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Ed stirs slowly. He's warm, comfortable, and enveloped within the grasp of something that feels a bit like an octopus. If an octopus was dry, and as big as a man, had four clingy limbs instead of eight, and had a fondness for using one of them to sweep up and down the bare skin of Ed's back.
Okay, so maybe not a lot like an octopus at all.
Ed smiles. Through his closed eyelids, he perceives a golden light; dawn streaming in through the one window whose curtains he always insists on leaving open at night. In their first weeks here, Stede would close it every night, only for Ed to come along and nudge the curtains open again, and after a while Stede clearly noticed he was doing it on purpose and let it go. Now it never gets closed, not unless they feel the need to shut out the world for a while.
It's nice, is the thing. Going to sleep safe under the stars, and waking up embraced by the sun.
And Ed has it at his front and his back today. He stretches, long and languid like a cat, and the chest behind him rumbles and shakes with a familiar laugh.
"Morning, Ed," Stede whispers even though there's no one else to hear, because it feels like sharing treasures that belong to no other soul but them.
Careful fingers brush a little of Ed's hair back from his neck so that Stede can bend forward and press a kiss to the skin there. Then another on the side of his jaw, and one just behind his ear. His eyes still closed, Ed absorbs every sensation of it - the soft brush of lips, the slight rasp of stubble, the puff of warm air against sensitive skin.
And then, "I love you," Stede says, for no reason at all except that he means it, and it's such a fucking miracle that Ed can't stay still any more. Can't just lie there and do nothing with all the dazzling feeling going off like fireworks in his chest.
He has to wriggle a little bit to loosen the arm Stede has around his waist and the tangle their legs have become. This task achieved, he flips himself over and immediately gets his legs right back around Stede's again, and deliberately deposits Stede's arm back where it belongs as well.
This earns him another little laugh, but this time Ed gets to see it dancing across Stede's face.
And this is the other reason he likes to let the sun inside in the mornings. Because it doesn't only land in golden warmth on him, it does the same for Stede. And Stede was born for it. He's so beautiful. The light lies so well on that mess of golden hair, where the odd curl or two is starting to turn to silver now like moonlight glinting off the sea. The lines on his face sit a little deeper than they used to, but it's the ones around his mouth and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes that are the most well-worn paths these days. His eyes shine as he looks at Ed, and what a remarkable thing it is that Ed went through decades of his life not knowing how it felt to have someone look at him like that but now he does know, and he knows he will never have to be without it again.
What a thing to be so loved, and to be loved so endlessly in return.
He's stopped asking if he deserves it. That kind of question haunted him a lot back when they first set up here. So many doubts and so much uncertainty - about himself, about Stede, about what life could be for them.
Five years now, and he doesn't regret a day. And they all begin like this.
"I love you too," Ed says, and then remembers to add, "good morning."
Not the way round you're meant to say it, probably, by society's rules, but what does he care? He loves Stede, and that means Stede will have a good morning, because Ed will make it so.
"Yes, it is," Stede says, and this time when he shuffles closer Ed comes in to meet him. They kiss slow and lazily, hands trailing up to each other's faces without urgency. They have time for tenderness. They have all the time in the world.
Although perhaps not without interruption.
"What's the time?" Ed says after minutes or years, breathing the words against Stede's lips. "How long've we got?"
"Barely past dawn," Stede answers quietly. "Hours yet. I think they remember what happened last time they came early without warning."
Ed snickers with fond remembrance. "That was a fun day."
"Lucius still mentions that he's mentally scarred in every single one of his letters."
"Exactly." Ed giggles again.
Stede sighs, but if he's trying to sound put-upon he shouldn't be so tenderly brushing his thumb along Ed's cheek as he does it or looking at him like Ed's joy is the brightest light on earth.
"Breakfast then, I suppose," he says, and utterly fails to sound anything but fond. "And we should start thinking about what we'll do for dinner. Our crew are always hungry."
Our crew. Five years they've been retired now, and the crew have found their own adventures since - sometimes parting ways as life leads them apart, but always coming back together in the end. And every few months they come back here, all of them, without fail: to the island where Ed and Stede have been together all that time, and still when they come back they call them both captain.
They'll always be their crew, his and Stede's. Except now Ed calls them family too, and loves them.
What a thing. What a joy.
"Mm, good point," Ed says, and shuffles a bit closer until his head lands on Stede's pillow and he gets his arms both under and over Stede and attaches himself there like a limpet. "Or," he says, half-muffled by the pillow and their mingled hair, "we could assume that if they've got any common sense they'll bring their own fucking food, and stay here for another five hours."
He squints at Stede with his eyes half-closed, and the expression he sees there fills his heart with something even floatier and more sparkling than fireworks. Something he doesn't have a name for, but that transcends any hurt or sorrow he's ever felt in his life. He doesn't need to name it to hold onto it, to blaze with it, to know beyond doubt that he is in the place where he will always be safe and happy.
"Yeah, let's do your thing," Stede says, and settles back down properly into the important task of holding Ed as tight as Ed is holding him. "Best idea I've ever heard."
And with the warmth of the sun now on his back and Stede before him, Ed smiles and closes his eyes again.