Chapter Text
[Clears throat] “Good afternoon. As you know, our newly elected Representative, Nigel Badminton, did not appear at his scheduled events last night, and has not been seen since the evening of the thirteenth. The Wellfleet police department, as well as teams from Truro and Eastham, have begun a countywide search.”
“Jeffrey Fettering, WGBH. Mr. Mayor, do you have any theories on where he could have gone?”
“The investigation is ongoing, and I won’t speculate. Police Chief Badminton is following every lead and we are confident he will have answers for us soon.”
“Margaret Helcat, Fox seven. Is it true there have been sharks spotted on the beach? Should they really be open for swimmers if there’s a possibility of man-eating sharks?”
“Absolutely not. The beaches remain safe and open. These vile rumors are just that, rumors.”
“Jean French, Cape Cod Investigator Weekly—Mayor Bonnet, it’s the full moon in a few days, and historically most disappearances—”
[scuffle]
[muffled “get him out of here!”]
[THUD]
[CRASH]
“Any further questions can be sent by email. That’s all.”
#
Thirty hours earlier.
Stede had to get away, just for a moment.
It’s been three days already of their month-long sojourn on the Cape, and he’s already run out of small talk and emotional fortitude. Three whirlwind days of events beside his father, smiling through clenched teeth, hands tight on the children’s shoulders as cameras flash in his face. Three days of Mary’s jaw ratcheting tighter, of his father’s eyes narrowing, of every outfit and outburst being picked to pieces in both their eyes. At least with Mary, it’s different now that they’re separated, a bit less friction. And he knows she’s just as stuck as he is, and he can take time to himself to nurse his emotional wounds—the calluses against his father’s scorn have sloughed off in the ten months since he last set foot on the Wellfleet sands.
He digs his toes into the sand, his shoes heavy in his hand, socks balled up and slightly damp where they’re stuffed into the leather. The sound of the waves, at least, is comforting: a familiar susurration against the sand.
Stede steps forward, down the beach, and breathes in deep, salt air soaking into his lungs. If he looks to the west, he can just barely see the lights of Boston—and if he turns to the north, there’s the faintest flicker of the Provincetown lighthouse on the horizon.
(He doesn’t think too deeply about Provincetown. He doesn’t think about the calendar he’d snuck a look at before leaving home back in Wellesley. He definitely doesn’t think about the fact that Bear Week is starting tomorrow. That’s not relevant to his interests at all.)
The water rushes up, brushes his feet, and he knows he should step back and turn around, knows the sand on his feet will be impossible to get off and knows he’ll be feeling the grit of it inside his socks until he can finally go back to the rental and shower, but the water feels so lovely against his skin that he takes another halting step forward and lets it run around his ankles, cool and soft.
“Ah, Baby Bonnet, there you are.” The smug voice makes his spine straighten all at once, makes the pit of his stomach drop, makes his breath catch in his throat. He turns, pasting a smile on his lips.
“Nigel,” he says. “Or should I say, Mr. Representative. Congratulations.”
“It’s only the 4th Barnstable,” Nigel says, but his smug voice belays the false modesty. “And you’re to be congratulated also, I understand?”
“What?”
“On your newfound freedom.” Nigel leans closer. “Or is the rumor that your wife is leaving you just a rumor after all?”
Stede reels back as if he’s been slapped. “I—”
“Oh, Baby Bonnet,” says Nigel. “You can’t be surprised.”
It’s not that it isn’t true, obviously—Mary’s staying in a separate rental down the road from his own, the children with her since he’s had to spend most of his time with his father, but it’s not public knowledge, not announced anywhere. His father doesn’t even know yet, so how—
“He is!” Nigel gives a grating, hooting laugh. “Oh, little Baby Bonnet thought his big secret wouldn’t come out.” He turns toward the town, points. “Well, your little air bed and breakfast is owned by my family, you know. And so is the lovely Mary’s. Maybe I’ll stop by and see her—”
And then—
Stede’s not quite sure what happens.
He moves, that much he knows, steps forward, hands raised. He makes contact with Nigel’s coat, the feel of the wool rough and hot under his fingertips, and he shoves, and the next thing he knows—
Nigel’s silent.
Everything’s silent.
Because Nigel—
Well. Nigel won’t be seeing Mary anytime soon.
Or anything else.
Because he’s fallen into the ocean, and somehow—
Stede takes a step back, breathing hard, because there’s—
The technical term is telson, his brain provides. The sharp, stiff tail at the back end of a horseshoe crab. Used for maneuvering and for righting itself when it gets flipped by rough seas or too-curious children, or for—
Or for stabbing directly through a man’s eye.
Apparently.
Stede takes another step back, then another, slipping a little on loose kelp. Nigel fell backwards, face under the water, feet on dry land, and Stede can’t just leave him like that, can he? He’ll be found, he’ll be discovered, Stede will somehow be blamed, because he did this! Somehow!
He has to—he has to do something. He has to make this disappear. There’s nobody around, no one to help, no one to turn him in—this is Stede’s doing, and Stede needs to fix it.
(In a manner of speaking, anyway. Nigel probably wouldn’t consider it fixing.)
Stede takes a deep breath, lets it shudder out his nose, and sets his jaw. The tide’s on its way out, just an hour from low tide, so the spot where the beach drops off into deeper water is only a few meters out. He takes another deep breath and suddenly, bizarrely, wishes he smoked or something, anything to calm his nerves. Then he rolls up his pantlegs to just below his knees and grabs Nigel’s coat at the shoulders and starts to drag.
Half an hour later, he’s wearing his damp, sandy socks and trudging back up the beach to rejoin his father’s party, heart pounding and pits sweaty. He makes an appearance and a little small talk, then escapes to his little rental to lay awake for hours, the image of the sharp point of chitin emerging from Nigel’s eye under the waves burned into his retinae.
#
Stede’s awakened by a sharp knock on the door, and when he’s pulled his robe around himself and stumbled to the door, he nearly screams a little looking through the peephole.
It’s Chauncey, he reminds himself. Identical twins.
“Get it together, Bonnet,” he murmurs to himself, and tucks the robe tighter. It’s his big golden one, comfortably heavy, but he wishes he’d taken a moment to dress—or that Chauncey had given him some warning—before confronting the man.
(In a distant corner of his mind, Nigel’s smug, malicious chuckle rings out.)
He gets another nasty surprise when he finally opens the door, because just behind Chauncey, out of sight of the peephole, is his father.
Mayor Bonnet is looking down at his watch, jaw working. He’s impeccably dressed as always, not a color or crease in evidence, what’s left of his iron-grey curls combed severely back. Stede straightens his spine automatically, swallowing hard in a suddenly dry throat.
“Father, Chauncey,” he starts, what can I—”
“Chief Badminton,” Chauncey interrupts. “If we could please have some formality here—”
“Stede.” His father cuts in and they both fall silent. “Nigel never returned to the function last night. Did you see him?”
“What?” Stede’s knees go a little jelly-weak, and he’s actually grateful for the swathes of golden fabric he’d been regretting a moment ago. They give him a little bit of cover on his shaking legs. “Where—”
“We don’t know,” he father says, cutting him off again. “He was last seen walking towards the beach.”
“You had sand on your trousers last night, Bonnet,” says Chauncey. “And no one saw you at the fundraiser during the time of the disappearance.”
“I—I took a walk,” Stede says. “On the beach, yes. Alone.”
“And you didn’t see Nigel out there?” Chauncey asks. “Or anything else?”
“I saw—” Stede thinks fast. “I saw a shark!” he blurts out. “That’s all!”
“A shark,” repeats his father. “In the inner harbor.”
“A big one,” Stede says, nodding. “A real, er, whopper. It could have—I mean, if Nigel fell into the water—you know how he likes to drink sometimes at these functions—”
“My brother did not fall into the harbor and get eaten by a shark!” Chauncey yells, his voice raising to a strangled shout. “You did something to him, Bonnet!”
Over Chauncey’s shoulder, Stede sees movement. “Sharks?” says a small voice. “Mommy, are there sharks here?”
All three men turn to look down the path to the sidewalk, where a family of obvious tourists has stopped walking. There’s a little girl staring at them, maybe Louis’s age, and her ostensible parents—two women in sandals and bucket hats—are frowning up at Chauncey.
“No sharks,” says Mayor Bonnet. “Enjoy your stay in Wellfleet, ladies.” His voice is tight, his smile devoid of any actual pleasantness. “The beaches are perfectly safe.”
“Maybe we’ll do the museum instead today,” murmurs the shorter woman to her partner. “Just in case.”
Stede’s father turns to glare at him for a moment. “If this rumor you’ve started impacts our revenue this summer—” he starts, then turns to stalk down the steps back to the street. Chauncey follows, and Stede lets out a long, shuddering breath as he closes the door and leans his back against it.
“Well. Shit.”
#
It’s a beautiful day, and Frenchie’s working the patio today instead of Lucius, so Ed’s having a nice, chill morning. He’s had a truly delicious almond tart and is sipping an iced arnold palmer the size of his head in the sunlight. He’s come up for the season, avoiding the Brazilian winter and ready for a nice couple months in breezy New England. He usually comes up north, but usually just to Florida—he’s spent a couple summers in St Augustine, and a couple really memorable ones in Miami, but he hasn’t been to Cape Cod in... fuck, it’s been at least eighty years. Last time he was on this beach was during the war, dodging subs on his trip north, and the town had been much smaller. Now there’s a parking lot full of cars between him and the water, something called a pickleball court, and he can get raspberry tarts any time of the year. The years skate by like sunlight on the water, and Ed’s just floating through.
He swam up slowly, stopping along the way a half-dozen times, and he’d just gotten himself settled the night before. Obviously, he could have stayed in the bay, sleeping in the water, but what good’s a bank account with a couple hundred years’ worth of dough in it if you can’t get yourself a nice little hotel suite every summer?
So he’s got a room at the Bellamy Inn, with a little private patio that opens directly onto the sand, just in time for the full moon and all that that entails. He’s relaxed, is the point. He’s—
He’s fucking bored.
Back down in Rio, he’s got a whole team: Izzy and Fang and Ivan and Archie, all working together to bring some excitement to the harbor and liberate fancy shiploads to sell on the black market. It’s a busy life, never stopping, and back when they were chasing down sailing ships and blasting each other with cannons it was even fun. The last hundred years or so? It’s been kind of a drag.
So he’s started taking longer and longer breaks from it, much to Izzy’s dismay, but exploring the coastlines of the Americas and the Pacific islands—and even the sojourn he spent in Europe a few decades back—hasn’t broken the monotony.
At least the tea’s good.
He’s just stretching a bit, one arm over his head as he tips his head back, cup in hand, when—
#
Stede needs a coffee. He cannot handle any more stress without caffeine.
Mary and the children are headed to some art gallery today, and he was invited, sort of—more of a notification of where they’d be than a real invitation, really, but he’d taken the implied disinvitation because going to a modern art gallery is not his idea of a nice day. Of course, that means he’s rattling around the town panicking about last night, but.
He’s just walking past the coffee shop at the beach when he hears Chauncey’s voice carrying over the breeze—he can’t catch the particulars but he hears his name mentioned and that’s enough to make him hurry onto the patio, looking over his shoulder as he steps over the low chain separating it from the road.
He trips just as he clears the obstacle, arms windmilling, and knocks into something solid, cold liquid splashing all down his champagne linen trousers.
“Oh! Fuck! Mate!” Strong hands catch him around the shoulders and keep him from going facefirst into the flagstones—small mercies—and when Stede looks up, it’s into the warmest, most beautiful brown eyes he’s ever seen. They’re deep and dark and flecked with gold that sparkles in the late morning light like tigers’ eye, huge and wide and kind, creases in the corners and faint freckles across the bridge of the man’s nose, and Stede thinks, a little bit wildly, that he might be in love.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” the man is saying. “Oh, bro, your nice pants—” and he’s releasing Stede’s shoulders and pressing a napkin to Stede’s soaked crotch and oh, god, this day cannot get more humiliating, Stede thinks as his cock—just as surprised as the rest of him—stirs with a question.
No, he thinks to it firmly, and steps back, finally looking down at himself.
It’s not good: what must be iced tea is soaking into his trousers in a way that absolutely suggests urine, and linen isn’t very opaque even dry, and boxers or briefs would have ruined the line of them, form-fitting as they are, so.
So Stede’s entire human penis is on display on the front patio of the Queen Cafe, to Frenchie, the beautiful stranger who’s holding his tea-penis-napkin, and the entirety of the Senior Citizens’ Detectorists Club (and their leader, Doug).
Yep.
#
This was not how he’d expected his morning to go, honestly, but Ed’s working on learning to roll with things as they come, get zen and all that. So when the blond guy trips over the patio chain and falls balls-first into Ed’s arnold palmer, what’s a guy to do besides catch him?
He probably shouldn’t have tried to dry off the guy’s dick, maybe. That might have been too far.
He hands him the napkin, not trying too hard to pull his eyes from the outline of his solid dick through the pants (what is that, linen? Commando in linen at the beach? Wild!).
“I’m Ed,” he says, holding out a hand, and the guy stares at it, then glances up at Ed’s eyes. There’s a question in his gaze, and Ed tries to look nonthreatening. It must work, because he swaps napkin-dick hands and catches Ed’s palm against his own. It’s warm and surprisingly dry, his grip firm, and Ed squeezes once before letting his fingers drag across the man’s wrist as he pulls away.
“Stede,” says the man. “Thank you for the, um, napkin. Sorry about your drink.”
“Eh,” Ed says. “Should’ve gotten a milkshake anyway.” He eyes his new friend Stede’s wet shorts. “Hey, if you want to change, my room’s not far?”
Stede looks down at his pants again and grimaces. The stain has wicked its way down his thighs, definitely pee-shaped, and the napkin’s not doing shit.
“Here,” Ed says, and pulls his jacket off the back of his chair. “You can’t go anywhere looking like that.”
“You’re right.” Stede sighs and folds the jacket over his forearm, letting it hang in front of the wet patch. “I’ll be right back with this,” he says. “My rental is just around the corner.”
“I, uh.” Ed glances around at the patio, filling up as the morning shades to midday. Something about this guy—he wants to know more about the kind of man who wears white linen to the beach. “Nah, I can come along. If that’s okay?”
Stede blinks at him, and Ed gives his most casual, whatever, it’s fine, no big deal face back.
Stede’s face brightens like sunshine through the clouds. “Well,” he says. “That’s—you’re welcome, of course!”
Ed can’t help smiling back, because fuck if the man’s joy isn’t infectious. “Lead on,” he says with a sweep of his arm, and Stede straightens Ed’s jacket over his crotch.
Stede’s rental is like nothing Ed’s ever seen before. He’s rented a lot of rooms in his life—comes of being an itinerant were-shark three centuries old—and he can see the bones of the vaguely bland room underneath the explosion of what must be a shipping container’s worth of Stede, but...
He can’t help it: he reaches out and brushes his fingertips over a soft-looking piece of deep blue fabric, and it’s just as soft as he’d imagined. Softer, maybe.
“That’s a rather lovely silk,” Stede says. “It’s a bit much for a dressing gown, especially at the beach, but the color was just so stunning I couldn’t resist. Feel free to try it on—to try anything on!”
Ed flicks his gaze towards Stede, not sure what to make of that, and oh shit: Ed can see him in the bathroom mirror. He’s put Ed’s jacket down and he’s stripping off the damp pants, skin rosy and dusted with golden hair. Ed wants to bite the meat of his calves, wants to rub himself all over those tanned, gorgeous thighs, wants to—
Stede slides a pair of tight red briefs up his legs, and Ed swallows hard and whirls back around, stepping up to a hanging rack of clothes and breathing in deeply. They smell like lavender and citrus, like clean human skin and sunshine, and he runs fingers down the line of them, trying to tell his dicks to chill because they’re clamoring for attention in his leather pants.
Ed likes humans. Used to be one, a long, long time ago—or at least thought he was. He’s never been quite sure what the fuck he is: when he was fourteen, after the whole incident with the ropes and the docks and his dad, he’d run away from home and everything he’d known. He’d only been on the run three days when he looked up into the night sky, saw the gibbous waxing moon, and found himself transforming for the first time.
And yeah, it had been traumatic, whatever. He’d lost his shit for a few decades, swam around, probably ate a lot of ships (no people that he can remember, though, and he likes to think they all got away). Then he’d found Fang, who’d called him a fellow taniwha, and slowly learned to get his shit back together.
Now he’s in control, mostly: the five days around the full moon are a little dicey, but he hasn’t had a stretch of getting stuck in shark form in decades. Centuries, maybe. Not since the whole thing with Izzy, back when Izzy had been going by Ahab instead of Hands.
(He still feels a little bad about eating his leg, but it turned out all right: Iz is a member of Ed’s crew now, still fucking nuts, but he and Ed hashed it out decades ago after he finally got the whole “Fang’s the whale but Ed’s the one who ate your leg” confusion. He still gets grumpy when he has to replace his waterlogged prosthetic, but if he’d just keep it inside his fucking sealskin when he’s in seal-form—)
Anyway. The point is, he’s part shark, has been almost all his life, and he finds humans fascinating but hasn’t wanted to fuck one in a long, long time.
There’s a red robe—velvety, covered in bright patterns of birds, heavy against his touch—and Ed pulls the sleeve out to brush against his cheek, above the line of his beard, where he’s not covered in calluses.
It’s so, so soft. It’s soft like seal fur, like warm water in shallow tidepools, like a cheek against his own, and when he inhales, the scent of flowers fills his nose.
“You have fine taste,” Stede says quietly, voice low and pleased, and when Ed looks up, Stede’s smiling at him. “That’s a beautiful piece. You’re welcome to try it on.”
“I—” Ed starts, and cuts himself off, because what is he going to say? I’m afraid of how lovely this is. I’m worried I’ll ruin it with a touch. I’m afraid a beautiful thing like this isn’t meant for someone like me, that it’ll snag on all my sharp edges.
“Go ahead,” Stede encourages. “That color suits you perfectly.” He cocks his head, considering Ed, and Ed feels the visceral slide of his gaze like the pull of the tide. “Please. I insist.”
Stede’s wearing an open shirt now, and fitted, tailored pants in a peachy apricot sort of color, and they hug those amazing legs in a way that makes Ed’s cheek heat where it’s still pressed to the fabric. His chest is broad and golden-haired and one of his little pink nipples is peeking out beside the open edge of the shirt, and Ed—
Ed’s lost. Ed’s a goner. Ed’s dashed up directly against that gorgeous, flushed rock of a chest and he doesn’t think he’ll ever recover.
#
Stede is having A Day. What kind of day, he’s not entirely sure—he doesn’t quite know if he’ll be able to sum it up in the end, or where it’s going, because it started with nightmares about Nigel returning, eye a ruined mess, then dealing with his father, then the tea disaster. Then it turned around truly bizarrely in the last twenty minutes to... whatever this is.
What it is is Ed—a beautiful, fascinating man—in Stede’s rental, rubbing the dressing gown Stede had been wearing this morning against his face.
His face!
And if Stede was not mistaken, Ed had taken a sniff.
Of Stede’s dressing gown!
It boggles the mind!
He can feel strands of his careful curls falling against his forehead, knows he probably looks like an electrocuted dandelion (Louis’s words after an ill-fated bicycling disaster years ago, no less hurtful for being true), and pulls his eyes from Ed’s—deep, golden-brown, sparkling and huge—to turn and try and do something about it in the bathroom.
He’s just dipping a fingertip in a pot of hair wax when something in the mirror catches his eye.
Ed’s taken his shirt off. He’s taken his shirt off to pull on the robe, and Stede can see the back of him in the sliver of his bathroom mirror reflected in the mirror over the dresser at such an angle that Ed’s mirror doesn’t catch the line of sight—goodness, Stede has a lot of mirrors, doesn’t he?—and the rippling muscles of his back move under tan skin and tattooed lines and a striped sort of grey-black pattern down his spine. Stede can feel his mouth hanging open, can feel the way his heart is pounding in his chest and against his eardrums. The pattern goes all the way up to the curve of his neck under the swinging masses of silver-iron curls, and down to the place where his spine curves in and back out, on either side of the dimples of his back. They look almost three-dimensional, like if Stede’s fingers brushed over them they’d have a different texture than the rest of Ed’s skin, and in the center of his back there’s even a hint of a shadowed ridge. Stede doesn’t have any tattoos, of course, but he’s always found them fascinating, and this one? He’s blown away by the artistry of it, the sheer skill required—
And then Ed lifts his arms to slide the robe on, flexing the muscles around his shoulderblades, and the shadow changes.
It’s not a tattoo, not a trick of the light, and Stede hears the gasp leave his lips. It’s a fin, it’s some kind of dorsal fin, and Stede’s mind is groping for any answer he can find—
The knock on the door makes him jump, fingers still frozen halfway to his hair.