush of pink unfurling across his cheeks. Ed sees now how it managed to break through to the game. He blushes so intense that the pixels stood no chance. 

“Edward Teach. You went missing on February 29th 2020.”

“What date is it now, d’you reckon?”

“Haven’t a clue, I’m afraid, but I– I know I came here on Thursday, March 3rd. 2022.”

“Thursday,” Ed echoes numbly, the least significant part of that sentence catching in his brain for its mundanity. Ed always liked Thursdays and how they seemed to parallel rainy days – the frothy approach of them on the shore, the hushed frenzy; a world too busy to notice him in all his anguish, the perfect atmosphere for a mope.

At least two fucking years worth of Thursdays, gone. 

Ed wonders who had to make the call to report him missing. Not like he had any job to turn up to or any friends waiting on his calls. Maybe his neighbour, Kevin, whose dog he used to sit sometimes. The woman at the aquarium who used to gently usher him out at closing time multiple times a week. He wonders how long they searched for him before giving up.

Stede leans out of the booth. “Shit,” he says. “Looks like we won’t find out for a bit, anyway.”

Ed goes to follow him out, but his legs falter for a second. Stede catches him at the waist, and it turns out the muscles on him weren’t just basic character design either. 

“Woah, steady. There we go. Alright?”

“Yup. Still got to find my land legs, I guess,” he jokes. He allows himself one more second of clinging to Stede’s bicep before prising himself away. Stede huffs a quiet laugh, cautious hands still hovering close to Ed in case he stacks it again. Heat radiates off of him.

The arcade is mostly dark – games still glowing, but the main lights off and the street shuttered out. Empty, save for them. Must be locked up for the night.

“So I just disappeared,” Ed says.

“Sort of,” Stede replies. He follows Ed across swirled carpet, taking a seat beside him in front of the wheel of some driving game. “It’s… You’re kind of a local legend. A myth, you know, a…a mystery.” 

Ed’s knee bounces rapidly. Some red sports car flies down an endless road of black pixels in front of him. He curses and gets up again, itching and restless with the return of all his senses. With all the time that’s passed here, out of his control, without him. 

He paces the rows of pinball machines and penny pushers, trying to piece it all together and coming up short. 

“What do they think happened?”

“People have different ideas,” Stede says. Ed feels his eyes following him, back and forth. “Some say you…um, that you were last seen up on Hornigold’s Cliff and the current must have swept you away. Some suspect it’s not a coincidence you packed your bags and left town just after the bloke who ran The Sharkshead was fatally murdered. Some people think you were just a ghost, here and then…gone.”

“And what did you think?” 

“I figured it out, of course,” Stede says. He stands and approaches Ed, eyes lit up in the bright white spotlight that shines over the plush toys at the bottom of the teddy picker. Ed narrows his eyes like he’s trying to hook a claw into him, calculating the moves it’d take for a win. 

He’s feeling pretty lucky. “Go on then, Miss Marple.”

Stede grins, glinting mischievous and triumphant. Ed hears the satisfying clunk of the prize box with it. 

“There was a police report, see – don’t ask how I got it, I have my ways – and the last place you were seen– no rumours, no botched investigations, I mean cold, hard evidence, the last place you were really seen was here. There was security footage of you walking in and never walking out. Now, there’s a blind spot, sure, just in the left corner there by the door, but the camera at the back would’ve picked up you making your way towards it, at least. And it didn’t. You came in and you never left.”

“What, so you just go, ‘oh, yeah, guy got sucked into one of the games,’ boom, solved?”

He shrugs. “What else am I supposed to think?”

“Uh, I don’t know, anything else? That’s fucking insane, mate.”

“Well, I couldn’t come up with anything else. That was it. My one theory.”

Ed stares at him. “How many games did you play to figure out which one?” 

“All of them.”

“Jesus, Stede.”

“What?”

“That didn’t seem like a stupid idea to you? Man goes missing, and you just go and– and throw yourself right into what you think the cause of it is? You wouldn’t survive one fucking second in a horror movie, you nut.”

“Well, I–” Something complicated and so human crosses over his face. “I didn’t have anything to lose.”

Ed shakes his head, stunned by the familiarity of those words and how much it hurts to hear them from somebody else. 

He stares through the glass at a rabbit in the crush of toys, unable to meet Stede’s gaze. “What, so… So anyone who plays it gets sucked in? You don’t think someone would’ve noticed, all those people going missing?”

“It’s not everyone,” says Stede. “In fact, I don’t know that it’s anyone else at all. No one was reported missing after you. And I watched plenty of people come and go unscathed.”

“Just you and me?”

Stede shrugs, one-shouldered, small. “Who knows.”

“Why would it– I mean, how would that even work?”

He’s silent for long enough that Ed looks back up, finds his expression contemplative and sort of…sad. 

“I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I mean, I– I could theorise, but how will we ever truly find out?”

“You’ve been pretty good with the theories so far. Go on, hit me with it. What do you think?”

“Well. Okay. I hope this isn’t offensive, and please feel free to not answer, I just– How did you feel? The day you came here to play?”

Ed doesn’t remember much about the specific day – whether the mirage of him had been drifting aimlessly along the coast, through the comforting blue darkness of the shark tunnel, or contemplating the jagged crags over the shoreline – but he can guess. Felt the same fucking emptiness for forty four years of his life, so it’s not that difficult of a question to answer. 

“Like shit,” he says. “And you know what the fucking catch is? I woke up alone, all numb and pixelated, and…yeah, I figured out that I’d gone and got trapped, and I thought– well, fuck, it’s not like anyone’s waiting for me on the other side, is it? I’d kind of…accepted my fate, I guess, before you came along.”

Stede nods. “I think that’s…yes. I think that’s it. I moved here three months after you disappeared, and I had nothing. No one. And it was…it was still better than the life I’d left behind, which only tells you how miserable I must’ve been. But it was lonely. And there didn’t seem to be an end in sight to that loneliness. You know?”

“Yeah, I fuckin’ know.”

They share a melancholy smile, a little less alone here in the quietened chaos of the amusements.

“I don’t know if that’s really it, but it’s– it’s a correlated variable, at least.”

“You mean to say not everyone in the world feels this fucking alone all the time?”

“Apparently not,” Stede says, mouth twisting bittersweet.

“Huh.”

Ed fiddles with the joystick on the teddy picker, stiff without payment. It’s weird to hold something solid in his palm again after so long. To feel the prickle of tears behind his eyes, damp when he blinks. He breathes in sharply through his nose, overwhelmed by it all and so lost here in the presence of this man who is, essentially, a fucking stranger. 

“Hey,” Stede says. “Now you’ll always have someone waiting for you.”

Ed looks up at him, wide-eyed in the face of such unfiltered earnestness. The heartfelt is so unfamiliar to Ed, even without the past few years stripped to numbness by a machine. The race of his pulse is brand new.

“Me,” Stede clarifies, like there’s anyone else around here that tucked red silk over Ed’s heart. “I would wait for you.”

Overwhelmed, disorientated in the pinky-purple mist of emotion, it punches out of him fast; “Did you mean it?”

“Mean– mean what? That? Of course I’d wait for you, Ed, I–”

“No, man, all of it. The fucking– treasure hunts and the breakfasts and. And when you kissed me back, did you mean it?”

“Did you mean it?”

“Which bit?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, lips curving upwards to one side. He deepens his voice in some awful fucking Blackbeard impression, throwing his head back like a fair maiden with cascading locks. “‘Stab me, Stede! Ooh, Stede, come to bed with me, Stede, look at me and my big brown eyes in the moonlight, Stede, you’re a lunatic, Stede.’”

Ed laughs. “In total fucking fairness–”

Stede raises his eyebrows. “This should be good.”

“Shut up, listen, I didn’t– I never asked you to come to bed with me.”

“No, you did. I remember it well.”

“No, I mean I– ah, fuck. It was the computer.”

“Hm?”

“Did you ever try to say something and it– like, it wouldn’t let you, right?”

“Oh,” Stede says. His laughter fizzles out, smile dropping slightly. “I suppose, yes.”

“You thought I was trying to have pixel sex?”

His mouth drops open. Flushed red, he slams it shut again. He’s too sweet of a sight, embarrassed like he wasn’t in there constantly pulling the moves on Ed.

“Mate, I don’t know why you’re blushing now. You rejected me, remember?”

“I didn’t! I was trying to ask if you were really you!”

“Oh, so if I’d have said yes, you would’ve been down.”

Stede doesn’t answer, but he huffs plenty and looks off into the distance of neon labyrinth. 

“Oh my god,” Ed cackles. “You wouldn’t have even been able to feel it, are you kidding me? You really are a fucking lunatic.”

He watches pink creep past the triangle of Stede’s ruffled collar, addicted. He sways closer in his laughter, even as Stede stares up at the ceiling helplessly mortified. 

Ed lifts a hand to his face, fingers grazing his chin to tilt his gaze back to him. His skin is so warm, soft under the scratch of stubble. Magnetised, Ed brushes a thumb over his blushed cheek. It all stops being quite so funny when Stede’s lashes flutter at the touch. He stops laughing when those hazel eyes meet his again. 

“I’m dying to know,” Stede whispers. “What were you trying to say?”

“Doesn’t matter now, does it?” Ed goes to drop his hand from Stede’s face, but Stede’s palm – so warm, so alive – pins him there. 

“It does to me. Please?”

“Was trying to say,” Ed mumbles, like if he’s quiet enough about it, Stede might not hear it in all this buzzing silence, “I think I’m falling for you.”

“Oh,” says Stede. “And now that you’re out of the game, do you… Is that… Would you want to take that back at all?”

“No,” Ed says, brow furrowed. “I’d be mad to.”

“You are, to be fair, quite mad.”

“Not that mad. Or– well, maybe completely fucking mad, just…driven to insanity by you and your mental ship and your fuckin’ crappy swordsmanship and your pretty eyes.”

Stede looks caught between protest and flattery, blinking fast over watery hazel, the very cause of Ed’s madness.

“You want to hear something even more mad?”

“Boy, do I ever,” Ed says, grin crooked, his grasp on the world distorting out of shape. He’s never been looked at like this before. This could easily be another universe, another wormhole that he’s collapsing through at lightspeed – except Stede’s so warm and beautifully tangible, the breath on his lips so in reach, that it couldn’t be at all. Could only be Earth, here with him. 

“I’m in love with you,” Stede says.

“Yeah,” Ed manages, hoarse. “That is…pretty fucking mad.”

Stede laughs like he knows and he doesn’t care. 

“Fuck are we going to tell people? ‘How did you meet?’ ‘Oh, I was just trapped in this game, and he went and got sucked in too, and he thought my sexy pixelated form was irresistible.’”

“‘I’d been gut-stabbed,” Stede riffs with him, “and he just so happened upon the ship I was bleeding out on.’”

“Didn’t just so happen. I went looking for you.”

That gives Stede a pause. “You did? Why?”

“Already told you. I knew you were real.”

“But– how? You couldn’t have–”

“I did,” says Ed, brushing a silver-streaked golden curl back. “I just did.”

“Just when I think you can’t amaze me more.”

“Stede,” Ed whispers. “What would you say if,” he takes a deep breath, achingly human, all nerves and jitters, “if I kissed you and it…wasn’t to save our lives? It was just a– a kiss? Just ‘cause?”

“I’d love that,” Stede breathes, and Ed leans forward to taste its reverence.

It’s sweet like their pixels, for a moment – and then, in the warmth of lips meeting and oxygen shared and bodies solid against each other, it’s greedy and hot. Their mortal eagerness has them stumbling through the maze of games, kisses never ceasing, hands rejoicing in corporeal flesh. 

Stede’s back hits the wall of the arcade booth that they woke up in. In the dark glow of it, Ed licks into his mouth.

The electric light from inside burns at his eyelids, head all tangled up in pixels and particles, reality and not. Stede is grounding – ruffled shirt, clutching fingers and trembling moans, the wet heat of his mouth – but Ed still feels like if they part, if only for a second, he could so easily trickle away back into the dark dimension of piracy.

In there, he could’ve kissed Stede forever and never have needed to breathe with it. Here, remarkably alive, his lungs run out, and he has to pull back, just fractionally, from the kiss.

Ed glares at the plastic wall, painted in crashing waves and garish, overflowing treasure chests, behind Stede.

“Ed? Are you alright?” he asks, wonderfully breathless. 

“Yeah,” Ed says, dragging distracted eyes back to Stede.

Stede, who’s all flushed and dishevelled, a world apart from his coiffed pixels and yet still so unmistakably himself. So much of him bled through into the game, Ed realises, watching the way his eyebrows furrow; the soft amber in his eyes, kind and worried and dark. His expressions feel familiar, even in the newness of flesh, because there’s something so Stede about them all. Something so like home in the way he looks at Ed.

“Yeah, I’m good.” He leans back in, drowning out the memories of infinite two-dimensionality.

He can’t shake it though. He kisses Stede, and images of his pixelated, straight-toothed smile flashes through his head. He has to keep pulling back to remind himself of the exact slope of his nose, the crease in his cheek that dimples when he smiles. 

“Fuck,” he sighs in frustration. “This fucking thing. We should just fuckin’– just smash it up.”

Stede turns his head, studying the skull and crossboned hunk of plastic. He raises his eyebrows, wry with teasing amusement, as he looks back to Ed. “And how do you suggest we do that?”

Ed answers by wrestling a fire extinguisher off the wall. He tries not to think about how dizzy he feels stepping away from Stede as he does so, cold in every place that those strong hands had roamed. 

In the middle of the neon chaos is a kiosk, filled to the brim with all the mundanity that it takes to run a flashy arcade. Ed flings drawers open and wrangles a couple of hammers.

He slaps the handle of one into Stede’s palm, warmer now he’s back by his side. “There you go. Do your worst.”

Stede’s responding gleam of roguery, sharp grin and a wink, has Ed wanting to beg for the same under very different circumstances. Splayed out for him in candlelight, those tight pleated trousers and frilled shirt long disappeared for an endless expanse of soft, muscled heat.

He swallows back his desire and lifts the fire extinguisher above the glass screen, ready to watch it shatter to smithereens.

“Wait!”

Ed freezes, arms in the air. He looks at Stede. 

Worry dulls his earlier mischief. “What if there are other people in there? I mean… We don’t know how long I’ve been gone.”

Ed stares wide-eyed at Stede, slowly lowering the extinguisher. He’s such a sweetheart. Ed feels all kinds of terrible, because he didn’t even think of that. Forgot, a little bit, that anyone but them even exists. That’s how it was in the game – the two of them against the machine, every other presence so scripted and insincere. So insignificant. 

“If Izzy turns out to be a real fuckin’ guy, I’m going to be so pissed.”

That makes Stede crack a smile. “He really was a nightmare.”

“I think I know how we can figure it out,” Ed says. “C’mon.” 

He takes Stede’s hand in his, leading him to the devastation earlier made of the kiosk. Invoices are scattered everywhere, paperclips and rubber bands littering hideous carpet, like the besmirched waves behind the retreating pixels of Blackbeard’s ship.

Ed blinks away red-cubed memories.

The desktop starts up sluggish and clunky when he turns it on. Eventually the loading circle makes way for green rolling hills and a cloudless sky, and there in the corner sits the time – 5:18 a.m. – and the date.

Ed’s been disappeared from Wolfchurch – from the whole of reality – for four years. 

It’s January 9th 2024. The numbers don’t even look real, but there they are, bright white and haunting. Him and Stede stare at them for a lingering, weighted moment before Ed clicks ‘log in’, exorcising the screen of the ghostly reminder of all the time that’s trickled away.

His fingers hover over the keyboard, cursor waiting in the empty password bar. “Fuck,” he mutters. Didn’t think this one through. Forgot about tedious, modern things like passwords and cookies and fuckin’ emails and shit.

Then Stede lifts the keyboard from under his hands, and simple as that, there’s a piece of paper sellotaped to the underside of it with Unicorn123 scrawled in biro. 

Ed narrows his eyes, biting down on a smitten grin, and types in the password. “You’re fuckin’ fascinating,” he says.

Stede just smiles, shining beautiful on the right side of a screen.

A Google search for missing people in Wolfchurch instantly brings up a flurry of articles thumbnailed with that gorgeous face. Stede Bonnet, 49.

Ed’s never cared about birthdays, but he finds himself inexplicably sad for Stede having missed the big five-oh. He reckons that Stede’s the kind of guy who loves a big bash. Loves to be fussed over. Though, from their shared loneliness – and this thought devastates him even further – maybe no one’s ever bothered. 

He wants to throw a party for every birthday that they’ve both missed whilst trapped in the game. Fuck it, he’ll bake a cake for every year that nobody baked Stede one, shower him in embarrassing celebrations and expensive gifts. His bank account’s probably frozen, sure, but he’s got money stashed somewhere. Thousands, actually, safe and sound where no bank can get their grubby hands on it.

He goes to scroll down, aware of the staggering painfulness to the whole thing, but Stede’s hand falls on top of his on the mouse and stills him.

He leans in close to the computer, reading each headline like prodding a bruise. “That’s rich,” Stede scoffs at one of them – a quote from someone called Mary saying she hopes he’s okay. “She was perfectly glad to see the back of me after I walked in on her and her painting instructor one evening, let me tell you.” 

Under the snark, Ed can see the glassy shine to his eyes, bygone days of hurt evident under the surface of his familiar courage.

Ed lifts his pinky finger to hook over Stede’s, a small comfort in the strange grief of it all. Stede strokes his thumb over Ed’s knuckles, smiling softly in his periphery. At least they have each other in this peculiar sadness. It’s still them versus the world.

Further down the page, a couple of clickbait articles ponder Ed’s own disappearance, but that’s it. They’re the only two people under the search.

He cuts a look across at Stede, raised brow and a questioning glimmer of trouble. Stede grins back.

They rush back to the game, armed to the nines. 

“We’ve got about half an hour,” Stede says, weighing up a hammer in his hand. 

“How d’you figure?”

“The man who runs the arcade arrives at six every morning, even though it doesn’t open until nine. Rigging the machines, probably. Between you and me, I don’t think he has anything better to do with his time.”

“Better get started then.”

Stede Bonnet, turns out, is kind of a bitch. Ed very almost backs him up against the booth again, desperate to get his mouth back on his.

Instead he lets Stede swing first, hammer crashing hard into the glass. A fissure erupts over the loading screen’s stormy bays, demolishing shorelines that Ed became all too sickeningly familiar with. Then Ed swings too.

Together, they attack the machine over and over again, metal colliding and denting, floor scattering with shards of glass and metal coils, the computer coming apart at the seams.

“Stupid…motherfucking…game!” Ed shouts over the loud crash of destruction. He rams the fire extinguisher into the power supply, wires hissing and sparking as the force of it mangles them up. “Fuck you!”

“Fuck you!” Stede agrees, hammering down at the control buttons. 

Ed grins up at him, and Stede giggles, sunny and musical. It’s then that Ed thinks, with startling clarity, that he’s going to marry him. Stede, with the sleeves of his floaty shirt rolled up to his elbows and sweat shimmering, like an echo of his pink and gold tail under the depths, is the one. The one that Ed’s going to figure this whole reality thing out with. The one that he’s going to drag out into the rain with him; the one that he’s going to argue about nothing with; the one that he’s going to bring breakfast in bed, let the toast go cold for kisses, let the sun get nice and settled in the sky outside, the two of them oblivious to it.

Stede wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, fingers still wrapped tight around the hammer, forearms muscular and freckled. “No salvaging that, eh? We’ve shown it what’s what, don’t you think, Ed?”

Ed doesn’t say anything. He simply steps forward, boots crushing broken glass, and sweeps him up into a kiss. 

He doesn’t expect it, but maybe he should, when Stede clicks away at the security system in the backroom to erase all footage of their vandalism. However justified it is, it’s pretty unlikely that ‘we got trapped and tortured by a pirate simulator at the family amusements’ would hold up too well in court. 

Four minutes to six o’clock, they duck behind a fruit machine and wait. Stede’s arm brushes Ed’s in the neon shadows, electrifying. Ed wants him closer. He can tell that Stede wants to kiss him again, and it’s making him a little stir crazy.

“What do we do when we get out of here?” Stede asks in a whisper.

“Well,” Ed says, smirking in the dark, “I’d invite you back to mine, but there’s probably about four years worth of cobwebs and spiders, so I’m thinking I’ll just burn the place down actually.”

Stede ducks his head against Ed’s shoulder, and Ed knows that he’s blushing even if he can’t see it. With his nose pressed into Ed’s coat, he looks up, a smile in his eyes that’s both coy and menace. 

“I’ll go in first and kill them all?” he suggests, and yeah, Ed’s definitely going to fucking marry him. 

He laughs, clutching tighter at Stede’s hand. His ears stay half tuned into the silence. The minutes stretch out around them, the pass of time so slow without computer interference. Ed reckons he could luxuriate in it for a while, the quiet rise and fall of their breaths intermingling, the slightly fluttery thump of his heart in his ears.

Stede’s head stays rested on his shoulder, and Ed’s fingers find themselves carding through his curls, softer than he remembered anything could be.

“I think we should go to the beach,” Ed says. 

“The beach?”

“Yeah. The beach. Fucking love the beach.”

“Won’t it be…a tad cold? It’s January.”

Ed goes to shrug, but then he remembers Stede pressed against him, so he stays still. Doesn’t want either of them to move ever again, cramped as they are ducked behind the fruit machine. It’s strange, this whole cuddling business – this whole sharing his space with someone else. It’s not something he’s ever done before, and he feels frozen with it now, hesitant to move a muscle in case the moment shatters. In case Stede slips away from him and he ends up back in an endless compass of squares again.

Fucking pixels still all jumbled in his brain. 

Before he can reply, a clatter breaks the silence, shutters rising and front door unlocking. Stede twists his neck around the corner, watching the owner’s legs make their way past the penny pushers towards the kiosk. He’s mapped a route out for their escape, quick past the unicorn kiddie ride, invisible thanks to this supposed blind spot of the security cameras. 

His skillful espionage is definitely doing things to Ed. 

Stede grabs his hand and tugs him along, and like two rebel kids, they sprint through the labyrinth of games. Feet scuffling against the carpet, giddy laughter bubbling up through the both of them, they cause a racket that makes the arcade owner shout after them. It grows distant, though, as they leave the smashed up scraps of their torment behind. 

The running doesn’t stop. Their footsteps echo down the pier, empty save for the odd early bird jogger. Concrete turns to rocky sand, crunching beneath Ed’s boots and Stede’s chunky-heeled loafers.

The sky is still star-studded, velvet indigo and freezing cold. The sharp freshness of it burns in Ed’s lungs. 

He didn’t have a plan exactly, but it seems his body does. His legs carry him hurtling towards the water, hands at his belt buckle. Stede’s laughing behind him, verging on manic as he slips and slides over the rocks. 

“What on earth are you doing?” Stede cries as Ed’s clothes get strewn across the beach.

“Come on, man,” Ed shouts, icy water biting at his ankles. “You don’t fancy a dip?”

“You’ve got to be mad,” Stede says, but he’s kicking his shoes off too. 

“Yeah,” Ed says, “we’ve established that.” 

He does feel well on his way to total fucking lunacy with how cold it is, but god is it a reminder of his physical body. Of feeling, when he thought he might never feel again. The blissful recklessness of being alive, a sweetly dangerous buzz. He wades further in, freezing to the bone and ecstatic about it. 

Stede dips a toe against the tide and stumbles back. “Absolutely not! You’re going to catch your death, Edward.”

Ed laughs at the sky, breath a cloudy vapour misting into the still-dark morning. His head tips back, hair sinking into the ocean, head to toe glacial now. “I feel so fuckin’ alive,” he sighs.

He catches Stede’s eyes on him, certain that his cheeks are burning pink even if the moonlight is too dim to make it visible. His gaze traces the rivulets of icy saltwater at Ed’s collarbones, and he looks hesitant but spellbound. 

“Stede,” Ed says, voice low and deep, arm outstretched. The water glistens across his tattoos. He feels more siren than human, like he’s the one tempting sailors into the depths. “Join me.”

“You know, there’s a very nice inn just up the road? Fireplace in the lobby and everything, very– warm.” He squeaks the last word out as Ed splashes a cold wave at him. 

“What, do you turn into a mermaid when you get wet?” Ed says, firing another splash at him. “Don’t want me seeing your tail, is that it?”

“You should be so lucky,” Stede huffs back, and yeah, Ed was, pulled out of the darkness by those orange sparkles.

“Aw, come on, you can trust me. You’re going to freeze your balls off stood there anyway, mate, might as well give into temptation.”

He’s so obviously fighting a smile, he’s so obviously going to join him, but he’s being a dick about it first. It’s one of the many things that has Ed totally, ridiculously fucking captivated. 

“I’m a good pirate captain, right?”

Stede gives one last yearning glance towards the pier, like he’s kissing warmth goodbye forever, and then he says, “The best.” 

It’s better than all those pixels, Stede submerged in the silvery sea, nose red with the cold and starlight soaking his wet curls. His knees graze Ed’s underwater instead of a scaled tail. He squeals out a string of curses as the ocean swallows him up to his shoulders.

Ed’s memories of the sea start to rewrite themselves, the battlefield fading for natural beauty. He feels one with the ebb of the tide, finally and wholly present, not a computerised dot left in his mind. Just the waves, the sand, the splinter of an orange sunrise on the horizon’s cusp – and Stede, majestic in his humanity. 

“See?” Ed beams at him, swimming closer. He holds Stede’s face in his hands, savouring the remaining warmth from sea-splashed skin. “Alive.”

A starling trills in the sky somewhere. Stede gazes up at the moon above them, small and half-waxed. So unlike the full sphere that had hung over the Revenge’s deck, but there’s a trace of it in the air still, the reverberation of the gentle words Stede had uttered. There’s the phantom of it in his eyes when he looks back at Ed, unspoken but ringing clear between the both of them. The admissions of love that slipped through the mainframe. 

“Alive,” Stede agrees, and it’s a confession of its own. It’s a promise, Ed thinks – one he’s never made before. One he plans on keeping for as long as he can.