Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ed doesn’t remember what the sun feels like on his face.

It’s not hyperbole for the sake of illustrating just how fucking much his life sucks right now, which is a lot.

He literally does not remember.

There are a lot of things missing in his brain, and he can’t even inventory which, what, how much, because there’s not one single person on this ship he can ask.

Point of fact, identifying who the people on the ship were so that he could tally up exactly who he couldn’t ask was a high stakes game of espionage and guess-who that he never wanted to play and couldn’t afford to lose. He’s pieced it together between hearing other people call each other’s names: Izzy, who is apparently his first mate, though Ed can’t figure out why. Other crew: Archie, Jim, Frenchie, which seems a few people light to be sailing a vessel this size (a vessel he also doesn’t recognize, though for some reason the captain’s cabin, despite the stripped down decor and gloomy atmosphere, does feel something like home.) Couple days in, someone mentions Fang, due back— from something no one gets into the specifics of enough for Ed to catch what— in a week or so, and Ed has to steel himself from melting at the relief of a familiar name.

Right, cause that’s the other thing.

Best he can tell, everyone on this ship wants him dead.

Sure, it ranges in intensity and flavor— from Jim, who seems so hair trigger ready to stab him up sweet vengeance style that he’s not actually sure why he’s kept them armed, to Frenchie, whose vibes are less murderous and more to the tune of “this is a hostage situation and you’re between me and the exit.”

And then Izzy, who—

Look, Ed’s tough shit, last Ed remembers he was the rising star, pirate-name-to-watch, future king of the caribbean, and from the way Izzy says “Blackbeard” like it means more than an old nickname, he actually made it to the top.

And even before that, Ed’s fought for everything he’s ever had and ever been.

But— and maybe it’s the fact that there’s big gaping holes where all his recent memories should be, echoing voids fogging over his older ones, maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t actually know how he got like this, maybe it’s the fact that whoever Ed says he is, there’s still a scared teenager cowering in the center of him.

Whatever.

Whatever it is, Ed is fucking scared of that guy.

The way he fucking looks at Ed—

Ed’s been dancing on a knife’s edge of trying to figure out who these people think he is and who he has to be to live through it for five days now, and sometimes Ed will tip one way and Izzy’s fangs will flash like he wants to eat him, but other times Ed will tip the other and he’ll look at him like it’d be a waste of chewing and he’d toss the corpse without dressing it if it came to that.

It’s murder on his nerves, leaves him exhausted by the day’s end, still makes it damn near impossible to sleep. A whole day on edge, looking over his shoulder, and he forgets how to turn it off even when he’s alone. Is this how Blackbeard would stand, how he would stride across the deck, how he would drink his rum, how he would curl up into bed and stifle the sobs that threaten to come?

He actually has an answer to one of those, as to how Blackbeard drinks his rum, which is to say “often”, considering the bottle delivered with his nightly dinner, but after the first shot hits his system the first night after—

Right, whatever happened to him, biggest on the list of shit he can’t remember right now, which.

Best he can figure— based on the steady, pounding ache in his head, the opening his eyes to the rain-heavy sky above him and the deck under the flat of his back, the echo of swords and gunfire around him— he took a blow to the head during a raid and lost his footing and a shit ton of his memory.

There was no one and nothing standing by to help him off that deck except some residual adrenaline and a gut instinct that he did not want to keep laying there unless he planned to make it a permanent habit, and so he’d pulled himself upright against the drag of vertigo and pouring rain to find that the sounds of what he thought was a raid in progress were in fact exactly that, and he’d had to pick out in an instant which side he was on. Statistics were for him being part of the raiding party, so he’d stuck the knife from his belt through the shoulder of a guy running past him just in time to let some short guy in the world’s saddest clown make up catch up with his stabbing victim and put a sword through his back.

Mr. Platform Clown Shoes had grunted “Captain” at him in acknowledgement before carrying on to fuck up whatever other poor sap he’d targeted next, and that’s when Ed knew he was fucked.

Didn’t know much else, but if he knew two things— that he was still a 1. pirate 2. captain— he also knew he was in fucking danger.

Not that he has to tell anyone this, but pirates are fucking vicious, and they do not like weakness, and they like it even less in their captains.

A captain who couldn’t remember the last however many fucking years, let alone the fact that he was their captain? That was just begging for mutiny, and Ed didn’t know enough about his apparent crew to know if it would be the survivable kind, but he wasn’t betting his fucking life on it.

And cheers to his self preservation instincts apparently flourishing in his old age— and that was the other thing, where did all this grey in his hair come from? But, yeah, apparently his gut instinct had been right on the money because this crew all seemed to want him dead. Frenchie’s vibe was more an ambivalent “give me the means and opportunity, I might come up with a motive” sort, but Jim seemed dead set on—

Did he already—

He was saying, about the rum—

Right, that first shot, that first night.

When it hit his system, the headache he’d been fighting off with a stick since he opened his eyes a few hours back had sat up and started barking, and with it the clamouring noise of it, the vertigo and the nausea too, and he had started heaving, but there wasn’t much in his stomach to chuck up, and even if there was, it was like taking the boulder clattering around his skull and adding spikes, and—

Yeah, however Blackbeard drank yesterday, today he was a teetotaller.

At least in private.

That was another thing on a list that was too long for Ed to actually keep track of, especially because his working memory was still fighting tooth and nail to let him know simple shit like what he was looking for when he stepped below decks. Thing on the list of things that Izzy seemed to watch him for. How much he drank, if it was too much or too little. How much he talked to the crew. Where he stood on deck when he gave orders. How he stood.

It wasn’t—

It’s just the way Izzy looks at him, kinda feral, kinda hungry, kinda disgusted, and if Ed hadn’t had to make a life out of reading people, he’d say whatever happened to his head had made him paranoid too, but he can feel eyes on him all the time, and Edward knows he’d better watch his fuckin step.

Ed— Ed better watch— But if he wasn’t Blackbeard these days, actually, he would want to be called Edward from now—

His head fucking hurts.

Sunshine, he was saying something about the sunshine.

Cause it’s been raining since the thing, the whatever head injury thing. Even in monsoon season you usually get breaks in the clouds, little spots of light peeking through before the next deluge, but apparently the person he is now doesn’t catch breaks either, because it’s been steady precipitation, hasn’t stopped for one minute, has petered down to a sprinkle here and there, but there hasn’t been more than sixty seconds without a raindrop.

Ed’s pretty sure about it because just today, he’d stopped on the deck, forgotten where he was going or who he was looking for, then promptly forgot that he forgot and started noticing the rain instead, started noticing the rain was slowing down, and then he held out his hand and started counting seconds between the nearly imperceptible little plashes of raindrops into the leather over his palm, though the highest he could get without losing track was 13 seconds before he noticed Izzy noticing him again and had to get a move on in case Blackbeard wasn’t allowed to care about the weather.

But that’s about the rain, not the sunshine, which—

He doesn’t—

He can’t remember what it feels like. He didn’t forget the entire existence of sunny days, he remembers squinting his eyes against the horizon, he remembers having to plan higher water rations, he remembers the stink of a full ship in high summer, he remembers warmth, but only academically. He knows about sweating, he knows about summer linens for the worst days, he knows about sunburn.

He just can’t remember what it feels like, can’t remember heat on his face, can’t remember how it felt in his bones, in his skin, in his chest, to have the center of the entire universe’s light and life pointed right at him.

So when it happens again, all over again, he has to rely on his gut instincts, jump in headfirst, and pray he lands right.

The rain doesn’t break, not actually.

The sun comes back on a day more brutally wet and cold than Ed can remember ever seeing— ha— and like most good things, Izzy is spitting mad to see it.

The sun comes back on a small fishing sloop that slips so fast through the rain and the grey that no one sees it until it’s right on top of them and it wouldn’t make any sense to fire the cannons and then Ed is barking for the crew to prepare to be boarded and then the sun rises right up over the edge of the railing, sets onto the deck, and calls Ed’s name.

He calls Ed’s name, this beautiful, bright beacon of a man, all blond curls and broad shoulders and bold look of determination, and Ed has not a single fucking clue who he is, knows only what he represents.

Innately, automatically knows.

A chance. A little fucking spark of hope that the clouds will part.

But once again, Izzy accidentally gives Ed exactly what he needs to make a split second call to keep his rapidly fraying shit together to fight another day.

“Stede fuckin’ Bonnet, absolutely the fuck not,” Izzy says, and draws his sword.

If Izzy hates this guy, Ed knows he’s supposed to as well, though he knows, he knows, whether he remembers it or not, that he doesn’t.

Still, he spits the name Bonnet with just as much venom as Izzy did, though it tears at Ed’s fragile footing to see the fracture in Stede’s face to hear it.

“Shall I dispose of him for you, captain?”

Izzy would suck at poker, not that he’d be any fun to play with either way, cause this guy is nothing but tells. For him. So whatever Stede did, it’s personal to Ed, which means—

“Nah.” Ed waves it off, heart pounding, head pounding, fingers crossed that they can get to the next part, cause what Ed really needs is— “I’ll deal with him personally. Put him in my cabin.”

The two of them alone, and the second Ed closes the door behind himself, makes sure the door is locked tight, he practically throws himself at Stede, once again trusting his gut instinct that this Stede will catch him, that caught in his arms is a place he wants to be.

Stede only hesitates for a moment, probably surprised to have an armful of Ed because, far as Ed can remember, the list of people who’ve had the privilege is a solitary one and he can’t remember what happened to her. But then his arms raise up, wrap themselves around Ed’s shoulders, and Ed remembers.

Not—

Not everything.

Still doesn’t know who Stede is to him, doesn’t know why he’s on this fucking ship with these fucking people, doesn’t know any more than he did yesterday, except for one really crucial little thing, just a tiny little bit, just—

Sunshine on his face.

Warm all the way through his chest.

The kind of heat that soothes aches, that simmers relief through clenched muscles and chattering bones.

No, he doesn’t know who Stede is to him, but he knows he was right, that this man is a small, sloop-delivered piece of hope.

“Ed?”

Ed might be shaking, might only realize when he hears his name said like that, like he hasn’t heard in— like he can’t actually remember hearing. Like he’s a friend.

He takes in a breath, and when that one rattles and rasps, he takes another, tries to bring himself back to earth, pull himself out of Stede’s orbit and into the real world where he still can’t remember anything and doesn’t actually know what to do about it besides walk an infinite tightrope he’s bound to fall off eventually.

But, this guy, maybe—

Pulling himself back, though he fucking hates it, so he still keeps his hands anchored on Stede’s— very impressive— shoulders, he says “You gotta fucking help me, man.”

And Stede, who is blinking back tears, which Ed will ask about later since it’s not like Stede’s forgotten everything important that’s ever happened, doesn’t even bother to ask what Ed needs help with, he’s already nodding, already saying “Anything, Ed, what is it?”

Ed, again, the way he says his name. Friends, definitely, they gotta be friends, the way Stede talks to him, the way he holds him, so it really fucking sucks that Ed doesn’t remember his first ever friend, and that he’s gonna have to tell a guy that is so obviously unforgettable that Ed actually did.

“We better sit down,” Ed says, partially because this is a sit down kind of conversation and partially because if he has the choice, everything is a sit down conversation for Ed these days, when standing is just a race against how fast his head and body will complain about the effort.

Stede looks around the room and raises his eyebrow in what is clearly trying very hard not to be cunty judgment. Ed likes it immediately.

“Yeah, I know, limited seating, I dunno who decorated in here, but it sucks. Bed should be fine, if you don’t—?”

Stede purses his lips, and it doesn’t look like an objection, more like a question, but he keeps it to himself and lets himself be led to the bed where he and Ed perch on the edge, matching pictures of tentative.

Ed doesn’t know why Stede’s hesitant, but little as he wants to have to explain this shit, he doesn’t want Stede to go first, doesn’t want him to unload stuff he won’t have the context to understand, so he swallows his nerves and tries to start.

“Look, man—”

“Ed, I want to apologize—”

Which, oof, right, can’t be good, so—

“No.”

Stede’s face, light though it may be, that veneer is tremulous, and for the second time today Ed sees it crack.

“Right, of course, you don’t want to hear it, I—”

“Nah, no, let me just stop you there.” Ed takes a breath to steel himself, cause. Sure as he believes in the out that Stede represents to him, he knows the next words from his mouth are gonna hurt Stede. Sure, but completely without evidence, nothing for it beyond the fact that he just knows.

“I don’t know who you are.”

Stede blinks, and then his brow furrows.

“Ed, I know I hurt you—”

“I don’t.”

“— but I think that’s a bit dramatic— ‘you don’t’, Ed, really?”

This guy, he does edge-of-bitchy-but-still-a-soft-touch well. Like, really well. Ed knows they must be friends, but he wonders if maybe they— Nah, not likely, not a guy like this with a guy like Ed.

“Look,” he tries again, he tries to try, but the thing is.

The thing is—

The—

He was saying—

“Ed?”

Why does he say his name so— so soft? So fuckin gentle? It’s like, Ed took that first look at him and he saw safety and he saw comfort and Stede knew he did and he’s bent on proving him right with every little syllable and Ed can’t fuckin—

“Oh, Ed, don’t cry, please—”

Ed doesn’t want to be crying either. Didn’t exactly decide to start. Crying’s another thing that gives him headaches. Gives. Exacerbates the existing and continuous headache. But he doesn’t have a choice in the matter, fuckin apparently, and then Stede hesitates for a short blink before he leans close and pulls Ed tight into his arms, and if there was any chance of him curbing the tide it’s gone now.

Take cold, tired, achey Ed, tug him tight against the chest of someone who is all warm, solid, strength, and.

It’s just—

“You’re being so nice to me,” which is a fucking novelty alone, because forget the last five days— ha ha ha— Ed knows who he used to be too, and no one liked that guy either, and—

“Of course I am, I l—”

Ed reels back— fuck, too fast, has to swallow against the nausea, the dizziness, needs to breathe— and pushes against Stede’s chest, because Ed doesn’t know that tone of voice, which is exactly why he is so damn certain the L-word Stede is about to detonate on him like Ed can take one more piece of shrapnel is not like or loquacious or liquidate or any other shit like that. Nothing he can fucking fucking stand to hear, not from someone he only knows well enough to know that’s a fantasy, something like that between someone like Stede and someone like Ed.

“Don’t.”

“Ed, I—”

“Please.”

Cracks and splinters, all through his head, spider webbing down into his vocal chords, shredding one tiny little syllable into tinier pieces.

Stede hears him anyways, seems to finally see something in Ed’s face he’d been missing.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

Stede waits, worries at his bottom lip with his teeth.

“I really don’t fuckin know, my head’s fucked, not like it usually is, or, yes, like it usually is, it’s just as much a broody mess in here as per uzsh, except maybe worse because I don’t usually have a crew that hates me, or if I do, I know damn well why, and it’s been raining for at least five days, and I can’t even fuckin drink about it and I can’t remember where my fuckin weed is and—”

“Ed.”

Stede’s pulling Ed’s hands apart and that’s when Ed realizes he’s been worrying his thumbnail into the opposite palm and it’s starting to sting.

“Ed, I don’t understand, you don’t remember—?”

“Anything.”

He stares at their hands, Stede’s neat nail tipped fingers twined up in picked over cuticles and tattooed knuckles.

“I don’t remember anything. Five days ago, came to, flat of my back, didn’t recognize this boat, anyone on it, don’t know what I’ve been doing the last few years, missing bits and pieces from before that. Don’t know. You.”

“Oh, Ed.”

And he braces, cause he doesn’t know, doesn’t actually know what kind of man—

“You must have been terrified.”

Fuck.

Fuck, but yeah, he has been, is the thing, and Stede, Stede knows Ed so much better than Ed knows Stede, probably better, right now, than Ed even knows himself, and what the hell is Ed even supposed to do with that? Stede’s already got copies of the map, what good is it if Ed holds back the key?

“Yeah, man, I’m scared as hell.”

“What can I do?”

“Fuck.”

Ed tries to think, tries to come up with a plan, he knows enough to know this is what he does, make a plan, execute the fuckin plan, but he’s been playing it minute by minute since he came to on that deck and now that he has more resources at hand than his own scrambled fucking brain, said scrambled fucking brain can’t string two thoughts together to think of a way out of this—

“I don’t know. I don’t— I don’t fuckin know, I know everyone on my crew is waiting for an excuse to mutiny me and if they do, man, a week ago, sure, but now, there isn’t shit I can do, and I have no idea how to get them to stand down, I’ve got no fuckin clue—”

“Ah, well. We may be alright on that front, actually.”

“Fuck do you mean?”

“I told my crew to take the ship if I wasn’t back on deck in fifteen minutes, and also, not to quibble, but a solid half of your crew is, in fact, my crew, so. The Revenge should be back under my command by now, and that sorry first mate of yours tied up to be dealt with later. If that helps.”

“The Revenge? This ship is called the Revenge?”

“Yes.”

“Sick name for such a pretty boat.”

At that, Stede looks around the room, which, yeah, is about as gloomy as Ed found it five days ago, though he’d made an effort to unstick all the knives from various surfaces (seriously, man, why?) and to collect the empty rum bottles. Stede’s face pinches for a brief moment before Ed sees him very deliberately smooth it out.

“Yes, I thought so,” he says, though quietly.

Cause— Ah. Course.

“This is your ship.”

“Yes.”

“Your cabin.”

“Mmhm.”

“It didn’t used to look like this.”

Stede shakes his head, one slight turn to the left and then the right and then back to center, and then it’s his turn to study their hands where they’re still twined up.

Ed itches with shame, though it’s less of a memory and more of a gut instinct, that he’s the why to we can’t have things like this, always has been.

“Sorry.”

He goes to pull his hands free from Stede’s because— but Stede holds fast.

“Do you know what you’re sorry for?”

Anyone else, that would be a fucking challenge, would leave him scrabbling over the last week’s worth of memories for something he’d done wrong before the smack— the lash— the— whatever comes, and maybe it’s the fact that he’s so fucking worn out from five days of combing through his memories a few teeth short to actually come up with anything, or maybe it’s the fact that from Stede, it’s just not that. It’s soft, it’s kind, it’s gentle, it’s a real fuckin question.

“No,” Ed says.

Stede squeezes his hands.

“Then don’t be sorry.”

Ed sniffs. He’s not crying, but he’s dangerously fucking close, and it aches behind his eyes, the holding it back, but he knows from experience that it hurts more to let it go, to actually do the head-pounding, body-shuddering sob of it all. He needs to move things back to— something in the direction— something practical. What did Stede say? Pretty boat, pretty boat with its guts scooped out, pretty boat named Revenge, Stede’s revenge, his boat, his crew, his crew had taken the ship back, back from Ed, fuckin Ed just sitting here in the cabin, like— right, okay—

“So what, am I your prisoner?”

Sounds flat, even to himself, like, does he even care if he is?

“No!” Stede rushes to reassure. “Well. Maybe. I didn’t plan this far ahead.”

“What— what, you had a plan to board Blackbeard’s ship and take his crew and you didn’t plan for after that?”

“Well…”

“Lunatic.”

Stede smiles at that, a little private thing, and Ed doesn’t get the joke.

“To be fair,” Stede continues. “The crew had a plan, their plan was for you to be prisoner, because they all thought you would kill me, and I think after everything they’ve become a bit protective, but even though I told them that was nonsense, they weren’t interested in alternate routes. I thought I’d play it by ear.”

“They thought I’d kill you? Why would I—”

“You wouldn’t—”

“But why do they think—”

Stede takes a deep breath.

“Ed, I know you have no reason to trust me—”

“Do, though.”

Stede stops, looks guilty, guilty like a dog that’s been in the trash while its owner’s out and knows they’ll be upset, also knows he doesn’t have the thumbs to undo any of it. He takes another visible breath.

“You don’t have any reason to trust me, and the story is not. Good. For either of us. And I’m worried about you. I don’t want to hurt you— I don’t want to hurt you again by telling you when you’re. When you’re.”

“Completely fucked in the head? Brain like rotten cottage cheese? Probably never going to recover?”

“Ed, don’t say that—”

“S’probably true.” And he knows he sounds bitter. And he knows— feels like— Stede didn’t do anything to deserve his poison. But he knows injuries, has had enough of them, and like the steel-toed boot he took to his knee and the horrible weeks he spent hobbling around after, there’s something in this that aches familiar.

Stede opens his mouth to say something, pauses, furrows his brow in thought.

“Okay,” he finally says.

“Okay?”

“Okay, maybe.” Stede swallows. “Maybe you don’t ever get your memories back. But there’s still things we can do, to make things easier for you. And we can— you know, work around the things you do remember, maybe find some support?”

Ed blinks at him. His head’s a mess, he knows that, but he doesn’t get where the— Ed didn’t say anything— Stede didn’t say anything— the dots don’t connect, right, it’s not just Ed that—

“We?” he asks, feeling dumb, feeling lost.

“Well, yes, we, I could do it for you, but I don’t actually know who any of your friends are, and I don’t know what might make you more comfortable, but I do think we could figure it out together?”

It’s still— he’s still— together, he’s saying together.

“I don’t get it.”

“To be honest, me neither, darling, I’m not an expert on medicine, and certainly not head injuries, but—”

Darling, what the fuck, darling. Fuck, his head hurts.

“No, fucking. Spell it out. Please. What happens next.”

“Oh. Well, well once we sort things out with the crew, I’m not sure if they’d be willing to keep you on, but if they do, obviously I will be here with you. And if not, wherever you’d like to go instead, we can do that. And then we can brainstorm—”

“You keep saying we,” he cuts off, frustrated. “I don’t get, I don’t get—”

“I’m sorry, Ed, let me be plain. Wherever you go, I go.”

“Why?”

“Well— you asked me not to say, before. But also, I have been looking for you for months now, so I’d hardly just leave now.”

“Now, even though, even though I’m not even half the man you’ve been looking for, even though—”

“Ed. Of course you are. Of course you’re the man I’m looking for. Nothing changes that.”

Fuck. Ed doesn’t want to fucking cry again. Doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to claw and scrape and try, he just wants to fucking lay down and fucking get some rest. His body answers the call for him, shudders and tips towards Stede, that same instinct that’s saved him before, saving him now, because Stede catches him.

Catches him in his arms, helps them tilt and shift until they’re laying down together, until Stede can pull the blanket— the stupid scratchy wool one because Ed didn’t know where to find anything better— up over their shoulders, tuck them in tight together.

“Okay,” Ed finally says, not because any of it, any shred of it actually is okay, but because Stede makes him feel like, eventually, it might be.

Ed’s eyes open, and he snaps them shut right away.

Ed’s eyes open, and his head fucking hurts, and there’s watered down cloudy afternoon light filtering in across his face, and even that’s too fucking much for his pounding skull, so, yeah. He’s not doing that.

In the dark, which never really just feels like dark anymore, like his head pounds and his stomach twists and everything is so intense, so twisty and painful all through his nervous system that he feels like he can see it spiderwebbing across the inside of his eyelids, and so the dark isn’t even dark and his rest isn’t even rest and his sleep isn’t even sleep, it’s dreamy fragments of things he remembers and those fragments shatter into smaller and smaller pieces the longer he’s awake until they slip completely free of his hands and he’s back to not remembering anything—

In the dark, he feels something, pressed up against his side, and his heart hitches up to pounding right along with the thump in his skull, and he tenses, he’s ready, ready for a fight, not actually fucking ready at all because he’s slow like this, he’s slow and he’s clumsy and he’s—

“Ed? Darling?”

Soft, soft voice, soft, wrapping around the spikes behind his eyes, and so he can open them.

Sees a face, a handsome face, close and concerned, and Ed doesn’t—

“Stede?”

The name comes to him, slips out before he can decide if it’s right or not.

“Yes, yes, I’m here, is everything alright?”

Not in the fucking slightest, but the panic in his chest is slowly ebbing as the mush of his brain starts to reconstitute, and Ed remembers earlier— yesterday?— Stede promising to help him, remembers falling asleep believing that meant something. He has to thread it together, has to work backwards with those pieces, but then he ends up at what he thinks is the beginning of what he has access to, Stede showing up and Ed wasting no time throwing himself into his arms.

There was a gut feeling in that, Ed deciding to trust him, and that gut feeling is with him now, but also, so are his doubts. His second guessing. He doesn’t actually know who Stede is, doesn’t know why he should trust him. For all Ed knows, he could be in more danger than he was yesterday, and he just invited it, literally, into his bed.

But he doesn’t have anything else.

“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.”

Stede perks up, and Ed can practically hear the question in his puppy-eager eyes.

“Nah,” he cuts him off quickly. “Not like— I’m just the same level of fucked I was before.”

“Oh. Oh, well, that’s okay. Would you like something to eat?”

Ed’s stomach twists, saliva gathers in his mouth like he’s gonna be sick, just at the word, but he doesn’t know how long it’s been, so he nods.

They sit up, Stede standing first and then offering his hands out to Ed, like— like—

“S’fine,” he says. “I can walk fine, it’s been five days.”

Stede looks deeply unimpressed, that cunty skepticism he wields like a knife, but the softness in his voice when he speaks cuts deeper.

“You deserve much better than fine, Ed.”

Burns him up to hear it, to have no idea who this man knows that he speaks to Ed like that, has been speaking to him like that, but he doesn’t have any energy to fight, so he just puts the tremble of his hands into Stede’s, lets him stabilize his walk, steady him all the way to a table and a pair of chairs that— Ed is mostly sure— weren’t there when he fell asleep, and a mismatched tea service Ed is actually sure wasn’t there, would bet even that it had been nowhere on the ship until Stede boarded.

Stede, his hand still steady at Ed’s elbow, pulls out a chair for him, helps him settle in, doesn’t let go until Ed is solidly sat, which takes him an extra beat longer than he’s guessing it ever did before his brain went mutiny on him.

Without asking, Stede prepares Ed a cup of tea, dropping in sugar after sugar, adding cream, and then passes it to him like he hasn’t done something insane, making a man like Ed a cup of tea more sweetness than bitter, moves right into splitting a roll and slathering on jam, setting it on a plate, which he also passes straight to Ed.

Ed doesn’t even like tea, but he doesn’t have the heart to say that to Stede, to disappoint him twice in so many minutes. Besides, what does he actually know, maybe he does, maybe the Ed that hangs out with Stede likes tea and— poetry, and soft fabrics, and whatever else Stede is probably into.

He picks up the cup of tea, and takes a sip, prepared to get it down without tasting it like he always does with tea, but—

Warm mid-morning light on his cheeks, heat in his chest, sweet on his tongue, sweet, sweet on his tongue—

He likes it.

He takes another sip, just to check, just to make sure it’s not a fluke, not a flutter in his fucked up brain, but no, yeah—

He likes it.

“You got it just right,” he says, almost a question, all disbelief.

“Yes,” Stede says, and then smiles into his own cup of tea. “A dollop of milk and seven sugars.”

“Huh.”

“Took a lot of trial and error before I figured out that was how you liked it,” Stede says, still smiling.

“What, I wouldn’t drink it with six?”

Stede’s smile falters, and Ed hates this, hates that his own past is riddled with mines, and he doesn’t even have the map.

“No,” Stede says, a flash of a frown turning down his mouth before he swallows, coughs his smile back up and pastes it on his face. “You said it wouldn’t be the same with six.”

And Ed wants, he wants his own words spoken back to him to call up that warmth of an almost memory, the way that first sip of tea did, wants to feel any kind of familiarity in it, wants to be able to even say yeah, that sounds like me. He wants so fucking bad, but he can’t. Can’t feel a damn thing beyond the ache behind his eyes, the sting in his throat, the threat of frustrated tears.

He gets saved from the humiliation by a knock at the door, lets Stede deal with it while he swallows down the feeling with tea and bread and jam, and it does start to settle his stomach until he catches a snatch of the conversation at the door, Frenchie’s voice—

“— Blackbeard know when Fang got back—”

He’s on his feet before he can think about it, think about the physical consequences of moving so quickly, and when they do hit, he ignores them, strides over to the door through the swimming of vertigo, the drag of nausea.

“Fang is back?” he asks, more like a demand than a question.

Frenchie, barely inside the doorway, takes a quick step back into the hall. When he nods, he doesn’t meet his eye. “Yep, just got in, so that’s the news, very well delivered I have to say, and so I will just be—”

“Well, you don’t have to go,” Stede says, like he either doesn’t see or doesn’t care about the fray in the atmosphere between them. “We were just having tea, you can join us.”

“Wow,” Frenchie says, and now he’s not even looking at Stede. “That is so nice, but I think I’m just gonna— Not do that, okay, good chat, bye!” and then he scarpers off down the hall.

Stede blinks, and then looks at Ed and shrugs, takes him by the elbow and guides him back to the table, pulls out his chair again, helps him settle back in. This time Ed is almost used to the motions.

“Do you know why you wanted to be notified of Fang’s return?”

“Yeah, fuck, I actually do,” he answers, and his chest loosens, caught up in the relief of having an actual answer to a question. “I remember him.”

“Oh, oh excellent, we can use that to narrow things down! How much of your memories you lost! When did you first start sailing with Fang?”

Ed thinks, does a bit of mental math, that one really dry summer was ‘98, he picked up Fang three years— no, four, before that.

“‘94?” he answers, 95% confident.

“Oh,” Stede answers, significantly less excited.

“What?”

“Well, it’s 1718.”

“Shit.”

“Doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

“No.”

“Well, what about—”

“I don’t really want to do this.”

He doesn’t mean to say it, it’s another one of those things that just fucking comes out of him, the way they do now that he has apparently no fucking control over his mouth around this guy, but it is true. Something about unpicking his past, the gaps in it, around Stede, it feels—

Raw.

Terrifying.

Fucking horrible.

Feels just a little bit worse than seeing Stede go all kicked puppy disappointment on him again, but Ed figures he probably ought to get used to disappointing Stede. Seems inevitable at this point.

“Oh,” Stede starts, but Ed doesn’t let him finish.

“Just, can I talk to Fang?”

“Well, you obviously don’t need my permission—”

“I fucking know that, just can I go out on deck, is everyone gonna freak out, what’s the deal?”

Fuck, he can feel himself burning red, because he didn’t mean to snap either, but something about the way Stede said it, something about the fucking obviously, Ed already feels about ten leagues behind everything else in the world and no, fuck, Ed doesn’t actually know.

Stede’s mouth pinches tight for a moment before he speaks, and when he does, it’s the same soft touch he’s been handling Ed with since he arrived, and it just makes Ed feel worse.

“No, I suppose it would be best if he came to you. I can go get him, if you don’t need more time?”

Ed doesn’t know what the fuck he’d do with more time, delaying the inevitable, so he just says yeah. Remembers a second too late to tack on a please, isn’t sure if Stede hears it before he’s out the door.

Fang comes in alone, maybe five minutes later, not that Ed would bet anything on his ability to keep time these days.

“Boss?” he asks tentatively, looking around the room like he expects something, maybe someone else.

“Fang, yeah, have a seat,” Ed tells him, already exhausted and very aware that what’s coming is the ontological opposite of rest.

“What’s happening then?”

“Fuuuuck, isn’t that the question?” Ed says, scrubs his hands across his face, scrapes across the absence of his beard and gets knocked backwards another day. He just—

“Boss?”

Right, yeah, right. Weird how Fang calls him boss, cause Ed’s been his captain probably awhile now, and he’s pretty sure his boss longer than that, Ed thinks he hired Fang, but Ed has this feeling, this memory of this feeling, like he’d gotten the job on accident and it was real sailors like Fang that were gonna say psych, say it’d all been a joke to see how far Ed would take it. Ed wonders if he ever grew out of that feeling, ever got used to Fang calling him boss.

“I’m gonna ask you some questions.”

“Ohkay.”

“Maybe some dumb questions. Some really dumb questions.”

“Shoot.”

Fuck, and where does he even start? There’s so much shit, he doesn’t know how to untangle it, how to trace any of it back to the source, there’s so much big and dark and awful and twisted and—

“Why’s Izzy my first mate?”

Fang’s brow furrows and he leans in, asks it quietly. “Is this a kinda test? I do a lot better with more direct stuff, you know.”

“No, fuck, no, it’s a real question, like, pretend I’m like— say I’m some guy who hasn’t met him before and only knows the general stuff about Blackbeard. Why is Izzy Hands his first mate?”

Fang winces. “I dunno, boss, I—”

“Fuck, alright, nevermind. How about— how did I know Stede?”

Fang keeps his twisted expression.

“Why are we on this ship instead of the Queen Anne?” he asks, a question in a question, is this something that can even be answered, is Ed actually gonna get any answers?

“Look, boss, I dunno what’s going on, but you’re asking me to talk to you about things you asked me not to talk about, and maybe you should just tell me what you want me to say?”

Ed bites the inside of his cheek, grinds in his molars. The frustration is bubbling up inside him, boiling and expanding and pressing against his skull and behind his eyes, and he wants to scream and he wants to throw things and he doesn’t want that, but he feels like he’s trying to guess the picture of a puzzle with only half the pieces, and he feels like if he spreads them out on the table they’re gonna get snatched away, and he feels so fucking stupid because he just can’t put any of it together.

“Okay, forget, forget Blackbeard, we sailed together before Blackbeard, so just, whatever he would say to you, forget all that. It’s just Ed asking the questions, right, just Ed. Can— can we do that?”

Fang looks wary, but he nods, says, “Sure.”

“Okay, um—” Ed goes searching through his brain, tries to sift through things, tries to pull up something he remembers that’s fuzzy enough that he knows it wasn’t recent, something he can’t totally pin down. “The raid where— where that guy on our crew lost his thumb trying to cut out someone’s tongue cause he fucking bit it off, what, what year was that?”

“1710.”

“And, and when we had to reroute our course for like two weeks cause someone got pregnant, was that before or after that?”

“Hah, the abortion roadtrip of 1712. You should still have your badge for that somewhere, cap.”

“So after, right?”

“Mmhm.”

“Fuck, okay. So, between 1712 and whenever you left on your trip, like, you know. What have I been up to?”

Fang just looks at him.

“Just, rough outline. Please?”

Fang still looks deeply confused, but he continues. “‘Kay, well in 1712, let’s see… You were captain of the Queen Anne, we did Josie’s little sabbatical. That’s when you— Blackbeard, I mean— really started to pick up, so she stepped down as first mate, and we didn’t have anyone for about a year and a half, and then we picked up Izzy.”

“And I made him first mate?”

“Nooo, not right away.”

“So why did I— Why Izzy?”

Fang looks at him, and Ed shrugs, tries to make his face nonthreatening, like, hey, still Ed.

“I think, he did some of the stuff you didn’t want to have to do.”

“Like what?”

“Mostly pushing around the crew, you know, writing rotas, dictating rations, making sure everyone knew their place, didn’t get in your way.”

“And he was good at it?”

Fang lifts his hand, wiggles it, ehhh.

“He was bad at it, and I kept him on?”

“Honestly, Ed, I don’t think you saw. Blackbeard was Blackbeard, you know, doing wild genius things and making all the crowns crazy mad, and Izzy did the other stuff, and no one ever actually mutinied, and so that was alright, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?”

“Well, you know, it’s pirating.”

Ed does know, very fucking much does know. For the wash that his memories are, the theme that’s stayed pretty constant is the danger, and the discomfort, and the trading of one kind of pain for another, and even when he woke up to a hard reset, these five days that have followed have been all more of the same.

Except Stede. Who is apparently a pirate also.

“Where does Stede come in?”

“Well, you never really said, but now I figure maybe you were getting bored, cause Captain Bonnet was mostly making a mess of things, pirating by himself, and then we had orders to track him down and ended up saving him from getting killed by the Spanish, and then, mostly, we just hung out with him?”

“We— Hung out with him.”

“He and his crew, mmhm, for a couple weeks. And then Izzy tried to kill him for the first time and you kicked him off the ship, and then he came back with the English to try and kill him again—”

“Tried to fuckin kill him?”

“Yeh, and you weren’t having that, so you and Captain Bonnet took the Act of Grace and you two got shipped off together, and then right before we were gonna dump Izzy overboard, you came back alone.”

Ed feels sick, sicker, that horrible vertigo twisting deep into his gut. “I left him with the English?”

“We dunno, boss— er, Ed— no one’s actually sure what happened between you two.”

Ed sits back, slumps into the chair. This fucking— this is shit. Literally no part of this is anything but shit, and it’s making him feel like shit, because mostly it sounds like he’s just been a shit. He’s a pirate, right, was never gonna make his mama proud, was never gonna give anyone warm fuzzies or win any citizenship awards, but he figured maybe he could at least be good by piracy standards, but mostly it sounds like he was a shit captain and then he sold out to the fucking English.

“Ed, something wrong?”

“Yeah, no, fuck, probably, Fang, probably.” He sighs, reaches his hand up to run his fingers through his beard, and then, of course, there’s nothing fucking there. “Stede tell you I’m a prisoner now?”

“Wellll, he did say it was for show until things got sorted with the crew and all, but he said he thought I could keep a secret.”

Ed chews at the inside of his cheek. Good judgment call on Stede’s part, honestly, not for no reason Ed was so relieved it was Fang that he still remembered. He’d be fucked if the only crewmember from the old days still around was like, fuckin, Carlos or something. Fuck it, fuck him going around this in circles, maybe he just needs to say.

“Fang, my whole memory is fucked. Hit my head, everything’s a mess.”

Fang’s eyes widen. “All the way back to ‘12?”

“Ehh, got some bits and pieces, and things before that aren’t perfect either, but yeah, mostly.”

“Including Captain Bonnet?”

Ed’s stomach lurches.

“Yeah, including him.”

“Oh, Ed, that’s bad.”

Ed laughs. Bad, yeah, fuck, it is fuckin bad, it is, but bad isn’t the fucking half of it, so Ed laughs. A barking, awful thing, and it rattles against his brain, so he cuts it off quick.

“Yeah, Fang, it kinda is fuckin bad.”

Fang just frowns at him for a minute, like they’re sitting with it, the how fuckin bad it is.

“Well, you know…” Fang starts, and then stops, and Ed doesn’t wanna have to try and fuckin connect any dots, no, he actually does not know—

“What?”

“Captain Bonnet’ll make sure you’re okay, even if things are a mess for now.”

Fuck. Yeah, he did, he did say that much.

“And I trust him to do that?”

“From what I know?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, yeah you do.”

And for the second— third? Is it? Fourth?— time, Ed is left with this feeling, this gut deep feeling that the last bit of trust, last bit of hope he has left to him is all in Stede’s hands.

And even if it wasn’t, even if it wasn’t a gut thing, even if—

With what little Ed has left, where else would he put it?

After that, things are— fine, whatever. They agree that they should tell the rest of the crew what’s going on with Ed— or Stede says it will be fine, says that he’s the captain now and won’t let anything happen to Ed, says all these people used to be Ed’s friends, and Ed doesn’t put up a fight about it, even if he sorta thinks given the Jim and Frenchie of it all, Stede might have some of his wires crossed somewhere, might have some bad intel.

But that’s sorta what Ed is figuring out Stede is like. On Ed’s word, Stede doesn’t try to explain what happened between them that they went from hanging out with each other chummy enough to take the Act of Grace together to whatever’s going on now. But Stede talks about other things. Casually mentions “when we went to St. Augustine together” and “during our first fuckery,” dropping little pieces of what Ed is adding up to one absolutely mad man, and Ed just sorta lets him.

It’s harmless, right, Stede is good to him, just in general, brings him tea, brings him snacks, found his weed even, and doesn’t mind if he smokes in the cabin, always makes sure the sheets on what Ed now understands is technically Stede’s bed are clean— though after that first day, Stede doesn’t sleep there with Ed, goes off somewhere in the night after Ed is out cold and appears first thing in the morning with breakfast. Lets Ed milk the shit out of his convalescence, gets between Ed and the crew when their general bristling distrust turns sharp and pointed, never lets it go too deep, though Ed can’t help but catch snippets of it— marooning, kidnapping, drowning, desecration of a perfectly good cast iron dutch oven that did nothing to deserve it. Seems like Ed’s instinct to have Stede protect him is only matched by Stede’s instinct to actually do so.

But then.

Expectation.

Which Ed honestly should have expected— ha.

Stede’s not just telling him stories, not just to tell them; he’s looking at Ed; he’s hoping.

Ed can see it written all over his face, clear as every other feeling Stede’s ever had in his presence.

So Stede asks, one evening after dinner while they’re hanging out with their legs through the railing, Stede sipping on a glass of brandy and Ed on his pipe, and it’s a musing thing, an obviously not fucking thinking about it until the words are out of his mouth kind of thing “Remember how we met?”

And Ed, man, Ed is such a bristly fucking mess, he gets mad so easy, and he honestly doesn’t know if it’s new or old Ed, kinda thinks he’s always been some kind of volatile, not that he can sort it for sure, so maybe he’s just an angry fucking dude, but Ed hates biting back at Stede because he doesn’t fucking deserve it, bends over backwards to take care of him, and Stede didn’t put him in this corner, so it’s not fair if he gets hurt while Ed tries to scrabble his way out. So he bites the inside of his cheek until the boiling, simmering, fight/flight/freak-the-fuck-out inside of him settles down enough for him to just say “Nah, mate.”

Stede looks embarrassed for a brief moment, a flash and a shutter, before he brightens. “Oh, well, it’s an excellent story!”

Ed mostly likes Stede’s stories, so he doesn’t stop him.

“So! I had just bested Izzy Hands with a clever bit of fuckery and won a British officer as hostage, and we had our eyes on the Republic of Pirates…”

Stede keeps going, and Ed does his best to track. Stede is saying some shit about Jackie’s nose jar and the Spanish, and Jackie’s not actually Spanish but does Stede—?

“And then—” Stede pauses for effect. “I was gut stabbed.”

Ed’s own gut twists in fear, just for a second, because obviously Stede is here, obviously Stede is fine, but he wasn’t—

“And then! They tried to hang me! I was certain I would die, I said my last words and everything— they were very noble— but then—”

Stede’s giddy excitement goes warm, and puts a warm hand on Ed’s knee to match, gives a soft squeeze.

“You were there. Had happened upon the ship, it seems, and cut me down. You were like an angel, glowing, and not only did you save me, you knew who I was. ‘The gentleman pirate, I presume?’, you said, and the rest, was, of course, history.”

And Stede seems so fuckin happy, but Ed doesn’t know what to do with this, this half of a memory, one part of a story that Ed can’t retell, can’t even recognize himself in. Where had Blackbeard gone that he was happening upon ships, no plan, aimless and acting as an avenging angel for hapless renegades like Stede? When had Ed ever saved anyone?

Ed wants the story to be true, wants to feel in his chest the belief, the warm feeling to match Stede’s eyes that he is connected to this man, that he is good.

But he can’t.

He reaches for it, scrabbles and claws, but there’s nothing there.

So he bites it down, chews it into the inside of his cheek until he can muster up a smile.

And he tries to let it go, he does, he doesn’t want to be angry, he doesn’t want to be a twitchy, fidgety mess, but it crawls in his skin.

It’s like he’s surrounded on all sides by people who expect him to be someone he’s not, some version of himself where he can see where it’s coming from, the picture of it, Ed but a little to the left, but it’s just not him.

And it would be easier to defend against, if he actually knew who he was, but he doesn’t want anyone to tell him.

The conversation with Fang, he needed that, shitty as it had been, to set some fucking kind of baseline, to get a little bit of context.

But when Stede looks at him like that, all gooey and soft, Ed doesn’t want Stede to tell him why.

When Stede’s scribey person, Lucius, flinches away from Ed when he rounds a corner and won’t say even two words to him, Ed doesn’t want Lucius to tell him why.

When the whole crew keeps at minimum, a cool distance from him, and at max seem to actively fear him, to expect, beyond what he can write off to the mystique of Blackbeard, for him to snap at any moment, he doesn’t want anyone to tell him why.

He just wants to know.

He just wants to know, but it only takes a couple days of this for him to know that he doesn’t know shit.

So he goes back to basics.

Before Blackbeard, before being a captain, the one thing he definitely was was a sailor. Sailor who pirates, sure, but a sailor. So he does sailor stuff. He goes to Buttons, the only one of the crew who seems completely unphased by him, and gets his name added to watch rotations. He mends sails, or tries to, but he can’t get his fingers and his eyes and his brain to communicate right, and eventually someone takes the needle from him with a shake of their head. So he rigs, he hauls lines, he fuckin swabs the deck, though he hasn’t had to do that since back from when his memories start fading in the other direction, just too old to fully stick.

It’s fine, mostly. It feels like, when Ed stops haunting the ship like a pointless ghost and starts acting like a real crew member, some of the crew start to reluctantly accept him as one. When he sat down on the deck to mend a sail, Archie didn’t get up and leave. Frenchie will let him help haul a line without abandoning it for Ed to scramble after the slack. Jim ignores him, but from what Ed can tell, they ignore everyone except Oluwande and Archie. It’s something, and for most of most days, Ed can keep his hands busy.

But keeping busy can get difficult for him, which is some shit, because he remembers being someone constantly at odds with all the things he could, should, would do. Remembers itching to get his hands on, wrap his mind around new things, bigger things, more complicated things, remembers being a whirring machine that never ever stopped.

And the whirring, the itching, the insistent buzz, pretty much the second he calms down about the Stede of it all, it’s back in his brain in full fuckin force.

But he can’t always do something with it.

Too much detail work straining his eyes, and his head hurts.

Too much physical exertion hauling lines, and his head hurts.

Up too late for a night watch, and what do you fucking know?

His head hurts.

His head actually always hurts, it’s just, when does he get too weak to push through it to get the job done. When does he start failing to do things he, by all rights, should be able to do?

And that has nothing on the shit he straight up cannot do anymore.

He’s in the cabin— his cabin, Stede’s cabin, he doesn’t fucking know actually— stuck at another loose end, and he sees their course half mapped on a scatter of charts and note paper, and he figures, not like Stede asked him to, not like Stede ever asks him to— Stede actually sort of asks him not to do things, in this round about way where he never tells Ed no, just sort of tries to suggest that Ed could rest, or read, or have a bowl, or do anything but actually be fuckin useful, but he can’t sit still like that. So no, Stede didn’t ask, but charting’s a breeze, and Ed knows basically where they’re going, and he could wrap this up, get everything plotted and neat before Stede even gets to the cabin.

He leans over the charts, starts reading back the notes in Stede’s looping, messy scrawl, tucks the directions and headings into his brain, and then slides his eyes over to the map, ready to start plotting the next point, notes said they were headed for— headed for— damn it, he just read it a second ago. He looks back at the notes, and they swim in front of his eyes longer than they should before settling down. Port au Prince. Port au Prince, he knew that, he knows that. Back to the map. They need to avoid the Canal de la Tortue as they round the island, which Stede missed, but Ed knows the Revenge isn’t built for some of the twists and shallows that crop up on the way to— Damn it, he just— It’s on the tip of his fucking tongue— Port— Port— of course they’re headed for port, that’s the whole thing— Port au Prince! Fuck. Okay. He grabs the divider and the straight edge, starts situating around the last spot Stede marked, and starts figuring in his head.

Starts figuring in his head.

Starts—

He does.

37 degrees tilted 5 for the currents through this path, aiming for 42—

37 for—

And then—

It just keeps slipping out of his brain, sliding right from his grasp.

He’s never not been able to do this, could fucking do it in his sleep, what the fuck is happening—

“Port au Prince,” he repeats to himself, grits his teeth. “37 degrees off from— Where the hell did he— Did I say 37 or 27—”

The divider slips in his hand and gouges through the chart, leaves a gash over Stede’s last marked place.

“Fuck!”

He grips the divider in his fist, reels his arm back to throw—

“Ed, darling—”

The cabin door pops open and Stede steps through.

Ed tightens his fist, drags in a breath, sets the divider back atop the charts, though he can’t steady his hand enough to be gentle about it.

Stede looks between him and the charts, eyes searching, so Ed gets out, casual as he fucking can “Hey Stede.”

Stede steps closer, eyes still searching. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah, fine,” Ed tells him, which isn’t not true. Doesn’t really make the captain’s list of concerns that the guy hanging out on his ship not responsible for navigation can’t navigate. So, essentially, everything is fine.

“Well,” Stede says, and steps even closer to Ed’s space, which would normally be fine, but Ed is practically vibrating with the rage that hasn’t yet burned off, and Ed doesn’t want it on Stede, is the thing. He breathes through, tries to breathe it down.

“Is now a good time?” Stede asks. “I wanted to show you something.”

Ed swallows one more time, tastes copper on his tongue, shit, cheek must’ve bled through. “Yeah, fine.”

Stede smiles another one of his brilliant smiles, so good, so bright, they hurt Ed’s eyes, and then he’s off, rambling and ambling.

“Now, I showed you this the first day we were acquainted, not the first day we met, mind you, because of the stab wound and the convalescing and all, but the first day we actually properly spoke, and you were quite taken then— err, not with— with the— I’ll just show you then, won’t I?”

And then Stede gives Ed a big showman’s grin, and tilts a switch on the empty bookshelf, and the wall swings open.

“Oh,” Ed says, and even under the deluge of the day’s frustrations, there’s a pull in his chest that feels like excitement.

Stede’s grin stays up, practically giddy, and he waves Ed through, following close behind.

Ed steps in and he’s surrounded by the smell of cedar and silk, sees on all sides racks and rows of the finest clothes he ever has, in brilliant shades of green and purple and pink and blue.

“My auxiliary wardrobe. A back up to my actual wardrobe,” Stede beams. “Ended up being a remarkable bit of foresight, actually.”

Ed doesn’t know if that’s a dig, still doesn’t have the full story, but sort of gathered that the previously shit state of decor had more to do with him than anyone else, but it’s so fucking hard to tell with Stede when everything is said with that blazing smile. Still, Ed doesn’t say shit, turns to run his hands over the racks instead, feeling until his palms land on something cool and slippery, practically liquid for how it runs.

“Ah yes,” Stede says from behind. “You always were partial to a bit of silk.”

Were.

“Though,” Stede continues. “It might be a bit chilly these days for silk, but there’s a velvet number just there that you quite fancied.”

Ed bites his cheek.

“Now somewhere around here is that pair of şalvar you liked—”

“Stop,” Ed finally says, quiet, choking down the full font of irritation crawling up his throat, but he says it.

“Oh no, it’s no trouble, I know they’re in here—”

His shitty self control snaps.

“Stop,” he says, whirling on Stede. “Fucking stop. I’m not him. Whoever you loved, whoever you want me to be, he’s dead, he’s gone, so stop fucking looking for him.”

By the time he gets it all out, he’s shouting, can hear it in his own voice, feel his body shake with it, but he can’t fucking stop it, he can’t stop the real him from lashing out from inside of himself.

Stede looks at him, eyes wide, mouth working open in shock.

“That’s me,” Ed says, can’t help throwing kerosene on the fucking fire, because that is the kind of man he remembers being.

Not this. Not silks and velvets and fancy trousers.

“Ed—” Stede tries, always fucking trying with Ed, but for once Ed helps him out, saves him the breath, turns and walks away.

Walks out of the wardrobe, out of the cabin, across the deck, and hauls himself up to the maintop.

He’s sweating through his clothes and his left leg is shaking trying to hold together his bad knee, but at least he’s alone.

Thing about being alone is that he’s alone with his thoughts, can’t do shit but sit and stew in them, and he knows that’s what he deserves, but that doesn’t mean he feels fuckin good about it.

No, point of fact, he feels pretty fucking shitty for blowing up at Stede like that, feels pretty fucking shitty for losing control, feels pretty fucking shitty that he threw love back in Stede’s face like that when Ed hasn’t even let him say it yet— and he didn’t have to, was the fucking shit thing, Ed could see it all over Stede’s face, the way he talked to him, the way he treated him, the way he took care of him. It might be massively misplaced, but it was definitely love.

But Ed is nothing but an angry, bitter asshole, and with half his brain missing, he’s not even a clever asshole.

From what Ed does know about Stede, he knows he’s fucking insane, but even accounting for that, he also knows he’s got nothing left for Stede to love. He knows it’s Stede’s optimism, spliced up in his veins like rewound rope, that has Stede still seeing anything in him, fuckin in fact, is probably that that had Stede seeing anything in him in the first place.

The other way around, it’s pretty easy to see where that came from. If Ed loved Stede, it was for his lunacy, his bitchiness, his soft hands and pillow-chest, for the tender way he treats Ed, for the way he takes every shitty thing in the shitty world of piracy and tries to shove some fun into it.

If Ed had, anyways. It’s not a question he can follow too far, it’s not something he can hold in the sieve of his mind without it clogging in some places and leaking straight through in others. All he knows is if he had, he’s got no business having it now.

And now, he’s gone and fucked up pretending he can sit and accept the love Stede keeps trying to give him, which, if he was any shred of the tactician he remembers being, he could have seen coming. But whatever, he’s here now, and he needs to make a plan.

When they hit port— port— port— swear to god if he forgot again— he needs to offload, needs to trick some other vessel into taking him on. He’s pretty sure he’s done for as a pirate, but if he can still sail, he can probably take up on a fishing vessel long enough to find one of his caches— assuming any of them are still where he left them— and buy himself enough time to figure out what the hell he’s going to do with the rest of the fragments of his life.

The thought of it, of any of it exhausts him, and again it’s that niggling doubt. Is he this fucking tired because his brain went splat across the deck like an egg, or has this been building for longer than that? Has the fatigue been sitting in him, just waiting for a chance to cut him off at the knees?

He doesn’t fucking know, and he just shredded up the only person he could have asked, not that he ever really wanted to.

Now that he’s on the other side of it, now that the shake of anger has started to fade from his fists, it tastes less like anger. Feels more like fear. Shame. Two sides of the same coin.

What if he was someone worth Stede loving? How does he live up to that?

What if he wasn’t? How does he live that down, knowing Stede gave it to him anyways?

Doesn’t matter, actually, doesn’t actually matter, cause it’s done, he made sure of that, and he just needs to bide his time for the— how many days? How long would it take to— Port au Prince, fucking got it— but he never got it plotted, and— and then it’s lost in the grey again.

Grey in his brain, grey in the skies, grey stretching from one side of the horizon to the other.

The rain has stopped, but the clouds haven’t cleared, and from the shape of them, they won’t be any time soon.

It sounds like Ed is being pessimistic, but he knows weather, he knows clouds, he knows climate, and he knows the grey that’s held for days has no plans to break, just like Ed’s losing streak against his shitty nature.

“Ed!”

Fucking of course that’s when Stede pops his head up over the side of the maintop. Ed was just getting into the groove of his brooding, besides the fact that he does not wanna fucking talk to Stede right now.

“I think we should talk.” No. “Can I come up?” Absolutely the fuck not.

Ed shrugs, grumbles out a sound that could go either way. He’s no fucking good at telling this man no, fucking embarrassing—

Stede scrambles up onto the platform of the maintop and sits next to Ed— further away than he has these past few days, but still closer than anyone else would want to sit next to him— and for a blur of time, it’s silence between them.

Fine by Ed, he doesn’t actually want to be doing this.

Somewhere in his gut are the words I’m sorry, but he can’t cough them up anywhere near his heart, let alone his throat, out of his mouth.

Eventually, Stede speaks again. “I think we should talk,” he repeats. “I think we should talk about what happened between us.”

It’s so far the opposite of what Ed wants to do that at first he just laughs.

“Ed,” Stede says, two layers of gentle wrapped around a core of steel, insane, the way Stede does that, the way he talks to Ed like that.

“Nah, m’not fuckin interested in hashing out how horrible I’ve been, now in full color detail, alright, mate?”

“No, Ed, that is exactly why we should talk—”

“Look, I get the picture, it’s bad news, I’m bad news, I’ll pass—”

“Edward.” Oh, and that’s all steel.

Ed stops.

Looks up at Stede for a moment, looks up at Stede’s face, stand down, and looks away.

“Edward, you seem to have a major misconception about the balance of wrongdoing between us.”

Ed looks at the sea, makes a little sound, lets him know he heard.

“Haven’t you wondered, Ed, why I had to come looking for you? Why I wasn’t just here?”

He shakes his head, aborts it, too much movement for his loose-couscous brain, and gives a tiny no.

Cause he hadn’t.

Ed’s first mate had tried to get Stede killed, tried hard enough that their only way out was an Act of Grace, and clearly neither of them is licking English boots right now, so they must’ve beat it, one way or another, but Ed can’t imagine Stede wanting to stick around with a liability like Ed. And the dots were too far apart, and they moved too much for Ed to bother trying to connect them, what linked his apparent bender of violence and Stede being gone after the Act of Grace and Stede coming back.

“Fang told you about the Act of Grace, yes?”

“Yeah,” Ed tells the sea.

“Why we took it together?”

“No.”

“You took it to save my life. It was your idea. They were going to let you go, but they were going to kill me, and you stepped in, called Act of Grace, made a deal. Blackbeard’s Act of Grace to legitimize mine.”

Ed couldn’t imagine doing that, and yet, could, could imagine doing that for him.

“I was a mess, I wanted out, I couldn’t wrap my mind around being trapped, again. But you seemed almost relaxed. I didn’t understand, and when I asked, you told me it was a relief, just to be yourself, to have a chance to focus on what made you happy.”

“And what— what did I say made me happy?”

“Well— You said the time we spent together— that it was the most fun you had in ages, maybe ever. You said what made you happy was— Was—”

Ed looks at him, looks up at that face, soft and sunshine and a small streak of a tear.

“Me,” Stede finishes.

Ed leans in.

“Ed, wait.”

Stede stops him with a hand on his chest and Ed burns bright with embarrassment, he doesn’t know what the fuck came over him, Stede tells him one cute story, one he can’t even remember, and Ed just leans in like— like—

“That’s not the end of the story,” Stede tells him, and fucking obviously, why can’t Ed get it through his head.

“You made a plan, for us to escape, to run away together, to go to China, and I agreed.”

The twist of embarrassment in Ed’s gut starts solidifying, freezing into fear.

“I didn’t come. I don’t know what you did, how you got back to the Revenge, but I know you did it alone. I know you did it without me.”

Oh.

“That’s when I went crazy on everyone. The— the fuckin marooning and the dutch oven desecration and shit.”

Stede’s face twists up, though Ed gets the weird sense it’s not directed at him.

“No, no, according to everyone, things were mostly fine for the first few days. You were— distressed, I think they would say, but the crew were fine, Roach’s crockery was fine. No one knows what changed, except that Izzy Hands seemed sickeningly excited about it, and no one, myself very much included, wants to ask him about it.”

“Where’s Izzy been, by the way?” Ed finds that he doesn’t really care, but he also really really doesn’t wanna go back to the Stede-agreeing-to-run-away-with-him-and-never-showing thing.

“I don’t know, the brig probably. I asked Oluwande to deal with it until you could be consulted. I’m delegating.”

On another day, Ed might laugh at Stede’s bitchy disregard, but he’s a little too weighed down today. This, the memory thing, the shit between him and Stede, and now, apparently, he’s gotta figure out how to fire a first mate he doesn’t remember hiring. Ed’s so fucking tired; sleep’s getting better, but Ed’s baseline success at sleep even before the head injury, he can’t remember it ever being all that good, can remember, sorta, just the shape of it, playing games in his head as a kid, trying to trick himself into falling asleep, and he doesn’t think he ever got better, just grew out of the games maybe.

He just hums so Stede knows he heard, and leaves the quiet.

He gets precious little of it, anyways, between living on an active pirate ship and the mess in his head always needling him, do you remember this, do you remember that, why don’t you chase this nothing thread of a memory down a dead end hallway. And thankfully, mercifully, Stede seems to get that, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t press.

Actually, what he does is scoot closer to Ed, line his side up with Ed’s, nudge him with his shoulder, give him this soft smudge of a smile. It feels like an invitation, and Ed isn’t strong and he is so so fucking tired, so Ed takes it. Tips his own head in until he’s resting against Stede’s shoulder, all soft and solid, and yeah. The word is rest.

He closes his eyes, blocks out the endless grey, and just rests.

His brain is running, always running, and he lets it go, doesn’t try to chase it. Stede left him, so what. Ed went crazy on everything that was left, so what. Ed doesn’t know anything and remembers even less, so what. Stede came back—

Honestly that one feels a lot less like a so fucking what.

Ed’s lost a lot of shit in his life, people and things and feelings, and some of them have slipped away, organically with time, some of them have been beaten out of him, some drowned in drink or drugs, and some of them have been knocked clean out of his head, and so maybe he won’t put too much stock in the word “remember” here, but Stede is the only one of those things he can ever remember getting back.

And fuck it, he’ll take that.

He’ll take that and he’ll sit with that, the comfort of his solid shoulder, of the warm line of his body next to Ed’s until Ed is warmed all the way through.

Something does knock loose while he watches his thoughts flicker by behind his eyelids, and it’s a needling, curious thing, and maybe it’s because it has a definitive answer that Ed can’t stop himself from eventually asking.

“Where’d you go when you left, anyways?”

Ed’s eyes are still closed but he swears he can feel Stede grimace.

“Back to my wife and children.”

Ed does open his eyes at that, snap wide open, though he catches himself before he whirls on Stede too fast for his head to take. Still turns to face him, though, still asks, incredulous, “You have a wife? Kids??”

Stede smiles, though it’s fighting with his sickly little grimace. “That’s what you said last time I told you.”

“Stede, c’mon, would you give it a rest—”

“Ed,” and jesus christ, how does Stede keep coming up with new, devastating ways just to say his name, all gentle and patient and trust me, let me explain? “It is never my intention to hurt you on purpose.”

Ed’s throat clicks when he tries to say anything back to that, so he just doesn’t.

“I don’t talk about our past together because I expect you to be some version of yourself that no longer exists. Yes, the Ed I know is fond of a fine fabric, he makes me laugh, he is clever, and determined, and very very good to me.”

Ed scoffs.

“But also, he is stubborn, and a bit of a dick, and he doesn’t know when to quit, and sometimes, he doesn’t know when not to quit.”

“Okay, I get it—”

“Hush, I’m not done. He’s also a brat, when he wants to be. My point, Edward, is that I am not looking for a love that I lost, but that I am trying to share something with the love I already have.”

“Jesus, fuck, Stede.” His voice sounds wobbly, even to himself, and he feels wobbly, more than the usual level of wobbly, because when has anybody ever— “Can I kiss you now?”

Stede doesn’t answer, not with words, but he tucks back the fall of Ed’s hair, cups his jaw in one gentle palm, and tilts his head in, answers with his lips.

There’s a spark, a shiver of energy, and for one wild moment, Ed thinks this is it, like a fairy tale, true love’s kiss reanimating the buried body of his memories, that this touch of lips, this tender press between them feels so familiar, down to his bones, into the marrow, that he must be remembering it, the first time, and with it will come everything else that he is missing.

But no.

It feels familiar because it’s easy, because Stede moves with him and matches him, it feels familiar because Stede is familiar now, a friend, someone that Ed could maybe love.

It is not magic.

It does not turn back time.

Ed does not turn into a real boy.

But it feels good, and sweet, and Ed can taste it on Stede’s lips: he loves him, all of him, this new him, the old him, whatever comes in between. These days, what Ed knows and doesn’t know is constantly lost in the no man’s land of his memory, no one thing he can pin down long enough to settle on it. But with this kiss, Ed does know, he knows that Stede loves him.

And in that way, it is magic.

And kissing Stede, all by itself, feels like a kind of magic. His lips are soft, they’re eager, they meet and retreat against Ed’s in perfect time. Stede brings up one hand to weave through Ed’s hair, but like he just knows, he doesn’t tug, he doesn’t pull, it’s just a gentle caress. It’s just hands and lips, but that’s what it is, yeah, Ed feels, all over, held.

And since Stede came back— and that’s weird, isn’t it, that Ed can sort it in his brain as coming back when for all he knows he met Stede for the first time that day— he has held Ed a few times, mostly at first, mostly when Ed was such a vulnerable, abandoned-kitten mess about things, though since then Ed felt kinda— kinda— something, he felt something about it that kept him from just falling into Stede’s arms even though he was sure he’d let him. But yeah, even having been held by Stede before, it doesn’t entirely feel like this.

Before, it was warm, and solid, and grounding. Now, it’s those things, and also heat, and also liquifying Ed at his core, and also, sending him off into space.

It’s—

It’s turning him on?

He says that like a question because it’s not something he’s felt or thought about feeling in. A while. But he does, also, actually know that’s what this is. Stede’s hand cradling his head, keeping it safe while he hums sweetly against Ed’s lips, Stede moving easily with him when Ed’s neck starts to bite at the angle and he has to shift them into something softer, it starts circulating blood that’s felt sick and stagnant since— since— Starts circulating the blood, blood that pushes a pulse into his chest, a restlessness in Ed’s hands. He starts reaching, pulling Stede in close, trying to worm into the open V of his shirt, trying to tug against his hips.

He gets the opposite of what he wants, Stede pulling back, but he doesn’t go far.

“Would you, maybe—” and fuck, fantastic to see that Ed is not the only one affected here— “Maybe like to go somewhere less precarious?”

“Yeah, let’s— yeah, we should—”

It’s a great fucking idea, and Ed is trying to say they should go to the— the fucking place where he sleeps, his bed is there, it’s a part of a ship— but Stede is already on the same page, shimmying off the main top and getting those perfect legs into the rigging, holding out a hand to help Ed down.

Which he doesn’t need, Ed’s been scrambling up and down the rigging of ships since he was 15, but. Also, Ed’s not gonna not take Stede’s hand.

(And it’s maybe. Nice. To have help down the rigging, just an extra set of hands to reassure that he isn’t gonna fall, that he’s gonna make it back down to the deck without the risk of going splat again. Maybe makes it a bit easier on him and his head.)

When they get to the cabin, Ed expects a rush, for Stede to be all over him, was kinda what he was angling for when he dragged Stede determinedly across the deck, and besides the fact that Stede’s been carrying around several more months of wanting than Ed is.

Should’ve known that isn’t what he gets.

The desire is there, Ed is pretty sure of that, but Stede is gentle with him, gentle as they walk to the bed, gentle as Stede gives him space to settle himself back into the mattress, and then helps him to situate himself gingerly, deeper in the berth, gentle as he toes out of his boots and joins him.

It would piss Ed off. He doesn’t like to be treated like he’s fragile, like any little thing will set him off.

But there’s a firmness, a determination, solid steel in his movements, the way Stede has been with him; it’s not hesitance or reticence, it’s just that he cares.

Ed knows it when Stede kisses him. When Stede kisses him and kisses him, and slowly, softly, lowers him back against the pillows, kisses his cheek, his chin, his jaw, his forehead, kisses him in all these fluttering ways, fluttering away in Ed’s gut.

And the same way those kisses on the maintop get his blood flowing, this does too. He feels bright, buzzing, and even if he’s only had this for a few minutes that he can remember, he doesn’t have it in him to wait any longer. Honestly, feels like a lie to say it’s only been a few minutes; the wanting has stretched out for an entire lifetime, it’s just today that it’s started shaping itself around Stede. But whatever it is or isn’t, patient it for sure is not.

Stede keeps kissing him and Ed starts pulling at Stede’s shirt, desperate to get it off, because he can feel it, that heartbeat pounding like a warning, and he wants this so badly that he just wants to outrun it, wants to have this, have something good, something that feels good. Stede takes the hint and pulls his shirt up and over his head, revealing his chest in a flash of ginger, ginger-like-the-root golden hair, soft flesh, a smattering of freckles, before he dips back in to kiss Ed again.

Not having a good baseline for his head not spinning, it maybe sounds like some bullshit to say that just these kisses make his head spin. He’s almost forty— wait— fifty years old, and this is hardly his first go round. It’s crazier shit than this that used to get his rocks off. But it does, yeah, it really really does, Stede is making him feels things, just from this, things that swirl in his head and get all swimmy among the day to day shit that already twists around up there, and it’s hard to hold on to, it’s so fucking hard to hold on to, but that makes him want it even harder. Makes him want the good, want to feel the good so bad.

So maybe he rushes it a little bit.

Maybe he leans forward too fast, maybe he tries to whip his shirt up over his head, get this moving fast enough that the failures of his body and his brain can’t catch it up in their claws.

Maybe it’s the dark and disorientation of his shirt over his face while his blood is already pumping that suddenly takes the background ache of his head, the baseline ringing in his ears, the persistent undercurrent of nausea, and cracks it wide open.

He barely manages the shirt off his head and pushing Stede to the side before he tips out of the bunk and—

Fucking all over the floor, couldn’t even keep his hair completely out of the way, and the taste of bile is burning up his throat and across his tongue almost as fast as the shame across his cheeks.

His ears are still ringing, but outside of that the actual silence of the room, that rings even louder. Rings even louder, the sound of Stede standing up from the bunk, striding quickly away, though Ed doesn’t look to see it, won’t.

Fucking horrible. Ed hasn’t thrown up on a lay since he was an idiot fuckin kid, drinking too much just because it was allowed. Fucking of course Stede needs to walk away—

“Ed, darling?”

Stede.

Back by his side, and almost immediately.

Ed has no idea what to do with that, isn’t prepared to look at it. Emotionally, and also in the literal sense; everything is still spinning and he’s not ready to open his eyes.

“I have a glass of water, if you need it.”

Ed’s glad his eyes are closed because he feels tears prick up damn near instantly. It’s easier for him to hold back from the ache that builds behind his eyes when he starts to cry with his eyes closed. Water, yeah, water sounds amazing actually, but he has to get his breath back, he has to get the world, shifting and twisting like he can feel it doing outside of the dark of his eyelids, to settle down first.

At some point he had hunched over, braced his hands against his knees, and it helps a little bit, so he just leans like that and breathes and breathes.

When he finally feels like his stomach isn’t going to lurch up out of his throat, he swallows, tries to get some words out. “Water.” It’s creaky, not his best effort, but he tries again. “Yeah, please.”

“Should I—?”

Ed reaches out his hand, blind, slow, but after a moment he feels Stede press the glass into his hand, and then his hand steady over Ed’s and following it back to Ed’s mouth.

“It’s fine,” Ed says, though he sounds more like sfyn to his ears.

“Ed,” and there it is again, Stede asking him just as much as he’s telling him: stand down. Let me help.

He’s too fucking tired, is the thing. He’s been fighting and fighting and fighting as long as he can remember, and honestly, even after Stede rescued him, he didn’t exactly stop. Couldn’t sit still, couldn’t let himself. You don’t sit idle on a pirate ship, even the kind of insane, crewed by muppets, floating sweethearts retreat Stede seems to captain. And more, even than that, he’s been fighting himself, fighting the scrambled hash of his brain, fighting his urge to lay down somewhere warm and dark for several weeks until the ice in this pain-nausea-dizziness cocktail of his life melts and waters it down to something he can swallow.

And he’s too tired to fight anymore.

He’s weak, feeble, cracked open, and he can’t fight anymore, definitely can’t fight the warm, solid, unflappable affection of Stede.

So he doesn’t.

Just lets Stede tip the glass against his mouth, starts sipping carefully while Stede slowly, very slowly tilts it further back. He can’t get the whole thing down at once, needs a second to breathe, even though he wants it, the cool across his tongue washing out the acrid taste of his own sick, so he brings his hand up to stop Stede for a moment.

He keeps his eyes closed. It’s easier this way; everything’s easier this way. If moving through the world with his eyes closed didn’t spin him twice as dizzy and disoriented, if he hadn’t lost the ability to navigate any space he’d been in at least once while blind, deaf, dumb, and drunk, he’d be doing that always.

“Ed, is there anything else you need me to do?”

Ed doesn’t want to nod his head, shake it, doesn’t want to speak. He just squeezes Stede’s arm in his hand, hopes he can feel in it everything Ed’s not saying. Good luck to him, since Ed’s not entirely sure what it is either.

“Okay,” Stede says anyways. “I’m here. Take your time. I’ll wait for you.”

And he does. Waits as long as it takes for Ed to be ready for more water, to tug Stede’s arm back in, to drink it down, to take another beat for his body to come back to level.

He wants to say sorry, not that he’s ever been much of an apologizer, but he can already guess how Stede would react to that, so instead he says, “Thanks.”

“Of course,” Stede answers him, easy, so easily.

Ed wants to see his face, even though he in general doesn’t want to have to see anything, so he slowly opens his eyes, blinks and drinks in the bright of Stede’s face.

It’s a little worn, not worked all the way through, but like—

Oh, fuck, and suddenly he can smell it, the nasty cloy of his own sick, and he closes his eyes protectively, though it changes nothing; he can still feel it prickling up his nose and pricking at his brain, the stink.

“Ed?”

“Smells bad,” he says.

“Oh, okay, wait just a moment, I’ll—”

“You don’t have to do that—”

“And I suppose you will?”

Ed doesn’t answer back to that. His cheeks still heat, a little embarrassed, a little into the way that Stede’s tolerance for nonsense is high until it isn’t, but he doesn’t stop him. Hears the shuffling sounds of Stede walking across the cabin, but after that the noise gets lost in Ed trying not to hear it, trying not to smell it, trying not to have to think too hard, until eventually he realizes the smell isn’t so bad anymore and the mattress is dipping next to him again.

“That’s sorted. I have a wet cloth for your hair, shall I get it?”

Ed reaches out and squeezes another yes into Stede’s arm, and he feels the gentle movement, still not tugging, still not pressure, of a cloth running over the strands of his hair that had been caught in the crossfire.

“Now, darling, do you want to lay down? Do you need anything else?”

Ed wishes he’d only asked him one question, because now his brain is stumbling back and forth between both, trying to figure out which one to answer first, but eventually he just leaves it, starts leaning himself back against the pillows again. Laying down, it’s this mess between: relief, he doesn’t have to hold himself up anymore, and: oh god, the tip of everything inside him, destabilized and sloshing against the sides, the nausea and the ache. Through it, he feels Stede situate himself until he’s settled next to him, though not yet touching.

“Can I hold you?” Stede asks.

Ed gets it out, wants him to hear, wants him to know, yes, yes, yes.

And then yes, yes, Stede holds him.

And he lets himself really fucking feel it. Lets himself feel the warmth, and the comfort, and the solid strength, and how his own body just doesn’t have any of that, but he can let it sink into, against Stede, and be held, held, held.

The nausea, the ache, it starts to slow, even out, it is better like this, laying down, but swirling up inside of him, there’s still dregs of shame, embarrassment. He still feels like he needs to get up, to move, to do something, be something, but it’s just so fucking clear that he can’t. That he can’t force it, that he can’t push it, that there’s no well of strength he’s just too pathetic to draw from, and if he just— No, there’s none of that, there’s nothing fucking left, and if he wants there to be anything fucking left of him after this—

“Stede,” he says, quiet, words gummed up with snot and bile, gummed up in his brain, by his brain, but if he doesn’t now— if he doesn’t— then maybe he just doesn’t, is the thing.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know how to get better.”

“Oh, well, darling, you don’t have to—

“No, I mean.” Cause there is yeah, there is something here, hard to accept, and harder to say, but if he doesn’t— “I need help.”

“Oh, Ed.”

“Like. Like a really lot of help. Like I don’t know what I’m doing but this isn’t working and I don’t want to feel like this forever.”

Stede holds him closer, doesn’t tighten in a way that hurts or makes him suffocated, just makes him feel secure.

“No, no Ed, of course you don’t.”

Ed burrows in a bit, eyes still closed, enjoys the way Stede just sort of smells like clean, sweat, soap, not much else that he has to drag through his senses.

“If you have, like, suggestions…”

“Ed,” Stede says very seriously, and Ed wonders if he’ll live to regret opening this door. “You need to rest.”

Well, hey— “I did rest! I am resting! I don’t even go on raids! The one. I didn’t go on the raid!”

“Absolutely you are not, climbing the rigging and mending sails and doing ship chores and trying to chart is not resting.”

“Well, I can’t just sit around being use—”

Kinda impressive how Ed can hear the look Stede is giving him even with his eyes closed. He wonders if Stede can teach him that trick.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine, resting.”

“Other than that, Ed, I don’t know myself.”

That’s kinda what Ed was afraid of, like he had to go and do the absolutely mortifying thing where he admitted he needs help, and now, like, of course there’s not actually any help to be had.

“But, Ed, we can try to find out. Try to find a specialist, or books about it, or something, and it will probably take time, the whole thing—” Ed grumbles. “But you’re not going to be alone.”

Ed hears him say that, hears him say he won’t be alone, and this time he actually fucking hears it.

Because he had, hadn’t he, assumed that at some point this shit that was going on with him would piss Stede off, or disgust him, or somehow not be what he signed up for and send him packing. And Ed’s been, this whole time, letting Stede take care of him, sorta, while also trying to do as much shit alone as he could, expecting that he had to be ready for the other shoe to drop.

And he just threw up on the guy after the first time they’d kissed since Stede came back, and Stede was still here, and he wasn’t going to go, was he?

He wasn’t.

Ed actually believed that now.

Actually took the trust he’d thrown at Stede when he’d first appeared and gave it some fucking roots, let it fucking mean something.

Okay, he thinks.

“Okay,” he says, and takes his arms up around Stede and holds him right back.

Once again, Ed finds himself falling for the hope of fairytale magic.

Like, part of him thought just admitting out loud to Stede that he needed help would unlock something in his brain; not even to bring his memories back, but just to make his head stop feeling like such shit, or even to calm down the swirling shit thoughts and feelings he’s got going.

No such luck.

It’s some insane conflicting bullshit, that if he wants to get better, he has to do the work, but also the work is: Stop fucking trying to work all the time.

He wakes up in the mornings and the first thing that tries to solidify out of the porridge of his brain is what’s on the agenda, and the answer is Nothing, darling, do you want to go back to sleep? Or shall I bring breakfast?

He gets out of bed, he has breakfast, he gets dressed, and then.

And then?

And then.

He can’t go back to being a ghost, but he also got told by Stede, hey Ed, anything that makes your head hurt? You don’t have to do that thing. And things that make his head hurt are still almost everything.

So he goes back to bed, mostly. Days, several days that bleed into each other, where he mostly just hangs out in bed, and mostly just tries to get a lot of sleep, and mostly watches the shadows move across the walls. Stede is there, when he can be, when he’s not captaining, and Stede will talk to him, and tell him stories, and kiss his forehead, but yeah, it’s mostly a lot of laying around, trying not to let the restlessness of it eat him alive. And it doesn’t always work; eventually he has to get up, at first just to wander around the cabin, to dig through the auxiliary wardrobe and the en suite, but he starts venturing back out of the cabin too, wandering into all the corners of the ship.

One of the days, he ends up down in the galley. His appetite is touch and go, but now that he’s not pushing himself to the point of nausea— not pushing, whether it comes on its own or not— it’s getting better, and he kinda wants to get a snack, mostly to give himself something to do. And it’s not too close on either side of a meal time so he figures it’ll be empty as he ducks into the actual kitchen-ey part of the galley.

Nose ends up dangerously close to the tip of Roach’s cleaver.

“If you’re here for my cast iron, you should know I fight dirty,” he says.

Ed flinches back instinctively, even more protective than— he assumes— usual with anything near his face and head, before he remembers to say something.

“Nah, fuck, man, I don’t even remember doing that.”

“Right,” Roach says, very much in a way that he does not agree that this is right, but he lowers the cleaver. “Well, either way, lunch isn’t for two hours, and you either help in my kitchen, or get out.”

Ed can kinda guess, based on the tone and the dearly departed dutch oven of it all, which of the two Roach would prefer, but also, when’s the last time he cooked anything? And also, like, cooking probably doesn’t count against resting and taking it easy, not if he’s just helping, yeah?

He ignores the judgy little Stede voice in his head that says that doesn’t count; there’s only so much he can do with sitting idle before he snaps.

“What can I do to help?” he asks instead.

Roach gives him a very skeptical look, but still he points his cleaver at a pot of potatoes, a cutting board next to them. “Those need to be chopped, and then,” he gestures again. “Into the stew.”

Ed shuffles over to the cutting board, picks up a knife, sets a potato on the board. The knife feels weird in his grip, weird cause he doesn’t usually hold cooking knives, weird because whatever his usual is, it’s scrambled now. But his head doesn’t hurt, at least not more than usual, and actually a little bit less than usual, so he keeps going. The first chop through the potato is— well, it isn’t straight, and it isn’t even, and it’s a little ehhh, deciding to do the motion versus the actually physically following through, but again, he keeps going. He figures, if he’s just super careful, moves real slow, all the wobbles in his motions will even out into neatly chopped potatoes.

He’s about halfway through one potato before Roach stops him.

“These potatoes are not for display, they’re for eating. They don’t have to be perfect. Just chop, eh?”

Ed feels stupid for a second, a second that threatens to drag, but Roach just repeats, “It’s fine, just chop.”

So he just chops.

It’s kinda— not bad? Doing something he never knew how to do now that he doesn’t know how to do anything. He doesn’t have all these half formed memories of a smarter, faster, better Ed doing this flawlessly to compete with. The only person he has to try to be better than is the Ed of the previous, like, fifteen seconds, and his bar isn’t super high.

He’s still wobbly, he still has to focus his eyes on it, there’s strain there, inching in, yeah, but it’s okay, okay, feels good to do, actually. He gets through a few potatoes, chop, chop, chop, dump, before he has to start pushing the good back against the creeping bad, the strain in the head, repetitive noise, been standing too long, actually it’s kinda hot in here bad. But he’s hardly made a dent in the potatoes, shoddy show of progress for him to be tapping out now, and so he keeps going. Only thing is, the more his brain wobbles, the more his hands wobble, and so he has to slow, slow way down, not even aiming for neat, just aiming for actually cutting the potato.

Roach stops him again.

“Sit down, take a break.” Again, it’s not an argument any more than it’s compassion. Just, this is Roach’s kitchen, he makes the rules.

“Ah, mate, I haven’t even done that many—”

“It’s stew. It isn’t going anywhere. Sit down.”

Ed sits down. Finds a crate in the corner of the kitchen, and plants his ass on it. Closes his eyes for good measure. “Sorry,” he says, even though he’s doing as he told (rare for him).

“Stew takes time anyways,” Roach says. Doesn’t directly address the apology, which is fair, he’s probably still mad about the dutch oven. Instead, he continues with the stew— “This recipe specifically, if you really want the flavor to develop you will let it simmer for three hours, minimum, but try saying that to captain.”

Ed cracks a smile. “Yeah, he is, like, wildly stubborn.”

“I know! I told him once, you want the red lentil curry, you need to get me fresh garlic. He said, why can’t you make do with the dried? Make do, as if I’ve ever made do in the kitchen. Unbelievable.” As Roach talks, Ed can hear the steady chop of his knife, and it taps against his brain, an imperfect rhythm, thunk, th-thunk, thunk, thunk, th-thunk.

“What else is in it?” Ed asks, for something else to listen to, something good to fill up his brain while he tries to empty out the bad.

And Roach actually tells him, lists all the ingredients, how to prepare them, what order they go in, why it’s this and not that. Ed tracks about half of it, retains about half of that, but it’s good, letting his brain run over it while he breathes and waits and breathes. Eventually the spinning stills, the pounding muffles, and he opens his eyes, stands back by the cutting board, gets his hand back on the knife.

He’s still wobbly, but he can do it, doesn’t feel like he’s gonna collapse on the potatoes, impale his eye on his own kitchen knife in some kinda freak accident that he’s pretty sure could never actually happen to a person, but hey, stranger things.

He chops, chops, dumps, until his eyes start to ache and he needs to sit, and instead of waiting, he just does it, right away, rests, closes his eyes, rests.

Roach had trailed off about two potatoes ago, but it’s not a bad silence. It doesn’t echo the way the dark behind his eyes sometimes dances: so much absence that his brain just fills it up with static. Nah, this is fine, peaceful even.

He lets the peace soothe down on his eyes, his brain, his body until he feels like he can get back to the potatoes.

The knife is starting to feel comfortable in his hand, even if standing and working is never really his favorite thing to be doing— or, well, more comfortable, since things, physically, have just felt kinda awkward to him since the whole head thing, but yeah he can make this work.

Only, he makes it through maybe half a potato because his body starts calling up its protests, and suddenly that peace he was feeling has evaporated, suddenly he’s just— fuck. He just wants to be able to do one fucking thing, even if he’s slow, even it takes forever, he just wants to be able to.

But he knows, knows this isn’t a battle he’s going to win. And then the frustration, all boily and itchy, starts pricking tears in the corner of his eyes, and fuck if he’s going to cry in front of Roach, so he retreats to his little crate in the corner, already bargaining with himself, how long he needs to sit before he can try again.

Again, Roach stops him, before he even plunks down on the crate.

“That’s enough,” he says.

Ed turns back, looks skeptically at the pot of potatoes: not even half emptied. “Nah, man, just give me a minute, I can finish.”

Roach doesn’t even stop what he’s doing, just thunk, th-thunking away at his own cutting board. “No, that’s enough. Besides,” he says, and he looks up, not pausing his knife, just long enough for Ed to think maybe that’s a smile. “I am sure Captain needs someone to listen while he alphabetizes his neck scarves.”

It startles a laugh out of Ed, and he almost tells Roach that’s Stede’s already done that, then reorganized them by season when it didn’t suit, but then Roach is determinedly thunk, th-thunking, and he doesn’t, just turns for the exit to the galley, makes his way out.

Just as he’s passing the threshold, Roach tells him, “Come back tomorrow.”

It’s an invitation, Ed knows that, and he wants to take it, he really really does.

“Thanks,” he says, and then takes himself back to the cabin.

Takes himself to the galley again the next morning, and hey, between chopping yesterday and heading down there today, he took an entire afternoon nap, ate a hearty lunch and dinner, went to bed on time to the sound of Stede’s rambling not-quite-a-bedtime story about albatross migration, and then when he woke up still exhausted, did not force himself out of bed but instead let himself have a lie in until he actually wanted to get up.

Cause he actually does, is the funny thing, the funny thing that sorta makes him have to reckon with the fact that he mostly got out of bed most of his life because he had to. He was on watch or he had a raid to prep for or a crew to command or he fuckin had to, because he hasn’t ever once had a life where he’s allowed to just sit idle.

He’s kinda had a hard time convincing his body and brain that he’s allowed to now.

Like Stede kept trying to get him to relax, and no one else on the crew seemed to actively want him involved in crewing the Revenge when he first started trying to put himself back into the mix, but like, his nervous system didn’t care. You live on a ship, you work. He could think and feel whatever the fuck, he could be explicitly told by the actual captain the exact opposite, and still it would be thrumming through his veins. You live on a ship, you work.

But fucking around in the galley with Roach, barely chopping potatoes and listening to him talk about how you can never find good sumac in the caribbean, that doesn’t feel like work, but it also doesn’t feel like laying in bed letting the pudding of his brain congeal.

So yeah, when his body and his brain really truly are done sleeping for the night, he wants to.

He takes himself down to the galley again, goes slowly since there’s no real rush and his body will thank him if he does, and finds Roach there, in his element, pulling out tins and jars and arranging them in an order Ed couldn’t decipher on a good, not brain scrambled day.

“We’re doing bread today,” Roach tells him.

“Oh,” Ed says, because baking is kinda— like, what does he know, but he’s pretty sure between baking and cooking, the former is a lot less forgiving about imprecision than the latter, and he doesn’t know how he—

“I measure, you sift,” Roach says, and hands him a sieve-type sifter, reaches around for a big steel bowl and sets it on the worktop with a soft ting. And then, faster than Ed can track, and so he stops trying to, Roach measures powders and salts and flour into the mesh catch of his sifter. “Tap, side to side, until it’s gone through.”

Ed taps, side to side. It’s not a difficult motion, doesn’t require him to put too fine a point on his movements, but he does feel it in his arms, the rest of his body, if he moves too fast. So he doesn’t. Roach has already moved on, working some kind of concoction in another, smaller steel bowl, and then moving again, and Ed stops trying to track, just keeps sifting away at his task.

He ends up having to stop once to rest, and actually, even, he doesn’t have to, but he knows he’ll feel better if he does, so he just. Does. And then when he’s ready, he picks back up and sifts the rest of it, and by then, Roach is saying the yeast is ready, and having Ed combine the bowl of wet stuff with the big bowl of dry stuff until its a gummy mix of stuff, and then there’s a natural rhythm built in— knead, let the dough rest, let Ed rest, knead it up again, let it bake, let Ed rest.

He’s tired by the time the two perfect— and one kind of lumpy and awkward— loaves come out of the oven, but then Roach says lunch is soon enough anyways, and Ed doesn’t want to take himself up the stairs just to make someone follow him up with a tray 15 minutes later, so he just sits at the table, just sits at the table until crew start filing in, sitting down around him. Just sitting down around him, not avoiding him, not watching him, just filling the gaps around him and then when Roach starts serving up lunch— the bread, and trays of sliced ham, and bowls of olives, oranges— they pass to each other and to him like he is not an other.

Someone says something about the fresh bread, and Roach says, “Ed made it.”

The chatter at the table stills for a second, and Ed stares at his plate, doesn’t want to see anyone else’s stares.

“Really?” Jim asks.

“Eh. Mostly,” Roach allows, and then the chatter picks right back up.

Ed doesn’t follow most of it, and it’s kinda a lot, noise, and close, and a lot of it, and it could piss him off, could frustrate him, but he just kinda likes that he’s allowed to be in it. He doesn’t force himself, sits just long enough to eat his lunch, just about as long as he can tolerate, and then when he’s done, he carefully moves to stand, plate in hand to bus to the kitchen.

Feels weird just to duck out without saying anything, even if he doesn’t have any idea what to say. They didn’t talk around him, but they didn’t talk to him. He feels like he should say sorry, but it’s still— it would feel as hollow as the memory of what he’d be apologizing for.

He dumps his plate in the dish tub, wanders back through the dining room, and pauses. Turns. They’re all looking at him now, and sorry still isn’t the right word, so he says instead, “Thank you.”

What for, let them decide, he’ll figure it out later, or he won’t, but he still carries it in his chest, this feeling like he said the right thing, as he carries himself back up the stairs to the cabin.

Roach hadn’t told him to come back again, but he chances it anyways, another trip to the galley, the next day. When he gets there, there’s a high backed stool up against the work top, and laid out in front of it, cutting board, kitchen knife, courgettes. For dinner, the pirate’s answer to ratatouille, Roach tells him, about 50% of the neatness and about 200% more spice and flavor. And carbs, over a bed of rice, he says, because there is no point in cooking if there are no carbs. Ed emphatically agrees.

Chopping is easier sitting down, makes it easier to take breaks cause he can just stop, close his eyes, doesn’t have to move across the kitchen and back. The other thing, the kinda big blaring thing that must’ve been so loud he’d long since gone deaf to it, is his knee hurts. Not so much today, sitting down, leg stretched out to rest on the lower shelf of the worktop, but it’s like, the fact that everything else hurts way less than it has for weeks means that suddenly he actually fucking notices it.

And honestly, if he can pick anything out of the memories of the past few weeks, he’d bet he’s been moving around it, compensating for it, letting it simmer, harsh and sharp, in the back of his mind this whole time. Knee’s given him trouble for ages, that’s one memory he wishes he had lost, that one kick on that one raid that shifted his knee so far out of place that it never really shifted back, and he’s had to move around it ever since. And if he’s not doing well, he can always bet that his knee’s doing worse. It’s just he’s gone so far beyond not doing well that he’s barely even fucking noticed. Strapped on his brace every morning, propped it up on a pillow every night, but beyond those, the automatic motions not even a decade’s memory loss could take from him, he just didn’t see it.

Until someone else did.

Until someone else made him sit his ass down, literally, and give himself a fucking break.

There’s probably something in that, some broader fucking thing about Ed taking care of himself, or not taking care of himself, but he doesn’t need the introspection, not when he’s got chopping to do.

That’s the magic of being in the kitchen, actually.

Ed’s brain is never off, never really has been, and he doesn’t know how he handled it before, if he even did. He remembers being a man in constant motion. And this now, this after, his brain hasn’t stopped trying to move, trying to work over every gear and inquire in every corner, but now it’s working with half the power, and as often as not, the gears just grind, the corners turn to dead ends.

It’s a lot quieter in here.

Doesn’t make the world go away, when he leaves the kitchen there’s still the rock of the ocean, the horizon with threatening black dots appearing and disappearing on the edge of it, there’s still the weird atmosphere between him and the crew— though, weirder thing, the crew that was with him before Stede came back, they’re the ones that seem to have the least beef with him, massive turn-tail from Ed being pretty sure they were all gonna kill him. But yeah, there’s that, and then there’s him and Stede.

Which, look.

Ed hasn’t been avoiding Stede, and hasn’t been avoiding talking about Stede.

It’d be ridiculous to try to do that when they live in the same cabin on the same boat in the middle of the ocean.

It’s just, if Ed’s brain is vibrating as a baseline, it’s a full-body shudder when it’s around Stede, and he needs— needs to— he needs—

That’s actually the thing that he needs most of all, is to figure out what the fuck he needs to do.

There’s the want of it, yeah. Being around Stede feels good. Kissing Stede feels good. Curling up next to Stede to sleep at night feels good. Making Stede laugh, making him look at him fondly, letting him brush back a loose curl of hair from Ed’s face, that stuff feels good.

But also, this stuff feels good. Working in the kitchen. Other things, maintenance things, like today. After a solid week of cooking, Roach had declared it leftovers day, and now they’re catching up on the cleaning; Roach has the whole worktop cluttered with tins and jars and bags of ingredients, sorting them by some system known only to him, and Ed is posted up at the dining table folding tea towels, rags, aprons.

There’s a rhythm to it, a neatness. It’s simple. It’s all just different rectangles, matching corners and folding down into smaller rectangles. And he remembers a time that there was rhythm in piracy for him, far off and distant though it is. But his world has gotten a lot smaller, and now the chaos of pirating, the risk and the danger, the noise of it, all that shit is too big to fit in the rickety basket of his brain.

But also, now that he thinks about it, his life before, it didn’t have any room for stuff like this. Cooking, cleaning, folding laundry. Resting when he got tired. Slowing down. Doing things the easy way instead of the way they were always done. And he’s not— he’s not saying he’s glad for it, because fuck that, there were definitely other ways for him to catch a fucking break that didn’t involve cracking his skull open like an egg.

But this is where he is right now.

Folding laundry.

And that, just that, forgetting about the everything else of it all?

That’s okay.

It’s okay for him, anyways. That’s the part he still worries about, the Stede of it all. It’s pretty clear Ed’s days of piracy are behind him, far behind him. But Stede’s a pirate, really seems to fucking like it, the crazy way he does it, anyways. And long term, Ed doesn’t think any amount of resting, and doing the easy tasks, and just being Captain Stede’s— whatever the hell he is to him— is gonna work out.

He needs the floor to stop moving underneath him.

And he doesn’t know how to say that to Stede, doesn’t know how to shape a future around such a nebulous, fragile idea of a need.

Which is of course, when Stede comes into the galley. Guy’s got something— something— just, something for showing up right when Ed is deepest in thinking about him and least ready for him to appear.

Stede stops for a moment in the doorway, doing that soft-eyed thing where he just runs his gaze all over Ed, drinks up every little bit of him before he even says anything, even if that anything is almost always, and including this time, “Ed, darling.”

Ed likes that, that’s another thing that he likes. Ed comma darling. Ed, who is a darling. Sweet enough that Stede has to say it twice. Ed likes getting to be that.

“Hi,” Ed says, as Stede joins him at the table.

“Hi,” Stede says back, serves it up with that smile he does just for Ed, a sneaky, private, half-formed thing that is still somehow in no way half-full.

Ed doesn’t really have anything else to say, so he keeps with his folding. There’s a huge basket of them, actually, and Ed has no idea where they keep them all or why they have so many, but whatever. Not much of a burden to Ed, is it, to spend his afternoon slowly folding 20 kitchen towels?

And then Stede picks up a towel, starts folding too. Doesn’t say I’ll take care of this, you rest, just does it with him, like maybe Stede thirst-for-adventure-dashing-pirate-captain Bonnet also, a little bit, likes folding towels.

Or likes hanging out with Ed. Either. Both. Why not.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Stede starts, and Ed braces. Could be any of a billion things Stede means to ask him, and Ed has a hard time answering questions in general these days, let alone questions from Stede. “What are your thoughts on Izzy Hands?”

Huh.

Ed’s mind is blank, which is usually a fucking annoyance, but it’s sorta like that thing with his knee but in reverse. Ed spent five days scared shitless of that guy, and then he just sorta disappeared, and since before those five days he didn’t even exist, now that he’s out of sight, he doesn’t exist all over again.

“What, uh, what do you mean?”

“Well,” Stede says, still folding, though Ed wants to tell him the corners really don’t need to be that neat on a kitchen rag. “I didn’t want to do anything without your input, but we’re approaching port, which gives us some options, so I was wondering what you’d like to do.”

“I wanna open an inn,” Ed says.

Stede blinks at him.

Ed blinks back.

An inn? Where the fuck did that come from?

“I meant about Izzy,” Stede says, and Ed appreciates that Stede says it normal, not like you’ve lost the plot and also what are you talking about.

“Yeah, no, I know,” Ed says, cause he does, but also he’s thinking.

Ed said it, just kinda out of nowhere, but the thing is, it sounds right. He could have something that was his, something he got to steer, but it would be. Just a lot of the quiet stuff that he can handle. Cooking. Cleaning. Laundry. Customers, probably, but Ed deals with the crew now, he thinks he could figure out how to be a customer guy. Yeah, the more he thinks about it, it sounds really fucking right.

Dealing with Izzy, pirating, whatever, all of that shit, it doesn’t sound right.

“Let the crew vote on it,” he says instead, which again, where are all these insane ideas coming from, fucking democracy, but still, the truth— “That feels like a Blackbeard problem. I’m not Blackbeard anymore. Not really sure I can deal with that problem. Not really sure I should.”

Ed keeps folding, Stede keeps folding, they’re both thinking.

“Okay,” Stede says, and then they keep folding.

Eventually the basket of laundry is emptied and the table stacked with all their neat rectangles, and then they load the basket back up so they can ferry their handiwork into the cupboard off the side of the kitchen that the linens live in, and Stede asks Ed if he’d like him to carry the basket, and Ed wouldn’t say no to the help, but instead he has Stede grab one handle of the basket so he can grab the other.

It’s a little awkward, the basket between two people, but Stede quickly adjusts his step to Ed’s, and honestly, anyways, it just goes down easier for Ed, them doing things, not Stede for Ed, not Ed trying to do for Stede, but Ed and Stede together.

At the cupboard, Stede holds the basket and hands over linens, and Ed tucks them into the cupboard, stacks and stacks, some more wobbly than others, but none of them fall down, and then Stede puts the basket back in the kitchen, says a quick hello to Roach, and then he’s back by his side.

Now’s about the time in the day that Ed retreats back to the cabin, sometimes to nap, sometimes to just sit down on something softer than the crate in the kitchen, and beyond being his routine, yeah, his body, his brain are calling for it. Stede’s usually not there, off captaining and doing captainly things, but he’s here right now.

Ed looks down, looks at Stede’s hand dangling by his side, and hesitates for a moment before he takes it.

Holding hands, that’s another thing he didn’t have before. Wouldn’t’ve thought to. Hand holding didn’t really factor in with fucking another pirate in an alley or a hold or wherever. And, again, he’s pretty sure Stede would’ve held his hand without the brain injury, but this is what he has now, and Ed likes it.

“Come back to the cabin with me?” Ed asks, and Stede smiles his just-for-Ed smile.

“Of course.”

Back in the cabin, it’s warm; not a stifling kind of thing, but just— Warm. Cozy. The thing with his head is sometimes he overheats, his body trying to burn out whatever’s making him feel sick, not knowing it’s not an infection but a bruise, and so cold should be nice. But Ed fucking hates the cold, hates feeling even a little bit of chill. He doesn’t wear leather in the caribbean for nothing.

So yeah, the warm, being able to feel it, being able to feel it in his skin and his bones without it simmering up against the boil of his own blood, it’s fucking good.

Being in the cabin usually does feel good, now that it feels like a place he gets to be, instead of the only place he can safely go, and especially during his little afternoon cat naps. It’s a little— a little— it’s something, having Stede here, cause not like Stede isn’t there with him at night, not like this isn’t also Stede’s bedroom, but also. This is like, his self care routine, and the operative word is self.

And also, there’s the Stede of it.

Ed feels things for Stede. A lot of them. Positive things, even. But sometimes it gets a little slidey. Does he trust him because his gut knows better than his brain, or does he trust him because both his gut and his brain have fucked off and Stede is the only choice? Is that why he kisses Stede, lets him say he loves him, sleeps in the same bed with him? Because Ed’s never had a better option than this, and for all the shit he doesn’t know, he does know that?

But— fuck— no, that isn’t even fair.

Stede’s been actively good to him, been kind to him, been patient with him, has stood by his side through all this weird shit, and that matters to Ed. Whoever he was before, Ed remembers the way back before before, and someone who was good to him— that’s rare shit you don’t turn down any sooner than you turn down an unarmed merchant weighed down with gold.

There was something between them, something that made Ed risk everything and turn Act of Grace for this man, and maybe he can’t remember the Ed that made that choice, but he can take care of him, can give him the future he gave it all up for, can take that Ed and tuck him into a warm bed with a warm man and offer him the same rest and the same hope Ed is looking for today.

He can try.

He tugs Stede across the room by the hand, hadn’t ever let go, and pulls back the covers, turns and sits down on the bed, toes out of his slippers, and gingerly picks his legs up and pivots into bed. Stede gives him just enough space to adjust, to settle in deep, before he joins him.

This part, at least, is easy. The wiggling and shuffling and adjusting until they’re comfortable on their sides, facing each other, hands clasped between them, covers pulled up to their ears. This isn’t usually how they fall asleep, but it is usually how they get in bed, because Stede likes to tell stories before bed, and Ed really likes to listen, but also he likes to interject questions and opinions and better endings, and it just feels like they need to be facing each other, even if, more often than not, Ed’s eyes slip closed.

This time, though, it seems like Stede is angling for a story.

“What’s this inn like, then?” he asks, and the covers and the body next to him and the question with it, warm, warm, they’re all warm, Ed’s all warm.

“I dunno,” Ed says, but he’s thinking, more than anything. “There’s a big kitchen, I’d do a full service breakfast— it’s not a B&B though, it’s an inn that happens to serve breakfast.”

“Of course,” Stede agrees.

“And fancy linens, for all the rooms, no guest is ever gonna complain of scratchy blankets on my watch.”

Stede hums, a listening hum.

“And every room has its own bathroom. Been sharing bathrooms on ships for so long, fuck that noise, even for guests. This is gonna be a classy establishment.”

“Do you think we could get plumbing in? Baths on demand? Imagine the rave reviews!”

“Yeah, we—”

Maybe Ed should stop being surprised by the “we”.

Stede’s been nothing but consistent about it, is the thing.

But also, is the thing is Ed, Ed and consistency, Ed and Ed’s brain, nowadays, and consistency. Not as much. Maybe he needs to keep hearing it, maybe he needs to, over and over again until he can actually remember that it’s there, can stop bracing for a drop off because he can actually see where he’s gonna land now.

Ed just doesn’t get how anything can be this easy.

But every time he digs his heels in against easy, against comfort, the pain comes springing back twice as hard.

He picks up his heels and lets go.

“Yeah, plumbing, I think we could swing that. Leaves less money in the budget for security, but that’s fine, most of the booby traps I had planned were pretty DIY.”

“Booby traps?”

“Well, yeah, we’re, like, pretty famous pirates. Gotta make sure no one tries to blow up our spot.”

Stede squeezes his hand. “That’s good thinking, darling. So trip wires around the perimeter of the property, certainly, but what happens if they trip the trap, so to speak?”

“Axe catapult. As a warning shot.”

“Of course. And if they go further?”

“Snake pit. They fall into a snake pit.”

“What if they climb out of the snake pit?”

“Mate, who even would want to go on living after taking a bath in a snake pit? If any of the events in your life lead to you sitting in a snake pit, I think you gotta take the hint.”

“Sure, but what if we get invaded by someone who’s immune to snake venom?”

“Right, grew up taming snakes and cuddling with them and shit, and my evil snake pit is like a vacation to him.”

“Well, if he’s on vacation, he’s in the right place! I hear there’s a five star inn and breakfast experience right around here!”

“Oh shit, whose place is that?”

“It’s yours!”

Ed smiles, big, silly, grinning.

He’s warm.

Warm, warm, warm, in his cheeks, and his hands clasped in Stede’s, and all the way down to his toes.

Ed still feels a bit slippy slidey in all his feelings, even after that, but he ends up not having to do anything right away.

Turns out if you decide you’re gonna be an innkeeper one day because that’s what filters through all the cracks in your brain on that day, you can’t exactly just do it the next morning, not even just because you’re currently on a pirate ship two days of sailing away from the next hospitable port.

It wasn’t from second guessing, neither from him nor Stede. In a bout of lingering insecurity, Ed had asked him again, are you sure? Cause it just seemed like Stede fit into piracy like— like— something, something you would never expect in a place that, now that you saw it, you could never imagine it anywhere else. But Stede had hit him with: The only thing I was looking for when I came to sea was you. Had hit him with: You were my dream, and I don’t care about anything else now that I’ve found it.

Just casually. Just whatever, like Ed wasn’t still so fragile that that shit set him off crying, basically instantly.

No, it was something else, something Stede forgot to mention among his many confessions, being which: he is— what’s the fucking word, Ed just had it— oh yeah— broke as shit.

It’s sort of romance novel dramatic, giving up all his wealth and ties to his old life to come back for Ed, but also, between that and a guy who can’t remember where he stashed his money, it’s not exactly practical.

The other thing is, Stede is a good captain, so he actually cares about his crew, and says he’d feel bad “leaving them rudderless,” which he also said with a bit of an eyebrow waggle, which made Ed laugh, less at the pun, and more at the fact that Stede was so pleased with himself, but anyways. Stede wanted to help “facilitate the transition with future leadership.”

Unfortunately, nobody could agree who new leadership would be.

Well, actually, everyone pretty universally voted for Oluwande, but the one holdout was Oluwande himself, who really didn’t wanna do it.

Ed sits in on some of those conversations— not contributing, not even always tracking all the back and forth amongst all the different voices and all the noise— but he likes that he’s allowed. Accepted even. Even has a couple of in-jokes with Roach, a couple of old riffs with Fang, that mean that he’s connected, in some small, tenuous ways, to the crew.

It’s weird, still weird, because he hasn’t apologized, because he still doesn’t feel like he can, not in a way that means anything, and it leaves him with only one choice, the way a lot of parts of his life have narrowed down on the number of choices lately. He can’t do anything about past Ed, so all he really gets to do is work on present Ed, future Ed. Kinda annoying how that doesn’t even apply only to how he behaves around the crew, that’s just his whole life. Not a lot to look back on, so no choice but to look forward.

He tries to do it, tries really fucking hard, and not in the trying hard way where he ran himself ragged pretending things were normal and fine and the same as whatever made-up version of himself smashed together from fragments of past and present that he was trying to be. No, this is more like. Like the time he asks Frenchie if he knows any softer, folk-ier songs to play on his lute, cause— not that he said it but he thought Frenchie knew— the swooping cadence of the shanty he was playing was kinda pounding nails into his skull. And Frenchie said yeah, no probs babe, and switched over with a smile on his face like Ed had done him a favor by asking.

Just.

Talking to everyone like they’re people, and by some god damned miracle they talk to him like he’s a person back.

He can’t really remember ever having that, and he’s not sure if it’s something about him, or if the world started it first with the way it talked down and over him from since before he could even talk back, and maybe it’s both or maybe it’s neither, but again.

Past.

Plans moving forward though, he can focus on those: to port, and then some meandering sailing to see if they can find any of Ed’s money or some merchants to raid, and then once more to port, but this time as Ed and Stede’s final stop: a tidy cove on the southern end of Cuba that Ed remembers from back when and Stede confirms still exists that they think they could set up shop in just fine.

With the deck of the ship tilting under him every single day, more pronounced the more he lets himself notice it, Ed is really fucking looking forward to the moving forward.

It takes about a year for Ed to truly, genuinely, honestly feel like he’s moving towards something and not away from something.

The inn was an honest instinct, and he honestly fucking loves it.

But with all the hindsight of someone mostly settled in himself, he can admit that it was also a 180 pivot from everything he knew. Trading maiming and gunpowder for hospitality and crisp linens. And he likes those things, mostly. And he a little bit sometimes still craves a bit of the maiming and gunpowder. But his body and his brain aren’t up for it, not really.

Not that he’s defanged, don’t get him fucking wrong.

They had some dickhead in the inn just a week ago who wouldn’t pay for his second night because of a “noise” “““problem”””, and Ed pulled up the pants shitting fear of Blackbeard to set that guy straight no fucking issue. Said dickhead didn’t need to know that if things got physical, it would be Stede backing up the threat, and Ed wasn’t gonna tell him, because just the threat got him coughing up his money and swearing never to come back, so yeah, Ed can still put it on when he wants to.

It’s just that because he, like, trusted his instincts, and made the choice that would take care of him in the long run, now he never has to.

Crazy.

But yeah, he really did take everything he ever had been and walk as far away from it as he could, and at first it was mostly the walking away.

Now it really is a lot more walking towards.

Cause he’s got all this time on his hands, right, and he’s had to figure out what the fuck to do with it, and he can’t hang out with Stede every hour of every day. (Stede’s pet project is the garden, and even if Ed was suddenly addicted to getting dirty and being eaten by bugs, Ed really can’t spend that much time out in the sun, and the pressure from overcast days makes his knee act up.) So he has to figure out other things, like.

Their inn was a— Stede says fixer-upper, but Ed says— shithole when they first got it. And in the process of the repairs, there were some things Ed could do slowly, and there were some things he could do badly, and there were some things— a lot of things, honestly— he couldn’t do at all. But one of the things that he could do was paint the walls. If he sat himself on a stool, and didn’t try to reach too far, and took breaks between moving to the next patch, he could actually paint the fucking walls. And there was something really cool about that, watching the walls slowly transform right in front of his eyes from his rhythmic, repetitive motions.

And eventually all the walls were painted, and they had finally decided on a final— definitely this one, for sure— color for the front room, so Ed couldn’t justify painting it again.

But he didn’t really wanna stop painting.

So he didn’t. At first, honestly, he was just painting scrap wood. He was telling himself they could use ‘em for shelves, but really he just wanted something to do that didn’t require too much detail work or too much physicality. But then Stede must’ve noticed, because he came back from a market run one day with a set of brushes and paints— like, forreal oil paints.

Ed’d scoffed, told Stede “I’m not an artist,” but he should’ve known by that point— probably two months in?— that wouldn’t work on Stede. Stede’d just said “Of course not, but you don’t have to be an artist to paint,” and fucked off to the garden with one of his smug smirk specials on his face.

(Ed loves those specials, kisses them as often as he rolls his eyes at them.)

And, annoyingly, Stede was right.

Oh, Ed was shit at it. Make no fucking mistake. His hands still wouldn’t hold very steady, and if he watched his movements too closely he’d give himself a headache, and so there was absolutely no detail work to be done, at least not at first.

No, at first it was mostly smudging paints around his palette until he made a color he really really liked, and then painting a canvas all that color. And then he was sorta starting to enjoy what had originally been the frustrating tendency of oil paint to goop and clump, because if he painted it on right he could make the goopy clumps into shapes and textures that would hold up all the way through curing. And then the longer he did that, the longer he could sit at it, smudging around his goops and clumps, before he needed to take a break, and so eventually he’d do a couple different colors, and his smudges would turn into flowers, or clouds over the ocean, or sunsets on rolling hills. It was still way less about what they looked like and more how it felt to paint, to do in a way that he could see the results and feel like he had something, something else that was just his and not touched by all of the not-his of his past, but it’s good.

Not everything was learning brand new things, though, cause honestly sometimes brand new things just sent him spinning. Stede got really into sudoku, and though it seemed like the kind of thing that Ed would be into, puzzles and numbers, Ed sat through Stede explaining how it worked to him at least five separate times before he gave it up as something that his brain was never gonna stick to. Like, he heard the words, and understood them, and then he’d look at the puzzle, and no he didn’t. Not something that’d ever happened to Ed before, he can’t remember ever failing to learn something. But it’s not like sudoku was gonna keep wood in their stove, so he’d let it go. So no, not always new things, sometimes it was relearning how to do an old thing that Ed wasn’t actually willing to leave in his past.

He’d made peace with leaving a lot of things in the past: things he could remember; things he couldn’t; the idea that some day the memories would come back if he just— insert thing that was a pointless waste of time, because the memories just weren’t coming back. But there were some things that weren’t pointless to worry over, to reshape and renegotiate until they fit back into his life.

Like sex.

Sex in Ed’s past was a quick, dirty, impersonal crime of opportunity more than it was ever anything else, so if it was anyone else Ed shared an inn with, maybe he could’ve just left it behind. But since it was Stede? Forget it. Or don’t forget it. Remember it sometimes when you’re just in the kitchen kneading dough and get a full body horny shiver and wonder if the dough will survive some more prove-time if you just go find—

Anyways.

The noise complaint was legit, actually. Ed just didn’t give a fuck. And besides, it was in the guest agreement, down in the teeny-tiny font at the bottom that Stede wrote out: No refunds, even if there are noise issues from intercourse or most likely owls.

But, yeah, no. They’d been having sex. Not at first, but then, yes, and then more of it when they figured out the best way to get Ed through it comfortable and without— y’know. Basically, sex with Stede lived in the sweet spot where Ed wasn’t rocking an empty stomach, but hadn’t eaten so recently that said stomach might riot, where Ed was awake enough that his body and brain were online, but not worn out from the day, where he was hydrated but didn’t need to pee, and then also fingers and toes crossed that despite all of that it wasn’t just a bad day, cause he still had enough of those.

Ended up being, they had a lot of their sex in lazy mid-mornings, which Ed really actually fucking loved.

Like this morning, this perfect Sunday morning, where Ed’s actually had an easy time eating breakfast first thing, and so by the time he’s back in their room contemplating getting properly dressed, the sun is coming in through the window at that perfect angle that makes him toasty and warm without threatening to sweat his balls through the sheets.

“Stede!” he hollers, figuring he’ll either hear him or he’s already in too deep in the garden for it to be worth (well, debatably) dragging him away.

“Yes, Ed?” comes echoing back from somewhere in the inn.

“Come to the bedroom!”

There’s some muffled thumping, and then Stede appears in their doorway, somehow with his collar askew and his loose golden waves ruffled, like he rushed to get here and managed to fall down, like, twice, on the way.

“Everything okay, darling?” Stede asks.

“Yeah,” Ed tells him, feels his face tugging into a smile at the look on Stede’s. “I was just thinking…”

“Ooh, now? Yes, let’s!”

It’s kinda fucking insanely cute how excited Stede gets about sex. They don’t do a lot of it impromptu, though Ed’s been having more good days lately, so sometimes, but since so much of it is pre-negotiated, Ed gets to see Stede get geared up for it. Gets to see him get flushed just from the suggestion of it, gets to see all the energy start wiggling in his body in anticipation.

Just like he is right now.

Ed fucking loves it.

Pulls him in for a kiss, tells him “I love you.”

Cause he does.

Started to trust the feeling, a while back now, and then a slightly shorter while back, started saying it.

Stede had completely fucking melted, that first time, and he completely fucking melts, this time. Melts into Ed’s arms, giving him enough of his weight that Ed can feel it, but not so much that it knocks him unsteady, and kisses him.

Kissing Stede rocks. It still gives him butterfly fairytale feelings every fucking time, and if that’s all Ed was ever going to be up for, he thinks they would both figure out how to be happy with it. Kissing Stede really really rocks.

But also, Ed is glad that they do get to have sex. One of those things he gets to look forward to, future shit.

Ed is glad they get to have sex, and glad that even when he’s the one settling himself back into the mattress so as not to set himself spinning, Stede still manages to make him feel swept off his feet. Glad that they get to go slow, and to talk about it, how do you want it this time, I dunno, feeling good but a bit iffy, maybe you steer this morning. Glad that what they talk about is what Ed actually gets. Glad that Stede will undress him gently, and touch him gently, but it’s never in a fearful way, never fragile.

No, Stede knows his limits as well as Ed does, knows that if his eyes are gonna be closed then he also needs to be able to stay still, knows that if Ed needs a break it doesn’t always mean they have to stop, knows how to twist his wrist just right on the upstroke that Ed starts seeing colors he wouldn’t know how to mix on his palette if you gave him a million paints and a million years.

Yeah, Stede knows him, every inch, but it’s not cause Stede has access to some secret past that, to Ed, is dead and gone.

It’s cause Ed knows himself now, knows himself in his life now, and knows the shape of the life he wants to move towards, and he’s shared it with Stede, has grabbed his hand and pointed to the horizon and asked him to go with, to walk forwards into the future.

And that future’s looking pretty damn bright.

He’s still gotta squint his eyes against the light, hold up his hand for some shade, but for now, it’s exactly what he can handle.

He doesn’t want to look away.