Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“How was your day, Edward?”

The candle on the table is the only light in the room. The rest of his family went to bed hours ago. 

The sigh leaves him. He does not remember inhaling. 

In recent weeks, he has begun to understand that sanity will abandon him slowly—or more accurately, that he will abandon it. Each night, he inches further from the last place they cohabited, he and sanity, and further into the realm of … whatever this is. 

“Got a suit today.” He giggles, telling his secret. He’d imagined himself in candlelight, eyes all over him—only two. “Red. Sharp. You’d have liked it, I think. But I returned it, you know.” Another giggle bursts from him. “Nowhere to wear it. More of a curse than an outfit, really.”

His wine is dry. His mouth drier. The giggles subside and silence swaddles him. The clock ticks in the adjacent room. His head feels heavy in the palm he leans it on. Twice the normal weight. Three times. 

But then, his whole body is leaden. He is fusing to the chair. Gravity, entropy. Time. 

He’s not far gone enough to not understand that Edward isn’t real.

Edward Teach is a pirate. A dread pirate—also a dead pirate, from three hundred years ago, half-legend and half-myth, more story than history, more smoke than mirrors.

Stede reads too much. Always has.

But especially lately, as his children grow into their lives and hobbies and friends, as his wife finds her second life in the wake of it, as the implosion ends and the long explosion begins, flinging it all away—and there, at the center, is Stede. He is sitting alone at his dining table, talking to a fictional pirate as the candle flickers, withers, and dies. 

He could go to the books. Right now. There is nobody to stop him. 

Nobody but himself. 

The books are in his study, a stack on the floor next to his chair. At the very bottom is the one that started all his troubles: the Christmas gift last year from Mary’s brother—a stab in the dark (hah hah), some bloated bestseller, a sweeping history of piracy that half the people on planet earth bought for the brother-in-law they barely knew that December. Stede read absently, barely absorbing. He wasn’t there to feel, he was there for the absence of feeling, to let time pass without need of him. Why would he want to go somewhere when he could go away? The words came and came, a soothing incantation, Blackbeard’s glorious extralegal exploits in the Caribbean, and then—

… it was there that Teach met Captain Stede Bonnet, known as The Gentleman Pirate. Bonnet was a wealthy landowner who abandoned his family in favor of a life of piracy despite his lack of sailing experience due to what some records describe as his “discomfort in a married state.” Bonnet was known, among other things, for paying his crew a living wage when other pirate captains forced them to loot and steal to earn their bread. He is also credited with inventing the concept of walking the plank: the practice of forcing an enemy to walk off a beam of wood extended over the side of the ship into the ocean.

With Bonnet’s permission, Teach took over his ship, The Revenge. Bonnet’s crew worked willingly for the more experienced pirate. For years, they sailed and worked together without incident until Bonnet, evidently fearing consequences from the governor, departed on a small sailing boat. Sources are divided on the nature of their relationship, but a plurality agrees that it was most likely a mentorship scenario that was hindered by Bonnet’s lack of skill generally and his impulse to flee when things got dicey…

There had been a glitter of good chemicals all down his body, like Tibetan bowl sounding, like fingernails on his scalp. He turned the page. 

The illustration showed Edward Teach trussed up in guns, gripping a sword, hand on his hip, tall and lithe and … soft. His face was nine tenths obscured by smoke and hair and beard—but the eyes, even illustrated, told more story than the words. The eyes looked directly out from the page, across the years, in defiance of physics and time and logic. They glinted with knowing, sharp as the cutlass, slicing through scar tissue around Stede’s heart, through every impossibility between them and him. They asked a question: Do you see me?

The sudden blood flow nearly lifted him straight off the chair.

”Isn’t that strange?” He tapped the paragraph later, as Mary leaned over to read. She had paint everywhere, a thumbprint on her cheek, a pale spring sky blue, like maybe someone—

“You can’t be the only Stede Bonnet in history.” She frowned. She did not notice that the book shook in his hands. 

She went to shower the paint off.

But it WAS strange. Not for the fact of a name, the fact of history, but for the fact of a feeling: a body-level certainty that this changed something, that it was important—that he was meant to read it. 

He took the book to his study, wanting it, for some reason, far away from his marital bed. There, he read the paragraph again and again. He flipped to the index—that was the only mention of the other Stede Bonnet. Edward—Blackbeard—was, after all, the far more famous between them. 

So, back to the paragraph. Whatever he was supposed to understand would become clear if he only read it again, and again. 

And again. 

It was just there, a hovering no-see-um, biting. He closed his exhausted eyes, pressed his fingers to them, and—

A single flash: wet deck pressed to his cheek, salty air in his throat, his hands behind his back (tied?), adrenaline racing around him, and a low rumble from behind all that beard and smoke and time, Never left—

He slammed the book closed. His breathing was fast and shallow, the room blinked in and out of focus. An arrow straight through him, wedging between his ribs—no, a rapier, a gut stab, but no sepsis, no tetanus, only to shock him back to life, only to make him feel something. 

He sat very still. 

The book said he went by Thatch, Thach, Thache, Thack, Tack, Thatche, Theach, and possibly, once, before everything, Drummond. 

He was Ed, though. 

His name is Ed. Stede knew then. 

The feeling in him vibrated and flickered, like if he got too close he might spook it. Carefully, he brushed, flossed, moisturized. He climbed into his silk pajamas. He went to bed with careful slowness. The click of his bedside lamp turning off was so loud he felt it in his teeth. It echoed around his head as he shut his eyes and breathed. In and out. 

Leather. 

The sea surging beneath him, floorboards creaking—a window, a door—sunshine yellow, backwards stained glass B—a room lit by candlelight chandeliers, the reek of tallow, wood, fat rafters like his dining room, plush, lush, textured, odd angles canting. Sitting up hurts. A slug trail stain on the floor, from the door to the bed. His blood. He’s never seen so much of his own blood before. Smells fire, wait—a pipe, smoking, a twist of it languishing toward the ceiling, the low ceiling—the belly of a beast—a ship, his ship, B is for Bonnet.

A door. A secret door that opens with a trick. 

A door that opens with a secret. Can you keep a secret? Oh, yes. He can keep it from anyone, especially himself. 

But Ed, though, Ed is in there. Stede knows it but he doesn’t. The room gets smaller and hotter as it absorbs them. The room is the secret but there is another. 

Face to face, his throat constricts with the walls, with the fever, with the smoke and tallow and Ed, the proximity to those eyes, through time, through space—

I’m Blackbeard. He is the voice and the smoke, the song Stede forgot, the vibration low enough to get between his cells and move them in concert. One eye closes, only one, but the other never leaves him, it never left—

A grin just for him, for no one else—what is the last thing that was his alone? This dream, this knowledge, this smile— shh, cool warming, a secret inside a secret, a hush over the sea, the air, the soul, and then—

The worn, warm animal softness beneath his fingers, the heat it trapped, the mold of Ed’s body around his own. The sun beats on him, soaks into the leather, twists around his fever. Somewhere in the deep center of him, where the blood used to be, where the blade was, is the spot that knows. The sun touches him there, seeping, infusing him with what he can no longer avoid, the secret, the trick door, the hush—Ed soft, in velvet and lace, Stede’s clothes. He is motion made still, the waterfall of hair, the silken lashes, the eyes that ask: do you see?

And then, Stede is running. He is running as fast as his legs will carry him. The branches whip and scratch his face, tear his clothes. 

He sat bolt upright in the bed, confused, soaked in sweat.

He was alone. Where was Mary?

He stumbled toward his office. He opened the book to the page with the illustration. He was shocked to feel the tears come. 

Not because he was afraid. Not because he was sad. Because it was real, realer than anything had been in a long, long time. 

And because nobody would believe him. 

Nobody but Ed. 

How do you find a legend? The phone book? The community cork board at the grocery store?

Here’s how you don’t find one: transcendental meditation. Yoga. Acupuncture. Therapy—although that’s a maybe, because he assumes therapy doesn’t work as advertised when you lie your way through precisely one session because you are too chickenshit to admit that you are desperate to find a pirate from the 18th century whom you’ve convinced yourself is alive. Do you think I should maybe try Craigslist? I mean, come on. 

No. 

Reading books hadn’t found him Ed either, but he likes to think they’re getting him closer. Every book on Blackbeard, every book that mentioned The Gentleman Pirate, every book that every brother-in-law has ever received at Christmas. He read them all, late into every night. Night after night, until it began to affect his ability to do his job, to care about where his wife increasingly spent her evenings, to do everything except goad his boisterous children to play pirates with him so he could exist in that slipstream and feel, for a tiny bit each day, infinitesimally closer to Ed, right up until someone demanded he do something more appropriate with his time. 

Edward Blackbeard Teach was slick, cunning. He used trickery instead of violence, leading with his reputation instead of any of his several guns. He wore, for some reason, leather in the Caribbean humidity. He was prone to fits of moodiness, during which his crew gave him a wide berth. He was fierce and he was feared and he was tall and he was rich and he was strong and he had iron control of the seas and a minute understanding of her weathers and he was an impenetrable, unstoppable force. 

And in his dreams, Ed looked at Stede like he had something he was dying to tell him.

He honed his sleep hygiene. Filed it like a weapon. Chamomile, melatonin, long baths, screens down, lights out. Eight hours a night—sometimes more, sometimes ten, eleven—anything to understand. 

But the dream is always the same. The blood, the secret room, Ed’s leather on his skin, and then—running for his life. Again and again and again. 

Speaking of: time for bed.

Little things glow in the kitchen, clocks and gadgets and buttons. The fridge hums. The tile is freezing up through his slippers. 

He runs the water until it’s screaming hot. He holds his hands beneath it for a long moment. Blood roars into his fingers from wherever it was hiding inside him. 

All manner of things seem to hide inside him. He contains a vast and sprawling world of left socks. His pale blue dreams, soft, hole in the toe; his deep maroon hope, golden diamond pattern; his future—black. Left socks all the way down, a man comprising only halves. 

Sometimes he tries to reach down to them. He is a broken claw machine eating quarters. His fingers graze them and they slip and all that he has are the outside right socks, the ones that say his dreams and ambitions and future are all small, normal, human things, things his family and colleagues expect of him. The left socks stay firmly, infuriatingly put. 

His fingers start to burn in the water. The wine glass in his fingers feels like nothing. It hits the cast iron not with its normal tink but with a dull crack. Probably, he ought to know what the sound means, but he’s busy watching the swirl of merlot as it wends toward the drain. Good merlot, a shame to waste it, good enough that he drained the whole glass, and—

Oh, yes. That’s not wine, that’s his blood. It flows from the left socks up through his heart, his viscera, the fingertips shaking under the hot water and down, down the drain. The hot water is undoubtedly making this problem worse. Perhaps that is why there is so much of his blood in the sink. 

He examines his hand. There is an inch long slash on the interior of the second segment of the index finger of his right hand. It is not deep, it requires no stitches, no butterflies, a simple bandaid, perhaps a kiss to make it better—and yet, the blood comes and comes, it clings to the white cast iron, it pools around the edge of the tarnished copper drain. 

Somewhere—some time—a cabin, bigger on the inside. A trail of blood from the door to the bed. How big was the cut that made all that blood? Six inches? Ten? Twenty? Would the blood be measured in cups? Quarts? Gallons? 

Oceans?

Something curious happens deep within him. A structural failure, a crumpling. It careens down through his groin, his thighs, into his knees. They fold, and he lets them. 

His knees are not enough. Whatever crumpled goes on crumpling. He lowers himself to his back, feet on the mat before the sink. The tile against his skull is a jolt of frigid cold. It shocks his eyes to closing. 

Supine blackness, the world spins 180 degrees, but then it keeps going, a soft undulation, a rhythmic motion— oh no, not here, not now—

Boots. Black, black boots, black leather against dark wood, pink twilight—salt. Salt in his mouth, sharp against the merlot, a contradiction within him, lurching his stomach. 

The boots, they are connected to legs, long legs, up, up, his eyes move but his head can’t, or it can but it hurts, god, it hurts, everything—and the legs end in a gun? The gun that made the blood? No, a different gun—why does he know this? The legs become a torso, a jacket, an exposed arm, tan, tattooed, hair brushing the shoulder, god, the hair. The hair makes lifting his head seem worth it, and up he goes, up, up so he can see, his whole middle is fire, but there it is, the face, the strange smile, the eyes from the illustration, the eyes are what pierced him, ran him through—

The Gentleman Pirate, I presume.

It takes a moment to register—the man means him, means Stede. This is how it begins. This is the land of lost left socks, this dream, this hope, this future's past, black from head to toe, silver when the light catches, tall, dangerous, soft—

There is commotion around him, chaos, smoke, screaming, guns firing. The blood goes out but the chaos closes in, closer and tighter, spiraling toward the center, toward the wound, toward—there isn’t time now—

You’ve heard of me?

I’ve heard all about you.

A song swells within him, a haunting elegy, fragile harmony. Which can only mean—

Ed? Is that you?

I dunno, mate, is it? You tell me. This is your dream. I think technically that means I’m you.

The sea goes up and down and up and down.

You’re me? The … The Gentleman Pirate?

Is that who you are?

Am I?

Ed laughs. He cocks a brow. Shouldn’t you know that, mate?

Should he know it? Come to that, what does he know? 

He knows he’s been The Gentleman Pirate for 45 seconds and it feels better than being Stede Bonnet ever has. And that’s with a gut stab that is probably right at this moment about to kill him stone dead. 

But at least he knows. The knowing suffuses him. It zings around his nervous system, a pinball, bells and whistles. He can feel himself smiling, smiling as Ed reaches down to help him stand, finally—

“Stede? Jesus Christ are you okay?”

He blinks until Mary is Mary. She gets paint on his hand as she lifts him up. He makes bland, baldly false excuses about the blood making him woozy, but she doesn’t challenge him. She walks him to the bathroom, runs the cut under cold water, makes nervous sounds about him taking better care of himself, had he drunk enough water? Had he been sleeping? She seems irritated more than concerned, and can he blame her?

She presses gauze to it, wraps it in tape. She runs her fingers through his hair, and something passes over her face. Irritation? 

No. 

Guilt. 

She leaves him there, sitting on the edge of the tub. Wants to finish what she was working on, she says. 

That’s when, for the first time in years, he cries.   

Chapter Text

The thing is, it’s always drowning. It’s so on-the-nose as to be humiliating. Especially for a creative. 

Worthless subconscious. 

Course, that’d be true even without the nightly drowning. Subconscious hasn’t tapped into the creative divine in years now. Just retreading that same path till he wears a hole straight to the center of the goddamn planet.

He uncrosses his ankles on the desk, recrosses them the other way. He folds his arms across his chest, tucks his fingers into his armpits where they won’t get cold. He’s always so fuckin’ cold. 

Worst thing about creative burnout is there’s nothing you can do about it except ... nothing. 

And the problem with doing nothing is he can only hold off the nap for so long. 

The dreams keep him up nights, which seems paradoxical but somehow isn’t. Rather, the dream, singular. He sleeps, but he doesn’t. He gets up and wanders around to shake it off, remind himself he’s on land, he can walk, air is plentiful, shit like that. It’s strange, though, because even the rhythm of walking, the white noise of his apartment at night, the glow of the streetlight through the dark curtains—it all blurs and morphs. The robe tie around his waist, a rope; the cold floor on his feet, the icy waters that would be killing him painlessly if not for his stupid fucking lungs. 

Never remembers going back to bed. Always wakes up there. Night after night, yada fuckin’ yada.

This is karmic, as he understands the concept. The universe saying: I know what you did, you little shit. 

Thirteen years old. Playoff game blaring from a radio—baseball? Sure. His dad’s friend’s docked boat, bobbing at the harbor. A small crowd, drunk beyond sense—certainly beyond fun. Ed’s dad holding out an illicit beer, our little secret from mom. Winking like Ed’s a mistress.

Ed didn’t care about sports. He didn’t care about the beer either—though that would come later. And Mom? He just felt guilty. She was back home, probably, hunched over the machine, spinning survival into art. Turning thrift store trash into Ooh, where did you get that?, envy of the office. Making extra bits to sell at the consignment shop in town. Fixing all the shit Ed tore and stained and fucked up just by being Ed. She was magic. And Ed wanted the magic, too. He wanted to cut his life into scraps and sew it back up into something better. Something his. 

No chance of that, though. Ed standing, desk up to his chest, her chin on his shoulder. The bobbin clicked into the case, a perfect fit. Press the pedal gently, she said, and watch your fingers. Easy peasy. But the door slammed open, the liquor wafted in, and zoom went the thread, crash went the machine. No son of his, etc. Maybe that’s where Ed’s subconscious got its accursed fondness for cliches. 

But, the boat. The sway of it. Not quite up and down, not quite back and forth. Both, and, continuous.

Ed watched the stars. The game must have been over. A fight from the cabin, shouts piercing the night, anger between angry men. Here’s where the sway becomes a lurch, where the world tips, the underside of the rollercoaster: dad, coming out to rant, whiskey in his fist— fuckin’ asshole thinks he can tell me what I can say, s’a free fuckin’ country—just as the wake from some distant, bigger, richer man’s boat hit them on the broad side. 

The world slowed down.

Glass shattered. His knees gave. He landed hip-first on the cleat, hard, probably too drunk to feel it. The boat lurched again, and somehow he kept falling, kept crumpling. Ed thought: holy shit, it’s happening, holy shit—  

More impossible and perfect than any lightning strike. His pants tangled on the cleat as he went over, cuff hooked, twisted. Upside down, his head under water, his leg pinned, body thrashing, and Ed—

Ed watched the stars. 

It was an end, but it was also a beginning. 

So, fine. It’s revenge from a dogshit god, punishment for a good deed done well. A constant sway within him, not quite up and down, not quite back and forth. Both, and, every which way, all his damn life. 

If you’re a thinking feeling person, Ed supposes, you’re gonna have guilt. Even if the ocean killed that guy. Even if you made the right call. 

What choice does he have? He’ll ride out the fuckin’ dreams. It’s what he deserves. He can do it because he knows, he’s seen it first hand. The thrashing stops eventually. With time, with patience, with deep breathing—the thrashing stops. Just have to tread enough water. 

Here we go, we’re going—here’s how it goes: a cliff. A decision. Someone else is there, he can sense it—but he is alone. He stands before every precipice he’s ever stood before, every trap door out of here he’s always been too chickenshit to jump down. His body wants to jump. It wants to crack up on the rocks. His body wants it so bad, more than anything. 

So it jumps before his brain can stop it. 

The water crashes into him. Bone-shattering. All the cold in the world, concentrated. 

The rope is around his waist—who put it there? Caught in the middle, like father like son. His feet are bare. He wears socks to bed; he wakes up shivering. The light is thin. The water is thick, viscous. There are no fish, because fish are alive and Ed is dead. 

And there it is, all that silence he’s so terrified of.

He wants to be brave enough to not resist it. He wants to be chronically unfazed. He wants to become the water. Wants to take his time, bask here where finally, for once, no one is waiting for him.

But the panic isn’t rational, it’s physical, it rushes at him across decades, across sense, across will. If no one is waiting for him, then no one will find him. He pulls at the chain. He kicks his legs to exhaustion. 

And then, inevitably, inexorably: reality goes vignette. Everything shrinks to a single sharpened point of panic, the needle tip of eternity, the end of it all, and—

“Oh, very nice, you’re working real fucking hard,” a voice says, and Ed goes flying out of his chair onto the floor. 

“Jesus fuck, Iz, want me to break a fuckin’ wrist?”

“Oh, yes, the royal wrists, they must not be injured,” he sneers, slapping a folder down onto Ed’s desk. 

“Told you about barging in here,” Ed says. 

“Yeah and I keep telling you: it’s my fuckin’ job.” Izzy pours a cup of coffee from the half pot Ed forgot he made an hour ago. He pours it, Ed notes with simmering fury, into Ed’s mug. He leans against the bookshelf and slurps as he sips it. “You gonna even fuckin’ ask about the meeting? Or is that too taxing for your precocious genius brain?”

“Thought that was tomorrow,” Ed says, pinching his nose.

Izzy sighs. Downs the coffee. 

“God this shit’s weak as piss, you make it that way on purpose?” He pours another cup. “New firm is fine, I think. Fine enough that I scheduled us to meet the whole team tomorrow. They’ve seen the old campaigns and think the shine’s worn off that dusty Mad Max aesthetic. Wanna take it in a new direction—just not sure what that looks like, and the reason we don’t know what that looks like yet is you—“

“Oh Christ, yes, I know, I—“

In unison, they say it: “don’t have a fuckin’ line to show them.”

“Kept it vague,” Izzy grumbles, like that’s not his fuckin’ job, too. “Told them you were considering new shapes, roomier trousers, blah blah. One cunt said, what about something nautical?, and I had to cough so my eyes wouldn’t roll. Edward, they need—“

“Yes, I know what the fuck they need, Iz, been doing this twenty fuckin’ years.”

“Yeah—and yet.” He slams the rest of the pisswater coffee. “I will leave the precious genius to his broody solitude, but if we walk in there tomorrow and you don’t have so much as a fuckin’ sock to show them—“

“Yeah, Iz, that’s spring RTW, a fuckin’ leather sock—“

“—I swear to god I will tender my fuckin’ resignation, you absolute twat.”

The door slams behind him. Ed can hear him muttering swears as he stalks down the hall to find some other unsuspecting idiot’s day to ruin. 

Ed flips through the packet on the table. Standard bullshit. One-sheeter with J E F F x Brdgtwn at the top in a fancy header. Glossy photos of campaigns stripped of context, graphs with massaged numbers, whatever. At the back, a who’s-who of marketing douchebaggery, every-six-week haircuts arranged in tidy squares like an instagram feed. 

His eyes land on the upper leftmost square: a swoop of blonde hair, a tidy beard in a charming scrum of blonde and white, pale eyes like the olive in the martini, light somewhere way in the back, dimmed by life. First in the lineup—a B name.

He wears, Ed notes, a sweater in place of a suit. Did he knit it? He did. No question. Ed hears needles clicking in the dim. Sees him frown, mutter shoot as he drops a stitch, distracted—maybe—by a foot on his thigh, or hands appearing on his shoulders from behind, sliding down his chest, an unsubtle breath in his ear, careful now. 

STEDE BONNET, Chief Creative Officer. B for Bonnet.

Something nautical. He scoffs. This guy would. All the way out at fuckin’ sea, that’s for sure. 

His stomach growls. He slaps the book closed. Slaps his giant sketch pad closed too. 

Sometimes designing clothes is just opening your sketchbook, staring at an empty page for eight hours, and closing your sketchbook. Then you tell yourself you’ll do some work at home, so you go home, and you don’t work there either—but at least you feel like shit about trying to relax. 

That name. Stede Bonnet. Weird name. It’s like, Ed thinks, like you have to say the whole thing, a spell or an incantation, a rhyme in a children’s song. Stede Bonnet Stede Bonnet Stede Bonnet Stede Bonnet, short short-short, he sets it to the pace of his stride as he walks, left-right, Stede-Bon-net, a tidy hemiola. 

The whole way home he’s singing it like lyrics, can’t get it out of his head. He cracks a beer at the breakfast bar. At his laptop, he googles him, Stede Bonnet.

The result, though, isn’t some ad guy, it’s for—can this be right?—a pirate. “The Gentleman Pirate.” Some Barbadian dandy who took up the profession as a lark. Some rich fuck who didn’t know what he was doing until he got some help from—

Wait. 

Ed was aware of his own name, sure. Hasn’t read up on it, but he knew. His name was ordinary enough for plausibility’s sake—how many Edwards, how many Teachs? Basic math, bound to happen. His mother didn’t know shit about pirates, neither did his dad—Ed’s pretty sure neither of them even graduated high school, much less read a book. It was only an accident—Ed’s uncle in the front, his dad’s dogshit lineage in the back, who cares. 

But Stede Bonnet? 

A Stede Bonnet that hung out with an Edward Teach?

He finds some pirate scholar websites—why are there so many? Are people that feral for fuckin’ pirates?—and does some quick scouring. Stede Bonnet left his family, was uncomfortable in a married state. He gave up his wealth, his status, his comfort. He sailed with Ed-slash-Blackbeard, quote unquote happily. 

Ed expands some images. Illustrations show a curly wig, a long fancy coat, colorful silk, lace, stockings. Shoes with little fuckin’ bows on them. He looks out of place in his surroundings, standing on the deck, gazing at the sea. He looks like no rope would have the audacity to callous his hands. Even so, there is a meanness to him, even in line art, some steel in his eyes that dares you to call him soft, weak, gentle. Chip on his shoulder bigger than the pad sewed into his frock coat—

Ed gropes around for one of the endless notebooks he keeps around should inspiration—heaven forfend—strike. 

A zillion tabs open, he sketches something different. Really different. Textures: slippery silk, rough velvet, delicate-but-tough lace. Layers. Stockings—can he get away with stockings? Yes, it’s all possible here. Cinched waists, buttons, exaggerated sleeves and lapels, filigree, fuckin’ frippery. He imagines color—blues, teals, silvers. The ocean in miniature, its constant motion, all wrapped around him. Drowning, but make it fashion.

His hand stops. He sips his beer. He squints at what he’s made. 

It’s wholly different from everything he’s ever done. Izzy will pitch a fit. 

He rolls his eyes, adds some shit from his oeuvre. Drops the neckline, adds some heavy hardware to the belt, pops some rings on his fingers. Erases that insane pocket on the coat—what was he thinking there? Makes it a little messier, a little grittier, a little more reckless—

Yep. There it is. Too much everywhere he looks but the whole picture? Totally cohesive. Wants to walk right off the page and shake his hand, job well done.  

This could be it, he thinks. This could be the way out. The surface he’s been clawing his way toward. It will take some editing, sure, and one outfit does not a collection make. But it’s a direction, it’s something to show Iz and the ad guys. 

All thanks to Stede Bonnet—or, perhaps more accurately, Stedes Bonnet, the dead one and the dead-behind-the-eyes one. He lifts his beer in salute, downs the dregs, and the yawn hits him like a tank. 

“Shit.” It’s gone midnight.

Even though he’s only been sketching an hour or so, it felt like a day’s work. He can’t remember the last time an idea leapt fully formed from his consciousness. Years, easy. It’s exhausting, in its way.

Weird. He’ll have to tell Stede Bonnet the story, if they ever meet. Hey man, did you know you’re a pirate?

Chief Creative Officer and Gentleman Pirate Emeritus.

Ed showers, brushes his teeth. He crashes on the couch with a thousand pillows. He turns on the tv with the volume low, a flimsy plea to his brain to stay awake. 

He hits the water as soon as he’s horizontal, of course. Sinking, sinking fast. Big boulder tonight, he notes, bigger than usual. 

Everything else the same. Blue velvet light, satin water. Little bobbing flecks of organisms that never have to deal with this shit. 

Stomach rumbling. Forgot dinner, again. Even drowning, he’s hungry. His career is whatever, he’s very lucky et cetera, but all the shit he denies himself to keep it—the warmth, the good food, the orgasms? The long days, the lonely travel, the take-out straight from the carton when he remembers to order it five minutes before the place closes instead of after. That’s also what these dumbfuck dreams are about, he knows it, both-and. 

But there’s no time for that—there never is. His body’s ceaseless demands take over. His lungs RAGE. His legs kick without his brain’s input, his arms flail. His head whips, and—

What? Something catches his eye. Way out in the distance: a bolt of light. It glints off something shiny, again, again, again, a rhythm, that hemiola in three dimensions. Or a signal: do you see me?

He does, but he doesn’t. There is only light. His eyes strain to focus. 

No mistaking it. It approaches. 

Just what this nightmare needs, he thinks, the terror of the goddamn unknown. This is a defense, of course, a ring of salt around himself. A dismissal, to rob it of power. Still, a potent fear moves through him—not the fear of death, no. The fear of life. The fear of fucking surviving this. Real fear. 

Closer. The undulation is hypnotizing, swimming but inhuman somehow. Ed resists oblivion, he holds on, for once. The light bifurcates—two lights now, a body and a weapon—no, not a body, not a normal body, not a normal weapon either, a—

A tail. Orange, glittering.

And a trident. A face he can’t make out yet, but it is coming closer, if he can just hold on, just hold on—

His eyes open. The room is dark. The television is off. 

A figure in the darkness, near the door. 

Ed is frozen. 

I’ve been waiting for you.

His voice is high, excited, but gentle. That’s all he says, and somehow, Ed knows. Headlights from a passing car illuminate Stede Bonnet. He wears the teal monstrosity Ed just created, million fuckin’ buttons, rings on his fingers, stockings (he can get away with stockings). His heels clack as he crosses the floor. 

He sheds the jacket as he walks, then the waistcoat. Beneath it is a billowy white shirt, big lace sleeves, black cravat—nice one, Ed, great choices there. The neck opens halfway to his navel, strings trailing. Impossible hair, incandescent smile. Ed should move, should sit up. Ed is frozen.

His knee lands between Ed’s thighs. He lowers himself to Ed’s body. His heat is total. Uncompromising.

There, he soothes, because Ed’s shivering like mad, teeth chattering, can’t stop. Stede's voice is high, gentle. He tries to breathe as Stede’s warmth suffuses him. Pins and needles, but everywhere, every place—

He’s under Ed’s chin. He drags his open mouth up Ed’s neck. His nose brushes behind Ed’s ear, and god, Ed shakes. Ed’s used to adrenaline numbing his feeling, but this time, maybe, it dials it up. His beard is maddening against Ed’s skin. The cravat drags against his collar bone. Stede Bonnet smells like lust and sweat and flowers. Ed wants to help him, wants to shift to give him more access, but he can’t, he can’t do anything, he can only absorb this—

Stede Bonnet bites—a little, softly—behind Ed’s ear and adjusts his hips to grind them down, down, pressing to Ed’s erection. Testing, then sure. Then a rhythm, a sweet undulation—a signal? God, he moves and moves. His tongue finds the heartbeat in Ed’s neck. His hands slide up Ed’s shirt to find the freezing flesh beneath, his fingernails find the scalp under all Ed’s hair. Ed swallows and shakes. He breathes through his open mouth.

And Stede moves—violent in its sweetness, deadly in its intimacy, soft in its power. Slowly, like the ocean, rocking, unceasing. 

It goes on, interminably. Time folds on itself, an origami fortune teller. Stede finds Ed’s mouth—finally, finally. His tongue is a distraction and a new terror. He worries his teeth on Ed’s lip, he presses his tongue deep. Ed inches closer—his cock weeps, his balls ache, his spine tingles. He is lightheaded with want. He will come in his pants if Stede continues. He cannot tell him. He doesn’t know if this will feel terrible. He wonders if this is purgatory. He is really dead this time. 

Ed, Stede says, meeting his eye, still moving his hips, I’m going to—can I?

And suddenly, miracle of miracles, Ed’s voice bursts from him, wild, harried, low.

Take your sword. Run me through.

Stede raises his arm. The rapier glints. This doesn’t make sense—did he have that? The proportions are wrong, the foreshortening is off. His hips still move, and Ed’s so close, so close, his voice is gone again. Stede’s face is determined, his eyes mean. 

Ed fights it, but he can’t stop it. It feels too good. He feels it, fireworks inside him, fuse racing, and Stede grins, wicked, and—

The rapier pierces him. The world goes white. The pain tips to ecstasy. His hips jut against Stede’s thigh, and it happens, it’s happening. The orgasm goes and goes and goes and every twitch is agony because there’s a sword in his fucking guts and he’s going to die, he’s going to fucking die coming in his pants on his couch and there is warm everywhere now, in his pajamas and soaking through his shirt and seeping into his couch. 

There, Stede says again, soft as a lamb. His fingers trail in the blood, a soothing aftercare motion made mad, spreads it around like come. Don’t be scared. 

And Ed isn’t, now, he realizes.

Easy as breathing, Stede says, which is a hell of a thing to say to a man who spends every night drowning. 

Stede licks Ed’s blood from his finger. He leans down to kiss Ed. 

And Ed wakes up on the couch. It’s daylight. Late daylight. The TV drones on to nobody.

It’s 10AM. The most sleep Ed’s gotten in a sitting in months. Maybe years. Maybe ever. 

He pats his middle, absurdly. It was so real, though, real as the drowning. Real as—

Oh. Well, one thing was real, anyway. His pajamas are cold and damp and stuck to him. That’s gonna be weird at the marketing meeting. Which is—

"Fuck, shit—"

—currently in progress. 

Ed sits, and something slips from his neck, soft and slithery as a snake. It lands in a pool on the floor, and it turns out at least one other thing was real, too: the black cravat. 

Chapter Text

The sand is everywhere. It’s in his shoes, in his hair, in his mouth. Feels like it’s in his brain, slowing the gears. 

This is pirate world. But he is on land. 

At least his situation provides ample shade. He is—only momentarily and quite begrudgingly—grateful for the shade. 

Stede's boredom has a sharpened edge of panic to it. What has happened is his fault, a consequence of his arrogance and his naivety—and worse, everyone knows it. Thanks to him they are stuck. They have been stuck here for too long. Something must change. 

He must be smart enough to figure out how to change it. 

Behind him, a ruckus. Sounds of a vacation: laughter, play fighting, splashing in the waves. He can’t turn to look at them. He is too ashamed of this impossible and intractable problem. 

Something MUST change. It must. 

He stands. He stalks with determination toward the looming ship, the provider of his shade and the evidence of his error both. He braces his palms against it. He plants his heels in the sand. He pushes with all his might. 

He pushes until his lungs might pop. Until he’s grunting and whining, until his shoulders ache. He pushes until his heels slide backward in the sand. The boat remains precisely where he (inadvertently) put it. 

“Bolloxed this one up well and good, eh Baby Bonnet?” 

The voice is mincing, the nickname familiar. Stede whirls. 

A man in some sort of Royal Navy uniform stands behind him. He has, unmistakably, the hilt of a sword protruding from his eye socket. Blood seems to be frozen in place where it was running down his body. He appears unbothered by this predicament. 

Two things occur to Stede: the first, this man is Nigel Badminton, his nemesis from grade school. Stede’s body bears the scars from Nigel’s tormenting. Nigel is the phantom ache in his wrists from where the ropes dug in; he is the shadow of a rock thrown overhand and arcing straight toward his face; he is the lesson Stede was supposed to learn from the punishments he received when he came home with ruined clothes and bruises on his body. 

The second: Nigel Badminton is dead. 

Stede peers around Nigel’s side. The sword’s blade comes out of the back of his skull. 

Nigel sticks his tongue out, every inch the brat he’s always been. The sword wiggles as he moves his head. “Little Baby Bonnet broke his little baby boat on the big bad beach,” he mocks. 

“Why are you dead?”

“You killed me. Don’t you remember?”

“What? Surely I— that can’t be right. Can it?”

He is Baby Bonnet. He can’t wield a sword. Even in this world, that feels true. 

“Oh, so I just shoved my own stupid sword through my own stupid eye, did I?”

“Really, I—” Stede reaches toward the sword, but Nigel slaps his hand away. “I did that? On purpose?”

Nigel laughs like a deranged fortune teller animatronic at the fair. “Of course not. I grabbed my sword because I heard your crew of imbeciles attacking my men. You hit me in the back of the head while I was unsuspecting and therefore defenseless, as a coward would. I collapsed. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“So you’re saying you sort of … did? Shove your own sword through your own eye?”

“You couldn’t have done it there,” Nigel says. He is suddenly serious, rooted in place. “But you can do it here.”

“Do what?”

“Push the boat.”

“Excuse me? I just pushed the boat. The boat is stuck.”

“That is because you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. When you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing happens.”

“I thought it meant something BAD happened?”

“Incorrect. The valence is immaterial. Things may happen when one is in the wrong place at the right time, or in the right place at the wrong time, or when one is in the right place at the right time. In the wrong place at the wrong time—well.” He gestures at the boat but keeps his eye trained on Stede. “Nothing happens. Stuck.”

“This is nonsense,” Stede says. He tugs at his waistcoat, adjusts his posture. All the things he does when he’s very nervous. “Then why can’t I move the boat?”

“It is still the wrong time.”

Nigel’s head turns toward the sea. Stede’s does too. He freezes there, staring as something peculiar happens. Quickly, as though in timelapse, the waves kick up, the water inches closer—the tide comes in. The barnacles submerge. Stede feels the water rise over his shoes, his calves, his knees. It takes what cannot be more than thirty seconds.

Farther out, the water comes up almost to the mark on the side of the ship—but the ship doesn’t bob, doesn’t rock, doesn’t move. 

“How do I know when it’s the right time?”

“Ask Mary.”

He turns back to Nigel, but Nigel is gone. 

“Mary?”

He is sitting up in his own bed, aware and embarrassed that he has said her name out loud.

But Mary isn’t there. 

She emerges as Stede sets three bowls of oatmeal onto the table and the kids fight for their turns with the maple syrup and cinnamon. She is freshly showered. 

“Good morning. There’s enough left for you, wasn’t sure if … “

He pours coffee from the carafe into two mugs, hands one to her. She gathers a bowl, looking slumped. She yawns deeply as she sits.

“Thanks for this. Sorry.”

“No worries,” he says, but he’s worried. “Everything alright?”

“Spent last night in the studio,” she says, which is not an answer. “Been working on a new technique. Doug and I just got lost in it.” She sips her black coffee. 

“Doug was here?” Stede is aware of Doug. He facilitated a weeklong artists’ retreat Mary went on last summer while the kids stayed with her parents. He lived nearby, so Mary began taking lessons from him. But Stede thought the lessons had stopped—the payments haven’t gone through in months now. Since last Christmas, maybe. He feels like a bad husband for not asking.

“Yes,” she says with a laugh. “We got to talking about it, and we were standing there shivering in the cold, and I said, why don’t you just come back to the studio?”

“Smart. I didn’t realize you were still taking lessons.”

“I’m not,” she says, digging around in her oatmeal, not eating. “I ran into him on the way home from book club last night. He happened to be passing by—isn’t that strange? Right place, right time, I suppose.”

Mary turns to the kids and asks them questions, but Stede doesn’t hear a word. He is hot, like he’s standing under the beating sun. He is parched like he’s spent hours inhaling sand. He hears only the repetitive and soothing whoosh of the ocean, finally and at long last dragging a stubborn and reluctant boat back out to sea where it belongs. 

--

The future is rushing backward and the past is barreling forward and one of them has jumped the median. And he is picking out tapas for the company’s holiday soiree. 

“I am begging you to pay attention.”

Olu taps the spread on the table, an array of possible color schemes for the company’s winter gala.

This is usually the fun part of the year. Something to think about besides how to sell things he wouldn’t buy anyway. A fancy party, a flashy suit. Mary on his arm looking expensive. Everyone slinging compliments. Dancing, drinking. Forgetting. 

He thinks about the erstwhile red suit. How long his legs looked, how broad his shoulders. He turned himself around in the mirror, looking at his bum, his neck, his waistline. He imagined Ed’s eyes on him. It was how he wanted to feel, how he wanted Ed to see him. 

But Ed wasn’t in this world. And Mary never liked him in bright colors. 

And Mary is having an affair.

So. He would wear something old. 

But: this meeting. He wills himself to focus. There is a task at hand. This is about more than his suit and his wife’s affair. This is his responsibility to his people. It has been a good year for the firm. They are eager to celebrate. 

Normally these things come easily to him. Despite his position and his appearance, he has the heart of a dreamer. Through his eyes, the world has a sheen. A gauzy curtain keeping everything in soft focus. His interior—the world he wishes—is much sharper. It’s why he’s good at this job, despite not quite choosing it: he picks up on a note in a fragrance or a seaming detail on a garment, and he imagines a version of this world he wants to live in—a version of this world that might, incidentally, compel a person like him to buy a specific product. He ferries that version of this world into being, and lo, the money flows. 

Problem is, he doesn’t want to live in any version of this world anymore. 

Would his wife even come this year? Depends on when he decides to let the tide come in, he supposes. 

“And please do it fast,” Lucius says, “because if we don’t finish today I will personally kill you. J E F F is first thing tomorrow. The little man they sent as envoy was absolutely crystal clear that they want our best on this project, including you, and I do not wish to piss him off because he was deeply unpleasant and more than a little terrifying. But like, you know, in sort of a sexy way.”

Was he terrifying? Stede had felt no fear. He’d shaken his hand. The conversation was interminable. The man had made his boss wanting to meet Stede sound like a threat. As the man—Iggy?—and Lucius spoke, Stede’s attention drifted. He’d thrown out some half-serious suggestion about going in a nautical direction because he had, at the very moment he realized they were waiting for him to speak, been experiencing a strangely intense sense memory of the salt air in his mouth. Even the coffee he’d been drinking smelled like fish.

“Okay, no he absolutely is not, and could we please focus?” Olu sighs. 

“My point is,” Lucius says, “that none of us are leaving this room until decisions are made, even if I have to drug you and use your finger to log into your email account and make them myself. Likewise, I swear to god if you breeze into that meeting tomorrow fifteen minutes late with an iced coffee I will stand up on that table and slit my wrists in front of everyone just to prove my point.”

Stede’s irritation breaks through his fog. “Okay, Lucius? You’re at a seven and I need you at about a four.”

“Yeah, looking four a new job,” he says.

“Adorable, thank you. Let’s go with—hmm. The third hotel you showed me, the one with the chandeliers, and all the burgundy and gold. Let’s use the florist around the corner—don’t look at me like that, I don’t care if she’s more expensive, she’s local and her work is exceptional. Cheap doesn’t mean better. As for food, anything but Italian—it’s so … ordinary.”

Olu looks concerned. “It’s what your father always—"

“And that’s why we’re not doing it. What was the last spread you showed me? Syrian, right? With the little kebabs and yummy lamb dumplings and things? Go with that. For music, I leave that to you and support what you choose, just please be reasonable. And you know what? Let’s go full open bar.”

Lucius’s eyes go big. “But this is for—I mean, should we talk about—”

“No, thank you.”

“Well. That was fast, at least,” Olu says, gathering his various one-sheets and business cards. “Your funeral.” 

Olu glances at Lucius. Stede can see them ask a silent question: did he have a stroke, do we think?

It doesn’t matter. None of this does. This is the wrong place, the wrong time. Mary told him so much this morning. 

If he doesn’t care about this job anyway, well, then it’s about time he captained this ship with a little more poise, a little more authority. No more fear of failure, no more listening to his dead father’s voice echoing around inside him. He can go all out for the holiday party if he likes. Lord knows they have the money. His father had gotten so miserly that for the last two years, nobody was even allowed to bring a plus one to the party. Another year and they’d have been ordering pizzas to the offices. Garlic bread? Who are you, the king of England?

No. Stede has no use for endless growth. Has no use for any of it. Give it back to the employees—they’re the ones who earned it in the first place. They do all the work. Raises will come around in the spring, but for now, let them have a little bacchanal on his dead father’s dime. Let them dance on his grave.

“Have you looked at the packet yet?” Lucius gestures at the booklet he made for the J E F F meeting tomorrow. “I need you to say yes, right now.”

Stede looks at the packet. He blinks. “Yes.”

Lucius covers his face with his hands. “Oh my god we are so boned. That little man spits when he talks—do you know that? Do you know that he’s going to spit in my face and I won’t even be able to admit I like it because he will be trying to MURDER ME?”

“You know what? An iced coffee sounds lovely,” Stede says, grabbing his coat. 

“Oh, I’m good, I don’t need one, thanks for asking,” Lucius snarks. “Also not sure you’re aware, but it is Novem—”

He doesn’t hear the rest of Lucius’s sentence because he’s already humming as he sweeps down the hall. Who cares that it’s November? Nothing makes sense. Why should a beverage? Anyway, it’s hot as a fever in these offices. 

--

The iced coffee was a bad idea. 

Mary is off doing whatever nefarious night owl things Mary does, and Stede, despite his usual bedtime routine—the tea, the bath, the skincare, the white noise machine, the eye mask, the ear plugs, the twenty deep breaths he both focused on and counted diligently through, in and out—rotates incessantly in the bed like a gas station hotdog. 

He turns on the bedside lamp. There is a single pirate book nearby. He reaches for it.

He keeps that one book on his bedside table. Somewhere in his mind is a box of which he is newly aware. The box is labeled PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, and in it are several tools he uses daily—this is one. Mary would notice if he read nothing just as surely as she would notice if he had twenty pirate books in a big stack. His pirate fascination is not a secret, necessarily. More like it’s … private. Something he doesn’t wish to explain or defend. Something his alone.

And in a way, all criminals want to be caught, don’t they? 

Doesn’t he?

Doesn’t she? a voice that he knows as Ed’s asks. He’s right, Stede thinks. She doesn’t even bother to hide it. Never has. 

But that’s a tomorrow problem.

He forces himself to read the entire book, not just skip to the bits about Blackbeard and The Gentleman Pirate. (This is another tool in the Plausible Deniability box: I find myself rather taken by the idea of piracy and so I read books about it goes down more smoothly than I have an obsession with Blackbeard bordering on the fanatical that came on like a sheet of glacier breaking off into the sea and now I am beset by a deeply-held conviction that I am trapped in a life that belongs to someone else—do you think I should get a tattoo? )

To this end, he picks up where he left off, some interminable paragraph on the finer points of the War of the Spanish Succession that is essential for context about the later chapters discussing blah blah blah. It’s insufferable, all these people do is talk. This diabolical upper crust, disguising cutting remarks in politeness—

He looks across the room. It’s drenched in burgundies and golds. He adjusts the ascot at his—

Wait. 

An ascot at his throat, silky, white; the bow on top, dense, velvet; the waistcoat, buttoned, checkered, fitted. And—stockings?

Stockings. The ocean goes up and down and up and down and—

He is back on the sea, moving. But this place is new. 

He looks for the blood. There is no blood. No yellow door, no B for Bonnet, no waterfall of hair—no Ed. 

From the next room: the arrhythmic clack of heels on wood; a woman’s laugh like glass breaking, slicing through the din; the soft tinkling of a piano. 

A party, he thinks. The holiday party. The Syrian food, the florist—

No. The musk of human sweat and liquor and piss, the smear of rouge on handkerchiefs. Grotesque laughter, too-loud voices, the chemical, frenetic vibrations of a bacchanal in progress. French accents. Left socks. Backs to be stabbed.

He takes cautious steps toward the melee. There is a piano. A man in purple sits playing with his back to Stede. He plays beautifully, a high melody dancing over moody chords below. The tailoring on his suit, the detail, it’s immaculate, lavish, stunning. There are white flowers and shiny butterflies in his black and silver hair. The suit is velvet, maybe, something lush, gold accents. His body moves with the music, back and forth, low to high to low, up and down and up. 

A sick swirling maw opens within him. He is scared. Of this place, of these people—but that is Ed. Even from behind, even in the wrong clothes, Stede knows. They’re not supposed to be here. But if Ed is here, then this is where Stede is supposed to be. 

He approaches, walking carefully across the surface of the moving ocean.

Stede places a tentative hand on his velvet shoulder. His fingers tremble. The velvet is soft, so soft, so warm. Ed lifts his left hand to reach for something. The melody keeps going with no foundation beneath it. Ed is reaching for a coupe glass of champagne on the piano. The coupe glass is perfectly round, the champagne perfectly gold. The glass is full to the very brim, only surface tension keeping it there. Why isn’t it spilling as the ocean moves them? The champagne is wrong. He stares at it as Ed’s hand moves closer, closer—

The champagne is the moon, the moon is in the sky, the sky is full to bursting with it. The softness on his fingers isn’t velvet, it’s silk. Burgundy like dried blood, but liquid soft like the blood within him, worn like his own stupid, worthless heart. 

But, no—not his. Ed’s. 

Ed is there now. Finally, Stede's right place, his right time. Ed stands at the railing, facing him. His hair is up off his neck—Stede’s never seen his neck. The little butterflies hover, they hold their breath. Their wings vibrate with the beat of Ed’s heart, faster and faster.

It’s Ed who’s afraid now. He shivers as Stede caresses the red silk. The butterflies shiver. 

This is important, Stede knows. He must get this right, he must pay attention. Everything is still, clear, waiting—not the hot blur of the fever, not the claustrophobia of his own confusion. Only them. He is free here under the champagne moon, and Ed is trying to tell him something. Something about this heart of silk. 

Ed, come to that, still wears the purple, a vest over a white shirt that glows in the dark. These are details. Nobody is around. 

Pay attention, he urges himself. His fingers move, they shape the fabric. There is a pocket in Ed’s vest—a perfect spot. The silk slides in without resistance, and Stede can hear his heart, the butterflies want to fly away, and now—

You wear fine things well, he says, and god, he means it. The blood in Ed’s cheeks, the velvet clinging to his waist. The butterflies giggle.

Go ahead, Ed says. His voice echoes. How does his voice echo in a place with no walls?

What?

You can. It’s okay. I’ll let you.

Let me what?

Ed only stares. 

Ed, please, I can WHAT —

—

His iced coffee is full to the brim, round, gold and opaque as the moon, floating ice like craters, and for once, he’s not the one late to the goddamned meeting. 

The little man was pacing around on the sidewalk, smoking. Stede had passed, and they’d both pretended not to see each other. Small mercies. Two other guys in black leaned on the building looking bored and annoyed. They were waiting for someone. Stede still hadn’t cracked the packet, but his calendar said there were supposed to be four of them.

He checks his watch. It’s seven after. It seems like enough of a kindness. After all, they’re all busy. The little man knows it. Stede takes his iced coffee and tucks his packet and his other packet and his laptop under his arm and heads for the conference room. 

They’re all there. An enormous pile of donuts sits on a tray at the center of the table. Nobody eats them. Lucius gives him the eye for being ten minutes late, but he knows what he was doing. The enormous circular table sports two empty chairs. Stede takes the one between Olu and John to his left and Lucius to his right. The other empty chair is across the table between the terrifying little man and one of their folks, the one covered in spikes. Hands are shaken and names are repeated and business cards are exchanged. Pleasantries are uttered. The little man (Izzy! Izzy) starts talking. 

“The boss is on his way,” he says, clearing his throat. “Transit issue. He sends his sincere apologies. In the meantime, I’m happy to give you all a general rundown of the brand, and when he gets here, we can jump into the good stuff.”

He talks about the brand’s history, its successes, its growth, the vision. There is so much history, so much lore. The little man takes his time. Stalling? Probably. It’s annoying. Should’ve just cancelled. 

Stede fights himself to pay attention. He makes a face like this is all fascinating. He opens the packet Lucius prepared to the middle somewhere. A collage of leather. Gorgeous tailoring, interesting shapes. Nothing that moves him terribly. Except—

A jacket. A leather biker-style jacket, hardware, big dramatic shoulder, a shark’s tooth stitched on, with—

With only one sleeve.

His vision telescopes. His breath goes shallow, goes fast. A hymn blooms into harmony. The exposed arm that reached for him. The grip that hauled him from death. 

Nothing, in all his life, has felt like this. This is the end of the rainbow, this is the castle in the clouds—this is goddamn wonderland. All those months, all that fear. He wasn’t insane and he wasn’t wrong and he wasn’t alone. 

It races around him. The fever pulses, reality contracts. He can smell it, a wave of that salty, sharp world his brain has come to understand is Ed’s. It’s there in his throat, he tastes it. A heavy, repetitive thud, thud, thud vibrates the mugs on the table, boots stomping across the moving deck—

He realizes he is standing. All the eyes in the room are on him. 

This is how it begins.

The door to the conference room opens—

Chapter Text

The train is late. The transfer takes forever. He sketches like his life depends on it, whole body braced to keep the pencil steady as the world churns beneath him. The work does something to calm his mind in what must be the strangest twelve hours he’s had since he was regularly going on benders. He cannot think about what else the day might contain. 

A five minute shower and he was out the door—no breakfast, no coffee, nothing but a hovering sense of unreality. The day is blisteringly bright and frigid cold. His hair is still wet. The leather jacket isn’t warm enough. He doesn't care because he is bursting with sketches. Everything is secondary to getting the images out of his brain and onto paper, in some rudimentary form, before they vanish. 

In all his career, he’s never woken up with an entire collection sitting fully formed in his mind. And so URGENT, so IMMEDIATE, so COMPLETE. He’s dizzy with it. 

Looking up, he sees the doors are open to his stop. He bolts. Some dickhole tries to enter before anyone’s exited and Ed shoulder checks him out of the way. He apologizes to an old lady as he whizzes past close and fast enough to throw her off balance.

He races up the stairs, through the gate, around the block and east two more blocks. He arrives sweating and dizzy. He decides that if he survives this meeting, he will go immediately to the nearest diner and eat a Hungry Man Special big enough to sustain him for the next three full business days.

He shakes out his still-damp hair. He takes a deep breath. He opens the heavy glass doors. 

A receptionist introduces himself as Buttons and Ed thinks it’s not too late to wake up from the insane dream he seems to still be having. Buttons (really?) takes Ed’s leather jacket and puts it on a hanger and places the hanger on a rack in an invisible cupboard behind the desk. As his wet hair hits his back, Ed realizes for the first time that he is wearing a t-shirt to a business meeting. He tugs the hem down so he will hopefully not be leading with midriff. He considers asking for the jacket back, because then at least the shirt will seem like it is part of an intentional look. But the office is sweltering, or maybe he just ran up three flights rather than waiting for the elevator. Point is, that ship has sailed. The man hands him a cup of tepid water and he gulps it in one go before realizing he was probably expected to savor it politely. This is a disaster. 

“I will show you the way,” Buttons says Scottishly, like he’s fighting the words on their way out. 

Ed smooths his hair, he twists his rings. He adjusts the cravat. He was halfway to the train before he realized he’d grabbed the cravat with his phone/wallet/keys/sketchbook as though it had long been a vital item for his survival and not a mystical object from a horny ghost that may or may not have Ed’s come on it. 

During his five minute shower, he’d retraced his steps back three solid days and found no hidden pockets of memory, no lightbulb moments where the cravat’s provenance revealed itself like the answer to a crossword clue. No. The first time he saw it was seconds before it dragged across his gasping, paralyzed throat—the same throat from which it now hangs dutifully, tied loose.

He touches it. It’s soft like a well-loved stuffed animal, silky as sin. He adjusts it over his necklaces—nothing tangled. He tightens his dagger earring. He straightens his spine. 

“Here we are, sir,” Buttons’s voice says. 

“Oh mate, none of that sir stuff,” Ed says, and then everything falls away. The commotion of the hallways crashes into the still silence of the conference room. The air changes texture.

At the far side of the table, already standing, is—

“Ed?”

“Stede?” Was that out loud, or did he only think it?

Ed is frozen in the doorway, staring. He’d forgotten that Stede Bonnet was a real person in this very real timeline. The idea that he might appear in this meeting, right now, right here, had never once occurred to him. Since when does a Chief whatever whoever show up to a first meeting anyway? Izzy must have knocked some fuckin’ skulls. 

Doesn’t matter: Stede’s smile is the kind that loves you unconditionally. His eyes are so stuffed with repressed feeling they might burst. He’s gorgeous in a perfect ocean blue suit, classic but interesting, subtly flashy, gold chain, rings. Better than his headshot, better than Ed’s dream, and shit fuck horniness is happening. 

Izzy stands, turns to Ed. “What the fuck?”

Buttons ducks out and shuts the door with a low whistle that doesn’t go nearly far enough to address the oddness of the moment. The silence in the room is suddenly so total it sucks the whole world into it. 

Stede makes his way around the table, bumping two chairs and the sideboard on his way, but looking as though he cannot be bothered with anything as pedestrian as pain. One of Stede’s colleagues—sideburns, neckerchief—watches open-mouthed, shocked like Stede just took his pants off at the grocery store. 

Up close, Stede is two inches shorter. His hair is the color from the photos, primrose blonde, voluminous. He smells exactly like he did in Ed’s dream. He is broad, he is slender—he is terrifying. 

“You’ve … heard of me?” 

Out loud, then.

“I’ve heard all about you,” Ed says, mind racing guiltily. He could swear that just for a blink, just for a flash—only noticeable at this proximity—Stede freezes. 

“You’re … J E F F,” Stede says. “Of course, yes.”

Stede sticks out his hand. There is no way to refuse to shake it. It’s not that he doesn’t want to shake it, it’s that shaking it here, in front of everyone, seems indecent. For all Stede’s suit and pomade and posture, for all Ed’s leather and hair and practiced nonchalance, the two of them are standing there stark fuckin’ naked. 

The stupid gloves, the leather fingerless ones. God, he wishes he weren’t wearing them. He resists the urge to slide his index finger to Stede’s wrist, feel how soft it is, steal a molecule or two of his cologne to enjoy later. Stede’s hand is warm and his grip is gentle. A curious thing happens because neither of them seems interested in dominating this interaction and so Ed’s hand gets a moment to simply experience the contact. It races down the back of his neck, it spreads across his scalp. All at once he is 15 years old again, a hand on his arm enough to make him insane, everything a possibility, every chance a first, every part of him brand shining new. The lingering is a second that lasts an hour, and then their arms move up and down and up, like they were each asking permission first. 

And Ed, staring at those martini olive eyes, he thinks about the dream, he thinks about drowning, every night, every miserable night, over and fuckin’ over and over—and that’s when it hits him, the glittery orange thing out there, that sweet bright impossible little vision on the horizon? That is what those stupid fuckin’ dreams have been about. Everything before that was a prequel. 

Does Stede Bonnet know that? 

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

He knows.

“We—I mean, we’ve been waiting for you. You know, to really get into—into the meat of it.”

“Sorry to be late,” Ed says. He mumbles something about the train. Their hands are still clasped. Stede covers the back of Ed’s hand with his left. The room is warm, so warm. There is a bandage on Stede’s finger, Ed notes. Its texture makes him nervous and protective. Stede’s hand grips tighter, surer, like he gripped the rapier. Ed’s pulse pounds. It doesn’t feel like an introductory gesture. It feels like being held, it feels like a warm weight soothing him to sleep on the couch. It feels like Ed is crying into his shoulder.

Stede would let him. This Ed knows. 

He doesn’t want to let go. 

To summarize: the man he’s never met who ten hours ago dry humped him to completion in his dreams parentheses as a pirate close parentheses and stabbed him parentheses to death question mark close parentheses is currently bathed in horrendous fluorescent and shaking Ed’s hand like Ed’s hand is a tiny lost kitten he’s gently warming back to life, and by the way Ed is wearing the cravat that materialized, somehow, inside the same dream. This is madness, Ed has cracked, he has lost his mind, the horrors have finally closed in and this is it, he is going to die in a conference room, he is going to fall down right here, probably fart on the way, that’s how he’ll be remembered, the visionary designer who left the world with a big fart right before launching the only good line of his career. RIP to that guy.

“Would someone care to tell me what the fuck is happening?”

Izzy. Right. The line. The meeting. The room of people at the meeting waiting to hear about the line. 

“Yeah, god, sorry.” Ed removes his hand from Stede’s and Stede looks, for a beat, how he might look if he’d just handed Ed a puppy that Ed promptly dropkicked.

Ed grabs for the file folder jammed under his arm. His body and brain move at different speeds and somehow, a bunch of his little watercolor markers scatter on the carpet. His hand-sketched pages, most of them done from the moving train this very morning, follow leisurely. He hadn’t meant to show them in this state, not yet—they were for Izzy. The plan was to talk through the concepts, do his elevator pitch on the fly. Bullshit his way through the big picture with his five-star smile and let Izzy handle the specifics, the way they’d done a thousand times. Great start, Teach. 

“Oh, allow me.” Stede’s bending, he’s gathering. He stops. “Oh. OH. Ed,” he calls him Ed, “these are exquisite. Is this the new line?”

Exquisite? 

“Oh, uhh. Just some rough concepts. Preliminary. I was—”

“This one, my god,” Stede says, looking genuinely awed. It’s a sketch of a banyan, huge open sleeves, cool deep red, birds all over it. Soft, feminine, heavy velvet. Motion weighed down. It’s open over a billowy white shirt that seems like it might float away, a study in contrasts. “I can see this on any red carpet, on any magazine cover. It’s a vision, it’s stunning it’s—god, I should look at the rest before—”

He pulls out the nearest chair and gestures. Ed sits, dazed. Stede sits in the one next to it, shoving a folder and tablet out of the way to spread the sketches around. 

“What in the living fuck?” Izzy splutters. Izzy’s tablet, Izzy’s papers–Izzy’s old chair, Ed realizes too late.

But Stede doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. He’s rifling through Ed’s sketches like they’re long lost ancient scrolls. He stops on one Ed started and immediately abandoned, too weird even to show Izzy: a finale sort of number, orange, glittery, wrap style trousers, harem inspired shape, slit halfway to Alaska. The model carries a trident. He can picture it, though, on Stede. His quads are like fuckin’ bridge supports. 

“For menswear this is … daring, Ed. It’s refreshing,” Stede says, fingers stroking the page like it’s precious. “It looks sort of … sorry if this isn’t what you intended, but almost like a mermaid. Gorgeous.”

Ed feels the flush of pride and shame race from his hair follicles to his toenails. 

There is one remaining empty chair—Stede’s—and Izzy heads for it, grumbling. One of Stede’s people—sideburns again—scoots his chair subtly away.

That’s when Ed clocks the donuts. He smells the sugar as his eyes land, and he goes weak with hunger. His stomach contracts. The pile is big enough to feed three times the people in the room, even accounting for how many Ed intends to eat. He has to stop himself floating over like a hobo to a windowsill pie. 

“Some autumn vibes in here. You know, for this one I can picture—” Stede lifts his head, catches Ed eyeing the spread. “Oh, sorry, how rude of me, would you like donuts? There’s coffee, too, on the sideboard.”

“Uhh. Yes.”

“Of course. Can’t do the work on an empty stomach, can we? Lucius, would you get him a coffee? How do you take it?”

“Oh, I can—”

“Nonsense. Lucius will do it.” 

Lucius—sideburns, scared of Iz—stands and moves to the sideboard. He pours and awaits instruction. 

“Erm. Well, a dollop of milk, and … ” Ed says, nervous that the whole room is listening to his insane coffee order. There are sugar packets. The mugs are large. He does some quick math. “Seven. Of those little packets.”

Lucius turns. “Seven??” 

Ed cocks his head, raises his brow like, that gonna be a fuckin’ problem? and Lucius whips right back around. 

Ed’s heart pounds. He reaches for a little plate—not paper—and puts two donuts on it. He slides it back in front of him as the coffee lands with a muted thud. The donuts are soft and still a little bit warm and the first bite melts on his tongue and he has to stop himself from moaning. 

That’s three for three, Stede Bonnet, Ed thinks, warm office? Check. Good donuts? Check. And—did the dream orgasm count? (He decides it counts—fuckin' check please—)

“For this one, I think,” Stede says, pausing, pointing at the blue sketch, the first one. “It’s funny, I thought I was joking, but … picture this one in a spread, this guy, he’s on a boat, you know? And everything around him is brown, drab, dirty, rough, wood, rope, pirates, whatever,” he waves his hand with a little eye roll. “And then here's this guy, this fancy, bright, soft guy. Out of place, but you can’t stop staring at him. He’s confident, but he's vulnerable. Most importantly, he's interesting. You want to know more."

Ed blinks. He can see it—of course he can, he spent all night thinking about pirates. (Okay, one pirate, one very specific pirate.) Even beyond his deranged mind, the concept makes sense. It grounds Ed's weird imagination, gives it context. It fucks, in fact. He swallows the donut. 

“This guy in the sketches, I think,” Ed says, buyoed by Stede's gush of enthusiasm, "he wanted a whole new life. That's why he's out there, you know, he wanted some chaos. Some drama, some fucking life. The outfits, the adventure, it's sort of his—"

In unison they say it. “Sports car.”

“Right, exactly,” Ed says, beaming.

“Oh christ, he's having a midlife fuckin' crisis,” Izzy mutters, reminding Ed there are other people in the room.

“He's reclaiming something,” Stede says, undaunted. “Out of place but exactly where he’s supposed to be.”

“Wherever you put him, he stands out. You can’t not look at him. This guy.”

“You’re so right, Ed. There’s so much potential there. A bustling marketplace, a dangerous sort of, I dunno, dive bar? A fancy party, a prison—you’ll always know it’s him, right away.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, speechless. The first donut is gone. The coffee is almost sweet enough to wash it down. 

“There’s so much to play with here, Ed. This is brilliant. It’s so different from what I saw in the packet.”

“Oh, erm.” Ed flushes. Drowning, every night, every goddamn night, every sketch five more minutes of treading water on his sentence— “Just … in the mood for a change of pace, I reckon.”

“And thank goodness you were. Take this one, here. We could—sorry if this is too much, stop me, but I’m picturing your old collections, the ones in the packet there—Lucius, pass me the—thanks. Picture him standing there in a crowd of guys dressed in the old stuff, like all black and spikey, edgy, and then BAM—” Ed jumps, “—there he is, a world of color, all eyes on him, brand new phase for J E F F.”

“I actually love that,” Lucius chimes in, pausing his note taking to examine one of the sketches. “He’s sexy in a deeply confusing way, but like, you know he’ll blow your mind in bed.”

“It feels like a recognizable extension of the brand,” Olu adds, taking notes too.

“Quite right,” Stede beams. 

Izzy slams a fist on the table and everyone jumps. “Should I just wait in the fucking car like a dog?”

“Don’t start holding back now, Iz,” Ed says. “Go on.”

“Have you lost your fuckin' marbles,” Izzy says—not a question. “We’re not a pirate brand, we’re—you know, we’re leather. Bikes and spikes, post-apocalypse, eighties revival, tough. Not soft, pre-industrial fuckin’ dandies prancing about—”

“Oh, no, no,” Stede says, “you’re seeing it all wrong, I fear. This is more than just soft. This was the height of masculinity once, and filtered through a modern lens? It’s a reclaiming of color and texture and excess, it’s a statement about the complexity of masculinity, its multifaceted joy. Eighties revival was over a decade ago, you have to think seventies. Think Prince, think Ian Anderson, think early Robert Plant—fresh contrasts, contradictions. Like Ed in all this leather but with his long hair, and this soft cravat. Lovely, by the way.”

Yeah mate, it’s yours. “Uhh, thanks, it was … a gift.”

Izzy looks like he’s been slapped.

“Sorry to interrupt, Captain,” Buttons says from the doorway, and all eyes turn to him. “The lad’s 12:30 is here.”

Captain?

“I don’t want to,” Lucius says. “This is weirder. I mean funnier. I mean—where I can be most effective professionally.” He clears his throat. 

“Shall I reschedule her?“

“No, no,” Lucius sighs, rolls his eyes like a toddler. He gathers his things. “Be right there. If I MUST.”

“Shit, I’m in that one too,” Olu says. 

Stede checks his watch. “Shoot. The team will work up a proposal and a contract, but in the meantime, do you mind if I take a few photos? Confidential of course. I could stare at these all day, but I don’t want to keep you, I’m sure you have other meetings.”

“Not me,” Izzy says, grabbing the coat he probably refused to check and storming out the door behind Lucius, Ivan on his heels. Fang looks from Izzy to Ed to Izzy again.

“Go, mate. All good,” Ed winks. 

"Call you later," Fang says, patting Ed's shoulder. He leans in to whisper, "Nice work," like Izzy might somehow overhear. 

"Yeah."

Stede digs out his phone, turns pages this way and that, taking snaps, getting close for details. 

By the time he’s done, they’re alone. Stede looks around surprised, like perhaps he’s forgotten where he was. For the first time since Ed arrived, he seems nervous. But then, Ed can feel his heart hammering his ribs too. All that sugar, all that coffee. All this proximity.

Ed’s dutifully interrupted every depraved thought that’s flitted through his mind since he walked in this room, but he is powerless to stop the feeling that rushes him now they’re alone. If the cravat is real, then reason suggests the rest was real too—the power in Stede’s body, the growl in his throat, the care in his deft fingers. The rapier through Ed’s guts. What has Stede been dreaming about? Did he wake up this morning with sticky fingers too?

Stede swallows. 

“Well,” Stede says, fingers on the table, a lean that stops just short of casual. He laughs at himself. “Perhaps this is unprofessional, but I want to say … I know these are just some early concepts, and I know they’re only clothes, but they fill me with such feeling, Ed.” He laughs, seemingly at himself. “I haven’t had much verve for my career of late, but I find myself thrilled to be working on this campaign. Not that—I mean, not that I would do an incompetent job if I wasn’t excited, only that—“

“I get it man, yeah,” Ed laughs. 

He touches his forehead, closes his eyes a moment. “It’s just that. Just that I have so many ideas, and I don’t want to lose them, but I also don’t want to get started on the wrong track. Do you have a bit of time? We could get lunch, keep throwing ideas around? Iterating?”

Ed yearns to be caressed the way Stede Bonnet caresses the word iterating.

“Yeah, sure mate. Haven’t eaten. Except the donuts.”

“Oh! We must get some real food into you. Diner at the corner okay? They usually don’t mind if I sit for a while. Or are you in the mood for something fancier?”

“Diner’s great,” Ed says. 

“Fab," Stede says, grabbing his things, leading Ed toward the door. 

He waits in the doorway of Stede's office for him to get his coat. His body stands at the cliff’s edge, nerves alert—but this time when his body jumps, it will float away. 

It won’t stop at the diner, Ed knows. They’ll sit there for hours, chatter of patrons and kitchen sounds blending into a white noise that insulates them from time's passing. They'll pore over sketches, revealing themselves stone by stone. After that, Stede will suggest coffee, and off they’ll go to his favorite little spot, tucked away off the main drag, and the coffee will be superb, and he will remember that Ed likes it sweet. Stede will be buoyant and he'll talk fast and he will tell stories, and Ed will memorize each one, even though none of them will tell his whole truth. 

Personal numbers will be exchanged, coffees balanced on newspaper boxes. Future meetings will be alluded to and plans will be gestured at. They’ll shake hands for another thirty seconds or thirty minutes, and Stede will say, Ed, I swear, I didn’t look at that packet at all before you walked in, but I felt instantly as though I’ve known you a long time, I can't explain it, is that weird?, and Ed will say, Yeah, but me too, man, I get it, and both will be understatements, both will be stand-ins for what they want to be saying, which is something like What is happening here, I am scared and I am sad but I am strangely alive, strangely electric, I feel as though I dreamed you into being, but it won’t matter yet because they each will feel the thrum of it, the search morphing into finding, the opening of a secret door—the click of the latch, the squeak of the hinge, a place they've always felt but never stood. 

And that night, Ed will dream. He will dream about the mermaid, and this time he won’t be afraid. He’ll watch it with open eyes and an eager, beating heart. The mermaid will come closer, closer, and Ed will smile. He will cry, somehow, underwater. The mermaid will stop just before Ed, light refracting, water swaying, and he will smile too, because the mermaid is Stede, and because they have reached an understanding between them that transcends reason and sense and time. Ed will open his mouth to inhale the saltwater and tears, and he will wake up someplace warm. He will understand this new place as the belly of the beast—the ship, the cabin, Stede’s cabin, golden light, dark woods. He will understand that chaos has happened here—his chaos, Ed’s, he will recognize it. The wood will be scarred and the furniture cracked and the curtains torn but the center will hold, their center—their center is here—and Ed will wrap himself in the softest robe he’s ever felt, blue like the ocean but not cold, never cold. Stede won't be there, but on the sill, he will see rings, trinkets—evidence. He will feel his midsection to be sure, and find there only scars, old, healing. He will carry something very heavy—a boulder?— out of the room, up the stairs. He will walk barefoot onto the warm deck, into the bright hot sun, and he will heft the heavy thing onto the railing and he will realize the boulder is made of leather. He will drop the ball overboard because it is finally—finally!—untethered from his waist. He will watch it fall without him, big splash. He will tread back to the cabin lighter for it, floating, drifting, a balloon with its string cut.

When he wakes, he will have four screaming voicemails from Izzy that he will skip for later, and one text from Stede Bonnet, Gentleman Pirate and Chief Creative Officer and Merman Muse of his Dreams, and it will read, sorry if I overwhelmed you with my enthusiasm yesterday. I’m a bit of a clotheshorse and Ed will laugh and fall backwards, sinking into his pillows like a boulder dropped into the sea.

This is how it will begin. 

Chapter Text

“I have to admit, I’m relieved you said something. I was starting to worry you’d never figure it out.”

“I’m not THAT oblivious,” Stede pouts. Mary sips her tea, bafflingly calm and utterly without remorse. Nothing about this conversation is going as expected. “You were pretty careless about—"

“Oh my god, wait,” she snaps her fingers. “Nigel saw us at the concert last month—damn, I KNEW he recognized me. He said something, didn’t he? God, he’s such a smarmy asshole, of course he would. He probably couldn’t wait.”

“You said you went with Evelyn,” Stede says stupidly.

“Oh, I lied. Where did he run into YOU though? You two are NOT in the same circles. The gym maybe?”

“Well, I don’t see how that’s—Mary, forgive me, how are you so calm about this?”

“Oh. I did my grieving months ago.” She waves a hand and actually … laughs? “Whenever it was you started saying that name in your sleep.”

“I—WHAT?”

“God, it was every night. At first I thought you were having a nightmare, but then I realized it wasn’t distress, it was, like. Yearning or something? And I thought: my god, when does that man find the time to have an affair? I’m an artist, yearning is basically all I do, but you? You work every day, you’re home every night! Is it someone at work? I’m dying to know, I figure it has to be—”

“Mary—” He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Mary, I’m sorry, but I’m not having an affair.” 

Was he apologizing for that?

She laughs again, slaps his knee. “Come on. We always swore we’d be friends, no matter what happened. My ego was bruised, sure—and I always thought I’d do it first. But it’s fine! Really. I think we can both admit we should have tackled this head-on years ago. So go ahead, you can tell me. Who’s Fred?”

The urge to correct her is powerful. He can’t figure out a way to do it that doesn’t insinuate guilt, despite the fact that he is decidedly not—even literally in his wildest dreams—having an affair with Fred. 

“It’s only a coincidence! I’ve been reading books about pirates for a campaign at work, and I think my brain got stuck thinking about one of them. Had some weird dreams—but that’s all, Mary, I swear to you, there is no Fred.”

She blanches. Her teacup rattles against its saucer. 

“Stede, I—shit, SHIT. I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I, I justified it on such a flimsy—I’m a monster, oh my god, the kids, we have to, I have to—”

“No, absolutely not, stop that.” He plucks the teacup from her hands before she drops it. He sets it on the coffee table. “When I realized, you know, I—I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, Mary, but I knew it was right. It’s time.”

She looks at her hands. Her face gets very serious. Her laugh is distant, flighty, demented. “I think I love him.”

It’s a dagger to the guts—but it’s not the cutlass, no gallons of blood staining the floorboards. 

A little time, a little fresh air, and it’s a wound he’ll survive. 

--

Alone in the bedroom, the silence screams inside him. 

Mary’s life fills it from the kitchen beneath him. She hums as she prepares tea, and, guessing by the sounds, makes a plate of snacks to take into the studio, where she said she’d be happy to stay for now. The electric kettle boils, clicks off. The fridge opens, closes, opens and closes again. Silverware clanks, drawers rattle. 

Tonight, they’d agreed on a deep breath, a little pensive solitude. A reset. Tomorrow: the kids, the plans, the chaos. 

He takes inventory of himself. His stomach hurts, his pulse pounds. Excitement isn’t the word. Neither is dread. Neither is relief or regret or disbelief or confusion. He queries the entirety of his lexicon and can’t for the life of him come up with a word that encapsulates the feeling within him. “Shock,” however, gets him most of the way there. 

“Bewilderment” does some lifting of its own. He … dreamt this, right? He foresaw this? In a dream?

“Shoot,” Mary mutters. There is a moment of anticipatory silence. When she speaks again, her voice is bright and hushed. Her intonation is one of someone who has a juicy secret they’ve been dying to share. “Hey you! Sorry to text while you’re teaching but you are not gonna believe this—”

Her voice is cut off by the opening and closing of the kitchen door as she departs for her studio. So much for solitude.

Stede inhales, and Stede exhales.

Who would he choose to break his solitude tonight? It would be Ed. No question. Despite meeting him only once and in a professional context—it would be Ed. Like a dislocated shoulder, meeting Ed had wrenched something deep within him back into its socket—just like that, the pain was gone.

It’s so odd. All those years he didn’t even realize he was in pain. That, or his brain had begun ignoring the signals so far back he no longer recalled the before. Regardless, it took Stede Bonnet, Gentleman Pirate, uttering the words discomfort in a married state loudly enough or often enough or to someone who bothered to write it down for the annals of history where those words waited, sleeping, biding their time long enough to sneak their way into Stede Bonnet, Chief Creative Officer’s goddamn Christmas present.

A laugh bursts from him. Another. He claps a hand over his mouth but the giggles keep coming. It’s not funny, per se, it’s maddening, confounding, hysterical. The laughter comes until he weeps, until he is, hands braced on the edge of the bed, leaned forward and convulsing. It comes like it will never stop, like it will claim him, destroy him, render him the same silent, hovering ghost he’s been for most of his life. 

There is a sense within him of total system overwhelm. Of sitting weirdly on his foot for so long that twenty years of blood rushes it now. It’s agony and it’s euphoria and it’s different in some new horrible way each second—but at least he’s got a foot. At least he can walk around on it. 

At least he’s no longer numb. 

At least the boat’s no longer stuck. 

He sniffs, wipes tears from his face, forces himself to calm, to breathe. He picks up the pirate book on his bedside table, Latitude: How Pirates Shaped the World. He flips open to the first third, the section that had a chapter on Edward Teach. The book falls open across his knees, and there, on the right side, taking up the entire page, is an illustration of him—of Blackbeard, of Ed, of J E F F, of Fred—ink on paper, black as his beard. His foot is tangled in the rigging, a rope in his right fist, his left hand flung wide in a jaunty gesture evoking motion, gusto, fun. 

Where is he going? Where is Stede going? Are these questions worth asking? 

He runs his fingers over the page, light, gentle. They land on Ed’s torso above his heart, and that’s when he sees it. He squints. His face moves closer to the book. Closer. He touches it, as though it will feel somehow different from the rest of the ink on the page (it does, it does, are you paying attention?).

Blackbeard wears, around his neck, a slim, black cravat. 

He races downstairs to his study, opening book after book, checking. 

In every illustration, it’s there. Had he never noticed it before?

Had it appeared?

--

One month later. Ish.

This side of the city—now his side of the city—is different. A bit spread out, a few more hills. He’s learning its contours with his legs, putting miles on his personal odometer until his body aches pleasantly. And when he’s done, he’ll sweat it out in his huge new bathtub reading stacks of pirate books to his heart’s content. The used bookstore over here had an entire shelf—he couldn’t believe his luck. 

But, the walking. It took the edge off. A reliable way to put his brain into an endorphin-soaked haze. He could walk until his amicably failed marriage was a receding horizon within him. He could make his heart float instead of sink.

And, perhaps today especially, he needed a bit of floating. 

In all his life, he’d never spent Thanksgiving alone. 

He’d opted for it. The kids deserved normalcy. He didn’t want them worrying about their dad’s loneliness straight out of the gate. He didn’t particularly care for turkey, anyway. He saw it as four guilt-free days—no work, no kids, no responsibilities. 

Only, he’d perhaps not realized just how soon it was. The suddenness of his concentrated solitude caught him off guard. His head had barely stopped spinning and there it was, all that sucking silence he’d always craved but never knew what to do with when he got it. 

That morning, he woke up. And then what? He woke up. 

He pulled on some comfortable jeans and an old sweater. He ran damp fingers through his hair. He fried an egg in heavy cream and slid it onto a buttery slice of toast and twisted the pepper grinder several times. He ate it gladly. He washed the pan and the plate and the fork. I should paint the back room, he thought, knowing he wouldn’t. The coffee maker sighed. He sighed back.

He put on his shoes. 

So here he is. Walking again. The city is empty, the weather is mild, the report of the concrete up through his bones keeps him present. He falls in love with the limping pigeons and the corner store signs and the silhouettes of skeleton trees against the blue-grey sky. Spray paint on brick declares in all caps, like a plea, ONE DAY THE SADNESS WILL END. He walks toward things he wants to look at, and then he looks at them, and then he goes on walking, until—

Ah, yes. The waterfront. How many of his wanderings brought him here without his foreknowledge? Perhaps not all, but certainly many. Did the city slope down this way? He stares up at the hull of an enormous ship— The Brass Whale, an antique sentinel looming over the empty harbor. 

Its skyscraper masts, its chipped paint. For $40 a head ($35 for children), one can purchase the pleasure of walking around on its deck and not touching anything. (Stede has never.) (This, too, was plausible deniability.)

He watches it rise and fall with the water, down and up and down again. You wear fine things well. His own voice echoes around inside him. It felt nice to say, nice to watch Ed hear, but he can’t shake the feeling that he missed something. Something important. You can. It’s okay. I’ll let you. 

According to the plaque he reads every time his legs find their way to this precise spot, The Brass Whale was a cargo ship, built about a hundred years after The Revenge. It sailed the world in continuous operation until it ran aground—a phenomenon Stede didn’t think was technically possible until he read about Stede Bonnet doing it in the Caribbean somewhere. After that, The Brass Whale was sold and eventually used—and every time, Stede blinks at the sentence—in a 1934 movie musical called Walkin’ the Plank, which was about—you absolutely guessed it—pirates.

“I invented that, you know,” he sneers at the plaque. 

“Invented what?”

It’s happening again, right here and now, in public. Time fracturing, telescoping, collapsing. His system going tingly electric as it catapults him into the past. The ship before him is no humble salmon runner but a sleek ten-gun sloop, not moored but slicing a gash through the water, the gulls above circling, the waves below eager to claim him, the pitch and yaw in his knees, the salt in his mouth, adrenaline raging, and Ed’s voice, so close, so real he can almost—

“Stede?” A leather arm lands on the railing beside him. “That’s you, right?”

His scream evokes Jackson, his leap evokes Jordan, and that’s the notable Michaels covered. Ed holds back a laugh for all he’s worth. His smirk more than gets the sentiment across. 

“Ed! Sorry,” Stede breathes, hand on his hammering heart. “My goodness, you scared me.”

“Go on,” Ed says. “What’d you invent?”

Ed smells like sugar and spice and his voice is growly and playful. He wears an old t-shirt under his leather and the cravat— the cravat, the cravat —looped loose around his neck. As Ed plants a booted foot on the bottom rung of the railing and hoists himself up to stand on it, his hair brushes Stede’s arm. Even through his coat, he feels the contact. That’s four out of five senses confirming the same reality, and he’s not sure how to check the last one. 

Point is: Ed is real. Ed is here. 

He’s too discombobulated by this fact to think up a lie. 

“Oh, erm. Walking the plank? Like the movie there, on the—I should back up. Did you know there was a pirate with my name? I read about him once—golden age of piracy, early seventeen hundreds, notorious more as an oddity than for his piratical prowess.” As Stede talks, he becomes aware both that he is talking and that he is incapable of stopping himself from talking. “Point is, supposedly he was the first to demand an enemy walk the plank—although, historical accounts differ, as they do, so there’s some disagreement about whether I—whether he, whether one person, or anyone!—invented it, in so far as such a thing can be invented, hah hah, or whether it was simply a whim that sort of caught on in some fashion—almost like a meme? A pirate meme? Anyway, some scholars suggest he put it into regular parlance aboard his ship, and, well … the rest, as they say, is, erm. History.“

He waves a hand. He stops himself from filling his pockets with rocks and walking straight off the pier.

Ed laughs softly. He hops off the rung and lands on the sidewalk with a thud. He braces his forearms on the railing. “Sounds like you read about him more than once.”

Stede laughs. Blushes. “Maybe.”

“Lunatic,” he says, but his smirk is kind.

For a long moment, they stand, leaning on the railing, rooted to the path. The water sloshes, the gulls chatter. From way out on the horizon, a cargo barge with multicolored containers sounds its foghorn. The breeze kicks up, dies, kicks up again. Ed sighs. Stede sighs back. 

Ed turns, leans with his back against the railing. He jerks his head over his shoulder, toward the boat. 

“What do you think they did all day?”

“I think they primarily fished? Boat was used for salmon—”

“Pirates,” Ed says with gentle exasperation that lands right between Stede’s ribs. 

“Oh, erm. Standard fare, I’d imagine,” Stede says. He, of course, knows the answer to this question succinctly, but that's not what's needed here. “Table tennis in the rec room in the mornings, jam band session in the afternoon, you know. Polishing cannonballs. Oh, and don’t forget arts and crafts hour.”

“Oh yeah. Gets ugly if you skip that.”

“Don’t talk to me until I’ve sewn my flag.”

“A flag,” Ed snaps his fingers. “Damn, that’s a good idea. Gotta work that into the line.”

“Could carry them on the runway. If you're doing something like that."

“Fuck.” From Ed’s back pocket, a tiny moleskine notebook emerges, pen clipped to the cover. He scribbles, snaps it shut, sticks it back in. “So what the hell are you doing out here on Thanksgiving, man? Figure a bigwig like you would be with family, a big fuckin’ fuck-you turducken or some shit.”

Ed ambles along the walkway. Stede falls in step beside him, hands jammed in his wool coat. 

“Oh. Well. Recently divorced. Well, technically separated, but. Sorry—I feel guilty saying it, sort of a downer.”

“A downer?” Ed ribs him. “One of the top three most stressful life events and you’re worried about harshing my buzz?”

Stede is, though. He shrugs.

“Is it?” Ed asks gently. “A downer, I mean?”

“No,” Stede says, honest but reserved. He aches to tell Ed the story of how it came to pass. “Only … recent. Still getting my land legs, I suppose.”

“Because you were a pirate.”

Stede laughs. “Right. Anyway, kids wanted the normal thing, the, erm, fuck-you turducken. My turn to take it on the chin, so here I am.”

“Better than a gut stab,” Ed says. Stede’s phantom gut stab pulses.

A seagull squeaks on the railing, flaps away with a big to-do. Far down the path, an old man walks, hunched. Somewhere, an engine revs. Ed doesn’t seem to feel like talking much. And that’s fine, Stede’s head is a mess. The only things he can think to bring up are tedious, stressful, too personal. He’s happy to meander companionably. He’s happy to be near Ed in three dimensions. 

“I hear a guitar,” Ed says abruptly. “Do you hear a guitar?”

Ed stops walking to listen.

Stede does hear a guitar. It’s low, soft, hypnotizing. Their heads turn in unison toward the water, where a boat bobs at a pier. It’s bright red, and where the figurehead ought to be hangs an oversized Halloween lawn skeleton with a sign around its neck that says BEHAVE YERSELF. The sound seems to be floating from its deck. 

“Oh hell yeah,” Ed says. “One of those shitty fish-and-chips-but-you-eat-it-on-a-boat tourist trap spots. Let’s go.”

“There’s no way it’s open, right? It’s off season,” Stede says. There’s no sign out front, and a chain hangs across the entry point to the pier. “Also it’s Thanksgiving!”

As he and Ed stare at the boat, a shard of light catches his eye. A repetitive movement, like a signal. Shading his eyes, he realizes that it’s sunlight glinting off the keys on the belt of a man on the boat as he moves absently, back and forth, strumming. Behind the bar, one man appears to be drying glasses with a rag, and another is chucking ketchup packets over his head and into a bucket on the far side of the bar.

“Looks open to me,” Ed says. He starts walking with purpose toward the pier and steps, one long leg and then the other, right over the chain. “Hungry?”

“Ed, what are you doing, we can’t just—Ed!”

“Afternoon, my good sirs! Do we fancy a late lunch today?”

“Sure do, mate,” Ed says amiably. 

“Right this way, then. I’ll pop you in the sitting nook. Best seats in the house.”

The restaurant is, obviously, otherwise deserted. The server leads them to an L-shaped booth at the stern of the boat, facing the water. He introduces himself as Frenchie. 

He announces his coworkers like the starting five on the olympic team. “Working the bar there, we have the superstar Swede,” he says, gesturing grandly as bartender blushes and give a shy wave, “and there, with the ketchup, we have the inimitable Roach on the grills. Don’t let his apron scare you—the blood’s from normal meat.”

“Sorry, I’ve got to ask,” Stede says. He feels like he’s fallen through a portal into another world. “Why on earth are you open today?” 

“Oh, well, see, the three of us, we ain’t American. Convinced the boss that it was against our heritage to celebrate this dogshit holiday. Said our people don’t even believe in Christopher Columbo.” He leans in conspiratorially. “Tired of losing a day’s pay every year. Convinced her we ought to be allowed to work. Three years we’ve been doing it, and you’re the first people who’ve ever come through.”

“Probably because you keep the pier roped off, mate,” Ed laughs. 

Frenchie winks. “Anyway. All we’d do at home is play video games on our asses, so instead we play ‘em here at the bar, where we get drinks discounts and a shift meal. She takes the hit instead of us. Pretty sweet arrangement, if you ask me.”

Sure enough, the TV above the bar is paused on a game called “Overcooked.” Three bright controllers are scattered across the surface. 

"But it's winter," Stede pleads. This makes no sense. "Are you open all winter long?"

A cheerful, "Nope!" is all the answer he receives.

“You might be a genius,” Ed says, unbothered.

“Hah, right. Anyway, anyone not participating in the day’s typical festivities is a friend of mine,” he says. From his pouch, he produces a menu. “Cocktails. I highly recommend the Certain Death. I can show you food menus, if you like, or, you can simply ask for something, and if Roach feels like it, he’ll whip it up.”

“Two Certain Deaths, for sure,” Ed says. “And two fish and chips?” He raises a brow to check, and Stede nods. “Two fish and chips.”

Frenchie takes a long, long time writing it all down, tongue poking out. Eventually he nods and turns to go, yelling, “BURN TWO, ROACH.”

When they’re alone, Ed sighs contentedly. He leans his elbows on the table. The light is thin and sharp. The heater above them kicks on.

“Now that’s fuckin’ service,” Ed says gratefully, basking. 

Stede shucks his coat off as the warmth seeps into the back of his neck. 

Stede's real life, he thinks, has never felt more like a dream. He still can’t fully comprehend that Ed is real. That this impossible scenario is happening to him. He wants to slap his own face to be sure of it. 

He’s never dreamt before. In his whole life, he remembers a quantity of dreams that could be counted on his fingers. Until he dreamt up Ed, who now sits beside him. It was surreal enough the first time, at the office, but there was a job to be done, then. The work pulled focus. Now they appear to simply be … having lunch. On an empty boat. On Thanksgiving. Does Ed like tartar sauce? Soon he will know. He wonders whether the detail will show up in his dreams, the way that details from his dreams keep showing up in real life. The cravat that drags on the table, the gut stab pulsing, Mary's affair—all those things were sketched in dreams.

He wonders, with a flush of anticipation, when he will have occasion to tell Ed he wears fine things well. Maybe then he will see what he has missed.

From the overcast sky, a lightning bolt to the center of Stede’s brain: I should tell him about the dreams. The urge is powerful, distracting.

Mary had taken it in stride. And he trusted Ed. Surely Ed would understand. Right?

He watches Ed surreptitiously. The angle and their proximity means that Ed’s boot is pressed against his sneaker. He wonders whether Ed is aware of it, or whether Ed thinks he is simply the table. Ed seems content, but with a sadness pulling at him, and even without asking, Stede feels like he already understands, like he already gets it. Surely, Ed would get his sadness too. Ed would understand, Ed would believe him. How lovely it would be to have this mystery off his mind, to have someone else help him carry it?

Ed shifts, and his hair obscures his face. It hits Stede like the ocean at the wrong end of the plank: he’s known Ed for one single month. If he didn’t count the dreams—and even Stede is aware that he really, really shouldn’t count them—they’ve spent a grand total of about four hours together. And he’d only told Mary approximately one sixteenth of the truth.

He stares at the horizon and forbids himself from saying it. 

Frenchie punctures his navel-gazing by placing a drink on the table, and then another. They are brim-full and pale pink. There is a third on his tray, Stede notices, as he looks up to thank him. 

“Cheers, me dears,” Frenchie says. 

“To Christopher Columbo,” Ed says, and they all laugh and clink glasses. Frenchie downs his drink in one, giggling as he returns to the bar. 

The drinks are divine. The blonde bartender beams with pride, and comes over to explain with a bow that they are a Chartreuse and Campari concoction and the secret ingredient is saline. His Nordic lilt has a hypnotic effect. Light catches a golden tooth in his mouth. 

The food arrives. The chef stands behind the bar to see if they’re pleased. He carries an enormous knife that is not threatening but seems like it could turn so at any moment. The fries are fresh out of the oil and the fish is crispy. Frenchie brings them a side of Brussels sprouts, citing fears of scurvy. The sprouts are delicious enough to take this odd comment in stride.

They eat. Ed loves tartar sauce, but he loves the vinegar more. The heat falls from the heater, holding the afternoon chill at bay. The boat bobs pleasantly, down and up and down again. Ed’s leg jiggles beneath the table, the contact jiggling Stede in turn. Ed is quieter today than last time, more pensive. There is less giggly banter. And then Stede remembers what day it is. 

“Wait,” Stede says suddenly. “Why are YOU alone on Thanksgiving?”

Ed looks down at his lap. The shift in him is instant. “Eh,” he says, picking at a thread on his napkin. “Don’t have any friends.”

He tosses the comment away, but Stede feels the emotion behind it like a bell calling him home.

“I’m your friend,” Stede says. 

“You’re a colleague.”

“No.” Stede shakes his head vehemently.

“Are you firing me as a client,” Ed says with a bitter laugh. He looks angry. 

“Look,” Stede starts, and has to pause. It’s the first time he’s come close to crying since long before his divorce. He finds his bravery and touches Ed’s arm. “Ed, you’re the first person I’ve told about Mary and me. I can’t bear it, the way people react, the way they look at me. But I wasn’t afraid of that, with you. I know we’re colleagues first, and if that’s all we are, that’s fine with me, really. I will happily do my job for you, to the best of my ability. But ever since I met you,” he winces, remembering with a flush of embarrassment the way he’d leapt from his conference room chair, “it’s felt … easy. To talk to you, to be near you. And I do. Think of you as a friend.”

Ed smiles the saddest smile Stede's ever seen. He mutters something that might be thanks and stares at the water for a long moment.

“On the house,” Frenchie says, and deposits before each of them a wobbly little dessert in the shape of a koi, with orange scales and a fanned-out tail on a plate. “Jelly fish. Get it?”

Ed makes a noise, and then giggles himself to convulsions. In thirty seconds, Stede can pass off his tears as those of laughter.

Dessert disappears. Drinks appear and reappear. The conversation begins to feel more like that first day, light and bouncy like a game of table tennis in the rec room. Ed pulls out a sketchbook from his bag. The sketches are much farther along than the scribbles that had so moved Stede in the conference room at the office that no longer seems like a real place at all. They have color and motion, they have life. Ed runs things past Stede, colors and shapes and drape, and Stede says yes, and definitely, and maybe not, and gorgeous. The sun sinks. The employees go back to playing “Overcooked,” swearing and hollering and high-fiving from the bar. 

The check appears. The number at the bottom tells Stede they’ve been charged for maybe half of what they’ve consumed. It’s difficult to discern what was left off the bill because all the orders are scribbled pictures. 

Stede leaves a tip of 100%.

They hug, and Ed’s hair sticks to the stubble of Stede’s beard as they part. 

“Call me, Ed,” he says. His voice shakes but it holds. It’s not a question. “Promise you will.”

He floats home and sinks into the tub. 

He dreams about Ed. 

The dreams take new shapes. They are full of verbs now, the dreams. Action sequences. The boat is no longer stuck. A hundred wild adventures bloom in his unconsciousness. They raid ships and they get into bar fights and they sit on the bleeding edge of the deck, feet dangling over infinity. They eat breakfast in the crow’s nest with sticky fingers and cramped backs. They practice dueling. He can feel salt wind in his open shirt and hear the clink of their glasses as they sip brandy. He can sense gravity rushing to meet him as the ship weathers a storm. 

It’s enough to let him forget that every dream used to end with him running away in terror. 

Chapter Text

“You know what, Iz, you don’t like it, go fuck yourself.”

“Excuse me? You think this is about my impeccable taste? No, EDWARD, it’s about my fuckin’ mortgage, it’s about my career prospects. Do you not understand that?”

“It’s not about that, though, is it,” Ed spits, pointing. “If it was about that, you’d HELP me, not fuckin’ shoot me down every chance you got. You’d want to figure out how to sell this thing instead of insisting it can’t be done.”

“But, Edward,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose, “why does it HAVE to be done? Why won’t you fuckin’ answer me? I’m not saying you can’t have creative whims—you wanna throw a silk pocket square into a leather jacket, string the models up in pearls, have fun! Be my guest! But you can’t abandon the brand on a whim! You can’t throw away twenty fuckin’ years of work because that stuck up twat is currently gargling your balls.”

God, Ed fuckin’ hates Iz. Hates him because he’s always right. Yeah, Ed did those initial sketches before he met Stede—but he stayed on that track because Stede liked them so much. He stayed on that track because he thought, hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have something soft for once? Something that moves you instead of restricts you, something that invites people in rather than pushing them away? 

How do you explain that to a man like Iz? A man for whom brute force is step one in any negotiation, a man whose brittleness is load-bearing, a man who’d rather carve out his own eyes than see something he doesn’t want to fuckin’ look at. 

“I knew it—I KNEW this was about Stede. My interest in him is professional, not that you know anything about that fuckin’ word. YOU had a tantrum and fired the last firm, YOU vetted and picked the new one, and now YOU want me to drop them—even though they’re doing exactly what we asked—because you don’t like the guy who can’t wait to do the job. God, you can’t stand me working well with anyone but you, can you? That’s what this is about, that’s what it’s ALWAYS about.”

Izzy spits and stutters for a moment before pausing, collecting himself, shaking his head, resigned. “I’m scared, Ed. Please. I don’t want us to embarrass ourselves,” he says quietly. 

Embarrass ourselves. Ed whites out. He sets his jaw. 

They’d always lived and died by one rule, he and Iz: don’t blink. You flinch, you die. Some prick in a suit says, are you sure about this? and your reply was yes the fuck I am. So Ed wasn’t flinching. Yeah, the new line was different, but he was going for it, yes I’m fucking sure. It's how they'd clawed their way to where they were. Time to remind him.

“Wanna know what’s embarrassing?” He steps closer to Iz. He fondles the string on his leather vest. He talks softly, calmly. Cruelly. “Washed up old men clinging desperately to their lost youth. Doing the same thing over and over forever because it felt cool at age twenty-five. Refusing,” he says, looking Iz down and up and down again, “to grow the fuck up.”

He stuffs his shit into his bag and pretends he can’t see Izzy standing there looking shattered. 

The rain is torrential. Righteous and staccato and bitter fucking cold like a tirade. No reason whatsoever, his station’s closed. Next one’s a fifteen minute walk away and when he gets there the platform’s so packed he knows without checking the board that no train is coming, and even if it does, his ass is not getting on it. 

Thanksgiving week, and nobody can get anywhere. Probably why normal rich people love their cars so much. 

He shakes his head trudges forth.

Finally home, he attempts to break the world record for longest, hottest shower. Swaddled in pajamas, a cardigan, socks, a scarf, he feels too guilty ordering delivery in this mayhem—no one should have to suffer out there. He mixes up some tuna salad instead, dumps it onto a pile of greens, squeezes a hunk of lemon over it. He digs up half a bag of fries freezer-burned into a brick and drops them onto a tray with a thunk. They come out so mushy they might be mashed potatoes, but they’re a carb, and he’s really been trying to take better care of himself. Trying to eat at semi-regular intervals instead of waiting til he’s half dead and slurping from the nearest trough.

And it’s nice to feel full without praying for death. 

Praying for death is, come to that, not something he’s done since the new line appeared in his brain. He ought to do some noodling on it tonight—not, for once, because he’s banging his head against an empty page as he races the doomsday clock to midnight, but instead because the new work is so vivid and detailed in his brain that he feels he must get it out onto the page before any of it vanishes. Nice change of pace. 

He doesn’t have it in him to do more work tonight, though. Call it petulant, call it spite, fine. If he works, he’ll only seethe about Izzy and his fear of embarrassment. 

No. He pulls out the auxiliary sketchbook instead. The main sketchbook is filled with headless bodies that are definitely for sure not Stede’s wearing all the clothes Ed wants to see Stede in. 

In the auxiliary sketchbook, Stede does in fact have a head or two. Clothes, less so. 

He’s fun to draw. Even in posed headshots, his face is so compellingly unusual, his features so meticulously asymmetric, his grin so crookedly mischievous. There’s so much emotion in his face, such nuance in his expressions. Ed stole a few candid full-body shots he found on the internet, too, and he learns the tilt of his shoulders, how his long legs hold his weight, what his hands do in repose. Ed sketches and sketches and sketches.

Tonight, he puts him in a golden robe. Big, open, dramatic sleeves that really show the heft of the fabric. A loose cravat—white this time. He looks like a stained-glass saint with the sun at his back, like a mermaid on a white sand beach, like a long nap on a warm Saturday afternoon. 

He knows it’s weird. He can’t stop, though. 

What he’d said to Iz was true, to a point. Stede is, before anything else going on in Ed’s sick dreams, a colleague. A professional collaborator. What do you do when you can’t stop dreaming about a colleague? What do you do when a professional collaborator—from what Ed can tell, a straight and married one at that—colonizes your subconscious? When he redirects your entire creative endeavor before you’ve even met him, nudging you into territory you’ve always feared to go? When he somehow turns your heart inside out using only the look on his face as he greets you for the first time?

Nothing. You do nothing. Because what do you say? I think I dreamed you into being and I’m still not convinced you’re actually real and when I saw you, real life became a dream, too, like the rest of the room disappeared, all the noise and the stress and the pressure and the stench of human anxiety and sweat and frailty and death, my dead dad, all of it, gone, like I was absolved of my humanness on the spot, like falling, falling down into myself and breaking the water with barely a splash and floating on my back beneath a pale, full moon and knowing for the very first time and with a hundred percent certainty that I am me and this is it?

What do you do when it all makes no sense?

Stede’s number sits in Ed’s phone, tempting him, daring him. He’d wanted Ed to call, he was clear on that. To talk about the line, the plan, anything at all. White glove service. Ed’s charming, when he wants to be. Wouldn’t be hard to come up with a wedge to get in that door. But Ed’s too sick in the fuckin’ head to actually do it.

No. Whatever's between them, it’s only in dreams. It’ll run its course—it always does. As soon as they get past the leather into the meat of him, it runs its course. 

He slams the sketchbook shut. He shakes out his cramping hand. The rain plus the walk plus the boots for aesthetics over function equals: his knee’s shot dead. Toast. He goes to the sink and drinks a glass of water, refills it. He downs three Advil. He fakes his way through some stretches, but his heart’s not in it. He puts some ice packs on his knee, wraps it up in dish rags. He crashes on the couch and pops on the TV, joins an old Invitation to Love rerun already in progress. Emerald seduces Chet in some plush, well-appointed salon in a Burbank lot, as Ed swears to himself he won’t fall asleep.

Can’t stop shivering. Like the rain got inside his blood. And the ice pack is so fuckin’ cold. He pulls the blanket up to his neck and tries to calm his overheated brain. Tries to put it all out of his head—the long miserable day, the forbidden number in his contacts list, the sting of Izzy’s words, all of it.

Somewhere beneath the blanket, the knee throbs. Chet steals a will or something from an office drawer. The muscles spasm and convulse. It feels like the joint has grown a seam that wants to split wide open, like his bones are trying to climb out of his body. The Advil isn’t doing shit for fuck. 

The TV cuts to static—cable must be out. As he reaches for the remote, a blade of pain slices through him. He bolts upright from his reclined position, yanks the blanket off. The joint pulses, it’s purple and furious. Twice its size, and growing. The sight of it stuns him speechless. He ought to wrap it—does he still have that ace bandage? Will he be able to walk?

He reaches for it to test its sensitivity, poking delicately with his index finger. Poking doesn’t hurt, but the joint is freezing cold—he is still shivering, he can’t stop shivering—where is the ice pack? He prods, trying to get a read on the situation. The joint feels almost boneless, like poking a water bed. His nerves don’t register the poke at all. The whole knee is numb. 

He presses harder, deeper. Trying to reach the pain.

The skin splits with a sick squelch. 

Ed jerks back, terrified. The air tastes like salt, like standing in a fast food joint. No blood seeps out, no bones protrude, no—instead, something much worse, something horrific, something impossible—

The curious purple-black tip of a tentacle peeks hesitantly out, seems to sniff the air, get its bearings. Ed and it stare at each other for a hanging moment as the world tips 45 degrees. Ed’s mouth hangs open and his hair stands on end and his breath goes faster and faster and faster and—why doesn’t this hurt, shouldn’t it hurt? Am I in shock? Is that why I can’t stop shivering? The tentacle reaches toward his face, closer, closer still, and this is how it ends, with a sagging couch, with ripped boxer shorts, unrinsed tuna cans stinking up his recycling, a violent, absurd death for the farting designer, RIP, it’s been real, it’s been terrible, it’s been weird—

His knee explodes. His knee, or maybe his legs, he can’t tell, because he’s being sucked down the couch into the explosion, sucked down toward the tentacles, sucked inside out, his head spins and he can’t tell if he’s screaming and his vision goes black and then white and then—

Familiar cold, but it doesn’t feel like cold. It feels like relief, it feels like perfect. He knows this spot—knows it too well—but this time it’s different. This time it’s home. 

How does he know? He knows because his lungs don’t complain, his chest doesn’t ache. There is no rope around his waist. He doesn’t even have to feel with his hands to know. It’s like his whole body is hands, like his whole body is water, like the water entered him as he entered it.

He knows because of the angle of the light, because of the total lack of life, because even a barren patch of nothing can feel like home if you spend enough time in it. That knowing remains, it is as much a part of him as the water. Any minute now, it will come, the flashing thing in the distance, the bright undulation that is Stede—THIS Stede, HIS Stede, his orange scales, his fanned out tail. Ed waits for it. He pretends he doesn’t ache for it. 

Right on time, there it is. Way out in the distance, slow and sure, even and bright, swimming, approaching. Ed watches with great anticipation. He wants to smile, but his muscles feel odd. Like he forgot how to smile. Like the smile is trapped in him. 

But wait—he is untethered this go-round! He can move! He is scared to move, for some reason. As though this must progress as it always does, he must sit here, wait to be saved. His legs, too, don’t know how to swim. He thinks about it, really concentrates. It’s like he has to think about moving each part of him separately. Focus. And then—ah hah! He is a bullet through the water, a hawk diving at prey. He will get to Stede in no time, Stede will be so impressed! 

When Ed’s halfway there, Stede stops swimming. His face warps with confusion. It’s enough to stop Ed, too. As his momentum fades, tentacles spread out into the dim water before him, huge and horrible, writhing and twisting, feeling every molecule of everything. Ed realizes, with fear, that he is enormous. That’s when Ed understands that he is not Ed but some other thing, some entity beyond men, beyond literature, beyond science, beyond sanity. 

It shows in Stede’s face. He seems poised to bolt. Light glints off his trident as he uses his arms to still his body. His head shakes out a tiny, barely perceptible no, his curls distressed. He is afraid. He is disgusted. 

He is disgusted by Ed. 

This hurts worse than any cutlass, worse than any insult Iz has ever hurled, worse than the sound his mother made when she heard about his dad. Ed tries to call out, but he is underwater, also he is an enormous octopus of some kind—this to say, nothing happens. He can’t speak. He fights to keep his frustration in check.

Ed approaches him slowly, slow as he can manage in his new slippery state. This is allowed, it seems, though Stede looks trepidatious. He’s as frozen as he can be underwater, tail not flicking, arms positioned defensively. His face hurts to look at. His brows are drawn together, his mouth a tight line. 

This is the closest this Ed’s ever been to this him in this place. The whole world hangs. There’s so much he wants to say—don’t be scared, this has always been inside me, I can control it, I can handle it, please, this is important, we are important, I don’t know why but we are important. The words are stuck in some other Ed. 

Ed reaches out cautiously, slowly—if he can’t speak, perhaps he can show him it’s safe in other ways. A single tentacle unfurls toward Stede’s non-trident forearm. Stede will see, he will understand, he will—

The shock of the contact is total, it’s apocalyptic. Sensations race through him, shoving each other out of the way, flooding his human brain with knowledge—some he understands and some he does not. Through his appendage flows every sense plus some, enough information to stop time: he can smell Stede, taste him, feel him, know him—adrenaline, cortisol, blood, lilac, toast, sun, loneliness, arrogance, hope. His heat is volcanic. Stede’s heartbeat goes faster and faster, his muscles clench. Ed can hear the crunch in his neck as Stede shakes his head again, as he seems to plead, now, no no no—

He recoils from Ed’s touch. 

Stede is afraid. 

The despair hits him like an open palm. He jerks away. He’s so fast now, so slick, and his emotions are too. The despair morphs in fractions of seconds, to hurt, to shame, to grief, to rage. Before he can fully feel it, he’s gone, racing upward, a bullet slicing a gash through the water. He can smell more than see Stede on his tail, can taste more than hear him calling, begging, pleading. 

None of that matters. All that matters is getting away from the feeling. 

A shadow appears in his awareness. A shadow on the surface. An enormous shadow. His body understands before his brain can parse its meaning—this is what to do with his hurt. Up he shoots, and up the hurt goes, into his flailing, violent arms. The ship is huge, but he is bigger. A single arm crashes through the quarterdeck, rips it clean off the boat. Men fly like confetti. The screams are a brass band marching his rage steadily onward. Ed dives back into the water, flinging bits of wood and things from him. In his periphery, the light glances off Stede, coming fast.

Let him, Ed thinks.

Ed rears back, readies himself, delivers the next slap. Crash goes the mizzenmast. Boom goes the gunpowder—fireworks, embers drifting up into the sky to become stars. Little trinkets to break, nothing more. Child’s play, a lark, a fraction of his power—they will see. Everyone who looks down upon him will see. They will see his terrible power. 

The ship’s guts are exposed. It bleeds out in reverse as water rushes in. Ed’s limb is wrapped snug around the ship, ready to drag it down, eager to end this. A man on the broken deck stares at him and pisses himself in terror. He is in rags, scrap of rope as a belt, bare feet. He weeps. He raises a pistol to his head and pulls the trigger.

Ed hesitates. His muscles twitch in readiness. A light catches his eye. 

Beside him, orange scales white tail, trident. Stede, looking devastated. 

And then what? his eyes ask. Ed doesn’t have an answer. 

Suddenly, Ed’s anger is a tiny boat thrashing atop an ocean of sadness surging beneath, and he clings to it with all his might.

Stede’s mouth opens and the world ends. His scream stops time. It contains harmonies and dissonance, overtones that reach beyond human hearing or comprehension. It keeps coming, on and on, reverberating, splitting Ed apart, dismantling him and then—

Stede rears back with the trident and stabs, once—but that’s all it takes. The world goes black. Gravity flips. Ed hits something solid, feels his bones crack as they absorb the impact. Wait—solid, yes, but it moves. Up and down, back and forth, a motion approaching, but never quite reaching, rhythmic. The air tastes dry in his mouth, and he wants to cough. 

He sees red.

In his hands—his small, human hands—a scrap of silk. It moves with him, pulses with his blood. He understands that this is what was missing. No—what he was neglecting. Its absence is what sent him up toward the shadow instead of down toward the hideous darkness. But it is back now, this tiny thing that keeps him Ed. His tether to reality and to the world. His tenderest feeling, his truest self, a tiny church within him from which to worship. Without it, he would fracture. He would be carried apart by the sea breeze, drift up to become stars. 

He worries the fabric, grateful to have it back. 

Well, that’s a lovely piece of silk you have there, Stede’s voice says. Ed’s head whips up. 

Now Ed is the one who is terrified. He tries to hide it, but he is still relearning how to control his muscles. He is smaller now and the movements are more subtle. More nuanced. A face can have so many feelings in it. 

And then Stede is taking the silk. The brief contact this time is as ordinary as it is thrilling. It’s his smile, now, that stops time. It’s his voice that sends all those sensations racing. He maneuvers the silk into a new thing, a better thing. A whole bigger, somehow, than the sum of its parts. In his hands, it beats again.

You wear fine things well, Stede says. Mouth smiling, eyes bright. He seems to wrestle with a nervous, budding confidence. A thousand emotions fight to control his expression, too.

There is something here—a memory, a future. It itches at Ed. They’ve been here, this has happened already, but they were different. 

But he hasn’t been here. He’s only been under the water, only been drowning. There’s so much air up here. 

Okay, Ed says, not meaning to exactly, unsure.

Yep, Stede says, at the same time.

Some instinct from Ed’s other, deeper self kicks in, some extra sense. A sense of time, of weight. They’ve been balking here forever, he and Stede. Drowning forever. 

This is it. 

Wait—

Ed grabs his forearm before he can turn, lightning fast. Stede’s eyes go full moon big. More leftover senses kick in—through Ed’s fingers, Stede’s wild heart, his beading sweat, his cortisol, the sun, the sun, the heat of him, toast, champagne, hope—

Remember? Remember the couch? The way you looked at me? The way you—your rapier, do you remember? And then—and then later, the robe, the—the—

Ed, he says, tell me the truth.

The truth? The truth is that Stede’s heart beats faster and faster. Ed can feel it all through him. 

That’s the truth. 

Ed kisses him. This is it, this is the path he’s been searching for, the one that leads to the good shit, the bare feet on the warm deck, the sticky marmalade on his fingers. He knows it’s right, knows it’s what Stede wants because he can feel Stede’s breath stall, his heart go even faster, the adrenaline flood, the rush in his stomach—Ed feels it all, flowing into him from Stede through that beating heart in his breast pocket, that humble conduit, that blessed tether.

Ed needs to see it. He needs to see the surprise on his face, the moonlight in his eyes.

Ed pulls back. 

His eyes focus on a tiny figurine in a shaking tattooed hand. A toy, a trinket, a topper for someone else’s wedding cake. Mere confetti.

His own hand.

That’s all, a little doll for him to project onto. The heartbeat, the adrenaline, the rush—that was all Ed. 

A character on the television screams in terror, and Ed wakes up sweaty, breathless, and all alone. The ice pack hits the floor with a thud.

—

Some clear grey morning, Ed walks to the pier, where he realizes it’s Thanksgiving. 

He’s lonely and he’s alone and it’s a fuckin’ stupid ass holiday and Ed’s so tired of being Ed. The place is deserted, as he expected and hoped. He parks on a bench and manspreads to his heart’s content. He’ll sit here all day. He’ll sit til he’s so hungry he can’t walk, til he’s encrusted in salt like a prime rib, til his ankles have fuckin’ barnacles. Anything to clear his miserable head, stop going around about Iz. Anything to stop his miserable hands from sketching Stede fuckin’ Bonnet fifty more times. 

A man saunters into view. It is, but it can’t be. 

But it is. 

His coat looks expensive and soft. He’s dressed down to how Ed’s used to him—from their meeting, but also from the various headshots and event photos he’s searched online. White sneakers. Jeans. 

Stede mutters to himself and Ed wants to laugh. Ed wants to cry. Scratch that—he is crying, or at least tearing up. He didn’t know it until right now, but this is the only person he wanted to see. Today, ever. He gets the distinct feeling that even if they don’t talk about it, he’ll help Ed make sense of all this internal chaos. It’s just he doesn’t want Stede to see him like this—mopey, lonely, exhausted. Kraken.

He contemplates slinking away before Stede sees him. Could do, the man’s oblivious as ever. He stares at the boat like he’s about to steal it and sail off to another life. As Ed watches, he realizes Stede looks as lonely and alone as Ed feels. Stede leans on the railing. He sighs like he’s melting. Even his hair seems wilted as the neglected kale in Ed’s crisper drawer at home.

A seagull lands on the railing beside Stede. That first day, at the diner, there was a pigeon outside picking fries off the sidewalk. Ed said, absently, You wouldn’t be a pigeon. Immediately, Stede had shot back, What bird would I be then? Twenty minutes had vanished as they argued back and forth. Ed declared Stede a magpie, and Stede declared him a raven. Today, Ed’s dressed in black, and Stede’s dressed in blue. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense but it’s still simple. One to one. 

Still, Ed’s afraid. The dream pulls at him. Ed's feelings are all wrong—too big, too dangerous.

And then Stede talks. To the boat, or the plaque. Seems to maybe argue with it. 

It’s so oddly charming and charmingly odd that it stops Ed’s spiraling. 

Ed gets up to say hello.

He’s divorced, Ed learns. Also a pirate, apparently—but Ed knew that, of course. 

The boat is weird, but the kitchen is open for them—for them alone, it seems. Them and a charming server with scurvy, a beautiful himbo mixologist with a golden tooth, and a knife-wielding murderer, probably. They sway and they watch the sun sink over the horizon and they let their arms brush as they eat fried cod and crispy Brussels sprouts and drink whatever those yummy cocktails were. They make friends with the staff. It’s the best Thanksgiving Ed’s ever had. If only he could enjoy it.

“Wait,” Stede says. “Why are YOU alone at the pier on Thanksgiving?”

There it is again. The boulder, the rope around his waist. The terrible force of his anger flinging everyone away from him like so much fuckin’ confetti. He has to look down to stop himself bursting into tears. 

“Don’t have any friends,” he mutters. Used to call Iz one. That broke ages ago. 

He's a big fuckin’ monster, too big for this tiny booth. Iz was afraid to be embarrassed because that’s what Ed is: embarrassing.

But Stede won’t have it. Refuses to let Ed mope. Ed doesn’t know how he does it, it’s like up-close magic and Ed kept his eyes on the wrong hand. It’s delightful. It’s terrifying. Then Ed looks down and it’s his Stede on a plate, goldfish scales, big white fan tail, jiggling little jelly fish. The laughter bursts from him. What an absurd day, what an absurd thing. Disarms him totally. Won’t last forever, but for today, it's not nothing.

Next thing he knows he’s pulling out his sketchbook, laughing as he shows him the really weird stuff, watching him react. 

“Love this pirate vision,” Ed says to him. “Never would have thought of it in a million years, for a fashion campaign.”

Heat floods Stede’s face. He looks at the ground, at the sea, anywhere but Ed. “Thank you, yes. A lucky stroke of inspiration.”

And something starts to happen. 

This Stede becomes realer than the dreams. And that’s worse.

Ed likes him. Likes his style, his cartoon face, his steadfast refusal to make a big deal of himself, his down-to-clown energy, his childlike enthusiasm, the pale spot on his finger where a ring no longer blocks the sun. 

“Call me, Ed,” he says from the pier in the dim as they prepare to part. His voice shakes but it holds. It’s not a question. “Promise you will.”

Ed promises, but he doesn’t know if he means it yet. 

A week later and that damn dream is still dogging him. Mood’s stayed foul, sleep’s been awful. Still hasn’t talked to Iz.

He tries to work through it, like always. However, presently, Ed’s so mad at a piece of fabric he ought to be committed. The pleat won’t lie how he wants, the drape is pulling all wrong. He can’t figure out the movement on the dummy, he needs someone to put the fuckin’ thing on and do a twirl, do a swish, something. Never had this problem with leather. But he left the leather behind with his dignity and his begrudgingly peaceful cooperation with his business partner somewhere back in the world before Stede Bonnet, so here he is. 

Fury overtakes him. He throws the pincushion as hard as he can, but its dull thud is wholly unsatisfying. Ed needs more. Ed needs regrets. 

He roars. The dummy hits the ground. The ruler goes flying, the pencil snaps. He gets the sewing machine in his crosshairs—he wants to hear it smash, wants to know he bested it, that all it is now is a shattered heap of plastic and metal on the fucking ground. He cocks his arm, about to send it across the fucking room, and—

Suddenly he’s eight and the door slams open, the liquor wafts in, and zoom goes the thread, crash goes the machine, no son of his, etc. 

Ed freezes there, arm still raised. He calms his breathing, waits for the adrenaline to recede. Whenever he thinks he understands himself, just as quick, he learns he's wrong. He sees Izzy, standing there in the office, alone, destroyed. He sees Stede staring wide-eyed underwater, afraid. The tears flow. He cries until he chokes and then—

He laughs. “Fuckin’ idiot,” he mutters. Over a suit jacket, over some cloth. This kraken bullshit. Who does he think he is? “Grow up.”

He plucks a Coke from the mini fridge. His hand shakes as he pops the can open. He pulls his greasy hair into something like a bun. He cleans up his mess with careful, deliberate slowness—pencil by pencil, pin by pin, he makes it right. His phone appears from beneath a scrap of red silk. 

Before he can change his mind, he enters his password.

The phone rings twice. 

“... Hello?”

Ed expected something stiff, formal, a voicemail recording from a living throat. Instead, it’s the timid greeting of someone who wanted to hope but never dared to expect this call would come. 

“Hey man. Wanna do something weird?” 

Chapter Text

The sun falls for the moon, and the moon falls for the sun. In this way, days pass, with Stede suspended in the hazy unknowing of possibility. Who was Ed? Ed was. 

On an unseasonably warm Sunday at the park, he loses a duel with Louis via a stick through his armpit. Alma ties his arms behind his back with his scarf. She puts her beanie onto his head and pulls it down over his eyes as he pretends to struggle. His kids leave him there alone as they wrestle and argue nearby. For a second, the present tangles with some other kind of memory. His body understands. His muscles tense. His heart picks up. His knees wobble, anticipating the movement of the sea beneath him. 

It’s not a memory. Neither is it a dream. A memory is a story you tell yourself about something that happened, and a dream is a story that your brain tells itself to spin meaning out of the onslaught of consciousness. This had a strange blended quality, both-and. His brain telling him a story to spin meaning out of the onslaught of someone else’s memories. Deja vu for an entire life.

Last time, it wasn’t windy either. This was unusual. He recalls it through the fog of familiarity. The air was still, wet, heavy, hot. It draped around his shoulders like a shroud. He wore cotton—no, linen. A vest. He sweat through both. He felt underdressed to meet death. 

And then, two hands. He knew them by their approach through space alone, the way the air bent around them. Comfort for a damned man. Amid the shouts and arguments, he turned toward the hands. They lifted the veil from his eyes and the sun was so bright it was like looking at a negative of the world. Slowly, blinking, Ed’s face had come into focus. His expression was pained, worried. His mouth open, his brows drawn. And Stede understood here that he was being given grace he had not earned. 

Was he wearing the cravat? Yes. It was under the jacket, the jacket with one sleeve, one secret, one fact. He could see the edge just there at Ed’s neck. 

His children shriek with laughter. A phone rings through the stereo of a passing car. Focus.

What was written in Ed’s expression? Fear, yes, but something else. 

What WAS Ed?

Stede had perhaps gotten lost in the euphoria of meeting Ed and knowing he was real.  The bigger questions gnawed at him now. Why was this happening to him? What was he supposed to DO about it?

Stede had been Ed once. Or Blackbeard. Had donned the leather, had wielded the power. He had climbed inside the legend, walked around as it. If he could only do that now. If he could only climb inside Ed’s clothes and understand. 

Alma crashes into him. Not hard, but he has no balance with his hands tied. He loses equilibrium, goes down on one knee. Louis hits him from the other side and he crashes to the grass, chest down. They pile on him, call him a scoundrel. Then they’re gone again, and Stede is alone, restrained, blind, prone, prostrate before his own confusion. 

His breath goes shallow. His guts twist. 

That first day, that first pirate book, almost a year ago now. The first time he heard Ed’s voice, out of breath, distressed, elated, fevered, whispered— Never left —

He wrenches free from his daughter’s bonds. It’s too easy—the quarter of his brain still living in the present resolves to get her a book about knots. He pulls the hat from his eyes. He gets on all fours, rearranges himself to a seated position. Ankles crossed, forearms on his knees. The kids have a stick, they poke at something in the grass. Everything is as it should be. 

Except him. Always. 

--

When the kids go back to Mary’s, exhaustion shatters him. Every time, like never before. He’s yawning before he’s taken his shoes off, while his keys are still in his hand. Some extra gravity pulls at him, like staying in the tub as the water drains. He throws his shirt in the laundry because hanging it seems too hard. He gives up folding his trousers and abandons them in a lump on the dresser. 

The sound of his toothbrush echoes around his bathroom. There is no other sound in the house. Solitude is still confusing. He craves it; he dreads it. He had filled his life with work until it revealed itself to be an empty pursuit. Until he felt the richness of his life as an outlaw. Until he touched its contours and felt its thrilling and delicate heartsickness. Until he learned he was a man with mettle to test.

He ought to change these sheets. He ought to make a dentist appointment. He ought to stay up another three or four hours so he doesn’t wake before dawn with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. 

Will Ed call? He feels he’s done what he can to advance that agenda. He’d asked earnestly, almost pleadingly. He’d held eye contact. He’d insisted. Surely Ed must see that this went beyond professional affiliation. Ed must know he wouldn’t spend his first shaky, listless post-divorce holiday with just anyone. Only with a true companion, only someone with whom he felt utterly at home, no matter the setting. 

Ed had been a thousand things on that impossibly strange Thanksgiving afternoon. Morose and taciturn at first, brighter when the restaurant had presented itself. He’d been guarded about his loneliness, and excited about his work, and shy about Stede’s praise, and gracious when they’d parted. He’d hugged him for a long time. He’d sighed into it. 

But more than any of that, Ed had been himself. Not the himself of the conference room or the interviews Stede’s admittedly watched on Youtube or the glowing profiles in magazines both print and digital or anywhere else. The Ed at lunch was undeniably one man, one Ed—the Ed of his dreams. 

There was something of an uncanny quality to it. Like wondering when the oven timer would go off mere seconds before it started beeping. His heart was happy to discover what it already knew. 

But it had been days and Ed hadn’t called, and Stede did not know what that meant. He didn’t know what any of it meant, and it weighed on him. How was he supposed to ask Ed what this all meant? Why his skin tingled with anticipation at seeing him? Why the conversation was as easy as the quiet? Why it felt somehow like Ed had always been there, ambling along the boardwalk at his side, pulling him into boat-related misadventures?

What WAS Ed?

The crackling fire draws his attention. The chandeliers tinkle and sway with the ocean. That moon again, that impossibly full moon. Imagine it bigger. Bigger than that. His breathing is shallow and sharp. The room grows with his inhale and shrinks with his exhale. 

The moon gets closer. It pulls the tides toward it like a lover. The ship rocks, thrashes. 

The moon gets closer. He can see only a quarter of it now, and still, it comes. 

It seems to butt against the window, and then to press itself there against the rocking ship, urgently entreating entrance.

Stede stops breathing entirely. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, this enormous, encroaching moon. Its dips and curves, its glitter and shadows. He wants to caress its ridges, let his thumbs grace the declivities, he wants to let it wind around him, wear a suit of its silvery palette.

Forward momentum eases to a still. The ship stops rocking with a groan. The cabin is tilted 20 degrees. The chandeliers hang crooked, a distressing plumb line. Somewhere, a glass slides off a table and shatters. Stede’s body is pressed into the seam of the couch. 

The moon pushes, pushes. Into the window, in, in. As it reaches the air inside the cabin, it begins to warp, stretch. Melt. It oozes forward, liquid mercury. He watches in awe as it puddles on the floorboards, drop by drop. 

It begins to form a shape. 

Silver legs rise. They flow into a silver groin, and reflexively, Stede’s eyes slam shut. He breathes one, two, three times, and when he opens them again, he trains his eyes higher, where a face might be.

Ed. 

Breathtaking. Alive. Flesh. Silver in the moonlight he’s made of. Hair falling down around his strong shoulders. Black ink on glowing skin. Big eyes wide and earnest. Asking. How do you describe Ed’s darkness, how do you describe his light? 

Stede sits up straighter. His mouth falls open. The air is damp on his chest, exposed at the neck of his robe. There is a cramp in Stede’s thigh from how tensely he has been holding himself. The blanket he’s reclined on is fuzzy. The fire warms only one side of his body. The rug beneath his foot is thin and soft. The brandy in the glass on the table beside him smells sharp and fruity. The candlelight gleams golden, and even in the dim, the colors are rich, lush. Absent the white noise of the ocean, the sounds are sharp—the creak of a floorboard as Ed shifts his weight, the crackle of embers, the squeak of the divan as Stede tries and fails to sit up. 

Ed is nude. 

Stede has, it occurs to him, been sleepwalking through his entire life. This is the only place he’s ever been awake. The world is full of color and texture and sound and light. He experiences it, for the first time, with acuity. Everything tingles, everything pulses. Everything is gorgeous, supple, inviting. 

Ed is gorgeous, supple, inviting. 

Stede tries not to look but it’s there. He can’t avoid seeing: the long lines of his legs, the spread of hair on his chest and stomach, the tattoos that seem to circle it as though drawing attention to it by their absence—

He can’t stop himself. He lets his eyes sweep down and up and down again. 

Ed is half hard. Stede’s chest aches from holding his breath. His heart thumps and thumps. Dips and curves, silver and shadows, ridges and declivities. Ed, seeing, noticing, lets his own eyes fall down his own body. Perhaps surprised by his own corporeality, his own nakedness, his own arousal, his palm lands on his stomach. His hand moves curiously around his middle, exploring. Down. Farther down. Keep going.

Stede’s eyes clamp shut again. Darkness assaults him—he wants to look. He is not supposed to look. It is rude to want to. He wants to so much. 

Stede. Ed’s voice is low. Its mercury shimmer, its moon drip.

So Stede looks. No—he watches. Ed’s hand roams up his own body. It lingers around the chest. As though feeling the softness of his hair, the swell of his pec. His thumb grazes his right nipple, once, twice. It travels up his neck, up the muscle there, his jaw. His eyes are serious, his expression pained. 

He is, Stede notes, now fully erect. 

Ed’s face searches him. Seems to fully take in Stede’s presence for the first time. Ed’s expression seems to ask: Do you see me? Is this real? Ed approaches with even steps. He glides, he floats.The lamplight absorbs him, silver and gold.

As Ed gets closer, Stede can see his scars, his bruises. One knee slightly larger than the other, the old injury—why does Stede know this? Ed lowers himself to the coffee table, sitting with careful slowness. He smells like smoke, like night air. His hair hangs at the plumb line of the chandeliers, tangential to the ship’s walls. With soft concern, Ed takes the hand that rests on Stede’s chest. There is a memory there, a recognition. Ed gives it a light squeeze. This, too, has happened. Stede stares at their hands, trying to make sense of it. He blinks. Blood, the trail to the door, metallic, congealing— is this?

No, Ed says, shaking his head. Still smiling. 

He lets go of Stede’s hand. He wants that hand back, urgently—it felt so real, so warm. Uncertainty freezes his body. Instead, Ed’s hand parts Stede’s robe. Stede is shirtless, wearing worn silk trousers. He is visibly erect—impossible to miss. He is desperate to relieve the pressure. He can barely breathe.

Ed looks. Ed considers. Despite Ed’s naked, similarly erect state, Stede feels the urge to hide himself away. He wants to apologize, but the words are stuck. Stuck like his body, stuck like the ship. He’s always stuck. 

Ed smiles at him, as though to calm his racing heart. His hand moves slowly to the swell in Stede’s trousers. Stede knows what will happen. Stede knows how fast it will happen. He has never been so desperate for it to happen in all his life. He will be humiliated. No, he tries and fails to say, no no no no —

It’s okay, Stede, Ed soothes. Really.

Ed’s hand lands. Its warmth is volcanic, even through the silk. 

A tiny bit more and it will happen, a bit more pressure, a bit more motion. Stede’s breath goes short, sharp, shallow. He is hyperventilating. His body heaves itself from the divan, up into a V, and then—

The glass of water next to him on the coffee table goes flying, lands with a crash but somehow doesn’t shatter. Soaks the rug. The late day sunlight is blinding, shattering. Shards of light piercing him. The view of his real-life home assaults him. 

He is so hard it aches, it prevents him from taking a full inhale. He rips open his button, his fly. He can still feel the warmth of Ed’s hand, the stillness in the room, Ed’s breath on his skin. He can hear Ed’s soft voice, pleading for him to be okay, to let this happen. He can smell the salt in Ed’s hair, inches from his face. It’s wet enough already to not be dry. It’s over in seconds and it hurts as he comes. He makes a noise he’s never heard himself make before. The world goes black. Semen lands on his stomach and chest and soaks through his shirt. It is hot on his fingers as he works himself through it. 

His head hits the pillow again, hard. His arm flops down to his side. His chest heaves with exertion. His blood sings. And then—

Feelings flood him. A tsunami. He shuts his eyes and holds his breath. His breath is all there is to hold onto, to keep him from washing away.

He holds it in. He holds it in and holds it in. He whimpers, but he holds it. He squeezes his eyes shut and there—

There is Ed’s voice, it’s okay, Stede. 

It’s okay.

It’s okay it’s okay it’sokayit’sokay —

Stede lets go a fraction. The tide takes him immediately. The tears come. And not a few middling, leaking tears, not a bitten off whimper. No. That was still holding. He understands that now. 

No. This is gasping, choking sobs. This is stomach muscles clenching, this is convulsions, this is grief. This is grief. More grief than his body has room for. 

For what? All of it. 

He turns inward, presses his face into the back cushions. It comes and comes and comes—until it doesn’t. Until he can hiccup a few breaths and take stock of himself. Sticky prick still out, eyes burning. There is jizz on the couch.

He flops back onto his back. He closes his eyes to breathe. 

A memory surfaces. 

That dream. Ages ago—a lifetime, now. The one where Ed appeared in full for the first time, in more than just a flash of hair, a smear of leather. The one where Ed looked at his weak and bleeding heap on the ground and told him, directly, exactly what he needed to know: This is your dream. I think technically that means I’m you.

It didn’t make all that much sense, then. But he gets it now, maybe. More so, at least. 

The brain named itself, after all. And everyone you dream about is you. Some part of you, some experience, some feeling, some puzzle. 

Or, perhaps, things you refuse to see in waking life. 

--

He wakes up the next morning. And then what? He blinks his ceiling into focus. 

He flips through the books. In book after book, Blackbeard and Stede had a ‘friendship,’ or a ‘good friendship,’ or a ‘puzzling friendship,’ or an ‘acquaintance,’ or a ‘mentorship relationship.’ 

Useless. He heads downstairs, pours himself coffee. 

Had he known? After a night of dreamless, terrible sleep and three quarters of a pot of coffee and a long sit staring numbly into space on his balcony, he thinks the answer is probably yes, but with conditions. 

It’s less that he hadn’t known and more like the thought rejected itself before it ever took root. Nope, can’t be. Impossible. Wrong. I’m married. That’s for other people, other lives. People with choices left to make. He was done making choices. The claw machine had come back up with right socks and he was out of quarters. I have it better than most. I have nothing to complain about.

That was all different, now. 

Himself? Ignorable. First lesson he’d ever learned was that what he wanted never mattered. Not to his parents, not to his bullies, and later, not to his wife or boss or anyone else. 

But Ed? Ed was not ignorable. Not anymore. 

At the fish boat, after the clouds had broken, Ed had been charming, sweet. He’d touched Stede’s arm when he’d been excited to show a sketch, he’d nudged Stede with his shoulder when Stede said something that made him giggle. Called him mate. Hugged him. 

What would it have been like? He closes his eyes, he sits with it. What would it have been like to let himself feel it, in that moment, instead of rejecting his own senses? The softness of Ed’s hair as it brushed his neck as they sat side to side, the feel of Ed squeezing his knee as he related some sad story about his childhood? To smell Ed’s neck as they hugged goodnight on the boardwalk, to let his nose linger there, to dare to tip his face up to Ed’s in silent question— is this what I think it is, or are we simply having a puzzling friendship?

His phone buzzing on the table beside him jolts him out of his haze. He grabs for it—it’s Mary or the kids, they’re the only ones who ever call when he’s—

Oh. Oh.

--

“You sure you don’t mind this?” Ed stuffs pins into the cushion he wears like a watch.  “Feeling a bit self-conscious about how, you know. Insanely unprofessional this is.”

Something in Stede flattens. He has little interest in being professional right now. He’s been professional since he was seven years old. He wants to sip cocktails on a secret boat. He wants to try on nice clothes. He doesn’t want to work, he wants to play. 

Ed is casual today—trousers that might look too big if they weren’t perfectly tailored to seem so, a white tee with strategic holes and fraying, hair up in a loose knot. He wears glasses with a thick black frame. The cravat hangs in a loose knot around his neck. He looks gorgeous in the patented J E F F leather; he looks gorgeous like this. Ed clearly didn’t expect to see anyone today, and that does something to Stede’s insides. He has been allowed someplace new. They have become unstuck. 

Stede will not think about the dream. He simply will not. 

The room is lousy with sewing machines. With dummies, with fabrics, with sequins. There appears to be an entire table just for empty Coke cans. Soft dreamy music plays from somewhere, a low female voice. He feels like he’s inside the genie’s bottle, and Ed wants to talk professionalism. Ed, who stands there with hope in his eyes looking sheepish, looking shy. Ed doesn’t know this isn’t the old Stede anymore. He doesn’t know this Stede has found the land of left socks. 

“Oh, Edward,” Stede says, waving a hand. “Forget it! Let’s have a day!”

Ed smiles, relieved. “Okay, well—oh, here. Take your coat.”

He moves behind Stede with an easy hand on his shoulder. Ed’s hand is warm, his touch light. He helps Stede shrug out of his coat, waits as he unwinds his scarf. 

“Gorgeous, this,” Ed says, fingering the scarf. The scarf is probably ten years old. A birthday gift to himself, because he rightly suspected that nobody else would get him anything he liked. Ed touches it gently to his face, as if testing its softness. He doesn’t seem to realize he is doing it. The gesture is familiar, charming, specific.

“Cashmere,” Stede says.

Ed lifts a corner of his mouth as he meets Stede’s eye. 

“And you, of course, know that!” Stede feels heat crawl up his neck. “Sorry.”

“Nah,” Ed says. He winks, like in the secret closet behind the secret door, and Stede’s stomach drops into his shoes. 

Ed swivels his head around on his long neck until he finds what he’s looking for: a stray hanger on a clothes rack in the back corner. He hangs the coat with care, slings the scarf over it. 

“Well,” he says, ambling his way back over, “dunno if it’s gonna fit you, probably won’t, whatever. Just want to see how it looks when it’s on a person who’s moving. You get it.” Ed’s really nervous. He fiddles with his nails, he looks at the ground. “Not even a real piece for anything, not for the line, just realized it had been a while since I made something? Just to see if I could make it? So like, you know, whatever, if it’s weird you don’t have to. Or whatever, it’s whatever.”

“I’m sure it will be beautiful.” Stede says. He holds his arm out with a grin he hopes is charming. “Hand it over. Or whatever.”

Ed relaxes. He grabs a red heap of fabric from where it sits, draped over the high stool Ed uses at his table, careful not to disturb the pins. He drapes them carefully over Stede’s arm. “Start with the trousers. Might not fit, but don’t panic, just don’t force it, okay?" He grabs something off a hanger on a rack behind him. "Here, take this plain black dress shirt—it’ll have its own shirt, obviously, but that'll do for now. When you've got that on, we’ll pop the jacket over it.”

And then—

“Oh, shit, right,” Ed says, ostensibly looking around for something, somewhere—there are four walls and only the one door, nowhere to go. “Don’t usually do this bit here.”

“No matter, I can just—”

“I can turn around and—I mean I can step out, if—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Professional, right? Just legs, same as any other legs,” Stede says. Surely, his tailor’s seen him this way a hundred times. Still, he feels himself shift his weight from one foot to the other.

“Watch the pins,” Ed mutters. He turns to pretend to tidy his desk. “Lunatic.”

Lunatic. He’s been called it before, but never enjoyed it quite so much. He grins as he undoes his belt. Stede’s trousers hit the ground and he feels more naked than he did on his wedding night. He is a free man now, he realizes, as though for the first time. The studio is warm but the air feels cool on his bare skin. He is aware of everything—the gooseflesh on his thighs, the sweat at his crotch, the hair tickling the back of his neck. The shape of his body, all the ways it’s different from Ed’s—the soft paunch of skin at the waistband of his silk boxer briefs, the cut of his clavicle in the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips. He finds himself standing taller. He folds his shoulder blades down and back like wings. He juts his chin, like he’s carved of marble. He stuffs down a mad urge to stay like this until Ed turns, just to see what he would do. 

Ed drops a pair of scissors with a clang. He bends down, gropes blindly for them, sorry, sorry. It snaps Stede out of it.

He steps into the trousers. They are a deep, bright red, like how it looked when he cut his finger open. Like what it looked like before it turned to a stain on the cabin floor. The lining is black, the detailing is gold. Incidentally, they do fit, and like a dream at that. They have a fall front, and he dutifully does up the buttons. 

“Ready,” he says, and Ed turns. Ed’s mouth opens softly, his eyes go down and up and down. 

“Wow,” Ed says. “Better than I’d feared. Okay, here, arms.”

The jacket slips onto him like it’s bespoke. The shoulder seam, the sleeve length, the hem—they all hit his body almost exactly where they’re meant to. 

“Ed, did you make this suit for me?” The question is stupid, his tongue is thick. But there’s no other explanation. 

He twists around to find Ed on his knees behind him, fussing with the hem. 

Ed laughs around the pin dangling from his lower lip like a cigarette. “How could I? Never measured you. Stay still.”

“Has my tailor been talking out of school?”

It’s a joke, hah hah, but when he’s satisfied, Ed takes him by the arm—the wrist, almost the hand—and leads him to the platform in front of the mirror. He steps on it, centers himself, and looks up, and—

He feels a hundred feet tall, he feels strong, he feels held and kept and seen. It’s more than the sum of its measurements, it’s like Ed himself twisted the thread, like he bent his body before the loom to weave the warp and weft. There are parts of Ed in this garment, Stede can feel it. His eyes jump from detail to detail: exaggerated collar, contrasting inlay, oversized cuff, intricate but subtle piping. The jacket is cropped at the front to meet the high waist on the pants, the back is dramatic and sweeping. There’s so much to take in that he has to unfocus his eyes, see the garment as a whole instead of a collection of parts, and then— 

And then he realizes. It’s a red suit. It’s THE red suit, the one he’d returned when Ed was only a dream. It’s the red suit, only better, bolder. Only his, there is no denying it. This garment was made for him. He fights tears. All that grief, still hovering around his system. Different now. New.

He turns to see Ed, to figure out what all of this means. He finds on Ed’s face great, sweeping emotion, almost as though he, too, might cry. 

“Ed,” Stede says, a whisper slicing through the thickness in the air, “it’s wonderful.”

Ed huffs a shy laugh. He resumes fussing. Fiddling with the pins at the waist, brushing the sleeve, adjusting Stede’s posture to make sure it sits how he wants it to. 

“Do a twirl,” he instructs, and Stede doesn’t need to be told twice. He twirls once, twice, thrice. 

“The flow, Ed,” Stede says brightly, twisting to see the cut of his waist, the swell of his ass. He likes to dress himself well, but somehow has, perhaps, never seen himself this way. Never seen himself as attractive, as, well, flamboyant. Another left sock, another ignored throb of want. Well, no more. He twirls again. 

“Easy, killer,” Ed says with a chuckle. Ed’s big eyes in the mirror show pride. He bends to adjust the waist at the back of the trousers, so it nips him a bit closer. Then Ed stands, he steps back. He places a finger to his lips, assessing, and Stede gleans that his job now is to stand very still. He natters away to avert fidgeting, just some nonsense to fill the space, to entertain Ed. The banter comes easily, back and forth, a ping pong ball zinging. It’s easy to banter with Ed. 

Ed circles him from behind. He reaches out to touch something, changes his mind. Does it again. Finally, he comes to stand beside Stede. He holds out his hand to help Stede step down from the low pedestal. His hand is soft, cool. 

It stays there between them, chest level, holding Stede’s just a beat longer than it needs to. Then, he drops it, lets his eyes sweep down and up Stede’s body, one last check. Finally, Ed stills, after all that motion. Hands jammed in his pockets, he seems almost sheepish. After all, he’s been working his magic, showing his heart. It’s vulnerable, probably. It’s gorgeous. Ed is gorgeous. Stede can see that, now.

Ed meets his eye. 

The look on Ed’s face is one he’s seen before—but not there, not now. He saw it on the deck, under the too-full moon, when Ed was also draped in silk. He saw the same wonder there, the same agony. The same sense of time suspended, of gravity heightened, of the world quieting. 

A sense that something was supposed to happen. Something he didn’t know, then. 

He knows it now.

“You wear fine things well,” Ed says. 

A ringing in his ears deafens him totally. His body trembles. He has to close his eyes and open them again. 

“What did you just say?” Stede’s voice is a whisper. 

“I—I didn’t mean to—”

“Ed. I think I have to tell you something.”

Chapter Text

It doesn’t seem possible until it’s happening. Until he cracks the studio door, and there he is, marigold hair, bright agave eyes, tangerine and plum sunset at his back. Today he’s in day off chic: dark mock neck sweater, trouser with a subtle check, updated 70s cool, Mr. Rogers’s neighbor if he fucked. 

On the phone, he’d said he could be here in an hour. Ed had burned two cigs. He’d straightened his studio in a Looney Tunes blur. He organized up all his scraps into piles that seemed intentional, he ran the shop vac to get any stray pins off the floor. He swiped some deodorant under his arms. He put on some low music so the silence wouldn’t make him fidget. He corralled all the dead Cokes to one table but forgot, he realizes, in real time, to dispatch them to the dumpster out back. 

After the sewing machine incident, there had been—generously—about one second between seeing his phone and dialing Stede’s number. In the space of that second, he’d experienced what could only be described as full ego death. He’d shut his eyes and open them to a totally new world. In this world, he called Stede Bonnet. In this world, Stede Bonnet answered.

Ed takes his coat. As Ed goes for the scarf, Stede attempts to somehow unwind it with an arm while simultaneously turning in a circle. He tangles himself hopelessly.

“Cashmere,” Stede informs him, as he spins him like a cartoon mummy to detach him from his scarf. God, what a prick. Of course he goes around announcing his fine fabrics to the world. Ed shoots him a wink and an accompanying look— I see you motherfucker —and watches him go rosy.

Ed takes his time hanging the coat and scarf. Stede’s heat lingers on the camel. The scarf smells, Ed realizes, like his neck. Ed’s never fucked in the studio, and would probably get a pin in the ass for his trouble, but that’d be a fun story to tell at parties, so what the hell. 

But first, tailoring. 

He rambles a bit about the suit. Ed feels like a dunce for thirty seconds when he realizes there’s no place for Stede to change. He hasn’t needed one, the only person who ever steps foot in here is Izzy. Stede is, as always, though, down to fucking clown. Ed barely gets his head turned before he hears Stede’s trousers hit the carpet. Ed pretends to tidy his desk like he didn’t do it frantically as Stede was on his way. He has to take a long inhale by his table. He has to hold it for a count of four. 

Stede hums to himself as he changes. He seems to not even realize he’s doing it. 

When Stede’s ready and Ed turns, Ed almost passes out on the spot. Ed thought he’d left extra length in the trousers, but that man’s legs are longer than June fuckin’ solstice. They’re a whole concept album, full hour of music in two perfect tracks. 

Before he can get too excited, Ed grabs the jacket, since that’s what prompted this whole encounter to begin with. He slips it onto Stede’s shoulders, zing, boom. Immediately some things bug him—cuff placement, the fall of a pleat. He sets to fussing. 

He tells a half-lie about the fit being accidental. Sure, how could he have known? It’s true enough, he has no idea how he knew. Can’t even lie that it’s because he’s just so good at estimating, blah blah. Only that a part of him simply knew. The part that dreamed, the part that understood that something was happening that would change him forever. That part.

Did he make this suit FOR Stede? Yes, of course, if anyone else so much as tried to squeeze into it they would get a dagger through the fuckin’ eyeball. But he lets Stede think they’re talking about measurements, which, ostensibly, they are.

Ed leads him to the pedestal with a hand at his elbow. He tries not to think about how it’s only the two of them in this room. For the first time maybe ever, he wishes there were half a dozen sycophants around, waiting to spout off about how Ed’s a visionary. Then maybe he could hide the anxiety he’s feeling about the only reaction in the room. So Ed keeps his eyes on Stede’s face. 

Stede’s eyes go big. His mouth drops open in delight. He stands taller, just a bit, shoulders dropping and chin lifting. He smoothes a hand down his front, and rotates his torso a bit left, and then a bit right. He shakes his head in disbelief. Ed’s never seen him like this. He’s so bright, so easy. Clothes can do that, sometimes. That’s why he started doing this. But Ed dares to hope it’s more than that. 

Satisfied Stede’s happy, Ed lets his eyes stray to take in the whole picture. 

Soon as he sees, there’s a seven car pileup in his frontal lobe. Time stops. Air molecules hover unmoving in his lungs. A pin, escaped from his wrist, pauses in its descent, halfway to the floor. 

It’s been a few weeks of noodling on this suit in his spare time. Told himself it was getting back to his roots. Making shit because it compelled him, outside of the grind. Concepts started off blue—Stede looked fuckin’ murderously good in blue. Then one day, he thought: no. Red. And it all came together. The suit wanted to be red. 

But now he understands. The suit didn’t want to be red, Ed needed it to be red. The red silk tucked in his breast pocket under the moon, shaking with his pulse— you wear fine things well. That goddamn red silk, the beating heart of him, the spark of his passion, a living tendril of his memory, his feeling. A square of torn-out lining from an altered jacket, pilfered from the scrap pile in his ma’s sewing room and secreted away, there on his person, for so many years it had turned invisible, blended into nothing, until it was lost, forgotten, gone. 

Until Stede Bonnet found it in a dream. 

He’d taken his own fuckin’ heart and wrapped Stede Bonnet in it. And he hadn’t even realized. 

Ed’s never had a muse before. He’s not sure that’s precisely what’s happening, but it’s a funny feeling. Twenty years he toiled away at his stupid fuckin’ passion in order to amass the wealth, the notoriety, the recognition, the staying power. Now all he wants to do is give it away. This belongs to you. I don’t want anything for it. Nobody else should ever touch it. 

“Ed,” Stede gasps, “it’s wonderful.”

Ed’s stomach swoops. It is wonderful, it’s so fuckin’ wonderful. When’s the last time anything was wonderful? Ages. Years. 

Ed scoops the pin from the floor to interrupt his pricking tears. “Do a twirl,” he instructs, voice thick. 

The man is nothing if not obedient. Stede twirls and twirls, the coattails fly. Ed laughs. His heart in motion, soaring. He’s a cardinal taking flight from the garden feeder; a perfect red lipstick smeared across a throat; the sweetest, ripest cherry from the long-dormant summer. 

“The flow, Ed,” Stede says brightly. Stede sweeps the tails one way, the other. He twists at the waist, admiring his figure. 

“Easy, killer,” Ed says with a chuckle. “Not finished yet.”

Stede finally goes still. Ed gets to work. He’s a perfectionist, so the final product can seem flung together. That’s his style, his process—the minutiae of effortlessness. Even for this, when it’s only ever gonna be on Stede’s body.

Or, maybe, especially for this. 

“Good you clocked I’m a killer,” Stede says with a grin. “Consider yourself warned.”

“Well, you’re a pirate,” Ed says. “Probably killed a few guys at least. Brigands. Wait, no. Fuckin’ navy guys and shit. The pigs. Wouldn’t kill the brigands. We’re the brigands.”

“May have run a man or two through in my day,” Stede says, feigning mystery. 

“Oh, I bet you did,” Ed says. His eyebrows try to shoot up into his hairline. He keeps them firmly in place, but only just.

“You know, I read somewhere that Blackbeard didn’t really do much killing,” Stede says. He stills himself dutifully as Ed adjusts the ridiculous dramatic cuff. “When it was directly necessary, maybe, to protect himself or his crew. But by and large he relied more heavily on tricks and confusion. Illusions. Using the enemy’s fear against them. Things like that.”

“Bit of fuckery,” Ed says confidently, like it’s a real word and not one he made up on the spot. 

“A fuckery,” Stede grins. “Yes. Brilliant.”

He’s a liar, Ed thinks. Tries to drop these little pirate anecdotes and play them off as nothings, stray thoughts. The man’s obsessed with pirates. That’s why Ed can’t stop dreaming about them. His brain was priming him. This guy’s gonna show up and he’s gonna be weird about pirates. Don’t let it throw you. Ed gets it, maybe. A bigger life, a freer one. A place to be reckless, to let it all go. To see the stars and scream as loud as you can. A place where you get  to hurt the people who hurt you first. 

Even now, as he works, Ed can see the little movies playing in Stede’s eyes of the two of them, tangled in the rigging, lost in the smoke. The fuckeries they’d come up with together, the way their brains would complement each other. No wonder they sailed together. Together they were more than themselves. 

He lifts his face to the mirror to check his work. On his way up, he catches Stede’s eye. Stede’s eyes are big and full of feeling. His mouth is open, smiling. Stede feels it, too. Whatever the fuck it is. The dreams, the pull, the kismet of it all. He feels it. 

Terror swoops in. 

This is big, this thing. Ed’s not so good with big things. Well. Big good things. Big bad things? Had more of those before puberty than most lucky fucks get in a lifetime. That shit slides right off. Breakup? One night of drinking, max. Professional disappointment? Maybe two. Easy come easy go. 

But this isn’t easy come or easy go. This is another thing entirely. This is his goddamn subconscious doing a whole-ass dissertation at him while he’s supposed to be sleeping. This is real fear, this is real stakes. 

This is real. 

But then, way out there in the cold, lonely sea, that goddamn Stede mermaid is always swimming straight for him. Glittery scales, trident at the ready. Undaunted, undeterred. You gotta stay down deep, Eddie, his ma’s voice finds him, here, in the sanctuary he built for her. You gotta do it scared.

Time to do it scared. 

Stede’s still above him—that won’t do. He’s fixated on his own reflection, eyes darting all around, flexing, turning. Ed laughs to break his focus. He extends a hand to help him down off the pedestal. As the contact lands, he goes flying back to the shock of that first morning meeting, the handshake that felt like hours, whole rest of the room melting away.

Ed takes him in up close. Not the suit, fuck the suit—him. The gorgeous length of him, the nip of his waist, the breadth of his shoulders. The curl on his forehead, the part at his temple. The pink high on his cheeks. It reminds him of the deck, the moon, the salt air, the sway, the buzz, the Caribbean heat in his voice, the silk of it all. For all Ed’s been fighting it, he’s sweet, and he’s enthusiastic, it’s all in his face, in the little dimple beside his mouth, in the way the smile hits his eyes. Also, he’s here, and that’s more than Ed ever dared hope for. Suddenly Ed knows exactly what to say—

“You wear fine things well,” Ed says with a smile, and—

Stede blanches like a southern belle. He looks like he might faint. He closes his eyes, seems to sway on his feet, no, this is not—this wasn’t supposed to—

“What did you just say?” Stede’s voice is a whisper. 

“I—I didn’t mean to—”

“Ed, I think I have to tell you something.”

“Mate, I’m sorry, okay, you can just forget it, I didn’t mean anything by—”

“No no, no, can we just—can we sit? I need to sit.”

There’s a loveseat, a drafting chair, two stools, and a footstool in the room, but Stede simply crosses his legs and crumples to the ground, which, okay, sure. Ed does too, sits cross-legged facing him. Stede’s gotta have a zillion pins poking him but he doesn’t seem to care. Stede touches his forehead with his fingers, blocking Ed from seeing what’s happening on that face of his, but even at the fringes, it doesn’t look good. Ed begs himself not to panic. 

“I—I don’t even know where to start here,” Stede says, ostensibly starting, shaking his head in disbelief already. As he pulls his hand away from his forehead, it shakes. “This may sound insane, but, I … I suppose I have to ask it. Ed, have you, by any chance, been having strange dreams? About … me?”

There is a ringing in Ed’s ears that somehow transforms into a block of ice that moves down his throat into his stomach. He can feel his mouth drop open, but no words come out of it. 

“It’s just that—well, I ask because… god, all of this sounds crazy, I know, but, see, I’ve been dreaming about you? It started, gosh, months ago now—“

MONTHS?

“—after I got a book about pirates as a gift. There was a passage in the book about, about Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard—you, Ed—and the two of them traveled and worked together a while, and after I read it, the dreams started. You and me, as pirates. Almost every night.”

Almost every night. “What the fuck?” It comes out as anger even though Ed doesn’t mean it to, he’s just overwhelmed, just weirded out, just confused. Sure, Ed haas had some weird dreams, but that's because he saw the guy and his stupid March Hare-ass horny brain got a crush—but even THEN, not every night, not for MONTHS. Why the fuck hadn’t he said something? What WAS he? “That why you were so keen to get my fuckin’ business? Some kind of weird obsession with me?”

“Ed, no, NO, I swear. I had no idea you were J E F F. I probably shouldn’t admit that, but I’ve been a bit checked out at work lately, just sort of, you know, treading water? I didn’t know you were you until … until I met you.”

What the fuck is he talking about? 

“Lucius will tell you, he was furious—I didn’t look at the packet he put together until the morning of our first meeting. I was so thrown off when you walked in. The man of my dreams—in my dreams—Ed, he was … he was you. Down to every detail. He wore a leather jacket with one sleeve, he had your, you hair, your voice, your smell, all of it. He had a cravat—that cravat, the one you’ve got on there. In every dream, it’s there.”

Ed’s eyes slam shut. He can’t take this. He doesn’t believe in this shit—in ghosts, or other dimensions or afterlives or whatever the fuck. He lives with two fuckin’ feet on the ground, he takes the subway, he prefers smooth peanut butter, all normal, tangible, three-dimensional shit, what the fuck is he supposed to do with—

“We traded clothes sometimes,” Stede says, talking more urgently, as though trying to convince him. “We lived on a ship together, we sailed, you taught me things. About how to be a pirate. I don’t know, I don’t—it was always so REAL, and then…there you were, somehow. When I saw you, I almost fainted. And and and, god, there’s so much,” he says, talking faster and faster, panicking maybe, “and I didn’t meant to do this today, but the red suit, you know I’d almost, I’d almost bought myself a red suit! Right before we met! But it felt wrong, like the timing wasn’t right or something. And now I know why, Ed, it’s because you were making one. This one, a better one, a perfect one. And then—”

Stede pauses to collect himself, shake his head. This is going somewhere. This is leading to something. Do they fuck in his dreams, too?

“And then, I had this dream. We were on the deck of the ship and the moon was—god, it was huge, bigger than it ever could be. We’d just come from a party. Dressed to the nines, you know, you were in this purple velvet thing, it was gorgeous. We’d had a bad time at the party, I think, so we were talking about it. And you had this little scrap of red silk.”

If a meteor landed on this building and crushed them into paste, Ed wouldn’t notice. 

“This little tatty thing, but it was lovely, and so I folded it and stuck it in your breast pocket, and you looked so … overcome. So vulnerable.”

Ed can’t breathe. He can’t breathe and he can’t move and he can’t breathe. 

“And I said to you, you wear fine things well.”

“And then?” Ed hears himself say. An exhale. 

Stede looks away. Down. Straight down to hell. He swallows, hard. “And then … I woke up.”

Ed feels, in real time, his heart tear in two. He looks down at his shaking hands, at his rapidly numbing feet. And then what? He woke up. 

“I don’t know, Ed. I don’t know what any of it means, I’ve been torturing myself trying to figure it out, and I realize now I should have mentioned all of this sooner, but I couldn’t understand why it was happening, I still can’t, I can’t for the life of me understand what it means that you said the exact words to me just now that I said to you in my dreams. I can’t get my hands around it. But … I thought I should tell you. In case it weirds you out. Or something. I’m sorry, I just … I don’t know what it means.”

I don’t know what it means—

Ed knows what it means. Ed knows exactly what the fuck it means. 

And apparently he’s the only one. 

“Ed?” His voice is a squeak now. 

“No mate,” Ed says, looking at the disintegrating polish on his bitten fingernails. “No idea what it means.”

The ensuing thirty seconds take three hundred years to pass. Oceans of time, walloping him. Sanding him down to a shiny rock. 

Stede breathes. Loudly. 

Ed stares at his hands. 

Until he can’t take it. “Okay,” Ed says, “I should—”

“Yep,” Stede says, “I can—”

Ed leaps to his feet. He does not help Stede up. As Stede arrives at his height, he blinks, and goes bounding toward his coat. 

“Suit, mate,” Ed says. He presses his fingers into his eyeballs. 

“Yes, god, sorry,” Stede says. 

He crosses back to his clothes. Ed stands at his desk, turning pages in his sketchbook, not seeing a goddamn thing on them. Stede changes, thankfully, in record time. He gets his coat before Ed even turns. 

At the door, he hesitates. 

“Sorry,” Ed thinks Stede mutters as he leaves. 

--

He waits for the text, but it doesn’t come. Not later that night. Not the next morning. Not during his second night of heavy drinking. Nor during his third. 

But of course it doesn’t. Ed’s nothing to him. Ed’s only a fascination. A whim. Stede doesn’t know what it means, after all, so why would he text?

Ed resolves to stop sleeping. 

It’s petty and it’s bitter, but if Stede’s not gonna meet him where they’re obviously at, then all Ed can do is withhold his presence. Even from dreams. 

The drinking gives him a few nights of murky oblivion, no dreams in sight. But Ed can’t keep that up forever. Not 25 anymore. So he lets the hangover burn through him. He takes to making a full pot of coffee instead of the half pot he’s weaned himself down to. He stays awake until his body refuses and then sets the alarm for two hours, three hours, not long enough but still too long. 

It mostly works. The dreams are chaotic flashes, bursts of caffeinated motion in a sea of exhausted darkness. He wakes unrefreshed and unremembering.

He calls Izzy. 

“Dunno mate,” Ed says from the sofa, cold rag on his forehead, “been thinkin’ maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t go with these guys. Got a weird feeling. Kinda intense, don’t you think?”

The screed he gets is one, at least, he truly deserves. 

“You say this to me NOW? After you bit my head off and spat it at my fuckin’ feet and DEMANDED I sign the fuckin’ contracts? After I wrote and signed the fuckin’ check, after I humbled myself before that fuckin’ PRICK? Edward, I say this with the entire trickle of blood left in my polluted, decaying heart: eat shit, it’s too late, I fuckin’ hate you. You absolute diva.”

Izzy hangs up the phone. 

He drinks coffee. He does his job. He resents every goddamn sketch, every bright color, every soft fabric, every bit of goddamn frippery that Before Ed stuck in there. The clothes are good. Fine. But now, the only motivation he’s got left to finish is spite.

Lucky for him, he and spite go way, way back. Hello old friend, how ya been keeping?

When his body’s finally sick of the booze, he walks. To exhaustion. To muscle fuckin’ failure—he walks. He walks everywhere—except the pier. No boats, no fish, no chips, no sir. Instead, he walks up, he walks down. He paces the living room with the TV on. When he finally hits the pillow it’s a few hours of black, dreamless unconsciousness. Never enough, always too much. Anything to avoid having to feel that crushing disappointment, that free-fall to nowhere at the end of I woke up. 

Then it’s back to it. 

It’s days before his system fails. He forgets lunch and eats a big dinner way too early, lets his guard down. The TV blares into the room, loud enough, he assumes, to keep him awake. 

Until he hits the water. 

The sea is peaceful, at least. Cold, but not frigid. The current is calm today. No thrashing. Ed lets his muscles relax. Closes his eyes. Sways. Lets his body become the water. Lets it go. Lets it all fuckin’ go. Feels nice, almost. Feels safe. 

When he opens his eyes again, there it is, out there in the distance. Of course. Ed tenses, but can’t remember why. Just an old reflex. He touches the rope at his waist: check, check, all systems go. Still stuck. No surprises. Thank fuck. 

So he waits. He watches the easy rhythm of him, so at home in this place where Ed’s always dying. Makes Ed think maybe he could learn to be at home here, too. 

Maybe. 

His lungs start to complain, but he ignores them. Who needs air? Who needs anything? Not Ed, not when this finally feels like fuckin’ rest. Like respite. From what? Who can remember. 

Down and up and down, he comes. He comes. He comes into focus, his broad shoulders, his strong arms. The weapon he wields without menace. The light that catches only him. The hair that floats, the scales that glimmer. 

Ed knows him like anything, by now. Easy peasy. This place is horror, panic, darkness, but when he shows up? When he shows up, it’s adrenaline, cortisol, blood, lilac, toast, sun, loneliness, arrogance, hope. It’s healing and possibility. It’s safe. 

Stede glides to a pause before him. This is the closest he’s ever been. He looks concerned, but Ed is not. Ed feels a smile crack his face. He feels the pain evaporate from his lungs. It might be ten seconds, it might be half an hour; Ed is happy to look at him. The lines around his worried eyes, the steely cut of his mouth, the tension in his muscles.

Ed can’t talk, but he needs to communicate somehow that it’s all okay now, that this is where they’re meant to be. That no matter how hard Ed resisted it—why was he resisting it again? What was he mad about?—this is where he belongs. 

His lungs, though. They’re at a crisis point. No more ignoring it, no fighting it. It’s over. He’s grateful, at least, for this moment of peace. This chance to look at him, and be Edward for a while.

He loses the fight. His lungs inhale. Everything goes black. 

But then his eyes open. 

Ed’s mouth is open, too; he’s about to speak. 

Thin light, warm air, quiet waves, soft clothes, sand. That same concern all over Stede’s face, that same worry. The same pit of anxiety in Ed’s guts, and he doesn’t know what he’s about to say until—

So…

This is big, it’s too big—good big? God, yes—his lungs are on fire as the air leaves to become words—

So, uh, I reckon … what makes Ed happy is—you?

And then finally—suddenly—his whole system stutters back to working. He can breathe, he can think—he can move. A hand on the scratchy linen of Stede’s sun-warm shoulder, to gather him close. To kiss him. To feel the tension finally leave Stede’s body. To feel the exhale as Stede plunges into the moment. 

To finally get it right. 

To finally stop waiting and declare the truth to be true. To say it plain, easy. Unselfconsciously. 

There, on the beach kissing him. Warm, dry, still. It’s the safest Ed’s ever felt. The steadiest. The surest. All he had to do was let him come. All he had to do was stop fighting it, pushing it, fearing it every time.

You make Stede happy, Stede says. 

His words are not a love confession—but neither were Ed’s. He talked around it because Ed talked around it. He was following Ed’s lead. 

The vibration of Ed’s phone jolts him awake with a snort. The salt air fades, the warm sun dissipates. Ed shivers as he reads the text.

Ed, I know what I did was wildly unprofessional. I want you to know I’ve taken myself off the campaign. Your work is too important for you to have any concerns about working with me. Deeply sorry to cause you such obvious discomfort. -S

He was following Ed’s lead. 

--

Ed walks. And walks and walks and walks. He walks in the morning before work and at night after work. He walks to dinner and then he walks after dinner. 

How do you get everything so wrong all the time? How do you hold the frustration and the hope and the hurt and the forgiveness and all of it? Angry is easy. This is hard. He’s never had to do it before. Never cared enough to. Easy come easy go. Until Stede. 

He walks. And then what? He walks. 

Tonight’s dinner is some new Afghani burger hybrid place that just opened. Masala fries are killer. Only eats half of everything. Takes the rest in a box and hands it to the first guy he sees laid out on some cardboard at the corner. 

He walks. Knee’s stiff from it, but it doesn’t matter. Needs to be anywhere besides his house, his studio, his head. Needs to stay the fuck awake. Needs to walk. And then—

Just up ahead, in the center of the deserted sidewalk, in the middle of the city, bathed in streetlight: a rabbit. 

Ed stops. He cocks his head. 

A rabbit. On a city street. In the middle of the night. Did Ed pass out while walking? He pinches the inside of his forearm, between the teeth of the jacket zipper.

“Ow, fuck.” Definitely awake. 

The rabbit hears him. It takes off. He tries to follow, but the little fucker is so fast, and Ed’s got a fuckass knee and trash bins and newspaper boxes and A-frame signs to dodge. He can still see it though—it takes a hard right off the main drag down a side street. 

Ed picks up the pace. 

As he rounds the corner after the rabbit, halfway down the block, the biggest whitest dog he’s ever seen tears down the avenue. It hits a dark patch by a dumpster and, Ed swears, disintegrates into the thin fuckin’ night air. 

He stops jogging, puffs white clouds of hot breath into the frigid night. The noise of the city behind and before him resumes, which is when he realizes it had gone silent. Bar hoppers chatter, cars honk, a stereo blares from an open window. 

The street is residential. Little neat rows of brownstones, tidy, efficient. Curtains open, curtains closed. Square yards, skinny fences. Crooked, broken sidewalks, trees, roots bursting through concrete. Amber streetlights, mottled colors.

Light glints off something ahead as he walks. It bounces with his steps, it reminds him of—no, not now. Focus. 

As he gets there, he sees it’s a chandelier in a front window. Big thing, crystals, showy but tasteful. He lets his eyes drift all over—the built-in bookcases lining the walls; the fireplace, roaring; the bold, patterned wallpaper; the antique furniture, lovingly restored. His eyes bounce around until—is that? Over the dining table? 

A second chandelier?

“Overkill,” Ed mutters. 

As he’s about to shove off, try to find that wolf, Stede Bonnet sags into frame, and the world drops away. Stede looks shrunken, defeated. Depressed. He sets the mug of tea he’s carrying down onto the coffee table. His body collapses more than sits on the sofa. 

He puts his head in his hands and folds over on himself. His back heaves, like maybe he’s sobbing. 

Ed pulls his jacket tighter around him. He looks up at the sky. No help there. He looks down at his worn boots. His knee gives a spasm, as if to say come on, you stubborn asshole. 

“Motherfuck—“

Ed climbs the steps. He rings the bell.

Chapter Text

On Monday he wakes up, and thinks about telling Ed that he woke up. 

He thinks, as he showers, that perhaps those two words are the ones he most wishes he could unsay, surpassing even the previous record-holder, I do. 

He could have said anything. He could have said, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about you, he could have said, and I couldn’t wait to tell you that you wear fine things well, but you beat me to it, he could have said, and I wish I could dream it every night, Edward. Hell, he thinks, combing pomade through his coif, he could have simply said, and then I woke up, with all the feeling in his heart, imbuing the words with proper meaning, conveying the full sensation of awakening within him. Anything. 

He’ll never forget the look on Ed’s face. As long as he lives. If he lives. If his skittish heart doesn’t give out the next time he sees a long-haired man at the market. If he doesn’t keel over dead from humiliation with an eggplant clutched in his sweaty fist. 

He finishes his coffee in anxious haste a block before he gets to the office. He will have no accompaniment for the first miserable hour of inbox triage. Mistakes, mistakes. Throw it on the pile. 

He nods at the security guy who nods back and records his name in the register. “No coffee today, Captain?” the man asks. They all call him Captain, it’s a joke, ha ha.

“Morning, Steak Knife. Drank it already,” Stede says, trying for his patented Normal Guy smile and feeling himself, in real time, fall short. He lets the charade drop from his face as he passes the desk, heading for the elevator bank. There is no queue today, no huddle of coffee sipping and weekend debriefing. Surprising, as one car is out of order. Small mercies. 

His hands are lost without his coffee. One is slung around his messenger bag, as ever. He puts the other in the pocket of his trousers. No, nope, wrong. The pocket of his coat. Better—still wrong. The pockets on that red suit, silky soft, right where they’re meant to be, invisible, chic, generous. His hands had slid right in, meant to be, easy as—

The elevator dings, jolting him. The doors open with a whoosh. In the car sits a Doberman Pinscher with perked ears and a spiked collar. To its left, a Bichon Frisé, whose fur has overgrown its eyes and collar and any other identifying features. Their heads tilt uniformly. There are no people in the car. 

The Pinscher takes off at a trot toward the front doors. A pink tongue emerges from the smaller mass of fur as the Bichon follows. 

He blinks in disbelief, watching them cross the lobby. The guard tips his hat as they pass. Just as Stede drags his eyes away, the elevator pings again as the doors whoosh closed and strand him. 

“Shoot.” He smashes the button five, six times. Too late: the car is on floor three. 

He checks his watch, but doesn’t register the time. He cranes his neck toward the front, but the dogs are gone. 

The elevator dings again. He takes one step forward, just as the emergency stair door flies open. A man in a lanyard from the tech startup on six nearly upends him as he bolts past. 

“Sprinkles! Zeus! Shit, shit, SHIT,” the lanyard man yells as he tears across the lobby. He seems to be crying.

Which is which? It would be too obvious for the Bichon to be Sprinkles and the Doberman to be Zeus, he thinks. The man hurls himself halfway across the guard’s counter, gesturing, shouting questions. 

Yes, Stede decides. The guard shrugs, points toward the automatic doors. Must be the other way ‘round. 

“Oh, god damnit!” He kicks the already closed doors as the elevator pings, whooshes, and departs skyward without him again. 

--

Meetings try the last of his patience. Everyone has questions he’s already answered, everyone wants files and contracts they already have access to. He’s a TV blaring to a room full of couch snoozers. That is his job.

He dips out for lunch. The line at the good salad place is out the door and onto the sidewalk. He waits. His phone vibrates. It vibrates again. Again. Again. It never stops. He works as he waits in the thin winter sun. Approves some invoices, okays a vacation request, agrees to—

His sigh is so irritated it sounds like a growl. The woman in front of him turns to glare. He mumbles an apology.

His one free hour—the free half hour he’d blocked off specifically to consume the salad he seems no closer to ordering—is now, per the calendar invite, an “🚨 🚨 EMERGENCY 🚨 🚨” meeting with Lucius.

Half an hour later, armed with a supplementary coffee and a premade to-go salad instead of the fresh one he vastly prefers, he finds Lucius and Olu already waiting in his office. 

“Do not give me that look, I won’t let you put this off another minute,” Lucius says, eyes closed, chin raised, arms crossed. 

“You can’t even see my face,” Stede says, making his way around his desk.

“Please. As if I can un-see it. Haunts me. Like I got struck by lightning while making eye contact with a cursed Victorian doll in a flea market bin.”

“Alright, that’s enough pleasantries for now, I think. What’s the emergency then?”

“Your bloody New Year’s party,” Olu says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We need to know which clients to invite, so we can get a headcount, so we can, you know, do literally everything else.”

“Yes, and you have been stalling on sending me a list for weeks, so what you’re going to do,” Lucius says, talking to him like a child, “is sit there at your big boy desk and eat your big boy salad while I rattle off a list of potentials from Christmases past, present, and future, and you will say yes, no, or simply nod if your mouth is full.”

Of course he’s been stalling. Because he can’t decide whether to invite Blackbeard. Ed. J E F F. Whatever. 

Whatever! The list commences. He nods, he shakes his head no, he says, Who?, and Lucius or Olu clarifies until his head does one of the two, and on they go, alphabetically down their enormous client list. 

“Fab 5-7-9, that capsule wardrobe company for school-aged rich kids?”

“Sure, but only two invites, one for each founder–be sure to specify 21-and-over ONLY.”

“Gazpacho Dispatch? The fancy pants restaurant that only serves cold soup?”

“I thought that place closed,” Stede sneers.

“Of course they closed,” Olu says. “Still a client on the books.”

Stede shakes his head. “No, I think.”

“Intimate Gatherings, the company that lets you hire attractive people to pose as old friends at your wedding?”

Stede pulls a face, but he nods.

“Okay,” Lucius says slowly. “J E F F? I assume that one’s a—“

“No. Nope. Absolutely not.”

Silence. 

“Who’s next?”

“Stede...” Olu starts, but loses his way. 

“Oh, sure, we were in such a rush,” Stede says, rolling his eyes. He can feel himself heating. 

Oh, to be a dog on the elevator, en route to places unknown, not understanding the forces that move you through this indifferent world—

“What did you DO?” Lucius blurts. 

Stede jams his fingers into his eyeballs. Well you see I was personally invited to his private studio where he hypnotized me with his big brown eyes and I momentarily forgot that it’s widely preferred by societal standards to keep one’s most insane thoughts on the inside and found myself confessing that I’ve had a series of intense and increasingly erotic dreams about him as a notorious 18th century pirate—to answer your next question: yes, a pirate, yar matey booty et cetera—and then asked him, and you won’t believe this, whether he might know what that meant, when I should have realized that what it meant was no, Lucius, we cannot invite him to the gala because I have to give a stuffy speech to honor the company’s legacy and not accidentally pepper it with pirate words because I’m so humiliated to be alive that I slowly turn into a seagull and die on stage in front of my colleagues and friends—

Lucius continues, unmoved by Stede’s angry silence. “Olu, am I mad? You were there for that meeting, you saw what I saw, did you not?

“I did,” Olu sighs. He sounds exhausted.

“And yet, he sits here, he looks me in the eyes, and he tells me he doesn’t want to see Edward—the man who took a wrong left turn on his way to the generationally talented cover model audition only to accidentally stumble into the room labeled ICONIC FASHION DESIGNER instead—wearing whatever it is a gorgeous tattooed leather daddy wears to a black tie event? Have I died and gone to gay hell?”

“You say everything is gay hell,” Olu says. “Last week you said going to the open mic night to see Pete play guitar was gay hell.”

“He played ‘Creep,’” Lucius spits. “I stand by it.”

“And you CRIED,” Olu says. 

“I said no,” Stede cuts in. “Enough.”

“Describe the date to me. In detail,” Lucius presses.

“It wasn’t a date!”

“SO IT WAS A SOMETHING,” they shout in unison. 

There is no getting out of this. He is defeated. 

“Yes, we met a few times. To talk about the line, and then … extra-curricularly. Absolutely nothing happened, for your information. Our measly little company gala is probably so far beneath the kinds of parties that man attends, and there is no reason for us to bother him about it. Now, as I am overworked, under-slept, mid-divorce, and surrounded by colleagues who won’t stop hounding me for information they do not need to do their jobs, can we please drop it? No—let me rephrase that. Drop it.”

“Okay, well, I’m inviting them anyway.”

“No you aren’t.”

“Y,” Lucius dictates, writing with great exaggeration, “E—“

“IN FACT,” Stede interrupts, “I was going to tell you at the team meeting later, but I will be stepping down from that campaign, as soon as I can brief Olu on where it all stands. He’ll be running it going forward.”

“Olu? Why not me? No offense, obviously.”

“Oh, be serious,” Olu says. “We both know you meant offense.”

“Because,” Stede cuts in, “Lucius, you don’t want to actually do the work of running a campaign, you want this job, the one where you get to feel important because you know all the gossip and you get to tell everyone in every campaign what to do. You’ll stay on as my assistant, and Olu, you’ll take on lead creative for J E F F.”

“And Lucius gets a five per cent raise,” Lucius says.

“Fine, but ONLY if you drop the J E F F inquisition.”

“Oh fuck, he’s a shrewd negotiator,” Lucius says, chewing on a thumb. “Have to think about that.”

“Oh my god, take the raise,” Olu says, exasperated. He leans in and shields his mouth, whispers, “He’ll have to tell me when he briefs me on the account anyway."

“You’re devious. You’re brilliant.”

Olu sits back, smug. 

“Okay? The rest of the clients? The rest of these very important details then?”

Final guest list, table placements, menu confirmations, music, timelines. Invite design. Stede nods his way through the information, the samples, the costs. Mostly, he tries not to yawn. They’ve done great work, even if it feels like none of it matters. Even if he feels like he’s done with all of it. 

And … the concept unspools within him: maybe he is done. Maybe this was his wake-up call. Maybe dropping J E F F was step one. 

Maybe. 

--

From the diner, he orders a turkey club and a side of onion rings, keep the slaw and pickle. “Fuck it,” he says out loud, ordering a slice of pie, too. He sits at the counter. An older man two stools down casually browses pornography on his phone. Stede looks away as he pinch zooms on a nipple until the areola takes up most of the screen. 

He might be an idiot, but at least he’s not that guy.

“Sorry, erm—can I get that to go, actually?”

He totes his dinner home, plastic handles digging into his fingers. There’s plastic cutlery in the bag, even though he asked them to skip it. What a strange world, he thinks, tossing the unused plastic-wrapped packet containing a fork, knife, spoon, napkin, salt, and pepper straight into the trash. What a journey they’ve had to earn this fate.

Each time his mind wanders to Ed, he tells himself firmly: no. It doesn’t work. He misses 3/4 of the podcast that plays in the background as he eats. When he gives up and switches to the music app, it’s ten minutes before he realizes he never actually put any music on. 

Showered, moisturized, groomed, he realizes there’s no way he can justify going to bed at 8:17 PM. First, he’d be up before dawn. Second, that’s so many hours to dream about Ed. 

He pops on the TV, indulges in some awful murder drama, rich botoxed wives stabbing each other in the back to keep their secrets. Bad accents, worse wigs. The kind of thing Mary would have watched, if only to laugh at.

It’s not that he misses her. He misses not having to think about how to fill his time. She would put the television on and he would watch what was on the television. 

But even that was years ago. Before the art instructor, before the pirate books. 

He’s warm and full, and he’s been sleeping so badly. He nods off, of course. For forty-five minutes, an episode and a half, he dreams of running. Sprinting through the woods, tripping on roots. Branches rending his clothes, tearing at the flesh of his arms and face. He runs until his sides ache and his bare feet bleed and the long muscles in his legs burn with acid. 

Just as the sea becomes visible at the edge of the trees, he gasps himself awake, sweating. 

He turns the TV off. He putters into his gleaming modern kitchen in a daze. It was redone just before he bought the place and he hates every inch of it. Sensors on the sink, an oven that responds to his voice, a phone app for his dishwasher he refuses to use. It’s soulless—but worse, it’s silent. The fridge condenser doesn’t buzz, the oven doesn’t heat up with a click and whir, the cabinet doors don’t so much as whisper as they ease themselves shut. It’s a lifeless place, the kitchen in his new home. On nights like these, he misses the clink of the faucet, the rattle of the lousy utensil drawer, the squeak in the tiles near the sink. Signs of humans, of life. Now he wants to apologize for humming lest it disturb the appliances. 

He clicks the electric kettle. It, at least, makes some noise as it heats up. The water hisses and crackles to life.

Where is he running in all those dreams? 

What is chasing him? Nothing. Nobody. Never was. It’s difficult to articulate—he was running FROM something, that much seems true. But there was no shadow on his heels, no huffing breath behind him, no crunch of branches in his wake. Only Stede and his terror. 

What was he running from in life? He’d been sure it was his marriage. His refusal to acknowledge the thing that was so obviously broken; his steadfast commitment to complacency as a response to deep and abiding internal despair; his stubborn refusal to allow that his sexuality might be slightly more complicated than “heterosexual with a side of occasional fantasy.” 

He’s dealing with all that. But he was still running. 

If anything, it felt like he was running harder. 

As the kettle comes to a boil, he considers his career. He pours the water, lets the tea steep. It’s true enough, his job mostly bores him. Has for a long time. 

But that answer doesn’t satisfy him. Because for a few blessed, soaring weeks, he’d loved his job again. Inspired, filled with direction and purpose, excited about the magic he could make with his budget and stable of talent. 

But that was before—

Ed’s name is stuck in his throat. Inside him, there are signs of distress. An empty feeling in his stomach, a tightness in his chest. A thrumming in his limbs forces his hands to move, to smooth his hair, to rub at the back of his neck. He shivers. 

The truth is, he knows the truth. 

Still, there remains a frantic internal sense that things with Ed weren’t finished. That some bigger mystery was still as-yet unraveling. That something hung between them, something he was too scared or too stubborn or too new at this to understand. 

He takes his tea into his empty living room. It is full dark outside his living room window. He catches something in the darkness—a man, maybe, running. For a second it looks like Ed, and he wants to slap himself in the face as hard as he can until he stops it. It’s torment. It’s torture. 

He sets the tea on the coffee table and collapses onto the couch. 

He’ll be okay, lord knows. He’ll see the other side of this. He’ll get a cat, maybe, or take up kickboxing, or, heaven forfend, download The Apps. It’s just that he would give almost anything for another shot at that conversation. A redo, a reframing. Ed, I dreamed this would happen but I never dared to think it would. Not a stupid open-ended question about whether Ed was having dreams too. What a foolish thing to ask, how insane he must have sounded. Are we having the same dreams? Come on. Outrageous. 

There’s nothing to do but let his head drop into his hands, let the shame move through him. Nothing to do but finish his tea and climb into his empty bed and succumb to the dreams that no longer contain Ed in corporeal form, only the ghost of the idea of the history of him. 

A sharp sound jolts him off the couch. Having never heard the sound before, he has to peer around the corner into the kitchen, open the closet with the washer and dryer, into the kids’ room. One of his confounding electronics on the fritz? A rogue smoke detector, thirsty for fresh battery power? 

Something taps like a woodpecker on the glass beside the door, and the penny drops. 

The doorbell. His doorbell. 

He shuffles to the front door, slippers catching on the rug. Probably a neighbor, he thinks, a pizza delivery at the wrong address, or—

“Edward?”

“Hey.”

“What on earth are you—”

“Mind if I—”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Come in, please.”

Ed shuffles inside, hands jammed into his pockets. He looks everywhere but Stede. 

Some ancient hosting protocol thrums to life. “Can I offer you a cup of tea? Kettle should still be hot.”

“Sure mate, yeah.”

“Make yourself at home, please,” Stede says. His voice vibrates with surprise and adrenaline. What is happening? “Back in a jiffy.”

Back in a jiffy? Christ’s sake—

He hits the kettle button to buy himself some time, but it comes to a boil instantly. Stupid efficient modern appliances. We’re not meant to live this way, he thinks. Society has run for thousands of years on the grace afforded by the time it takes to complete small tasks. He ought to be gathering wood from the stack, stoking the fire, drawing water from the well. Maybe then he’d have a chance of getting his head together enough to have this conversation.

Seven sugars at the meeting, one, by one, by one. He will never forget that, either. He chooses a mug of similar size. He steeps the tea, but gets antsy before it’s done. He adds sugar. A dollop of milk. He stirs and stirs. 

He breathes all the way in, and all the way out. His exhausted brain, his beleaguered heart. 

All he can do is be honest. That’s all he has to offer. 

He brings the tea inside, but freezes in the doorway. Ed’s not on the couch, where he expected him, but standing at a shelf, tilting a ship in a bottle this way and that. He examines it a moment, then replaces it, pushing it with one delicate finger back just to where it was. He picks up a statuette beside it, then the brass whale. One after the other, turning them in his hands, examining them. No—admiring them. He tilts his head to the left and reads the titles of all the books on the shelf above, pausing occasionally to graze the edge of a cloth spine, or run his fingers along embossed letters with gentle reverence.

Stede is aware of some light glowing dimly inside him. He is scared, yes, of whatever it is Ed came here to say, of their sudden proximity, of a million other things—but he is also excited. Ed is here, touching his things. For all his worrying, for all his self-imposed shame, anything could happen once he alerts Ed to his presence. And THAT’S what was missing, that experience. Sure, he didn’t feel all that bad with Mary most days. But he didn’t feel much good either—no anticipation, no excitement, no fear, no rush. No life. Like his silent kitchen. 

Ed pulls a book out. It falls open in his palms to the page marked by the cloth bookmark. 

“Look at this shit,” he says, evidently aware of Stede’s presence and perfectly comfortable with it. Finger on the page, he turns to get Stede in his sightline. “Nine guns? What’s even the point of that? No way he carried this many.” He slaps the book closed, replaces it on the shelf. “Then again, you should see the shit they print about me. Never trust anything you read.”

Ed flops down on the couch. He slouches with his knee jiggling restlessly, a posture that is somehow relaxed and tense at once. Stede sits primly at the other end, and then remembers he is holding Ed’s tea. He offers it.  

As Ed takes the mug, reality fractures. He sees the motion in prism, a kaleidoscope of memories and dreams and fantasies. Frillier sleeves and daintier china, a pretty saucer, more rings on Ed’s fingers, black under his nails, sun at his back, wind in his hair, sugar sugar sugar. 

This has happened. He is glitching. He is frozen. Ed’s eyes are big and there is concern scored into his face. Looking at him, Stede is twitterpated, in every plane of existence. 

And, yes—there it is—he wants to run. He wants to bolt away as fast as his legs will carry him. 

“So,” Stede says.

“So,” Ed says. He takes a sip of the tea. He swallows it and Stede watches the bob of his throat. He lifts the cup. “Perfect, by the way. Thanks.”

“You have something of a unique order,” Stede smiles. “Easy to remember.”

Ed’s laugh is quiet. His smile is soft. Everything about him tonight is gentle. Open. What has Stede done to earn it?

“Listen, I’m sorry to barge in late like this,” Ed says. “You’ll never believe it, but I was wandering around, you know, just fuckin’ walking off steam, like I do, and I looked up, and there you were, man. Sitting here. Felt like some kind of sign. Figured I should probably come talk to you, after … you know.”

Stede girds himself. This is the hard part, the part where he must give an unrehearsed speech that contains all the multitudes of his heart without overwhelming Ed to the point he flees. Again. 

“I mean, and if it’s not a good time, I can—”

“No, no no, sorry, no, just—just a bit thrown off.”

Stede sets his tea down. He squares his shoulders. He faces Ed. 

“I’m glad you did. Really. A reminder to put some proper shades on those windows.”

Ed laughs, but it’s fizzy. Floaty. It’s a giggle, isn’t it? He giggles. Stede’s heart trips, floats off the surface of the world.

“But also, Ed. I’m glad because I feel—well. Very silly about our conversation the other day. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Stede, you don’t have to—”

“Please. Let me just—”

He folds his hands in his lap to stop himself fidgeting.

“As you know, I’m recently divorced. At Thanksgiving I sort of breezed right past it—I think I was still somewhat in shock? But the dreams began right around the time I started to suspect my ex-wife had been having an affair. Which she was, as it turned out.”

He sips his cold tea, choosing his next words, and trying not to see the pity on Ed’s face.

“The shock, I think, short-circuited my—well, my circuitry. When I read my name in that book, it was … hope? That there could still be something left out there for me. Then I met you, and saw all those sketches, and I suppose I got carried away, imagining I could wear that stuff, be the sort of guy who could pull off silk trousers and a billowy shirt under a soft pink robe.”

Ed raises a finger. “For the record, you could totally pull that off.”

Warmth spreads in his chest. He laughs. Shrugs. “Anyway, it probably sounds to you like a bog standard midlife crisis, which I suspect you could argue it was, but … to me, it felt different. And the weird thing is, as chaotic as it’s been, I think I prefer it to feeling nothing, like before? For twenty years, I might as well have been a rock, or a knickknack on a shelf. Hope it’s not strange for me to say that.”

“No,” Ed says softly. He squishes one eye shut. “And hey, I should apologize too? I reckon I was pretty rude about it. Had my share of sycophants and ball lickers come courting, and I just sorta froze? I think?”

“You have nothing to apologize for. I was totally unprofessional.” Unprofessional enough to have abandoned the campaign—but maybe that’s better left for tomorrow. “You’ll be comforted to know that except for the one you were just perusing—it’s more decorative than informative—all the piratical literature has been secreted away to a shelf in the closet until I can be trusted to read them without letting whimsy ruin my life.”

“Into whimsy lately, too, I think,” Ed says. “Whimsy’s good? Part of why I’ve been drawing the pink robe guy lately.”

“Another version of you?”

“Sort of,” Ed allows. There’s something he doesn’t say, but Stede has forfeited the right to push.

Ed finishes his tea in two big gulps. He sets it down with a clink. He drums his fingers on his knee, jiggles his leg, clenches his teeth—and then seems to stop, all at once, like someone hit his Pause button.

“So, uhh,” Ed says tentatively, “the dreams have stopped then?”

They haven’t, of course. But he doesn’t know how to say that. And he promised himself he wouldn’t lie. He stares at his stone cold tea like he’s reading the leaves in it. 

“They will, I’m sure. With time,” he says softly. 

“Do you want them to?"

He tears at a cuticle. Ed speaks before he can answer. 

“I’m always in them, yeah?”

“Yes,” he admits sheepishly. “Every time.”

“Since before you met me?”  

The line of questioning throws him. Is it not a taboo topic? He dares to lift his head, and Ed looks different now. Alert. Attentive. His big eyes are wide open. It does something to his insides he’s been trying to avoid since he opened the door.

“Since before I met you,” Stede confirms, nearly breathless. 

“Mate, you can’t give up that easy,” Ed scoffs, pulling a face. A face he’s seen in the dreams Ed insists on pressing him about. It’s a face that means a fuckery, a makeshift lighthouse, a way forward. 

“What?”

“Spent all this time with your subconscious screaming at you about pirates and adventure and a second chance at life, and you’re gonna give up because maybe it’s about grief or whatever? Of course it is! Everything’s about grief! Doesn’t mean this isn’t some other fuckin’ cool thing, too! Where’s your bed?”

“Where is my BED?” 

“Yeah mate, how else are we gonna hack this dream of yours?”

“Sorry sorry—just to be clear, you want to—to get in my bed and go to sleep with me?”

Ed scoffs. “Well, I’m obviously supposed to be there. So fuck it, I’ll be there. See what it churns up. Bet it changes SOMETHING. Come on. You want adventure, right?”

Ed stands up. He holds out his hand. 

With a still-floating heart, Stede takes it. 

Chapter Text

Ed had expected rich-guy chic: empty shelves, plain, open spaces, six indistinguishable shades of off-white and two of beige.

No—Stede’s stuff is so COOL. Knickknacks and trinkets and colors and textures and shiny things—everywhere, all of it, shiny. Was his office like this? His car?

His wardrobe? Definitely his wardrobe. Ed would commit a whole wanted poster’s worth of crimes to have a stroll in there.

He picks up a for-real actual legit ship in a fucking bottle and squints to see the little bits inside. A tiny flag! A unicorn figurehead, what the fuck, man? He wants to cry, looking at this perfect, tiny, useless object. How dare it be so small, how dare someone have taken such care. How dare its whimsy be so total.

Stede Bonnet has whimsy inside him. Ed knows this, of course, but to see it here, in his haven, so concentrated, so multifaceted—it changes things. It changes him. It is possible, Ed thinks, to contain this, and also contain a mega career, fatherhood, fuckin’ regular haircuts. All of it. Multitudes.

Looking around makes him realize: Ed’s got money, sure. But Ed doesn’t fuckin’ spend it. He just perches atop his hoard like a depressed dragon and breathes fireballs at anyone who gets too close. Makes him think maybe he could stand to cut loose a little. Own a knick-knack or two, instead of staring at all the same pressboard shit he got with his first real paycheck 20 years ago because he’s too lazy and cheap to replace it.

Somehow, it also makes him more determined than ever to refuse to compromise on this new line. Show the world he’s got a multitude or two hiding somewhere. A mote of goddamn whimsy.

He makes no noise, he blocks no light, but Ed knows he’s standing there. A change in current, sugar in the air, something. Ed keeps right on browsing, undaunted. Let him watch, Ed thinks, because again—no plan.

Not even the first step in what could be a plan. Not a stirring, not a fuckin’ iota. Been planning every goddamn thing his whole life. Thanks to his career, he spends so much time thinking six months ahead of the actual calendar that if he was tired enough and you caught him off guard, he might confidently tell you that Christmas comes in June. For once, he’s going to stand in this room, in present tense, and let his own goddamn life happen to him. If Stede Bonnet’s emergence has shown him anything, it’s that every day is a brand new day. Anything could happen.

Standing there in his living room, it feels almost normal. Normal as it’s ever felt with him—which is to say, weird, but in a cool, memorable way. An exciting way. Normal in a way that makes Ed’s head perk up like a dog when someone says the word ‘ball.’ Normal as a floating fish barge on Thanksgiving day, anyway. Feels stupid for flinching, stupid for all the angst he’s put himself through. All that fear and anger—for what? When it’s this easy to waltz back in?

Sometimes you gotta follow a rabbit until things come into focus. Or something.

It’s just that it was fucking scary. How does that happen—two people having the same kinda dreams about each other without knowing each other? When it was just Ed, when he could write it off as idle fantasy, it seemed almost fine. But to know it was the two of them? What the fuck do you even say to that?

More specifically, what does ED even say to that? Ed, who’s locked love outside himself since the day he saw his father’s foot sticking out of the hungry water. Threw away the key after he saw the first tattoo of his own face on someone else’s skin. Ed, who hadn’t dared to crack his heart to a stranger since his voice still occasionally squeaked. Ed, who went from having wet dreams about a guy to realizing, in the space of one floor conversation, that the universe was telling him he was fated to know this man—this man who, by his own admission, didn’t even know what the fucking dreams were trying to say?

Can’t dodge it forever. The goddamn rabbit corrected his course, so now it’s time to hear him out. Take Two. All he had to do was not think about the fact that they’re about to sit down together on a couch, a couch not altogether dissimilar from the one on which he’d dry-humped Ed to completion the first time they’d properly met in dreamland. Just. Just don’t think about that. Think about the ship in the bottle. Think about tea, and listening. Think about listening super hard.

--

Ed thought about listening the whole time, and he gets it, he’s pretty sure. Stede’s lonely, he’s been through some shit of late, sure. But Ed thinks he’s also starting to hear what Stede doesn’t say, or what he’s maybe talking around. That Ed brought some excitement back into his life. Or that he hasn’t felt this hopeful and excited in a long time.

That ever since Ed let him flee the studio like a coward, Stede’s been trying to convince himself to walk it back. To calm it down, be chill.

But sitting here with him, feeling welcome, seeing all his cool stuff in his weird old brownstone, Ed has no desire for him to chill. He wants to open this thing up to highway speed, get some wind in their hair. He wants to witness this guy’s weirdness at full tilt and refuse to be cowed by it.

Ed WANTS to tell him about the dreams. He just doesn’t know how to get into it. Stede’s dreams are like kid’s books, full of adventure, daring, seafaring. Ed’s are … well. The kind where he’s late for an important meeting because he required an emergency jizz-removal shower thanks to a rapier through the gut. Awkward is a word for it.

Still, he tries to steer it there.

The whole conversation Stede is calm, open, forthcoming. Right up until Ed mentions the dreams. Then he goes pink, he shreds his nails, he shrinks. Suddenly he’s got everything to hide. Ed’s confession sits on his tongue. Just tell him, his treacherous brain urges. Tell him the dreams are normal, who cares, just move this thing forward somehow.

There is something about Stede that makes him sweat, and Ed’s not a sweater of relationships. He’s not a man afraid to say the wrong thing. Not a minder of norms or manners. But Stede? With Stede he wants to get it right. Wants to be able to say he lives in a perfect house with perfect knickknacks and makes perfect tea, wants to be able to say that his dreams, too, are the swashbuckling kind—without on-the-nose swordplay innuendo. Wants this to be as buoyant and innocent as it feels in person.

What if the dreams are complicating things? What if they could start here, some tea and chatting, forget all about that?

Tell him, his brain bleats again. Just start fucking talking.

Ed opens his mouth.

Something entirely different comes out. Something he didn’t even know he had a plan to do until he was already suggesting it.

“Where’s your bed?”

Nice work Teach, brilliant shortcut. His brain hides its face in its fucking hands.

Stede is incredulous at first, because of course he is, he may be a lunatic, but a business acquaintance just strolled into his home late at night and asked to sleep with him so they could lucid dream together. But when Ed doubles down—yes the fuck I am—something happens.

His posture lifts, his face brightens. The light returns to his eyes—where it fucking belongs.

So maybe Ed’s a genius.

He stands up. He holds out his hand.

And Stede takes it.

Ed is dizzy as he takes it—the strangeness of this turn of events, the potential. The open-hearted whimsy of it. The fact Stede doesn’t let go of his hand as they climb the stairs—they are holding hands. There are photos of his kids on the walls. There are doors left ajar, that Ed doesn’t dare peer into. Either the altitude from one flight is getting to him, or he’s dreaming already—another way, another life.

The bedroom is dim, chilly. He leaves Ed in the threshold to cross to the lamp and click it on. The space is dark, moody, textured. Layered. It smells cool and expensive. He has never wanted to have sex in a room more.

What was he thinking, suggesting this?

“Can I offer you pajamas? I have a spare toothbrush—tragically it’s kid-sized.” Stede’s voice is quiet, nervous. He laughs. “Wow, that’s an indictment of my dating life, isn’t it? Anyway, if that sounds amenable, I can gather it all, leave it in the en-suite for you?”

“Sure mate, sounds perfect,” Ed says, shifting his weight, shoving his hands in his pockets. It occurs to him that he is nervous. Scratch that—terrified. He is terrified of this gorgeous, bright man who is trying so hard to make this normal. He is terrified of meeting him where he is, because he’s there too, has been, always was.

But first, he must brush his teeth.

The ensuite is generous in size and far too bright for Ed’s present level of anxious introspection. He winds his hair into a bun on top of his head, and helps himself to a five minute rinse. He doesn’t let himself think thoughts about the claw foot tub. He wraps himself in the softest, plushest towel he’s ever used outside of a five star hotel. He climbs into the silk pajama set—a little short in the legs, but ample in the shoulders. They are plum colored, lightweight, heaven. He pops some fancy cream on his face, blinks at his newly-dewey reflection. Maybe it’s the nuclear lighting, but his eyes are clearer, his skin more awake. Not here an hour, already an improvement.

He exhales and exhales. What if he’s wrong? What if all these dreams have nothing to do with reality, nothing to do with the man beyond this door? Worse: what if the man beyond this door is only interested in some polished, adventurous, debonair dream version of Ed? Oh, god, or what if Dream Ed kills Dream Stede’s Ed boner? What if they meet in dreamland and they have nothing to talk about? Just weather and sports teams. Ed doesn’t even watch sports.

What if all Ed does is drown?

Fuck.

He scrubs a hand down his (soft, moist) face. Too late now.

The tiny toothbrush is lost in his grip. He has to hold it between two huge, fumbling fingers to use it. It does the job, somehow, and he rinses with mouthwash. He takes his hair down, flips it over a few times, shampoo commercial-style, shakes it out with his fingers. He smooths down the frizzy bits, twirls some errant ends around his fingers, adjusts his part—slightly off-center, there.

Nothing left to do. No more excuses, no more stalling.

“Time to hit the old dusty trail,” he sighs to his reflection. “No, wait. Ocean. Wet trail.” He rolls his eyes. “Nailed it.”

Stede is on top of the covers, leaned back on a zillion pillows, long legs crossed at the ankles. He is in a different set of what look to also be silk pajamas—blue as the ocean at dusk, deep and liquid, teal piping, all-over jacquard print like a fancy wallpaper, little white candy buttons that are probably mother-of-pearl. What does it mean that Ed barely glanced at the pajamas he put on his own body, but notices every detail of Stede’s? Probably nothing, shut up.

Stede opens one eye, cocks his head toward the bathroom.

“Used the kids’ bathroom,” he says with a warm smile. “Gosh, you look dashing in those,” he adds, opening both eyes now, and gesturing to the pajamas Ed hadn’t bothered to notice.

“Super lush, man. Thanks.”

“Of course. Glad they fit. Hope they’re up to your exacting standards,” he says.

Hah hah, is the thing about Ed’s standards for Ed.

There is a glass of water on the bedside table. A satiny-looking sleep mask hangs from a peg. Somewhere, a white noise machine whirs. The room is cooler than the rest of the house, the perfect temperature for disappearing under the fluffy duvet he’s got folded down to the foot of the bed.

This man, Ed understands, does not fuck around about sleep. He has been invited into a sacred space, to a private ritual between him and his circadian rhythm. He could be, right this minute, with his reticence, holding up the works.

He climbs onto the bed, on the side that isn’t occupied by Stede.

“Hope you didn’t give me the good side,” Ed says, just as Stede says, “Gave you the good side.”

“No, mate you don’t have to, I mean—your house.”

“And you’re a guest in it! Over there, you’re closer to the bathroom and the white noise, farther from the window. You’re doing me a favor. You’ve earned it.”

“Suppose these are your favorite pajamas, too,” Ed says, looking down at his hairy feet poking out from the cuffs.

“No,” Stede laughs softly. “These are.”

“Well you better fuckin’ trade me then,” Ed jokes.

“But these ones look better on me,” Stede sneers.

“Lunatic,” Ed says. “Ought to pirate them right off you.”

He settles into the pillows. Somehow, it’s the perfect amount of pillows, at the perfect angle. He sinks just so, like a sprinkle into whipped cream. This bed, this room, it’s a goddamn oasis in this endless desert of a world. No wonder this man’s dreams saved his life.

The lights, honest to god, dim. Like when the trailers start before a movie.

“What the—”

“Timer,” he grins, eyes shut. “Get a good look now, they go off completely in five minutes.”

“Damn,” Ed says. “You know a thing or two about how to live, Stede Bonnet.”

There is a bitterness to his laugh. “Thanks,” is all he says.

But Ed can sort of maybe hear what he doesn’t say, again. A lifetime of being too much. Bullies who harangued him, parents who rolled their eyes, an ex-wife annoyed by it. It’s all there in the silence.

And the dreams.

“Mean it,” Ed says, because he feels a little guilty and also a little enchanted by this guy—and also because he means it. Nothing Ed’s seen in this room or the ones beyond is trendy, or a status symbol, or the latest whatever just for the sake of it. This little world has personality, style, opinions. It’s Stede Bonnet, corner to corner. “Most of the marketing guys I know? They’re dead inside, so you’re doing a hell of a lot better than them.”

“You’re a good man, Ed,” he says. He sighs, settles on his fancy pillows. “Think this’ll work?”

“Why not? Makes as much sense as anything else.”

He squishes up his face. “Really?”

“Yeah man! Have some faith. All kinds of crazy shit in this world. Cephalopods predicting football. Dancing plagues. Hell, Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air.”

“Edward, I know you’re not badmouthing Shonda in my presence.”

“I’m just saying. Life’s fucking weird. Sometimes, when you least expect it, the exact thing you need comes alo—”

The lights go out. A flash of white teeth above his pajamas fades out, and then there’s nothing.

“Wow,” Ed says. The room is velvety, otherworldly dark. Like Ed could take a bite out of it.

“Guess that’s as good a sign as any, then,” Stede says. “Hopefully this is an extremely fun, memorable, deeply cool adventure! Wait. Forget I said that. That’s embarrassing.”

“Hope Blackbeard likes adventures,” Ed says. “Imagine he must.”

He can hear Stede getting comfortable. The bed jiggles—barely, some miracle fuckin’ mattress—as he adjusts his pillows, rustles the comforter up over their legs.

Stede inhales big, exhales big.

“I’m nervous, Ed,” he says, voice small, but perhaps braver in the darkness.

And Ed is too. What if all that bullshit was true, and this really does change everything? What if he wakes up tomorrow a different man? What if he gets a glimpse of life at sea with Stede and it breaks his own brain like it did Stede’s? What if, through Stede’s eyes, it’s more than just drowning and smashing ships and kissing his own hand like a seventh grader?

“Me too,” is all he can say. He doesn’t know how to convey any of it. Not when they’re on the precipice, not when he’s stuck with himself inside all this darkness.

“Goodnight, Ed,” he says with a shaky exhale.

“Goodnight, Stede.”

--

He’s never in his life had more perfect conditions for a good night’s sleep. And yet.

Stede’s asleep. He must be. His breathing’s evened out, long, slow, deep. He twitches. Twitches again.

Ed’s jealous. He drifted so quickly, he seems so peaceful. The night Ed’s had—hell, the week Ed’s had? His body is dying for it. Too tired and anxious for anything except yearning for oblivion. Feels like he’s on hour ten of a twelve hour flight. Time to lie there and try to explain baseball to an alien, or whatever insane thing you’re supposed to do to combat insomnia.

Stede twitches again. Harder this time. He emits a syllable, something pained maybe. Urgent.

Stede is definitely one hundred percent asleep. No faking that. And the room is so dark that even if he was, what happens next would still be impossible. But somehow, his hand skates across those silken goddamn sheets and lands directly, precisely, in Ed’s.

And squeezes.

And gravity takes over, reverses, spins, like Ed drops straight through the mattress and lands on the ceiling. Ed’s eyes shoot open to find hands, their hands, resting on Stede’s bare chest. He’s pale, bruised, dead to the world—but somehow, his chest goes down and up and down, shallow, slower than Ed’s, but faster than the ship. The ship, the ship they are on, Ed’s ship? He looks around. No. Nice furniture, books. One chandelier, two.

Stede’s.

Ed studies him. A gut stab, certainly. And a massive one—no rapier. Also a hanging, maybe. Why does he know that?

Stede whimpers in pain, bringing Ed’s attention back. His brow furrows, his breath shudders. Ed feels real fear. It can’t end like this, it was just beginning, there is so much more for them. There has to be.

Ed squeezes his hand, I’m here, and—

The world goes black. Gravity pulls him down, down, until he is almost fetal, knees up. The light is dim, golden. He is still on Stede’s ship, but also he is tucked into a space that fits him. Holds him. Molds to him, almost.

A bathtub. Claw feet, amber light. Candlelight. A bathroom without faucets.

He is crying. He has done something very bad. But Stede is there. He wears black, and it makes him look like a floating head in the dim. Stede puts a hand on his shoulder, to comfort him, and Ed leans right into it, presses his cheek to his warmth. Stede squeezes, and—

The bathtub dumps him. Tumbling through space and time, he grasps for Stede, anywhere, nowhere. Somehow, he can feel it, it is coming, the splash, the freezing cold, the weightless fathomless nothing, but then—

“Ed.” A warm grip on his cold hand, squeezing. There is only blackness and a voice and a hand. “Ed!”

A desperate grip, desperate words, a desperate pulsing blackness. “Come back to me,” he pleads, but Ed can’t, he’s still under, there is only cold, too cold to swim, only dark, only—

“Please don’t die,” he says, with all the feeling Ed’s too cowardly to show. “Ed, wake up, WAKE UP—”

And he is there but he is not, he is there but he is beneath the world, he is lost but Stede squeezes his hand until the tendons grind, and he is here, he is right here, ship at his back and air in his mouth, his heart racing again, finally, fully, and he sits up fast, clanging their skulls together and it all goes black again—

Hands. All four of them, smashed together, fingers tangled around a line with a fish dangling, and Ed’s heart is still racing. Whatever it is, it lingers, he feels it, he just had it and then lost it somehow, some way, some fear. The boat sways and his head swims and Stede’s shirt is open low and his eyes are honey in the twilight and he breathes hard, and—

“Do you get it yet, Stede?” His voice is calm, but his heart keeps racing.

Ed squeezes his fingers, squeezes them, please, please don’t leave me.

“I’m starting to, now,” Stede says, breathy and high. “The thing is, I close my eyes, and you’re always there. And then I can look at you, talk to you.” Squeeze. “Touch you. Of course I take my sleep seriously.”

Is he here, too? Is this him? Is Ed Ed? He can’t know, he’s only feelings here. Only big bright open spaces inside him, only down and up and down again, only hands held together, over and over, only sherbet sunrises and curtains of stars, only momentum, their boat a ribbon through the ocean, forever unfurling, and—

Of course Stede’s hand found his in the pitch dark bedroom, how could it ever miss? Ed closes his eyes.

When he opens them, Stede is shirtless in the bed nook, again. This has happened—the overwarm room, the sweaty bare torso, the pain. A spike of panic—all that to be back to the start? It can’t be, it can’t—

He looks around frantically. This time, Ed’s in the nook, too. He is horizontal, on his side. Silent pink dawn streams through the cabin window. Ed, too, is shirtless. The sheets are hiked up to his waist, and he is warm, too warm.

Stede sighs, shifts, turns to him with sleepy, half-closed eyes.

Their fingers interlace in the space between them. No more squeezing, no more crushing. These hands are not desperate. They are curious. Loose, easy. Stede’s thumb, moving back and forth across the side of his index finger. Ed waits for the scene change, but it doesn’t come.

Awake now, Stede stares at him. He smiles. He lets go of Ed’s hand and uses it to brush hair from Ed’s face behind his shoulder. If he’s not wounded, why is he shirtless? Or—

Or naked.

Because Ed is naked.

Stede’s hand stays there now, on his face, near his ear, his temple, his cheekbone. Just touching. Exploring.

“Wow,” he whispers, like he really does get it, now. Maybe for the first time. “Are we us?”

“I think so?” Ed knows what he means, but he can’t remember. It’s an important question, whether they are them. But the particulars are lost. Whatever this is, it’s not what he’s afraid of. It’s different. Both simpler and more complicated. “Least I feel like me. You look like you.”

Stede shifts, the sheet slips, and Ed can see the gut stab scar, pink and gnarly—healed. He feels a phantom pain. Maybe that’s what he was asking. Were they alive? Had they survived?

The breathing is so easy here. “I like your whimsy,” Ed says, disturbing the dust motes in the morning light. “Please don’t stop being whim-prone.”

“Never.”

When they kiss, it’s timid, tentative, a question. There are so many answers here. Stede by winding his fingers into Ed’s hair, gripping. Ed by moving closer to him, yanking the sheet off him. He pulls Stede by the waist into his body, pulls a leg over his hip. His thigh is solid and soft beneath Ed’s palm. He gasps when Ed gets a fistful of his ass, groping.

The sheet is pooled between them. He is missing out on glorious skin.

“Shit, here,” he whispers, yanking at it. But it’s tangled beneath them.

“Here,” Stede says, rolling to his back, and Ed can’t resist that. Why try? This is the easy place. His legs are long, his broad chest heaves breath, his cock is proud and pink and eager on his soft belly.

Ed climbs aboard.

“Edward,” Stede says, and there’s something about his name in Stede’s mouth in this context that drops straight down his body like a plumb line. They’re them, this is real, it’s everywhere. He closes his eyes to feel it, and then—

“Edward,” Stede says again, and Ed is awake. He is awake and he is Ed and Ed is on top of Stede and they are both silk-clad and hard and panting. Stede reaches over, clicks a button, and somewhere a dim light fades to life. Stede is flushed pink, his hair is everywhere.

“Shit,” Ed says, still reorienting, lost. “Were we just—I mean, did you—”

“Mhm, yep,” he says, swallowing. “Yes. In the—on the—”

“The ship,” Ed whispers, astonished. “We’re us.”

“Apparently,” Stede says, with something like a laugh.

Ed kisses him. Didn’t seem possible for it to feel more real than it did on the ship, but it does. It was easy there, but it was dull. Here, he can feel the stubble on his upper lip, can smell the lotion on his skin, can feel the velvety softness of his tongue. The silk is liquid smooth between them, urging them on, inviting them.

They should probably talk about this. Ed moves, maybe to try that, and is rewarded instead with a wanting little mmf and hands on his hips to encourage him. So there are answers here, too. He moves again, and Stede moves with him this time, down and up and down.

Ed’s had a lot of sex in a lot of configurations, but he’s never been so rip-roaring hot over silk pajama dry-humping. Maybe it’s vapors of the dream or the sexiest bedroom he’s ever been in, or maybe it’s the fact that not ten minutes ago he was looking at Stede Bonnet’s bare torso and thinking he’d never loved a plane of skin so much in all his miserable life and would personally dismantle the next person who dared to mar it. Maybe it’s that this man had opened the door and let him back in, no matter how hard Ed tried to shove him away. Maybe it’s that this is the precise thing he’d been trying to shove away from—the full-body epiphany, the undeniable knowing, the fall faster than goddamn gravity, like that ride at the county fair that pulls you down.

It’s shameless, the thing that is happening. He could do this all night. When was the last time he didn’t have his dick out in under four minutes? When was the last time he kissed someone until his lips stung with it? When was the last time he felt the build-up on purpose? Sober, alert, curious? Alive?

“Fuck,” Stede says, tilting his head back, hands firm on Ed’s hips to still him. “Sorry.” He breathes deep, exhales. “This is a lot, I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

“Please,” Ed says, nuzzling his neck, chewing a little. “Consider it payback from last time. Still get hard whenever I look at those pajama pants.”

Stede stops moving entirely. “What last time?”

“Sorry,” Ed says, heart stopping, stopping, dropping, “nothing. Just carried away.”

But Stede is pushing at him, wriggling, making space. Ed climbs off, it’s over, he fucked it, another goddamn gut stab. “Stede, listen, I—”

“You had a dream,” he says. He certainly looks like he’s been gut stabbed. He is covering himself with the comforter, pooling it between them. “You did, you had one.”

“Please, Stede, just let me explain, it wasn’t like yours, it was—”

“I don’t care! You lied to me!”

“I was nervous, because—”

“You think I wasn’t nervous? Edward, I was terrified! You sat there and let me make a fool of myself, torture myself after for being so stupid. At any time you could have put me out of my misery and chose not to.”

And, yeah. Can’t argue with that. A million sentences form and dissolve.

Brilliant tactician. Check, mate.

“Please go. Take the pajamas, I don’t care, just please. Go.”